Into the Q&A box, and at the end of the presentation, we will collate the questions and answer as many as possible in the time we have available. Before getting to the nuts and bolts of the presentation, it is worth reflecting on the significance of our longer-term strategy. In a year where we were working through an inventory overhang, we shipped another million Dante units, matured our first cloud-based management platform called Dante Director, and completed the strategic acquisition of Iris . Our long-term strategy is to capitalize on the growing installed base of networked AV devices and provide the software platform used by the industry to deliver audiovisual products and services globally. AV installations are generally understood to require three kinds of functions: audio, video, and control. Today, including the Iris .
acquisition, more than 8 million audio and video devices are available in our product ecosystem. The time has come for us to invest in the third leg of the stool, the control function, and this has financial implications for FY 2026, as you will see later in the presentation. With the completion of the Iris acquisition and the onboarding of a crack team of industry veterans to spearhead our platform strategy, we've put in place key capabilities and talent that will advance our long-term vision of providing an interoperable audio, video, and control platform for the AV industry. I'll cover results, highlights, and strategy before handing over to Chris to walk through the financial results in more detail. Turning to slide four, I'm pleased to report that we have returned to half-on-half growth, with a U.S. dollar gross profit increasing 12% over the first half.
During FY 2025, our manufacturing customers have worked through their stocks of Dante chips and modules, and we believe that inventory rebalancing is largely complete, positioning Audinate Group Ltd for a return to growth in FY 2026. Pleasingly, underlying demand for Dante remains strong. Demand for our software products, and particularly embedded software used by our manufacturing customers, grew steadily throughout the year. Unlike hardware, embedded software products are delivered essentially on demand without lead times and are less impacted by industry levels. The 15% growth in embedded software revenue indicates continued growth in demand for Dante technology and is especially pleasing in light of slowing industry growth, highlighted by Avixa's reduction in their growth outlook to 3.9%. Leading indicators for the business remain positive, with design wins increasing by 12% and an additional 427 new Dante products coming to market during FY2025.
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. Overall, there are now 4,603 different Dante-enabled products on the market for AV professionals to choose from when designing their systems. The gap to the next nearest competitor continues to widen, with 14 Dante products on the market for every competitor product. Interest in Dante from AV professionals remains strong. In particular, we're consistently training and certifying around 4,000 AV professionals every month, with the total exceeding 300,000 trained and Dante-certified professionals globally. By way of a brief summary, the third column 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 network products.
As the number of Dante devices grows, platform software will become increasingly important to manage and deliver AV installations at scale. The industry shift from analog to digital networking is still in relatively early days, and our video and platform software products are 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. Turning to execution during FY2025, as you can see in the left-hand column, it has been another really busy year with product launches and improvements. The first three products relate particularly to that control and management function I mentioned at the beginning, and these are needed in pretty much all AV systems. During the year, we built out a range of features in Dante Director, and we established the organization to support our first SaaS product globally.
Dante Director is a cloud platform that monitors and manages AV installations. Dante Controller is the face of Dante to AV professionals around the world. It is software used to configure and troubleshoot AV installations and benefited from a facelift with a modernized look and feel and improved usability. Dante DeviceLink is new, I think, for investors. We haven't talked about it before. It enables remote configuration and control of a wide range of features inside audio-visual products. The devices or the features don't have to be Dante related. They might be a temperature fault indicator, a volume control, or perhaps an exposure setting for a camera. DeviceLink is closely coupled with Dante Director and has received strong interest from both manufacturers and AV professionals alike. During the year, we also extended our successful range of adapter products with a new range called Dante AVIO for Installation.
These are optimized for installation contractors with clips and screw brackets to simplify mounting and installation. We also extended our Dante Virtual SoundCard PC and Mac software, doubling the number of channels and introducing a recurring revenue model for the product. That was a good, it was a relatively simple thing for us to do, and it enabled us to increase revenue from a mature product. If you've been following Audinate, you know that we raised capital in late 2023 and have been evaluating a variety of M&A opportunities. I'm really pleased to have closed the IRIS transaction since it is so well aligned with our long-term strategy, and the team is basically excellent. IRIS is a leading cloud-first remote video production platform that enhances our AI-driven video capabilities and aligns beautifully with our vision for unified audio, video, and control over networks.
The IRIS product is expected to launch publicly in the first half of FY2026. Through FY2026, we'll invest in go-to-market and product development to drive adoption and scale, bringing audio, video, and control closer together under a single interoperable platform. Finally, our financial position gives us the flexibility to invest without overreaching. We ended the period with just under $110 million Australian in cash and a pro forma balance of $72.8 million post the IRIS acquisition. That provides a strong financial capacity and optionality to invest strategically in product development for future growth. In short, we had a year where there were meaningful product launches, a strategically meaningful acquisition, and we retained the financial strength to execute, and this positions Audinate to capitalize on the opportunity ahead. Slide six shows key financial highlights for FY2025. The full-year revenue result of $40 million is consistent with previous market guidance.
As we have been saying, FY2025 has been a transitional year for us, with financial performance temporarily impacted by inventory overhang at our OEM customers and overall a more softening AV industry growth rate. The solid 7.9% increase in gross margin percentage is largely due to a product mix shift toward high-margin software products. As we've been saying for several years, manufacturers using Dante in high-volume products are increasingly shifting to embedded software implementations, and this was again apparent during this financial year with 15% growth in embedded software revenue and an improved GM percentage. Note that the cash position of $109 million on the slide is prior to the IRIS transaction close. Chris will speak in more detail to the financials later in the presentation. Slide seven breaks down hardware and software performance further.
The charts graphically tell the story of inventory overhang after the return of chip supplies in FY2024. They also highlight the ongoing growth in embedded software, both in revenue and unit terms. We believe our manufacturing customers have largely worked through their accumulated inventory balances, and we expect a return to growth in FY2026. However, industry growth forecasts have moderated, largely due to concerns around the potential impact of tariffs on demand. Slide eight highlights second half versus first half performance. As you can see, hardware, chips, cards, and module products were impacted by overstocking, particularly in the first half. Embedded software sales show relatively consistent half-on-half growth, a trend we expect to continue. Embedded software growth largely looks through stocking issues to underlying demand for Dante. Slide nine recuts our product portfolio financials in a new way. We're now splitting out our hardware products into two categories.
The first is adapter products sold to end users, and the second is embedded hardware products sold to equipment manufacturers. Likewise, we're splitting out software products sold to end users from embedded software products sold to equipment manufacturers. We believe that this categorization makes sense going forward and better reflects the main components contributing to Audinate's performance. I'll leave the rest of this slide for your reference. However, it is worth highlighting the strong second half performance of adapters as stocking issues alleviated. Lastly, the Dante Avio for Installation product range, that's the new range that we launched this year. It was launched relatively late in FY2025, and we expect a larger revenue contribution from it during FY2026. Slide 10 highlights ongoing strength in our core business metrics.
As a reminder, Audinate's sales cycle involves an OEM design win, followed by a period of 12 months - 24 months for product design to be completed, followed by repeat revenue derived from the ongoing purchase of chips or royalties as each new unit is manufactured. That goes on for the sales lifetime of the product once it hits the market. The three charts on the slide show the key metrics in the sales pipeline, starting with design wins, followed by product development, and then the ultimate launch of that product for sale on the market. As you can see, these indicators have tracked well through FY2025 with 129 design wins representing manufacturing brands signing up to use Dante technology in their products, 194 brands currently developing their first Dante-enabled product, and 427 new Dante-enabled products hitting the market during FY2025.
Just as a reminder, each new product for sale generates repeat revenue for Audinate. The strength in these core business metrics bodes well for FY2026 and beyond. On slide 11, you can see progress against our FY2025 objectives. Given the headwinds in the first half, we focused on sales and marketing activities that could drive revenue. Notably, that's deepening the relationships with system integrators. These are the folks who design AV systems and specify what technologies and equipment get installed. Secondly, we have continued to drive video adoption and video product development, launching multi-channel support in our Dante AV-H and Dante Studio products. This enables significant conferencing and higher education use cases, and I'll say more about IRIS later in the presentation. Thirdly, we launched the first in a range of installer-friendly adapters. These have different connectors and mounting options that are suitable for installation under tables.
We also delivered Dante Connect into a number of cloud-based audio production applications, and we developed new features enabling audio contribution and monitoring using standard web browsers in Dante Connect. Finally, we have invested in Dante Director, maturing its product features and building the organizational structure to support our first SaaS product globally. Through the year, we delivered an improved user experience for Director with streamlined onboarding, multi-language support, and remote performance monitoring. We have included slide 13 as a one-page summary for Audinate. I won't talk too much to this slide because we've actually touched on many of the things on this slide already, other than really to highlight the breadth of applications for Dante technology listed in the column on the right-hand side of the slide. Just as a reminder, we benefit from this diversity.
For example, during COVID, corporate conferencing and higher education experienced tailwinds, and while corporate conferencing remains a significant market for us, it has moderated since the COVID days. On the other hand, the lifestyle market has recovered strongly. This slide is also included for your reference. We've touched on each of these product developments earlier in the presentation. One thing I would point out, though, is if you look at the bottom right of this slide, you'll see a couple of images of our new Dante AVIO for Installation product range. Slide 15 is also included for your reference. It shows the major features of Dante Director, broken into a standard tier and a professional or enterprise tier. Dante Director is our first SaaS product, and it's aimed at monitoring and managing audiovisual installations, as I said before.
It is, as a reminder, a strategic first step in our plan to offer a portfolio of management and monitoring functions for Dante installation. Dante Director has been in the market for just over 12 months, with an initial launch targeting smaller-scale systems. Over the next year, we will be building out a series of enterprise security features in Dante Director that will enable a variety of larger-scale corporate IT applications. Pleasingly, there is a strong pipeline of beta customers for the enterprise version of Dante Director, and we think that there should be good conversion with those customers. Dante Video continued to grow during FY2025. A total of 122 Dante Video products were on the market at the end of FY2025, with a total of 64 brands licensing Dante AV in some form.
During the year, we continued to improve our product portfolio, delivering a multi-channel version of Dante AV to manufacturers and a multi-channel version of Dante Studio to end users. Multi-channel support is particularly useful in conferencing and live applications. Clearly, the IRIS acquisition is very significant to our video strategy, and notably, it brings an ecosystem exceeding 1 million units into our product portfolio. As with the Cylux acquisition that we undertook a few years ago, Audinate will continue to support our customers, particularly our manufacturing customers who are relying on Dante or IRIS video functionality in their products whilst we merge the two product portfolios over time. Slide 17 summarizes the IRIS transaction. In terms of strategic fit, IRIS strengthens our video capability and accelerates our vision for interoperable control and management.
It aligns with Dante's core markets today in corporate, education, entertainment, sports, government, house of worship, and extends the value of Dante Director and Dante Studio. As a product, IRIS is cloud-based. It is a control-first AV platform with a simple browser-based monitoring and control function. Like Dante, it is manufacturer-agnostic and launches with advanced camera features, including AI auto-tracking, color correction, and cloud recording, with a roadmap to expand into a variety of other devices, including video encoders, decoders, and vision mixing products. With respect to traction and go to market, IRIS has strong early adoption from 14 leading camera brands, with a white-label version of the IRIS product being launched in April 2025. Public launch of the IRIS branded product is targeted for the first half of FY2026, and it will use a SaaS model with monthly and annual subscriptions. The team is frankly excellent.
It is founded and led by Noah Johnson, who has prior experience founding a remote video production services company in a similar space. The IRIS and Audinate teams are an exciting combination of capability and talent, with a shared vision of the future. It's an exciting time as we look to accelerate and deliver that vision together. Now I'll hand over to Chris for the finance section.
Thank you very much, Aidan. I'll take you through the financial results for FY2025. First, we'll look at the income statement, and we're presenting the income statement in Australian dollars. Revenue for the year was A$62 million, gross profit of A$51 million, and that represents a gross margin of 82.3%, which is up from 74.3% in the prior year. Operating costs were A$50.5 million, an increase of 6% on the prior year. Overall, this results in underlying EBITDA of A$651,000 for the year. If we break revenue down further, as already alluded to by Aidan, revenue from our chips, cards, and modules products was A$22.1 million, which was down 50% on the prior year. This is a reflection of the impact of the OEM inventory rebalancing that's taken place throughout the year. Pleasingly, though, our software revenues were A$7.1 million, which represents a growth of 11% year- on- year.
Again, highlights the underlying demand for Dante products, which is strong and shows performance where there's minimal impact from the inventory fluctuations. Encouragingly, performance as the year has progressed has improved. Second half revenues and gross profits were up 12% on the first half, and this provides a really solid base as we look towards growth in FY2026. Turning to our gross margin, the transition to software continued to reshape that revenue mix, and gross margins expanded to 82%, driven predominantly by sales from high-margin software categories. In FY2026, we expect to maintain margins above the 80% range. Finally, on our cost base, operating costs are A$50.5 million, an increase of 6% on the prior year. This reflects our continued investment in products to drive growth in the future. The headcount increased from 225 - 235, supporting product development and go-to-market capabilities.
Primarily, this investment sat with the Dante Director product. We also increased our marketing expenditure with a focus on supporting product launches and also expanding our industry training initiatives, which are very important in building the network effect. Turning next to our cash flow statement, Audinate delivered positive operating cash flow of A$7.5 million for the year compared to A$25.4 million for the prior year. After investment in intangibles and fixed assets, Audinate had a free cash outflow of A$11.3 million during the year compared to a positive free cash inflow of A$6.9 million in the prior year. The choice to continue our strategic investment in new products such as Dante Director, such as video, to drive future growth opportunities has clearly had an impact on cash flows in the current period.
As we've demonstrated in prior years, Audinate has a business model that's able to scale and also to deliver positive free cash flow as revenue volumes increase. Finally, on the financial section, just turning to the balance sheet, the key highlight here is that at 30 June 2025, we allotted A$109.9 million in cash in term deposits. After accounting for the acquisition of IRIS, which will take place in July, has taken place in July, so on a pro forma basis, cash was A$72.8 million. Audinate is well funded to execute on our strategy. I'll now hand you back to Aidan.
Thanks, Chris. If we turn to slide 23, this summarizes our priorities for FY2026. Firstly, it is imperative that we continue to drive the core of our current business, shipping Dante audio and video units to manufacturers. The total ecosystem of installed products is the foundation for a future software platform business. Related to that is a goal to partner deeply with our manufacturing customers and deliver combinations of products and services that fit specific applications and market segments like a glove, for example, in higher education or conferencing applications. Third, it is critical that we support the IRIS team through product launch and scale-up. This will initially involve building out go-to-market functions in sales, support, channel management, and marketing.
In the short term, we will continue to support Dante and IRIS video customers with the stacks that they are using as we plan to merge the two technologies in an orderly fashion. Finally, building on the successful launch of Dante Director, we aim to deliver a roadmap of expanded features. We're also building out the organization and processes necessary to operationally deliver and scale both Director and IRIS products globally. Slide 24 summarizes the FY2026 outlook. I won't talk through all of the bullets on this slide. From a big picture perspective, ongoing strength in the core metrics cited earlier indicates continued progress in what we like to call the profitable land grab part of the business, with U.S. dollar gross profit growth expected to be between 13% and 15% over FY2026.
This represents two to three times the overall industry growth rate, which is itself slowing due to tariff-related uncertainty. As I said earlier, our long-term strategy is to capitalize on the growing install base of Dante devices and provide the software platform that the industry uses to deliver audiovisual products and services globally. The acquisition of IRIS, the maturing of Dante Director, and the onboarding of industry veterans specifically to develop our platform business are strategic moves aimed at delivering our long-term vision. Making these moves involves investing, and we therefore expect operating costs in FY2026 to increase by 25% over FY2025. Over the medium term, we expect operating leverage to return as these investments scale with revenue growth outpacing cost growth. To wrap up, there is an industry shift underway, and that's from proprietary AV hardware to more IT-style networked software-driven solutions.
I can't think of a company that's better placed than Audinate to drive and capitalize on this industry transition, and I'm excited by the talent and capabilities we now have at Audinate to make our vision a reality. With that, I'll hand back to Chris to coordinate questions.
Thank you, Aidan. The first question is anonymous. What are the growth expectations for IRIS? Given the purchase price, you must believe adoption by customers will be strong.
In terms of IRIS, I think we break that down into two parts. I think the public launch for IRIS will take place at the end of this calendar year. Ahead of that launch, there's more cost to invest into IRIS to ensure that that launch is going to be successful. Certainly, in terms of expectations for IRIS and more broadly the video category, we do expect very strong growth, not necessarily in FY2026, but as we look towards the outer years in 2027 and beyond.
Yeah. Actually, I might jump in because it relates to another question, which is a question from Michael Wu. There's a question: IRIS white-label product has already launched under the PTC Optics Hive linked brand. What has the initial customer feedback been like, and what are you learning from these early deployments? I would say that there are a few things that make us optimistic about the revenue prospects for IRIS. One is that it is a different business model. IRIS is actually monetizing the end user. They have a vertical software application for managing video production sold to the end user, much like Dante Director is sold to an installation or an end user. Compared to our current business model, where we are a component inside a manufacturer product, it has a different revenue profile, and it is also a SaaS-oriented service with recurring revenue as well.
It has quite a different structure in terms of its business model. IRIS is at a relatively early stage, and the questioner notes that Hive has already launched. That is actually one of the things that gives us good confidence about the product market fit and that these guys have an application which can grow and scale over time. The company is at an early stage, and we need to invest in its go-to-market in sales and marketing functions, but we do expect a good response. The track record of the founders in essentially a services company that does this kind of live production gives us quite a lot of confidence that they've got a good product market fit and that we'll be generating not necessarily loads of revenue.
We'll see initial revenue in FY2026, but it will be really FY2027 and beyond when we start to see significant revenue from the IRIS product range.
Next question from Tim Plum just in relation to inventory destocking. An update there, and just giving some flavor around OEMs that have paused orders for Brooklyn and Altimo and whether they're back in the market. Just given the current trajectory, when we would expect that Audinate works our way through these headwinds. What I'd say in relation to inventory restocking, I think at the start of the financial year, we certainly outlined that we expected the impact of the inventory challenges to last throughout FY2025, and that's certainly been the case. I think a couple of data points, we have seen certainly an improvement as we've progressed throughout the year in terms of our revenue profile. Certainly, if you look at first half, second half, we've seen an improvement of 12% on revenue.
If we look at our OEMs, we look at our top 20 customers for Brooklyn and for Altimo in FY2024, and of those top 20 customers, 12 have reordered. We're still working our way through that, but certainly seeing an improvement is probably the best way to describe that, Aidan.
Cool. Okay, I believe that one's answered. A question. Can you quantify the impact you've assumed from U.S. tariffs in FY2026 on the top line GP growth?
I think tariffs are somewhat unknown in terms of their impact. We're working through our supply chain and ensuring that we are manufacturing in markets and locations that make most sense. I think the biggest impact from a tariff perspective, from Audinate's perspective, is just the somewhat unknown as to the impact it's going to have on the U.S. economy, U.S. market, and AV demand more broadly. I think we'll certainly have a better understanding of that as we work our way through the first half of this financial year.
There's another question, which is, is Dante Director tracking according to expectations? Platform software was up only 4%. I could quip, I guess, that it depends on expectations. From my point of view, the way I think about Dante Director is in the context of AV systems overall. I mentioned that AV systems generally have an audio, a video, and a control component in them. Dante Director is really extremely important for us from a strategic perspective to be able to deliver control and management functions. We have an on-prem version of the product called Dante Domain Manager, and we've got a cloud version of that product. We launched Dante Director really aiming at small-scale audiovisual systems, and our intent was to really reduce the friction on onboarding that type of management solution at the low end. We have got customers with that.
We've learned a lot from doing that, but we have found that one of the significant areas of interest is actually from larger-scale systems and corporates in particular. I think Dante Director hasn't disappointed me in the sense that as a product, we have matured it and it's got traction in the market, but we think that there's a significant opportunity in the larger-scale systems and corporate and IT applications in particular. There are probably a couple of questions around new video products released from OEMs slowed quite a bit from the previous half. Is this likely to be temporary? I think there was another related question, how do we feel about the video land grab? Has this been in line with expectations? Are we able to find strategic investments similar to what Yamaha did in audio back in the day? I would combine these together.
We have had promising growth on our video units in the past, and it is true that it has slowed in the last half or so. In terms of have we been able to make strategic investments, absolutely. That's part of the rationale for IRIS. IRIS really has two pieces. One is that even though they are offering a cloud-based remote production product, there is an ecosystem of interoperable products associated with that IRIS ecosystem. That base of camera products is something like a million products. IRIS both jumps our video addressable units in terms of the number of units in the Dante ecosystem forward by a million units, and also provides a control-oriented, vertically integrated solution. IRIS is hitting both the video land grab side of things and also the control and management side of things. From that point of view, it is an extremely strategic acquisition.
I think the thing with IRIS is that we need to manage the transition. We've got customers using Dante AV today. We will continue to support and manage those software stacks. IRIS actually also has a device stack as well. Clearly, there are synergies that we can have between the product development we have today with Dante AV and the IRIS software stack and solution that we can exploit going forward.
There's just a follow-up question around IRIS costs for FY2026 and the additional step up in FY2027. I think we're going into 2026 with a base level of cost that we think will allow the launch of IRIS to be successful. Based on revenue that's generated from IRIS, we'll have an impact on the additional cost that we invest into the IRIS business. At this stage, we're factored in the cost for 2026, and based on revenue, we'll adjust our estimates accordingly as revenue comes through.
There's a question here. Have you experienced or seen within the industry any impact of AI on your hardware and software? If so, have you made allowance for SaaS revenues impact? For us, SaaS revenues are quite early. I see technologies like AI as ultimately enabling us to grow our SaaS revenues or enable us to jump ahead of the way people do things in the industry today. I think there's lots of interest in using AI in the industry. There are some early products that are out there, particularly in the control and management space, sort of diagnosis systems trying to automatically fix some fault, for example. I think it is super early days in the industry.
I think that AI is the kind of technology which is going to bring quite a lot of disruption to an industry that today is largely driven around physical pieces of equipment that get installed and plumbed into audiovisual systems. A technology company like us, who provides audio and video signals into software, is very well positioned to take advantage of AI and to disrupt the incumbent kind of hardware model for shipping and installing boxes into the industry.
Yeah, question just in relation to, did you see any pull forward demand in the second half for hardware sales as U.S. importers sought to get ahead of tariffs? I think the answer was no. Overall, around 40% of our revenue is shipped into the U.S., so it's not an insignificant amount. In the second half of the year, we haven't seen any significant material pull forward. That's been consistent with what we've heard throughout the AV industry as well through the industry body Avixa.
I think maybe I'll add another comment to that. I think one of the things that's going on for importers is that there have been various exemptions and things that have been applied. I think the musical chairs haven't quite stopped, and people haven't figured out what the final tariffs will be. For manufacturers, that situation is also the case too. I think one of the things that's likely to happen over the next, for example, the tariffs on China-imported electronics and materials, that was kicked down the road another three months. I think it's November when that decision, the deadline, has been extended to. One of the things I think that will be the case is that the simple arbitrage between manufacturing in China and not manufacturing in China, that arbitrage will close. I think many manufacturers are currently just sort of waiting for the musical chairs to stop.
Once they do, they'll figure out what to do in terms of reconfiguring their supply chains.
Have you addressed that one?
I have not. There's a question, is IRIS only generating revenue from Hive at the moment before the public launch? That's correct. IRIS is essentially, it's not quite pre-revenue, but it is relatively small amounts of revenue at this point.
Question from Jenny, just in relation to long-term incentives imply spiking growth in FY 2027. What's going to drive this? I think this relates directly to the investment and the increase in cost base that we are forecasting in FY 2026. We have a number of new product launches that have launched in 2025 and again in 2026. It's that investment in Dante Director and in particular IRIS, where we're expecting to see an increase and acceleration of growth in FY 2027. I don't know if you add to that.
No.
FY 2026, again from Jenny, just FY 2026 expectations is a 15% growth. Just asking around what is the bridge to get there, how much is driven by hardware, recovery IRIS contribution, or are you potentially discounting or being conservative? I think the answer is no. At this stage, in terms of revenue, that's our expectations of where revenue is going to sit for FY 2026. Obviously, it's a combination of things that is going to drive that growth. Certainly forecasting some recovery as we go into FY 2026 in our hardware products, in particular chips, cards, adapters, and also AVIOs. In terms of contribution from IRIS, not a significant contribution in the FY 2026 year. Again, the launch is going to be the backup for this calendar year, expecting a far bigger contribution from that business as we enter FY 2027.
Okay. Just sorting through a question. I think we should... There are quite a few questions. We're just sort of scanning through. Chris, I might get you to scan through and figure out what you'd like to do as sort of bundling together some of the more analyst-y questions.
Yep, certainly.
There's a whole series of questions in here on U.S. tariffs, expectations, growth, and things like that. I might just say a few more words on that. I think the challenge with the tariff world at the moment is we just don't quite know where it's going to land. There's essentially a level of maybe paralysis with respect to just waiting to see where things will settle out. Because of that lack of clarity, I think people just haven't done much pulling forward of orders. I think that may have been the case for some consumer electronics products, but in our case, we're not seeing significant pulling forward of orders. That would also probably apply mainly to hardware-oriented products, electronics and chips and things. These were also the type of thing that many manufacturers had inventory of anyway.
I think the calculus as to whether to buy more was probably biased more towards, okay, let's not do anything and figure out where the tariff world is going to set out. The biggest thing I think in the tariff world is again the restructuring of supply chains. It used to be the case, and Audinate is a great example of this. We had dual manufacturing in China and in Malaysia. Anything we would ship to the U.S., we would ship out of Malaysia, and that was not subject to the China tariffs or the Chips Act tariff, for example. One of the observations I would make is that that very simple arbitrage between manufacturing in China, manufacturing not in China, that will go away.
There's a sense in which manufacturing locations are going to equalize more, and the figuring out what the optimal thing to do in the new world order, where there's sort of more tariffs applied more broadly across different countries, I think that's a work in progress for us for sure. I think many of our manufacturing customers are in a similar place. Really, the big uncertainty is what the impact with tariffs will be on demand. From an industry perspective, Avixa is certainly taking the view that if costs go up, then overall demand will go down. I think many economists would take that view.
A question in relation to the connection between revenue growth and OpEx growth in the short term and whether we see that as a permanent step up in the cost base. For FY2026, we're forecasting revenue or gross profit growth between 13% to 15%. We're expecting our cost growth to exceed that at 25%. The drivers of that are certainly IRIS, where we've got investment ahead of the product launch at the end of this calendar year. As Aidan has outlined, that continued investment in new opportunities around Director and in particular building out the Dante platform. We certainly don't see that step up is necessarily going to be permanent, and what we want to see is certainly that connection and nexus between revenue growth and cost growth. Certainly in the short term, we're prepared to invest. The balance sheet remains robust and will enable us to do that.
There's a time-bound opportunity here that we're looking to continue to generate growth in the business.
Okay, so there's a couple of, I'm going to answer these too. What are some of the changes in business process or product you have done that would enable you to better manage customer purchases or prevent or better manage future industry inventory overhangs? Yeah, great question. It's like, do you learn from the things that have happened? Yes, absolutely, we have. One of the things that our sales organization is actively doing is every quarter they will do calls with our top 20 manufacturers and we'll have a conversation about inventory. That is at best imperfect because many of our manufacturing customers don't disclose levels of inventory to us or don't want to. However, we do get telemetry from a number of them. Obviously, we also can pay attention to things like ordering patterns. Internally, our systems are better than they were with respect to tracking opportunities.
If there are, in particular, we had some quite substantial blocks of Dante modules, for example, which were associated with some products that ultimately turned out to be not very successful in the field. Through no fault of ours, it's just that the product was not selling as well as it otherwise would have done. Getting our account management folks to be on top of those large orders and tracking those orders and then trying to come up with a view on the probability of conversion of that order and not assuming it's going to be 100%, that type of process improvement is part of our budgeting and forecasting. There's an element of learning from experience of this as well. It is absolutely the first time that I've personally been through this sort of inventory whipsawing process, and it certainly taught me a few lessons along the way.
The other thing I would say structurally about products is that the more our larger customers move towards using a software solution, an embedded software solution of some kind, the less that we are in the supply chain piece for them. That does tend to the increasing use of software-oriented solutions, particularly in audio, de-risks our visibility and/or dependence on things like chunky orders of things like chip, cards, and modules. There was a second question. There was a product-related question as well. I'll take that one off. There was a question. At the first half result, you spoke to a 12 months or 18-month plan for enterprise security and encryption. Has there been any notable progress over the last six months? Yes, is the answer to that question. I didn't major on it in the presentation.
At the last trade show, which is InfoComm, we had a showcase on our booth showing three of our manufacturing customers, including Sennheiser and I think QSC and someone else, I'm forgetting. A microphone, an amplifier, and a signal processor box. Several of them. We were showcasing support for media encryption, encrypting the audio and video passing over the network and the way that that then connects to Dante Director for configuration and management. Enterprise security and encryption is, I think, a latent feature. I think it is going to be required more and more over time, in particular in jurisdictions like the European Union, where there's, for example, regulatory requirements around IT security and encryption in products.
Do you want to take that one?
Time. I'm just.
Times.
There's a question. What do you need to do to access the enterprise market for control? How much time, effort, etc. are required to get to a minimum viable product? What does it take to get to an acceptable product? What does IRIS mean for this? Great question. My answer to this is probably not to spell out precisely what we would do from here going in, but to actually say that this is one of the reasons why we have hired three people who are industry veterans who have walked this walk over the last 15 years, 20 years. They come from a background of actually delivering audio, video, and control, and control is a significant part of what happens in these systems. Having onboarded those people, we are expecting to develop a plan for creating the control functions that are needed.
IRIS is obviously a significant building block in that, as is Dante Director. The combination of that talent plus IRIS plus the Dante Director product that we have in the market sets us up pretty well to adapt those products together. Over the next 12 months-18 months, we'll be releasing control and platform-oriented products, which hopefully will join the dots for you.
Question just in relation to margins. How should we think about gross margins first half, second half in FY2026? We're forecasting gross margins to be in line with FY2025 in FY2026.
Yeah, for that one. There's a very simple question, which is when do you see a foot return to historical growth rates?
Good question. My crystal ball, unfortunately, is cloudy around that. The way I would answer this is that Audinate's profitable land grab, that part of the business, is really a penetration story. In my view, if we're doing well on our profitable land grab, we should be growing that business at something like 2x- 4x the underlying growth rate of the industry. Will that be a return to historical growth rates of 25% or 30%? I think that's unlikely for the next, certainly in FY2026, I think that's unlikely. Not because we are failing to continue to penetrate with Dante technology.
It's just that over the last few years, there have been some really significant tailwinds for the AV industry, driven by the hybrid working revolution that's occurred post-COVID and the desperate desire to get every university online likewise. There's been a variety of things that have happened that have really driven strong industry growth, and we were the beneficiaries of that. I would expect us to continue to grow at some multiple of the underlying growth rate of the industries.
Notice of time. The question in relation to with some of your larger customers reordering, is the demand headwind? Are there any demand headwinds, and are they going anywhere?
I think in terms of the way we look at FY2026, I think there's certainly some uncertainty that's been created in relation to tariffs around demand. We'll have a better understanding of what that all means as we work certainly through the first half of the year. I think as Aidan has outlined, you've got a softening, I think, of the AV growth rate expectations slightly as we've progressed through 2025 and into 2026.
Okay, so we're just conscious that we're getting towards time, so we should probably just have a quick scan. There are a couple of questions related to competition, competitive landscape, you know, those sorts of things. I might glom a couple of those together. There's a question about if people are not reordering, are they going somewhere else? There's a related question about how do you see the competitive landscape generally, particularly in control? What about OpenAV Cloud and things like that? Periodically, we engage in an exercise where we think about competitive analysis. The last time we did that analysis, we certainly have seen some effects of the chip shortage coming through. We're manufacturing customers because of supply chain constraints and our limited ability to deliver when we couldn't get chips. They then started to develop products that were using other technologies, their own AES-67 solutions, things like that.
We have seen some of that, but it hasn't been what you'd call a sort of significant or continuing shift. There was some usage of different technologies at the margins a couple of years ago. It was essentially at the margins and didn't give us a strong cause for concern at the time. I would say that the continued consistent growth in embedded software products is a great indicator of the underlying growth of the Dante product ecosystem. There was another, the related question is to do with the competitive landscape with respect to control. That sort of divides up in a variety of ways. There are incumbent companies in the industry where control is a significant part of their product offering.
That's often the case for the large signal processing vendors, the Crestrons, the Extrons, the QSCs, people like that, who sell the box really in the center of the AV system, the kind of brain. Much of the control functionality is actually delivered in a vertically integrated walled garden through one of those vendors. That's a whole bucket of competition. There are also some other companies that are just doing only control functions of various sorts. There are some startups out there, and there's also some other companies that have been around for a little while. I would say that none of those companies at this point have got significant traction.
One of the key advantages that Audinate has in this area is access to a footprint of 8 million devices that we can actually, we've got our software stack in those things, and we can control and manage a lot of functions in those devices in a way that many other people can't. OpenAV Cloud, we're sort of paying attention to that and watching that. I think it's an interesting example of an industry body or consortium which could be quite beneficial to us. In many respects, it speaks to the desire that people have for interoperable control and management functions. A lot of it is about having good APIs. Part of what we're doing with Dante Director and now IRIS in the control side of things is to have APIs that can be used.
We don't see ourselves necessarily as the single pane of glass, the one ring to rule them all. One of the things we realize is that many large organizations have a variety of different control and management systems, and we need to play nice with whichever ticketing system they're using or whichever sort of background control and management products that ultimately they're using to manage their system. Thank you for your questions. We've been unable to get to them all. I appreciate your time this morning. I may see many of you in the roadshow. If you have other burning questions, please don't hesitate to email us, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you very much, and thank you, Chris.