Now I'd like to hand the conference over to Mr. Brian Maher, CEO. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome to today's call for the Aussie Broadband Group FY 2026 half year results. My name is Brian Maher, and I'm the Aussie Broadband's Group CEO, and I'm joined on the call by our CFO, Andy Giles Knopp. Also available on the call today are our three group executives, Jonathan Prosser, Aaron O'Keeffe, and Michael Omeros, who are present to answer any specific questions you may have. As previously disclosed, Andy will be leaving the business shortly, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his outstanding contribution to Aussie and wish him well, but not too well in his next role. Also, as announced, I welcome our new CFO, Darren Rowland, who has commenced with us today. I look forward to Darren's contribution, and I'm sure many of you will get to meet him in the coming weeks.
Before we get into the results for the half, I'd like to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first Australians, and for their role as the original communicators, connectors, scientists, and carers of the land and waters across Australia. We pay our respects to elders, past and present. We commit to working respectfully to honor ongoing cultural and spiritual connections between the traditional owners of this country and to building an inclusive Australia together. On page 3 of our deck, you can see today's agenda. We'll start by going through a quick overview of the half before diving into the financials and the performance of our three segments. I will then take you through an update on our Look to 28 ambitions before I conclude with a trading update and a view on our expected full year performance for FY 2026.
We will then have time for Q&A. Let's turn to page four now for a high-level view of the group. Telco is an ever-evolving sector, and it takes a lot of collective work and energy to gain and maintain the trust and love of our customers. I'm delighted to report that we're continuing to uphold the reputation that has got us here today. This reputation is recognized by a range of external organizations. Aussie Broadband is the most trusted telco, as measured by Roy Morgan. We've held this honor since 2021. We were awarded Canstar Blue's Most Satisfied Small Business Customers Award. On the enterprise front, our security vendor, Fortinet, recently nominated Aussie as their Australian Partner of the Year and their Telco Partner of the Year.
We continue to diversify our business across our segments, across our core telco product range, and through a multi-channel go-to-market approach, supported by the exciting announcements we've made over the last six months, which I will cover later. We also maintain a structural advantage through our strategic assets. A major initiative for the half is the successful launch of our enhanced Nitrogen platform, which we first used to migrate Symbio's NBN connections onto the Aussie Broadband network in June last year, and has since been evolved to enable the migration of More and Tangerine customers over the next half. The business maintains a strong financial position, thanks to a disciplined management, sustained growth across segments and improved productivity. I'm pleased to announce that the company has declared a fully franked interim ordinary dividend of AUD 0.024 per share.
Let's turn to the next section on page 6 for a recap of the highlights. Half 1 of FY 2026 was another exciting period for Aussie Broadband, with double-digit growth across all segments. We delivered a strong half of growth across key financial and operational metrics. Underlying EBITDA was up 13.5% on the prior corresponding period, courtesy of continued revenue growth across all 3 segments and supported by benefits of scale and efficiencies. Andy will share more on that later. Our NBN market share continues to grow and was 8.8% in December, with a with a 14% growth in broadband connections over the last 12 months. This was largely due to our successful brand positioning around the new high-speed tiers available under the NBN Accelerate Great program, as we continue to take share from incumbent telcos.
We remain a leader in the new high-speed world and expect that we will continue to do well in these tiers as more Australians gradually upgrade and gain access to these new speeds in the coming months and years to come. 69% of our connections are now on speeds of 100 Mbps or higher, and we have 43% market share in 2 gig plans. As mentioned, our Nitrogen platform is completed and ready for scaled migrations, starting with the transfer of around 290,000 More and Tangerine connections. This will be the largest migration of connections on the NBN network to date, and those connections will provide a material lift to earnings from FY 2027.
Our Investor Day last April, we communicated that our strategy was to drive our own Aussie Fibre network utilization and increase connections from 1.2 per building towards 3. While we have made progress towards this goal, we have decided to refine our strategy based on our capital allocation guidelines. Moving forward, future Fibre investment will focus almost exclusively on less capital-intensive on-net buildings. The existing Fibre infrastructure will continue to provide strategic advantage in enabling scalable growth in our core business and, where appropriate, providing an alternate product offering to NBN in existing buildings. We have identified that a better use of our capital is to accelerate the replatforming of our core systems, and I will go into that in more detail later in this presentation.
Productivity remains a focus. We saw the benefits of that with a 1.2 percentage point reduction in operating costs to revenue. Over the last 18 months, a range of initiatives have seen a material improvement in the ratio of frontline staff to connections, including a 14% improvement in the last half. We see further opportunities ahead as we modernize our platforms and use contemporary tools to remove the burden of low-value back-office activities from our staff. Lastly, a lot has changed since we talked to you about our Look to 28 strategy at our Investor Day in April last year, and later I will discuss our renewed ambitions in the new context. Let's turn now to the operational metrics for the half on page 7.
As mentioned before, our market share of on-net NBN services has climbed by 0.4 points to 8.8%, with group broadband connections growing by 39,000 to 828,000. I look forward to achieving more than 1 million connections by the end of the financial year, and then over 1.25 million in the second half of this calendar year, following the AGL migration. This would position us as number three in the market, based on the shape of the market today. Mobile services across the group grew by 24,000 to 240,000, which is encouraging progress. As at 31 December, we hosted 8.1 million numbers across our Symbio and NetSIP Tier One voice networks, and 4.5 billion core minutes across our networks over the first half.
Lastly, the Aussie Fibre numbers, with 1,317 customers in 1,057 connected buildings, being a slight improvement to 1.25 connections per building. I'll now hand you over to Andy, who will take you through the key financial figures for the half on pages eight and nine.
Thank you, Brian, thank you everyone for joining the call today. Let's turn to page 9 for a look at the financial highlights for the half. Half 1, FY 2026 was another excellent half for the business on the back of strong organic growth. On a reported basis, revenue grew by 8.4% to AUD 637.8 million. Our underlying EBITDA was up 13.5% to AUD 74.7 million. Importantly, our underlying NPAT-A was up 24.5% to AUD 31.3 million, and our earnings per share of AUD 0.107 was also up 26.5%. Last, our operating cash flow was 16% up to AUD 57.1 million, and I will talk about that in a few more slides. Let us turn now to the group's underlying P&L on page 10.
The underlying P&L removes the impact of the one-off items. The table also includes the contribution from Origin in half 1 of FY 2025. Excluding this impact, revenue grew by 13.5%, underlying EBITDA grew by 27%, and our underlying NPAT-A grew by 50%. As you will see in the segment slides later, there was impressive double digit in all segments, growth, underpinned by a 13.7% increase in broadband connections, strong growth in mobile, continued success in winning customers in the business, enterprise, and government sector, and strong growth across data and mobile in wholesale. Gross margin at 36.3% remains very robust and in line with half 2 of FY 2025, albeit down on half 1 of FY 2025. This is despite the competitive market and the significant change created by the NBN's Accelerate Great program.
Productivity gains and operational improvements continue to support the strong results. Company headcount reduced over the period as wholesale made organizational changes, and residential customer service team continued to drive productivity. The relationship of customers to FTE improved by 14% in half 1, on the back of a 26% improvement in FY 2025. These reductions are being offset by an investment in technical resources to ensure the delivery of key strategic initiatives. In the reported numbers, there were several one-off items during the half. These relates to the restructuring of the business, costs associated with the business disposal, and the AUD 14.8 million impairment of goodwill relating to the sale of Digital Sense Hosting, which we announced today.
The company declared a fully franked interim ordinary dividend of AUD 0.024 versus the AUD 0.016 last year, up 50%, noting in the prior year, an interim special dividend was also declared. Let's now turn to page 11, to a simple bridge explaining the underlying EBITDA. In line with the underlying bridge provided for guidance at the FY 2025 full year results, I provide a similar view for H1. Removing the AUD 7 million contribution from Origin in H1 of last year, the restated EBITDA is AUD 58.8 million. From there, a like-for-like growth of 27% has been achieved, noting that this is at the upper end of our guidance range. The announcement of buddii disposal led to a natural slowing of trading periods since August, and marketing expense was lower, resulting in an improvement of AUD 2.5 million.
Importantly, in the half, the first half of FY 2026, we incurred AUD 1.9 million of one-off costs, largely relating to additional capacity for our network, post Accelerate Great, to prepare for the significant growth from the More and AGL migrations to ensure that our customers experience the same high quality network. In our guidance range for FY 2026, we indicated that the net impact of More and Tangerine wholesale agreement was expected to be immaterial, which remains the case, as a positive contribution is expected in half 2, to offset this impact. There was also a few M&A-related expenses not included as non-recurring, as the transactions hadn't been completed, but these will be reclassified in half 2.
Excluding these one-off costs, our underlying EBITDA would have been AUD 76.6 million and up 30% on last year. Let's turn to page 12 now and look at our cash flow and balance sheet. The cash conversion in the year was 76.5%. Again, there have been several factors that have played into the half. First, we paid a one-off cash incentive of AUD 2.5 million to More as part of the wholesale services agreement. Second, we made advance payments of AUD 3 million on customer-related hardware supplied to our Business, Enterprise & Government segment, recoverable over the contract life. Last, there were upfront payments on non-discretionary expenses of AUD 5 million, for which we received attractive commercial terms for three-year commitments. Please note the increase in prepayments on the balance sheet at the 31st of December.
I expect the cash conversion to improve for the full year 2026 position in line with FY 2025. Our net leverage remains comfortably below the 1.75 times to 2.5 times target ratio at 0.9% at times. Our net debt position increased from AUD 101.2 million to AUD 139.2 million over the year, which was largely due to the AUD 43 million of excess cash being returned through a share buyback and the special interim dividend in half two of FY 2025. There are a couple of one-off items in the cash flow worth noting, such as the proceeds from a disposal and investment, and the tax paid on the significant disposal shares last year. Finally, the refinancing was completed last month.
We maintained AUD 195 million redraw facility, which provides greater financial flexibility and which will be used to fund the Nexgen acquisition. Favorable terms will have a positive outcome in half 2. Let's go to our CapEx investment now on page 13. Compared to half year FY 2025, I'm pleased to say that our CapEx came in at AUD 27 million and remains in line with the FY 2025 in line with AUD 55 million-AUD 60 million guidance for the full year results. For FY 2026, we planned around a very tight list of strategic priorities, including investments required to support More and Tangerine, as well as AGL Telco, which has led to a very disciplined CapEx outcome.
Investments have been focused on enabling growth in customer capacity, as well as uplifting capability platforms like Nitrogen and other platforms to enable the migration of AGL's Australian customer and in ServiceNow underpinning business, enterprise, and government segments. We've invested in property for the regional Vic teams with an amazing facility in Traralgon for our Gippsland teams, officially opening next week, and we've invested a further AUD 8 million into Aussie Fibre. There was a material shift from off-net growth to on-net and near-net as we drove the utilization and returns. We've decided to refine that strategy further, and this will be covered a little later by Brian. That's it for the financial highlights for the half. It has been a strong half and sets us up for a positive FY 2026 and beyond.
Let me talk you through now our segment performance and how it's contributed to those results. Let's start with residential on page 15. Residential continued to lead the way for Aussie in the half, with a 14.7% increase in revenue and strong margin delivery. That growth was underpinned by an 8% jump in NBN broadband services and 20% growth in connections on the OptiComm network. Mobile continues to be a great opportunity for Aussie as well. The addition of new bundles, powered by the 5-year agreement we announced with Optus last April, has helped drive our mobile connections to 85,000. That's a 33% jump from the preceding period, and the churn rates remained low at the same time.
Our gross margin percentage is marginally ahead of the corresponding half, despite the customer mix adapting to the new high-speed tiers, higher access costs, and our strategic approach to pricing ahead of Accelerate Great. Below the gross margin profitability, the residential segment also continues to benefit from the increased efficiencies within our customer service team. The most significant event in residential came from the launch of NBN's new high-speed tiers in September. Let's turn to page 16 for a little bit more detail. NBN unveiled new high-speed tiers last September, including the addition of multi-gigabit residential connections for the first time in Australia. As a known leader of high speeds, we were always well placed to take advantage of these new offerings, and all eligible Aussie Broadband customers upgraded to the new high-speed tiers on day one.
Research from our partner, Sprout Strategy, found that Aussie is leading the market with the highest customer awareness of the new high speeds. That shows in our customer base. Our percentage of customers on NBN 100 or higher plan has increased to 69% of all connections, up from 56% in June 2025. 44% of all customers are now on NBN 500 plan or higher. We also continue to lead the market for those who want the new multi-gigabit offerings, with more than 2,700 connections customers today on the NBN 2,000 plan. This has more than doubled since September, demonstrating the high demand for the fastest plans.
Not all Australians can access the higher tier plans yet, and we continue to work with NBN on the best pathways to upgrade the millions of households still on legacy copper connections. As those households and users gain access to the higher speeds, we are confident that Aussie will continue to gain market share and connections through our positioning as a high-quality provider of high-speed broadband. Let's turn to Business, Enterprise, and Government on page 17. Our Business, Enterprise, and Government segment recorded 10.8% revenue growth for the half, with a record month for the new business broadband connections in October. Mobile continues to deliver positive momentum for the team, with more than 5,200 new services activated since December 2024. Whilst the average contract value deal from new customers is 38% higher from H1 FY 2025.
One driver of this was the signing of our largest ever E&G deal to date with Bakers Delight, as well as securing major clients such as Korr and the John Laing Group. The Business, Enterprise & Government team streamlined their customer project delivery, reducing the average time by 15 days. As Aussie continues to grow over the coming year, our brand positioning of superior service quality and our increased market reference ability will drive further growth in our sales pipeline and the average size of those deals. The segment saw a marginal reduction of its gross margin percentage following the repricing of our business products in anticipation of the NBN Accelerate Great program in September, and the effect of the changes on broadband speed mix. Let's turn to page 18 for a look at wholesale.
Our wholesale business experienced strong growth in data and mobile, which drove revenue up by 12.5%. Mobile SIOs grew by 12.7% in the half, on net, broadband connections increased by 90.5% year-on-year, including the migration of 17,000 Symbio connections in June last year. The gross margin was affected by the product mix as data and mobile growth outpaced voice, along with a strong half of growth in the lower margin international swaps trading. Of course, one of the highlights of the half was the signing of our largest wholesale customer to date, the More Telecom in August, and we're excited to continue onboarding more wholesale partners onto this platform.
The team has shown our capability to migrate data connections at scale, and we have a delivery pipeline ahead, and we believe that will provide us a strong outlook for H2 FY 2026 and for years to come. Strong segment performance through H1 and an exciting outlook for H1. I'll hand you back now to Brian to discuss the strategic ambitions.
Thanks, Andy. Looking now to page 19. As part of our Look to 28 strategy, we communicated that growth across all segments and countries was a strategic priority, and over the last 12 months, we've made this our primary goal: to ensure we have the foundations to accelerate our growth. Over the last 6 months, we've announced wholesale service agreement with More and Tangerine, the acquisition of AGL Telco, and today, the acquisition of Nexgen. We support diversity and continued growth across all the segments, ensuring we've broadened our market reach into strategic sectors like banking and energy, but importantly, deepen our core capability in segments such as SME with Nexgen. These successes are a testament to the entire business. We've established a reputation and delivery capability that has attracted significant market players to want to leverage Aussie's network and customer service capability.
They set us up to become the number three RSP in market by the end of the calendar year. Importantly, they also underpin our confidence in delivering greater value and upgrading the Look to 28 aspirations. Before I get to that, let me talk you through the key strategic drivers of growth. Let's start with an overview of the wholesale services agreement with More, which we announced back in August. Over the past few months, our team has worked closely with More Tangerine to deliver enhancements to our proprietary wholesale platform, Nitrogen, to ensure it delivered on our commitments to them and was delivered on time. Today is a big day for both More Tangerine and Aussie as we enter the pilot stage and some customers from new new sales will start to come onto the Aussie Broadband network.
The focus will now turn to the migration of More and Tangerine's existing customers onto our network, which will grow our share of the NBN market to more than 1 million connections by June this year. Once the migration is completed, we expect the connections will provide AUD 12 million in annualized EBITDA, while being accretive to the underlying EPS on a pro forma basis. At the same time, we announced the sale of our value brand, buddii, in August. The final cash consideration for the sale is dependent on the number of customers transferred to Tangerine and some post-transfer adjustments, and with connections sitting at approximately 16,000 as of 20th of February, we expect the consideration to be in the range of AUD 6 million-AUD 7 million. Those migrated buddii customers will also remain on the Aussie network as part of the agreement.
The migration is expected to begin in mid-March, and the deal to be completed shortly thereafter. Let's turn to page 21 to talk about our acquisition of AGL's Telco assets and customers. As we announced on February 11, Aussie Broadband has entered into an agreement with AGL that delivers a material step change in connections and earnings for our residential segment. The agreement consists of the acquisition of AGL Telco, adding a combined 350,000 broadband and mobile services, along with 46,000 voice services. A long-term exclusive partnership between Aussie and AGL, where AGL will promote the branded telco products to its energy customer base through bundles. This provides us with an important and strategic channel to the energy market. Aussie will be responsible for delivering its award-winning customer service to these new customers.
This deal will deliver around AUD 235 million in revenue and AUD 21 million in underlying EBITDA in the first 12 months post-migration, and will be EPS accretive in the first year. Aussie has agreed to pay AUD 115 million in equity to AGL under the deal, which will result in around 22 million shares that we expect to issue in June 2026. Another AUD 10 million in AMP shares will be issued in tranches of AUD 2 million each, provided net growth hurdles are met. The migration will be finalized by Q2 FY 2027. We are truly excited about this long-term partnership with AGL, and look forward to working with them and growing AGL Telco connections together.
We believe this is another win-win agreement, and we're very excited about what the long-term partnership enables as we collectively reimagine how we can impact the energy telco sector. As part of our ambition, we have a working estimate for AGL Telco connections, inclusive of mobile, to grow to 500,000 within 5 years. It's an exciting time for Aussie with these two deals bringing scale to existing customer connections that will drive synergies across the network and provide operating leverage. There's more. Let's turn to page 22 to talk through the announcements we made this morning. Aussie Broadband has entered into a binding agreement to acquire 100% of Nexgen, a provider of advanced business communication solutions. This deepens our core capabilities, enhances our value proposition to small and medium enterprises, and expands our national reach and sales capacity into the SME market.
The Nexgen business will add 6,000 SME NBN connections to our numbers and is highly complementary to our existing value proposition in that market. The acquisition will allow us to sell an expanded product set, including an agentic AI feature that will be targeted at the SME landscape. Nexgen will be EPS accretive and is expected to generate AUD 8.1 million of EBITDA for Aussie in FY for Aussie, with a contribution of AUD 2.7 million EBITDA in FY 2026. We will also benefit from AUD 2 million-AUD 4 million in expected annual cost synergies within two years. Revenue synergies are also expected. Aussie is acquiring the business for AUD 44.1 million, with an additional payout of AUD 5.9 million, subject to the completion of EBITDA targets for FY 2026 or FY 2027.
The Nexgen co-founders will be remaining with Aussie and have been offered incentives to deliver growth targets. We're also announcing that the company has made the decision to divest its cloud business, Digital Sense Hosting. The decision comes after the comprehensive strategic review as part of the Look to 28 strategy, where we realigned the business to focus on core telecommunication services. Aussie Broadband has entered into an agreement with 11:11 Systems for them to acquire our cloud business for AUD 18 million, structured into an upfront payment of AUD 14 million and another deferred payment of AUD 4 million. We anticipate a negative EBITDA impact of approximately AUD 2 million in FY 2026.
There is a one-off non-cash impairment to goodwill of AUD 14.8 million, recognizing the challenges in the cloud market for smaller scale players and the tightening margins over the last few years and the future prospects of the business in Aussie's ownership. Cloud customers will be migrated to 11:11 Systems over the coming year. We expect the deal investment to complete in March 2026. Let's take a look at our upgrade, upgraded strategic aspirations, creating greater value for the future on page 23. Our overarching ambition, of course, remains the same. We want to change the game and to be the telco people love. We've upgraded our ambitions based upon our confidence from the successes over the last six months and adaptations of our strategy within this new context. These better reflect our new scale, opportunity, and market position.
What we've reflected in this upgrade, the wholesale service agreement with More, our acquisitions of AGL Telco and Nexgen, the divestments of buddii Customers and Digital Sense Hosting, and the impact of the ACCC's determination on regulated voice termination rates, which we communicated to the market in December. It also reflects our capital allocation considerations around Aussie Fibre investments and replatforming our core systems. Our upgraded strategic ambitions are as follows: Our revenue ambition has been increased from AUD 1.6 billion to AUD 2 billion, reflecting the expanded base revenue. We aim to continue double-digit growth across all segments, which we simply measure by maintaining residential at no more than 60% of total revenue, ensuring that business, enterprise, and government, and wholesale segments keep growing at a similar pace.
The acquisition of the AGL customer base increases the pressure on Aaron and Mo in the non-residential segments. We are looking to improve our underlying EBITDA margin to greater than 13.5%, up from 12.5%, reflecting an improvement in efficiency, productivity, and simplification, particularly through our replatforming investments, which I'll come to in a moment. We believe we can grow our NBN market share to more than 17% or around 1.5 million connections. Being number three by the end of the calendar year sets a new baseline for our aspirations. Product of these ambitions is to deliver outstanding returns to shareholders, measured here by CAGR and EPS of at least 30%.
Our strengthened market position and expanded scale provide the foundations to deliver greater value. These upgraded Look to 28 strategic aspirations are supported by our confidence about the future. Integral to the ambitions is the five strategic priorities, which you'll be familiar with. We've amended one of them, and that relates to our Aussie Fibre strategy, which I will discuss next on page 24. Aussie Fibre continues to be one of our most valuable strategic assets. By owning our own fiber, the business saves in backhaul costs while driving operational leverage, enabling us to be competitive in the wholesale sector. This is a significant ongoing benefit to our bottom line. Last year, we set ourselves a target of improving utilization of Aussie Fibre to two to three connections per building.
We've made modest progress towards this target, having added customers at a faster rate than we connected new buildings, but not at the speed we anticipated. While we're continuing our long tail strategy of improving the utilization of Aussie Fibre, we've made a decision to redirect future capital allocation for further expansion of the fiber network to near net buildings. As a result, we will focus on improving utilization within our existing on-net buildings. Those are the buildings where we already have Aussie Fibre connected, and there is no additional infrastructure required to connect a new customer. With this change, we have capacity to accelerate our replatforming work, and so I want to give you a bit more context to this work, which is set out on page 25.
We've previously highlighted that the work had begun on a multi-year program to create new enablement platforms that could empower our wholesale customers and Aussie to new levels of sustainable long-term growth. Our Nitrogen platform is one piece of that work, but it is not the only investment Aussie is making to strengthen our product suite into the future. We've already begun the next phase of our replatforming journey, which will roll out through incremental value drops over the coming years. This work will strengthen the business by improving the systems that support our network and power our entire product suite across residential, business and energy, and wholesale. Our goals for this body of work are to enable Aussie to launch more products and innovations faster, while maintaining simplicity and consistency in delivery for our customers.
We're bolstering the experience for our wholesale customers. By consolidating the number of platforms we use internally, we'll also be improving the experience, capability, and efficiency of our business and support systems. This work will also ensure that Aussie is future-proofed by aligning to global best practices and industry standards. In terms of the value of this OSS and BSS investment, we anticipate this to be AUD 30 million over FY 2026 to FY 2029. It's important to note that this is included in our existing envelope and will not impact our overall planned CapEx spend in coming years. As that work progresses, we estimate that we'll see a 30% reduction in maintenance CapEx costs over the next four years. Let's turn now to page 27 for a guidance and trading update for FY 2026.
Having delivered a strong first half result, another 12,000 net new connections in the quarter to date, and with confidence in our outlook for the remainder of the second half, today, we are revising the FY 2026 EBITDA guidance. We now expect to land within the upper end of our previous range of AUD 162 million-AUD 167 million, which represents annual growth of between 17% and 21%. Our CapEx guidance for FY 2026 remains unchanged at AUD 55 million-AUD 60 million. We have one more slide today before we take your questions, so let's turn to page 28 for the key takeaways from today. Over a year ago, we unveiled our three-year ambition under our Look to 28 strategy, and I'm proud to say that we are well on track to delivering on and overachieving our previous ambitions.
The business has continued to deliver results in line with expectations, with double-digit growth across all our segments and growth in our broadband connections and market share. We will also continue to focus on unlocking greater efficiencies from our increased scale and productivity initiatives. Our approach to M&A and partnering has unlocked some strong partnerships and future growth opportunities. Our More and Tangerine deal will start to contribute to earnings from FY 2027 onwards, and we'll also see a material uplift in earnings from the AGL Telco acquisition from the second half of FY 2027. Our business and B&EG teams are growing their sales and increasing contract sizes. Our residential division continues to grow organically off the back of the new high-speed tiers, and our wholesale platforms continue to unlock growth opportunities for Aussie at scale. This has enabled us to upgrade our guidance and longer-term ambitions.
All of this leaves us in an incredibly strong position, and we're excited for what's on the horizon. One final thing before I move to Q&A. I just wanted to acknowledge our outgoing director, Graeme Barclay. Graeme leaves the board today to focus on an executive chair opportunity that has presented itself. We thank Graeme for the significant contribution in a short period of time, and we're hopeful of reacquainting in the future. With that, we're now available to take your questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question via phone, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please type it into your question into the Ask a Question box. Your first question comes from Benjamin Jones with JP Morgan.
Morning, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just the first one on the FY 2026 guidance you've provided. I mean, if I look at consensus numbers, it does imply a little bit of a step-up on, on the margin side into the second half. Can you just talk us through some of the moving parts on, on the margins there?
Yeah, it's, I mean, it's really the same as what we would have said at the full year. We've got, you know, reasonable momentum on connections that comes through. We're holding our margins better than we expected from half one, so therefore we're positive about that. Productivity will continue to drive through, so again, that's a, a lever. And I think those are the key things. I mean, those are always the key levers that we would talk about. We're sort of, when we went into the full year, at the beginning, there was a lot of uncertainty where we may come through, the Accelerate Great and all of the pricing, and now we're feeling much more positive since then.
I think that the last thing I'd say is that the momentum in each three of the segments, particularly actually Business, Enterprise and Government, and Wholesale, and the opportunities that we're seeing in the pipeline are obviously something that we're excited about.
Great. That's helpful. Just second question on, on the resi business. I think you were putting the preso there. You got 16,000 buddii subs as at 20th of February. I mean, it sort of implies X buddii subs, you're adding sort of 24,000-25,000 for the half. Is this a fair run rate that you'd expect to maintain in the core business going forward, or is there a scope for that to accelerate once you've, you know, concentrated on the core business?
Yeah, the start of the year, start of this calendar year, has actually been quite, quite positive for us. It's going at least reasonably well. We don't see a slowing down in, in the growth. We, you know, there are some opportunities in the market with, you know, planned NBN activity in terms of trying to encourage more, more people to move on to fiber. That's a positive for us, and we're working with them on, on how that can play out. We're reasonably optimistic about our growth, prospects, going forward.
Got it. Just 1 final one again on the resi side. I know the market's been very active late last year with the speed restores and also with Telstra coming down with the NBN-only plans, I mean, any observations that you can share with us on market pricing, how you're seeing your own discounting activity versus the same time last year, and any sort of implications for, you know, changes, step up, step down in gross margins and whatnot?
Yeah, I mean, I, I mean, our observations would probably be what you see as well. There's, there's, there's pricing out there that's essentially selling at NBN wholesale pricing in the short term at least. You know, we, we, we participate in the promotional activity along with everybody else, probably not to the same degree. Yet we're still delivering the, the net growth that, that, that we are. We're, we're, we're pretty comfortable that we're, we're still relatively maintaining our, our growth levels whilst also, to a, to a large degree, protecting our margins. We're, we're pretty comfortable where it's at.
Very helpful. Thanks for taking the questions, guys.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Anjo Raczkowski with E&P.
Hi, Brian. Hi, Andy. My, my first question is just a clarification, and apologies if I've missed this in all the materials, but the, the AUD -2 million impact on EBITDA in FY 2026 from the sale of Digital Sense, is that, does that reflect lost earnings, or is it, is it also M&A costs? I, I guess I'm just trying to understand the ongoing impact on Aussie from the sale.
No, that's, that's lost EBITDA from, from trading. The important part on that, Anjo, is, we touched on in our release, is that the, the longer term prospects for our cloud business were not as positive as they once were. The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has changed the industry dynamics. Broadcom's focus is on having large scale customers, not small scale customers, and they are pricing smaller players essentially out of the market, and in, and in some cases, withdrawing product. Ultimately, that, that, that, the margin from that business would have dissipated over time. And we're, we're actually pretty, pretty happy that we've got an outcome here of, of, of making a divestment in that business.
Okay, got it. Just, I mean, if we to annualize it, is it circa AUD 8 million impact? Is it a bit lower than that, just for our modeling purposes?
That math is accurate, but we would not have experienced AUD 8 million next year.
Yeah, got it. No, appreciate the, the trend is not positive. Okay, great. Then secondly, if we consider your updated FY 2028 ambitions, particularly EPS CAGR of more than 30%, which is certainly up there, but I'm just curious whether you foresee this will require further acquisitions to get to that number, relative to what you've announced to date, or do you think you can get there through organic growth?
There are many paths to the, to the goal, Anjo. it, it could include acquisition, but we also see the possibility for it to be done purely organically as well.
I, I suppose maybe asking it a different way, sort of when you, when you budget for that, do you have a sort of like, do you target, you know, 50/50 acquisition organic, or is it too difficult to split out?
As I said, there are many paths, so we, we could follow a number of different paths. It's an ambition, it's not a, it's not guidance. If you look, if you look at the revenue we're adding through the acquisitions and take off the bits we're losing from, from divestments, if you assume the similar level of CAGR in our core business that we've experienced the last couple of years, you should find a way to getting there organically. We don't rule out that, that we may also acquire to get there as well.
Okay, that's helpful. Just the final one on the subscriber trajectory. I guess if I look at the subs growth, was pretty evenly split between 1Q, 2Q, at circa 20,000 broadband connections per quarter. I mean, do you see that as a reasonable run rate for the foreseeable future, or do you think that, I suppose I think about that as the foreseeable future prior to AGL, because I appreciate that's a step change? I suppose, how do you view the key risks to this number, either upside or downside? Is it churn, the competitive environment?
I, I think, I think you answered your own question. It's, it's all those things. You know, I mean, I think we, we continue to grow strongly, organically in our view. You know, there are a range of, you know, uncertainties in the future and, and opportunities in the future. You know, we, we, we are comfortable with our current growth trajectory. You, you, you obviously make your own assumptions, you know, I, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that we keep going at the current rate.
Okay, great. Thanks, Brian.
Our next question comes from Jonathon Higgins with Unified Capital Partners.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Well done on the results today, and also, great set of investor presentation materials. Thanks, and well done to Heidi on that one, on the increase in disclosure. Look, a couple of things for me today. Firstly, maybe just touching on the E&G segment, which we, we don't sort of speak about too much, but it looks like you're having a pretty active period of TCV. We've seen this in the past, and then obviously there's a timeline to getting the conversion there. Just if you can just talk to us through how that segment's going and when some of that TCV turns up into earnings, please. Thank you.
Yeah. Aaron might have a bit, bit more on, on sense of the, how, how it lands and the, and the duration, I, and I, I think the, the, the large contract we've, we've won today is, is Bakers Delight. I think we've only started the journey of, of those coming online. I think there's still quite a few to go, to come. There is, you know, these deals do take, you know, 6-12 months to fully flesh out in terms of revenue landing. Maybe if you want to pick up anything I've missed there, Aaron?
It's. Yeah, every project's different, unfortunately. Depending on, you know, what, what the, the technology mix is that the customer is acquiring, depends on how long it takes to deliver the solutions. Brian's right, between 6 and 12 months. You know, Bakers Delight, we're, we're well on the way there, and we're already, you know, partway through that project and, and, and billing, billing revenue there, which is good, but still has a long way to go in that project. And it's not necessarily a, a straight line for, you know, TC, size of TCV versus complexity as well, and time to deliver. It's, it all depends on the technology mix. You can have some quite small ones take a long time to deliver, and you can have quite big ones that, that deliver quite quickly.
Yeah, it's pretty positive, though.
Thanks. A couple more from me. Maybe just on the NBN side of things. Obviously, a lot of emphasis in this business, like looking at it, very consistent sort of run rate, good second quarter. Year to date started well in what looks like a pretty competitive market. Are you sort of surprised this is holding up well, or is it you just feel like the Aussie value proposition is, is something that just resonates as the majors start to shed towards the specialty guys? Thank you.
Jon, I think, in some ways it, it shouldn't be possible, what we do, but it is, and we keep doing it. I think our brand, our reputation, our service levels continue to resonate strongly with consumers. We get a lot of quite a lot of boomerang customers who leave for price and then come back because the experience was not enjoyable. You know, we think that that still has a way to run. Equally, we're not complacent about that. Part of our efforts in replatforming and becoming more productive and efficient is that we, you know, we are conscious that we do need to be as affordable as we can be.
We'll continue to find ways to, to, to do that. Yeah, it's, it seems to keep going in the same trajectory.
Understand. Last one from me, I'll jump back in the queue, and thanks for taking the time. Just, just supporting sort of the question from Andrew in regards to the FY 2028 sort of targets. I'd just keen for you probably just to be clear, just 'cause I think obviously we've seen, you know, some divestments and some acquisitions and obviously some moving parts on earnings and the like. The, the AUD 2 billion target, is, is, is that clearly something that you, you're looking at obviously targeting based on what you've got in hand? 'Cause you've, you've obviously already got some acquisitions in that targeting that you've announced today. Is that what you're referring to in regards to acquisitions or, or the potential for further to add, add to that target and beyond, I suppose? Thank you.
I mean, no. As I said, it, it's an ambition, and there are, there are many paths to an ambition. As, as I said, if you, if you carry our existing revenue, you add in More Tangerine, you add in AGL, you add in Nexgen, you allow for some growth in those businesses as well, you get pretty close to the number we're talking about, based on our recent history.
Mm-hmm.
We're not, we're not saying that it absolutely will all be done organically. There may be M&A opportunities that help us get there as well, in addition to.
That's it.
What we've already done. Yep.
Awesome. That's clear. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from Liam Robertson with Jarden.
Thanks, guys. Look, I might just continue with the FY 2028 ambition. I've done some quick math that sort of suggests, you know, based on that AUD 2 billion revenue at 13.5% margins, you're targeting, you know, circa AUD 270 million. Organically, if I put, you know, all the various bits together, the More and Tangerine deal, the AGL deal, your core business, et cetera, there's a pretty natural path to AUD 230 million-AUD 240 million. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but if we assume achieving the ambition does rely on acquisitions, which I think, you know, people are sort of trying to understand today, can you just give us, give us an idea of what types of assets or capabilities you might think will be a good fit to your existing business?
It, it could come from any of, any of the, the divisions we're talking about. It could, it could be, bolts on customer books, it could be, similar access to Nexgen, that brings some capability. It, it, there could be spacing in wholesale as well. You know, there, there, there's a range of opportunities and, and I, I wouldn't want to narrow myself right now to what they might be.
Okay, all good. Just secondly, on the resi segment, I'm conscious in the first half, your marketing spend was only up marginally in absolute AUD dollar terms versus the PCP. Obviously, it looks like the market is getting a bit more competitive. You know, some of your peers are investing quite hard in market for subscribers, and then conversely, your ARPU margins were really strong in the half. Can you just talk to how you think moving forward, you'll be looking to balance subs growth and margins?
Yeah, I might ask Jon to jump in there, but just, just for, for, for, you know, my, my sort of introduction to it is, there, there is a, there is a little bit of money spent in that first half, and there was in the prior corresponding period. That, that will disappear or largely disappear in the second half of the year. The, the other important thing is, is, you know, you need to distinguish between marketing spend and promo costs. Promo costs get experienced through the revenue line, so that sort of is, is, becomes invisible to the market, as opposed to the marketing spend, which is the, the, you know, you, you, you bring the people to the site, and the promo was probably what gets them over the line.
But I'll, I'll defer to Jon, who's got more handle on it.
There's, there's lots of different answers to your question, but, starting at the kind of highest level, the, the most important part to our answer is in terms of where we will position in H2, it will all be within what we see as being our current budget, range. So we've been incredibly stringent, this, this half as well as the prior halves in, in really managing to that outcome. We will continue to do that as we move into H2. Having said that, we do continue to experiment. The important thing for us is being very active in where we seed our marketing money in terms of the channels that we try to acquire customers through. We are doing a range of experimentation, particularly in the digital channels, to really identify, the, the lowest cost, highest value channels.
There's just some very interesting work that we're doing in terms of our movers campaigns and really ensuring that when our current customers seek to move, it's very easy to rejoin. Obviously, when competitor customers are seeking to move, that we, that we become the most obvious choice for them. The key thing is whatever we do, it will be within the allotment that we have to play with, but we're, we're continuing to find ways to make that spend even more productive.
Great. Thanks. Then maybe just last one. Are you able to confirm what the Symbio EBITDA contribution was in the half? Then just keen to get some color on gross margins between Symbio and the rest of wholesale. Just conscious in the second half of 2025, you'd called out, some pricing pressures. Just trying to understand how those trends have continued. Thanks.
No, we operate a wholesale division now that incorporates Symbio. We don't. We're not disclosing Symbio separately anymore.
All good. Thank you.
Your next question comes from James Wilson with Macquarie.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Just firstly, conscious of your existing long-term incentive hurdles have a three-year EPS growth component already. I was just wondering whether this hurdle will now be adjusted to reflect the raised ambition to a 30% EPS CAGR, effectively incentivizing you to achieve the, you know, Look to 2028 ambitions given that they are three years away?
That, that's a matter for the board. My, my personal view is I wouldn't be changing retrospective grants of LTIs. What they do with future grants, we'll discuss in the next round.
Okay. Just on the OSS and BSS investments into 2027 and 2028, just wanted to confirm that AUD 55 million-AUD 60 million CapEx number is a go-forward number applying to all of those periods, including those with the step up?
At this stage, yes.
Yeah.
Great. Okay. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from Ian Munro with Ord Minnett.
Good morning, Brian and team. Just firstly, on the E&G business, maybe on, we can obviously read the gross profit growth and revenue growth during the half. Just, I guess, interested in the return profile on a blended sort of cash basis, like how are you seeing the performance of E&G and how are you seeing the return profile on incremental fiber builds and fiber deals wise?
In terms of incremental deals, it depends on what product mix that they're buying. If it's heavily data related, then the gross margin will be proportionately lower. If there's more security and managed services involved, then it'll be higher. Our interest on each deal has its own sort of profile. I think it's probably fair to say it's probably more data-led than anything else. In terms of Aussie Fibre, I mean, Aussie Fibre delivers 85%-90% gross margin if we can get an Aussie Fibre link in.
In terms of the, the, the, the, the proportion of the whole of E&G that is Aussie Fibre, it's, it's relatively small.
Just, just maybe as a, as a follow on then, in terms of the Nexgen acquisition, can you maybe just give us a sense of the network synergies that you're anticipating? Is this a kind of lift and shift onto the Aussie, Aussie network relative to bringing new capabilities into the group that can scale up a little bit better under Aussie ownership? Thank you.
That 6,000 NBN tails that are currently on an alternate network, they will be migrated onto, onto the Aussie network. Outside of that, we see this quite complementary. In, in terms of Aussie's, Aussie's strengths to date have been in the smaller end of the SME market with, with single site operations, maybe, you know, up to 5 employees. Then E&G takes over sort of, you know, 50 and above. Where we've been a little bit softer is in that 5-50 seat range, and that's where Nexgen is really, really strong. We see that as a really complementary go-to-market strategy. We have a lot of leads. They, they're very, very good at converting leads, and particularly that, that work, that group.
So we have a lot of leads that we don't do particularly well on converting, that we think we can divert into Nexgen and, and get a really good return on and, and get, you know, telephony solutions, but also connectivity. We, we see some really good opportunities there.
Thanks, Brian.
Your next question comes from Evan Karatzas with UBS.
Hi. Morning, all. Just keen to talk through these efficiencies you're, you're realizing. As I said, actually, this is a pretty big opportunity for the business. Employee costs are up only 3%. You gave a metric in the residential slide.
Around the staff to customer ratio improving 14%. I just want to drill down on that a bit more. Probably not expecting you to give me a number there, but can you give us some rough idea of how much opportunity, in your view, there is to improve that staff to customer ratio in residential?
We, we, we think in terms of how our systems are today, we, we probably, probably haven't got a great deal more we can get out of it. We, we, we think we're pretty close to optimizing that. We do think there's a lot we can do in the replatforming to deliver efficiencies in the back office and delivering material quicker to our front, front-end agents so they can solve problems quicker. We, we, we, as, as, you know, as you'd expect, we're not, we're not gonna share what we think that might be, but we have lifted across the business our EBITDA margin goal by 1% for FY 2028, which gives you sort of a sense of what we think we may, may be achievable.
Yeah. Okay, that's fair enough. well answered. Then just maybe from more from a strategic sense or point of view, keen to hear your thoughts, Brian or Jon, just around the thinking with Aussie offering promotional discount pricing through that January, February period. Look, correct me if I'm wrong here, but that is a bit unusual for Aussie to be in the market offering promo pricing around that time of year. Just keen to know the strategic drivers of those sort of decisions.
Great question. We've been experimenting, and obviously I like that word, for the last three years with a back to work, back to school type promotion, which we're calling the summer sale this year. This is the third year that we've done this piece of work. What's really important is the relationship that we see between the January-February period, the prior to Christmas, Black Friday trading period, and then the end of fiscal year period. What we're really looking at is how do we help to shape the market in terms of those large retail events, and we see those being three big retail events that we're seeking to obviously get incremental volume going through during the year. In terms of is it usual for us, it is now usual for us.
It's, it's the third year, and we continue to see some really important wins.
Yeah. Okay, well, I said you can see that with the, the subscribe to those early months as well. Thanks.
That is all the time we have for questions today. I'll now hand back to Mr. Brian Maher for closing remarks.
Thank you. Thank you all for joining us today. We're very pleased with our results and really excited about our future with our new partners and hopefully more of those to come. I wish you all a great day. Thank you.