Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. My name is Aidan Williams. I'm co-founder and CEO at Audinate, and with me is Rob Goss, our CFO. In the first part of the call today, we'll be talking through the investor presentation that accompanied our financial statements, both of which were lodged with the ASX earlier today. You can ask questions at any time during the call by typing them into the Q&A box in your Zoom client. At the end of the presentation, we'll collate your questions and answer as many as possible in the time that we have available. As many of you will be aware, Audinate provides networking technology to manufacturers of professional audio and video equipment. Our technology distributes audio and video signals across a standard IT network, eliminating the need for traditional specialized AV cabling.
We are primarily a software company, although we have traditionally packaged our software for sale into electronic chips, cards, and modules, so that equipment manufacturers can readily incorporate our technology into hardware designs. Our customers are primarily manufacturers of professional audiovisual equipment like Yamaha, Bosch, Bose, brands you've heard of, and AV professionals who design and install audiovisual systems for clients around the world. As you can see on the map, we are a global company with headquarters in Sydney, Australia. However, we have several locations around the world, primarily, primarily providing sales and support functions with video engineering teams in Cambridge, in the UK, and Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. Before getting into the details of the presentation, I'd like to draw your attention to three highlights, I guess, three takeaways from our results.
First, we have again delivered excellent Australian dollar revenue growth of a tick over 50% and US dollar revenue growth of 40%. A freer supply of chips enables to-- enabled us to convert continuing demand for our technology into revenue. We delivered a positive free cash flow of $2.5 million in the second half of the financial year. Second, I want to highlight the long strides we've made with Dante Video this year. We've gone from seven to 48 video products released by our OEM customers during the year. We shipped over 10,000 video units, achieved 26 design wins through our video technology, and delivered new video products for OEMs and users. It's very encouraging to see such healthy traction with Dante Video.
Thirdly, we continue to deliver results in our core audio business, with our OEM customers releasing a further 261 products over the course of the year. We released our first cloud product called Dante Connect, which enables broadcast and corporate content production workflows to be delivered via the cloud. In the second half, supply constraints for Ultimo chips substantially eased, and we were able to deliver considerably more volume to our OEMs. With the successful launch of Brooklyn 3 earlier in the year, and the increasing supply for Ultimo chips, we're confident that supply chain constraints are now behind us. I'll return to these points later in the presentation. We've included slide three in the pack 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 that Dante technology is integrated into millions of devices in thousands of audio, video installations around the world. With the full alphabet of applications, ranging from A for arenas and stadiums, B for broadcast, through to Zed or Z for zoos. Slide 4. Many of you will have seen this slide before. This is a high-level map of Audinate's products and customers. On the left, you can see a vertical column where we have characterized our products into those purchased by manufacturing customers and those primarily purchased by AV professionals. The bottom row of the slide categorizes products, further breaks down those categories into chips, cards, and modules, which are some kind of electronics and software.
Dante solutions for manufacturers end up embedded in thousands of AV products and form the bedrock of the Dante platform. The products shown in the middle row are primarily purchased by AV professionals or by users of AV equipment. AVIO network adapters enable Dante technology to be added to an existing brownfield installation in a cost-effective manner and pull through a variety of other Dante products. In addition, we provide a full complement of PC and Mac software products to connect computer and application software to Dante systems. The top row is the category for configuration and management software, and includes the very widely used Dante Controller software, which is needed to initially set up a Dante system, and Dante Domain Manager, which professionals use to manage Dante systems at scale.
By way of applying this map, I'd like to highlight the launch of a new software video product for ASPEED chips, which you can see in the bottom right-hand corner. That's the Dante AV-A, and our first cloud product, Dante Connect, which you can see in the right-hand...... Also, supply constraints for hybrid products for OEMs, the bottom row, chips, cards, and modules, have largely eased with availability of chips for Ultimo and the delivery of a drop-in replacement for Brooklyn. Slide five summarizes Audinate's financial results for the first half. Again, I want to draw your attention to three points. The first is the excellent revenue results, indicating continued demand for our technology. The second is an improvement in gross margin percentage, up to 72.1% for the full year, from 71.2% in the first half.
Gross margin % has been impacted during this COVID period by variations in product mix, a need to prioritize reliable supply over price, and design changes to mitigate chip shortages. Ultimately, we believe gross margin % will return to the historical average and continue to rise with an increased proportion of revenue coming from Dante software designs. Finally, the improvement in operating cash flow is consistent with the scalability of the business, with increased revenue dropping through to improved EBITDA and operating cash flow. Notably, Audinate generated positive free cash flow of AUD 2.5 million in the second half. Rob will speak to much more of the financial details later on in the presentation. Slide 6 shows key operational highlights for the first half.
Strong demand for Dante continued during the year, or Dante audio continued, with 142 design wins, up 12% from the previous corresponding period. Each design win represents a new or existing customer committing to developing at least one new type of Dante product. As Dante technology becomes increasingly entrenched as the de facto standard, design wins become a more revealing metric than the simple total of OEM customers. The total number of Dante-enabled products continues to grow and hit a record high of 3,853 products, with over 10 Dante-enabled products on the market for every product using the next alternative technology. A healthy 261 new Dante-enabled products were released by manufacturers during the year.
Some products were retired as chip shortages forced manufacturers to do redesigns, with the total number of Dante-enabled products now at 3,853. There are 138 OEM brands developing their first Dante-enabled product at the moment. Strong demand for Dante, a positive industry outlook, and much improved chip supply bode well for future revenue growth. Slide seven summarizes the various supply chain impacts affecting Audinate over the last few years. I'm really proud of the team's adaptability, the hard work and resilience, dealing with chip shortages, product redesigns, factory shutdowns, and the like during this period. We've worked hard to develop product design variations that eliminate critical dependencies on specific chips that have been in short supply.
The combination of increased chip supply and the design variations we now have on the shelf, closes the chapter on COVID-related supply chain problems for us. It is remarkable, in my view, that over the three-year period, impacted by COVID and supply chain disruptions, Audinate has delivered a US dollar revenue CAGR of 31.8%. There are, of course, still risks ahead of us, high interest rates, potential recession, geopolitical risks, et cetera, et cetera, but we consider these to be typical macro factors that need to be managed in a business as usual fashion. Slide 8 summarizes progress against our FY23 objectives. I won't cover everything in this slide, but I would like to hit a few highlights. It has been critical to transition our products and manufacturing customers across to chips or modules that are available in reasonable quantities.
The Brooklyn 3 project has been particularly successful in that regard, with most manufacturers able to easily transition across to Brooklyn 3. Additionally, we have worked hard to deliver Dante software solutions on a wider variety of chips, creating alternatives for chip down solutions like Broadway and Ultimo. As you can see, we continue to drive design wins in our core business, mostly the audio products, and OEMs continue to bring products to market. Design wins and products coming to market are a leading indicator of future revenue for Audinate. Progress continues to be made on improving operational efficiency, with a substantial increase in capability in the Philippines, and the delivery of a configure price quote, or CPQ module in Salesforce to improve sales efficiency. Manila is now our second largest office by headcount. Slide eight summarizes our success with Dante Video.
I am delighted with the progress that we have made with video products during the financial year. We exceeded our goal to ship 10,000 video units during the year, and we collected over $3 million worth of revenue from video products. A total of 34 OEM brands have licensed Dante video technology, and you can see many of those brands on this slide. A total of 48 Dante video products have been launched by OEMs, up from seven at the 30th of June last year. We released several software solutions in the video space, Dante AV-H and AV-A, and Dante Studio, and we have made substantial progress integrating the designs and technologies that we acquired with the Silex video business into our hardware products. We've worked hard on delivering video solutions during FY23, and the reaction from our customers and users has been very satisfying.
I look forward to enjoying the fruit of that hard work during FY24. Slide 10 spells out what's ahead for video in FY24. As I've said on previous occasions, we aim to build out a complete toolbox of video product offerings that mirror our capability on the audio side. This means an appropriate suite of hardware and software product for manufacturers, integrators, and end users. For manufacturers, we will continue to refine our video software stacks for H.264 and ASPEED chips. Those stacks are called Dante AV-H and Dante AV-A, respectively. We will be releasing a next generation Dante AV Ultra product, our highest performance hardware solution.
The newest AV-- The new AV Ultra product will combine the video technologies we acquired from Silex with our Dante networking technology to deliver a best-of-breed solution capable of meeting the highest bonding real-time performance needs, but yet still operating on a cost-effective 1 gigabit per second net infrastructure. For integrators and end users, we'll be refining our Dante Studio, PC and Mac software and adding video support to our Dante Connect offering. We will be following our typical playbook over the next year in the video side of things, driving manufacturer adoption of video technology, getting first products to market from video equipment manufacturers, and continuing to broaden our portfolio of video pro product offerings. We aim to finish FY24 with a footprint of over 30,000 Dante Video products either installed in the field or shipped. Turning to slide 11.
During FY23, we launched our first cloud offering called Dante Connect. It enables broadcast and corporate content production to be shifted to the cloud. Content production has historically been an on-premises activity, with equipment, operators, and talent traveling to, traveling to specific locations to record or create content. The rise of network connectivity and the cloud enables real-time production to be delivered largely with software and with operators in remote locations, even at home. It is the type of thing we're doing with the results call today. Dante Connect enables millions of Dante devices already in the field to be used with cloud-based production workflows. It launched recently in April at the NAB Show, and it has been very well received with a strong pipeline of initial customers and integrators expressing interest. We also launched our first professional services offering during the year.
That's something quite new for Audinate. The aim is to provide paid professional support for integrators and manufacturers using Dante in their AV system designs. We don't intend to replace our integration partners, rather, we want to support them with complex designs and/or troubleshooting as the need arises. The combination of support and training has been well received. Please follow the links in the deck or head over to our website to find out more. With that, I'll hand over to Rob for the finance section.
Thanks, Aidan, and good morning, everyone. Over the next few minutes, I'll explain the FY23 financial results lodged with the ASX earlier today and summarized in the accompanying investor presentation. Financial information is set out on slides 13 to 18. I'll start with slide 13, which explains some of the key revenue information for the business. In US dollars, revenue was $46.7 million, up 40% from $33.4 million in the prior year. In Australian dollars, revenue was up 51% on the prior year, with the differential growth rate due to currency tailwinds as the Aussie dollar weakened against the US dollar. During FY23, gross profit dollars grew 34.4% to $33.4 million, at a gross margin percentage of 72.1%.
The overall GP margin strengthened in the second half, up from the first half, 71.2%, which was affected by a series of supply chain impacts we outlined back in February and Aidan referenced earlier today. We expect that the GP margin will improve gradually over time, based on the speed of transition to Dante software implementations. From this point onwards, all amounts quoted will be in Australian dollars. Growth in Dante units amounted to 30% for FY23. We use the term Dante units as the catch-all expression for the number of unique AV products and computers with Dante inside, whether that be units shipped are chips, cards, and modules, completed CCM increased by 22% in FY23. In May, this increase was driven by a recovery in the supply of Ultimo chips in the second half.
From a revenue perspective, CCM was up 42%, primarily attributable to Brooklyn, up over 30%, Viper boards, and Ultimo chips up over 50%. Turning now to software, a broad suite of products summarized in the footnote on slide 13 or in the product roadmap on slide four. In FY23, software units shipped increased 42%, due mainly to a second half recovery in reference designs and ongoing growth in Dante Embedded Platform. From a revenue perspective, software grew 34%, with this growth attributable to reference designs up over 50%, Dante Embedded Platform up over 30%, and Dante IP Core up over 45%. Our sales backlog remains at near record levels and provides us with excellent visibility over the first half in particular.
That said, given easing supply chain pressures, we expect that our customers will wind back the timeframe of forward orders, which is likely to see the sales backlog normalize from the current elevated level. Historically, our revenue split has been around 45% in the first half and 55% in the second half. However, for FY24, we expect a higher proportion of revenue in the first half as we substantively reduce the backlog of Ultimo chips to customers. That said, we still currently expect revenue growth in the second half over the first half. In terms of the income statement set out on page 14, you can see that EBITDA for FY23 amounted to $11 million, up from $4.3 million a year ago. Employee headcount ended at just under 200, up from 178 a year ago.
Together with the annualization of the headcount added in FY22, resulted in a 23% increase in employment costs in the current year. Sales and marketing expenses grew to $4.4 million from $2.6 million in the prior year. The main factors driving this increase were travel, up $800K, and trade shows, up $700K, as COVID restrictions eased. It is also worth noting that this expense line is denominated in US dollars and therefore was unfavorably impacted by currency movements in FY23. Other operating expenses were $5.4 million, up from $3.8 million in FY22, driven by increases in software subscriptions, travel, and professional costs.
Given the positive outlook, the company recognized $7.7 million of tax losses, making up the bulk of a $9.3 million income tax benefit in the income statement in the current year. It should be noted that this item has no impact on any of the targets for short-term or long-term incentives for staff and management. It is, of course, one-off in nature. On Slide 15, there is an EBITDA bridge outlining the key movements driving the $6.7 million increase in EBITDA in FY23. Please note that we've shown the increase in revenue dollars at the same rate as the prior year and quantified the impact of FX tailwind separately. The other factors on the graph have already been explained in my earlier commentary.
In terms of the year ahead, we budgeted at a US dollar exchange rate of approximately $0.69, and at this rate, a $0.01 movement impacts EBITDA by roughly $700K. Remembering that Audinate is a structurally long US dollar business. On Slide 17, you will find the cash flow statement, which shows operating cash flows of $12.4 million compared to operating cash flows of $1 million in the prior year. Pleasingly, the adverse working cap impacts experienced in FY22 did not reoccur, and the business generated over 100% cash conversion for FY23. It should also be noted that the business generated positive free cash flow of $2.5 million in the second half.
We continue to focus on improving cash flows in FY24, remembering that the payment of bonuses in the first half will increase cash payments in the first six months of the year. The statement of financial position is set out on Slide 18. From our perspective, it is a clean balance sheet with no debt and net assets of AUD 90 million. This includes AUD 40 million of cash and deposits at 30 June. I will now hand back to Aidan to cover the outlook for FY24.
Thanks, Rob. All right, slide 20 summarizes our priorities, essentially around growth for FY24. Clearly, we continue to continue to deliver video products and units to our customers, and that continues to be a substantial priority for us. We aim to end FY24 with over 30,000 Dante video products in the field or ships. We will continue to deliver video product releases and improve video support in our PC, Mac software, and cloud product offerings. Dante Connect has had a very promising start, and we aim to ramp up delivery of that solution during the current year or the coming year. Our channel is through market-specific third-party integrators, and we aim to broaden the number of integrators over time, including through relationships with major cloud providers like Amazon.
A constant theme for Audinate is managing growth and continuing to scale by improving and automating our internal processes. The more efficient we are, the more we'll be able to translate ongoing demand for our products into improved profitability and cash flow. On slide 19, we can turn to the, oh, it's slide 21, I guess. We can turn to the FY24 outlook. As I said earlier, I'm really proud of the team's adaptability, hard work, and resilience in dealing with the various supply chain and COVID disruptions over the last few years. With this chapter essentially closed, I'm looking forward to delivering strong GP dollar growth with some clear air.
With the supply chain fire drill finally drawing to a close, we anticipate that OEMs will return to a longer term theme of transitioning their products from using Dante chips, cards, and modules, so hardware solutions of some sort, to using a software Dante implementation of some kind. This migration is expected to be relatively neutral for gross profit dollars and should result in gradual margin improvement, with a slight moderation in headline revenue growth. Irrespective of the pace of this migration, we expect the % growth in US dollar growth, gross profit dollars to be consistent with historical performance. There are, of course, still risks ahead of us.
I think I mentioned a few of them before: potential recession, high interest rates, geopolitical risks, et cetera, et cetera, but we consider these risks to be the sort of things that we need to manage in a more business as usual fashion. We aim to grow headcount by 15%, investing in both core business activities and growth in video, cloud, and professional services. As usual, we remain alert for M&A opportunities that can help accelerate our strategy in areas like video, cloud products and services, and software-based signal processing. We enter FY24 with a strong backlog, which gives us good revenue visibility. Growth, in combination with the structural operating leverage inherent in our business model, should drive improved profitability, positive free cash flow.
Whilst continuing to grow the core audio business, I'm looking forward to further solid gains for our video and cloud products during FY24. With that, I'll hand back to Rob to coordinate questions.
Thanks, Aidan. We've got them up on the screen there for you to refer to. I'll, I'll handle the first two, and if you want to turn your mind to answering the next two after that. They're also on the phone there, if you'd prefer to reference them there. The first question is: How does a 3x increase in video units translate into increased revenue for FY24? What we've, what we've referred to then, in terms of the numbers for next year, is the 30,000 is a combination of units shipped during the current year and units that we expect to ship in FY24.
One of the things with the video revenue is that there is a bit of an impact in transitioning off the historical Viper board onto the next generation product. Aidan sort of referenced that. There is some different impact, headline revenue impact on that. The focus for us in their head is the ecosystem, all end up translating into revenue, and we'll update the market a half year around how that's tracking. Second question: I noticed that you removed the words "Expected double revenue over the medium term." Any reason why this has been included in the release? We in fact, refer back to the time that that quote was originally made by our chair, with the release of the FY21 results.
We confirm, our expectation, we will in fact, have double the revenue, during the FY24. Aidan, do you want to take the third question?
Yeah, sure. The third question is: There was a steep reduction in OEM brands with products in the market. Can you provide any additional information around this? Is it of any concern? I think what's really going on is that there were certainly some Dante products which were taken off the market, and that includes OEM brands kind of co-coming off it as well. What happened with all of the supply chain disruptions is that manufacturers had to make some difficult choices about whether to continue product lines using older, possibly not available chips anymore, or using chips that are expensive. In some cases, they decided not to manufacture those products. If it's a margin on the product, then we still have that OEM account, but the more ...
there is a development for OEMs, then we'll do the product, and they won't decide to not carry that. It... I think some manufacturers took some products market.
There's, there's questions that we have with from the team.
Yep. Thinking on video, when we think video in terms of ecosystems and trying network design and integrating with its use, think about where we are now compared to a standpoint audio. I think in the last sort of six months or about one year ago, I would make the comment along the lines of, I think probably going 3x faster than we were one year ago. particular, the, I think 48 product now in our market. It took me to that sort of number of products on the market with our audio things. I think we have a strong benefit in industry. People have a positive experience of using Dante technology.
They understand it to be reliable, they understand it to be easy to use, and I think that has translated substantially more progress, but the, but also the, the reputation of the technology itself. How you think about FY24 video versus FY23 from higher revenue, margin, lower than your Dante price? Yes, exactly. Well noted. The Viper products are the tiny products, white label, turnkey products that we acquired this business. The way you should really think about it is that Silex, and of course, Audinate, was acting simply as a contract manufacturer, white label, finished white labels to a small number of brands in the industry. That is not Audinate. Audinate's business model is to provide technology and technology components to many, many manufacturers in the industry.
It's, it's generally speaking, you get a higher revenue for those boards. They are lower gross margin because contract manufacturing is a lower gross margin business than selling technology and intellectual property, like software. But there are, you know, larger-- there's, there's larger revenue and gross profit dollars. The way I would talk about this is, our aim is to ship many, many Dante units, and the way for us to do that is to provide AV Ultra-- next generation AV Ultra components, to provide software stacks for H264 and ASPEED chips. All of those products will be a component as opposed to a complete video product that's shipped, but we'll be able to ship many, many more of those.
The long game for Audinate is to focus on our core business of being a technology supplier, possibly also incorporating the technology into chips or modules. We want to be a scalable, high margin technology supplier to the industry, rather than a relatively low gross margin contract manufacturer in the industry. We'll be going through that shift as Viper customers transition from the full white label product that they're currently buying to a reference design manufactured by one of the original design manufacturers or contract manufacturers who are in the industry already.
Aidan, what we, we might call time on the questions that we already have in the Q&A. We will be able to get to all of the questions that have been submitted so far. Yeah, effectively, we'll, we'll draw a line under those that have already been received to this point. If you'd like to handle this, this next one, and, and I'll do the one after.
On the OEM R&D?
Yep.
Yep, sure. The question is: Where are we in terms of OEM R&D required to do designs? Are the majority of major contributing items done? I would say yes, but possibly not because these designs are all done, because as people chips supply, and the chip suppliers kind of Chips are now more available than they were. Enough people have transitioned, and there's enough chip supply to not manufacturers in, and force them to do various kinds of chip designs. We think, but also the Broadway solution. The pressure is off, and most manufacturers would rather be strategic about how they do their redesigns.
That's what was behind my comment, that we expect many manufacturers to go back to a more strategic approach to thinking about pricing, in particular, how they can use soft Dante across a portfolio of different kinds of products as they redesign. I think the pressure's off the chips sort of things. It's not totally, but the cost of redesign is expensive. If you're going to do that, then manufacturers, I think, will start to think about next generation solution rather than chips, cards, and modules.
Thanks. There's a few more here, which I'll, which I will. Multi-part question from an analyst. Thanks very much. I wonder if you can remind us how much they contributed in the second half. Our practice is not to disclose whether you or universe employ in an earlier half unit, sort of being the impact in a particular half when we effectively weren't shipping many Ultimos at all. That should give you some gauge on the order of magnitude. Dante Connect and Professional Services, how much do they contribute in FY23? Remind us if they're incremental to TAM.
Yeah, very, very nominal contribution. We, we would sort of like it in FY23. They were both launched toward the end of the year. Professional services absolutely incremental to TAM. Dante Connect is sort of a way for us, or another example of us accessing the, the software and services TAM that we've, we've referenced in the past.
Can I comment about professional services? I wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that we've become a services business like, you know, an accounting practice.
Okay, we'll carry on here. Clarify historical range for GP growth. Reference 26%-30%, that's how we've done, or that's what historically done in U.S. revenue. We've given the two and five-year range for gross profit CAGR in the investor presentation, that range is 24%-32%. Expectations of gross margin going forward, I think we've sort of talked to the drivers behind that. I think the near-term sort of impacts around supply chain should, should ease, sort of certainly over the next 12 to 24 months, which would, would put us up sort of at that 75% level where we were historically. How we go and, and grow beyond that is sort of really around the pace of change to the software implementations.
Video gross margin compared to the existing base, well, it, it is lower, by way of the, the, the strong bias to, to the revenue from Dante AVIO. I think a better way of thinking about that longer term would be analogous to the, the gross margin we generate from audio products. FX, how much of your OpEx base is in Australian dollars versus US dollars versus others? In terms of, in terms of US dollars, all of our cost of sales is in US dollars. The majority of the marketing line is in US dollars, and sort of headcount would be, sort of less than 15%. Approximately sort of half of the headcount is Australian dollars, and everything going through sort of other operating costs, is in the main, AU dollars.
You can probably back solve on the rest in terms of employment costs. Over 100% cash conversion FY23, cash payment first half year higher from bonuses. So you see free cash flow potentially go negative in first half 2024. Yeah, potentially we could— we expect to be free cash flow positive over the on a marginal basis over the course of FY24. First half does have that additional hurdle, as you've rightly pointed out. And the the final, final question—
I can-
You want to answer that? Yeah.
Yep.
With respect to the 15% headcount growth in FY24, are most of these staff to be allocated to growth projects? If so, which growth projects? How many like, headcount are likely to be out of the Philippines, and how we should think of the cost per FTE in FY24 as a result? The really simple answer to this question is yes. Like, 15% headcount growth is absolutely associated with growth. That's because our core business continues to grow strongly, and we also need to invest in that in order to continue to scale. We also want to invest in the newer initiatives like the video side of things and the cloud as well. In terms of proportions, I don't have those in mind, Rob.
I need to jump. I have those at his feet. We absolutely want to make sure that when we're investing in the scalability of the business, we are looking at using locations like the Philippines for our core business as usual operations. That means we both with automation and with also building up a location like the office in Manila, that gives us quite a bit of leverage with respect to the Australian dollar per headcount example. With respect to the engineering side of things on, you know, product development, we obviously have.
Thanks, Aidan, and I'll just sort of round out on the numbers. There is a reasonable sort of chunk of those associated with the establishment of the QA function in Manila over the course of the next year. There is that sort of bias, and it should sort of drive down the average cost per FTE of the headcount that we're adding over the next financial year relative to what you're seeing in the existing cost base.
Okay. All right. I think that's it for all the questions that we have on the screen. I think we have answered all of the questions live. If you've got sort of further questions, feel free to shoot an email through or something like that. Thank you very much for your time this morning. If, if things have been a glitch, a little glitchy for you as you've been watching, my apologies for that. Hopefully, the overall result has enabled you to understand how we've been going this year. Thank you again, and with that, we'll call this particular call to a close. Thank you very much.