I would now like to hand over the conference to Ms. Virginia Spring, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good morning to our Australian participants, and good afternoon and evening for those joining us from the Northern Hemisphere. My name is Virginia Spring, and I'm responsible for investor relations at Articore. With me today, I have the Articore Group CEO and Managing Director, Vivek Kumar, Group CFO, Derek Yung, and Deputy Group CFO, Curtis Davies. Vivek and Derek will provide an overview of our first half FY 2026 results shortly, and we will then open it up for questions. The key information for today's call is contained in the ASX announcement and investor presentation released to the market this morning. I would like to call your attention to the safe harbor statement in our ASX release regarding forward-looking information. That safe harbor statement also applies to this investor call. This session is being recorded, and a transcript will be released to the ASX.
I will now hand you over to Vivek.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, I'd like to formally welcome Derek Yung. We are very pleased to have him join the group at this important stage of our turnaround. Derek brings more than a decade of CFO experience across leading e-commerce and marketplace businesses, with a strong track record of driving both growth and transformation. Great to have you here, Derek. Turning to the half, the first half of FY 2026 represents a clear step forward in our turnaround. The group delivered a material improvement in profitability while strengthening the foundations for sustainable growth. Margin expansion has been meaningful. Gross profit increased 6%, and gross profit after paid acquisition, or GPAPA, rose 8.9%, driven by supply chain synergies and the artist fee enhancements designed to strengthen the marketplace dynamics.
The marketplace revenue trajectory is improving, with the rate of decline moderating through the half. This reflects stronger marketing effectiveness, more disciplined pricing and promotion, and an increased contribution from repeat customers. The group delivered its highest first half EBIT in five years, a AUD 14.3 million year-on-year turnaround. Reflecting confidence in the sustainability of these improvements, we have upgraded FY 2026 EBIT guidance to AUD 6 million-AUD 10 million and tightened underlying cash flow guidance, now AUD 8 million-AUD 12 million. This slide highlights the structural improvement in the business over time. This half, gross profit margin expanded to 48.8%, the highest first half ever, and GPAPA margin reached 27.6%. At the same time, we have reduced operating expenses each year since the first half of FY 2023.
Since then, OpEx has decreased 35%, a significant reduction, especially given the impact of high inflationary environment and ongoing cost pressures. Together, margin expansion and cost discipline have driven the AUD 14.3 million EBIT turnaround delivered this half. These results reflect deliberate execution. Over the past 15 months, we have refreshed the leadership team, sharpened our turnaround strategy, and transformed the way the business operates. We have combined the operations of our marketplaces to remove duplication, drive efficiencies, and improve execution. The integration of our supply chain and marketing teams has been the key driver to the margin expansion and revenue stabilization we have just seen. We have just begun the consolidation of our technology stacks. This is an important next phase. It will reduce complexity and costs over time and unlock future opportunities for the group, shared capabilities, faster innovation, and improved cross-platform learnings.
The flywheel remains central to the investment thesis. A quick overview of how the flywheel works: creators upload designs to the marketplaces, customers purchase products printed on demand by third-party fulfillers, and we take a service fee for each sale. Because creators only earn when they sell, the group benefits from an asset-light, pure-play business model. As more creators join and upload designs, we attract more customers. More customers drive more sales, which attracts more creators, reinforcing the cycle. At the same time, greater volume drives fulfillment scale efficiencies, lowering the net cost and expanding margins. Stronger margins allow us to reinvest in customer acquisition and further accelerate the flywheel. When the flywheel gains momentum, it generates compounding benefits for all participants, more earning opportunities for creators, better value and selection for customers, and importantly, increasing cash flow for shareholders. Our focus is on building that momentum and sustaining it.
Supporting our flywheel are four structural competitive advantages. First, scale of content. Over 75 million designs, with more than 10,000 designs added daily, creating one of the largest and most dynamic catalogs of unique user-generated content globally. Second, fulfillment scale. A diversified global network of 42 third-party sites, allowing us to flex volume, optimize costs, and maintain efficient delivery. Third, network effects. We now have more than 3 million creators on the platform. As more creators and customers participate, the platform becomes increasingly attractive to both sides. And fourth, operational leverage. A global team of 200 people generating approximately AUD 1.8 million in revenue per employee. Together, these advantages make the model defensible, scalable, and increasingly efficient as volume grows. Our role is to actively manage and maintain the balance of the marketplace, driving stronger economics.
That's why in the first half, we took decisive action to strengthen the marketplace by enhancing our artist account fee to reward value-adding behavior and support sustainable margins. Since introduction, account fee revenue has increased by more than 35%. A key strength of our marketplaces is the quality and resilience of our customer base. In the first half, repeat customers accounted for more than half of marketplace revenue across both platforms, 51% at TeePublic and 53% at Redbubble. At TeePublic, growth over recent years has been underpinned by increasing revenue from repeat purchasers. This reflects targeted investment in life cycle marketing, improved personalization, and enhancements to the site experience that make it easier for returning customers to discover relevant content.
We are now applying the same learning to Redbubble and further investing in TeePublic and Redbubble as growing our repeat customer base is central to achieving sustainable long-term growth. Consolidating our technology stacks is an important lever to unlock further OpEx efficiencies and to accelerate future growth. Technology costs represent roughly a third of Group's overall operating expense base. At present, we operate two technology stacks, which create duplication and complexity. That presents a significant opportunity. During the half, we consolidated the engineering and product teams to operate as one function. We are exploring an offshore capability to augment our U.S. and Australia-based engineering teams with additional engineering capacity at an efficient cost base. We have begun to consolidate the technology stacks, starting with MarTech, our marketing technology infrastructure. This is strategic.
It directly supports our ambition to grow repeat customers, as highlighted in the previous slide, through improved targeting, lifecycle marketing, and personalization. This slide shows how we are leveraging AI across the entire Articore flywheel. Today, 100% of artist approval workflows are powered by AI, enabling us to detect fraud patterns, reduce manual overhead, manual reviews, and improve speed and consistency. On the customer side, 100% of search is now touched by AI, combining vector search and machine learned ranking to improve relevance, discovery, and conversion. AI-powered chat is also supporting customer service, with approximately 80% of customer chats now handled via chat, via AI. Across marketing and product discovery, AI supports more personalized and targeted engagement. Within engineering and product, AI is increasingly embedded in internal workflows and development processes, helping teams move faster and scale more efficiently.
AI is becoming a core capability for the group, helping us operate smarter, scale more efficiently, and support our broader objective of sustainable, profitable growth. We are really encouraged by the momentum we are seeing in Dashery in its first year. Dashery is a measured but exciting strategic investment for the group, leveraging our sales capability, tech platform, and global fulfillment network to build a high-margin growth platform. It enables creators like YouTubers and Instagrammers to easily set up their own branded storefronts without the operational complexity of managing the back end. Onboarding is simple. Stores can be launched in minutes, and feedback from creators continues to be very positive. In the half, Dashery generated AUD 1.3 million in NVR and GPAPA margin of 35.5%, highlighting its attractive unit economics.
Since launch, there are more than 1,200 active selling accounts, with the majority of creators new to the group's ecosystem. We invested AUD 1.8 million in the first half and expect a similar level of investment in the second half as we continue scaling the platform. I will now hand over to Derek to provide a more detailed overview of the group's financial performance.
Thanks, Vivek, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone joining us. It's great to be joining you on my first Articore earnings call as Group CFO. I've been impressed by the turnaround already underway and the clear strategy the team is executing against. The first half results show meaningful progress, and at the same time, there's significant opportunity ahead to grow the business, deepen our relationships with creators and customers, and further strengthen our financial profile. I'm excited to bring my transformation and turnaround experience to the group and to work with the leadership team to unlock long-term value for shareholders. Joining me today is our Deputy CFO, Curtis Davies, and I will now take you through the numbers in more detail. Marketplace revenue was AUD 220.3 million for the half.
We're seeing a moderation in the rate of decline, with second quarter down 3.2%, compared to down 6.6% in the first quarter. Gross profit increased 6.0%, and gross margin expanded 480 basis points to 48.8%, the highest first half to date. GPAPA increased 8.9%, and GPAPA margin improved to 27.6%, up 350 basis points year-on-year.... This reflects stronger unit economics driven by supply chain efficiencies, pricing optimization, and the new artist fee structure. Operating expenses declined 4.3% year-on-year to AUD 45.5 million, demonstrating disciplined cost management despite ongoing inflationary pressures. Depreciation and amortization declined significantly, down 60% year-on-year, following changes to our capitalization policy and a more streamlined approach to capitalized development costs.
This change better aligns reported EBIT with underlying cash flow, improves transparency in our earnings profile. In total, EBIT improved to AUD 12.1 million, compared to a loss of AUD 2.2 million in the prior corresponding period, a AUD 14.3 million year-on-year turnaround, and the highest first half EBIT in five years. Looking at the performance across the two marketplaces. Starting with TeePublic, it had a resilient first half. Marketplace revenue increased 0.3% for the half. The first quarter was flat and the second was up 0.4%. Gross profit grew 10% and gross margin expanded 420 basis points to 47.3%, driven by pricing and promotional optimization and ongoing supply chain efficiency. GPAPA increased 9.3%, with margin improving to 22.9%.
Importantly, this performance has been underpinned by strong repeat customer growth and ongoing improvements in marketing effectiveness and site experience, as Vivek highlighted. Turning to Redbubble, revenue declined 10.1% year-on-year and a half. However, the rate of decline moderated during the period, with second quarter performance improving relative to the first. Profitability improved materially. Gross margin expanded 580 basis points to 50.5%, and GPAPA increased 7.2%, with margin reaching 32.5%. This reflects the impact of pricing optimization, supply chain efficiencies, and the introduction of the new artist account fee structure. A few comments on cash. Our cash position has materially improved, reflecting the improvement in underlying profitability and tighter cost discipline.
At the end of January 2026, closing cash balance was AUD 47.8 million, a AUD 12.1 million improvement on the January balance last year. We're now guiding to underlying cash flow of AUD 8-12 million for FY 2026, tying in toward the top end of the previous range. This metric is a proxy for the group's free cash generation, adjusted for timing and calculated as operating EBITDA plus net interest earned, less payments for capitalized development costs, leases, and PP&E. The improvement in cash generation strengthens our balance sheet and provides optionality, allowing us to invest in growth initiatives. I will now hand it back to Vivek.
Thank you, Derek. As highlighted throughout our remarks, we have delivered solid progress against our FY 26 priorities in the first half. We have stabilized the revenue trajectory, expanded margins, and reduced operating costs and strengthened the balance sheet. Importantly, the foundations for sustainable improvement are now in place. In the second half, we are focused on building on this momentum and accelerating our return to marketplace revenue growth. Key priorities include growing our revenue through both acquiring new customers and increasing our repeat customer base to improve life cycle marketing, personalization, and site experience. Continuing to drive margin improvement by further leveraging AI across the group and supply chain optimizations, and advancing our outsourced engineering capability and continuing technology consolidation to improve scalability, speed, and cost efficiency.
Following the strong first half performance, we now expect to deliver EBIT in the range of AUD 6-10 million, compared to our previous guidance of AUD 2-8 million. We have also tightened our underlying cash flow guidance towards the top end of the prior range, now expecting it to be between AUD 8-12 million, compared to AUD 5-12 million previously. We continue to expect to deliver a GPAPA margin between 27%-29% for FY 2026. Overall, this updated guidance reflects confidence in the sustainability of our margin expansion and continued operational discipline through the second half. With the right team in place and a strong growth mindset, we are excited about the opportunities ahead. Thank you for joining us today. I'll now open the line up to questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Owen Humphries with Canaccord. Please proceed.
Good day, guys, and well done on the results, strong turnaround over the last couple of years. I guess, looking at the OpEx line here, it's come down a lot over the last couple of years. Just talk us through the potential for this... I guess, question one, number one here is, is that now a stabilized level of OpEx, or do you see further improvements as you integrate the tech stacks together?
... Thanks for the question, Owen. Yeah, so, as you know, the group has undergone significant, cost structure reengineering the last 9-12 months, and we're very, very happy with those results, and clearly those results are shown in, our bottom line. One thing to call out to, to kind of, you know, get to the heart of your question is, the first half operating expenses did have some, comparables that is important to call out relative to what we expect going forward. I mean, a part of that is the investment in Dashery. And you note that in our presentation, we noted that it's AUD 1.8 million in the first half. That was not an investment, that was in the OpEx the previous year. So, so that's one.
The second part is, we've also changed the capitalization policy as it was referenced in the prepared remarks. So that was also about almost a AUD 2 million change relative to a year-over-year comparison difference. And then lastly, we also made some compensation changes, where equity rewards are now tied to performance, in-year performance, but as a cash reward. So that's actually showing up in operating expenses, whereas previous years that would be booked in other expenses. So in total, if you add that up, it is a little bit over AUD 4 million, and I think if you were to take that out of the first half operating expenses, that would be more of a normalized level and what you expect in the back half.
Gotcha. Okay. So basically, so AUD 2 million on Dashery, AUD 2 million on the change in capitalization policy, and sounds like AUD 1 million or AUD 2 million from the service payments. Is that right? Moving to all cash rewards.
Yeah, in total, about AUD 4 million.
Good one. And just understand, obviously, digital marketing business here, just to understand, like, how you're seeing CAC as you kind of look to reaccelerate growth. I'm guessing it'll put more, more work to marketing. I know you got it to a GPAPA margin of 27%-29%. But just understanding what you're seeing around the customer acquisition costs in your marketplace.
Yeah. So, as you can see, the first half results are in line with our guidance for a full year, so we could continue to feel confident in our ability to deliver within the guidance. You know, we continue to make improvements on our overall paid marketing efficiency, in particular, a lot of the best practices that continue to be what we exercise in TeePublic, that we're deploying in Redbubble in particular. On the tech consolidation discussion, you heard that there is work that's underway already in terms of deploying our marketing technology across both of those companies, and we'll redesign it so that, and surely that will help us be able to deliver within the guidance, the profit margin.
Yeah, and, and just to build on that, when we look at our paid marketing or cost of customer acquisition, there are three components to it. There is clearly paid marketing efficiencies that continue to increase, and we are very happy with where the overall return on our spend levels are. Second part is our SEO traffic or the organic traffic, and the third part is our lifecycle marketing, how efficient we are in bringing the repeat customers back. We continue to focus on improving our paid marketing efficiencies, as well as bringing more of the repeat customers back. SEO has been a headwind for several years now, industry-wide.
We continue to see declines in the organic traffic, but our focus is on continuing to build the other two parts of the marketing engine, through the investment that we have outlined earlier. So very confident in terms of executing on our overall plan, which gives us confidence to operate the guidance, as Derek mentioned.
Owen, just going back to your first question, I just realized I didn't thoroughly answer all your questions. The four, the four million is a year-over-year comparison differences. So, so just to be clear, we do expect that four million to also apply to second year, second half, I would say, operating expenses.
Yeah. And just talking about your asset here, you got 3 million creators, 75 million designs on the platform. You've implemented artist fees recently with a multi-tiered structure. Just talk us through what you're seeing in the marketplace in terms of how you're curating the marketplace now through these initiatives, and the benefit, the benefits you're seeing?
Yeah, definitely. So I'll start by saying that TeePublic has always been a curated marketplace. We have had a very much of a strategy to only allow the high-quality artists and high-quality content on the marketplace, which has benefited the marketplace a lot in terms of improved search and discovery and a higher conversion rate. We are applying the same principles to the Redbubble marketplace now. Clearly, Redbubble marketplace had been a more open marketplace, but the first step was starting to really control the content that was getting uploaded that is already run. Second part is: How do we incentivize the right behaviors? And how do we really bring the right level of creators on the platform?
The artist fee changes are geared toward driving the right incentives, as well as providing the right tools to the artists, including how we activate the good quality content on both on-site as well as off-site channels. We'll continue to do the experiments that are underway on Redbubble. As you can probably appreciate, it's a very complex and vast catalog of designs, and where we are focused on is how do you- how do we surface the right designs to the right customer at the right time through our search and discovery, as well as optimizations of the overall site experience.
We are seeing some encouraging results, which is being reflected in some of the moderation and revenue declines that we have seen, as well as, margin expansion by focusing on, the content side of the flywheel. That's one of the key pillars of our growth plans ahead, of how we continue to really optimize the content part of the flywheel.
Good one. Thanks, guys. Well done.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Wei-Weng Chen with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Sorry, a bit going on today. So apologies if this has been commented on in the presentation part. But, within your updated EBITDA guidance, what's your expectations there for marketplace revenue?
Yeah. So, if you were to look at our updated guidance and look at what is the implied EBIT, you would see that we still expect year-over-year improvement in the second half EBIT compared to prior year, and much of that improvement will come from the same areas of improvement we saw in the first half. So, you know, our focus and goal is to getting the business back to revenue growth. And we'll get there as soon as we can. It's certainly our focus. We wanna do that in a profitable way. And I think we've done a good job of, you know, resetting our unit economics and our cost structure to the point that we are positioned well to do that.
You know, we're not in you know providing a revenue guidance within, you know, what we're talking about for the rest of the year. But certainly, you know, we you know feel good about obviously the performance of the company and therefore revising the EBIT guidance upwards for the second half.
Cool. Cool. All right, mate, that's all for me. Thanks.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Vivek for closing remarks.
Thank you for your time and engagement today. If you have any follow-up questions as you review the materials, please don't hesitate to reach out to Virginia Spring. We appreciate your continued interest and look forward to updating you on our progress in the months ahead. Thank you.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.