Welcome to Carma's FY 2026 results presentation. Following the formal presentation, there will be a Q and A session for investors and analysts. Participants can ask both text and live audio questions during today's call. To ask a text question, select the messaging icon, type your question in the box towards the top of the screen, and press the send button. To ask a live audio question, press the Request to Speak button at the top of the broadcast window. The broadcast will be replaced by the audio question screen. Use the dial-in number and access PIN provided to ask your question via the phone. Alternatively, for those on a home or personal network, you can ask your questions via the web by pressing Join Queue. If prompted, select Allow in the pop-up to grant access to your microphone.
If you have any issues using the platform, dial-in details can also be found on the homepage under Asking Audio Questions. Text questions can be submitted at any time, and the audio queue is now open. I will now hand over to Lachlan MacGregor, CEO of Carma.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I am Lachlan MacGregor, Co-Founder and CEO of Carma. With me is Yosuke Hall, my Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, and James Solomon, our Chief Financial Officer. We launched the results announcement, the annual report, and this presentation with the ASX this morning. Please note the disclaimer at the back of the presentation. Some of what we say today, particularly in the outlook section, is forward-looking. I will start with the business highlights. James will take you through the financial results. I will come back for strategy and the outlook for FY 2027, and then the three of us will take your questions. FY 2026 was the year the model came together. Nine in 10 cars now come to us direct from consumers through Sell-to-Carma, reconditioning throughput doubled, and gross profit doubled.
FY 2026 finished the year in an unusually weak used car market, and we are pleased to say that this tested the model and showed how well it holds. Starting with the headline numbers. We delivered 5,416 vehicles, up 86% on last year. Retail deliveries grew 50% to 3,156, and wholesale grew 180% to 2,260. Revenue was AUD 113.8 million, up 59%. Gross profit doubled to AUD 10.5 million, and our pro forma EBITDA margin improved about 12.5 percentage points to - 26.5%. I point you to the four-year view on each of these charts. The margin line has improved every year since FY 2023 from - 57% to - 26.5%, and this year was the biggest single step. Gross profit grew faster than revenue. Revenue grew faster than costs. James will show you the operating leverage in more detail, but the shape of it is visible on this page.
On the operating side, we purchased 6,235 vehicles, up 127%, and 5,577 of those came through Sell-to-Carma, including trade-ins. We reconditioned 3,743 retail units, up 99%, and the average units per shift doubled to 15.1. Online inventory days averaged 36 for the year, four days better than FY 2025. 36 is the full-year average. In the June quarter, with the challenging macro environment, online inventory days ran at 52. James will explain what happened in that quarter and what it did to margins. This slide sets out what we said we would do in FY 2026 and what we did. Sell-to-Carma, nine centers across New South Wales, supplying 89% of our purchases. Production or reconditioning on the reconditioning side. The St Peters upgrade, reconditioning doubled and an exit rate of 21.7 units per operating day in Q4.
Gross profit per unit up with a mixed shift to Sell-to-Carma purchases, lower reconditioning costs per car, a wholesale contribution that didn't exist two years ago, and a much better pricing model. Strong growth with revenue up 59% and gross profit up 102% through a challenging market at the end of the year. With our brand, awareness is rising, building on the NRMA partnership. Our own channels now deliver over half of our sales. The IPO, which funded the inventory and the initiatives you'll hear about today. I'll take the first three in turn. Two years ago, we bought most of our cars either from wholesale, how most dealers buy, or from consumers who had advertised their cars on a marketplace for anyone to buy. Today, nine in 10 come direct from consumers who come to Sell-to-Carma to sell us their car.
We opened seven Sell-to-Carma centers during the year, taking the network from two to nine across Greater Sydney, Newcastle, and Wollongong. Kotara and Albion Park, the Newcastle and the Wollongong sites, were our first locations outside Sydney. The chart in the middle shows quarterly purchases through Sell-to-Carma, which went from 250 in the first quarter of FY 2025 to 2,056 in the June quarter this year. This matters for three reasons. Firstly, cars bought direct from consumers carry better margins than cars bought wholesale and are a more interesting mix than fleet inventory. Second, the centers are cheap to open and cheap to run, and there is plenty of excess capacity, so we can add supply wherever demand is. Third, because we'll make an offer on any car, we buy many cars we don't want to retail, and that supply is what built the wholesale business.
Underneath all of this is our AI pricing models. We made a series of upgrades to our in-house models during the year, so they're more accurate and respond faster to market movements. I'll come back to the technology in the outlook because it's central to FY 2027. Next on St Peters. Stage one of the upgrade was completed in August last year, consolidating three sites into one 35,000 sq m facility. Stage one is operating just a single shift and a single line, giving capacity of 30 retail cars a day. The production line design uses lean manufacturing principles with end-to-end reconditioning, including our innovative paint operations and all backed by our custom technology. The quarterly numbers tell the story. Retail units reconditioned were 723 in the first quarter and closed the last quarter at 1,322. Per shifts went from 11 in the first quarter to 21.7.
The June quarter was 38% up on the quarter before and 10% about the exit run rate in our prospectus. At the half year, we said St Peters would soon be reconditioning over 20 cars a shift. It did, and we are still running one shift on a line built for two. Aside from doubling capacity with the second shift, we also have regulatory approvals and infrastructure in place for a second production line. I will cover what that capacity means when we get to the outlook. Finally, for this section, the customer. Prompted brand awareness across Sydney and New South Wales has continued to grow and is at 54%. Direct traffic to carma.com.au is up significantly, and more than half of our retail sales now come through our own channels rather than third-party classifieds.
Selection matters online, and we ended the year with 625 cars available on the site, up from 166 a year earlier. The NRMA continues to name us their exclusive preferred used car dealership, and our customers rate us 4.6 on Google with over 1,000 five-star reviews and a continued high NPS score. I will now hand over to James for the financials.
Thank you, Lachlan, and good morning. One note before I start. Unless otherwise stated, amounts are presented on a pro forma basis. We have removed the one-off IPO and convertible note costs and added a full-year of public company costs to both years, so they are comparable. Reconciliations to statutory are in the annexure. FY 2026 saw improvements in both our retail and wholesale channels. Retail units delivered were 3,156, up 50% on FY 2025. Retail gross profit per unit increased 22% to AUD 2,500. Growing units and unit profitability at the same time reflects the shift in how we source vehicles, with nine in 10 now bought directly from consumers. Wholesale units were 2,260, up 180%, and wholesale gross profit per wholesale unit was AUD 400, up 95%. Wholesale is a direct consequence of Sell-to-Carma.
Offering to buy any vehicle means acquiring vehicles we do not retail, and on average, generating a higher profit this year than ever before. This slide sets out our unit economics expressed per retail unit delivered. Total GPU for FY 2026 increased by 35%, paired with an 86% growth in total units. The Sell-to-Carma shift, coupled with further efficiencies in reconditioning, drove the 22% increase in retail GPU to AUD 2,500. Wholesale contributed AUD 300 per retail unit, a material improvement on prior years, and was the line most affected by the market shift in the final quarter. Before this, Q3 reached AUD 600 per unit, while Q4 was a AUD -1 00. Other GPU, which includes finance and extended coverage income, delivered steady growth, contributing AUD 600 per retail unit.
Despite the increase in vehicle write-downs following sharp price declines in Q4, the full-year write-down per unit improved 25% on the prior period.
We also saw a decrease in the average selling price of vehicles across the year, reflecting the success of the shift in sourcing mix towards Sell-to-Carma. Sell-to-Carma has driven a higher proportion of older vehicles through the business, which carry lower purchase and lower selling prices. Pleasingly, increased throughput and efficiency in reconditioning allow Carma to add greater value to these older vehicles, supporting gross profit at these lower prices. These results were achieved despite the unusual market conditions experienced in the final quarter of the year. From March 2026, the automotive industry faced significant headwinds flowing from the conflict in Iran. This led to higher fuel prices across the country, lower consumer confidence, reduced overall demand, and a sharp reduction in market values of ICE vehicles.
The impact was seen through slower vehicle turnover, resulting in more cars available on the market and softer consumer sentiment, resulting in a reduction in the aggregate number of leads. Most dealers, including Carma, experienced a reduction in leads per car from third-party classified sites. Carma's unique business model allowed us to respond quickly to these unusual changes. Our in-house pricing models are trained on live market data. We are able to scale Sell-to-Carma up and down to meet market conditions, and we can adjust inventory levels based on turnover rates. In practice, that meant we continued to increase vehicles reconditioned per shift and the selection of vehicles available on our website and dynamically shifted an increased marketing budget to our direct channels to partly offset this reduction from classified partners.
The result, a record 1,003 retail units delivered in the quarter, 30% up on the quarter before that. While days to sell expanded to 52, retail gross profit was in line with the first half. We saw total revenue up 59% to AUD 113.8 million, reflecting an 86% increase in total units delivered. As discussed previously, our average selling price has reduced, accounting for revenue versus unit growth delta. Pleasingly, we saw gross profit double year-on-year to AUD 10.5 million, with a 2 percentage point increase in the gross profit margin to 9.2%. Sell-to-Carma sourcing channel supporting this margin improvement. Employee benefit expenses were up 27%, noting Sell-to-Carma commenced in the second half of FY 2025, and so the prior period carries only part of this cost.
This year, we resourced to support 89% Sell-to-Carma sourcing, the 10% higher exit run rate in reconditioning, and capitalized less software development. Marketing expenses are measured in two elements: retail, which relates to the sale of our vehicles, and sell to, which relates to the purchase of vehicles. Given the 86% increase in units delivered, we measured this on a per retail unit basis. Retail marketing expenses per retail unit was approximately AUD 1,500 for the year, an improvement of AUD 200 compared to FY 2025, reflecting the efficiencies in our marketing channels despite the Q4 market conditions. Sell to marketing expenses per retail unit was AUD 600 for the year, AUD 400 more than the prior year, and reflects the success of the Sell-to-Carma once more. With reference to vehicles purchased, the trend is down.
Pro forma EBITDA was AUD -30.2 million and reflects the margin improvement of 12.5 percentage points as revenue outpaces the costs associated with scaling. Following the successful IPO, the group's balance sheet positions it for the next phase of growth. FY 2026 concluded with AUD 16 million of cash, AUD 25.3 million of undrawn bailment facility available, totaling AUD 41.3 million of total funding available. The table bottom right compares our funding to the prospectus forecast, which assumed we would draw down the facility. We held excess cash and elected not to, finishing FY 2026 with AUD 0.4 million drawn. Property, plant, and equipment increased AUD 2.4 million and was mainly driven by the investment in stage one of the St Peters facility. This investment and the completion of stage one provides capacity for 60 cars per day across two shifts.
We have provided a split of operating cash flow both before and after vehicle inventory to provide further clarity. Before vehicle inventory, pro forma operating cash outflow was in line with FY 2025. Interest rates and capital management also delivered AUD 0.7 million of net interest received. Vehicle inventory increased AUD 18.3 million against a AUD 5.5 million decrease last year, funded mainly through cash. This reflects the record reconditioning volumes and vehicles available for sale at year-end. Vehicle inventory can also be funded through the bailment finance facility, with any movements presented in financing activities. Lastly, to summarize FY 2026, we saw strengthening of our operating leverage in the year, underpinned by volume growth and efficiency gains. Gross profit margin improved by 2 percentage points. Pro forma EBITDA margin improved by 12.5 percentage points, and pro forma operating cash margin improved by 13 percentage points.
While the group is not yet EBITDA positive, the operational leverage is clear and closing the gap remains a focus for us. I will now hand over to Lachlan to talk through the strategy and outlook and the initiatives underway to support this.
Thanks, James. First, three slides of context. I will move through them quickly because none of it has changed. On the next slide. Australians buy about 3.6 million used cars a year, worth AUD 118 billion, and around AUD 34 billion of that is in New South Wales alone. There are more than 4,000 dealers, the largest group with well under 2% share and no national brand. Online is 14% of retail sales in Australia overall and 43% in electronics, so cars have a long way to go. Our 3,000 retail cars in FY 2026 are a small fraction of that market, and the plan we are about to describe reaches profitability inside New South Wales alone. The vision is to reinvent how Australians buy and sell pre-owned cars.
We are redesigning the experience to put customers first with our team, who are truly the best in the business, and we own the whole operation end to end. We are creating a pre-owned car experience that is beautiful from every angle. Slide 22 is the map of the levers that improve unit economics across retail, wholesale, finance, marketing, and operating expense. We have laid them out broadly, showing which are the shorter term versus longer term opportunities. The key takeaways from this are that we have many levers to pull to improve profitability. A lot are low-hanging, and we are still very early in the journey. The next three slides are the priorities we have set for FY 2027 to pull those levers. The three priorities for FY 2027. In FY 2026, we built the machine, the sourcing, reconditioning, and unit economics.
For FY 2027, the priorities are about what the machine produces per car.
The line at the top of the slide captures the objective, a step change in unit economics and scale in the next 12 months. There are three priorities. The first is Apollo, a whole of company program to step change our unit economics ahead of our next doubling. We are reexamining the business from first principles at the scale we are now. It launched in July. The second is rebuilding our technology platform on our own stack with AI doing real work at every step of the business. It has been underway since February, and the core migration completes in the first half. The third is scaling into capacity we have already built. A second shift on the existing St Peters line doubles reconditioning capacity to around 60 retail units per operating day. The second shift is planned to launch in the March quarter. They work together.
Apollo lifts gross profit per car and holds cost per car down as we scale. The technology platform is what enables new customer experiences and gives the team operating leverage, and the second shift supplies the volume that spreads fixed cost over twice as many cars. Apollo. The question we put to every part of the company is on the slide. If we were designing this process today, knowing what we know now, with AI available to do real work and at our current scale, what would we build? Almost every process at Carma was designed for a smaller company and before the AI tooling that exists now. Some carry layers of decisions nobody has revisited. Some things were not building at the old scale, but they are now. To clarify, this is not a cost-cutting program. Teams will still grow where they need to. The timing is deliberate.
We are doing this at around 500 retail cars a month ahead of the doubling to over 1,000, because redesigning a process is far easier before the volume arrives than in the middle of the climb. The program launched on the 28th of July, runs in fortnightly sprints, and reviews at the end of January ahead of the second shift. The table on the right shows where the 266 actions identified so far sit by business line and where we think the opportunity is broadly. In most of the business lines, the focus is on increasing revenue or improving leverage. In our reconditioning operations and technology, the focus is on enabling the next level of scale. Next is on the AI platform and reinvention. Slide 25 is our technology reinvention. We are well along the path to becoming an AI-native business. This reinvention is in two streams.
The first is moving the core of the business onto our own stack. One database, one API layer, and centralized access rules written as code that apply equally to a team member and an AI agent. The saving on licenses from moving to our own stack is real but secondary. In this new world where AI is being built inside our processes, controlling our own system enables all sorts of new agentic flows that wouldn't be possible or would take too long in our old SaaS stack. We've progressed rapidly. Authentication and vehicle data went live on our own services in August. Contacts and email are live. Payments, finance, and orders are in testing, and trade-ins, watch lists, and Sell-to-Carma follow through the first half. The second stream is what we've built on top since March. 18 AI-native systems built in-house.
These span across pricing, buying appointments, logistics, valuations, onboarding documents, sales coaching, listing videos, and the program management for Apollo itself, to name just a few. Each one has AI built natively, woven into workflows, and working on the same data as the team, sometimes with the person approving the decision and sometimes autonomously. We have also built our citizen developer platform, where anyone in the business can build a tool on our stack and in a secure and sandboxed environment. Think of it as an internal version of Replit or Lovable. One of the innovations in our new AI-native stack is that the team are empowered to make changes. Anyone can improve a tool. Coding with AI has shifted the development bottleneck from engineering to product and business thinking. We have designed around this to enable changes to flow rapidly without the old red tape.
Using our request system, any team member can now request a change guided by AI to test and refine the idea. The request is then passed to the system owner, who is also assisted by AI to further specify and approve the change. Lastly, it goes to the engineer or technical business team member to code it in production, accelerated by AI. Each step can take just minutes. This has been a game changer. Things that would have taken months or been lost in backlogs are getting done on the same day. We have 49 releases so far using the system, and the median time from an idea to being deployed in production is just 2.6 hours. This speed of technology development enables rapid process improvement and encourages everyone to move fast. One more slide on AI, given we get this question sometimes.
AI is a structural advantage for Carma's business model. Firstly, why is AI an advantage for Carma, not a risk? Well, AI hurts two kinds of businesses. It hurts companies who sell software because software is a thing AI makes cheap. Software stocks sold off hard in February, and despite the bounce since, still traded around four times forward revenue versus six times two years ago. It hurts companies who sell the introduction, the marketplace and classifieds, which have been marked down on the prospect that an AI agent can make the match. Carma does neither. We sell cars. We have no software revenue to defend, no matching fee to lose, and the customer deals with us directly. We buy software, and building our own has just become cheap. Secondly, Carma is structurally advantaged to benefit from AI in a way that our competitors can't easily copy.
In most industries, the benefits of AI will get competed away. Software did this over the last 30 years. Early adopters got a lead, then everyone caught up. When competitors all run the same business model, a rising tide lifts all boats and no one gets ahead for long. Our opportunity with AI is different from a physical dealership's. The advantage won't be competed away because a dealership can't get the same benefit without copying our business model. A physical dealership runs site by site, with customer interaction still largely physical and at small scale. Its technology usually sits on one shared vendor system, so AI arrives as a feature from the vendor. Carma is a digital operation, both in how we interact with our customers and how we run the business.
We use our own technology and data at every step, from valuing the car to delivering it, so we can rebuild every step around AI ourselves. That is why we think our AI advantage is sustainable. The third priority, scaling in to build capacity. One shift took us from 7.5 units per operating day in FY 2025 to 15.1 in FY 2026, 21.7 in the June quarter, and 24 in July. That's growth of three times in two years on a single shift against a one-shift ceiling of around 30. The second shift doubles the ceiling to around 60. What it needs is people, not buildings. The line, the site, and the approvals already exist, and the second shift runs on the same equipment. It also needs surprisingly little extra reconditioning inventory because the same work in progress feeds both shifts.
What grows is the number of cars online funded from cash or from the facility at 80% of value against AUD 41.3 million of available funding. A doubling of our available inventory would only require equity of around AUD 4 million. CapEx is also minimal. Beyond that, the second production line has regulatory approval and will take us to about 120 a day, roughly AUD 1 billion of revenue a year. The supply engine is already running. Nine Sell-to-Carma centers provided 89% of our purchases last year, and the network is operating with more than 40% spare capacity, with further ability to add inspectors per site as we need them. The shaded band on the chart, 45-6 0 units, is the range in which we expect to cross into EBITDA positive territory.
We expect to exit FY 2027 at over 35, while scaling rapidly towards the full double shift capacity of 60.
One housekeeping note, from FY 2027 will refer to the reconditioning per operating day rather than per shift so that the series stays comparable once there are two shifts. Current trading and market conditions. Current trading, there are two things to take from this slide. A strong start to FY 2027 and a market that is stabilizing with margins recovering. First, trading. Retail deliveries booked in from 1 July to 31 August are up 120% on the same period last year. Sell-to-Carma retail purchasing has continued at the rate we achieved in the June quarter, and reconditioning throughput in July exceeded the Q4 FY 2026 record pace. August is on track to be our largest month to date for retail deliveries. Second, the market and margins. We experienced margin pressure in Q4 due to the extraordinary conditions which resulted in vehicles being bought and sold into shifting markets.
We have observed market conditions stabilize during Q1 FY 2027. When prices stabilize, Carma buys and sells in the same market and gross margin recovers. The chart on the right is the cohort analysis we published in the 4C, with the September quarter to date in pink. Vehicles sold within 30 days of listing, which is 56% of vehicles sold, earned approximately AUD 3,300 of retail gross profit per unit in the September quarter to date, the highest on record. Vehicles held for over 60 days earned less, and the effects of the March softening worked through that stock. The FY 2027 outlook. This brings us to the outlook for FY 2027. Four statements, and I will read them as they appear on the slide. Revenue to grow over 80%.
As we continue to observe the used car market stabilize despite the macroeconomic headwinds, we expect to deliver ongoing unit economic, sorry, ongoing unit growth across our retail and wholesale business, resulting in FY 2027 revenue growth of over 80%. Second shift to double reconditioning capacity. The launch of the second shift at our St Peters facility during the March quarter of FY 2027 will allow us to increase retail unit reconditioning capacity to 60 per operating day with minimal additional capital expenditure. FY 2027 to exit at 750 retail units per month. In the final quarter of FY 2026, we were reconditioning 21.7 units per operating day. With the second shift in operation, Carma expects to exit FY 2027 reconditioning more than 35 retail units per operating day, approximately 750 retail units per month, and scaling rapidly. The path to profitability.
Carma currently expects that the company can cross over to positive EBITDA when reconditioning in the range of 45-60 retail units per operating day on average. Carma expects to be in this range before the end of calendar 2027. Thank you. Yos, James, and I will now take your questions.
Thanks, Lachlan. If you have not yet submitted your text question or joined the live audio queue, please do so now. I will introduce each caller by name and ask you to go ahead. You will then hear a beep indicating your microphone is live. Our first question today comes from Owen Humphries from Canaccord. Owen, please go ahead.
Good day, team. Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Hi, Owen.
Big year setting the platform for a big FY 2027, it feels like. First question here is, I guess in the cost base, you are about to take another leap up in step change in growth. I understand there is a lot of focus internally on various systems and processes, but in terms of the fixed cost base of your business, do you expect it to hold at these kind of current levels or second-half run rate levels in FY 2027 and into FY 2028 from the kind of AUD 35 million-odd run rate?
Yeah, sure. I will take that one, Owen. That is probably right. Obviously, we have always discussed this concept of having this fixed cost base that we can take advantage of for operational leverage. In FY 2026, we did see the resourcing up for Sell-to-Carma, which is in a really good position at the moment. So I think, based on what you have said, it is probably the right way to look at that.
Right. Just on GPUs. The wholesale GPU impacted the group GPUs, call it, in that last quarter. Has that stabilized and where do you expect that to be kind of FY 2027? Well, there's two questions here. Where do you expect wholesale GPUs, has it stabilized in the first quarter of 2027? Where do you expect it to be in FY 2027? In the third quarter, you guys did 3,800 GPUs or total GPU per retail unit. Is that level of margin is what we can expect in FY 2027?
I will jump in there. Quite a few questions, Owen. I think the best way to reframe that is just to take us back to Lachlan's slide, which was slide 27, which talks to the retail gross profit cohorts that we see in the current quarter. One of the key things that we've always discussed here is this concept of buying and selling in the same market. That was not the case in Q4. Because of that huge market shift, and everything that happened with the fuel prices and consumer confidence, the market reduced, and so we weren't buying and selling in the same market. Currently, as we stand today, we've seen that market stabilize from a pricing point of view, and so we expect those gross profit per units to revert back to normal levels.
Has the wholesale GPU reverted back to stability, given that's kind of really in the same market now?
The wholesale markets aren't back to where they were at the start of the year or last year, but they've certainly stabilized. Our last number of auctions are now, we're clearing at very high rates and they're profitable, but they're not back to the profitability level they were. We do expect them to return there, and we're working hard on that channel to get to that point.
And there's been a big shift post the war, call it, with fuel prices surging into EVs. Have you guys changed your strategy on EVs or purchases of EVs? And maybe you can give us an indication of the level of these in your platform or the level of new purchases being EVs.
Yeah. Hi, Owen. Yos here. As a business, we're relatively agnostic to the powertrain of the vehicles because a lot of the value add that we add through reconditioning is actually cosmetic. So a lot of the work we can do on EVs is similar to any traditional vehicle. From our side, what we're seeing is obviously there's a lot of new EVs coming into the market, and that'll take some time to flow into the used car space. So relatively speaking, there are less EVs available in the used car space than there are the new, but we'll expect them to really come into the space. And again, we'll just be trading the spread of vehicles that are out there in market and buying and selling in the same space.
So yes, there's absolutely been an increase in the demand for EVs and we're seeing the EVs move quickly through our site. And again, our pricing models are doing our best to acquire those vehicles at a good price.
Thanks, guys. Looking forward to the next 12 months.
Thanks, Owen.
Thanks, Owen.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Entcho Raykovski from E&P. Entcho, please go ahead.
Hi, Lach. Hi, Yos. Hi, James.
Hey, Entcho.
My first question, I might just focus on your expectations to achieve EBITDA break even by the end of calendar year 2027. You sort of alluded to this, but you can just clarify. Did I assume that you continue to operate only in New South Wales? I assume that's the case. Under what circumstances would you consider expansion into other states? If you can just talk about how that impacts cash flow projections.
Thanks, Entcho. I might take the first part of that question, then hand to Yos. Just to be explicit about the guidance, the guidance is that we expect the company can cross over to positive EBITDA when reconditioning somewhere in the range of 45 - 60 retail units per operating day on average. We expect to be in this range before the end of calendar 2027. I'm just saying that because you stated explicitly that definitely EBITDA break even by the end of calendar 2027. We're not being pinned exactly to when that crossover will happen. Yes, we are saying that is just operating in New South Wales. The New South Wales market is a AUD 34 billion market. We're still a minnow in that overall market.
There's plenty of opportunities for us to grow to what we're forecasting here, but many times the size of that. There's no assumption in that in terms of us going to another market.
In terms of the interstate expansion, as Lach mentioned, our current focus is on the New South Wales market, and we will be implementing that second shift on our production line first, and that will take us to a capacity of around 60 retail cars per operating day. Following that, there will be what we consider to be our next major scaling step. That could be between moving interstate into Melbourne and/or Brisbane, or operationalizing a second line on our Sydney IRC. All three get to benefit from running on the same technology, the same brand, and the same playbook. We will have a choice at that point in time to decide what is optimal and best for Carma and where we believe the demand to be strongest. We have not made a decision today, but we are assessing all those different opportunities.
Okay. Thank you. That is good color. It is a related question, but the decision to add a second shift in the March quarter, is that dependent in any way on the demand environment? Do you view it as independent of underlying conditions?
No, it is really independent of underlying conditions, where we are still at such a small market share in the market that our growth is not dependent upon the market being in a certain situation. We are planning for that shift already and working steadily towards that for that quarter. I think just to add to that—
Okay, cool. Thanks, Lach.
As we've stated throughout, what matters for us is stability of market conditions for our margins to be strong, not necessarily reversion to prior markets. As you can see from our current cohort profitability, as well as our record results that we're hitting quarter-on-quarter and month-on-month, we're seeing strong results despite the still somewhat challenging market conditions.
Okay. Thank you. Over the last few months, you've obviously used cash to purchase inventory, as opposed to drawing down on the bailment facility. Can you perhaps talk in a bit more detail what drove that, given it was a slightly different outcome to the prospectus forecast? Was it ultimately a cost initiative because you had the excess cash balance? I don't know if you're able to specify this, but what's the margin differential if you use cash to purchase inventory as opposed to the bailment facility? What sort of savings do you get? In the future, at which point do you start using the bailment facility again to a greater extent? What's the minimum cash balance that you require?
I'll take that one, Entcho. I wouldn't say it was a cost-saving initiative. I'd say rather that this was us being efficient with the capital following the IPO. We had excess cash available at the end of the year, and so drawing down that bailment would have resulted in us incurring interest expense, which was obviously, was much higher than the interest income we would've earned on the cash. We've disclosed in the financial statements that our average interest rate for the year was 7.33%, which is higher than the cash we would earn ordinarily on a cash balance. In terms of when we will draw down on that, it really depends on the growth and the scale in terms of the purchasing and the reconditioning facility.
At this stage, and as it was at the end of 30 June, we had excess cash, and so the need to draw down on that bailment facility was not there. There is no line fee on that facility. We have that facility available to us with the renewal period until March 2027. It's really dependent on the volume of vehicles that we purchase and the pace of sales that take place.
Okay, great. Thanks, James. Maybe I'll sneak one last one in there. Just of the AUD 32 million of inventory you had at the end of FY 2026, are you able to provide any color on what the average age was of that inventory and maybe how it's moved over the course of the year? I suppose what I'm also getting to is your level of comfort that you're not sitting on significant proportion of aged inventory which may need to be impaired.
Yeah, thanks. A fair question given how the market has changed. Certainly, we have seen the average age drift out a bit, given that what you can see in the average days. But we're very disciplined in how we manage our stock. We constantly are repricing all cars to market through our automated systems, using market prices. And we are harder on cars as they age longer, making sure that they clear. The result of that is that we actually, today, we have only 9% of our inventory is over 90 days today. So nine out of 10 cars are still under 90 days, and those cars are turning still very rapidly. The other point to make is that we also provision for cars as they age, and so we're very cautious in terms of how we carry that on our balance sheet.
We've been caught before after COVID. We know what it was like to live in an environment where inventory aged. We've learned from those lessons, and we are very disciplined about how we manage that today.
Okay. That's great. Thank you.
Great.
A reminder of the instructions. To ask a text question, select the messaging icon, type your question in the box towards the top of the screen, and press the send button. To ask a live audio question, press the Request to Speak button at the top of the broadcast window. Follow the instructions on screen to join the queue. We currently have no further questions in the queue, so we'll just pause for a moment to see if we get any more come through. Okay, as we have no further questions, I'll hand back to Lachlan MacGregor, CEO of Carma, for closing remarks.
Thank you. Thanks for the questions and for your time this morning. If you take one thing from today, I'd make it this: In FY 2026, we finished building the model. Nine in 10 cars come to us direct from consumers. The reconditioning line has doubled its output on one shift, and gross profit per car went up while the average car got cheaper. This is the business we said we'd build at the IPO, and it's now running. The June quarter tested it. Prices fell, cars took longer to sell, and wholesale margins were negative for a quarter. Retail margins held. We delivered a record quarter, and the cars we've bought and sold since prices stabilized are the most profitable we've ever had. FY 2027 is about what the model produces per car.
Apollo, our own platform with AI doing real work, and the second shift in the March quarter. We've said what to expect with revenue growth over 80%, an exit run rate of over 35 cars a day. It's scaling rapidly into the 45-60 range, where we expect we can cross into positive EBITDA. Finally, I want to thank the Carma team for what they've achieved this year. We're looking forward to an exceptional year ahead. Thank you all. Have a good morning.
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