Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Aussie Broadband's Investor Day for 2025. My name is Libby Hay, and I'm the General Manager of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs here at Aussie Broadband, and I'll be your MC for the day. I'd like to welcome you all, whether you're joining us here in person in the theatre at the New South Wales Parliament House, or to those of you that are joining us online through the live stream. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first Australians, as well as the Gadigal people who are the traditional owners of the lands where we meet today. We pay our respects to their elders past and present, and we commit to working respectfully to honor the ongoing cultural and spiritual connections between the traditional owners and this country, and to building an inclusive Australia together.
Now, there we are. Now you'll get a full introduction to all of our speakers throughout the day, but here's what we're going to cover off. We'll start with an overview of our Look to 28 strategy before diving deeper into our residential and business, enterprise, and government sector strategies. We'll have a customer interview with one of our business partners, followed by a look into our strategy for wholesale. There'll be another customer interview before we break for lunch, after which we'll go into the details of our technology future, how Aussie is being good to people, and our approach to capital management. We'll then bring the Aussie team back to the stage for a Q&A with you all, and then we'll wrap for the day. Before we get started, just some housekeeping items. The bathrooms are located at the back of the theatre at Foyer.
The fire exits are located on the right of the stage, and should there be any emergency, the fire wardens or New South Wales special constables will escort us to the evacuation assembly area, which is located behind the building at the rear and the Domain Gardens. Please follow any announcements that come through in the in-house PA in the event of an emergency. Lunch will be served today in the Fountain Court, which would be just outside, up the stairs, and to the right of the reception area, and that can be accessed both via the stairs, and we've also got an elevator nearby for our use as well. For those of you joining us online, you can submit your questions through the webcast portal, and we'll be able to address those questions as part of the Q&A session later today.
Please also, if you have not already done so, can you please set your phones to silent? Now, as mentioned, I head up the Corporate and Regulatory Affairs function here at Aussie, and I lead a team dedicated to listening to and engaging with our stakeholders, from our people to our customers, media, the government, and our communities to build, maintain, and protect our reputation. Before I hand over to Brian, our CEO, to kickstart proceedings, I wanted to play a short video to show just why Aussie is more than a business. It highlights the work we do in our communities through our Helping Communities Connect program and our staff volunteering days.
What are we doing with you, Peter?
Hey, you pay for things on the computer?
Yeah, yep.
You know, PayPal and all that stuff, which I don't understand.
Yeah, that's okay. What did you want to set up? What type of pay?
My name's Tyler. I'm the Customer Experience Team Leader at Aussie Broadband, and I've been at Aussie Broadband just under four years now. I volunteer at the Gormendale Community House, and what I do here is I actually do tech support for people who live rurally out near Gormendale, whether it be answering a mobile phone, whether it be downloading photos from the phone to the computer, because unfortunately, living out here rurally, they don't have a lot of support, friends, family that are actually able to help.
We wanted to run it as a free service to our community. I got onto some contacts with Aussie Broadband, and they told me about their community services outreach program.
I've been doing this over the last month fortnightly. I've noticed a lot of changes among those that have attended my sessions, and a lot of that change has come with confidence.
My skill level was pretty limited. In the past, we'd only ever had landline phone. I'd always resisted technology. I just wasn't interested. Being able to do these classes has been an eye-opener to me, and Tyler has been amazing. She's been so patient.
Tyler's my savior. She's my go-to girl for any problems that I have with the internet.
Just seeing them have a little bit of confidence when they come here the week after, it's a really good feeling, and just to see the happiness on their face as well, or when they've come in and they've told me, "Oh, Tyler, I've gone home and I've done this," and they've shown me how to do it, it makes me feel good that they're feeling good that they can actually do it.
I've been able to say, "Hey, look what I've learned. I can actually do this.
Seeing people excited, seeing people confident that they can now use this technology, whatever it may be for them, it means seeing a smile on their face and seeing them actually be able to do it.
It's been an absolute godsend, and I hope we can continue it and see where we go through from there because we're building some really strong relationships with not just Aussie Broadband, but our community.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Aussie Broadband Investor Day. Thank you all so much for being here today. I know it's probably been a rough week for many of you, and I hope you're not all too bruised. It's great to host so many existing and hopefully some future shareholders today. I am very proud to stand here today as only the second CEO in Aussie Broadband's 21-year history, succeeding one of our founders, Mr. Philip Britt. Phil is an icon of the Australian telecommunications industry, and we would like to thank Phil for his decades of leadership, wisdom, and advocacy on behalf of customers. I know I speak on behalf of the whole company when I say we are striving every day to build on Phil's legacy by continuing to grow this fantastic business that we are also very proud to work for.
Firstly, I'd just like to introduce our board of directors to you. Adrian Fitzpatrick is our chair and has extensive experience across a range of businesses, from his career as one of the founders of Picture Partners and many years now as a non-executive director. Sue Klose is the chair of our People and Community Committee, with a rich executive background in marketing, strategy, and operations, and several years of board experience across a range of industries. Pat Greene is the chair of our Audit Risk and Compliance Committee and has a long history with the business, having been an integral part of one of Aussie's antecedent companies, Westvik Broadband. Graeme Barclay is our recently appointed director. Welcome, Graeme. Graeme has deep telco experience as both a CEO and most recently as chair of Unity Group Limited and Coden Limited.
Michael Omeros is the executive director. He's a seasoned telecommunications executive and co-founder of Over the Wire. Next to our management team, our CFO is Mr. Andy Knopp. Jane Betts is our Chief People and Reputation Officer. Cheryl Cai, our Group General Counsel and Committee Secretary. Unfortunately, Cheryl cannot be with us today due to a family commitment. Our Chief Technology Officer is Brent Parker. Jonathan Prosser, or Jono, as we call him, is currently our Chief Strategy Officer, but will be charged with leading our residential business from July. Aaron O'Keefe, our Chief Growth Officer, will assume responsibility for business, enterprise, and government for FY 2026. Michael Omeros, or Mo, is the CEO of Symbio, and his role will soon be expanded to take accountability for the entire wholesale division of the group. I'm really proud of this team and the blend of skills and experience we've brought together.
More importantly, I'm really proud of how they show up in the business as leaders. They are humble, grounded, super smart, and all care passionately about our customers, our staff, and our company. Before I present our strategy, I wanted to provide you a trading update which we released to the market this morning. We've made a very strong start to calendar year 2025 with net growth in excess of 24,000 connections in the quarter. This is our best organic growth quarter over the last three years and is a 29% increase over the same quarter last year and 12% higher if you exclude Buddy. Talking of our little mate Buddy, yesterday we achieved a milestone with our active connections going past 10,000.
For the year- to- date, we've added 68,000 connections, a growth of 10% so far this year and higher than the prior year, which did include the acquisition of Unity Group Limited's NBN book. We've also announced today that we've signed a heads-of-agreement to facilitate an enhanced and expanded partnership with Optus to accelerate our growth in the mobility market. We're delighted to do this and extend our relationship with Optus through to 2030. Jono will talk more about mobile later today. In addition to the market announcement today, I'm also pleased to advise that we will tonight be awarded Internet Service Provider of the Year and Mobile Phone Service Provider of the Year under the Roy Morgan Customer Satisfaction Program for the second consecutive year. We're also aware of other awards to be announced shortly.
We're extremely pleased with our financial results to date, and I'm happy to reaffirm our guidance range for FY 2025 of AUD 133 million-AUD 138 million and no change to our CapEx guidance at AUD 75 million-AUD 80 million. We'll now look to the future and our strategy for the next three years. 2024 was an eventful year for Aussie, closing off a significant acquisition in Symbio and the loss of a notable contract. This provided us with the perfect juncture to reflect on Aussie's journey to date. We wanted to consider whether what got us here would get us there and what there even looked like for us. With the combined executive talents across Aussie and Symbio, we reconsidered what the group should look like in 2028. We looked at our operating structure and asked, is it still the right fit for us?
From those discussions and as we announced at the half-year results, we're moving the business towards a segment-based structure as opposed to a functional one. We believe this will bring superior customer outcomes and financial outcomes with a better focus on customer experience from attracting them to consider us as their provider in the first place to their first interactions with us and their ongoing experience with us as a customer and hopefully through a long-term relationship. We have got lots more to talk about. We will take you through where Aussie is today, where we see the opportunities ahead, our aspirations as we look to 28, and the potential returns for you as shareholders. I will provide an overview at the start before handing over to Jono to talk about residential.
You'll hear from Aaron and Mo about business and wholesale in segments, as well as a couple of our larger customers about why they do business with Aussie. Brad will give you an overview of our technology, while Jane will cover Aussie's people strategy and how we're contributing more broadly to society. Aussie Broadband was born in regional Victoria, initially focused on providing residential broadband services. The company evolved into an ISP built on a reputation of service, technology, transparency, and customer advocacy. The business grew in parallel with the rollout of the NBN, and this brought with it a desire to expand beyond residential and into the business, enterprise, and government space. In 2022, as part of the strategy, we completed the acquisition of Over the Wire.
That acquisition brought increased capability to Aussie through its Tier-1 voice network and its regulated revenue stream for call terminations, as well as greater capacity to service customers in the business, enterprise, and government arena. We then finalized the acquisition of Symbio in 2024, adding the largest MVNE operator in the region with a second Tier-1 voice network and telco as a service capability. The combination of these businesses has helped Aussie Broadband into a growing diversified group with significant capability and track record of disrupting the Australian telco landscape. The screen shows a quick snapshot of the scale of ABB as at the end of Q3. These numbers are updated from what you may have seen in our recent half-year results. The key message here is that the group continues to grow with more connections, more numbers, and more services enabled for our customers.
Aussie has an impressive awards track record, and as I mentioned earlier, they continue to come. They're all very nice to win, but winning awards is not what we're about. Having said that, being Australia's most trusted telco and the 33rd most trusted brand in Australia is an acknowledgment we are particularly proud of, given the household names we rank ahead of. We do have a proud record of growth over the years, meeting or exceeding our EBITDA guidance every year since we listed. For FY 2024, we grew connections by around 85,000. Our market share is already moving through the 8% mark, so we're on track to exceed that number for FY 2025. Our revenue has grown by 51% per annum over the last five years, and we expect revenue to reach AUD 1.2 billion for FY 2025.
We've also diversified that revenue so much that residential now only accounts for 56% of our group's total revenue. Our gross margin has grown both through the benefits of our fiber investment as well as the acquisition of higher margin businesses. That growing margin improves our EBITDA and cash generation. As you can see, we've had considerable growth in EBITDA over the last five years. We will also be keeping a strong focus on disciplined cost management as we look to 28, focusing on ideas that deliver exceptional outcomes for customers while growing our profitability at the same time. Symbio has also had a strong start to being part of the Aussie Broadband fold, securing synergies and growth. That growth trajectory will continue, and there are plenty of opportunities that lie ahead. Maximizing these has been the focus of our strategy development and organization restructure.
I just wanted to briefly cover the market context in which our strategy has been developed, but each of the group execs will provide a deeper analysis in each of their segments. In the NBN realm, the rise of the challenger brands continues at pace. The market share of the top four in the market has fallen from almost 92%- 80% in three and a half years. Challenger brands are still underrepresented in Australia when we consider other markets around the world. ABB was the vanguard of this challenger movement, and our success has encouraged others with over 130 RSPs now in market. We still very much see ourselves as one of the hunters and see continued opportunity for growth. We continue to take higher than our market share of gross orders and continue to over-index in high-speed plans. Jono will discuss speed in more detail later.
The bestowal of higher speeds occurring in September brings another significant change to the market, but one that we welcome and are well placed to benefit from. The new NBN SAU has introduced a new market dynamic with annual wholesale price increases, which agitates the market and creates more opportunity for the challengers. The NBN Fiber Connect Program has been encouraging the migration of residential customers to the more resilient and cost-effective full fiber. In mobile, similar to fixed, challengers are increasing market share, but also, as with fixed, by global standards, MVNOs are underrepresented, so the growth opportunity is significant. The wholesale voice segment is estimated at approximately AUD 2 billion in Australia, with a high gross margin, and the acquisition of Symbio provides the group with its second Tier-1 voice network, additional growth capacity, and advanced enablement platforms to support growth telcos in both voice and data.
The growth of challenges represents further opportunity for wholesale data NBN and backhaul enablement. Looking at the landscape across all the segments, the opportunity is clear, with significant market share for ABB to pursue. Having laid out the high-level context, we considered our strategic drivers to FY 2028 through the lens of five perspectives. We considered financials, of course. Our goals for FY 2028 and the key products that we expect to deliver these outcomes, supported by improving productivity and efficiency in a world of continued margin pressure. The customer. The customer is at the heart of everything we do. This includes the importance of our reputation as an industry leader and the evolution of our existing service models. Internally, we need to ensure that the conditions within Aussie continue to enable sustainable growth through streamlining operations, increased automation, and a focus on better ways of working.
We're very proud of our people and our teams, and we'll continue to create an environment that attracts talent and fosters thriving careers. In the community and governance arena, we will continue to play our part in the communities in which we operate while maintaining a high standard of governance and safeguarding our reputation. The team will run through the elements of the perspectives during the session, all of which will combine to deliver the ambitions we aspire to as we look to 28, which I will talk you through shortly. Before that, I wanted to set out what our overarching aim is. The team at Aussie don't just want a job or a career. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves or their personal ambition. Collectively, we have considered what we were trying to achieve, or as we call it, our game worth playing.
Where we landed is that we aspire for Aussie Broadband to be the telco people love. We're already the most trusted telco, but we want to go beyond that. The telco people love. Four simple words, but all carefully chosen. Telco. We have previously talked about being a communication and technology business, looking beyond the telco horizon. With the support of external research, we have identified that both globally and domestically, telcos have almost always struggled when moving into adjacent markets. With that in mind, we are committing to our core telco business and our future as a telco. People. Who do we mean by people? We, of course, mean our customers. Customers must be at the heart of everything we do. We also mean our partners and suppliers, our regulators, and the industry at large.
We want to be easy to do business with and be good collaborators and ensure great outcomes. We absolutely mean our staff. We want everyone to enjoy their time at Aussie and be a place where they love to work. Naturally, we mean you, our investors. We want to be as transparent as we are able and deliver outstanding financial returns. If we do, I'm pretty sure you'll love us too. Love is not a word often used in business, but we believe it has a place, and we believe it is a fabulous aspiration. It is more than trust. It is more than satisfaction. It's about having an emotional reaction to interactions with us as a business or as a partner. We experience some of this today, but we want to go further, and we will. That is our infinite game. It never ends.
We always want people to love us. But we have put some finite ambitions into our FY 2028 strategy. All the usual caveats apply. This is an ambition, not guidance. But nevertheless, targets that we are all collectively working towards. As we stand in the future, we want our group revenue to be greater than AUD 1.6 billion, a growth of 35% between FY 2025 and FY2028. The diversification of our revenue will be largely maintained with residential contributing no more than 60% of the group's total revenue. We anticipate an EBITDA margin in excess of 12.5% and at least 20% compound growth in earnings per share, outperforming revenue growth and delivering strong returns to shareholders. We will hold an NBN market share of 11% or more by the end of FY 2028. This represents about 1 million connections and about 1% market share growth every year.
We have a range of other objectives that will be touched on by the team. To achieve these lofty ambitions, we have identified five strategic priority areas. Growth across all our segments. We see a range of opportunities across all of them. That includes the potential inherent in the upcoming multi-gig, high-speed residential world, the growth of our reputation among business and ENG clients, the expansion of voice and data wholesale volumes, or even enabling other growth telcos through our network capacity and market-leading enablement platforms. As you will hear from our customers today, and evidenced by our litany of awards, Aussie is renowned for its service and broadly admired for our reputation.
We are in no way complacent about that, and we are cognizant of the dramatic changes in the industry from greater adoption of the more reliable FTTP technology and the introduction of high-speed semi-symmetrical products to the residential market. We need to maintain and even extend our lead in the service space, and our focus over the strategic period will include automating more interactions to enable our amazing staff to focus on areas where they can truly add value to customers. We will expand our digital self-service tools, and they will be so good, customers will increasingly elect to use apps and portals rather than calling us. Wherever we can, we will remove friction for the customer. All of this will require us to continue to invest in our systems and ways of working to ensure we can achieve greater leverage from growth.
We will refresh our technology to ensure it is modern, scalable, efficient, and integrated. We will focus on removing duplication and increasing efficiency. As the market moves more and more towards FTTP, the consumer focus will be on the in-home experience as the transit of data to and from the premises becomes more reliable. We will continue to innovate both internally and in product to deliver ever-improving customer experience. The expansion of Aussie Fiber. We have invested heavily in fiber. The initial project was to replace the bulk of our Metro East backhaul. This investment has had a very short payback, generating annual savings in excess of AUD 20 million and providing us with a fully diverse backhaul network accessing all capital cities on mainland Australia. Beyond the core, we've extended the network with further investments that have established a customer access network.
We will now increase the utilization of the footprint we have created by focusing on on-net and near-net opportunities, which have a lower capital intensity and will serve to power the returns over incremental and initial spend. Further, we are working on streamlining our Aussie Fiber connectivity, reducing lead times from months to weeks or even days. Our final focus area is and must be security. Security is not only foundational, it will be intrinsic to everything we do. As Australia's most trusted telco, it is incumbent on us to protect our own and our customers' data. Security is very much an infinite game. New threats emerge daily, and we need to be constantly vigilant. Regulatory change is increasing the security burden on telcos of any size as the industry now falls under the SOCI, or Systems of Critical Infrastructure, jurisdiction.
We work closely with government agencies, security partners, and industry working groups to ensure we stay contemporary and continue improving all aspects of our security. As we look to 28, our aim is to make our customers love us through excellence in product and service and enabling connectivity that makes their lives easier and richer. We aim to make our partners love us by being really easy to work with, collaborative, and working towards mutual success. We aim to make the broader stakeholders love us, be that regulators because of how we engage with them or the communities we operate in because we give back and contribute. We aim to make our staff love us by allowing them to be their whole selves and have access to enriching and rewarding career.
If we achieve all of this, we believe you, our investors, will love us because we are delivering you exceptional returns and being an investment that you are proud to have in your portfolio. In summary, our Look to 28 strategy is focused on continuing to change the game, driving growth in our core telco business, increasing simplicity, evolving and enhancing all aspects of our customer experience, improving efficiency and productivity, and delivering outstanding returns to our shareholders. We have the leadership to deliver these exciting aspirations and a staff that are excited and galvanized by the ambition to be the telco people love. I will now hand you over to the team to go deeper on our plans, and I invite Jonathan Prosser to address you on our residential strategy.
Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everybody.
Aussie Broadband has evolved enormously over the years, but the beating heart of our business and a core part of our success and our culture comes from our approach to the residential sector. When we say residential, we do not just mean fixed broadband, but mobile as well. Residential is and will remain at the core of Aussie Broadband, with a goal to reach even more Australians through our multi-brand strategy with Aussie and Buddy, a broader fixed product offering, and a redefined focus on disrupting the mobile market. From a customer perspective, we are running two simultaneous channels of thought. The first is a focus on customer service. We do a pretty good job on this front, and we are absolutely keeping the culture and ethos of how we run our call centers moving forward.
We can always do better, and we can certainly do a better job of giving our staff more modern tools and ways of working. Some of those will include a better focus on automating the small things. We want to remove the barriers that stop our frontline staff from really focusing on our customers, and the expansion of automation through our systems and networks will help us achieve that. Alongside that, we want the interfaces that our customers use to be industry, if not world-leading. To do that, we have to provide a digital experience that is simple, elegant, and something that only Aussie Broadband could provide. Let's lay out the field of play for everyone, which should help to outline the value of our core broadband business and why it will continue to be vitally important to Aussie Broadband's future.
The core residential broadband market in Australia has around 8.7 million fixed connections. The size of that core market is sitting at around AUD 9 billion in revenue today, with a positive growth outlook of about 1%-3% per annum. Importantly, the share of that market controlled by the larger operators is shrinking. The tier one share of the fixed broadband market today has dropped to 80% in 2024, down from 94% in 2018. We know that trend is going to continue. As you can see, while the overall market will have a 1%-3% CAGR per annum, the challenger cohort of the market where we sit is expected to grow at approximately 9%. The future market trends show that mobile is ripe for disruption as well. The mobile market is large, totaling AUD 11 billion in revenue, with around 1%-2% per annum growth.
Unlike fixed broadband, the big three incumbents hold an 89% domination of the market. That is not a situation that will continue into the future. The share of MVNO operators, which includes Aussie Broadband, has grown from 9%- 11% between 2021 and 2024, and that's lower than what it should be. Research overseas shows that in the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands, MVNOs have anywhere from between 15%-20% of the market. Put simply, we think MVNOs in Australia should be able to double their market share in the coming years. When we look ahead to the outlook for 2028, we already see the MVNO market outgrowing the broader mobile market, with MVNO growth at 8% per annum compared to 1%-2%. It is this doubling ambition that we have for ourselves in residential mobile.
Our new partnership with Optus enables us to move forward with confidence to provide a compelling choice to Australians as to why they should choose Aussie Broadband Mobile. We know that our brand has strength in the mobile domain, not just in fixed, and it is an asset, not a hindrance to our future mobile success. We are particularly excited by the choice we can provide to regional Australians and drive to increase competition in both the metro and regional mobile markets. Our change in sales and marketing tactics has already delivered a 20% growth when comparing Q3 FY 2024- Q3 FY 2025. For reference, so far in 2025, this improved performance translates to only 4.15% of our broadband sales having a mobile attached, showing the enormity of the opportunity ahead. We understand the size of the game we're playing, how much opportunity there is.
Let's talk about how Aussie will win. We know that both broadband and mobile markets will be clearly split into two pieces: the premium segment and the value-seeking or the price-sensitive segment. You can understand why our dual-brand strategy makes sense within the broader market trends. There are five different subsegments in both the fixed and mobile markets that we're specifically targeting. You can see on this slide these segments for fixed in more detail. For now, I'm just going to talk about the five fixed broadband segments to illustrate our understanding of who we are strategically targeting.
The segments within fixed broadband are Connected Homemakers, which account for 11% of the market and 7% of our Aussie Broadband customer base. Tech Trailblazers, which make up 24% of the market and 24% of our base. Simplicity Seekers, which have a 23% share of the market and 14% of our base. Golden Guardians, with a 17% share of the market and 10% of our base. Digital Junkies, at 25% of the market and 46% of our base. The main Aussie brand has a clear focus as a premium brand, with the importance of category-leading customer service and product excellence. We evaluate the size of this premium market as 75% of the total market in terms of SIOs, but close to 80% of the value available in any given month. Now, Buddy is playing in a very different territory, specifically the segments where the main ABB brand does not resonate.
These are the value-seeking households who want an internet service but do not want or need the premium-level customer service that Aussie Broadband provides. A Buddy Telco customer is value-conscious. They are mindful of their expenses and significantly are impacted by the heightened cost of living. They seek to reduce their expenses without compromising the quality of their internet service. These customers are comfortable using live chat and digital-based support to resolve any issues that may arise, and they see the benefit of this type of support for the lowered monthly cost. Buddy Telco provides a high-quality, affordable product that meets the needs of customers looking for reliability that simply works. From its launch at 0% brand awareness, Buddy stands today with a brand awareness approaching 15% at the end of January. That 15% plays strongly against Buddy's target competitors. For example, another well-established challenger ended January at 21%.
For Aussie Broadband customers who've become more price-sensitive, we've also designed Buddy as a soft landing for these customers. We can already see that we are more successful with Buddy in our portfolio than without Buddy, not to mention the benefits that we have achieved by having a live testbed for innovation, which I will return to later. The main ABB brand will forge ahead with its premium-focused approach, while Buddy concentrates on areas where ABB is less appealing. For the main brand, our strategy will see the continuation of our shape-of-share approach, which has been hugely successful for us thus far. I want to go through it a bit more with you or m aybe not. There we go. This slide shows our shape-of-market share, which shows the makeup of our residential base, excluding Buddy subscribers.
Our shape-of-share strategy influences our product features, our price positioning, and marketing placement, and underpins the success that we have had in establishing Aussie's reputation for high speed, reliability, and service. More than half of our residential customers sit on the 100 Mb and higher plans. For the year to date, 70% of our new service acquisitions are on these 100 Mb and higher plans. This 70% reflects a growth from 44% when we last spoke to you about this shape-of-share strategy and invested in 2022. We continue to invest in these tiers for a very good reason. Higher plans deliver greater ARPU and contribute more to the bottom line compared to the sub-100 offerings. You can see from this makeup why we feel very confident about Aussie's positioning in the new high-speed world that NBN is introducing across Australia from September 14 this year.
This high-speed future is one that Aussie has actively advocated for, and we supported it as part of the multi-year SAU process and in more recent consultations with the NBN and the government of the day. A faster, full-fiber future will be hugely beneficial for Aussie Broadband, but it will also be a huge win for telco and for Australians. We already know today that full-fiber connections are more resilient and power-efficient, meaning that customers have less issues and that there is less money spent on maintenance and repairs. Fiber connections will have a lower cost to serve over the longer term due to fiber's improved reliability, particularly when compared to fiber-to-the-node connections, which can sometimes drop out multiple times per day. With a window to this future, Aussie was the first household-recognized brand to launch semi-symmetrical high-speed plans under our Pro product line in August 2024.
We launched these with the intent to create brand recognition around these ProSumer offerings ahead of the launch of the NBN Speed tiers. That launch by us has been a huge success. Today, Aussie has 64% of the 1,400 plan tier and 52% of the 500,200 tier. As users on these plans are already on fiber connections and they're already showcasing a high demand for even more bandwidth, we expect users on these plans will want to upgrade to one of the multi-Gb offerings that will be available from September. We are well placed to take advantage of the new plans and the excitement around them. Now for some numbers. Today, we have 63.25% of our current fixed line customers on FTTP and HFC, and 69% of our monthly acquisitions are FTTP and HFC.
When the new Speed tiers launch on September 14, 65% of our combined FTTP/HFC customers will get an immediate improvement to their plan speeds. That number rises to 73% if we look at just FTTP customers. For those who are already on one of our existing Pro plans, a key churn-down mitigation will also occur. From a wholesale perspective, these plans will be reducing by an average of AUD 30. Along with our ability to benefit from the Speed tiers due to our shape-of-share, there is also a chance to rapidly acquire growth in non-traditional Speed tiers for Aussie without affecting the base economics of our ABB residential business. The latest ACCC market indicator support shows that the 25 Mb tier comprises 20% of the total NBN market and is still experiencing volume growth.
There are 1.8 million customers on that tier, which makes it the third largest pool of opportunity, just behind the 50 tiers and 100 tiers. We are still contemplating the role of this 25 Mb tier for Aussie, but at some point between now and FY 2028, these customers will be transitioned onto a full-fiber connection. The open question for us and the industry is, when will that transition happen and what will be ABB's role in that particular segment? I have spoken a lot about growth and revenue in residential, but I also want to highlight how we're maximizing productivity while keeping costs under control. We know Australia is moving to a high-speed future that's driven by fiber. We have talked about why that benefits Aussie from a product perspective, but what is not well understood is how this benefits us operationally.
Today, we already see that Aussie's FTTP customers have between 2-3x fewer issues than customers on legacy copper technologies. The obvious benefit of that is if our customers are having fewer issues, then we have fewer calls and fewer problems to solve. The resilience of fiber versus copper was proven out by the NBN during the flooding from recent ex-tropical cyclone Alfred. In the broad, customers on FTTP continued to receive service, whereas those on legacy copper technologies in the same area did not. As this fiber-led future starts to become more embedded in the Australian telco landscape, it gives Aussie the opportunity to reshape our ratio of customer service staff to connections, resulting in greater productivity outcomes across the board.
Since 2022, we have seen a 50% reduction in the monthly calls per 1,000 Aussie Broadband customers, in part thanks to our share of full-fiber connections, but also due to our initiatives to increase self-service, enhance proactive fault finding, and the improvement of our onboarding experience for customers. That change in call volume has been met with a 30% improvement in the efficiency of our frontline customer service staff per 1,000 customer ratio in the period between July 2022- March 2025. These productivity benefits have been achieved over the period without impacting our customers. Our voice of customer results have remained strong and stable throughout. We expect these improvements to continue as we grow and as we enter into calendar year 2026. We are not stopping there.
Something we know about our customers, something that is core to the reasons why we will be the telco that people love, is that we understand how important time and effort given back and saved is. Our customers already love us because they know our staff will do whatever they can to solve their problems on that first call. That is already a huge win for Aussie. We know that people who value our in-person support do so because they know we will simply go the extra mile to fix their issues and those issues that are plaguing them from doing the things that they want to. We can go further. We can give even more time back to our customers. Our approach here is to evolve our digital tools and the digital experience so that it is an equal partner to the in-person customer experience.
We want our digital channels to be so fantastic that many customers will simply self-select them for certain activities or for troubleshooting. We have already started upon this journey with Buddy. Buddy has already allowed us to safely test new features and enhancements that we can bring over to the My Aussie app. Our Buddy experimentation program has already allowed us to launch twice as many deployments in this year versus the preceding year, 124 updates compared to 63, with six full new features and eight improved user interfaces. Our ultimate ambition is a simple one: to be the top-rated telco app in both the Android and iOS stores. We are also investing further in improvements for automation in our back-end systems. The goal is to continue to remove the unnecessary manual tasks that take time away from our staff helping our customers.
We will look to use machine learning and AI only where it makes sense. One example here is the award-winning Fault Detector Project, or AFI, as we call it, which was a big success in helping proactively determine faults on connections before customers even realized. We want to understand how we can remove more burdens from customers through projects like these, as well as scaling the existing ones we have even further. Of course, we recognize that one of the most difficult burdens for customers is the hardware itself. Our data shows that we are most likely to hear from customers in the first two weeks of their journey with Aussie, usually due to challenges with their modem or their router.
We're working on a range of changes already to increase the plug-and-play capabilities for our customers, especially those with BYO devices, to remove as much friction as possible. BYO devices comprise 64% of our base and 67% of our new activations. We expect success in this area will then have a positive flow-on effect for productivity and our customer service staff. Armed with our focus on innovation, productivity, our commitment to industry-leading customer service, and our multi-brand approach, we believe Aussie is extremely well placed for the future. The fact that we've seen a rapid rise in awareness and consideration of Aussie Broadband through our regular tracking research with our Insight partner is testament to this. Prior to the launch of the actual Aussie way a couple of years ago, our national awareness and consideration sat at 82% and 35%, respectively.
We wanted our new brand to appeal to more Australians, have a marked point of difference to our other top-tier competitors, while still illustrating the premium branding and experience that Aussie offers. In the 20 months since that launch, our headline awareness and consideration metrics have grown to 90% and 40%. Our cost-per-sale metrics have become more efficient as well, improving by 17% over the same period. That is the state of play for where Aussie is in the residential sector today. The key components are brand positioning, innovation, productivity, and commitment to CX that will create the flywheel to drive our achievement of our residential targets as we look to 2028. I will now hand you over to Aaron, who will take you through our business, enterprise, and government segment and our plans there as we look to 2028.
Just before that, we're going to play you a short video showcasing some of the work we've done with another household Australian name, Akubra.
Without having decent internet connection, you don't have a business these days. People always ask, what defines Akubra? Akubra is part myth, part story, and 100% icon. Akubra makes hats for Australians, and the quality of the hats and the look of the hats is such that they become in demand around the world. Technology has been important to us, and one of the reasons we didn't go with technology early on was in a regional area, we didn't have a good connection. We couldn't upload and download information reliably. The impact that sort of thing has is we wasted a lot of time, and it prevented us from having an online store.
We're really excited to work with such an iconic Australian brand. Whether it's a business with 150 years of heritage like Akubra or a small business that's just starting out, we've got solutions to help businesses of any size. Akubra were facing a real bottleneck with their old legacy copper technology that wasn't allowing them to perform at their best, which meant that a fiber technology was the solution to help them overcome that.
The process of working with Aussie Broadband, it brings a smile to my face because I'm dealing with Australians. Nothing was too hard. If somebody said they were going to get back to me, they got back to me. Timeframes were given and met. The process couldn't have been smoother. I know if there is a problem, I can make a phone call, I'm going to give you help. I don't have a worry.
It was a real privilege to work with Akubra and deliver them a solution. We're really happy with the outcome. They're really happy with the service that's been delivered. It's a service that's going to help set them out into the future. That's a great case of Aussie helping Aussies. What a great story. Thank you very much, Jono. Good morning.
My name is Aaron O'Keefe, and I'm the Group Executive, Business, Enterprise, and Government. I'm excited to talk to you about our plans for our Business, Enterprise, and Government segment. I'm going to take you through the opportunity available in this segment, our strategy for making the most of this opportunity, why we have brought Business, Enterprise, and Government together into a single segment, and our strategy around our Aussie Fiber asset.
There are 2.6 million small to medium businesses actively trading in Australia, and this number is growing year- on- year. Today, Aussie Broadband services 61,000 of these businesses. The opportunity here is substantial. It is important to remember that the lifetime value of a Business Broadband customer is significantly higher than that of a residential. Business Broadband customers are more likely to acquire high-speed NBN plans or bundle other higher-margin services such as fixed voice, mobile, security, and other supporting products. How will we make the most of this? By giving these customers what they need at an affordable price point. Historically, these customers have not been looked after, either due to providers oversimplifying or overcomplicating the solutions these customers need.
To be successful, we will continue with easy but informative processes from sales to provisioning, a product set that is of the build-once-sell-many nature, but it can be configured to work for the different types of businesses that are out there. These products aren't customizable, just configurable by a predetermined set of dials that can be adjusted to suit. We're doing this because customizable products often end up being too expensive for the customer. They're difficult to automate due to their bespoke nature, resulting in higher costs, which leads to higher prices and products that can no longer appeal to or service these businesses well. That's the opportunity in the SMB space. Now let's talk about Enterprise and Government. In the Enterprise and Government sector, there are 73,403 businesses in Australia with more than 20 employees.
There are 537 local councils and up to 250 state government agencies in each state. The opportunity here is to provide solutions to their customers that require a higher level of complexity than that of a small business solution. To win in this segment, we will continue to take a consultative approach to help customers solve their problems with the services and products we offer, working in partnership with our vendors while providing a service delivery experience that keeps the customer informed throughout. Our core telco services have been streamlined so that we can sell and deliver at scale. We have rationalized our vendor partners to having four vendors across managed network and security. While we continue to provide inbound and outbound voice services to large businesses, we found a need to provide a full solution to these customers. We productized the Microsoft Teams service.
We can now provide Teams solutions to our customers and keep the voice revenue on our own network. The next phase of this is to bring a full unified communication suite to our Enterprise and Government portfolio via products gained from our Symbio acquisition. We do not need to recreate the wheel here. Our Carbon Portal is revered by our customers, and we will be continually bringing new features and functionality to this platform, and we will continue to do so. We will continue to provide our award-winning Australian-based support to our customers. Managing enterprise-grade customer networks comes with a number of different challenges compared to providing small business or residential internet. We have highly skilled people providing this service to our customers. Our goal, in a nutshell, is to be the preferred destination for business customers in Australia, as well as a thought leader in the ENG market.
We are targeting small business with a suite of core telco products and building out a line of supporting products to increase our share of wallet and increase business customer retention. Small business owners are generally time-poor. They have a higher propensity to bundle services together and receive everything on one bill. Adding further services to this capability and giving these customers the ability to purchase and manage all of their services with the same simple experience via our sales channels, our My Aussie app, and via our customer service centers. We are targeting the Enterprise and Government sector, which includes mid-market, with our core telco products, managed network and security, and managed voice.
We are focusing on providing the best customer experience and support in more of a business partner capacity rather than a provider of services capacity, making sure that we understand our customers' businesses deeply to provide the greatest possible customer experience to become their trusted advisors and their destination for advice on future developments in telco and security that could affect their business. We have gained a lot of momentum over the last couple of years, signing significant brands such as Bunnings Warehouse, The Reject Shop, Sushi Sushi, Findex, Lorna Jane, Morris Blackburn Lawyers, United Petroleum, and Pedders Shock Absorbers, to name a few. We have a healthy future pipeline of deals for customers of similar size mentioned and larger. Our customer connection number continues to grow, and this connectivity is what brings customers to Aussie Broadband.
We'll continue to grow and focus on the total number of connections, and we will leverage our brand reputation to do so. We will also use our total solution selling strategy, where we ask customers what the problems are that they have in their business, and we will bring our products together to solve those problems. We have been successful in growing our average revenue per customer over the years. While we do this with our existing telco service, such as connectivity, fixed voice, mobile, 4G, 5G backup, and hosted phone systems, we will bring further products and services to this strategy also. By coupling this with our award-winning customer support, we will continue to increase average revenue per customer growth and customer retention. Why do our customers love us?
We keep our business processes as simple as possible, and we make sure that no matter which channel our customers are dealing with us through, that they get the same experience. We keep our communication simple. We listen to our customers, and we react quickly to their requests. After we won the Bunnings Warehouse deal, we asked Bunnings Head of Technology a series of questions to better understand why they chose us. One of those questions was, "Within the telco industry, what do you feel is missing, and what could we do to continue to stand out in the future?" His answer was quite simple, literally. He said, "Simplicity. That's what's missing. Keep it simple." Our customers value the service that they receive, and our pricing is competitive in market.
Building smart automation into as much as we possibly can allows us to scale while providing a superior customer experience and competitive price points. We have multiple levels of support staff in business and enterprise and government, and these staff are trained to be able to fix the majority of issues while the customer is in contact with us. What our customers say. You can see some of our customer quotes on the screen, but I want to highlight and read the quote from Savers. "Fantastic customer service. Seriously, some of the best I've ever encountered." We love receiving feedback from our customers, both the good and the bad. We celebrate the good feedback, and we learn from the bad feedback. By combining our business and ENG support, delivery, and customer management teams, we can better leverage the economies of scale from a people perspective.
We can gain efficiencies by standardizing processes across the core telco product set. Even though we might be delivering more complex managed network and security products for ENG customers, for instance, the underlying telco services that support the managed network and security are the same across business and ENG. When we build a new product that will be available in both business and ENG, we can build it once and build it well to work for both segments rather than building the product twice with minor differences between them, using automation to turn on and off features as needed. When working in the mid-market segment, there can be confusion around which teams support which customer depending on how you look at the customer. Combining these segments removes any confusion or gray areas. It's the same team providing the same great support regardless of the customer segment.
As businesses grow, it's quite easy for a customer that has outgrown the small business process and product set to go unnoticed until it's too late. By removing any artificial barriers and bringing this segment together, we can take our customers on their growth journey and provide them the support, the experience, and the products they need to continue to grow their business with us. By simplifying our applicable products to work across segments and develop common processes across our delivery and support teams, we can streamline these processes, resulting in greater efficiencies and a superior customer experience. Aussie Fiber is an important part of our product mix, enabling us to provide an alternative non-NBN solution for high-speed symmetrical connectivity. Our products range from 250 Mb s through to 10 Gbs.
As Brian discussed earlier, our core fiber build has provided us with an invaluable backhaul backbone that's had a very short payback for a 25-year strategic asset. This backbone has enabled us to build extensions to ENG customers by bringing commercial buildings on net. The core network is 1,200 km long, and our access network now has grown to 700 km. We have now connected 792 buildings to deliver 952 services or 1.2 services per building. We have connected 30 major data centers, and 86 of the 121 NBN points of interconnect are connected directly to our own fiber network. When we began our Aussie Fiber journey, we did not have any on-net buildings, and we had very few near-net buildings, only the buildings that we had run fiber past to get to the NBN points of interconnect and data centers.
Now, though, we have an opportunity to be able to connect customers in much shorter timeframes because the majority of the infrastructure is already built. See, the opportunity ahead of us for Aussie Fiber is simple. 83.5% of our on-net buildings currently only have one connection. Our sales efforts will focus on winning more connections in on-net buildings to create superior returns. We'll also be looking for high opportunity near-net buildings that we can open up significant tenancy opportunities. Having developed this strong footprint, our approach is to expand Aussie Fiber through incremental investments to on-net or near-net premises. With respect to on-net buildings, we estimate there are 13,000 tenancies in the 792 buildings. As I said, 83.5% of these buildings only have one connection, and our penetration rate is 1.2. We want to increase that ratio to between two and three over the next three years.
Along with on-net buildings, there is a total of almost 2,400 near-net buildings, which includes approximately 25,000 tenancies. What does this mean for the economics? The image on the screen shows an incremental near-net build in Castle Hill in New South Wales, where we invested in connecting two customers with an initial build and then engaged with neighboring businesses to secure further connections. We now have eight connections into the blue and green buildings, yielding over AUD 3,000 per month in revenue at a margin in excess of 80%. The orange buildings represent additional expansion opportunity with no civil works required. There is another example on the screen that shows the impact of incremental connections in connected buildings. The initial customer does not generate an attractive investment case, but it does open up the building to future opportunity, and as the customers increase, strong returns can be generated.
It's worth noting that these returns are calculated based on the customer's initial contract term of three years. Any extension to that term will increment return with no additional CapEx requirements, and the build costs are generating long-term strategic value. As we look to 2028, we will seek to expand Aussie Fiber into on-net and near-net buildings. This will be achieved with targeted marketing campaigns and leveraging our existing sales capability. Off-net buildings, being those opportunities further away from our existing footprint, will only be considered where it makes strategic and financial sense and where we have a reasonable expectation of multi-tenancy opportunities or where the investment forms part of a larger multi-site contract. We'll continue to also focus on migrating existing customers off other carriers.
Our aim is to double our tenancy penetration over the strategic period with a target of an average of two and three connections per building. Thank you, and I will now hand over to Libby, who is going to interview a valued customer of ours, Anthony Sock, General Manager of IT at Sushi Sushi, on his experiences of engaging Aussie
No worries. Morning, Anthony, and thank you so much for joining us here today at our Investor Day. Really looking forward to hearing about your experiences of working with Aussie Broadband and to this chat. To start with, could you please share what tell us about the Sushi Sushi business?
Yeah, for sure. We are a business that was founded in Melbourne in 1998 in Box Hill. It was our first store. Fast forward now 25 years, we're now at 170 locations in Australia. Of our business, we're a franchise-led business, so of the 170, 70% are franchisees and 30 are company stores. Within a sushi business, most people don't see that it is quite complex sometimes. We've got four different concepts. If you see a store, there's the micro, which is a hole in the wall, kiosk where you go in the shopping centers and you'll see it in a thoroughfare, an inline store where you can eat your hot food and actually dine in and have a hot food menu, and then there's the sushi trains where you sit and jump on a conveyor belt.
I guess for Sushi Sushi, we want to be the market leaders in sushi in Australia. Similar to your FY 2028 plan, we hopefully want to put down 300 stores in FY 2028. Having you guys kind of showcase your business, it's quite compelling, and I think hopefully Sushi Sushi can align to that.
Wonderful. What was the challenge that you were solving for that first brought Aussie onto your radar, and how long ago was that?
I've only been here a year and a half, and we definitely flipped it on its head in that timeframe. When I came into this business, there were four core challenges. The first challenge was being franchisees. They were hard on their sleeve, and me coming in, I didn't want to be that guy who just sold them everything and didn't deliver. The first thing for me was gaining trust and respect. That was done through the first four months, and that was, "Hey, franchisees did a national call with them. There's over 90 partners. In the next four months, I'm going to commit to these SLAs, these commitments, and these strategies. If I don't do that, you can kick me out the door." I'm here today, so obviously I've done something right.
With that vision was getting them on board to then take them along the journey of trust and change. Transformation happened after the four months. There we are today. Next problem was we could not be proactive. We could not support stores in QSR. Our teams are leaner, and so our cost per click or cost per phone call cost a lot of money for time and also taking up the franchisees or the company store staff on the phone. They do not want to do that. They obviously want to sell sushi. The next thing was proactive measures. We did a large deployment of Juniper for our stores, and core switching gave us more visibility. We missed AI to use what is a platform to benefit smaller teams.
Our ROI was instant around that, and franchisees loved us that we did not have to hold them on the phone for two hours over something so basic around networking. Number three was not many people have heard of us. My job was to make the digital transformation a big bang in this ocean, and I think we are starting to make a good segue in the next five-year strategy. We have done a lot of work around point of sale, migration soon in this year, introducing mobile app, online ordering, clicking, collecting, all that, all that was bang. The fourth most important is around internet. I inherited a schmoozle, fair to say. You can imagine when you scale from one- 170, people just gravitate to different carriers, and different carriers will support either internet or voice or sometimes both.
When you have a team of four, to troubleshoot and feel like you're a domestic user over 170 locations, you are on the phone a very long time, and sometimes you're calling one carrier for the phone and the other for the internet. My unicorn Phil Yurari, he's my BDM in ABB. He came in and literally just threw this product at us, and it was called Carbon. Within, I think I was eight months into the job, within six months after that, we changed over 160 locations to Aussie in one quick churn because, yeah, we're sole believers in a product that shows an instant ROI and keeps it quite simple.
It sounds like part of the brief of what you were looking for in a partner was someone that could solve the technical problems for you. Also, with a small team of four, you needed someone who was essentially your arms and legs to help with that deployment and to be there and to help service. Customer service sounds like a really core focus for you too because you're supporting these franchisees. Would that be fair to say that they were key components of the brief? What were you looking for in a partner?
Yeah, 100%. In similar to you guys, you guys have your values. I kind of envy your values, but we stick to the values of RICE, which is respect, innovate, collaborate, and execute. That goes through customer experience to employee experience. I've come from retail, so customer-first approach is everything that I breathe, and we push it through our ELT and through our staff and our franchisees. Picking a strategic partner for us is exactly what you said, simple. I'm not that old, but I'm quite old school in my thinking. When we pick strategic partners, you want one business, one partner to worry about. One throat to choke or one back to pat is kind of the ethos I run by.
I think when you have someone show and demonstrate that your platform does the job, but also the person you're talking to is there for you 24/7 and can scale at pace, I guess you just double down on if you want to go 300 in three years, it makes sense.
Can you tell me a little bit about the Carbon platform, what it has meant for you and what it has meant for your franchisees and business partners?
Sure. Now, you can trademark this if you want, but I call Carbon Baby Jesus. It's a miracle child. It's incredible. When my team came to me with it, you can't imagine when you're putting down a greenfield for one of our stores, the amount of stress it takes to get three or four NBN visits to get your line in, and you just stress about it for eight weeks. Sometimes your store project changes. It might open two weeks earlier or four weeks earlier, and you go through that churn again. The ability to change what is an eight-week greenfield stress hit to what is almost 20 clicks in 15 minutes, the ROI, and my team just went, "Thank you so much." What could be a three-headcount additional work is now kind of being consolidated into one platform.
I guess what you see is a single pane of glass. One platform that gives you full visibility of your assets, your store, your connectivity. The best thing that I've seen, and it hasn't happened often, which is good news for you guys, is service outages because we've only seen one alert pop up, and this is one store. The best thing about that is you get to inform the franchisee first. With franchisees and customers and partners, they want to know before they find out. They don't want to call you about a problem. If you can see it first in a single pane of glass, then you can.
The way you described it to me too was that prior to Carbon, you had your franchisees literally sitting in front of their screen, and they had to make a decision about which screen view would they have depending on the task that they wanted to perform. For someone that was literally really more keen to be outside the front serving their customers, they needed to juggle doing their stock take, their marketing, the point of sale. Can you talk a little bit about how that actually made a real difference to them?
Yeah, for sure. If you guys can imagine coming from having to make a decision, and you're a franchise owner or a store owner, and you had four ports on a switch, and you had to decide within your 10 devices what's important for you today, whether it's your point of sale, whether you're going to update your digital content, is it your modem, is it your wireless, is it your fixed POS. It was very different when we could say, "Don't worry about doing technical support. Don't worry about being the extension of our arm.
If we can take internet troubleshooting, if we can take network visibility, and if we can take that away from you, we're living to our reputation of being a support office and making sure that we're a customer experience-led, meaning we're actually putting that at the forefront of what they should be doing. That was really easy to sell to. I mean, it's kind of in the society that we're in, you either you only make it or you break it with customer service. I think that was a big decision we made to double down around the partners that we pick is those who can enable my team to work more proactively.
Yeah, that sounds amazing and really wonderful to hear the experience. With Carbon being the watch and Aussie Broadband being the how, what else has stood out for you in the time that you've been working with Aussie Broadband about the way that you work together?
Yeah, I think in this partnership, like I said, we look for a growth partner. If we're trying to be aggressive with our growth, our expansion, whether it's acquisitions, international growth, and there's some big plays coming through, it's important that my relationship with Phil, who's my BDM, doesn't change. The end goal doesn't change. The formula doesn't change. I think when you look at if you were results-based creatures, I guess if you can see that I could churn 160 locations seamlessly without franchising knocking on my door, doing a pretty good job and just replicating that to domestic and all around Australia.
I mean, I think I know the answer, but I need to ask the question. In the process of the tender, when you were seeking a partner, could anybody else match Carbon?
It's a great question. I guess the quickest answer is I kind of shut every other carrier telco down by saying Carbon because a lot of them said, "We can do parts of it," but I'm like, "Why would I want parts of it when I have the whole thing?" I think what's very difficult is from what I've seen, the formula of Aussie from the get-go is your foundation has been solid, so scaling is always going to be easy. With what I've seen from other carriers, from retail, a carrier can make you look very bad as a technology leader, especially when you're franchise-led. If you don't trust and could put your heart on your sleeve and, I guess, die by the sword of the carrier you pick, none of them kind of gave me that commitment. That is why Aussie and Carbon was that formula.
That's wonderful. You have talked about scaling. How or what are your next three to five-year aspirations, and how do you see Aussie helping you get there?
Yeah, I think as the digital landscape is getting very heavy in stores, as I kind of mentioned, we want to introduce mobile app. We want to bring in click and collect. We want to even touch base into beaconing technology, which is a big play for us. The store, whether it's kiosk, whether it's inline, connectivity and customer connections is so important because a customer only grades you for the experience that they had. If the experience was, I guess, dropped out, as we would say, that is detrimental to a brand. The first thing is standardization and optimization across the growth, and hopefully we can do that with what we have. In the international space, I want to almost, we're a master franchising element.
I want to be able to bundle what excellence and the pedigree looks like and go, "If you can take this brand internationally, you must meet this." Because a brand isn't just a brand selling sushi. A brand is the digital experience with the customer experience and going, "Can you deliver this?" Yeah, I think that's where we'll be able to do some great stuff.
That sounds like a really exciting future. It really does. If you could sum up in three words what's really important to you about the partnership with Aussie, what would they be?
Simple, easy, and they're all the same words, effortless.
Anthony, thank you so much for your time. Really great to share and hear your insights today. Next, I'd like to invite Mo to the stage who's going to talk us through the wholesale strategy.
Thank you.
Thanks, Libby and Anthony. That was extremely insightful. I love the acronym of RICE for the values as well. That was really cool. Telecommunications allows us to communicate with one another through channels such as voice, video, email, and text. Most of you probably knew that. Wholesale is the backbone of the telecommunications industry. It is the behind-the-scenes partner that keeps us connected from communicating to the driver from your rideshare app that sometimes they do not respond to, delighting your customer online, or enabling the connection that powers your virtual meeting. Wholesalers like Aussie Broadband facilitate these services, such as providing access to our tier-one voice networks, both domestically and internationally for businesses. As we look to 2028, our wholesale division will continue to provide value to our partners through the strength of our brands and our position in the wholesale market.
Aussie Broadband has been awarded the most trusted telco for three years in a row by Roy Morgan, and partners can leverage that to ensure that they further delight their customers. Our Symbio brand has been a leader in communications as a service for many years now, and our global reach means that our partners gain insights that extend far further than our boundaries. Speaking of our voice capability, Symbio and NetSip bring a combined tenure of 35 years of experience in delivering voice, including direct inward dialing, inbound and outbound voice, and porting. We operate two Tier-1 voice networks in Australia, as Brian mentioned earlier, as well as Tier-1 networks in New Zealand and Singapore, with our tier-one network in Malaysia currently being built out.
Aussie Broadband owns and operates a comprehensive NBN backhaul network with 86/ 121 points of interconnect that we are connected to utilizing Aussie Fiber. We have over 1,900 km of fiber and pass almost 5,000 buildings, allowing our partners to leverage high-speed connectivity with their customers. In addition to owning and operating the two Tier-1 networks in Australia, our wholesale business has access to Telstra's mobile network, being able to deliver voice messaging and IoT, Internet of Things, with the know-how and experience as the largest mobile virtual network enabler in Australia. As an enablement provider, our software is highly regarded, with capabilities offering our customers a fully tailored experience that facilitates being able to purchase the services they need, from the building blocks to a completely tailored solution, from the telco people love. What's in the numbers? Voice cloud adoption continues to increase through unified communications.
We're expecting to see an upward growth trend in penetration in Australia from 43% in 2024 - 78% by 2028. We're also expecting over that time that cloud communications users will actually grow from 3 million- 5.2 million, according to research by Cavill. Across data, we continue to see a shift away from large incumbent providers to challenger brands. John, I mentioned earlier, the NBN market is expected to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 1%-3%, while over the same time, the challenger market is expected to grow 9%. In addition to our retail business succeeding, Aussie Broadband will facilitate the move away from the incumbents by helping our partners as well. Voice and data total markets are basically experiencing softer growth overall, but the growth for Aussie and our partners will be driven primarily through winning greater market share. Mobile's a little different, though.
When you look at services in operation, they're expected to continue to grow, for example, as the number of active handsets increases. It's also expected that MVNO penetration will increase and potentially align with what we're seeing in regions like Europe. John, I mentioned this as well. We're seeing a move away from the MVNOs, and we estimate that by FY 2028, this adoption could be as high as 20%, similar to levels we're seeing in the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands. By now, hopefully, you're wondering what do our customers look like and how do they use our services. Typically for us, we look at our customers in wholesale as falling into one of three categories: managed service providers and small retail providers, challenger telcos and non-telco consumer brands, and finally, over-the-top providers.
With managed service providers and small retail service providers, they typically consume voice, data, and mobile products from us, with currently 6,500 resellers and IT providers serving Australian businesses. We often see these providers servicing both consumer and business and achieving medium SIO growth. They value low-touch, automated interaction enabled via our software. Challenger telcos and non-telco consumer brands are customers who are looking for a digital-first approach to servicing their customers. This includes banks, retailers, utility providers that consume mobile and data products that are delivered through our software. There are currently over 200 of these within our domestic market, and through our next-generation enablement software, our ambition is to add many more. Over-the-top providers are global software vendors or global telcos that utilize our voice offering to power their global communications tools. These are companies looking for scale and speed to progress their technology, roadmaps, and coverage.
Currently, there are over 1,000 or sorry, over 100 of these. I wish there were 1,000 of them. Over 100 of these operating across global markets. The accelerated growth is made possible through our unique product offering. What I spoke about on the previous slide gave you a bit of a taste of the potential customers that we can partner with in wholesale. However, I always find it easier to sort of put a name to a segment. Managed service providers and small retail service providers include companies like Switch Telecom, FX Networks, and Central Telecoms. Challenger telcos and non-telco consumer brands include Red Energy and Yomojo. Over-the-top providers include global companies such as Twilio, RingCentral, Zoom, and 8x8. Named a few, but as you can see up there on the screen, there are many more on the slide. Obviously, we are not presenting all of our customers either.
Very small subset there that we're proud to support. With a large addressable market still in need of servicing, we look forward to winning even more of our share. Our ambition, I have to say, our ambition is bold. It's to dominate the wholesale telecommunications market by 2028, and I believe we've already begun on that journey. To deliver on our ambition for 2028, we'll continue to provide secure, reliable, and trusted products and services that customers love using. We absolutely respect that our customers come in a variety of shapes and sizes and want to interact differently with us. Our desire is to continue to enable and create value for them. Some are experts and know what they do, and the best thing we can do is give them the tools and just get out of their way.
Others will need a bit of additional help and support in creating a fully-fledged sort of go-to-market, and our offering is what's there to help them win. We will continue to develop a market-leading product portfolio. In voice, we will continue innovating and staying ahead of the growth trends and the headwinds. We will also dominate the wholesale data market and unlock mobile for our partners. We will continue to offer a best-in-class digital and customer experience. As we bring the capabilities of Symbio and Aussie Wholesale together, we will simplify and standardize our offering for our customers, enhancing our value-added tools to help them win further. We will also progressively integrate our systems but maintain our two voice networks in Australia, giving our customers the necessary redundancy that they demand through the convenience of a single, strong relationship.
Finally, we will continue to create a community customers love from learning events, regulatory briefings, information webinars, customer appreciation events, and attending conferences both domestically and abroad. We'll be sharing our knowledge as their partner of choice. We might have to add Clickr to our product portfolio because I'm te rrible at using it. How will we win? What is our secret sauce that will help us win? We've talked about our stellar customer service, and you heard it as well from Anthony and many others over time. Together with our new enablement platform, I think we have an unbeatable combination. As proven winners in the market, our existing enablement business powers over 2 million subscribers, including one of the largest MVNOs in Australia. As mentioned in our half-year results, we're excited to continue the partnership with our new five-year deal.
They'll see media on transition to our new platform in quarter two of FY 2026. The wave of growth for these non-telco brands continues to accelerate, with the likes of utilities, supermarkets, retailers, and banks adding telecommunications to their core offerings. Our new enablement platform has a proven track record globally of delivering at a scale beyond the NBN market in Australia. I'll just make sure Libby doesn't die on us because she's got one more interview to go. No, that's all good. We'll be able to support the largest of wholesale customers as we expand our addressable market to non-telco businesses like utilities, retailers, banks, and beyond. We anticipate more entrants from these established verticals combined with the emergence of new verticals mirroring global trends that we are seeing.
Our enablement solution will allow all industries looking for growth opportunities to add mobile and data products to deliver incremental revenue, further integration, and brand value, and ultimately engage loyal customers. Our new platform can support customers of any scale in Australia and can enable all consumer brands interested in offering their own branded telecom services through a white label offering. Our platform offers a low-code, multi-tenanted platform that allows customers to launch their own turnkey telco at scale within 90 days. Its multi-service capability allows us to deliver voice, mobile, and data across the Aussie wholesale portfolio. Voice continues as our pedigree, and we'll continue to invest in our platforms, innovating and remaining ahead of the growth curve to allow our customers to receive more than just call termination. Symbio has a long history of innovation in voice, being pioneers in voice over IP.
As a simple example, in recent times, we automated key porting processes, resulting in a 40% reduction in manual handling times. We're now enhancing this functionality to allow our customers to access it via APIs or our low-code, no-code portal so they can benefit from these efficiencies with their customers as well. Driven by customer demands and supporting the growth of our global software providers in the region, we remain focused on expanding our carrier voice offering in APAC. Symbio is the only T1 carrier in the APAC region that can provide DIDs, so directing or dialing numbers, for three countries accessible via the same digital experience. We also remain committed to delivering the Malaysian T1 network, and where there is a clear return on investment, expand into additional markets that provide meaningful outcomes for our customers.
Across data, historically, we haven't opened up all the elements of the network in a wholesale capacity. Anthony sort of spoke about some of the scale components, and Aussie's network was absolutely built for scale and resiliency. We will look to extend these capabilities and systems for our partners to leverage, providing their customers with the services that they need so they can delight. Aaron spoke about our strategy and ambition around Aussie Fibre. As we extend that customer access network of the Aussie Fibre footprint, we will also provide the systems that allow our partners to consume so they can actually service their customers as well. Finally, by utilizing our experience of enabling one of Australia's largest MVNOs, we will continue to provide mobile services and the systems that help our partners grow their mobility businesses. To close, I am going to loop back to our FY 2028 ambitions.
As you know, wholesale is not new to Aussie Broadband Group. However, it hasn't had the level of focus that we will provide it as we look to FY 2028. You can see from this slide that we already have customers who see the benefits across our ambitions. When we look at one of our ambitions being secure, reliable, and trusted products and services that customers love using, our customer Globe Tele Services said that Symbio consistently meets our stringent criteria for quality, reliability, scalability, and coverage. If you look at the next quote, our customers have different needs across multiple regions, and Symbio makes it easy to adapt. It's built to work the way we do. That's a quote from one of our customers, Comms Group, demonstrating that our customers come in a variety of shapes and sizes and want to interact differently.
We're absolutely focused on a market-leading product portfolio. It's not just about the technology. It's about the confidence we have knowing that we can rely on Symbio to deliver innovative products and services, helping us stay ahead in a rapidly evolving industry. That was Telco Collective. Central Telecoms said they're a critical part of our operation with a combination of their Australia-wide fiber network offering the highest levels of availability and NBN speeds and our amazing local support team. It's impossible for businesses to find a better NBN service elsewhere. A great example of best-in-class digital and customer experience. Finally, creating a community that customers love. Operating a full-purpose telco comes with many challenges, but telco in a box helped to further our goals and have been an expert and responsive partner. We look forward to building a long and successful partnership together. That was a good tale.
We intend to share many, many more of these stories with you when we next present to you as we absolutely do grow our wholesale base. On that note, I'd like to thank you for your time and hand over to Libby, who will interview a fantastic customer and partner of ours, Derek Cummins from Medion. Thank you.
Thanks, Mo. Just before Mo, we heard from Anthony at Sushi Sushi, with whom we've been working together for about two years now. Love to introduce Derek Cummins, who's the Managing Director of Medion Australia. We've been in a partnership through Symbio with Medion for 11 years now. Really looking forward to diving into and understanding how that partnership has evolved over the last 11 years. Welcome, Derek.
Thank you.
We'd love to start by, can you please just tell us about Medion Australia? What do you do and how do you partner with Symbio?
Yeah, I'm really glad there's been a bit of education about MVNOs today so I don't actually have to explain what one is because it is a tongue twister. We are an MVNO. We sell consumer plans, and we power one of the very big retail brands. I'm not going to talk about who they are today because it is not about them, but we are one of the largest MVNOs in Australia. Symbio really sit at the heart of our operations. The enablement platform, which Mo's just been talking about, really connects our customers, our wholesale carrier to us and all of our other little systems and different parts of our ecosystem. Really very much sitting at the center of everything we do.
Symbio's philosophy is that when our customers are winning, we win. Can you tell me about some of the highlights over the last 11 years and how Symbio has helped you achieve those wins?
Yeah. Becoming one of the largest MVNOs, I think, is a pretty big win on the scorecard. We've been with Symbio for 11 years of our 12 years, so very much a foundational partner, and everything we've done to get there has actually helped us get there. A platform that has been quick and rapid to get stuff out in market and let us grow, responding to all the regulatory fun we have to have in our space quickly and making it effortless for us. They're some of the things that have helped us get there.
Holding a partnership for 11 years is really just like any relationship where you need to continue to work at that. It evolves over time as the needs and the ambitions and your aspirations change. Can you tell me about how you've worked through more challenging times and what has really stood out for you in the way that Symbio partners with you?
We're a German company. After a decade of working with my German colleagues, what I've learned is that the German way of doing business is about valuing long-term commitments and partnerships over any kind of short-term gains. When you're dealing with the sort of challenges we have as an industry, whether it is sometimes tech doesn't work the way you want it to, sometimes we've got market evolution, regulatory evolution, opportunities, but touching those opportunities is hard. You want a partner that's standing by your side and is looking at it through a long-term lens. That really creates a lot of goodwill to get problems solved. What I find is that when we are sort of looking at some of the challenges, what we do is we focus on the challenge. What are we going to do right now? How do we fix it?
Everything else comes after that. I think that's really important because it creates that trust that you'll actually get through stuff.
There is a lot happening in the sector. Technology is evolving really, really quickly. We are getting ahead of things like AI and all sorts of factors around us. The regulatory environment, as you say, is taking time to catch up to that. What are some of the aspects of that partnership with Symbio that really help you as a business focus on what you have got in front of you and enable you to navigate your way through these things?
Yeah, that they're the experts in actually how to do the tech for us is really important because we're not the experts in the tech. Being able to sit down with a partner and for them to actually lead you and guide you, I've always talked about it as sometimes a co-creation relationship. We talk about what we need, and then our partners will come in and say, well, how do they help us get there? At times, they'll actually suggest things that we're not thinking about. It is very much a kind of collaborative co-creation model where we draw on the best of each other to get where we need to get to.
That sounds like a wonderful way to build a partnership, particularly over time. The depth of that partnership would be really impressive.
It is very deep. Yeah, very deep. I've always referred to them as an extension of our team. That's how we actually operate as if we're part of the same team. We don't sort of use the company barriers as different entities to sort of differentiate. We're all one team when it comes to how do we get our products out to market quickly.
I think that's the best way to work. You can't actually achieve everything if you have that silo mentality, I think. That's great to hear. We heard Mo talk about the new enablement platform, and I know we've recently signed an expansion of our agreement with you for another five years, I believe. This was around the enablement platform. What was the brief, if you like? I think you went out to market.
We did go out to market. This forum would be very happy to know that you won. There were really two factors. The platform that we started with has been a fantastic vehicle to get us where we are today. If it came in with all the bells and whistles, it would have actually been hard to actually pick up the speed we needed to. It is that classic challenge of being in a startup and just getting out there and getting it done. Where we were about, it is about two years ago we started this journey. It was a long journey to kind of get to the end point. We were growing. When you grow your platforms, your capacity needs to expand. We had to do something about that irrespective of anything else.
There was also an opportunity to think about, well, what do we need for the next 10 years of growth? Obviously, there is so much stuff happening with AI, all the great stuff Jonah was talking about, customer interactions and streamlining that. That's stuff I have to do in my business as well because I'm running a retail business. You have to look at, well, what platform or what systems do we actually need to enable all of that? For us, it was a really good opportunity to go, well, we need to expand the capacity. Do we go and do a change of the oil again on the same platform, or do we go out there and find a new solution?
The reason why Symbio were able to knock it out of the park was they kind of did not just come and say, okay, here is a system we have built or here is a solution we have got. They kind of went out there and actually found a software vendor that could bring in all that scale. I mean, the people that they are working with are in some of the most innovative markets. They have got some of the most innovative global MVNOs using their solutions. All of that IP and knowledge we can now tap into. Really critically, it still kept the local perspective and the local connections and connecting these systems to a wholesale carrier. I am glad I do not actually have to know how to do all that because there is a lot of work that actually goes in that.
They are able to bring in that skill and knowledge and expertise and then couple it with this global platform. It obviously was the winning proposition.
Thank you for choosing us.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Tell me about what are your aspirations over the next three to five years and how do you see Symbio partnering with you to achieve those?
Yeah, I mean, we obviously want to keep growing. You have heard today the MVNO story. There is still much opportunity in there. We still want to keep tapping into that. We need to be able to tap into the innovation, the AI. How do we make it easier for customers to interact with us digitally? How do we bring more and more activity online? How do we get our customer service teams focusing on the really complex stuff that needs support? I think for us, it is about bringing in all that technology so we can really kind of unleash the power of it.
With the technology requirements and I guess the technology that will underpin you being able to achieve those aspirations, what else are you looking for from a relationship perspective? I guess, again, to sort of reframe and describe that Symbio partnership and what it means for you.
It's someone that is part of your team, so someone that is sitting there and sharing the same goals as you, the same aspirations. Someone that you can trust. The environment we're operating in is very complex. There's a lot of stuff happening in the regulatory space, which we've already talked to. You need a partner that actually gets that. They actually build that as part of their actual business delivery because we are every year having to adapt to changing requirements. Anything that changes has to go through all your systems. A partner that's actually match fit for that is really, really important for us as well as being able to drive all the innovation and exciting stuff because the minute that other stuff falls over, it's a world of pain.
Yeah. I can well understand that. If you were to just describe or sum up the partnership with Symbio in three words or a few words, what would that be?
Trust. I think I've used that word already, but trust is really critical to us. Reliability. The Germans like steady. That reliability is a really important thing that's been drummed into me when I've talked to my board. And results. We are a business. We want results. We want a partner that we can get results with.
As we say, when our customers are winning, we win also. Our focus is very much on helping our customers win and achieve their goals. Derek, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
It's been wonderful to hear from you. Thank you for sharing your insights.
Awesome. Thanks.
That brings us to the end of our morning session. We'll now break for lunch. The lunch is served outside, up the stairs and to the right of the reception area near the fountain court. Where are we at? Twelve, quarter past twelve. If we could meet back here at 1:00 P.M., we will keep moving with the afternoon session from there. Thank you so much again, everyone, and we'll see you at 1:00 P.M. I should say, please join our executive and our board for lunch as well.
It's on now. It's on now. Welcome back, everybody. I hope you enjoyed your lunch, and welcome back to those that are online as well. I'd now like to introduce Brent Parker, our Chief Technology Officer. We've heard mention of our great platforms like Carbon, and Brent's going to talk to us about our technology future and how we're continuing to invest in these great enablement platforms to help support our customers.
Thank you, Libby. Thank you, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Brad Parker, and as the CTO at Aussie Broadband, I'll be taking you through our technology strategy and how it will underpin the success of everything you've heard today. Make sure this is working. No, maybe not. Round two. There we go.
Throughout Aussie Broadband's history, we have been the provider of industry-leading network performance, as evidenced by our lion's share of NBN's highest-speed plans, the plans that target the most demanding telco users, such as gamers. In the past year, we've continued to invest in that premium network experience. We acquired our first-ever IRU, or Indefeasible Right of Use, on an international subsea cable system. This has significantly increased our network capacity, allowing Aussie Broadband to provide our users with years of certainty while removing Aussie Broadband from the treadmill of competing with all carriers for limited space on these cable systems. With the launch of Buddy Telco, our digital-first channel, we created a venue to rapidly bring new delivery and experience capability to our digitally savvy customers, those most willing to go on a technology journey with us. To achieve our ambition, we continue the maturation of our technology delivery and execution functions.
We continue the uplift of our platforms and services, and we continue the enhancing of the software developed across the group, all in order to deliver secure, scalable systems that provide the foundation for continued growth, achievement of efficiencies, and increased capability to accelerate delivery. Innovative new products and features will delight our customers, will allow us to invest in the in-home and in-business experience, and ensure we remain competitive in the market. Our technology strategy is built across six pillars: intrinsic security, strategy and architecture, technology transformation, technology innovation, operational excellence, and delivery excellence. Each will play a key role in delivering our business objectives over the next three years. Security is an imperative. In the past year, the telco industry has seen considerable increases in both attempted and successful cyberattacks. Our aspiration for intrinsic security revolves around one key principle: trust.
Our customers, partners, employees, and shareholders trust us to deliver the most reliable and secure platforms and services. We will achieve this by, first, expanding our security operations center to provide a robust line of defense in depth against cyber threats, implementing an Aussie-wide identity framework that securely provides access to group assets, and expanding our vulnerability management capability to exceed our resolution targets. This includes robust data loss prevention, deploying new encryption, and new endpoint security controls. We will continue to strengthen and mature our security culture by addressing social engineering attacks. As we continue to grow, we need to ensure our technology solutions and investments are aligned with the needs of the business and are guided by our overall corporate strategy.
In many industries that I've worked, this critical connection is often lost with the tech heads and me working on technology architectures, on projects and initiatives that don't deliver business value. Aussie knows better. We are committing to achieving this through our strategy and architecture aspirations by, first, evolving the technology engagement model from one of cool technology to one where our business segment leaders view technology as a trusted partner and provide a role that is essential to achieving its strategic goals, developing a common reference architecture that informs our technology decisions and aligns those decisions to the business outcomes, rather than having three different architectures based on the previous business segments at ABB, OTW, and Symbio. We continue to focus our software development capabilities on achieving market differentiation through new capability enablement to products such as Carbon.
Aussie is making a concerted effort to be a leader in Australia's telco industry as increasing our presence and contributions among global telcos, standards bodies, industry forums, regulatory agencies, and through the early adoption of new and emerging technologies that will accelerate our growth. Our technology transformation aims to establish common core systems and processes, which are the foundation for scalable growth. During the next several years, we are leaning into four critical priorities that will address some of these most pressing issues facing our platforms. These include evolving our core network and our core internal cloud platforms, the management of these platforms, known as the OSS stack, the enabling systems tied to delivery of the products, or the BSS stacks, and the unification of our voice service stacks to bring together product and delivery capabilities between our residential, business, and wholesale markets.
Globally, the telco industry has spent the past 20 years focused on replacing the so-called last mile, or the connection from the telco network into the home or business. This is true in Australia as well, with NBN's continued focus on upgrading the legacy copper networks. As Jonathan—how did he go? He's over there. As Jonathan has indicated, and our own data has shown, these fiber-to-the-home or fiber-to-the-premise upgrades remove or significantly reduce legacy performance, capacity, and physical reach constraints that previous technologies like DSL had. As these upgrades near completion, differentiation between providers will become less about last-mile speed, and providers instead will compete in over-the-top capabilities, customer engagement, delivery and enablement, the in-home and in-business experience at the point of use, and the core network performance due to the characteristics of how these high-speed technologies operated.
I've indicated some ways that Aussie has historically innovated in the past, but we aren't done. Our technology innovation aspiration makes it clear that we want to be the drivers of actual innovation. We continue to transform our customer in-home experience and are researching new capabilities in the space. As I've indicated, we intend to bring those experiences to life first through our Buddy brand. There's a lot of hype and a lot of, excuse me, and a lot of false promises from AI and generative AI, but we have identified several key areas where we believe AI and their adjacent tools will add value to our systems and processes. Shortly, I will talk about some of these software innovations we have in flight. Aussie Broadband has built its reputation in part from having the best technology platforms, systems, and services.
However, unless we couple these platforms with utility levels of availability, performance, and reliability, the value of that technological excellence is lost. This is evident in light of the ever-increasing scrutiny from regulators. We intend to be leaders in operational excellence, the practices that underpin delivery. Across all segments, we will continue to evolve by transforming our site reliability operation centers, ways of working to achieve service availability of four nines plus for systems under our direct control, using a five nines mindset to guide how we architect, design, implement, manage, observe, and respond to achieve those service availability targets. Increasing our focus on product delivery speed and execution. For services in our Carbon platform, as we've indicated and hopefully as our guests on stage have shown, provisioning is very rapid and, as a result, is one of our most beloved products.
In contrast, our Aussie Fibre delivery times can be quite lengthy. Investing in an Aussie Fibre Carbon-like experience will reduce delivery times from months to mere weeks. Jonathan spoke to our ambition of being ready at launch for the upcoming NBN high-speed multi-Gb plans in September. I'm pleased to say this complex program is on track. However, initiatives like these underscore that we can have the best technology in the world, the best operations, but if we can't implement on time, on budget, and on outcome, we will miss the opportunities the rest of the technology strategy enables. Delivery excellence seeks to embed the maturity Aussie Broadband needs to achieve our multi-segment goals. To this purpose, we've combined our technology teams and our transformation teams. Excellence is realizing value through our ability to move swiftly with defined purpose and by realizing business value.
We will achieve this delivery excellence by evolving our ways of working with the interaction of our own fit-for-purpose project methodology, Aussie Agile, embedding our organizational change management framework across the group, implementing business process excellence with a focus on end-to-end improvements within the customer and end-user experience. Several key initiatives will deliver our technology transformation, which are already delivering value in FY 2025. We have embarked on a series of IT platform initiatives designed to increase customer satisfaction, accelerate customer delivery through unified workflow and through process automation and execution, and reduce service delivery fall-through to delayed and lost work in progress. We will complete our existing technology programs in flight, including cloud. Over the past 18 months, we have been building a modern fit-for-purpose internal cloud platform. I will share more about this journey shortly.
In parallel, we have been uplifting the service design resiliency of our critical production systems. Once complete, our core serving infrastructure will have improved availability, accelerated feature enablement, better fault tolerance and service segregation, reduced attack vector services for malicious actors, and improved notification and status awareness for our customers. Transformation, we will complete the outstanding plan integration efforts and optimization of the remaining OTW assets into the Aussie core infrastructure, including moving to cloud-native enterprise IT systems. A dedicated transformation program has been stood up to bring both Aussie and Symbio together, including technology. Through this transformation activity, we will deliver and execute IT stacks built on the back of deliberate architecture with clear organizational objectives underpinned by prudent investments in financial management.
We have begun efforts to bring together our disparate voice products and are utilizing the best of breed within those product software stacks to create a unified platform from which our voice products can be delivered and from which new voice products and features can be enabled for every business segment. Bringing together technology and process transformation designed around the principles of customer centricity while ensuring effective outcomes and a robust, excuse me, a robust return on investment. Aussie's core systems architecture, which also powers the business software behind our products, has been in place for over a decade. These systems are not well integrated, and it will make it harder to provide a seamless experience for all of our customers. Beginning by federating our data, we are aiming to provide every business segment an API-first platform that enables faster prototyping and product creation.
With targeted investments to follow, we'll enable cross-segment delivery across these previously disparate technology stacks. Again, we'll be leveraging Buddy as our incubator of choice, and this replatforming will provide an excellent opportunity to unlock the power that AI enablement allows. Finally, the Aussie Broadband Group, including Symbio and the NETSIT brands, have been designated by government as critical infrastructure due to the significant role we play in providing core services to Australians. Aussie has commenced its journey to meet the obligations under the Security of Critical Infrastructure, or SOCI, Act, and I am confident we will meet our level one and level two requirements well in advance of the government-imposed deadlines. The SOCI reforms place additional requirements on Aussie, including minimum cybersecurity standards and mandatory reporting per the Telecommunications Sector Risk Management Policy.
Aussie Broadband is a proud industry partner with the Australian Cybersecurity Center and maintains a close working relationship with the Department of Home Affairs. Aussie Broadband continues to maintain our ISO 27001 certification, which is part of our defense in-depth strategy. We are implementing a secure access service edge solution to consolidate and streamline our security management while enhancing our overall security posture. Software engineering has been one of Aussie Broadband's secret sauces and a key differentiator in creating unique market value. Software engineering at ABB not only adheres to industry best practices, but consistently exceeds expectations by driving innovation, efficiency, and reliability. I want to briefly share with you three of our exciting in-flight software innovations.
First, through our Carbon Next platform, we are bringing to life key improvements to Carbon, including a modern uplift of the platform with a new modular framework that will allow us to develop and deploy features more quickly while increasing security and flexibility. API enhancements and upgrades that will increase performance, as well as adding new UI/UX improvements that will improve customer CSAT and adoption. We continue to utilize Buddy Telco as one of the key platforms through which we will be incubating our new ideas and features. Our digital-first platform provides customer opportunities that are unique to us, Aussie—Australia, sorry—to us, Aussie, to explore new customer journeys, create in-app and in-web communication and issue resolution channels, and create exciting new opportunities to take advantage of the digital-first AI learnings in the market.
Responding to customer feedback, we are continuing to improve Buddy and its digital self-service offerings via enhancements in the notification center. This will provide a comprehensive list of all communications a customer receives from us, including customer in-app notifications. Bringing additional features to the live chat, where while troubleshooting a problem, customers will have access to speak to an agent while within the app. Enabling our wholesale and white-label data products is key to our Symbio segment. ABB's legacy white-label solutions were bespoke, which required a high degree of direct customer engagement and long development and deployment timelines. We are creating exciting new software to enable these customers and partner. Further, Symbio's MVNE enablement platform continues to be industry-leading, and the next generation will create further competitive gaps between us and the rest of the industry through refactoring and modularization to maintain maintainability, enhancing scalability, and optimized performance.
Finally, I want to talk briefly about our internal cloud platform, which is delivering modern network, compute, storage, and platform services to our production, IT, and employment enablement systems. I'm excited to say that our first production workloads are deploying now. Our legacy platform architectures did not fully consider high availability, resiliency, maintainability, or multiple workload types. Modern platforms and systems that underline your network must have these characteristics today. Our internal cloud platform delivers best-in-class technology capabilities hosted within our own data centers, thus removing a key domain failure and performance risk while providing stable and a well-understood cost profile. We view this platform as the building block for many of the other initiatives we have shared, providing multimodal compute with numerous platform-as-a-service features. These infrastructure capabilities provide, in turn, the basis of our replatforming initiatives.
To date, we are delivering this platform to plan, in budget, and are beginning to realize significant cost avoidance savings by redeploying workloads previously destined for Broadcom-based compute platforms. We can deploy new environments in hours compared to months on our previous platform. We anticipate a marked reduction in our systems risk register as our ability to maintain, deploy, and update vulnerable systems is significantly improved. The first migrated workloads, the ones coming now before Easter, eliminate several long-tailed deficiencies. Additional benefits include a reduction in our data center footprints, improved power and cooling efficiency, and reduced operating risk. In total, we expect this platform to be a core component of our serving infrastructure in the years to come. I hope you're as excited about our technology future as I am. I'd like to turn the stage over to Jane. Thank you very much.
Hi everyone. I'm Jane Betts, and I have the privilege of not only leading our people and culture team for Aussie Broadband, but I also look after our property portfolio and our corporate affairs and regulatory team, ably led by Libby, which also looks at our community impact response. Today, I've actually been with Aussie for almost three years, and today I'm pleased to share a bit about our values and then to move on to talk about the current levels of engagement amongst our ABB and Symbio teams and then share with you the people and community and ESG perspectives for our Look to 28 strategy. There we go. Okay, our values. It's fair to say that Aussie's always done things a little bit differently. It shows up in our outstanding customer results and underpins our growth story.
Behind all of that has been an unwavering commitment to our people. It's fair to say that you won't fit at Aussie if you don't balance carefully the strong desire for performance and our deep commitment to looking after people. Because we know that if we do that, that will ensure that they're able to look after our customers. Our values underpin everything we do, and I'm sure you listen to many customers telling or many companies telling you that, but I can honestly tell you, having come here from other medium-sized and large organizations, I've never seen values lived so strongly as I have in the Aussie Broadband team. Our values were developed nine years ago, and they remain the cornerstone of our business. They are, "Don't be ordinary, be awesome," which allows our people to find ways to delight our customers and to go beyond the normal.
Be good to people. This helps guide our leaders on what they should do to make sure our people are looked after, and it also helps our people to be able to look at what they can do to look after our customers. Think big. We like to think that's helped us in the past to punch above our weight and change the game, and we continue and intend to do that going forwards. No BS. I have to say that's probably one of the values that people talk about most, and it really, I think, guides us to be honest and authentic, and they're two attributes that I truly believe underpin us twice being named the most trusted telco by Roy Morgan. Finally, and importantly, have fun. Who doesn't want to have fun at work? Our call centers have dress-up days, they're spectacular.
We love celebrating our humans of Aussie, and we love dad jokes. If you're ever in a shocking situation where you might be on hold, which is not very often in our call centers, you might even get to hear a dad joke or two. Our values are uniquely instructional. They tell our people how we want them to behave and act. As we grow larger, it's really important to us that we make sure that we continue to ensure they're reinforced and embedded into our culture. Our Symbio team's values were also quite similar, and they're really working now on aligning under the same set of values through a project called Project Harmony. Although we do recognize that the no BS may not fully translate into our international customer and staff teams. In those cases, we'll probably use honest and transparent.
The secret sauce of Aussie, I believe, is our people. I know everyone's telling you it's our systems and all that sort of thing, but I'm a little bit biased. I think it's our people. We've always known that, and as we're growing, we really want to make sure we pay close attention to how we continue to engage them. It's easier to do in a smaller company, and as we grow, we need to continue with that. At ABB or Aussie Broadband, we use the Workday Peakon engagement tool. As you'll see on the slide, our current engagement level is 8/ 10. That puts us 0.1 away from being in the top 25% of organizations using that tool. We don't want to rest there. We actually want to aim to be in the top 5% of all organizations in the Workday Peakon tool for engagement.
Similarly, some of you may be familiar with the Employee Net Promoter Score, which is a very exacting and difficult measure. It measures the number of people who promote you versus the number of people who are detractors. The score of 46 that you'll see on the score is an amazing result and is in the top 25% of all organizations. We want to leverage that up to being in the top 5% of organizations. We've achieved all of those results whilst absorbing the necessary changes from Origin and some other organizational changes, which I believe is a testament to the commitment and the resilience of our people. Our Symbio team's results are also excellent. They use Culture Amp, which is another very widely acknowledged measurement, and they are in the top 25% of telco and technology comparators.
The two teams together are well positioned as a business to work with our people towards a well-managed integration and a best-in-class people experience. Now, onto our people and reputation strategy. My team has a simple vision: a workplace where everyone can grow and thrive and contribute to Aussie's success. The people and reputation team strategy has six pillars, as you'll see there. Four of these fall under the people perspective, while the other two are part of our community perspective. Our people perspective is all about creating opportunities and preparing for the future. When we take care of our people, they take care of our customers, and I believe that's how we'll become the telco people love. The first pillar is people and future capability. So why do I believe that's important?
Firstly, I think you need to have the right tools, frameworks, and systems to help your people to grow and learn. If you do that, your staff will be happier, and they will stay with the business longer. Skilled and motivated teams are key to driving innovation, but they're also more productive and more efficient. We can save time and costs on not having to rehire talent, and increased output helps Aussie to better compete in the market. We're committed to making sure that career progression is a real opportunity within Aussie. We are building our learning and capability programs to ladder into the needs of the business and our overarching workforce strategy. We've begun building out our capability frameworks and our career architecture that will ensure we can foster a culture that supports our people to build new skills and take on new challenges.
We have already started to investigate the ability of automation and AI to streamline and ensure knowledge is curated to our staff, allowing them to spend more fulsome time with our customers without having to go and look for information and allowing all of our team to be able to create excellent customer experiences. If we have the underpinning systems and then we have talent, that will mean that we have the right people in the right roles at the right time. We are actually looking to fill at least 40% of our roles internally, and we know that from our people, internal promotions build engagement, but they also save cost. We will identify high potential talent and provide tailored and targeted development for them. We will introduce performance-led—we already are looking at this program at the moment—performance-led development programs to keep skills aligned with business needs.
We plan to build on our existing strong employee value proposition, ensuring integrated early career pathways are available and that we leverage our regional talent hubs and our international talent to make sure we attract and retain the best people to take us forward in our strategy. You can have the best people, but unless we continue to bring them in and engage them and make them part of our culture and values, it will not take us to where we want to go to. Our positive and engaging culture has already helped us to attract and retain top talent, and we will continue to build on this. High engagement levels, as you know, always correlate to better customer outcomes and customer satisfaction. Our culture at Aussie, I believe, does make us a bit special.
We're committed to using data-driven insights to help make sure that we achieve that top 5% of all organizations that I talked about in our engagement. I want to add that psychosocial safety is critically important to us as well. It's very much in line with our being good-to-be people value. We're embedding the frameworks to ensure that we have a supportive and inclusive workplace, and some of the external consultants that we've been working on are telling us that we're innovating at higher and faster levels than other Australian organizations on this important expectation. Our work to embed how we live the Aussie way and our values will strengthen the link between behaviors and business success. This is really key to making sure that we're able to scale our culture as we grow larger.
We remain committed to a hybrid workplace model and will ensure it delivers flexibility without compromising performance or our customer experience. We are equipping our leaders with the skills to make sure that they can lead and support a hybrid workplace model and make sure that we leverage the existing infrastructure that we've already invested in to make sure our productivity remains high. We already have an inclusive culture. We score in the top 10% of organizations on inclusivity. However, we are aiming to continue to increase diversity across the organization. We've set ourselves a goal to achieve 40-40-20 gender balance across leadership and operational levels. We know and acknowledge that there's some global change in mindset around improving diversity and inclusion efforts, but we actually truly believe that focusing on this is good for business, and it actually really aligns with Aussie Broadband's values.
Whilst we know we've made progress, we know there's much more we can do to improve female representation at Aussie Broadband . We can leverage and take a leaf out of Symbio's books, who are further advanced and have made some great progress on this, having just recently also been acknowledged as a winner of the 2024 Tech Diversity Award for their Women in Symbio program. We hope to really leverage and work together on improving our metrics in that matter. Success for us also means leaving no diversity group behind. We're developing a comprehensive inclusion and diversity strategy to create a culture where diversity and inclusion is celebrated and everyone feels a sense of belonging. With Symbio joining us, we're now a global workforce, and our initiatives must respond to diverse workforce needs. The final two pillars relate to our community and governance perspectives.
The first is sustainable practice and trust. One of the things that I think makes Aussie Broadband special is our commitment to the communities in which we operate. It's built into our DNA, and it's evidenced through some of the things that we already support through our passion projects, which allows our people to nominate things that they're passionate about, and we provide funding and support to those, and the Helping Communities Connect program, which is where we support not-for-profits with free or discounted broadband services. Our Symbio team also has a really strong level of commitment to the community engagement measures. We recognize our important role in building digital connectivity, which is why we're proud partners of the School Student Broadband Initiative, and we're members of the Low-Income Digital Inclusion Forum.
Our heritage is rooted in the community, and people feel strongly about that in the business, as well as many of our customers who contribute to our small change, big change programs and see the difference that we make. I know you saw the video earlier on with some of those activities. Customers choose us, and we believe doing this means that we have relevance, and that enables us to become a voice where we can start to talk to regulators about community matters. We are fully integrating the Aussie Broadband Group ESG framework into our operations, ensuring continuous improvement across environmental, social, and governance priorities, and compliance is non-negotiable. We will meet all our regulatory requirements, including the Workplace Gender Equality Act and climate-related disclosures, by having robust monitoring and reporting frameworks.
Ensuring Aussie Broadband's reputation is rock solid is critically important to our ability to deliver on our growth ambitions and our strategic priorities and to protect our license to operate. We've all seen stories where people have very quickly lost their reputation or license to operate through a few poorly chosen activities. We know if we do the wrong thing by our people or our customers, they have plenty of choices. Our reputation is integral to the goal of achieving growth across all segments and countries, and all our work in this area is focused on building strong relationships and influencing perceptions of Aussie Broadband. This includes media interactions, customer communications, our social media posts, and participation in regulatory working groups. Finally, Aussie Broadband is deeply committed to being a good corporate citizen.
Whilst we've always engaged in meaningful activities, this year we established our ESG framework to provide a better structure and focus to our activities. The framework ensures we concentrate on the right initiatives and supports our decision-making processes. We don't have time to cover everything, but I did want to highlight a couple of things in our vision for where we aim to be in FY 2028 and the key initiatives that help us to get there. One of the key initiatives that you'll all see come to life this year is the launch of our first sustainability report, a significant milestone in maturing in our governance pillar. This report will provide transparency and accountability in showcasing our progress and commitment to sustainability.
To give you a closer look at our efforts and achievements, I'd like to share a video that highlights one of the initiatives that we've been particularly excited about, which is our partnership with ZOLO, who are committed to change through strong e-waste management. This initiative, part of our environmental pillar, aims to help us to support diverting 100% of e-waste away from landfill in 2026. The special part of this partnership is that it does not only have an environmental element; it also supports communities who might not otherwise have access to vital IT equipment going forwards. Thank you.
Australia, alone as a country, we generate over 500,000 tons of e-waste. Predominantly, this is contributed by rapid technological advancements and a lack of infrastructure to be able to do this ethically, sustainably, and securely as well. If you could just imagine that e-waste poses a lot of environmental and health risks. What we do as a company in partnership with Aussie Broadband in this case is we essentially help them turn their tech waste into impact.
When it comes to e-waste, we want to focus on extending the lifetime of our tech. They have a secondary purpose, and that purpose can be serving the benefit of people to work, education, as well as helping the communities to connect.
We refurbish every single device that we collect. That would involve perhaps replacing the screens, cleaning it up. This is a data erasure section. The operations team are just working on the data erasure for the devices. Yeah, this is where it all happens. Once that's done, we put it back into circulation. We create a platform where tech is more affordable and accessible for other people. As a company, we have a waste-to-impact initiative. What that means is we actually allow our clients to turn their tech waste into impact, and that's by donating devices. E-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world, and Aussie Broadband's dedication to somehow, someway use their platform to reduce that. I think that's inspiring.
As part of our B Corp certification, our teams are committed to working together to improve our environmental performance. Thus far, with the partnership, we have diverted more than 23 tons of e-waste away from landfill, and we expect this number to go up. It's really exciting.
Yeah, it's a match made. I know it sounds cliché, but it's a match made in heaven in terms of the partnership.
Afternoon, everybody. Great to see you all here today. I have just the opportunity to do a quick update on capital management, which I'll do now. We set out our capital management framework in August of 2024 to help guide through 2025 and beyond, particularly as we were in a position of having a really strong balance sheet. Over the last six months, we've remained very aligned to the framework, but several questions have been raised by you over the last two reporting periods, so we felt it was important to build in a few points of clarity. To remind you of the overall objectives are to maximize shareholder value, maintain financial flexibility, and to support and enable business growth. To deliver on these objectives, we set out five main principles. First, we're committed to an optimal balance sheet target setting consistent with a net leverage ratio of between 1.75 and 2.5x . Second, we will fund business-as-usual CapEx.
Third, we will look to grow the business both organically and through M&A. Fourth, we will then consider a return to shareholders through a fully franked dividend. Last, and after the other four above, we will forecast, and where the forecast of the group has excess capital between 12 and 18 months ahead, we will consider further opportunities to return excess to the shareholders. What have we done over the last six months? First, we announced and paid the inaugural ordinary dividend of AUD 0.04 for the financial year 2024, which was equivalent to 41% of NPAT. We announced an interim ordinary dividend of AUD 0.016 per share, which was equivalent to 39% NPAT for the first half year of 2025.
The net leverage ratio at the moment, in June 2024, it was 1.1x , and at the 31st of December, it reduced to 0.72 times, largely on the back of the sale of the Superloop investment. We made the decision on the back of that to return some of the cash to shareholders, and we've done that both by a share buyback, which we announced in November 2024, and a special dividend of AUD 0.024 per share for the first half year of 2025. The share buyback commenced on the 25th of February 2025, and to date, we've acquired about 2.3% of the ordinary share capital for a total consideration of AUD 24.3 million.
As noted in the results for the first half year, we chose also to invest in more CapEx, lifting our guidance by AUD 20 million, which was largely driven by the commitment to an IRU for intercapital and subsea fiber optic cable, the acquisition of IP addresses, an intangible asset, increased Aussie Fiber rollout, and the internal cloud platform, which I know Brent touched on earlier today. We felt it was important to provide a few points of clarity on the framework in two areas. First, the investment evaluation framework and the hurdle rates for CapEx, and then secondly, the dividend payout policy. Let's start with the hurdles and rates for CapEx. Our CapEx profile is really split between the replacement of long-term capacity, investments in customer growth, and also fiber.
Our growth investments are targeted to generate a minimum internal rate of return of 15% and have a payback period of between three and five years, which would depend on the nature of that investment. As we have shown earlier in the case of Aussie Fiber, the returns initially can be lower in the short term, but on the longer term, higher than those hurdles, but we will aim for those thresholds overall. At this stage, we're conservatively operating our Aussie Fiber on a three-year customer contract with no assumed renewals. To maximize returns on the Aussie Fiber, as you've heard today, our focus is on on-net and near-net opportunities, but we do see and will consider off-net opportunities. If we do that, it will be made on a longer-term strategic benefit case where we see growth opportunities into the future on the basis of that investment.
Now turning to a point on clarity on the dividend payout policy. The framework aims to maximize a fully franked ordinary dividend, and the target payout range has been set at up to 40% of the annual net profit after tax, largely in line with our two reporting periods. The overall objective of this framework is to maximize the shareholder value, to maintain the financial flexibility, and to support and enable business growth. Today, we have talked a great deal about our growth aspirations, and it's really important to stress that we continue to actively review opportunities in M&A in the marketplace that would add scale, capability, and value to the shareholders. To maintain the flexibility for any of those opportunities, we are still working to a net leverage ratio, which is below the optimal range and is much closer to 1.5 in the near term.
Thanks for the opportunity for the update on our capital management framework, and I'm now going to hand you back to Libby, who's going to take us into the Q&A session.
Thanks, everyone. We're just going to take a moment while our executive team come up onto the stage and take a seat. Now, we have some time for questions, and we've had some submitted by those who are online today. To just run through how we will provide the opportunity for those here in the room as well, we have Steph and Matt, who will each have a microphone available on either side of our aisle. If you have a question to ask, please raise your hand, and we'll pass the microphone along to you. When you do ask your question, please state your name, where you're from, and then the question itself.
Please raise your hands. What we might do is start with the first question, which I have online here, which is a question for Jono. Brianna from Monash asks, "Is there a limit use of AI?" Sorry, that's a bit of a strange. I think that's for customer service. Sorry, I might just ask the team to look at that question again because I think it has been cut in a way that I can't quite make sense of it. Sorry about that. Sorry, Brianna. We will get that question back in there. I think the question is really around the concern about losing the human element of customer service by using a tool like AI to help improve the way that we actually respond to customers. If you could perhaps use that first, then I'll ask the next question.
That's a sensational question, and it's one that we are very concerned about. With the two brands that we're talking about in residential, with Buddy and with ABB, any positioning of AI in those two will be markedly different to each other. For Buddy, as I've already said, we want to experiment with Buddy to see what does work, particularly in the realm of AI when it comes to direct customer interaction. We think there's some really innovative stuff we can do in that space to increase the human-like nature of our bot. Buddy bot is quite cute. Have a chat. To really make it feel more familiar in terms of how it can operate. In terms of the main brand, our secret source or part of the secret source is that in-person customer experience.
We don't want to do anything to touch that or to hinder that. The role of AI will be to increase the ability of our team to know even more about you, our customers, in terms of what's going on within that received experience domain. When I talk to the teams, I talk about, "Wouldn't it just be gorgeous if this little AI thing, like the paperclip back in the Word days, was sitting there on your shoulder, running all the diagnostics for you in the background without you doing anything with your fingers to click a mouse button whilst you're talking to that customer?
Wouldn't it be great if it could then proactively show you where the key areas for help actually are and where it's very complicated, actually flag early on in that discussion for you with that customer to help you navigate that customer into a complex problem-solving routine far earlier than we otherwise would? AI will probably have some type of role for both our customer-facing or residential-facing brands, but its role will be very different in both. We are incredibly aware and awake to the importance of in-person customer service for the ABB brand. Thank you, Jono. Does anyone have a question here in the audience? Thank you.
I've got it now. Thank you very much. Liam Robertson from Jarden. My first question is just for you, Aaron, just around enterprising government and some of the investment that you're making there, particularly in the customer access network.
I'm just interested in some of the market dynamics. Obviously, the benefits associated with transitioning customers to on-net, 80% plus gross margins. You're looking to increase utilization. I think that's all clear. I'm just interested in your thoughts around pricing at the market level. I think what we're seeing is some early signs of customers transitioning away from Enterprise Ethernet products onto those business-grade plans. They obviously come with much lower upfront APAs. And so I'm just interested in what you're expecting from a market pricing perspective as we look through to 2028.
Thank you. Yeah, and you're right. And as NBN roll out their semi-symmetrical high-speed plans on their TC4 network, there will be some pressure around those things without a shadow of a doubt. Where the pressure is going to be, though, is probably more in that lower end of mid-market.
Really, that's the right product for that market. In the past, there hasn't been that product available. In Australia, we haven't had semi-symmetrical high-speed tiers that NBN are rolling out. It's never happened before. In some places, yes, but there's still a very, very big business case for high-speed symmetrical one-to-one contention ratio, guarantees around latency, and all of those types of things that businesses need to run high-definition video conferencing and then the other newer technologies that are coming out in those areas that just absolutely need that. Yes, there will be some pricing pressure in that lower end of mid-market and the upper end of small business, I suppose, with that side of things. Anything bigger than that, they're going to need, they're still going to need that one-to-one contention ratio and those guarantees around latency and all of those types of things.
If I can just maybe follow up quickly. I mean, you provide that customer segmentation up on the slide. I think you called out 68,000 customers at that lower end of mid-market versus only 5,000 effectively with FT above 200. I mean, what is your exposure to customers spinning down to business-grade plans?
Good question. I do not think our exposure is that high to that because those customers we have already got on basically the NBN TC4 side of things now anyway. Our exposure, if we look at our customer mix, our customer mix is that upper end of mid-market, they are still going to need that symmetrical one-to-one contention ratio type services.
That small business and that upper end of small business are going to be, hopefully, we can migrate what we've already got that are sitting on a 50/20 or 120 or 140, whatever, up to those semi-symmetrical and actually increase the average revenue per user on those customers. We actually see it as an opportunity more than a detractor, I suppose.
Thanks.
Thank you. Is there another question? Yeah.
Thank you. Entcho Rykovski, E&P. My first question is for Andy. Andy, I reckon you might have been asked this question a couple of times already over lunch. It's just around the EPS CAGR ambitions to FY 2028 of over 20%. I'm just curious whether you can provide us with a bit more color, whether you think about this as underlying EPS, reported EPS growth. Is it just a framework of all the other metrics?
Obviously, you've given us some guidance around revenue, but I don't know if you can give us any more color around D&A to get to that EPS number over the next three years.
I think it was about 12 questions I got on it. I only went up for five minutes to get a sandwich. Yeah, look, the EPS framework is a way we think it's a guideline. It's more statutory based. It's a guideline for us. We're hardwired to the revenue and the earnings, and that really is a stretch for us. The question you're asking is the D&A and the CapEx. I think what's really important is a couple of things. One is that we obviously spend more this year, this financial year, and we've put that through the guidance, AUD 20 million higher.
Our view for next year is that we'll return to that $55 million-$60 million of CapEx. In the long run, that's what we see as our sort of baseline for CapEx. For me, I know there's some concerns about the D&A calculation backwards. It shouldn't be a concern for you.
Thanks, Andy. I'm just going to say that Evan from UBS also asked the same question online. Thank you for answering that one. Can I follow up with one more? Oh, sorry.
Yes, of course. Just follow up to my second question on the enterprising government margins. This one might be for Aaron. Just a comment on the margins for on-net versus NBN fiber. You mentioned that you're getting in excess of 80% margins on net. I mean, how do you think that can take the margins for enterprising government over time? Do you have a sort of a target as to mix between on-net and NBN?
I'd love to have everything on net over time. Obviously, it costs money to continue building the fiber network and whatnot. The goal is to have as much as we possibly can on our own network moving forward and have as little as possible on the NBN enterprise ethernet product.
I mean, is there a realistic target you can get to over the next three years? I mentioned earlier the two to three connections per building is our target over the next two to three years.
That number going does not sound that big when you put it that way, but when you break that down into how many connections you need and as you bring more buildings from near-net to on-net, that gets harder because the ratio, obviously, it gets harder because you have more buildings in there. That is our target for the next three years, to get that two to three and make sure that, and what we are saying internally is Aussie Fiber first. Whatever we are positioning to a customer, we position Aussie Fiber as the very first thing.
There is the odd occasion where customers have a valid reason as to be on something like NBN, and you can either just not take the deal then at that point or go, "All right, we're going to take a lower margin on this deal, so be it," type scenario, but Aussie Fiber first.
And if we roll that target, sorry, I was looking for a revenue target. I don't know if you're able to give us that.
Not off the top of my head.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks. It's Eric Choi from Barrenjoey. Can I just ask to follow up on the 2028 revenue and EBITDA targets? I guess if I just use the conservative bottom end, you're probably saying there's like a AUD 400 million revenue delta, and there's probably like a AUD 65 million EBITDA delta.
That cut-through is kind of 16% or so, which is a fair bit below your gross margin cut-through. It kind of implies a lot of step-up in other OpEx. I'm just wondering, is there an element of conservatism in there in those 2028 revenue and EBITDA targets?
Who would like to take that question? Brian.
I'll take it. It's a well-worn path with Eric, this one. We're trying to build models live. I'm not going to say we're being conservative because we think these are quite challenging targets to grow $400 million of revenue in three years. If you want to come and help us, you're more than welcome. To do that, you need to invest in people. Whilst we will improve those metrics Jonah talked about today in terms of efficiency of customers to connections, we will continue to achieve those goals.
With growth comes more things to do and more opportunity to improve our business. There will be OpEx growth in there. We've targeted 12.5% EBITDA. That is a step up from where we are today. We also believe, as some of the other questions, there will be gross margin pressure through the three years as well. Whilst the gross margin might get squeezed, we're going to make up for that through the OpEx efficiencies we can generate as well.
Makes sense. Can I ask a follow-up on the EPS? I don't know if this is right or not, but are the LTIs set on a sort of three-year EPS CAGR as well? How do the LTIs compare to that over 20% EPS CAGR that you've set?
Until this year, LTIs were all time-based. It was options with just pure duration. This is the first year we've switched to 50% normal options, 50% ZIPOs with EPS as the metric. The max LTI achievement on that is 20% EPS growth.
Can I do one more, Brian, or am I outstayed? Welcome. You push the adventure.
Go ahead.
Go on.
It's not a number question, this one now. Oh,
that's all right then.
Okay. Just pivoting to mobile and the new Optus HOA, I was just wondering, that relationship, is it kind of like an IRU-like relationship where you can eat sort of data and things, or is it more like a retail minus? The reason I'm asking is how often are there kind of reset points in that relationship? If Optus decides to kind of change your wholesale inputs, does that impact your retail flexibility?
I'll flick past that to my colleague on the right there.
Good question. Every year, there is a built-in price review mechanism for both parties, which will happen around the December period each fiscal. In terms of how the actual kind of product construct sits, the simplest way to describe it is there are three different data pools that we have access to. Each of those data pools have a differential rate between the three in terms of the dollars for that data. You then have a choice; it's a bit of a game to play in terms of how do you optimize. The optimization game sits on our side. We have the ability to effectively beat ourselves in terms of how optimizing each of the three data pools we have there, which is really one of the key ways when you look at our MVNO margins.
That's one of the key ways that we're able to achieve quite a strong gross margin in mobile. The current construct that we have is rolling forward out to the five-year arrangement, but with a 12-monthly price review.
Awesome. Thank you.
Thank you. We might take a question from our online friends. One for Andy. Evan from UBS asks, "To reach your FY 2028 connection and revenue targets, should we expect CapEx to remain at AUD 75 million-AUD 80 million, which is the FY2025 guidance, or will it revert down in future three years to more like AUD 55 million-AUD 60 million?"
I think that might be 14 times now. The answer to that, Evan, is that, as I said, we expect that there will be a step down towards the AUD 55 million-AUD 60 million for next financial year without giving exact guidance now. That's the range that we're operating to. We do foresee as a baseline going forward, that's the trajectory that we work to. It's not going to be the $75-$80. This year had $20 million of sort of one-off investments, which were very strategic and opportunistic for us. We're going to revert back to the $55-$60 next year.
Thanks, Andy. Is there another question?
Yes. Good afternoon. Ian Munro from Ord Minnett. My question is actually for Mo with respect to the wholesale business, please. You spoke to some positive trends in unified communications. Just, I guess, can you unpack how you see that, I guess, the top-line growth for the industry? Also with Symbio, obviously, over the while, there's been a lot of work with integration, and it seems like defensive customer relationships. Are you in attack mode now? How should we think about that, the growth profile of that business? Thank you.
Yeah, Ian. Starting with the, you sort of referred to that unified comms and that sort of growth up to that 78% penetration, the 5.2 million users. The way we look at it, and you sort of think of the unified communications market, and it does include things like Teams and all that sort of thing. If you then think about us in terms of being the back end of providing the services to a lot of those providers, we are sort of seeing that shift of that continual growth. That growth will come from a mix of what you would sort of call traditional IP telephony. There is probably also the elements that use data networks. We are sort of seeing the underlying voice growing steadily.
It's not sort of growing at double digits. For us, it then also becomes about taking a larger market share, which is sort of how we also view the data side. That probably then sort of ties a little bit to sort of the attack defense question. There is still a competitive market out there, but sort of versus probably two or three years ago. We have sort of spoken about this even in the half and the four years. The room to move, it's becoming smaller and smaller. You see it in all markets that sort of somewhat become a little bit commoditized. Yeah, that is settling. For us, and especially in wholesale, we're not a one-trick pony.
Voice is one element, but we are talking about MVNO and growing the mobility and continuing to grow it, which we've been doing very successfully in Symbio. Then we've got this thing, which is called data, which sort of in the enablement side or in the wholesale side, like Symbio especially has always been one step removed from the network. Being able to leverage that capability in Aussie Broadband and really be able to accelerate that, much like Jonah is doing in retail, as we sort of say, that growth of that 1.3% market share of NBN market versus 9% to Challenger, there's a big delta there of what we can win combined. Overall, we're seeing really positive potential in that business. I think the important thing for investors is to think of it beyond just voice, and it's the combination of the three.
Thank you. Another question.
Yeah, Jonah Higgins from Unified. Thanks for taking the questions. Firstly, just to Jonah, just on the RSP side of things, trading update out today. Obviously, we've seen RSP sort of looking like it's been accelerating throughout the financial year and from February through today. Can you just tell us a little bit about why that is? And then secondly, the changes that are coming through on the NBN side of things, how you see them affecting you.
Sorry, first up, Jonah, great name. In terms of, I'm just going to read through the question quickly. You're
just for the firm's name too, right?
Yeah, that's right. Appreciate it. That's good. Your first question is really about our growth on the RSP side and how have we done it. I think the first part to the answer there is what we haven't done. I think it's really important to have a look at where our price positioning, particularly off promo, sits in the market right now. We haven't been engaging in the same level of promo driven activity as basically the entire rest of the market. I think that's a really important thing to put in context when you look at our volume growth.
That growth has been achieved with far more rational pricing activity on our side than the rest of the market over the same period. Having said that, we are now on promo, and we expect for the period that we're moving into to see even higher rates of growth as well from the core RSP brand ourselves. We can talk about it a bit more, but that's my key point there in terms of what we haven't been doing in terms of the price positioning.
In terms of advertising, we have been doing a few things differently in terms of the marketing science that we're using. We've changed some of the ways in which we've been using the segmentation information that I quickly kind of jogged through today. That segmentation information is plugged all the way into our digital asset bases. We're able to target people effectively at a one-to-one perspective there using a range of geocoding as well. I guess a bit spooky pretty quickly, but we're getting much more efficient at targeting the customers who we know are most likely to be intrigued by either the main brand or the Buddy brand as well.
Just on just the NBN changes that are coming through in terms of the ultra high speeds in the mid part of the year, just how are you placed for that? Incredibly well. [crosstalk] I mean, the point I've made is just that you over-index on ultra high speeds. Just perceptions of if there may be sort of a churn event for you guys, probably that is what I'm touching on there.
We are very bullish on this. We do not think there is a large churn event coming our way. We think there's a massive disruption occurring in the rest of the industry as well. We're very excited about that mass disruption event occurring, and that is one of the main reasons why we went early with the prosumer plan offering last year to really start building what we think will be a very strong bell wave of recognition of our positioning in that marketplace. We also are very thankful for a lot of the SAU pricing flowing through.
It does make access to those higher speed tiers a lot easier for more Australians. As Brad was talking about, what's going to become incredibly important over the next, call it, 24 months is a very real point of network-based differentiation on the RSP side. That is a new game for us as Aussie and us as an industry to really start to play. As Brad walked through, we're in a very enviable position when it comes to our own network to really take it to the rest of the market there.
Just one for you, Brian, just in regards to the idea behind FY 2028 targets. Can you just talk us through that? Just noting you've said there's been significant changes. You've got segment-based profitability. You've added new directors. This is long-term guidance which we've never seen out of the business before.
Just the reasons behind going after it like that.
We listen to our investors who ask us questions around these things. We felt there was a craving for more information about what the future looked like for Aussie Broadband. Obviously, I've stepped into the chair and wanted to put my mark on the business. Rally the team around a new environment that telco people love, which is not just aimed at us, but also the rest of the business, and they're embracing that massively. I think our previous strategic goal was to be the fourth largest something or other, which inspired no one, bluntly. We wanted something to rally behind. We've got our telco people love, but also we've got some numbers to shoot for. Aussie Broadband has always set ambitious, what we call breakthrough targets. They've always been held closely, traditionally.
We have, and Phil will tell some stories about the past when people in fetal positions in corners and rooms worried about the targets they were setting. We wanted to do that. To hold ourselves accountable, we want to be public on it. We thought we'd share that with the market, give the market a sense of where we're going, and hold ourselves accountable.
Thanks.
Thank you.
It is not guidance.
Thanks, Brian, and thanks for the questions. Another question from our online people. This is from Evan from UBS who asks, and this is a question for Andy. On the at least 12.5% EBITDA margin target, if we assume you get all the Symbio synergies and Buddy gets to break even, you'd already be above that margin number today. I almost said magic, but margin number today.
Is there a level of operating cost investment that will be growing well above revenue growth that we need to be mindful from today to FY 2028 that might mean there will not be as much operating leverage in the business going forward?
I think Brian touched on this earlier. I think the reality is in the next three years, we do have a level of investment that we will put into the business to deliver against some of the strategic priorities. They will all need some investment. We see pressure on the gross margin. We do see over the next three years that that will get more challenging. We still believe we have got operating leverage.
Some of the numbers that Jonah put up earlier as well, which is really important, is that we've got some significant efficiencies that we are driving through the business, and we'll continue to drive that through the business for the next three years. I think there is inevitably investment. There will be more productivity, and we've got pressures on gross margin in our mind going forward. All of those balance too, we aim above 12.5% EBITDA margin.
Thanks, Andy. More than a magic number then we're looking at. Any other questions here? Thank you.
Entcho Raykovski, E&P, just with a follow-up. I mean, this is sort of maybe a bit of a high-level question, but obviously as part of the presentations today, you've come out, and my sense is, well, clearly pushing more into mobile than you have in the past.
Tell me if I'm wrong with that interpretation, but that's my takeaway. Over the last few years, you have benefited to some extent from Telstra in particular, being happy to take upper growth, but be willing to lose subs. I think that's sort of helped Aussie win share as well. I mean, do you see a risk that Telstra looks at today's presentation and they say, "Oh, you're sort of attacking us in mobile potentially. We may be a little bit more aggressive in NBN resale"? How do you balance that up? Do you not really see that as much of a risk? Interested in your thoughts.
I'm trying to control myself here. I'm really being recorded. It's a fantastic question. The first thing I would say is we have a very different rote view of the world compared to Telstra and other MNOs. We think that given where they are in their rote profiles and their commitments to the various investor community, they are very much stuck in a rational pricing mindset, particularly when it comes to mobility. We're also acutely aware that they see some near-term opportunity, let's call it that, in the residential market when it comes to NBN and their multi-product holdings. We think the July period is going to be very fascinating to see what Telstra actually does. It's a very strong indicator out there in the market in terms of the movements they'll be making, at least from the analyst perspective at the 50 and the 100 plan tiers.
That is all information that we can use in terms of our own price positioning, which we will be providing to the board in the next month or so to really position us for growth as we move into the first half of next fiscal. In terms of competition overall, look, our position in the marketplace is we are absolute advocators for competition where it's in the benefit of the end user, i.e., the Australian citizen. If Telstra wants to come to the party more and challenge us even more than they have been in terms of that competition dynamic, then all we can do is welcome it. We're pretty confident we'll beat them.
Sorry, in mobile, we talk about MBN as well. In mobile, yes, we absolutely have more of a growth ambition in mobile than we have in the past.
Part of that is due to the different type of partnership we've now entered into with Optus. That lets us move into traditional Telstra strongholds in regional Australia to really leverage our brand positioning in that place and start to really provide a mobile offering worthy of our brand and also worthy of regional Australians.
Just for the sake of clarity, does the new partnership give you greater network reach than what you had previously?
Our network reach is the same as their retail network. That was the case already. That was the case back then too, yes.
Why then the change? I mean, I guess that's what I'm trying to get to. Is there something extra going on?
There is something extra going on. The risk around the perceived network performance in regional Australia, that risk is being helped to be minimized by Optus in terms of some of the kind of deals that they're able to provide to us, particularly from a rebating perspective. Yes. Our existing contract was going to expire.
Yeah. Of course. Sorry, very final one for me, but I guess we're looking at deal-making activity in the market. Vocus looks like they're about to buy TPG's fiber assets. I mean, they've got ACCC approval, so it feels like that's going to go ahead. How do you think that impacts the enterprise and government space? Does the market perhaps become a little bit more rational?
It's an interesting one. We look at it as an opportunity for possibly a period of time where we can make some gains while things are getting, things are happening there type of thing. I don't have an answer so much. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. TPG have played usually a bit of a different game to Vocus in the past. It will be interesting to see whether Vocus does adopt that sort of same game that TPG were playing or whether they go down the Vocus path, etc. We believe it's a good thing for us because there's hay to be made while the sun is shining, I suppose. We'll put it that way.
Thank you.
Thank you. Is there another question here in the room? All right, then. Look, we might close with one last question from our live stream.
Jono, this one is for you. I'm very glad that Paul Dua from Cbus Super has asked a question because it gives you a chance to talk about the speed tiers that are coming in September and to talk a bit more about why this is such a great opportunity for Aussie, in particular for our customers. The question is, will the subs on 100 Mbs per second and greater plans get free upgrades to higher speed NBN plans come September?
Can you tell us how that will work? The short answer, great question. Thank you. The short answer is yes. The caveat is as long as you're currently on an FTTP technology, which is the acronym for fiber.
The high-speed upgrades in terms of the 100 becoming 500 overnight, which is what will happen in September, that is available to customers who are on fiber but not onto copper. Obviously, if you're in the hunt for speed and still on copper today, you should get a wriggle on and get over to fiber. That will be one of the first pieces of immediate benefit that flow through to customers. There's also benefit flowing through to customers, again, on fiber today, who are on a 250 plan. The 250 plan becomes a magical 750 overnight as well. The customers who are on 1050 today will also get an upload benefit from 50 up to 100. That's going to be beautiful. Overnight, in terms of the customer benefit, there will be an instant day-one benefit to those customers.
There will be no price delta in terms of what they would be paying otherwise for those speeds.
Thank you. Jono, while you've got the mic, I have another question here for you. This one from Brian from Morningstar, who asks, in residential, how is Buddy differentiated from all the other value players in the market without the ABB customer service edge? It's cuter. When we created Buddy as a brand, obviously, it's very cute. We spent an awful lot of time in research land trying to understand who is the end consumer we're trying to talk to and target. Every single part of how Buddy appears from a marketing and branding perspective is very, very deliberate to go after the customer segmentations that I showed up on the slides earlier before.
The other key thing that we understand about Buddy's failure or its ability to really win is how the customer interaction works via digital. The really important thing to understand about why is Buddy different in a digital domain is the incredible humans actually sitting behind Buddy. Whilst Buddy Bot is the first thing that pops up, we have six incredible people over in WA with me over in Perth who actually man the live chat in real time. Where Buddy Bot cannot actually answer your question, it is an immediate transfer over to our keyboard kings. They are sitting there ready and able to answer every single customer type query with all of the same tooling that we have sitting behind our in-person telephony-based customer service in Aussie.
Brilliant. Thanks, Jono. A question for Andy or Aaron, and I'll let you decide once I've asked the question. From Brian from Morningstar, who's asking in enterprise, how scalable is the operating cost base to customer growth? How did you arrive at the 12.5% group margin aspiration? Is that based on some global benchmark or based on variable and fixed cost modeling?
The latter part first. We did detailed modeling. The reality is we've got a three-year review and plan, and that's how we got to those sort of numbers. We obviously test that externally just to see what the overall market would look like. That's the first point. It's logically on detail. A whole bunch of assumptions behind that, by the way, in terms of mix of customers and how we get to those profits and gross margins.
The second point, which was the first part of the question, Aaron, clearly your leverage, there is leverage, but you equally need to make some pretty significant investments around people for customer service and sales relative to the market you're in.
Yeah, as we bring more customers on, we need more people to support those customers. There's opportunity, though, for further automation that we can do to reduce that by the number of people we need to bring on, essentially. As I sort of mentioned earlier, the reason for combining the segments from business, enterprise, and government is to get a better economies of scale from a people perspective rather than having this team supporting business. And that's a big team. This smaller team supporting enterprise and government, when I mentioned the underlying telco services, the core telco services are essentially exactly the same.
Leveraging that people capability and economies of scale better.
I just wanted to add one of the things that we probably haven't done a good enough storytelling job at doing is, at the same time as we were doing our very detailed bottom-up work internally within the business, we also ran an independent piece of work with a very blue chip, cannot use their name, the lawyers will kill me, very blue chip McKinsey-esque, but it wasn't them, consulting group to really come in very deeply to understand the current capabilities of our company, understand where we are positioned in the market. They have done an independent piece of work to understand what our future growth profiles by segment, by product could also look like. The purpose of doing that was to keep us honest and to really see if what we believe we could deliver, we can.
We're presenting it to you here today. We have confidence, and that confidence is backed up by not them, a different version of them.
Thank you. Another question from the floor.
In Munro here again. Just one for Brad, actually. Just talking about combining the architecture structure behind the brands. Can you perhaps give us a sense of the cost of doing this? Is this accounted for in the CapEx guidance? As a follow-on, how do you see that benefiting the cost to compete across the segments?
Apologies for the last part of the question.
How do you see the combined architecture supporting the segment's ability to compete in market?
The good news is part of that 20 million is we made some forward investments this year that laid the foundation for a large part of the capabilities that we'll use to combine some of the things together. There are some numbers there that we'll probably need to make some investments in future years. A large part of those have already been made, and those platforms are beginning to come online now. We have a lot of capability that exists in place as well across the non-compute platforms and networks and likes as well that we'll be able to bring together with. There's going to be people costs associated with that, but as far as my technology cost, we can bring together relatively rapidly. How that looks, there's some more architectural work to be done on that front.
I mean, I see probably a collapse or combined data network. We have indicated, as Mo has indicated, probably have multiple voice networks that will allow us to provide two tier-one networks in that space, which will require some additional complexity. At the core, from a technology standpoint, a lot of our products, whether they're wholesale, retail, really look very similar. There are some differences that we would need to account for, but the combined capabilities that I'm looking to achieve with that look very similar. As I mentioned, we've already made a lot of those investments. Future states will probably come back with future guidance on that or updates on that. For the immediate next 12 months-18 months, we're pretty well positioned to take that on with the investments that we've already made. Very good.
Maybe one for Jane Place, just thinking about the employment market at the moment and the cost base across the business and cost, I guess, to serve from an employee point of view, how are you kind of seeing the, I guess, the recruitment market at the moment and cost to serve?
Thank you. I mean, to be honest with you, we're actually getting really strong applications for any roles that we put up. I think that's a little bit about the brand. It's got a little bit of a unique flavor in the market. Having all onshore call centers does have a cost to it. We do supplement that. Some of Symbio uses offshore resources for some of the work that they do.
We are being carefully thoughtful about where we place our investment and our people so that we do leverage the internal talent mobility because that is a proven strategy to reduce cost if you bring people through the organization.
Thank you.
Thank you. Are there any other final questions? No. A big thank you to all the questions that came from the floor and to the questions that came from those that are on our live stream. Thank you to our exec team as well for your time in answering those. We'll let you take your seats back. Brian will now come up to have a final word and to wrap for the day.
Okay, tha t's the end of the session today. I'm really grateful for you all for taking the best part of the day, especially in the midst of the market madness of the week, to hear about our Look to 28 strategy. I'd also like to thank the whole team for all the work that went into today. It was a huge effort. I know it just looks like a few slides on the screen, but the amount of work that goes into setting up a day like today is enormous. Thank you to everyone. I'd particularly like to thank Anthony and Derek for joining us today. Really appreciate them sharing their stories with us about how amazing Aussie is, but also about how amazing your business is. We really appreciate that. We appreciate all our customer partnerships. That's great.
By way of recap, I started today by sharing a trading update which showed strong quarterly performance with great connection growth, increasing our market share and continuing a strong pipeline. We're also excited by the opportunity of our renewed partnership with Optus. We talked through the many exciting opportunities ahead of us and how we intend to deliver material market growth across all our segments, building continued diversity whilst remaining true to our core, telco. Our aspirations are simple: revenue in excess of AUD 1.66 billion, EBITDA margin greater than 12.5%, NBN market share greater than 11%, and our earnings per share compounding by at least 20% per annum. What you also heard today is that we'll make meaningful progress on lifting our employees' engagement and improving our sustainable practices, amongst many other things.
To achieve this, we will increase the concentration of on-net buildings, evolve our service models with a focus on productivity and efficiency without losing the secret sauce of Aussie Broadband, the human touch. We will simplify, enhance, rationalize our systems, and we'll do so with security intrinsic in everything we do. I'm very proud to be leading Aussie as the most trusted telco, but our ambition is to go beyond and to be the telco people love. Thank you again for your time today, and we look forward to seeing you all in August for our FY 2025 results. Thank you.