Good morning! I'm David Krall, the chair of Audinate Group, joining you from San Francisco, California. I'd like to begin today by first acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which this meeting is being held, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging. I'm delighted to welcome you all to the 2024 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders of Audinate. The time is now 9:30 A.M. in Sydney, and as we have a quorum of members present, I declare the annual general meeting open. Joining me today is our CEO, Aidan Williams, and our non-executive directors on stage, starting from the left, Amrita Blickstead, Tim Finlayson, and on the right, John Dyson and Roger Price. Unfortunately, Alison Ledger is unable to join us today.
From the executive leadership team, we have Chris Rollinson, our CFO and Company Secretary, and Joanna Dent, our General Counsel, who's sitting center stage beside Aidan. Also in attendance is Rachel Rudman, representing the company's external auditor, Ernst & Young. Today, we are also pleased to welcome those of you participating online through our virtual meeting platform, provided by our share registrar, Link Market Services. All attendees can watch a live webcast of the meeting. In addition, shareholders and proxy holders have the ability to ask questions and submit votes. Now, I have a few housekeeping items. First, if we experience any technical issues today, a short recess or an adjournment may be required, depending on the number of shareholders being affected. If this occurs, I'll advise you accordingly. Second, I'd appreciate it if all mobile phones can be turned off or put on silent.
And then lastly, I would also like to let you know that the emergency exits are clearly marked in the hallway outside of this room. Now, for the first part of the agenda, I'll provide a brief overview of Audinate's performance. I imagine that much of everyone's focus has already shifted to 2025 and beyond. That's certainly true for me as well. But I'd like to take a few moments to review the performance of the company over the past few years and to provide a backdrop for our expectations heading into the new fiscal year. Back at the end of FY 2021, the company publicly stated that our goal was to double revenue in the medium term. And as a reminder, we finished that year at AUD 33.4 million, or $25 million in revenue.
So as you could imagine, it was immensely satisfying to even surpass this goal over the past three years, with FY 2024 revenues of AUD 91.5 million, or $60 million. I wanna take a moment to congratulate the staff and management team for this meaningful accomplishment. This wasn't easy, especially because we faced the unknown impact of COVID, as well as unexpected parts shortages all along the way, but the team successfully navigated these obstacles and achieved its goal. So congratulations, team. Now, I also, although we anticipate a more challenging environment in FY 2025, we're committed to addressing these challenges and continuing to build on our foundations for sustained business growth. And I'd now like to talk more about these foundations. The next chapter of growth for Audinate is based on three key pillars.
First, in audio, the company will continue the expansion of Dante technology across a broader range of audio products. Key to this expansion is the introduction of lower cost and software-based implementations of Dante, which improves the unit economics for our OEMs and should increase adoption. While Dante has already established itself as the de facto standard in digital audio networking, the transition from analog is still in its early stages, and we believe there is still a vast market opportunity ahead. Second, in video, we've made excellent progress over the past several years. We've ended this year with 54 customers and 84 Dante video products announced. This is a strong indicator that we're laying the foundation for accelerating broader adoption over the medium term. The third and final pillar of our growth strategy is the development of a platform software business for AV professionals.
The launches of Dante Connect and Dante Director represent the first incarnation of products that are the foundation of this opportunity. And the market response to Dante Director has been encouraging, affirming that we're on the right path towards achieving our long-term vision. Now, before handing things over to Aidan for his CEO update, I'd like to make a few comments regarding the inputs used to create our forecast for the coming year. I know that this is an important topic for our shareholders, and I want to provide as much background information as necessary to feel comfortable with the process. As you know, we entered 2024 with a historic backlog. This was caused by the confluence of two macro factors. First, a COVID bump in end-user spending gave our manufacturers optimism to increase their orders.
But second, widespread parts shortages at the same time pushed our manufacturers to place orders further into the future than they had historically in order to ensure their supply of components from us. Both of these factors together resulted in historic backlog levels for Audinate. Next slide. The return of chip supplies in FY24 enabled us to start fulfilling our backlog, resulting in a strong first half of the year. But end user demand, which was no longer being accelerated by the COVID bump, was also easing at the same time, resulting in increased OEM inventory positions and reduced bookings of new orders in the latter half of the fiscal year. These two factors, so increased OEM inventories coupled with end user demand softness, introduced uncertainty into our normal forecasting process for FY25, prompting a statement to the market two weeks before our results came out.
This outlook for FY25 was somewhat of a disappointment for us because we had become accustomed to much higher growth rates year after year. But it's here that there's also a good news, bad news message in our findings. The bad news, as we previously communicated, is that we expect 2025 to be a transitional year as our OEM customers continue to work through their backlog, and we wait for end user demand to pick up the slack and reaccelerate future orders. As of right now, we're expecting this to only take a year, but obviously that's a projection that could change in the future. Next slide. But the good news part of our findings is that we uncovered nothing that altered our view of the total market opportunity, or TAM, available to Audinate.
We likewise found nothing that made us believe we will take less than our competitive share of that market opportunity. We remain optimistic regarding the long-term prospects in front of Audinate. In his section, Aidan will be presenting a slide that shows our market share relative to the competition. Next slide, please. We'll use this coming year to invest in our new product development efforts, as we always have, but at a more moderated pace, which takes into consideration our desire to continue to deliver positive EBITDA and operating cash flow. We will also continue to seek out profitable and strategically important ways to deploy our cash balance to further enhance our product offerings and to accelerate the rate of conversion of our market. These efforts are ongoing, and with any luck, we may find such an opportunity this year.
The capital we raised in August and September of 2023 has put the company in a strong position to consider these opportunities, and we'd once again like to thank all of the institutional and retail shareholders who participated in our private placement and the associated share purchase plan. On behalf of the board of directors, we also wish to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to all Audinate employees. Your passion, drive, and dedication were essential to our excellent results in FY 2024, and they're critical to our ongoing success in the future. I'd now like to welcome Aidan Williams, our Chief Executive Officer, to address you.
I might just move this. There we go. So, I'd like to just add my welcome to David's. So it's a pleasure to see some familiar faces in the room, particularly people who've been invested in Audinate for a long time. And I also want to welcome those of you who have taken the time to join us online. So definitely appreciate your interest in Audinate. So next slide, please. Many of these slides will probably be familiar to you if you have been following Audinate for a while. So I don't want to dwell too much on things that have been presented or spoken about before, but I do want to just sort of touch on things on the way through. So just to remind people, Audinate is a B2B type business.
Our customers are Yamaha, Bosch, Bose, people that manufacture audiovisual equipment. So our hardware and software solutions end up inside physical products that ultimately get installed in spaces around the world. So the other thing I want to just say is our technology is used in a very wide range of products. So I think that in the past, we've talked about higher education and corporate conferencing as very strong applications for us. But we also have seen the resurgence of live sound. So we get used in an enormous range of applications, but in particular, the kinds of applications where audiovisual systems get installed into buildings and spaces. Next slide, please.
So this slide, I think we've spoken to this slide on a couple of occasions, certainly at our results presentation, but I really want to just tick off a few things on here and just remind people. We did have an excellent FY24 financially, and so as David mentioned, that was driven largely off the return in chip supplies. We had a bit of a drought of chips, and that stopped us from being able to easily satisfy demand to our customers, and then when those chip supplies returned, we were actually able to fulfill quite a lot of demand. That generated a good result for us in FY24.
The thing I really want to point out is that FY 2024, I think, really showed that we have a scalable business model for Audinate. So that additional revenue that we got from shipping chips, cards, and modules ultimately dropped through into EBITDA, cash flow, and profitability. So it showed that we have a scalable business. The other thing I wanted to highlight here is the improvement in the gross margin percentage as well. So we expect gross margin percentage to continue to improve over time, driven essentially off the shift that we've been speaking about for quite some time, which is manufacturers using more software solutions from us as they build Dante into their products, rather than purchasing, say, a piece of electronics, like a module from us or a chip. So good margin improvement, good,
A scalable business where the revenue does drop through to profitability and cash flow were the two things I wanted to point out from that. Next slide, please. And again, we've spoken about these slides. I really wanna just plug three things on this slide. One was the strong growth in the video ecosystem. So I think we've been talking about this for a number of years, but we substantially outperformed the number of video units shipped last year. So more than double the number of video units. So that's immensely satisfying for me. We've had good results on the design win side of things, so getting manufacturers signed up, but the proof is really in the units that are shipped. So it's very, very positive and encouraging to me that we've seen some substantial unit shipments with that.
The other thing that I think was hugely significant for Audinate, and it's hard for me to underestimate. Sorry, it's hard for me to undersell how important it is, is the launch of Dante Director. So David kind of outlined the three pillars of the strategy. We're engaged in a profitable land grab on the audio side. We wanna repeat that profitable land grab on the video side, but the purpose of doing that is to offer management and monitoring software platforms for audiovisual professionals. So FY 2024, at InfoComm, we launched our first SaaS-based management product, which is Dante Director. Very early days for that, but that is a strategic milestone for Audinate, and so I wanted to highlight that. And the other thing I wanted to highlight on this slide is our ongoing efforts to manage costs.
So we want to maintain a scalable business, and so one of the key things that we've done, or probably one of the big milestones, is establishing an engineering function in the Philippines. So the Philippines is our second largest office, sorry, after the Sydney office. So there's a wide range of back office functions in the Philippines around sales, operations, marketing, operations, things like that. But we have also invested now in setting up an engineering function in the Philippines, which will allow us to sustainably grow the kind of maintenance for the variety of software products that we have. So sustaining engineering and quality assurance, we're able, I think, to provide a lower cost location for getting those sorts of things done.
Next slide. So what I'd like to do with this slide is like bend this slide a little bit and talk about it with respect to looking forward for FY25. So almost all of the metrics that we have around people who use Dante, so these are the AV professionals who are getting trained on this slide, or manufacturers who are building Dante into their products, most of those are leading indicators that we would expect to actually drive revenue in FY26 and beyond, typically. So talking to this slide, this slide is really showing you or reporting on the leading indicators around the users of Dante. So a number of these, well, these integrated indicators are all essentially tracking positively, as David was saying.
So you can see that people are getting training on Dante, so we've had that up by 22%. We also have a certification program as well. So there's ongoing interest in training and the use of Dante. So what happens generally is, an AV professional will come and do a course with us. They will get trained, and then sometime later, nine, 12 months later, they will start building and installing more and more audiovisual systems using Dante. So key leading indicator. Likewise, from the point of view of just general marketing, you can see our marketing database continues to grow very strongly, and that's because we offer system setup tools like Dante Controller, which put us in contact with a very wide range of people installing audiovisual systems.
So we actually know who the end users are, who are designing and installing audiovisual systems, and that database continues to grow. On the next slide, so this is more the manufacturer demand side of things, and so, here, a manufacturer signs up. That's what we call a design win. Then a product comes to market, and I just want to remind you that when that product comes to market, that's when we start to see real revenue. So it's when we get repeat revenue, not recurring revenue, like a SaaS product, but repeat revenue every time a new batch of amplifiers gets manufactured or a new batch of microphones gets manufactured, for example.
So the number of products continues to go up and to the right, and so that means we are adding more and more Dante products, which will generate repeat revenue over the next financial years. So things like design wins, growing strongly, and the products coming to market are the manufacturer demand side. So what I really want to communicate from these is to say that notwithstanding that FY25 will be a challenging year for us for a variety of reasons, on the users of Dante side, things are tracking quite well. On the manufacturers building Dante products, that's also tracking quite well. So that augurs well for the future, and so that gives me a lot of confidence around FY26 and beyond. Next slide. So again, we've spoken to this before.
I don't want to sort of go through it all, but I wanted to just make a couple of comments here on the adoption of Dante on the video side, so I've been extremely pleased. I think, having lived through the hard yards of actually getting Dante Audio started, I feel that Dante Video is going something like two to three times faster than the audio adoption side of it was, so and this is, I think, because people have had a great experience with Dante Audio, and they're transferring that expectation and experience across to the video side of things, so the installed base of Dante, the positive experience they've had in the past, is really helping us on the video side, so you can see we've had a great result on the number of OEMs that have signed up.
That's design wins, and we've also got a number of video products launched. So in this case, this is the manufacturers talking about them, and the next step is to then convert that into product shipment and sale. So units shipped, and that's where we would get our repeat revenue. The other thing I wanted to remind people about is, when you're looking at sort of FY24 versus FY25, we have transitioned this legacy Viper board to a software solution. So we're basically gotten out of a product range in a business that we acquired when we did the Silex acquisition. So we're no longer manufacturing white label products for a few brands in the industry, and we're transitioning that to our typical model, which is to sell them a software royalty or a chip or a module.
So what will happen with that is that we will get a per unit decline of gross profit dollars associated with those Viper products. We're not losing the products. We're changing how they're delivered, and we're working with an ODM to do the manufacturing piece rather than us doing the manufacturing piece. So that shouldn't be new to you. I just wanted to remind people of that transition. Next slide. In terms of FY 25, it's a sort of relatively simple set of priorities for us. Clearly, we want to double down on our sales and marketing activities to drive revenue. That's the products that we have in the market and getting customer products to market. So the second piece there is around getting as many of those video design win customers that we have and getting their products to market and shipping units.
So that's obviously very important for us to grow that video side of the business. We also want to successfully deliver new Dante products, and part of that is revenue-oriented for this financial year. So two that are worth highlighting are some new AVio adapter products that we have in development. I actually saw a couple of really nice-looking prototypes literally yesterday, so that's progressing well. So we expect that to add additional revenue. New product line adds new revenue. And also, we have a pro version of our Dante Virtual Sound card software for PC and Mac that we expect that will generate additional revenue as well. And the fourth thing, you know, as I've highlighted before, I think it is. I can't overstate.
I almost said it the wrong way around, but I can't overstate how important things like Dante Director are, is for our long-term strategy. So one of the important things for us to do is to, having launched Dante Director, we need to bed it down, and we need to iterate it so that it actually provides the best possible set of products and features for AV professionals and allows us to really unlock that, SaaS-style recurring revenue from AV installations. So next slide, please. So again, this slide is essentially the FY 25 outlook slide, so that we presented last time. So I, again, I'll tick off a few things here. David already covered off most of these. So one of the things that has happened to us is that our backlog visibility has reduced.
With the chip shortages and COVID, people were putting orders in a long way out. So we're now back to about two to three months worth of future visibility. So that's back to the typical pre-COVID kinds of levels. So the other thing to remind people here is that ongoing shift from hardware-based Dante solutions to software-based Dante solutions. So many manufacturers, particularly the large volume manufacturers, rather than buy a chip that we program or a circuit board, like a card that they plug into their product, they are instead buying their own chips and then taking a software solution for us instead. We don't lose the business. We sell them a Dante software solution that goes into their product, rather than selling them a chip or a module.
So the implication of that is that we want to get the same gross profit dollars for that Dante implementation from the software implementation without the bill of materials and the COGS overhead. So what will happen to us or what is happening to us is as that shift occurs, revenue modulate will won't grow as strongly, but you should see GP dollar growth continuing. So again, this is a story that we've talked about previously. The other thing I want to just talk about is the cost side of things. So given that it will be a challenging year for us, we want to be prudent with our cost growth, and that's why we've been talking about this cost growth in that 7-9% range, compared to the 20-28.5% over the last three years.
So the goal here is not to go too hard on costs, because we believe in the long-term future of the company. And so those indicators that I was talking about with respect to the installation and use of Dante and the manufacturers building products with Dante are both very strong. So I think we want to be good stewards of the resources we have. We want to be prudent about costs, but it is not the time for us to cut to the bone or, in particular, if revenue drops, it's not the time for us to scale back costs, because the opportunity is ahead of us, and we need to continue to invest in that. I think that's what I wanted to cover on that slide. Okay, so trading update.
So this is probably the main focus, at least of, of my slide. You will have noticed that, likely that there is a trading update that we've published on the ASX, so, please, take that, analyze that. So I'm gonna cover the main points in there. So Audinate delivered an unaudited gross profit of AUD 7.2 million in Q1 FY 25. I think, you know, realistically, that's not where we had hoped we would be. And so the factors that have affected that, Q1 performance, I think David alluded to them, they've continued on for us. So there's shorter order lead times, that's that backlog compression. There's increased inventory in the industry, and so this happened when we had chip shortages. The tap turned off, then the chip supply came back.
That allowed us to fulfill demand, and many of our manufacturing customers ordered a few extra chips. And so we're actually working through that inventory in both in terms of raw materials, chips that they have, but also in their full finished products that they've built, too. So that combination of inventory holdings in our manufacturers and softer demand in the industry, we're feeling that at the moment, and we're continuing to work our way through it. With respect to FY 25 outlook, we had previously stated that we anticipated a slightly lower US dollar gross profit for FY 25 compared to FY24 . But due to our first half performance, we think this target is unlikely to be met. So how we think about the rest of this financial year kind of comes in two pieces.
So we expect, essentially, our Q1 run rate to translate into Q2. At least that's our best understanding at the moment. So at the end of Q2, we will be making another update in terms of a trading update of how we've been going, and clearly, it's half-yearly time. But we feel like there's sufficient uncertainty around how this year is tracking, that we do want to make a further update. And our expectations of the second half are that they will be stronger. So I think we... I don't want you to get the sense in which you just sort of pencil through Q1 all the way through to the end of the financial year. We will work our way through the inventory in our customers sitting in our customers. That'll happen at some point.
If we look at the industry association, AVIXA, they are expecting also increased demand in the second half as well. So we do anticipate stronger performance in the second half. And I also would point you to those new products, so our new AVio adapters and the professional, pro version of Dante Virtual Soundcard, will be contributing to revenue in the second half. So FY 25 remains a transitional year, as customers will be working through their inventory backlogs. But we do expect a return to normal order patterns or more predictable order patterns in FY 26, and growth in FY26 , which is really representative of that penetration of the Dante technology in the audiovisual industry and or AV installations. So I also want to touch on the long-term strategic thesis.
Again, I'm sort of echoing what David has said. So we continue to have an expanding installed base. There are something like 6.5 million Dante devices in the field today. So that gives us a great installed base on which to sell things like Dante Director to. So it is the time for us to continue to invest and deliver our software and management solutions like Dante Director. I mentioned the new product launches. We expect those to contribute to revenue in the second half. I've also talked about the metrics from the people who use Dante and the people who build Dante products. All of those metrics are strong, so I expect that as we get through the inventory problem we have and as demand returns, we should be in a great position to continue to grow.
And you can see that there's a couple of points specifically called out. We have 22% up in terms of design wins, so that's manufacturers signing up to build Dante into products, and our Dante and Dante certification training programs are going very strongly as well. So we continue to train the users of Dante. So next slide, please. So having got that out of the way, let me talk about some people who've joined Audinate recently. So probably the first thing I want to do is to publicly thank Rob Goss, our previous CFO. So Rob resigned a number of months ago, he stayed with us and has been a great help as we've managed the transition to Chris Rollinson, our new CFO. So Rob joined Audinate before the IPO.
He's been with Audinate, or was with Audinate, for about eight years. So he's one of those people that made a really material contribution to the growth of Audinate and where we are today. So I'm immensely grateful for what Rob has done over those years. On the other hand, I'm also pleased to join Chris Rollinson. So Chris is joining us from a listed company CFO role with WPP. WPP had an Australian-listed entity, so they were an advertising and I don't know how you would call that, but they were an advertising company, essentially.
So Chris was originally part of a company called STW, which is a much smaller company, which grew strongly, became WPP, the listed Australian entity, and worked through the process of delisting that entity and merging it into the mothership, which is based in the UK. So Chris has a long track record of working through some relatively complicated stuff. And so a lot of experience, and listed company experience. So definitely glad to have Chris on board, and I'm sure many of you will be interacting with him as he takes up his role. I also wanted to call out that we have recruited a chief strategy officer. So we've been discussing this for a fair while at the board, so I'm actually really pleased to have Nick Pearce on board. So he... You may recognize his face.
He was Chief Strategy Officer at Pro Medicus, so he's actually joined us from Pro Medicus, and he's doing pretty much a similar role at Audinate that he was doing at Pro Medicus. So Nick has a background in venture capital. He was actually on Audinate's board, so he's like what I would call a boomerang. I love our boomerangs, the people that come back to Audinate. So Nick was involved in the investment decisions at Starfish Ventures and was on the board of Audinate very early on. So I'm really pleased to have him on board because he has that medium-term strategic focus. I think it's operationally, in a year like this year, we absolutely focus. We have to focus on delivering from our customers and dealing with sort of revenue-related issues, but we also have a big opportunity ahead of us.
In employing or in adding Nick to the team, we now have some dedicated capacity for thinking about that sort of two to five-year type timeframe and getting things done on that side of things. Finally, I wanted to also mention somebody who's not in the executive team, but just worth pointing towards, 'cause I think it's an extremely important hire for Audinate, and that's Tim Neill, who has joined us from Dolby. He used to run Dolby's development organization here in Sydney. Tim is Vice President of Digital Services. Tim has taken on the delivery of Dante Director, and this is a massive thing for us because Dante Director is a SaaS product. It's our first SaaS product. We need to deliver that globally to all of the AV installations around the world.
So Tim has experience delivering real-time media products online at Dolby, and he also has a very strong development and engineering background. So he's a great person to head up our team to deliver the Dante Director products, and those installation-facing products as opposed to manufacturer-facing products. So Tim basically is running that particular organization and has the responsibility for the care and feeding of those type of pro products going forward. So that's it for the new faces. I think we've absolutely added strength to the Audinate bench. And with that, David, I think I'll hand back to you.
All right. Thank you, Aidan. So, ladies and gentlemen, we now come to the formal part of the meeting, which is matters requiring resolution, which are outlined in the notice of meeting. So the notice of meeting, dated 20th of September 2024 , was circulated to members, and I will take the notice of meeting as being read. Before moving on to the various resolutions to be considered today, I will now briefly outline the meeting voting procedures for today's meeting. When you registered your attendance this morning, you would have been provided with an attendance and poll voting card. The voting on each of the resolutions will be conducted on a poll. As chairman of the meeting, I will be...
And having been appointed as proxy for a number of members entitled to vote, as detailed in the notice of meeting, I will vote, where authorized, all undirected proxies in favor of each resolution. I also advise that voting exclusions, as set out in the notice of meeting, will be applied to each resolution. All of the resolutions being considered today are ordinary resolutions requiring a simple majority of votes cast by shareholders present and entitled to vote on the resolutions. Resolution Three is advisory and does not bind the directors or the company. Are there any questions from shareholders attending in person relating to the procedures of the meeting?
No.
No?
No.
Okay, I will now take questions on this item received through the online platform.
There are no questions on the online platform.
Okay, I will now take questions on this item of business received over the phone.
... No questions on the phone line at this time.
All right, thank you. So in order to provide you with enough time to vote, I will shortly open the poll for voting on all resolutions. You'll be able to vote any time between the start of the poll and the closure of voting as announced at the end of the meeting. We'll give you a warning before we move to close voting at the conclusion of all items of business. I now declare poll voting open on all items of business. Please record your votes on your poll voting card at any time. Following the voting, general business questions will be taken. We will now move to the business of the meeting, and Joanna Dent, our General Counsel, will now lead us through the formal matters and resolutions being considered today as an officer of the company. Thank you, Joanna.
Thanks, David. The meeting will receive and consider the financial report, the directors' report, and the independent auditor's report of the company for the financial year ended 30th of June 2024. A copy of the annual report was made available on the company's website, the ASX platform, and was sent to those shareholders who requested it. I will take the report as read. Are there any questions from shareholders attending in person on this item of business? I will now take questions on this item received through the online platform.
There are no questions in the online platform.
I will now take questions on this item of business received over the phone.
There are no questions on the phone line at this time.
Okay, we will now move to the resolutions for voting. So I now move to the first resolution, which is to consider and, if thought fit, pass the following as an ordinary resolution of the Company: to re-elect Tim Finlayson as a director. Further details about the resolution are also contained in the explanatory memorandum that accompanied the notice of meeting. The directors, with Mr. Finlayson abstaining, unanimously recommend shareholders vote in favor of this resolution. The resolution is set out on the screen. Now, before I take questions on this item of business, I invite Tim to speak to the meeting.
Thank you, Joanna, and good morning, everyone. It's been an honor to be part of the Audinate journey since 2017. Just by way of background, I have over 30 years professional experience, being a tax and legal partner at PwC, CFO of the ASX top 30 listed entity, Sydney Airport, CFO of the ASX listed Hutchison Telecoms, and currently COO of King & Wood Mallesons, one of Australia's leading law firms. I'm a graduate and current member of the AICD, and apart from finance, I have relevant experience in risk management, information security, compliance, which are all part of my previous roles and current role, as well as international experience, particularly around China and Asia as a whole.
In my role at Audinate, as a NED and Chair of the Audit and Risk Management Committee, I have worked closely with the CEO, CFO, COO, and other management on strategic and operational matters, as well as audit and risk matters, and also our external auditors. These experiences are complementary to the other directors at Audinate, and I'm seeking resolution and hope that I can continue the journey and add value to Audinate's business. Thank you.
Thank you, Tim. I'll now take questions on this item of business from shareholders attending in person. Okay, no questions. I will now take questions on this item received through the online platform.
Chairman, there is a question from Stephen Mayne. I'll just read that question out. Did any of the five main proxy advisors, ACSI, Ownership Matters, Glass Lewis, ISS, and ASA, issue a voting report on our company ahead of today's AGM? If so, did any of them recommend a vote against any of today's resolutions, including on the re-election of Tim Finlayson and John Dyson? If so, what reasons did they give, and will you disclose the proxy votes before the debate on each resolution so shareholders can ask questions about the reasons if there have been any protest votes?
Uh.
Yep.
Yeah. Okay. So, to the extent that we are aware of the proxy advice that has been provided, we are not aware of any protest votes or things like that. My understanding is that the proxy advisors have been in excess of 90% in favor of the resolutions. So I don't think there's anything that came out of that that I'm aware of.
Thank you, Aidan. Any other questions received through the online platform?
No.
I'll now take questions from the phone.
There are no questions on the phone line at this time.
Okay. If there is no further discussion, I now put to the meeting resolution number one, and here are the proxies.... Thank you. Please now select either for, against, or abstain for Resolution one on the poll voting card or via the online voting platform. Okay, moving on. The second resolution is to consider, and if thought fit, pass the following as an ordinary resolution of the company: To re-elect John Dyson as a director. Further details about the resolution are also contained in the explanatory memorandum that accompanied the notice of meeting. The directors, with Mr. Dyson abstaining, unanimously recommend shareholders vote in favor of this resolution. The resolution is set out on the screen. Before I take questions on this item of business, I invite John to speak to the meeting.
Thanks, Joanna, and good morning, everyone. It's great to see you all here this morning. First of all, I'd like to thank the board and the shareholders for giving me the opportunity to seek re-election to the board of Audinate. Being on the board of Audinate is a great privilege, and I've really enjoyed my time, and hopefully I've built up a track record of where I've worked with the other board members and also with the executive team in creating value for the shareholders. Secondly, why am I seeking re-election? Because I think I can continue to contribute to the success of Audinate. For the last 30 years, I've worked in venture capital, and I've had the great privilege of working with some fantastic businesses and unfortunately, some businesses that haven't panned out as well as what I would have liked.
But one of the things I've learned is there's a pattern recognition to successful technology companies. It's about working with great people like Aidan and his team, having access to leading-edge technology, chasing big markets, and having access to capital. And Audinate has all of those ingredients. I think there's a fantastic opportunity at Audinate, you know, and I'm very keen, I'm committed to make sure the company reaches its full potential. But there will be challenges, and I've worked with companies in the past that have worked through similar types of challenges: transition from hardware to software, developing recurring revenue models, and obviously getting access to capital.
And what I want to do is share some of my experience, share some of my good and bad experiences with the executive team to allow them to navigate some of those challenges that they will be facing over the next few years. And finally, I am committed to the technology ecosystem in Australia. I am passionate about seeing that ecosystem be successful. It has changed so much in the 30 years that I've been involved, but I'm really optimistic about the outlook. But for that outlook to be successful, we need great successes. We need great businesses that we can look towards, and Audinate is one of those businesses. So that makes me doubly committed to make sure that Audinate is a great success, so it can be that light on the hill for other founders and technology companies to like, to look to and aspire to be like.
So again, thank you very much for the opportunity to seek reappointment to the board of Audinate.
Thank you, John. I'll now take questions on this item of business from shareholders attending in person. No questions? Okay, then I'll take questions on this item received through the online platform.
There are no questions on the online platform.
Thanks, Belinda. I'll now take questions on this item of business received over the phone.
There are no questions on the phone line at this time.
Okay, I now put to the meeting Resolution two, and here are the proxies. Thank you. Please now enter your vote for Resolution two. Okay, moving on. The next resolution of the meeting is regarding the Audinate Remuneration Report. Under the Corporations Act, listed companies are required to include the remuneration report within the 2024 directors' report. The 2024 directors' report within the annual report is available on the company's website and was posted to shareholders on request. I'll take the remuneration report as read. Further details about the resolution are also contained in the explanatory memorandum that accompanied the notice of meeting. This vote is advisory only and is not binding on the company.
I'd like to advise the shareholders that Audinate Group Limited will disregard any votes, as stated in the voting exclusion statement related to Resolution Four, as set out in the notice of meeting. Also noting that each director has a personal interest in their own remuneration from the company, as set out in the remuneration report. The directors unanimously recommend shareholders vote in favor of the resolution. The resolution is set out on the screen, and I will now take questions on this item of business from shareholders attending in person. So no questions, so I'll take questions on this item received through the online platform.
There are no questions on the online platform.
I'll now take questions on this item of business received over the phone.
There are no questions on the phone line at this time.
In that case, I now put to the meeting Resolution Three, and here are the proxies. Thank you. Please now enter your vote for Resolution Three. Okay, moving on. The next item of business is the approval of the issue of performance rights to the CEO, Aidan Williams. Details of Mr. Williams' remuneration package as CEO and the basis upon which this remuneration was determined is set out in the remuneration report, which can be found in the company's annual report. The directors consider that the proposed issue of performance rights is an integral part of effectively rewarding and incentivizing executive management in a manner that aligns to the interests of management with shareholders and is a key component of an appropriately structured remuneration package for Mr. Williams. Further details about the resolution are also contained in the explanatory memorandum that accompanied the notice of meeting.
The directors, with Mr. Williams abstaining, unanimously recommend shareholders vote in favor of this resolution. I would like to advise shareholders that Audinate Group Limited will disregard any votes, as stated in the voting exclusion statement, related to Resolution Four, as set out in the notice of meeting. The resolution is set out on the screen. I'll now take questions on this item of business from shareholders attending in person. With no questions, I'll take now questions received through the online platform.
We do have a question from Stephen Mayne, and I'll read that question out: "Could the CEO summarize his past LTI grants as to whether they have vested or lapsed, and his history of buying and selling shares in our company? Please don't say, 'Look it up in the annual report and through the ASX announcements.' It's complicated, and the CEO would factually summarize the situation in 60 seconds.
Grab the microphone. Yes, it is complicated, and I do not have an encyclopedic memory of all of the LTI grants that I have received over the time that I have been at Audinate. And I personally would probably go and look it up if I had to actually, like, provide something. But I am happy to provide a broad summary of the situation of things like LTI grants. I think probably the big picture with certainly myself and equity is that I'm a founder at Audinate, so I've been around for, like, 20 years with Audinate.
So if I have a large equity position at the moment with Audinate, it ultimately reflects the fact that I have retained equity in Audinate from that very first founding days through the IPO. My actual percentage in Audinate has diminished over time. On the other hand, Audinate has grown enormously, so I have been the beneficiary of that, I guess, early equity. So I would say that the majority of equity that I currently hold in Audinate hasn't come from LTI grants. It's actually come from the sort of long-term equity that I had from... as a founder in the company. In terms of the history of LTI grants, the...
What happens to me currently is that if I get an LTI grant, I have an immediate tax obligation, so often I sell shares. There was a point after I became CEO where I ran out of other assets to sell, and I had to actually sell Audinate shares. That is not my desire. I don't want to sell Audinate shares, but unfortunately, from a tax perspective, I ultimately have to do that. In terms of grants over the life of Audinate since you know IPO, there's been a variety of different LTI programs. Some of those have been sort of your typical total shareholder return type thing where there's been different indexes and things like that.
In the early part of Audinate, when we grew very strongly with respect to other companies in the various indexes that we were part of, most of those early LTI grants vested. More recently, there've been partial vestings and no vestings, and that's because. So what I would say, the performance hurdles for our LTIs were certainly 30% growth in revenue over three years in order to get 100% vesting, was a significant performance hurdle, and clearly, that's looking challenging in the face of a year like this year. So it's not my expectation that all of my LTI grants will currently vest. So maybe that's the sort of potted summary. I think the majority of my equity comes from being a founder.
I have been the beneficiary of LTI grants on the way through, which I view as being part of the remuneration package of either being the chief technology officer or, more recently, the CEO. And it'll be up to either the chair or maybe John to talk about the process of deciding what goes into those LTIs or how they're structured. Hopefully, that answers the question.
Thank you, Aidan. Any further questions online?
No.
Okay, I will now take questions on this item of business received over the phone.
There are no questions on the phone line at this time.
Okay, I now put to the meeting Resolution Four, and here are the proxies. Thank you. Please now enter your vote for Resolution Four. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our discussion on the items of business. In a couple of minutes, the poll will be closed. Please ensure that you've cast your vote on all the resolutions. I will now pause to allow you a moment to finalize those votes. I now declare the poll closed. We will take questions, and our CEO will coordinate responses on behalf of Audinate. However, before I hand over, we have received the following question in advance of the meeting. Does the board or CEO have any reflections about how they have kept the market fully informed of the business's progress in a timely manner, particularly considering the market's response to the FY25 guidance? I'll ask Aidan, our CEO, to respond to that question.
Sure. I'll grab that microphone back. So David, I might kick off, and then, if you wanna provide any additional thoughts as Chair, that would be great, so I think this is sort of reflective of the general question around how do we arrive at FY25 guidance? Why did it come out when it did? What are we doing today in terms of talking about Q1, Q2, and things like that, so I think probably sort of backing up. I think the board is absolutely aware of its obligations for things like continuous disclosure, takes that stuff seriously.
When we were coming towards the end of FY 24 and forecasting for FY 25, we were absolutely going through the process of trying to scrub what FY25 would look like. At the time, there were some significant uncertainties for us, and if you've been following the stock, I think we were speaking about some of those uncertainties at the end of the first half in FY24 , and we've been speaking, you know, consistently over time about those. The key uncertainty probably for us at that time was, we had this large backlog, and that backlog was actually... As we were able to supply chips, that large backlog was sort of naturally relaxing.
And so one of the uncertainties we had was how much of that relaxing of the backlog was just due to us being able to supply chips and how much of that was related to things like underlying demand, and how much of it was related to inventory. So we had a sort of series of confounding variables. As we sort of moved towards the end of Q4, the things like bookings heading into FY25 became clearer for us, and that's why the board decided to put out the FY 25 forecast ahead of our FY24 results. So in terms of communication, I'm hoping that people would take some encouragement from the communication today.
We've been quite explicit about our Q1 performance, so we've given you some information about how we've been tracking financially. I think that's important for us to continue to do because we still have that underlying uncertainty in terms of how quickly we work through the backlog that's with our customers and the underlying, like, softness in demand still continues. So I'm confident we will work through our backlog, and I also think that the second half will be better for us financially. But in terms of, like, communicating to shareholders, we've put out some specific markers today, and we've also said that we will communicate again at the end of Q2.
I think that at that time, we'll be in a much better position to see how far we are through that whole backlog process and provide a bit more certainty around the rest of the second half. So, yeah. I wish I had a better crystal ball than I do, but you know, this... it has been a process of uncertainty, particularly with the whipsaw around chip supply. David, I might throw to you.
Yeah, thanks, Aidan. I think you did a thorough job answering the question, and I would only comment on one other thing. I think partially the implication of the question is, if there were perfect continuous disclosure, there would never be a rapid movement of share price, and I think everybody would strive for that. But I think one of the challenges when a business is operating is you're getting information all the time, and some of that is actual true information, and some of it is noise. And so you kind of can't really always tell whether you're getting a signal or noise. And so there's the challenge from our perspective is timeliness versus accuracy or timeliness versus validity. And I think our goal was to communicate to the market at the appropriate time, but then also get it right.
I think the fact that we had to adjust our forecast again this morning reflected that it's just really hard to get it perfect when you're trying to do it in a timely fashion.
Thank you, David. Do we have any questions in the room? Okay, we've got a microphone just behind you.
Hi, I just wanted to, I suppose, explore there's maybe a connection, maybe you see it or maybe you don't, between your predictions for FY 25 and beyond and ASML's predictions for 2025 and beyond.
I had not thought through that connection, but interesting. The, like, so I don't believe that we will have chip shortages or supply shortages of the parts that we need, and that is because the most of the chips that we use are not the bleeding-edge of semiconductor manufacturing, so they, they're actually sort of a few generations back. So what actually crunched us during the pandemic was just this sort of supply shifting from people not buying cars to buying heaps of extra iPads and stuff. So that sort of sucked up all of the chips for us. So we're not exposed to the really bleeding-edge chips, like the stuff that goes into iPhones or GPUs or things like that. So we're a few generations back.
So there is actually supply reliability for us, and so we're not directly connected with the ASML type of thing. Like, if anything, probably there's... So I should be cautious about saying things. My mind goes to different areas. But in this area, so one of the interesting things is the quartz production in the U.S., that one, and the hurricane. So that's gonna unfold over the next, like, 12-18 months. So that might be more relevant for us, but it wouldn't necessarily be the ASML side of things, I think. Very macro, like, in the sense of if that turns out to be a problem, it'll be a problem for everyone, not us specifically. Yeah.
We've got another question coming on the floor.
Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Just, given you've commented that your backlogs reverted to a more normal sort of state, could you remind us of what the sort of usual cadence of order activity through the year might be, through the quarters?
Yeah... Is the question sort of largely around seasonality?
Yes.
Sort of what that looks like?
Yes.
Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. So, normal for me is like sort of returning to how it was pre-COVID. And so that gave us a sort of two- to three-month visibility. So, you know, as we get to the end of a quarter, we have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen into the next quarter. With respect to seasonality, that's an interesting one for us because I think historically, we had somewhat more predictable seasonality because we had pretty strong growth of the sort of 20%-30% growth. So when you have that kind of growth, it's almost implied that the first half is like 45%, the second half is 55%, just as a property of that underlying growth. So I think I wouldn't want you to copy-paste that mindset for this financial year.
So I think what I would say is I think we will see a return to growth in the second half, but I don't want to sort of pin it on the 45, 55. So that's not a helpful answer, I guess, in terms of if you're thinking about models and things like that, but I don't see the sort of level of revenue, GP dollars down for us at the moment, extending through the entire year. I think it should actually head back up because we've got some new products, but also because, you know, from the industry perspective and the people we talk to, we do expect demand to return.
This year, however, is not gonna be a 25%-30% year growth, and so, I, you know, I wouldn't want you to factor in that 45-55 split that we've talked about in the past.
Yeah.
Hi. Mine's more of a sort of medium-term strategic question. How do you think about, as you've moved from hardware to software, it definitely has positive flow-ons on gross margin-
Yeah
and stuff like that.
Yeah.
But in terms of strategic risk, in terms of the increased ability to reengineer or the lower bar for the people that you're selling to, to put many options in and then one get traction.
Yeah.
How have you sort of thought through that as it becomes a more dominant part of your mix?
Yeah, that's a great question, and we have thought about it. So, inevitably, from a sort of strategic perspective, there are pluses and minuses with every strategy that you go with. You know, sort of teleporting back to David's, like, we've got the sort of audio bit and the video bit, and then the platform bit. The big picture strategic thing is we want to drive that profitable land grab. So the extent to which we can profitably drive Dante into as many devices as possible, that's what I think motivates us to use software-style solutions because that enables a manufacturer to use a single chip, and they buy. So they buy one part, and then they can use that part for more than one thing.
So they get a bill of materials cost saving, and if we still get the same GP dollars for the Dante solution, I'm indifferent as to whether we sell them a chip or not, right? So one of the strategic lenses I have is, I want to reduce the marginal cost of adding Dante to a given piece of equipment, but I want to get my same fair dollars for the Dante stuff. So I sort of, I want to be indifferent as to whether it's a hardware or software solution. Now, your comment about, does that make it easier to substitute or not, I think is a good one. To some extent, yes, but also to some extent, no. Like, in a way, I think we have been the beneficiaries of that with the NDI technology.
So we've been able to actually penetrate a whole bunch of camera manufacturers because we can provide a software solution that will run on that existing camera. So on the other hand, there is this long tail of people in the industry who are manufacturers. They're hardware manufacturers. So the easy thing for them to do is to bang down chips. So I don't see those guys going away. So there's an enormous amount of momentum. Strategically, I would say installed base, very important. So that's 6.5 million units in the field, absolutely important. The user experience of people using Dante, critical. Like, critical to the adoption of video. People are copy-pasting their experience over to video and going like, "It's gonna work." So we've been given a...
In a way, people just assume we'll get it to work, and the risk there, of course, is that our video products are nowhere near as mature as our audio products, so we have a task to do to meet that requirement. And the other thing I would say is, as we roll out things like Dante Director, where we're adding actual monitoring and management functionality, an audiovisual person can monitor a university lecture theater from home across the internet. That type of functionality creates a whole lot of stickiness, so you've really got a service then, like a SaaS service, which is actually creating some stickiness with the footprint of products that you have.
In the end, you know, I believe that if we're going to be successful, I think the real opportunity for Audinate is in the platform layers. Strategically, as we move there, we probably want to be generating more of our revenue from the platform layers and less from the land grab. But the land grab is profitable, so I like our profitable land grab because it's actually giving us the ability to get to where we want to be. Hopefully, that answers... It's not a simple answer, but hopefully, that worked for you.
Are there any further questions on the floor before we move to online?
Can you just talk about-- Can you just give me the pie chart, the potential for market, given that-
Yeah.
It looks like, obviously, the proposition for audio using Dante is very compelling.
Yeah.
But AV, it's still very much a land grab, and there's NDI out there.
Yep.
-and BDD. How do you see that in terms of that potential for software, given that we may not succeed so well in video as we are likely to do in audio?
Yeah. Yeah. So I think of that in terms of market segments. So I think that something like NDI is very successful in a small scale live production market or in broadcast, particularly. Broadcast is not a massive market segment for us. We definitely support our manufacturing customers selling into broadcast, but the big applications for us are things like universities, higher education, lecture theaters, conference rooms, things like that, which are not so much about the broadcast production side of things, but they're about running audio and visual signals around. So, like, in terms of how I think about the TAM and the strategy and whether we'll get all the video TAM, On the audio side of things, I think we're going well, as you say. On the video side of things, it is fragmented. It's quite fragmented by technologies.
I think we were discussing this earlier, so I think in the market segments, which are the largest market segments for us, I think we have a strong footprint on the audio side of things, which sets us up well to deliver video solutions that work within that framework. When I was just talking about Dante Director, what an audiovisual professional wants to do, like if you're looking after a lecture theater, is they would really like to be able to remotely manage all the thingies in that room, and those thingies might be audio thingies or video thingies, or they might be like the blinds going up and down on the wall or something like that, right?
So, to that extent, if we're already in there with our elbows forced out because there's loads of Dante audio devices, that gives us a competitive advantage. But the competitive advantage is about control and management, and that's why David said, "Audio, video, control and management." So there's those three things. So I think it's a fight at the moment on the video side of things, but I think we are in a position competitively where we can win. I feel like over the last two years, we've been building out what I would call the jigsaw of product offerings. So we've been creating the video versions of the audio products that we have. So we've been building out that jigsaw, and I think we're starting to see the fruit of that in terms of units shipped on the video side.
So I think we've got the jigsaw pieces largely in place. Still lots more work to do. The other thing I would say is, I guess I'd just remind people, Audinate is more of a compound interest kind of company, so it's not a hockey stick company, right? So we sell software and hardware that goes inside physical things, like cameras and microphones and stuff. So it gets shipped, and it gets installed. It's not like pushing out an app on a phone platform or on the web, so it isn't going to go, hockey stick. It's going to be compound interest diffusion. So I think video, we're in early days. We've got the jigsaw pieces.
We've got a strong competitive position because of the audio footprint we have, and if we get the control and management piece right, that's what the AV professional really wants, and they're less hung up on precisely how the video packet formats work. I don't know if that answers. Does that work?
Yeah, I suppose that a lot of those software sales depend partly on how effective the video is, sort of thing.
Yes. So it is a complex thing, but when there's an audiovisual installation being put in place, ultimately people see that as a whole thing. And so audio, and if you're an AV professional managing that, you probably. It's a bit like in the IT world, where you get companies going like, "Well, we're a Cisco shop." Like, it's sort of, it's not that we couldn't go and buy, you know, Juniper Networks equipment or something like that. It's just that it's... Once you've made a decision, it's just, like, easier to... Yeah. And so I would say that we have a... To give you a comparison, we have 6.5 million devices in the field right now.
When I was sitting through the NDI 6 reboot lecture that they gave, they said, "We're going to have a million devices by the end of 2025." Like, cool. So I think it's that audio-video thing, and it's. I think one of the things I would like to say is, it's not about audio separate from video, it's actually an AV system in the end. It's actually probably both, particularly for the AV systems that get put into buildings, which is the big part of what we do. Yeah.
So I'm just trying to get an idea of, in audio, where you're very strong, what kind of market share you currently have? And how you would see the video segment market share growing, say, over the next three years.
Over the next three years. Right. So I think, depending on how you look at it, on the audio side, we're probably roughly sort of 9-1 1, maybe 12% penetrated on the audio TAM. So there's actually tons more like runway left on the audio side. And a lot of that actually is just people using analog, so it's partly a network replacing point-to-point cabling type of story. On the video side, you know, the way I think about that is that we're very early days, like, in terms of, like, if you're thinking about growth, it's sort of, like, hard to predict where we might be in three years. So it's very much down at the sort of high growth end of that curve.
I want us to be doing things like at least doubling our video units effectively year- by- year, 'cause I don't see why we can't do that. What that looks like in three to five years' time is a bit harder for me to predict, but my gut feel, and this is sort of not very sciencey or anything, but having lived through the sort of start of Dante Audio, video is going two to three times quicker, in my view. And so I think our adoption for the video side of things will just go faster, so I do anticipate it to ramp up quicker.
One of the things I would say about the TAM bit, though, as well, linking to that, is for video to really grow, there's a chunk of that TAM which is about displays, so think smart TV. So there's some software solutions, I think, where we can start to get into more of those, like, you know, smart TV-type world, which, if we can crack some of those and connect that to our monitoring and management, it could really actually provide a lot of value.
Do we have any questions on the online platform? We do have a question from Stephen Mayne. We have an unusual share register, with major customer Yamaha being our largest holder with 8%, followed by AustralianSuper with 7.84%. How do we deal with these two major shareholders? What is the point and history of Yamaha's holding, and what influence does it give them over their contracts and our product development? Are there any restraints on them selling, or do they have any shareholder rights, such as an entitlement not to be diluted in a raising? Also, which broker is the biggest source of our 14,000 retail holders?
So that last piece about the four, who's the biggest source of our 14,000 retail holders, can I... CommSec?
It'd be close to it, I would think.
Yeah. So we think that's CommSec, but if it's important to get the correct thing, we can follow up with that later. David, I might give this a tilt and then turn it over to you again, if you don't mind-
Okay.
- unless you'd like to speak to it.
No, go ahead.
Okay, great. So probably dealing with the easy bit. AustralianSuper is just a large shareholder, so they're an institutional shareholder for us. I think they've been on the register for a number of years, and they've been progressively growing their position with the ups and downs of the share price. So, there, in my view, there isn't anything particularly special about AustralianSuper in that context. I think they're one of our longer-term holders, and they have been for a long time. So I think they're-
Can I just clarify something?
Yeah.
So, so sorry to interrupt. So AustralianSuper actually invested in Audinate when Audinate was still a private company. So Starfish Ventures, the company which I represent, which I work for, managed money on behalf of AussieSuper. So AussieSuper had a exposure to Audinate before Audinate was listed, and a reasonable number of those shares, and I don't know the exact percentage, would have come from that investment. Sorry.
Yeah, no problem. Sorry, I had forgotten that piece.
Yeah.
It feels like ancient history, but-
Yeah.
Like, as in my experience as CEO, which is, like, just a bit over five years, my lens on AustralianSuper is they are one of our... Well, they are a large shareholder of ours, but they are an ordinary institutional investor, typical superannuation fund investor, and there's nothing special about them. They don't have any restraints or special... They just buy stuff like, as you would on the market. The Yamaha is a bit of a different kettle of fish. So Yamaha has been a long-term strategic partner for Audinate. Yamaha's shareholding, I think, is a residual position that they have had after they made a significant investment in Audinate, I think, in 2012 . Don't quote me on that exact date.
Yamaha made that investment because they had launched six products that were built around the Dante technology, and so my view, like, you know, I'm not speaking for Yamaha at the moment, and they don't telegraph why they made the investment in Audinate, but if I look at the, you know, the pattern of how they actually unrolled, they had worked with us for a number of years. They saw us as a strategic partner. They were building a range of products that were pretty important to them in terms of a revenue sense on our technology, and so they wanted to provide us with both capital to ensure we succeed, and they also wanted a bit of visibility in terms of our financial performance. Like, you know, to get a bit of an early warning about what's going on.
At least that's my lens on it. I am not describing, like, notes from a conversation I've had with Yamaha, right? So this is my view of Yamaha as an investor in Audinate. The Yamaha has never had special access to our technology. Yamaha has never had any preferential shares. Well, at least certainly not since the IPO. I can't remember the details of before the IPO. They don't have any particular influence with respect to contracts or product development, other than they are a large and important brand in the industry. So we work with Yamaha, we work with Shure, Bosch, Bose, any of those brands that you've heard of, and we try and speak to them about the strategy of what we're doing.
We are about transforming the industry generally, like in terms of going from physical cabling across to networking, from hardware-based products to software-based products, so for all of our top 10, top 20 manufacturers, we will try and have deep strategic conversations. Yamaha is not special in that regard, although we have had a long history with them. We have also had a long history with Bosch. Bosch actually predates Yamaha, but Bosch didn't invest, yeah, in Audinate, apart from providing us with being a customer and giving us, you know, they paid for various parts of development early on, so I feel like I've probably overanswered the question. There's nothing special about Yamaha or AustralianSuper in this. They are essentially ordinary shareholders. There's no restraints on them selling or anything like that.
No, no entitlements that I'm aware of.
Are there any other online questions? There is one more question.
Yes.
It comes from Stephen Mayne. The share price has fallen 13% this morning after the update. As a former public CFO and CFO of Freehills, the number one law firm in Australia for defending shareholder class actions, could Tim Finlayson comment on whether he thinks we could be hearing from some of the class action lawyers who might claim we've been slow to release bad news?
Thanks very much. I think we answered that question before when we talked about continuous disclosure, so I don't think I've got anything else to add.
Are there any further questions online? We do have one last question. It's also from Stephen Mayne. Thank you for running a hybrid AGM, and will you commit to keep doing this in future years to maximize shareholder participation? Also, next year, could you please disclose the proxy positions to the ASX, along with the formal address? When disclosing the outcome of voting on all resolutions today, could you please advise the ASX how many shareholders voted for and against each item, similar to a scheme of arrangement? This will provide a better gauge of retail shareholder sentiment and voting participation.
So, David, I'm not sure if you want to address this or you'd like me to.
Just specifically regarding the hybrid meeting format, thank you for the feedback on that. I think it is effective, and it certainly broadens the audience of shareholders who can participate. So unless anything significant changes, I think it'd be our intent to continue to do so in the future. I think it's been very successful.
Yeah, and I guess on the other matters about sort of disclosures of various sorts, I think, again, thank you for the feedback. I guess we will take that on board and consider those for next year or for next time.
Do we have any questions on the phone line?
There are no questions on the phone line.
All righty. So thank you for the various questions. And thank you for the strategic interest questions. That's always my bag. I love that stuff. So thank you very much. So I think that's it for me today. And with that, I think I might hand over to David to formally close the meeting.
Thank you, Aidan, and thank you on behalf of the Board of Audinate. I now officially declare the meeting closed. So the results of the poll will be announced to the ASX later today, and I just want to thank you all for your active and engaged attendance and participation in today's meeting. It's been very good. So thank you.