Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. My name is Aidan Williams. I'm Co-founder and CEO at Audinate, and with me is Rob Goss, our CFO. In the first part of the call today, we will be talking through the investor presentation that accompanied our financial statements, both of which were lodged with the ASX earlier today. You can ask questions at any time by typing them into the Q&A box that you should find in your Zoom client. At the end of the presentation, we'll collate all those questions, and we'll answer as many as we can in the time that we have available. Before getting into the details of the full year results presentation, I'd like to briefly recap our earlier announcement on Tuesday the sixth of August before moving into the substance of our full year release.
The trigger for this announcement was the board approval of our FY 2025 budget, after which it was considered appropriate to make an announcement in light of our continuous disclosure obligations. As we said in that release, Audinate expects to generate USD gross profit marginally lower than FY 2024 in FY 2025, and we expect that there will likely be a revenue decline in FY 2025 before a return to anticipated growth and more predictable order patterns in FY 2026. FY 2025 revenue faces a combination of headwinds. The first we called out is manufacturers' increased preference for software-based Dante implementations, which is expected to continue during FY 2025, driving the business's overall gross margin percentage towards 80%. Software Dante implementations drive adoption via hardware cost savings for equipment manufacturers. However, per unit revenue is lower for us.
This is a return to a long-term trend that we first flagged in our results announcement back in FY 2021 . Secondly, with the return of chip supply during FY 2024 , we were able to fulfill customers' orders. Many of our manufacturing customers have conservatively over-ordered chips and modules, and they are holding increased component and finished goods inventory, and that results in soft FY 2025 revenue for us. As we discussed at our first half results, lead times are shortening and are now back at pre-COVID levels, lowering future order visibility and reducing our backlog going into FY 2025 Finally, the Viper and MY16 products have been end-of-lifed. The Viper product is a turnkey white label product that we acquired from Silex.
Going forward, the Dante AV Ultra products that are based on the combination of Silex and Dante technology will be software and/or chip style solutions with lower per unit revenue, rather than the turnkey white label finished products, like Viper. The Viper product contributed $2.8 million worth of revenue during FY 2024, which will not continue in FY 2025. Notwithstanding the revenue headwinds in FY 2025, the long-term strategic thesis for Audinate remains intact. The last financial year , FY 2024, was actually an outstanding year for Audinate. During FY 2024, we shipped a record 1.4 million units, and we estimate that there are now over 6 million Dante devices in the field.
Our manufacturing customers brought 323 new Dante-enabled products to market during FY 2024, bringing the total number of Dante-enabled products to 4,176. So the pipeline of new Dante products is healthy, with 161 OEM brands currently developing their first product. Long term, we aim to derive revenue from the monitoring and management of audio/visual installations. A significant milestone towards achieving this was the recent launch of Dante Director, our first cloud-based SaaS product. It represents a new revenue stream for Audinate, building on the installed base of 6 million Dante products shipped to date. As usual, we've included slide 3 to give you a sense of the broad range of applications for Dante technology. I won't talk too much to this slide, other than to note the breadth of the applications. We benefit from this diversity.
For example, during COVID, corporate conferencing and higher education experienced significant tailwinds. While corporate conferencing remains a significant market for us, it has softened recently, while the live sound market has heated up. Slide four shows the TAM information that we have presented previously. It is based on market research we commissioned and our own internal estimates. The audio and video market segments represent the total addressable market for manufactured products that could take a Dante audio or video networking solution, and that's essentially the business we are in today. The combination of audio and video networking exceeds $1 billion. The software opportunity that you can see on the pie chart relates to products we already have on the shelf, so for example, PC and Mac application software or the Dante Domain Manager software for managing on-prem Dante systems.
The fuzzy circle on the right represents the potential long-term upside for Audinate, should we succeed in our vision to provide the dominant platform used to deliver software-based audio visual products and services globally. Slide five summarizes Audinate's financial results for FY 2024. With the recent focus on our FY 2025 outlook, it is just worth emphasizing that FY 2024 has been an outstanding year for Audinate. We achieved a record $60 million in revenue for the full year, an increase of 28.4% from FY 2023. As expected, gross margin percentage continued to improve, up to 74.3%, off the back of a favorable mix, favorable mix shift toward Dante software implementations and COGS reduction on our Brooklyn module product.
Finally, the operating cash flow is consistent with the scalability of the business, with increased revenue dropping through to improved EBITDA and operating cash flow. Notably, Audinate generated a record AUD 20.4 million EBITDA for the full year. Rob will speak in more detail to the financials later on in the presentation. Slide six summarizes progress against our FY 2024 objectives. Again, I won't cover absolutely everything on this slide, but I would like to hit a few highlights. At the top of the list is faster than expected video adoption. Strong second half growth led to substantial overachievement of our goal to double the number of video units shipped or in field. This is off the back of solid manufacturer interest and design wins for our newer Dante video software implementations, called Dante AV-A and Dante AV-H.
Additionally, our next generation Dante AV Ultra product is complete, with the first OEM product shown at ISE in February. Dante Connect was released earlier in the year and enables broadcasters and content producers to use Dante in the cloud for audio production. Several household name broadcasters and content providers, often sports content providers, are now using Dante Connect, with proof of concept projects converting into sales and lighthouse use cases. We continue to deliver initiatives to improve the scalability of our cost base, notably adding engineering headcount in the Philippines as a lower cost development location, in-sourcing of our website management, and process improvements around product release management. Slide seven highlights the ongoing strength in core business metrics.
As many of you know, Audinate's sales cycle involves an OEM design win, followed by a period of 12-24 months for product design to be completed, followed by repeat revenue derived from the ongoing purchase of chips or royalties as each new unit is manufactured over the sales lifetime of that particular manufactured product. Design wins and new product introductions are key leading indicators of future revenue. During the period, the number of OEMs in the process of developing their first Dante product increased to 161, up from 138 in the previous corresponding period. Furthermore, the number of OEMs shipping Dante products was up 15% to 460 from the previous corresponding period. The choice to use Dante in an audio-visual installation is influenced by the AV professional who's doing the design and/or installation work.
Audinate provides system setup tools like Dante Controller, training and professional certification programs, as well as software to AV professionals. As you can see on the slide, training, software sales, registration in our marketing databases, and website visits have all increased 20% or more during the year. As you can see on Slide 8, the Dante product ecosystem continues to grow. The number of Dante-enabled OEM products increased to 4,176, and this reflects a net increase of 323 Dante-enabled products on sale for the year ended 30 June 2024. That compares to 3,853 net products as of 30 June 2023.
A total of 660 manufacturer brands have Dante-enabled products on the market, and continued growth in the Dante product ecosystem is crucial for sustaining revenue and driving continued success in future years. Slide nine summarizes recent progress in Dante video. The progress of Dante video is very encouraging, with our objective to double the size of the shipped and in-field ecosystem during 2025, during FY 2024, substantially overachieved. 54 manufacturers have now licensed Dante video products, up from 34 at FY 2023. 84 Dante video products have been launched by manufacturers. That's up from 48 in FY 2023, and that represents a 75% increase in the number of Dante video products released by manufacturers over the last 12 months.
The legacy Viper board customers will transition to a software-based Dante AV Ultra implementation, albeit with a consequent decline in per unit revenue and GP dollars during FY 2025. As I've said on previous occasions, we aim to build out a complete toolbox of video product offerings that essentially mirrors our capabilities on the audio side. This means an appropriate suite of hardware, software, and software products for manufacturers, for integrators, and also end users. Slide 10, this is a build slide, so Slide 10 illustrates the evolution of Dante software for AV professionals. From the start, Audinate has offered a free, easy-to-use, plug-and-play setup tool for Dante networks called Dante Controller. It is shown on the left of the slide. Dante Controller is used to label and configure devices and to define the virtual wires connecting the audio and video devices via the network.
The AV professional typically must be on-site and directly connected to the local network in order to use Dante Controller software during system setup or when troubleshooting. As audio visual installations get larger, more sophisticated tools are needed to manage Dante installations and to secure them. Our first managed Dante product was Dante Domain Manager. It is an on-prem software offering, providing security, centralized logging and monitoring, and enables Dante networks to scale beyond a local LAN to much larger campus networks. For example, Sydney Trains uses Dante Domain Manager to manage and secure thousands of Dante devices on railway platforms across the entire Sydney metropolitan area. Using Dante Domain Manager, Dante devices can be managed from anywhere on the campus network, so the AV professional doesn't need to be directly connected at the railway station in order to manage the Dante devices.
Recently, we launched our first SaaS product called Dante Director. It provides similar functionality to Dante Domain Manager, but because it is a cloud-based service, deployment friction is substantially reduced. Additionally, secure remote management of Dante installations across the internet is now possible, which is very attractive to AV professionals. Dante Director enables smaller Dante networks to benefit from robust security and management tools without requiring an IT-heavy on-prem installation. Dante Director creates a new value stream for Audinate, which is the management and monitoring of Dante installations. It also provides web-friendly APIs, enabling managed service providers and manufacturers to innovate and deliver IoT-style managed AV products and services, without standing up their own bespoke cloud management platforms. Slide 11 summarizes the progress or the happenings with Dante Director to date.
The launch of Dante Director at InfoComm 2024 in June was a significant strategic milestone for Audinate, and it generated strong interest from our manufacturing customers, from AV professionals, from large corporates, and managed service providers. The potential to remotely manage AV installations across the internet, coupled with web-friendly APIs that can integrate with existing management dashboards, were well received. As of July, we've successfully converted nearly 50 customers to paying subscribers and wrapped up our beta program. During FY 2025, Dante Director features will be expanded, including additional health monitoring functions, notification and alerting, and additional enterprise security features. And now I'll hand over to Rob to talk to the finance section.
Thanks, Aidan, and good morning, everyone. Over the next few minutes, I will explain the FY 2024 financial performance, and the information I will cover is set out on slides 13 to 18. I'll start with Slide 13, which explains some of the key revenue information for the business. In US dollars, revenue was $60 million, up 28.4% from $46.7 million in the prior year. In Australian dollars, revenue was up 31% on the prior year, with the differential growth rate due to currency tailwinds, as the Aussie dollar weakened against the US dollar. During FY 2024, gross profit dollars grew 33.2% to $44.5 million, at a gross margin percentage of 74.3%. The overall GP margin strengthened to 76.8% in the second half, up from the first half of 71.8%.
This is due to favorable product mix shift and cost down initiatives on our Brooklyn product. We expect that the GP margin will continue to improve over time, based on the speed of transition to Dante's software implementations. Growth in Dante units amounted to 34% for FY 2024. We use the term Dante units as a catch-all expression for the number of unique AV products in computers with Dante inside, whether that be in the form of a chip, card, module, or software. Units shipped of chips, cards, and modules, collectively called CCM, increased by 47% in FY 2024. In the main, this increase was driven by a recovery in the supply of Ultimo chips, which were up 70% year on year.
From a revenue perspective, CCM was up 26.4%, primarily attributable to Brooklyn, up over 45%, Ultimo chips up over 70%, and adapters up over 20%. Turning now to software, a broad suite of products summarized in the Dante product roadmap on Slide 26. In FY 2024, software units shipped increased 42% due mainly to a second half recovery in reference designs and ongoing strength in the Dante Embedded Platform. From a revenue perspective, software grew 32.6%, with this growth attributable to IP Core, up over 70%, Dante Embedded Platform up over 75%, and retail software sales up over 40%. The revenue split between first half and second half is expected to revert to a more typical split in FY 2025, with the timing of new AVIO adapters potentially weighting in revenue to the second half.
From this point onwards, all numbers quoted will be in Aussie dollars. We've included an EBITDA bridge on page 14, which shows the main factors driving the increase in EBITDA from AUD 11 million in FY 2023 to AUD 20.4 million in FY 2024. Operating expenses increased by 21% to AUD 47.5 million for the year end of 30 June 2024. The key movement was a AUD 4.9 million increase in employee costs, as headcount grew from 197 to 225 at 30 June 2024. Salary increases and the annualization impact of new headcount added over the course of the prior year. Sales and marketing expenses were up AUD 1.6 million, excluding currency impacts. The main factors driving this increase were advertising, including a significant AVIO campaign in the second half, rebranding costs, travel, and trade shows.
Other operating expenses were $1.8 million up, excluding currency impacts driven by increases in software subscriptions, professional costs, and travel. As we have said in our ASX release on the sixth of August, given the outlook for FY 2025, a range of actions have been completed in marketing, sales, and product development to manage the cost base and allow ongoing investment in new products such as Dante Director and Dante Connect. This discipline supports incremental spending in sales and marketing activities to improve business momentum. Overall, this means that cost growth is expected to be in the range of 7%-9% in FY 2025, which compares to a historical annual growth of 28.5% over the last three years. By doing this, we aim to prudently balance costs with continued investment in the year ahead.
In terms of the year ahead, we've budgeted at a US dollar exchange rate of approximately 68 cents, and at this rate, a one cent movement impacts EBITDA by roughly $700,000, remembering that Audinate is a structurally long US dollar business. Slide 15 shows that operating leverage in the cost base is again evident as additional revenue drives EBITDA growth. This is also obvious in the dotted yellow line, showing both R&D and operating expenses as a percentage of revenue declining in FY 2024. From an income statement perspective, it is noteworthy that research costs increased from $2.7 million in FY 2023 to $4.2 million in FY 2024, and that development costs, excluding external spend, as an overall percentage of R&D, declined from 82% in FY 2023 to 76% in FY 2024.
Slide sixteen shows a traditional income statement with detailed explanation of individual line items, most of which I've already covered earlier. Net profit before tax increased from AUD 1.4 million in FY 2023 to AUD 12.1 million in FY 2024. However, it is worthy of note that last year, the recognition of tax losses caused the income tax benefit of AUD 9.3 million, which was one-off in nature and hence did not reoccur this year. Accordingly, net profit after tax is relatively flat year on year. On Slide seventeen, you will find the cash flow statement, which shows operating cash flows of AUD 25.4 million, compared to operating cash flows of AUD 12.4 million in the prior year.
Pleasingly, there were some favorable working cap movements in interest income, which resulted in over 100% cash conversion during the year. The business also generated positive free cash flow of AUD 6.9 million, representing an AUD 11.2 million improvement against FY 2023. The statement of financial position is set out on Slide 18. From our perspective, it is a clean balance sheet with no debt and net assets of AUD 170 million, including AUD 117 million in cash and term deposits at 30 June. I'll now hand back to Aidan, to go over the outlook for FY 2025.
Thanks, Rob. So if we move to slide 20, this summarizes our priorities for FY 2024. With the expected revenue headwinds in. Sorry, in FY 2025. With the expected revenue headwinds in FY 2025, our first priority is to double down on sales and marketing activities and drive revenue. As described in our previous release, a range of activities are underway to drive FY 2025 revenue, including event-based pricing for Dante Connect, launch of a new AVIO adapter, and other activities. With video, we will be again focused on getting our video OEM customers to market with their products while filling out our product portfolio. As with audio, it is the repeat orders for Dante video software or chips that occur each time a new video product is manufactured that will drive revenue growth for Audinate.
Building on the successful launch of Dante Director, we aim to deliver a roadmap of extended features for the monitoring and management of audiovisual installations. We are also building out the organization and processes necessary to operationally deliver and scale our first SaaS product. Turning to slide 21 and the M&A side of things, we have been active on several opportunities during FY 2024, but we have not closed any transactions since the capital raise earlier in that financial year. We initiated due diligence on two opportunities during FY 2024, but ultimately did not proceed to a transaction. We're actively pursuing one small opportunity with several other opportunities in the early stages of evaluation. We have appointed an experienced chief strategy officer to provide dedicated executive focus on M&A, but also our inorganic growth opportunities to accelerate our long-term strategic vision.
Slide 25, sorry, slide 22, summarizes the FY 2025 outlook. I won't repeat all the things I said earlier in the presentation, and which we covered in detail during our earlier release. However, I'd like to make a couple of points. I do want to emphasize that FY 2024 has been an excellent year, and that our long-term strategic thesis remains intact. Firstly, the core metrics around the growing adoption of Dante remain healthy, with more than six million Dante devices shipped to date. And secondly, we have launched a milestone product in Dante Director that builds upon that large and growing installed base. Dante Director is our first SaaS product, and it has the potential to generate a new revenue stream for Audinate from the management and monitoring of AV installations.
Given the outlook, we need to manage costs through the year and incrementally invest in sales and marketing activities to enhance business momentum. Our goal is to carefully manage costs and balance ongoing investment to capitalize on Audinate's long-term opportunities. So where are we? FY 2024 was an outstanding year in which we shipped a record 1.4 million units. FY 2025 will be a transitional year for Audinate, and I want to remind you again of the hardware to software product mix transition that is underway with our core OEM products. During this transition, we expect gross profit dollars to better reflect underlying growth than top line revenue. Over the medium term, we expect Audinate's underlying growth to exceed that of the wider AV industry, which is currently around 5%-6%, according to the industry body, AVIXA.
The last few years have taught me to expect the unexpected. However, two times or four- or maybe up to a maximum of four times the industry growth rate seems reasonable to expect for Audinate's underlying growth over the medium term. With that, I'll hand back to Rob to coordinate questions.
Yeah, thanks, Aidan. We've got a dozen on the screen here, and I'll just direct a few to you to think about while I answer a couple. So if you don't mind dealing with one, two, four, and five, I'll deal with three and six around the mechanics of the numbers. So a few questions here. So we've had video licensees increase by 59% and video products grew 75%. So what do you mean when you say we substantially overachieved our objective to double the video ecosystem, you know, by twenty-four? Wouldn't this require a 100% increase? So yeah, the reference to a 100% increase is absolutely correct. When we talk about the ecosystem, we talk about the number of units of Dante video products which are in the market.
That's the number of licenses or modules that go inside video products that we've sold in FY 2024 relative to FY 2023. It was in the order of an over 100% increase. That is coupled with very strong increases in the video products and the licensees that the person has referenced in the question. A second question at the bottom: With $60 million in revenue last year, 9% of the 330 million audio TAM, is it now closer to 18%? The revenue that we generated last year in U.S. dollars is made up of multiple different elements of the TAM.
So there is obviously some video revenue, there is some software revenue, and adapters are actually not included in the TAM calculation at all. Ultimately, Dante is built inside all equipment. The requirement for adapters largely goes away. So the detail of the calculation, when you factor in all of those different things, means that the penetration of the audio TAM remains in the order of 9%. Aidan, now onto you.
So, I got a question from Ryan: Are you only looking at M&A in video? What's the most attractive product teams, customer book, other? So no, we're not only looking at M&A in video. There was a slide which talked about sort of our M&A framework. Clearly, teams are extremely important. I think if we make an acquisition, like historically, we've been interested in acquisitions that have benefit for us from a strategic point of view. So that does mean video, but it also means signal processing, potentially control and management opportunities. And it could be team, could be channel. It's a broader lens than just the video side of things. So hopefully that covers that.
There's a question from Wassim: "How has the setting of the budget outlook impacted on management targets and incentives?" Well, so this is obviously a topic of conversation internally. So I think we need to make sure that we balance our incentives for both executives and staff, such that we don't cause them to. We want them to have positive incentives to actually drive revenue in FY 2025. We are, however, aware that the FY 2025 outlook is not as strong as it has been in past years. There's a balance between not exasperating our internal employees and also not disappointing shareholders in how we do that.
So we have tried to set internal metrics where there is an adequate bonus or reward should we meet our FY 2025 budgets. However, we do understand that revenue is going backwards for Audinate, and we want our actual kind of target settings are higher than our budget aspirations. The other thing we have been doing is it's three years since we did our executive remuneration review, so we've been working through that process as well. So we'll be providing a bit more information about that, I think, around AGM time or, you know, in the annual report when it comes out. So stay tuned for that too. Where am I going now? Yep.
Graham asked a question: "Who are Audinate's main competitors, especially software implementations?" Good question. This breaks down really in terms of, like, the audio side of the business and the video side of the business. There is some overlap, but they're quite different. On the audio side, the main competitors really are vertically integrated walled garden manufacturers who are building their own solutions. They have a strategic reason to not want interoperability. There's a few larger manufacturers who are building out their own solutions, networking solutions, to lock people into a particular system sale from those manufacturers. analog is still a competitor with respect to Dante in the audio side of things. Lots of people still run analog wires around the place.
So this strategically for us is about getting lower cost implementations that can get into a wider range of broader products. So there's a bit of roll your own, there's a bit of vertically integrated companies trying to create walled gardens, and there's analog on the audio side of things. In the video world, it's much, much more fragmented. So the video world is actually fragmented, typically around compression codecs, which cause interoperability. They cause mismatches, like, or different codecs don't communicate, so you end up with these, like islands of interoperability where there's a compatible codec. So there's a stack of chip-based solutions which you were not that interested in. On the software side, there are various H.264 solutions of various sorts. Some of those are standardized.
The NDI software solution is out there, particularly in small scale, live production. Yeah, so I think in the installed video space, probably the biggest sort of competitive wiring solutions are HDMI cables and a technology called SDI, as well as a thing called HDBaseT. So a combination of those technologies and the fragmentation of the video market represents the kind of competitive landscape for Dante video. The biggest advantage we have with respect to Dante video is that we have a very large footprint of Dante Audio. So if you imagine, for example, a university, the university might have thousands of Dante devices, Dante audio devices. There are such universities.
So when they come to thinking about putting camera systems in, say, lecture theaters or, you know, other environments, they would like to be able to manage the video devices as well as the audio devices using the one underlying management tools and infrastructure. And so that gives us a big advantage because we have such a large footprint on the audio side of things. So video is fragmented. It's early days for us. The war is not over, but we have some solid advantages because of our audio footprint and because of the management tools that we offer for audiovisual systems that are already in the field.
Pretty good, Aidan. I'll just give you a few moments to sort of think about those top two while I deal with some other questions here. Had a question about: "Should we be concerned by the drop in design wins?" No. So the historical numbers do include numbers that were sort of impacted heavily by supply chain impacts. So there were a very, very large number of Dante Embedded Platform design wins back during the Covid time, and then a very large number of customers signing up for Brooklyn 3 when we moved from the legacy Brooklyn II product. So the numbers historically are somewhat inflated. One of the things which I thought was most notable in reviewing the numbers ahead of today was that we in fact had our best half ever for Ultimo chip design wins.
So, somewhat, yeah, I guess I can understand people calling out the drop, but I would suggest that the historical numbers are, I guess, somewhat, sort of, I guess, artificially boosted by some COVID impacts.
Chip shortages in particular.
Yeah. We've got a question here about design wins, split of video versus audio. So I think if you were trying to get a gauge on the video design wins, we've quoted the increase in video customers. So that's a way of thinking about the number of video design wins during the year. Another question around video momentum. Video units shipped in FY 2024, split between first half and second half. Yeah, there is a little bit of commercial sensitivity around that, so we don't want to give too much fodder about our success to competitors, but very strong numbers in both halves. I guess there's an interim disclosure, which would suggest that gives you a reference point. We've massively overachieved on our internal targets and, you know, fantastic growth in both halves.
A question here about comment on customer concentration. Revenue is represented by our top five customers, and how much is the over order represented by the top five customers? So there's a lot of detail on customer concentration in note four of the financial statements, which you'll see on page 42 and 43 of the accounts. The top 10 customers represents 44% in the last financial year, and one customer at 8%. The over ordering does relate to, in particular, two customers in that top 10. And I think I have answered.
How much? Let me
A whole bunch.
Yeah. All right. So Michael asks: How is software unit revenue recognized differently from chips, cards, and modules? Could the OEM shift towards software products help mitigate future overstocking issues? I think in principle, broadly, yes, it can. So, generally speaking, many of our OEMs don't stock software royalties, so there's usually not a huge backlog. We don't have a huge backlog for, software royalties or activation keys, that kind of idea. So generally speaking, manufacturers don't need. With software royalties, they don't pre-order in advance, with us, and so that does, absolutely help potentially mitigate, overstocking issues. It helps to the extent that, you know, our software component needs to be licensed and activated at manufacturing time.
It doesn't necessarily change the game if the manufacturer has actually built finished goods and has them sitting on the shelf. So, you know, swings and roundabouts. But yes, it certainly does help with respect to, say, the overshoot of Ultimo chips that we're currently experiencing at the moment. Nick asks a simple question: What do you believe will drive the turnaround in FY 2026 ? So, I think we literally have, like, right at the moment, a combination of things that provide us with some substantial revenue headwinds with respect to FY 2025. Some of those are very one-off, like the end of life of the Viper product is very one-off. Some of those are kind of transitions that are happening. We had one particular customer that substantially overordered Brooklyn modules.
That meant that they're sitting on a lot of inventory, and that put a hole in our FY 2025 revenue for Brooklyn modules. So what's going on there is that, you know, when the chips become available, people overorder chip cards and modules, so you get an overshoot. We got the benefit of that during FY 2024, and now we're in a kind of undershoot. So my expectation is that as we get through FY 2025, we'll work through the inventory that's in the channel, both in terms of chips, cards, and modules, but also in terms of finished goods.
We don't know. We don't have 100% visibility of how many units are actually in the channel, but we expect those units to, you know, work through the channel over the course of FY 2025, and then we'll return, in our view, to more typical ordering patterns in FY 2026. Ultimately, our confidence around FY 2026 is that we believe all the underlying measures, yeah, like the operating measures that we were trying to talk to in this presentation in terms of new products, units shipped, interest in training, tools, certification programs, all of that stuff is all tracking very well, and so we expect that to drive future growth in FY 2026.
Good, Aidan. Now, I'm conscious of people's time and the number of questions. We're inundated, so I'll do my best to bash through a couple. There are two topics where we've received a number of questions, Aidan, so a little bit more color around M&A and an update on the CFO search. So we might sort of round out with those
Yep
couple of topics, and I'll do my best to bash through a couple quickly here, but we unfortunately won't get through all of them. Does expected cost growth 7%-9% in FY 2025 include higher sales and marketing spend? Absolutely. So we were trying to strike that balance to make sure that we were continuing to invest to drive revenue both in FY 2025 and beyond. Do you have a way of telling unshipped stock at your customer sites, monitor this overall, the situation in the future? It is tricky. We receive, you know, imperfect information from customers, and there are a number of places within the sort of chain that inventory can build up.
So it is a sort of constant battle for us, and we do, we have been building out a data science capability, which does provide us some additional information that we've been trying to rely on. Does the Dante Director market opportunity fall within the fuzzy sphere of the term? Yes, it does. I might throw back to you, Aidan, just to close out. So the questions were more color on the two M&A opportunities you passed on.
Okay. Yeah.
Update on the search for the new CFO. Yeah, and I think there were, kind of versions of
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The next topics.
All right. Yep. Yeah, so the two M&A opportunities we passed on, we actually did a lot of work on one of them over a year. So that was a more technology, video-oriented M&A opportunity. The good team, good technology, ultimately, we could not agree on valuation. To be honest, I think it was an example of reasonable discipline. So we walked away from that specific opportunity. Second opportunity was much larger. It was a more hardware-oriented opportunity. Again, the value combination and the expectations didn't align. So we've done a lot of work, but we haven't actually closed the transaction, so that means I'm in the position of saying, honest, you know, under the water, the ducks really are paddling.
We do think there are quite a few opportunities ahead of us, and that's one of the reasons why we've hired a Chief Strategy Officer, because it just needs focus. We have a framework and a solid pipeline of opportunities which we're working our way through. My expectation is that, you know, I can't promise that we'll close anything soon, but we do have a list of opportunities that would make material difference to our long-term strategy, and so, you know, we fully intend to execute on some of those. On the CFO search side of things, so I guess the first thing is that Rob is with us through to the eighteenth of September, October.
Yeah, so Rob's not sort of leaving anytime soon, and he's helping us through the results period, the AGM, getting set up for our AGM. Rob won't be at the AGM, but getting all the materials in place for that. We have engaged a recruiter. I've been speaking with initial candidates, so the search is underway. We have a pipeline of candidates that we're working our way through, but you know, timing-wise, results, all sorts of things going on, FY 2025 outlook, we've got to just squeeze that in as we go ahead. So I'm optimistic about that. I think we've got the right kind of caliber of candidates, and I feel like Audinate is still a great opportunity for a CFO.
So I think with that, I think we're probably at time. So thank you very much for your time this morning. Thank you for your questions. I hope we've been able to answer enough of those, and if you have further questions, feel free to drop us a line, and hopefully we'll catch up with a number of you over the next few days. Thank you very much.