I would now like to hand the conference over to Will Lopes, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Welcome to Catapult's investor conference call for our full year FY 2026 results. I have with me Bob Cruickshank, Catapult's Chief Financial Officer. This morning, Bob and I will present our results, our strategy and FY 2027 outlook, then take questions from participants on the call. FY 2026 was a transformational year. Catapult increased its ACV base by 28% while delivering a record 18% on Management EBITDA. We executed three acquisitions, doubled the size of the company, launched a number of new products while maintaining focus on our customers. That combination of scale, discipline, and execution is what this business has been built on. FY 2026 was also a year when we significantly grew the number of teams on Catapult's platform. We increased our total team count to over 5,500 teams globally.
While our focus remains squarely on professional teams, which we'll touch on shortly, that represented an increase of approximately 1,000 teams year-over-year, exceeding 20%. This reflects the global demand for Catapult solutions and our ability to expand our footprint into more and more teams around the globe. It's clear more than ever that Catapult is categorically the global standard for performance technology, trusted by athletes, teams, and organizations across every level of sport. There is no greater near-term example of that trust than the upcoming World Cup. More than half of the national teams competing in this year's tournament are customers of Catapult. When it comes to the biggest tournament in global sport, we are there supporting the very best teams and athletes on the planet. Now turning to our results.
Before I begin, I want to be clear that all figures I reference today are reported in US dollars, unless otherwise indicated. To provide a clearer picture of our underlying performance, year-over-year growth rates are presented in constant currency, removing the noise of foreign exchange and reflecting the true trajectory of our business. One of our most significant achievement of the year is our performance in the Rule of 40. As demonstrated on slide 6, Rule of 40 is defined as the sum of annual ACV growth percentage on a constant currency basis and Management EBITDA margin. In FY 2026, we hit a new record high of 36%, excluding acquired ACV, or 46% inclusive of it. This reflects a powerful combination of annualized contract value growth and a record 18% Management EBITDA margin. That is the amount of operating profit we retain.
This breakthrough confirms that we are not just growing, but we're growing with a discipline and leverage characteristic of the world's best vertical SaaS business. The next slide breaks this down into more detail, and these numbers tell a story of disciplined, profitable growth. Our ACV grew to AUD 134 million. This was the key driver of our top line growth, where we saw revenues reach AUD 141 million, a growth of 19% year-over-year. Translated into Australian dollars, we actually reached a new major milestone, AUD 200 million of revenue for the first time. Our Management EBITDA, the key measure of our operating profit, grew by AUD 10 million year-over-year to reach $25 million.
We continue to deliver top line growth at the same time as we are dropping more operating profit to the bottom line, consistent with our strategy and the hallmark of a great scaling business. Slide 8 shows that Catapult delivered an ACV retention rate of 96.1%, an outstanding performance. Catapult sits in an illustrious company in delivering retention rates of this magnitude. It is yet another validation of the quality of our product and the integral role we play in accelerating the performance of the best athletes and teams on Earth. ACV per pro team, our core ARPU metric, grew 10% year-over-year. As in prior periods, the primary driver of this increase is the continued expansion of customers adopting more than one solution. Historically, this has been adding a video analysis, [Audio distortion ] vertical, to our wearable solutions in performance and health vertical.
However, as our product suite expanded to include Focus Live for game day and practice, Hub Pro, as well as the acquisitions of Perch and IMPECT, we are now successfully cross-selling within the verticals and improving our opportunities to expand ARPU. Given the change in our ability to sell more solutions in and across verticals, we introduced a multi-solution metric to better reflect our efforts at cross-selling. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see how we are expanding the number of pro teams with multiple solutions, which increased by 62% year-over-year. Bob will cover more about this in a moment, but this reflects excellent cross-sell progress and the growing breadth and sophistication of our platform. Perch and IMPECT are early in their contribution to this metric, which gives us confidence in the runway ahead as we scale cross-selling in our sales organizations globally.
Turning to slide 9, you can see the depth of the operating leverage on our subscription business model and the strength of our unit economics. As many of you know, our target is to keep at least 30% of every additional dollar of revenue we generate as profit. I'm pleased to say that in FY 2026, we continued to benefit from the improvements in efficiencies across our cost base, and we exceeded this target with a 41% incremental profit margin. That is despite the addition of costs that we inherited from the acquisitions we made. In fact, when you exclude the impact from the acquisitions, our incremental profit margin would have been 48%. Before I hand it over to Bob, let me also take you through some of the innovations we delivered for our customers this year on slide 10.
This year we introduced Vector 8, the world's most powerful athlete monitoring system. Faster, more accurate, and built to save coaches time where it matters most. The product is out and in the hands of the best pro teams on Earth. Even though we acquired Perch less than 12 months ago, we've also already delivered a brand-new camera system. The Perch P2 has a 37% wider field of view and a frame rate twice as fast than the original device. Coaches today will get a richer and more complete data from every training session. IMPECT is now live on the Catapult platform. As a reminder, IMPECT is an end-to-end intelligence platform covering player scouting, opponent analysis, and internal benchmarking, all built on data that IMPECT collects and owns.
They are the leading innovator in soccer analytics, and their proprietary Packing data gives teams a unique perspective on player performance. With IMPECT now in our platform, rich match data and video analysis are now unified in a single workflow for the first time. On MatchTracker, we've gone further this year with a new automated aggregation service. We are now pre-packaging event data, positional data, and multi-angle view for every team in a league, hosted, synced, and ready to analyze at the end of match day. We are also actively bringing AI to our product suite. In January, we launched an AI-powered automatic shift detection in ice hockey. Our wearable device now detect active player shifts based on movement patterns, giving coaches instant automatic workload insights, no manual tagging required anymore. This has materially extended our leadership in pro ice hockey, and it's opening doors with new customers.
That same capability is expected to come to more sports this year. Finally, Focus Live has moved beyond game day and is now live for practice. American football teams get the same real-time insights on the training field that they've always had on the sideline. We now have teams across the SEC, other NCAA conferences, and the NFL using it, which further strengthens our position as the gold standard for video analysis across the pro American football market. FY 2026 is a year I am genuinely proud of, not just for the growth numbers, but for the discipline behind it. We scaled, we acquired, and we expanded margins simultaneously. That's the compounding model we've been building towards. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to Bob to take you through with more details.
Thank you, Will, and good morning, afternoon, and evening to those of you joining today. I'm very pleased to present another excellent financial result from Catapult today. I will begin with an overview of our key SaaS metrics before taking you through our financial performance in more detail, and then hand it back to Will to talk about our strategy and outlook. I would like to reiterate that unless I state otherwise, the numbers I'm about to talk to are actual reported numbers in US dollars, and that our growth rates, which compare our performance year-over-year, are in constant currency, removing the impact of fluctuations in foreign exchange rates. As always, I'll begin by focusing on our primary metric on slide 12, our annualized contract value or ACV.
In FY 2026, we delivered 28% constant currency growth, finishing the year at AUD 133.8 million. When normalizing for the acquired ACV from Perch and IMPECT, this represented 18% constant currency growth, another strong year. It's worth pausing for a moment to reflect on this achievement. In a year where we executed several strategic acquisitions and kept organic sales and marketing headcount relatively stable, we still maintained an organic growth rate of 18% even on a larger base. This is an outstanding outcome that represents another year of delivery for our shareholders. Breaking down our overall growth rate across our core verticals, we yet again saw a healthy balance of growth in both P&H and T&C. On P&H, which includes both our wearables and Perch Gym solutions, we generated 23% ACV growth over the course of the financial year.
This vertical now exceeds AUD 84 million. A small amount, around AUD 2.5 million , was acquired with Perch. You can see that this was overwhelmingly organic growth that delivered this outcome. We continued to experience success signing new teams in soccer across EMEA and Central America and growth across college sports within North America. We actually added 460 new pro P&H customers in FY 2026, underscoring the significant greenfield growth opportunities remaining in this vertical. Our T&C vertical, which includes our video analysis solution and now IMPECT scouting solutions, generated 40% ACV growth. Adjusting for FX, at the time of completion, we added AUD 8 million into our T&C vertical from IMPECT, and the remainder of our growth this year was driven organically.
Strong demand from global soccer teams for Catapult's Pro Video Suite, as well as increased adoption of new solutions in American football, were the key sports and solutions driving this growth. Our T&C vertical is now approaching AUD 50 million in ACV, and that represents fantastic progress given T&C ACV was less than $28 million only two years ago. On the next slide, the first of these two charts will be familiar to you, our ACV per pro team. In a reflection of our successful land and expand strategy, whereby we are growing our share of wallet after we have successfully landed with a new team, this has grown again in FY 2026, and at the end of the year, it exceeded AUD 30,000 for the first time. Growth in this metric will be crucial as we work our way toward our mid and long-term growth targets.
The chart on the right of this slide shows the multi-solution teams, a metric we introduced at our Analyst Day held in March and included in the presentation we uploaded onto the ASX. With the expansion of our platform in FY 2026 from the addition of Perch and IMPECT, we are now actively cross-selling different solutions to customers within the same vertical as well as cross-vertical. We believe this metric is a great indicator of our success. On this chart, you can see that we added 506 new multi-solution pro teams in FY 2026, a 62% increase year-over-year. Importantly, over 80% of these new multi-solution teams were the result of a great cross-selling effort from our sales team, with only a small component coming via acquisition.
One of the core pillars of our strategy is to target ACV retention rates greater than 95%. Slide 15 demonstrates that we are successfully delivering on that target. In FY 2026, we delivered an ACV retention rate of 96.1%, the inverse of which being a churn rate of 3.9%. This continues to be on par with the best retention rates seen among the world's most successful enterprise software companies. As we continue to add solutions to our product suite, this will provide for an environment whereby we can continue to deliver retention rates of this quality. Let's now move on to our financial performance. Slide 16 details the composition of our revenue. As this chart demonstrates, the growth in our SaaS revenue is overwhelmingly driving the growth in our overall revenue.
SaaS revenue growth, which is derived from our ACV balance, grew by 21% year-over-year, and this drove overall revenue growth of 19% year-over-year. Positively, our media business, which is licensed to sell American college football video highlights, continues to benefit from the growing interest of global video streaming companies in producing pro sports content for their platforms, and that business continues to grow at a healthy rate. Moving now to our cost base, which we group into variable costs and fixed costs. Let's start with the variable cost slide on slide 17. Variable costs made up of COGS, delivery, and sales and marketing expenses are now within 2 percentage points of our long-term target. These costs ended FY 2026 at 47% as a percentage of revenue, just shy of our 45% target.
This also means that our contribution margin has increased from 49% to 53%, which is a very strong performance and reflects a disciplined approach to how we manage our cost base. Variable costs are the cost of growth and will continue to grow in absolute dollar terms to support our revenue growth. I think it's worth reminding everyone of the journey we've been on related to our variable cost base. In FY 2023, as we exited a period of investment subsequent to the acquisition of SBG, our variable costs were 66% of our revenues, which meant that our contribution margin was 34%. It was at that time we set ourselves a target to get our variable costs down to 45% of revenue and a 55% contribution margin.
Over the last three years, we've been disciplined and resolute in working towards this goal, and I'm pleased to see that we are now within touching distance of achieving our long-term targets. Moving on to fixed costs on slide 18, which are our G&A and R&D costs, including both expensed and capitalized R&D costs. These costs declined as a percentage of revenue by 2 percentage points to 35% in FY 2026. Absolute growth in fixed costs was primarily driven by the addition of acquired costs into the R&D and G&A functions from IMPECT and Perch. We continue to target a reduction in fixed costs as a percentage of revenue while rising modestly in absolute dollar terms. These concepts all come together on slide 19, which highlights how our operating leverage is accelerating the growth in our profit margin.
You can see the gap that is now opening up between our revenue and our OpEx as a percentage of revenue and the impact that is having on our profit margin at the bottom of the chart. Our operating profit margin has now expanded 4x in the past two years, a 13 percentage point improvement, demonstrating the operating leverage of our model at scale. We continue to make great progress towards our targeted 30% profit margin, delivering an 18% profit margin this financial year. We feel very positive about this trend going forward. In slide 20, you will see our free cash flow result. Free cash flow, excluding transaction costs, was AUD 6.5 million, slightly less than the AUD 8.6 million we reported in the prior year.
As we communicated in March, the year-over-year comparison reflects the timing of our second half FY 2026 collections, which were impacted by the acquisitions, which placed temporary capacity pressure on our finance and collection functions. This deferred a portion of receivables into the first half of FY 2027, which is reflected in our increased trade balances of $20 million at March 31st, a AUD 10 million increase from where it ended in FY 2025. That is to say, this is a timing matter, and there's no change to our underlying cash generation. As we announced this morning, since the end of FY 2026, we have collected the majority of this outstanding balance, with the remainder expected to be collected in the coming weeks.
Finally, as you can see on that slide, we ended FY 2026 with a cash balance of over AUD 53 million in the balance sheet, and we have no outstanding debt, which is a great position to be in. Moving to slide 21, which is our operating profit and loss summary. We've already touched on many of these numbers, so I will only make a couple of observations on this slide. Our gross margin performance primarily reflects the growth in Catapult's media business, which I flagged earlier. While our media business has a very high operating profit, its gross margin is lower than the rest of our business. In fact, if you remove the media business from our P&L, our gross margin would have been nearly 85%. Our Management EBITDA increased by nearly AUD 10 million year-over-year to $24.7 million.
This was a 67% increase and resulted in a Management EBITDA margin of 17.6%. It's important to reiterate that we removed the payroll tax-related share-based payments from our Management EBITDA, as this expense is unrelated to our operating profit, as we previously mentioned. Finally, our operating profit as it translates to net profit on slide 22. I'll make a number of points on this slide as we're presenting some new information here. Overall, I'm excited that our operations continue their strong performance, as we just discussed. We can also see that this is translating to strong EBITDA and net profit progress when excluding non-operational and/or non-recurring items, such as the accounting impacts of acquisition accounting.
The increase in capitalized development primarily reflects the capitalized component of the addition of IMPECT R&D team into Catapult, which we added in the last five months of the financial year. The increase in SBP or share-based payments for employee compensation and related taxes reflects the impact on employee share-based compensation of the increase in the Catapult share price, as well as payroll taxes incurred related to that increase over the last several years. As a reminder, this does not reflect an increase in dilution from share-based payments, which has actually been trending down in the last two years. You can see that EBITDA, before any acquisition charges, reached AUD 25 million, improving by 33% year-over-year. Another measure demonstrating the operating success we continue to achieve. Acquisition-related charges includes the non-operating effects from the acquisitions we completed this year.
Specifically, this includes the non-cash accounting impact from both acquisition contingent consideration and the adjustments to fair value of future consideration. It also includes the fees paid to advisors related to the acquisitions. The increase in depreciation and amortization reflects increased subscription units effectively as a result of our growth in the wearable business and also amortization of our capitalized R&D. Amortization of acquired intangibles ended FY 2026 at AUD 7.4 million. This was lower than we had initially projected in March and reflects the outcome of that independent assessment that we referenced at our Analyst Day. FX loss and other one-time adjustments consist of an FY 2026 non-operating FX loss from the valuation of certain assets from a weakened U.S. dollar and an FY 2025 one-time deferred tax credit.
Finally, interest and other primarily reflects the interest in our debt facility, which we subsequently paid down after the October 2025 capital raise. I also want to make a point here that while we do have deferred tax losses on the balance sheet, we are not expecting to be able to utilize these in the short term, and therefore they should not be modeled into our future P&L at this stage. You can find more detailed breakdowns and reconciliations of some of this information in our financial statements and our analyst pack, both of which are available on our investor website. In closing, we finished FY 2026 in excellent shape. Our team has delivered another world-class performance, and our business continues to go from strength to strength.
Catapult has never been in better financial health as we create an even greater experience for our customers and drive our business forward as the platform for global pro sports teams. With that, I will hand it back to Will to discuss our strategy and outlook further.
Thank you, Bob. Let me remind everyone why we're here and the opportunity in front of us. Our market is expected to exceed AUD 72 billion by 2030 per slide 24, reflecting the enormous growth we're seeing across our industry. Live sport is drawing unprecedented levels of viewership, interest, and investment, these three characteristics are underpinning ongoing tailwinds in sports technology. The next slide shows that our unified SaaS platform is designed to help teams make faster, smarter decisions. Our solutions save time, add contextual insights, turning information into advantage, and advantage into a competitive edge. This platform is expanding, first slide 26. The last two years have really seen an evolution of our company. Catapult is no longer a company that is predominantly selling wearable subscription. Catapult is now a fully fledged platform.
The platform includes the video analysis tools, which are now reaching global scale, including MatchTracker, Focus, Hub Pro, and RaceWatch. It also includes strength and conditioning monitoring with Perch, and now includes both tactical and scouting analysis with IMPECT. This growing portfolio solution is built for ACV expansion, and this platform is positioning us as an absolute indispensable partner to pro sports teams. Moving to slide 27. At Catapult, we are positioned to lead the AI revolution in sports technology. No one else globally occupies the space we're in when it comes to the history, quality, and scale of proprietary pro sports athlete data. We are in an incredible position whereby AI needs this data for their models to function, and we own it, and it could only be collected with our hardware, which is also the best hardware in the industry.
This is increasing our advantage even further. We've been using AI for many years as we've developed players and sports-specific algorithms related to workload. We've also used it with computer vision in our video analysis solution. More exciting is that now we can also create new agentic products on top of our tech stack to develop more solutions that help teams make better decisions, increasing our upsell opportunities. AI also expands our addressable market. By removing the analyst capacity constraint, the limitation that prevents some teams without dedicated sports science resource from fully utilizing our platform. AI unlocks deeper value for existing customers and also helps us increase a market beyond them. This further entrenches our global leader position. Moving on to slide 28, you can see that our moat is wide, deep, and defensible, and it's only getting wider.
Our one-stop platform, our flexible tech stack, our global scale, and our multi-sport solution are unmatched in this industry. The combination of proprietary data, regulatory certifications, and a global customer base creates a compounding advantage that strengthens with every new team, every new season, and every new solution we add. Slide 29 is a reminder of our long-term strategy, which is to generate AUD 1 billion in ACV. Our strategy has been to land with new teams, typically with new wearable customers in P&H, and then expand with that customer in [P&C]. Historically, we've upsold a wearable customer that had an average contract value of AUD 20,000 onto 1, 2, or 3 modules in our video analysis suite, typically increasing the average contract to around AUD 60,000.
Now, with an expanded platform that includes Perch and IMPECT, our profile to expand share of wallet is moving well north of that number. Today, we have the capability to expand the share of wallet between AUD 100,000-AUD 150,000. That combination against our track record of landing new teams means I see no reason that we can't get to our ambition of AUD 1 billion of ACV in due course. Moving to slide 30, our unit economics model is unchanged following the acquisitions of Perch and IMPECT. The ability to drive our contribution margin through cross-sell and upsell from product innovation allows us to improve unit economics while leveraging a stable fixed cost base, increasing and allowing us to increase our profit margin.
With a 53% contribution margin and an operating margin of 18% at the end of FY 2026, our unit economics already demonstrates the ability to deliver profitable growth at scale. Slide 31 brings us back to where I started this morning, on the Rule of 40. The Rule of 40 is how we measure our success here at Catapult, and at the heart of this framework are 5 key drivers, each a critical input powering our ACV growth and Management EBITDA. The first is pro team count, which helps us measure our ability to expand. With more than 4,100 pro teams today, we continue to add teams through greenfield opportunities across leagues, regions, and sports. ACV per pro team is the leading indicator in our ability to expand contract value.
We're increasing ARPU through upsell, cross-sell, pricing, and platform expansion, especially as we convert single-solution teams into multi-solution customers. This is where new solutions like Perch and IMPECT will play an increasingly more important role. ACV retention is a key reflection of our platform's compounding value. We're maintaining retention above 95% by consistently delivering value, service, and innovation. The more solutions we offer across our key workflows for sports teams, the deeper the role we play in helping teams make better decisions, strengthening the stickiness of our platform and the trust those teams place in us. Variable cost efficiency ensures that our cost to grow the business is well managed and we're scaling smart, supporting growth while not losing sight of productivity.
Fixed cost discipline is what shows the ultimate leverage on the company. With a scaled foundation in place, we are positioned to grow without increasing fixed cost linearly with our top-line growth rate. Turning to our outlook on slide 32. Our objective remains to deliver on our strategic priorities with a continued focus on generating profitable growth. In FY 2027, we expect ACV growth to remain strong with low churn, continued improvement in cost margin towards our targets, and higher free cash flow, excluding transaction costs as our business scales. In closing, FY 2026 was a transformational year and one that was fully consistent with our strategy of delivering strong and profitable growth.
We are only just beginning to realize the potential of our expanded platform, and I have great confidence in our ability to continue to drive this business forward and help improve the performance of the world's best athletes and teams on the planet. Thank you all for listening, and I will now turn back to the operator for questions.
The first question comes from Owen Humphries from Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Great, Team. Well done. Great set of numbers again. Top to bottom beating your expectations and our expectations. Just a few quick questions, if I may, and maybe it's just a simple math question for myself. One, just on the ACV on page 12, AUD 101 last year in ACV. You said organic growth was 18%, gives you kind of a round number of like AUD 119. It gives the residual around AUD 14.8 from IMPECT and Perch. On the call you said IMPECT out at AUD 8. I'm just trying to understand the discrepancies in the numbers. Is that AUD 133.8 a constant currency number?
No, I'm sorry, Owen, this is Bob. The AUD 133.8 is a kind of reported currency number.
Got you
our FX rate at the end of March.
Okay, perfect. You said IMPECT was about [AUD 8] million, wasn't it?
Correct.
Easy. On the teams number there in the second half, you've added near 300 teams. Strong growth there. How much was impact of that 300? How much was organic logo growth?
I would say the majority of that was organic, probably about 80%.
Wicked. Well done. On guidance, same statement as last year, strong growth with margin expansion. Just to kind of clarify, when you say strong growth, you're still targeting 18%-22%?
We never really say a number on that. I think it's, you know, I think strong growth has been basically what we think, you know, historically we've done. You know, you can kind of look back at what we've done in the last, three years, and we've said, you know, we anticipate strong growth and something similar in that vein on it.
Well, on page 12, you kind of talk about 23% CAGR. Is that 18? I'm just guessing 18-22 seems appropriate.
Sure.
Maybe on payroll tax, can you just maybe touch on what the payroll tax was for FY 2026? 'Cause PCP didn't have that number in there.
Yeah, I believe it's in the analyst pack, when you get there, but the payroll tax ended up being $2.7 million.
Good one. Thank you. Last one, just understand the margin drivers here. In your expectation, you know, variable margins now tracking up to, you know, gone from 50 to 53. Your long-term target's 55%. Is the expectation you hit that in FY 2027? The second question here is, given you have a pretty strict cost discipline here. Is the expectation that fixed cost growth will grow that organically about 5% in FY 2027?
Yeah, I would say that, you know, from a variable cost, you know, I think we've been trying to hit that 45%. We get 55% contribution margin. I don't know if we'll hit it next year. I think we definitely have moved faster than I think we have anticipated. I wouldn't, you know, given the pace we're at, it wouldn't be surprising that if we did it next year. I think from a fixed cost perspective, you know, I think we've always said it's somewhere between 5% and 7%. I think you should anticipate something over that range as well.
Good one. Well done, guys. Great result.
Thank you.
Thanks, Owen. Thank you. The next question comes from Damen Kloeckner from CLSA. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Congratulations on the result this morning. Just a couple questions from myself. Just compositionally in terms of the new teams that were added in the second half, can I just confirm, was that all on an individual basis, or does it represent some league-wide contracts as well? I guess looking forward to that same point, would you continue to see mainly new team growth delivered on a team-by-team basis or do you expect, I guess, more of those league-wide deals? That'd be the first question.
Yeah, the bulk of that is on a team-by-team basis. We know we don't do a ton of team, league-wide deals where we're capturing a, you know, a ton of teams. There were some in there on it. I would say the bulk of it is team by team. I think your expectation should be that we continue to work directly with teams more so than we work with leagues.
Okay, great. Just a second question, just back to the contribution margin or variable cost line. Just given how close you are now to your target, just wondering if that still is the correct number that you're targeting. Is there any reason why that should move or, you know, that guidance should improve over time, or is that still the right number to think of?
Yeah, we haven't hit it yet, right? I think it's a good number to kind of imagine at this stage. I think as we get closer to it, and if we think there is a reason for us to maybe think that if we could do better, we certainly will pursue it, right? I, you know, I think the challenge for us is really gonna become around the more solutions we add into our platform. We know we're gonna have to add, you know, some level of experts, right, sort of software experts in to kind of be inside beside our salespeople. At this stage, it's hard to tell. I think we're actually being significantly more efficient than we anticipated.
If it continues, like, you know, there's probably a good chance that maybe we could do better than 45% of the variable cost.
Okay, great. Last one, if I can just squeeze one in. Just maybe early feedback on IMPECT, particularly in European football. Are you seeing any evidence of, I guess, improving conversations there with some of the customers in terms of winning market share, particularly European football?
Yeah. I would say the feedback has been just overwhelmingly positive. I think significantly more positive than we anticipated, even at this stage of where we are with the integration of, you know, what we're doing with them. We've already been able to sign a couple of major deals. You know, I think some that, you know, we'll probably in due course, talk about in a little bit more detail this year. We've been able to sign you know, a pretty impressive league-wide deal in the Americas. We've been able to sign a major federation in Europe. In both of those cases, they have been a complete turnaround or a complete flip, you know, to all of our products.
Meaning they're, you know, the customer is finding a real benefit of having our wearables, our Pro Video Suite, and now the scouting analysis product. It's been, you know, it's still early days, but I think we're, you know, we're very encouraged by what we've seen so far.
Thanks, guys. Congratulations again.
Thank you so much.
Thank you once again. To ask a question, please press star one on your phone. The next question comes from Lindsay Bettiol from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Hopefully you can hear me.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. Good. Okay. Yeah, maybe I'll just stick with IMPECT and Perch. Like there is a little bit of back-solving to be done, but it feels like the contribution from those two businesses is something like AUD 11 million or so to the ACV, which is more or less where you acquired those two businesses. IMPECT doing AUD 8, Perch doing AUD 2, AUD 2.5. Where you've just called out like a couple of major deals in IMPECT. Like it's obviously early, but it just didn't feel like there's been a ton of growth in those two businesses post-acquisition. Like, could you just comment on whether I've got the read on that correct? Maybe just over the next couple of years, like how we should be thinking about those two respective businesses.
Yeah. It's really hard to I think a couple of points. I think, one, you know, from your math of, you know, about 10.5, I think that's correct. That's, you know, there's nothing to it. I think the rest of the growth is now coming from a, you know, combination, or, you know, let's say sort of, you know, package design in terms of how we're going to market. It's gonna be hard for us to break that down, individually on it. Give you an example, you know, Perch actually has grown incredibly well. I think we've, you know, we've sold probably a little bit more than we anticipated by the end of FY 2026. A lot of that came through bundling with our wearables product, right?
The fact that you could have an athlete monitoring system and a gym product at the same time is showing up. IMPECT is still early. I think like I said, you know, we're incredibly impressed with the ability for us to do something, but that product is primarily designed for European football, and I should say probably global football. That sales period really begins in the first half of FY 2027. There wasn't a huge movement in 2026 after the acquisition, but we've already signed major deals going into FY 2027.
Okay. No, it's brilliant. Maybe just the media business. I think the last time you hosted a call, you said we should expect the long-term run rate in that business to be something like AUD 10 million-AUD 12 million. It looks like you've done AUD 8, AUD 8.5 in the second half. Just wondering if, like, your expectation is still media business goes back to that AUD 10 million-AUD 12 million run rate, or is that like structurally improved maybe over the last six months, even since we last touched on media?
Yeah. No, I think our guidance is still to kind of keep it in that range of, you know, 10 to 12. I think the reason we always say that is that the 10 to 12 are things that we know we could control. We've done better over the past couple of years, but that's been primarily driven by The streamers essentially needing more content for shows they're creating related to sports. You know, it's like we can't sell that. You know, we can definitely monetize it when we need to, but we can't go out and actually create more of a market. I think we're always a little bit conservative, I should say, on that number.
You know, we'd love for it to continue down this path and, you know, it's certainly aligning with the demand of sports entertainment that we're seeing, you know, across the globe.
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Then maybe I'll have another shot at your guidance, which I think you've kept, like, intentionally opaque. Given that we've got a range, whether or not it's 18%-22% or not on revenue, and you've exited the year with an EBITDA margin of, call it 18%, and you've mentioned 10 times through this pack that you've got a goal of getting to a Rule of 40 at some point in time. Would it be fair to assume that, like, 2027 is that point in time? It feels like, I don't know, even the low end of that is 18% growth and 22% margin should be achievable this year. Do you agree with that comment, or anything you'd like to say on it?
Yeah, look, I think we've always said, you know, strong growth, low churn. You know, I think the anticipation that we continue to improve margins. I would say that, you know, our expectation internally here is that, you know, we wanna get to that Rule of 40 as fast as possible. If we deliver another year of results like this one, we definitely should be there.
Brilliant. All right, very last question. I know I've asked too many, but just the AI-powered shift detection in ice hockey. You talked about that removing some manual tagging. Was there any reason the AI-powered product was targeted at ice hockey? Is ice hockey specifically prolific in terms of the manual tagging and the efficiencies you can get? Or just maybe help us understand why ice hockey and kind of where that sort of solution can be targeted in future, please.
Yeah. We started there primarily because it's incredibly difficult to do, right? In ice hockey, if you, if you could imagine, they are actually shifting the line a lot in a very small amount of time. Where other sports, you know, you actually that's a fairly easier thing to do. We tend to actually start these things on the hard edge cases so that we could then bring it in to the easier products. I'm trying to think. I can't even imagine right now a sport that has more shift detections, meaning, you know, like that everybody moves from offense, defense as quickly as ice hockey does. That primarily was the reason for us starting there.
Okay, great. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Amelia Hamer from Ord Minnett. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Congratulations on a great result. Just on the multi-vertical teams and that improvement that you've seen in the percentage of teams that take up 1 or more verticals. Can you talk about are there any particular products combinations that you've seen acceleration in? And sort of, you know, how many products are these teams taking? Is it just 2 or are you seeing more taking 3 or more?
Yeah. It from a multi-vertical perspective, it's, you know, continues to primarily be a wearables customer, mostly in global football soccer, moving into our Pro Video Suite. you know, and now I think we're finding, I mean, you know, obviously in some places we have the ability to not just take them to Pro Video Suite, but take them to a Pro Video Suite plus IMPECT and video analysis. That has been the I would say the bulk of that movement is primarily driven in global soccer.
Great. Great. Just, we're seeing some really aggressive behavior, and we talked a bit about this at the Analyst Day from STATSports post the Sony acquisition. You know, they're doing some hiring. They've obviously signed this league-wide NRL deal. A lot of announcements on new teams that they've sort of signed up. Are you guys seeing any of that from your end?
We've added $20 million of ACV and P&H, which is the size of Stats before they were acquired this year. They're really not having a gigantic impact in our, in our ability to grow.
Great. Just the third and final question is just that on that free cash flow, and I'm sure this is buried somewhere in the pack, but just to make my life and probably other people's lives easier. The free cash flow ex acquisition, what's the acquisition cash impact that you've got in that number? Or acquisition cost, sorry.
Sorry, let me find it. Yeah, give me one minute. I gotta track that down. It's a little over AUD 40 million 'cause it includes the outflows that we paid for IMPECT portion for purchase as well as all the transaction costs.
Okay. I guess I was just referring to more the one-off impact. I presume you've sort of taken a free cash flow number and then adjusted out anything that was one-off or sort of non-recurring. Is that how we should think about it?
The way you should think about it is we remove the actual cash outflows to acquire those businesses. There's a cash and stock equity components to both of those acquisitions. There's about AUD 2.8 million of transaction fees. Advisors, bankers.
Yeah.
Legal fees that was related to conducting those transactions. That's the one-time nature outside of the actual purchase price paid.
Perfect. I think that AUD 2.8 million was the number I was looking for. Thank you.
Great.
Thank you once again. The next question comes from Chris Savage from Bell Potter. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Hey, Will. Hey, Bob. Two questions, if I may. There's one slide where you highlight some adjacent markets you're potentially looking at entering. Just wondering, with the efficiency of AI product development, are you looking at entering those markets sooner rather than later?
Nothing at this point, I would say, is highlighting that AI would make us move faster into those adjacencies. I think right now our focus would probably be, you know, really bringing agentic products into our current pro sports market.
Okay. The second question, just on IMPECT, any guide on even when you may turn on the video solution, and if so, are there any costs we should factor into our forecast for 2027, particularly with regard to broadcast rights?
Yeah, I think, you know, our goal continues to be to deliver something on that as quickly as possible. I would be disappointed if we didn't have our video scouting solution turned on before the end of FY 2027. You know, I anticipate that these deals that we're signing, which I brought up earlier, also anticipates us getting there fairly quickly. I think we're, you know, we're feeling pretty confident that things are gonna come through. From a cost perspective, yeah, we anticipate there's gonna be some cost in COGS. I think, you know, right now the conversations have proved to be that those costs are gonna be well in line in terms of maintaining our 80% gross margin.
I wouldn't anticipate that you shouldn't, you know, anything above that, I should say, that's gonna change that 80% gross margin profile.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Thank you. At this time, we are showing no further questions. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.