Good morning, everyone. Apologies for the slightly inauspicious start. Never a good look for an audio-visual company, but what the heck. Thank you. Hopefully, we can edit that out later. That would be the usual thing that one says with these sorts of things. Thank you for joining our call today. My name is Aidan Williams. I'm Co-Founder and CEO at Audinate. With me is Chris Rollinson, our CFO, who joined Audinate last October. In the first part of the call today, we'll be talking through the investor presentation that accompanied our financial statements. Both of those were lodged with the ASX earlier today. You can type questions at any time, or you can ask questions at any time by typing them into the Q&A chat box thing.
At the end of the presentation, we will collate your questions and answer as many as possible in the time that we have available. I'm going to cover results highlights and overall strategy before handing over to Chris to walk through the financial results in more detail. I am pleased to report that our first half results are above guidance and that we expect moderate growth over the second half. As you may recall from our AGM trading update, we have been experiencing revenue headwinds as our manufacturing customers work through their accumulated inventory of chips like Ultimo and modules like Brooklyn 3 . We expect challenging trading conditions for our chips and module products to persist through FY25. However, the ongoing effects of overstocking have already largely been factored into our full-year outlook.
Given soft-ish demand, we expect a one-year transition period through the remainder of FY25, with customers returning to more regular ordering patterns for chips and modules in FY26. Pleasingly, underlying demand for Dante remains strong. Demand for our software products, and in particular, embedded software used by our manufacturing customers, grew strongly. Unlike hardware, embedded software products are delivered essentially on demand, without lead times, and are less impacted by inventory at our manufacturing customers. The growth in embedded software revenue indicates continued growth in demand for Dante technology, independently of accumulated stock levels. As we've discussed before, our manufacturing customers' shift towards embedded software in new high-volume products continues, and that improves our gross margin percentage . Coupled with relatively low hardware shipments during the half, our gross margin percentage has strengthened.
The leading indicators for the business remain positive, with design wins increasing by 15% and an additional 196 new Dante products launched during the first half of FY25. Each design win, which occurs when a manufacturer signs up to use Dante, and every new product coming to market represents future repeat revenue for Audinate. Interest in Dante from AV professionals remains strong. In particular, we are consistently training around 4,000 AV professionals per month, with around 730,000 contacts in our database. By way of summary, the third column on the slide describes the strategic opportunity for Audinate. We're engaged in what we like to call a profitable land grab, proliferating Dante audio and video networking technology into a wide range of audio and video products. As the number of Dante devices grows, platform software will increasingly become important to manage and deliver audio-visual installations at scale.
The industry's shift from analog to digital networking is still in its early days, and our video and platform software products are also at relatively early stages of development and maturity. Therefore, as we have said before, the bulk of the market opportunity for Dante technology remains ahead of us. Slide four looks forward to the remainder of FY25. We continue to invest in product development, notably Dante Director, our first SaaS cloud software offering for managing and monitoring audio-visual installations. We're also launching new AVIO adapters and have launched a professional version of the popular Dante Virtual Soundcard product. These are expected to contribute revenue during the second half of FY25. I'll talk more about video and Dante Director later on in the presentation. We retain a strong balance sheet, which enables us to invest in the strategic opportunities ahead of us.
With the recent appointment of Nick Peace as Chief Strategy Officer, we're actively managing a portfolio of partnership, development, and M&A opportunities. With respect to the full year, gross profit in the second, sorry, with respect to the full year, gross profit in Q2 of FY25 was ahead of Q1 FY25, and we expect further moderate strengthening in the second half of the year. Slide five summarizes Audinate's financial results for the first half. Whilst the recent focus has been on inventory impacts to our FY25 outlook, it is worth remembering that FY24 was the flip side of that story and for Audinate as we delivered pent-up demand associated with prior chip shortages. In this half, we achieved a U.S. dollar gross margin of $15.5 million, which was down 29% on the prior year. Sales of Ultimo chips and Brooklyn modules were markedly lower as customers worked through excess inventory.
Strong growth in embedded software sales and software in chips and module sales contributed to an increase in gross margin percentage, up from 71.5% in the prior period to 82.2% in the current half. Our customers continue to increasingly adopt embedded software rather than chips or modules, which will imply a moderation in revenue even as gross margin dollars continue to grow. As we have said before, we believe that growth in gross margin dollars is an appropriate measure of financial performance as this shift occurs. Chris will speak in more detail to the financials later in the presentation. Slide six breaks down hardware and software performance further. The chart on the left shows the shift in mix from the first half of FY24 to the first half of FY25.
You can see in FY24, we saw strong hardware sales as chip supply returned, and the first half 2025 result is a combination of growth in embedded software sales and softness in chips and module sales. The table on the right highlights the first half revenue headwinds in the chips, cards, and modules business, and also growth in the software business. As our customers work through their inventory, we expect orders to return for chips and modules over the second half period. On slide seven, you can see progress against our FY25 objectives. Given the headwinds in the first half, we've focused first on sales and marketing activities that can drive revenue, notably deepening relationships with system integrators, who are the folks who design AV systems and specify what technology and equipment gets used.
Secondly, we've continued to drive video adoption and video product development, launching multi-channel support in our Dante AV-H and Dante Studio products, which enable significant conferencing and higher education use cases. I'll say more about video later in the presentation. Thirdly, we've made substantial progress towards launching new install-friendly AVIO adapters. These have different audio connectors on them and different mounting options that are suitable for installation under tables, for example. We've also delivered Dante Connect into a number of cloud-based audio production applications and have developed new features enabling audio contribution and monitoring across the internet using standard web browsers. Finally, we have continued to invest in Dante Director, both in product features and also in creating the organizational structure to support our first SaaS product globally.
Through the second half, we expect to deliver features you can see in column four that will enable Dante Director to be used in a range of enterprise applications. The next few slides will be familiar to you if you've been following Audinate for a while, so I'll zip through those fairly quickly. We've included slide nine 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 applications. We benefit from this diversity, for example, during COVID, corporate conferencing, and higher education experience tailwinds. Whilst corporate conferencing remains a significant market for us, it has softened recently, and the live sound market continues to recover. Slide 10 shows three key pillars of our strategy.
First, we want to continue to expand penetration of our audio products into lower-cost and higher-volume applications, and this is primarily through software offerings. This has been a long-term theme for Audinate. Secondly, we want to grow our video business. Video is growing roughly two to three times the rate of the audio business at a similar stage. However, the video market is quite fragmented, necessitating a larger toolbox of product variations. Finally, AV systems contain both audio and video products, and as the number of Dante devices grows beyond 6 million and the scale of installations expands, monitoring and management tools for Dante networks become critical. Dante Director is a major step forward in cloud-based monitoring of AV installations from anywhere in the world. Slide 11 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, essentially that profitable land grab business that we're in today. The combination of audio and video networking exceeds $1 billion annually, U.S. dollars annually. The software opportunity you can see on the slide for professional AV relates to products essentially we already have on the shelf. For example, PC Mac software applications 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. As you can see on slide 12, the Dante product ecosystem continues to grow. The number of Dante-enabled OEM products, so products from our manufacturing customers, increased to 4,372.
This represents a net increase of 196 Dante-enabled products available on the market during the first half. A total of 476 manufacturer brands have Dante-enabled products in the market, with 173 brands currently developing a Dante-enabled product. Continued growth in the Dante product ecosystem is crucial for sustaining revenue and driving continued success in future years. Slide 13 highlights the ongoing strength in core business metrics. Each of the three columns here really is a metric associated with a particular phase in our sales cycle. Audinate's sales cycle involves an OEM design win, which is the column on the left, followed by a period of 12-24 months for a product design to be completed, followed by repeat revenue derived from the ongoing purchase of chips or royalties as each new unit is manufactured for the sales lifetime of that product.
The three charts on the slide show the key metrics in the sales pipeline, starting with design wins, followed by product development, and ultimately launch and sale of the product on the market. Each new product, as I said before, generates repeat revenue for Audinate. The two columns on, well, the design wins and new product introductions are key leading indicators of future revenue for Audinate. During the period, the number of OEMs in the process of developing their first Dante product increased to 173 from 161 in the previous corresponding period. Finally, the number of Dante-enabled products on the market increased to 4,372, reflecting a net increase of 196 Dante-enabled products available on the market over that first half. The strength in core business metrics bodes well for FY26 and beyond.
Before handing over to Chris, I just want to provide a couple of brief updates on Dante Director and video. You can see the roadmap for Dante Director on slide 14. Dante Director is, as I said before, our first SaaS cloud offering aimed at monitoring and managing audio-visual installations. It is a strategic first step in our plan to offer a portfolio of management and monitoring products and services for Dante installations. Today, we have a feature set targeting small to mid-sized installations, and at the recent ISE tradesh ow, new performance monitoring and dashboarding functionality was launched, along with a demonstration of new media encryption features. The new audio and video encryption features highlight the role that Audinate plays in the industry. Manufacturers need a non-proprietary, manufacturer-neutral way to manage encryption keys and security policies when connecting to products from their competitors.
It is natural for Audinate to provide those functions through a platform like Dante Director, enabling interoperable, secure audio and video networking for the AV industry. Over the next 12-18 months, we'll be building out a set of enterprise security features. You can see those on the slide there that will enable a variety of larger-scale corporate IT applications with Dante Director. Slide 15 summarizes recent progress in Dante video. The progress of Dante video continues to be encouraging, with 60 OEM brands licensed for Dante video, up from 50 as at the end of the first half in FY 24. 116 Dante video products have been launched by manufacturers at the end of the first half of FY 25, and that's up from 66 products at the end of the first half of FY 24.
This represents a pleasing 76% increase in the number of Dante video products released by manufacturers over the last six months. As I've said on previous occasions, we aim to build out a complete toolbox of video product offerings that mirrors our capabilities on the audio side. Unlike audio, video products come in various flavors depending on the compression technique that they use. This requires a portfolio of products shown in the table to cover an appropriate range of applications and market segments with differing price and performance requirements. A notable video development is support for multiple video channels in our Dante AV-H and Dante Studio Windows software, and this enables a variety of conferencing and higher education applications. With that, I will hand over to Chris for the finance section.
Thank you. Thanks very much, Aidan.
Turning to the income statement for the first half, the results in this slide are presented in AUD. For the first half of the year, gross profit was AUD 24 million compared to AUD 33 million in the prior corresponding period, which is a variance of 29%. The gross profit percentage was 83% compared to 72% in the prior corresponding period. The improvement was driven by a change in the product mix, a direct result of the transition from chips, cards, and modules to software-based implementations, which are delivered at a higher gross margin. As we have previously communicated, our financial performance has been impacted by manufacturing customers working through their accumulated inventory balances, leading to a dampening in short-term demand from our hardware chips, cards, and modules products.
This has a temporary effect on revenue as our customers work through inventory on hand rather than placing new orders. We are working our way through the rebalancing of inventory as the financial year progresses, and the financial impact has been factored into the full year outlook. By way of illustration, if we take our top 10 OEM customers in the financial year 2024 for our largest product by revenue contribution being Brooklyn, six of the top 10 customers have reordered and received inventory in the first half of the year, and four of the top 10 OEMs have not reordered as yet. They remain clients and are working through their accumulated inventory balance. Not all of our largest customers have yet returned to the market, and when they do, we expect this to have an improvement in our growth trajectory. Our underlying numbers are strong. They're good.
Design wins up 15%, which is the engine of future growth. Software revenue growing at 13%, which is a good underlying proxy for growth. Diversification of our revenue has strengthened as we launch new products across the portfolio in the second half of the year. If we turn to costs, we've continued to invest in our cost base to support new product development, and this investment has been at a more moderate pace. Overall expenses are AUD 23 million compared to AUD 24 million in the prior corresponding period, which represents a reduction of 3%. This reduction is primarily driven by a reduction in variable incentive expenses and is partially offset by an uplift in headcount to $226 million at the end of the period compared to 204 at the end of the prior corresponding period.
After costs, Audinate delivered a positive EBITDA of $0.8 million for the half year compared to $9.9 million in the prior corresponding period. Turning to the next slide, we have a look at the breakdown of revenue and units generated from chips, cards, and modules and our software products. This breakdown is presented in U.S. dollars. There has been a material shift in the first half of revenue generated from software products. In the first half of 2025, chips, cards, and modules accounted for 53% of total revenue, and software contributed 44%. In the prior period, the split was 75% to 24%. Revenue generated from software products was $8 million, up 13% on the prior period. This growth is supported by the transition of existing customers from software-based Dante solutions and reinforces the importance of software in our portfolio of products.
Unlike hardware, these software products are on demand, no lead times, and are less impacted by industry inventory levels. Software product revenue demonstrates that the continued growth and demand in Dante technology is independent of stock levels. A further benefit of software-based implementation is the unit economics improved for our manufacturing partners, and this will accelerate adoption across a broad range of products and higher volume product categories. Despite the increase in adoption of software, there still remains a market for Dante chips, cards, and modules. These solutions are offered at seamless integration and typically delivered at a faster rate to market, which will ensure that they remain an important part of our portfolio. Turning to the next slide and the cash flow statement, Audinate delivered positive operating cash flow of AUD 1.2 million for the half compared to AUD 11.8 million in the prior corresponding period.
After investment in intangibles and fixed assets, our free cash flow for the period was negative $8.1 million compared to a positive $3.4 million in the prior corresponding period. Our choice to invest in new products to drive long-term growth has had an impact in our cash flow in the current period. As demonstrated in prior years, the business model has been able to scale and deliver positive free cash flow as revenue volumes increase. Finally, to the balance sheet, Audinate has $111 million in cash and cash deposits, a robust cash position with no debt. We're actively looking to deploy this capital through internal development and also external market opportunities to enhance our long-term value and ultimately to accelerate growth. I'll hand you back to Aidan.
Thanks, Chris. Slide 22 summarizes our priorities for the remainder of FY25.
Probably unsurprisingly, our priorities from the first half will continue on through to the end of the financial year. With the expected continuing headwinds for chips and modules, our first priority is to focus on sales and marketing activities and drive revenue. As described in our previous release, a range of activities are underway to drive FY25 revenue, including, as I mentioned earlier, event-based pricing for Dante Connect, launch of the new AVIO adapters, and a new professional version of Dante Virtual Soundcard. With video, we're focused on getting our OEM video customers' products to market whilst maturing our video product portfolio. Again, as with audio, it's the same model. Repeat orders for video units are the thing that will generate revenue growth for Audinate video.
Building on the successful launch of Dante Director, we aim to deliver a roadmap of expanded features, and we're also building out the organization and processes necessary to operationally deliver and scale our first SaaS product. Slide 23 summarizes the FY25 outlook. I'm not going to read out all the bullets on this slide. As I already said earlier in the presentation, I think the real takeaway from this is that Q2 gross profit for FY25 exceeded Q1 gross profit, and we expect further moderate growth in the second half of FY25. We do expect continued softness in chips and module sales throughout the remainder of the financial year. However, this impact is largely already factored into our full year outlook. We expect a return to normal order patterns and growth by FY26.
We are really expecting FY25 to be a transition year followed by a return to sort of normal programming in FY26. The good news is that underlying demand for Dante remains strong, and this is indicated by growth in embedded software sales, which are not subject to the same level of impact from inventory. There is continued growth in leading indicators like design wins and new product introductions. On the installation and integrator side of things or the use of Dante, we continue to train something like 4,000 Dante AV professionals each month or 4,000 audio-visual professionals each month take one of our training courses. FY25 will be a transitional year for us, probably not a surprise to many of you on this call. However, the strategic opportunity for Audinate remains intact and largely ahead of us. With that, I will hand back to Chris to coordinate questions.
We have questions. Just one question, Aidan's threatened you. How many video endpoints are we estimating are now in the market?
That's a good question. I think that's something at the moment we would consider to be reasonably confidential. We're not actually disclosing that at this stage. We will undoubtedly do that sometime in the future, but unfortunately, I don't have an answer I can give you right now.
That's fine. Another question just in relation to Dante Director. Just getting a little bit of color and flavor around the market response and early take-up from Dante Director.
Yeah. It is early stage for us with Dante Director. I think we kind of exited out of a sort of beta trial, and we have a number of paying customers.
Where we are is that it's targeted towards lower sized or the smaller end of the market. And we think that, well, our experience has been that we've actually got quite a lot of interest in the larger scale implementations in the market. Today, we already have a product in that space called Dante Domain Manager. We can, and it's similar functionality, but it's an on-prem solution rather than a SaaS solution. We are exploring those larger scale implementations with our on-prem solution at the moment. We are actively adding new features and improving the SaaS products over time. I would say we're in a phase of sort of rapid iteration of Dante Director and pretty early stage with respect to customers and growth.
However, there's been plenty of interest from both integrators and end users and manufacturers who are pretty much all looking to have some sort of cloud strategy for their audio-visual products. Many of the smaller customers or many of the smaller manufacturers in the industry are really looking at Dante Director as a way of them piggybacking on Audinate's infrastructure to deliver their own cloud-based functionality.
Okay. Just a question around, will DBS Pro become available as a perpetual license?
That's a product management question. Perhaps. At this stage, I'm not sure what the plans are for that.
Just looking at design wins. Just asking you around design wins. Was the total design win base available? Did the competition capture? Just around design wins. I think 61 design wins in the first half of the year, up 15%. I think it's a very solid result.
As Aidan has indicated previously, it becomes the future or generator of future revenue opportunities. I think it's a positive result in relation to design wins. Just a couple of questions around the operating expenses. We previously flagged that the operating expenses for the full year were expected to be around 7%-9%. In the first half, operating expenses were down 3%. We do expect to see some moderate growth in operating expenses in the second half of the year. If anything, it's well towards the lower end of the range and the guidance that we provided post the AGM results. Just a question around acquisitions, Aidan. Just to give some color around what we're looking at in terms of the strength of our balance sheet and what acquisitions we may be looking to.
Yeah.
The way I think about this is that I don't only think about acquisitions. We do think about potentially strategic partnerships, but also inorganic development. Outsourcing, can we get something built using the capital that we have? There are a variety of opportunities that we have in the pipeline. Some are really small, and then some of them are larger. Typically, they're all some form of strategic opportunity. There's technology that's useful and that's complementary to either our audio business, our video business, or it's cloud-based control and management type functionality. Those sorts of processing and software or control and management of devices, orchestration of audio and video functions, all of those things are potentially of interest to us.
The purpose of doing those acquisitions is really, the purpose of exploring either inorganic development or acquisitions or partnership is really around trying to drive our long-term strategy. The aim here is to find things that can really help accelerate and complement what we're trying to do rather than to, say, explore a strategy of sort of rolling up a number of revenue-generating opportunities into a bigger business.
Just a question around AV installs. The launch of the new AV, the Phoenix range, in the second half of the year, just some information around that and expectations as to how that is going to help and support revenue.
Yeah. What we have, we have a successful business with our AVIO adapters so far. They've been going pretty well, notwithstanding the usual supply chain ship shortage type stuff that's happened over the last couple of years.
We have had feedback from integrators, so these are the people who are installing audio-visual systems, that it would be helpful to have different connector types on them that are easier to terminate in the field, and also some clips and mounting options that would enable them to be put inside walls, equipment racks, under tables, that sort of thing. It is the same basic guts of an AVIO adapter. Actually, it is using our next generation Dante chipset. That is that Dante Pro S1 chip. That is just essentially a natural evolution. That supports the media encryption functionality, and it will also support all of the control and monitoring functions that we want to deliver through Dante Director. I think it is a better package with respect to the next generation features. It is a natural evolution of the product.
I think it also has the potential to increase volume as it's a better fit for commercial installations. It's not that people don't use the existing AVIO adapters in commercial installations. It's just that that product is more designed for more of a sort of event-style production use case rather than something that's designed to be attached or screwed inside a ceiling somewhere and part of an installation.
Just a question specific to Dante Director. Updates for telemetry and retention, how are our customers responding to that?
It says ODM on there, but perhaps it means OEM. Yeah, it's one of those interesting challenges. I think it depends on the customer quite a bit. We have quite a long tail of customers who make, generally speaking, one type of product.
They may make amplifiers, they may make microphones, they may make speakers, but they do not make the whole portfolio of products. Generally speaking, those sorts of customers respond quite well to any of these cloud-based monitoring and management products, but also anything that they can use to add more value to their products from a control and management perspective. For the larger players, many of the larger players already have a cloud-based platform of their own or something that they have under development. In that case, the opportunity for the larger customers who are more sophisticated is for them to do more of a sort of cloud-to-cloud style integration with Dante Director or Dante Domain Manager. From a sort of positioning perspective, I think we do not see ourselves as providing the single pane of glass in all these various applications in the industry.
We think that manufacturers and managed service providers and potentially IT teams or AV teams and large corporates, they are more than capable of building out their own dashboarding and sheet panes of glass, that sort of thing. I think the best thing we can do is to provide a toolbox and building blocks that enable either our manufacturing customers or our managed service providers, all those people, to get value from Dante Director through particularly APIs, so web-friendly APIs that allow them to do integration rather than making them all use our dashboarding technology.
There was just a question in relation to tariffs and what impact we would see that having on our business. I think in relation to tariffs, I think the final result of where tariffs will end up is still up in the air.
We've internally looked at a number of ways in which we could look at the tariff situation. I think we're just waiting for some of the final legislation to come through and understand what we need to do from there, Aidan.
Yeah. I think that's one of those topics of great speculation, and I don't think we really know where that's going to land out. I think the immediate effect, I think there was a sort of 10% increase that was being mooted. A number of our products, like chips in particular, the Ultimo chip, already had a 50% tariff on it. It's kind of, at least initially, it's moving from, say, 50% to 60%.
They probably are some things that we can do, but I think we need the dust to settle a little bit on where the actual tariffs will net out before we do anything particularly significant.
A question in relation to AI. Any views on how AI may impact our marketplace or Audinate or our competitors?
Yeah. I think there are this in several ways. I think it already is impacting through processing algorithms of various sorts. Even on this call, there's quite a bit of machine learning involved in the gating technology. I wish the machine learning would have kicked in and fixed that loop that we had in the very beginning. That would have been awesome, but it didn't. I think on the processing side or processing audio and video, there's plenty of opportunities for machine learning and AI techniques of various sorts.
I think there's also lots of applications for interaction with spaces, particularly sort of multimodal interaction audio-video. Less use of things like tablets and things and more use of typical speech or video interaction, motion, movement of hands, things like that. Finally, I guess I would say that a lot of what goes on in the audio world is or the audio and video AV installations is a kind of design project. You can sort of think about the audio-visual professional as being a sort of creative person who's generating or designing a user experience. They do that with various sort of drawing tools and design tools.
I think there's potentially applications for things like generative AI to help with the automatic or more rapid design of audio-visual installations from relatively loose or more verbal types of specifications as opposed to sort of very detailed specifications. I think there's lots of opportunities there. I mean, you can imagine sort of dump RFP into AV installation generation type thing and then have it sort of spit out various configurations and designs. I know various people are having a stab at that in the industry.
Just some questions around video, whether we're contemplating an adapter for video and more generally just understanding traction in video above and beyond what we've communicated in the presentation.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess we've sort of said we've given us updates in terms of design wins and things like that with video, which I think has been great in the presentation. Not sure when this question exactly came in. On the question of whether we do an AVIO adapter, I mean, the purpose behind doing the audio AVIO adapters was really, I mean, it had a strategic purpose, and that was to there are a lot of brownfields installations with analog audio equipment in them. We wanted to be able to deploy new networked Dante products into brownfields installations. What was needed was a portfolio of this goes to that kinds of problem-solving products. That's why we created the AVIO range. There wasn't really in the market a set of products that actually fit that particular niche.
We decided that it was strategically important for us to provide those products and make them ourselves. On the video side of things, one of the nice things about having the portfolio of video products that we do is that there is a range of cost-effective and also very high-performance Dante video products that are out there. At this stage, I think our manufacturing customers are actually producing a pretty wide, a decent portfolio of video products that look and smell like AVIO video products. At this stage, we do not have any plans to make a video AVIO. Will that always be the case? I am not sure. It is not what I would call burning urgent right at the moment for us to do that.
I think our main aim with video is to basically help our customers, our manufacturing customers, to get as quickly as possible to market with the products they are designing. A number of those products look a hell of a lot like what we would imagine a Dante video AVIO product would look like. Big picture, it's still a Dante product, and we don't necessarily need to make it at this stage.
Thanks, Aidan. Just a question on FX risk and strengthening or weakening of the U.S. dollar. Has FX been taken into account when factoring in the guidance? We make assumptions on what the exchange rate may be in the second half of the year. We invoice in U.S. dollars. We also have some natural hedge there in U.S. dollar costs.
A strengthening U.S. dollar against an Aussie dollar will benefit our Aussie dollar conversion going forward. Yeah, we do not see that as a significant factor in the second half of the year in terms of how that is going to impact our earnings guidance. A question just in relation to reordering patterns now relative to, say, six to eight months ago and the inventory position of our customers. Certainly what we are seeing is more shorter lead times. Our customers are ordering probably more regularly, but in smaller doses, which is as we have expected to occur. In terms of inventory positioning or position across our customers, we are in communication with our customers to understand their inventory position, and it varies across the customer base.
I think the reference to say, "Look, six of our top 10 customers have reordered," gives us an indication that they've worked through any inventory balances that they have. The four of the 10 that we referenced that haven't ordered, clearly, they're still working through their balances. We're in constant dialogue with them and our sales team to understand their future needs and requirements. As Aidan said, those issues have been factored into the guidance for the outlook for the full year. I think we've answered the flavor of most of the questions. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. That's good.
Okay. All right. Thank you for your time and questions today. I appreciate your interest in Audinate. Again, I think it's nice to be speaking to you about more positive news than perhaps the last couple of updates.
I'm looking forward to the next half, the final half, and getting through FY25, and then looking ahead to FY26 and beyond, where I think hopefully we'll be returning to more normal programming. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time today. Hopefully, we'll talk to you again soon.