I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. David Dicker, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead.
Hi there, everyone. I'm David Dicker, CEO and Chairman, Founder of Dicker Data. And I'm here to present the results from last financial year 2024. Probably not as good a year as we would have liked, although certainly much better than many other companies, comparatively speaking, from their previous years. The conditions are still quite difficult in Australia, and we're such a large percentage of the market that the days of being able to just take it off the other guys are much further reduced. And we're much more affected by the overall economic conditions, and the overall economic conditions at the moment are just not great. Saying that, I think it was still a pretty good outcome, all things considered. We're very focused on this year, where we expect to do substantially better.
For a deep drill into the numbers, I'm going to now hand over to our CFO, Mary. Go ahead, Mary.
Thank you, David. Thank you, everyone, for joining the call. It's our pleasure to be presenting our results for the FY2024 year. As David has said, obviously not as strong as we would have liked in terms of bottom line, but on a top-line basis, considering all the market conditions, the company was still able to deliver growth despite a declining PC market that we were experiencing at the start of the year. The decline in sales that we reported in the half- year was abated with some new vendor additions and some growth in some segments, like our retail segments, and even our software segment increasing despite a loss of a major vendor in the comparative period from the year before. Top-line, in summary, AUD 3.4 billion, up 2.9% on a growth sales basis.
Pleasingly, we were able to maintain EBITDA relatively flat, even though there were some challenges around some cost elements, which I'll go into a little bit more detail with the P&L update. In terms of our recurring revenue, our software sales recurring revenue was also up 7.5%, with total software sales now making up around 29% of our total sales. In terms of PBT, sort of a headline number, down 2.8%, but having come off a flat EBITDA, a lot of that was impacted by increased interest rates and the cost of finance impacting the bottom line, delivering for the year earnings per share of AUD 0.436. If we go to the next slide, this is just a graphical presentation of our historical performance, and the area I want to highlight is the ability of the company to maintain gross profit margins in a difficult market.
Part of that was attributed to improvement in our New Zealand business growth margins, even though there was a small decline in the Australian business in terms of gross margins, with a pivot to more enterprise-type business, which generally operates at lower margins. Pleasingly, too, PBT margin was relatively maintained over the last couple of years, slightly down on last year, largely attributable to increased finance costs. If we go to the next slide, this is just a presentation of the Profit and Loss outcome. As you might recall from last year, we reclassified the way we present our revenue, with our statutory revenue now presented on the basis of our software and virtual services sales being represented as net, which is, in terms of an accounting perspective, the fee we earn is represented by the margin reflected in that revenue number.
Generally, though, in terms of our own business, we still sort of target ourselves around the gross sales and gross percentages, hence why we're presented in this format. So from a gross profit percentage, like I said, margins were maintained, and the fact that EBITDA was still able to be delivered relatively flat despite some significant cost increases, particularly related to increase in bad debt. So we had increase in provisioning plus a quantum of bad debt that we'd written off. I think if you add those elements back, in effect, the result would have been a more positive outcome. We're still seeing some sort of challenges around debtors and collections. However, I don't believe it's going to be as significant as we experienced in the last year. PBT, profit before tax, down 2.8%. Like I said, largely impacted by increased finance costs.
If we go to the next slide, we've got the results for the Australian operations, and as you can see, despite a difficult market, gross sales in Australia grew 3%. However, there was some decline in gross margin. This is mainly attributed to not only the competitiveness in the market, but also a pivot by our business to more enterprise-style customers, with our smaller mid-market segments having reduced their spending in FY2024. I think Q4 was a good indicator to show that some of this small-medium business is returning, with much stronger top-line growth recorded for our Q4 period last year. The EBITDA was down in Australia, and mainly the bad debts that were written off were in respect of the Australian business, so not our New Zealand business, so that's reflected in that outcome.
Interest costs in Australia were up over 26%, again impacting the PBT outcome, resulting in a decline in PBT margin delivered. However, if we go to the next slide, if we look at our New Zealand business, as we've said previously, there was a lot of focus and work done by our teams to improve the profitability in that business. While top-line was not as significant growth as we would have liked, the ability to improve margins and the collaboration work that we've done across ANZ to achieve that outcome, with margins increasing across many of our segments within our New Zealand business, having significantly improved, has flowed through to significant increases in profit before tax. While PBT margin is at 1.4%, that was a significant improvement on the one from the year before.
Our focus for this year is to deliver over 2%, preferably closer to 2.5%. So there's still more work. And with a lot of the new vendors and new signings are all, not all, but generally our conversations are around ANZ participation. So we would be looking to have some of the benefit of all these new vendor signings that are across our New Zealand business as well. If we go to the next slide, we're having a closer look at our balance sheet. A few things to point out. So overall, working capital increased by about AUD 12 million or AUD 13 million. However, this was largely funded with some increases in the support and terms that we have with our vendors. As you can see, inventory has increased significantly.
And that's largely due to some larger buy-ins with our major PC vendors in anticipation of the PC refresh cycles. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about it. We've sort of seen some movement in terms of demand for PC sales in our Q4. Part of that was education, but part of it is contributing to the refresh, particularly with our enterprise-type customers. In anticipation of sort of increased demand around that and the way some of our vendors have goaled targeted us, has resulted in increased inventory. However, we don't—I mean, we still don't see an issue with the size of the inventory, particularly knowing that there's sort of this incoming demand for PCs that we're expecting to come through in the next couple of quarters.
Our receivables balance also increased. This is a reflection of having pivoted to sort of more enterprise-style customers. And one of our stronger growth segments was our retail segment. With the profile of those types of customers, collections tend to be slower. So that's reflected in the receivables balance. And as I said, partly funded with increases in accounts payable of supplier payments, with some extended terms arrangements to cater for the sort of large linear purchasing that happened with some of our suppliers. Also, we didn't take up as much early settlement discount as we have in the prior years, just because of the nature of the way a lot of that inventory was delivered or concentrated in sort of short spaces of time. There was also an increase in borrowing. So the other part of the working capital requirements was funded with increase in borrowing.
We did renew our Westpac receivables facility last year, increasing the limit to AUD 320 million. Our drawn balance as at that balance date was AUD 245 million on that facility. So we still have headroom within there to keep funding the business for future growth. And the facility that was renewed was for three years. So there's a certainty around the funding that's been locked in in respect of funding growth from that. Obviously, we welcomed the rate reduction recently announced. So that's going to contribute to our reduction in our funding costs this year. That remains relatively stable, but that's part of funding the cyclical movements of working capital. Sometimes the drawn balances of the debt could vary from month to month. Moving on to the next slide in terms of cash flow.
We closed the year with AUD 45 million cash, about AUD 35 million higher, largely attributed to the EBITDA that was delivered and some drawdown from additional funding activities. The collections at the end of the year were relatively strong. Normally, we would have taken excess cash and applied it against the debt. However, with sort of in terms of forecasting how much was going to come in towards the end of the month, it ended up being more than what we had forecasted. Otherwise, the gross debt would have been lower, and we would have applied the excess cash against the receivables facility, but on a net debt basis, I think it was relatively flat. If we go to the next slide in terms of dividends, the company has long had a policy of paying quarterly dividends, and this year was no different.
We tried to set our interim dividend indicative of where we think we're going to finish for the year, possibly leaving some room for some final dividend being higher. But based on the results and the final PBT after-tax, total dividends paid in respect of the FY2024 year was 44 cents per share. We will continue with the quarterly dividend policy, and we are retaining the Dividend Reinvestment Plan, of which this year, I think we had about $2.6 million of dividends reinvested. That's all from me in terms of the financial update. I'll now hand it over to Vlad to provide a little bit more color around the business and future outlook and sort of focus areas for FY2025.
Okay. Thank you, Mary. So we're now going to Slide 14, IT Markets and the Strategy. And I'll just give you a little bit of a color around 2024, like Mary said, and then we'll look at the outlook. Okay. So 2024 was not a growth market. In fact, like David said, it was a challenging market. Both Australia and New Zealand were nearly in recession. Some people would say we were in the recession. Dicker Data has a majority market share in the IT distribution space. Full stop. However, when we look even further, where our success came from, where our growth came from, what is really our customer base is what we call small and medium business. That downturn in the economic condition, first of all, impacted spend by small and medium business. And that, first of all, impacted us as an organization. Now, that's a bad thing.
The good thing is, when the economy do recover, we hold a very, very good ground. The interesting fact that in 2024, we did not lose any small and medium customers in terms of number of them trading with us. What has changed is how much they spend with us. So their spend with us went down. Now, the market share that we hold with each vendor improved. So we know that Small and Medium Business gave more relative spend to us than to any of our competitors. But the overall spend went down. So for us, as 80% of our revenue comes from Small and Medium Business, we needed to find other avenues to find that growth. Unfortunately, those other avenues to find that growth are the territories where we usually don't really participate as much, such as consumer business, such as enterprise business. So we pivoted our investments.
We adapted to the new market conditions, and we started to drive more and more of that business. It's exactly what David said. We own a very, very strong market share position, and our market share is continually improving. We are adding more vendors. The further we go, the more and more we will be subject and dependent and create dependency on the market conditions. It's natural. That's why the company is talking a lot about getting into the new segments of the market. This is what we've done with our DAS business, AV business. We're gaining good momentum in our consumer, high- margin, high- service business. But also, we started to look outside of Australia and New Zealand as well. We've been talking a lot about it in the previous years. Now, we're starting to really put in a lot more effort into driving that motion.
2024 was a tough year, and within this tough year, we ended up growing our revenue. Unfortunately, the mix between Small, Medium, and Enterprise has shifted, but looking at 2025, we're looking to shift it back, which is good news. Our ability to adapt to different market conditions, I feel, is exceptional. We know where to go and get this business, even when our traditional bread-and-butter sweet spot customers are not spending, so market share is very strong. We're improving our operation in New Zealand. We're making it profitable. We've had one of the global distributors completely pulled out of Australian and New Zealand business. Arrow ECS is one of the globally largest IT distributors. They're no longer present in this market. We're seeing Tech Data, another big global distributor, is losing a lot of share, and we're seeing Dicker Data gaining some share.
We're seeing Ingram Micro, another big global distributor, did quite okay last year as well. So we're seeing larger dominant distributors, very resilient distributors, distributors who can adapt to the conditions, are winning the market. So we were one of the biggest winners in last year, tough environment. Now, going into our next slide, Industry Recognitions. Again, it's interesting. In the tough market that we've had, we've received more recognition than ever from various industry entities like CRN and ARN. For the 12th consecutive year, we've been voted as a Hardware Distributor of the Year. The interesting irony of this, I mean, we have an incredibly strong hardware business. What's really growing and what's really doing exceptionally well is our software business. We are by far the largest software distributor. Interesting tendency has been happening in the last couple of years, but especially last year.
Everybody trying to do more with less. Our suppliers, our software vendors, partnering with fewer distributors. In fact, last year, we've locked in four or five vendors that we already had as our exclusive vendors. So they went into the market. They said, "We don't need two or three distributors. We just want to really strategically partner with the distributor who gives us the best Return on Investment, the best value in the market," and servicing our partners through the Enterprise, Mid-Market, and SMB, and they've chosen Dicker Data to be partner of choice. We're doing so good on the global arena as well. Local distributor, Australia and New Zealand, winning global awards, global acknowledgments, and obviously, it gives us that really good boost in confidence that what we're doing here in this market, we can drive those values and practices outside of Australia and New Zealand.
And we're having a lot of conversation, a lot of work with a lot of vendors to see how we can pull it through. Again, more industry recognitions in New Zealand, industry recognitions by all our vendors. Look at the top three PC vendors. By the way, PC segment was in decline. Globally, it was in decline in Australia and New Zealand. Dell, HP, and Lenovo, three largest commercial suppliers, vendors, acknowledged us and for our work. We've added our market share. We've added more customers to them. Unfortunately, the spend of the customers was lower, but the number of customers actually continued to grow. We have various recognitions from so many different partners, including NVIDIA. We obviously are a very, very strong partner with NVIDIA, and there's lots and lots of opportunities there for us, especially this year.
But I'll touch base on it when we're going to go into 2025 outlook. All right. If we move further to 2024 New Vendor Additions, this work continued to happen. We've added some really strong vendors last year. Adobe was one of the largest vendors we've added, which started to really ramp up their sales, especially in the Q4 last year. And we're going to see the full year of expansion of this vendor. BMC, an AI platform vendor. Equinix to host a lot of data center equipment. And we have a really good partnership, exclusive partnership with Equinix, I have to say. Hikvision came on board as part of our access and surveillance business. So we're building our competencies and building our portfolio with some strong additions. Saying all that, these are the great vendors.
We're going to continue to add more, and you'll see Q1 and Q2. We're going to add some really good significant vendors. At the sizes where we are, when you add this sort of AUD 3.5 billion size, this is great. This will give more confidence to the vendors, to the partners to deal with us. Is that going to give me this kind of 10% growth year-over- year that we've used to experience? Probably not so much. That's why thinking outside of the box, thinking outside of other territories is very important. Again, I'll touch base on this a little bit later when we look at 2025. Long-term vendor relationship diversification is continuing to happen. I'm really, really happy with this slide. Top five vendors are now representing significantly less than 50%, which is fantastic.
I think you could see that that's kind of slowing down. I think our top five is always going to be there. Top five, by the way, haven't really changed. Microsoft is our largest vendor, followed by HP, Cisco, Lenovo, and Dell. So top five global vendors is top five with us, and especially improved their performance. Some of them improved their performance last year due to the very strong enterprise business. Now, we're moving to the Category Performance. Okay. So that's an interesting slide. I'll stay here a little bit longer because this is where I'm going to start to talk a little bit more on 2025. So this is the major segment that Dicker Data plays. Remember, 80% of our business is coming when we look not at the product categories, but at the customer segments, 80% is coming from Small and Medium Business.
That's our usual kind of structure: Endpoint Solutions, which is our personal computing, transactional type of business, as well as Advanced Solutions, which is our data center infrastructure, server storage, enterprise networking. Two major categories as a segment were in decline last year globally, and it was in decline in Australia and New Zealand. On top of that, these segments, we are dominant, very, very dominant in that Mid-Market and SMB. So if we were not to attack Enterprise, if we were not to transfer some of the larger Enterprise deals, we would have seen a much, much deeper decline. We would have declined with the market. We try to defy decline with the market. We try to bring.
We were very careful in attracting those deals because normally those deals are at a very low margin, and they're really putting pressure on our gross margin, which we really didn't want to achieve. Now, if I look in the past, Q4, Calendar Q4, and our Financial Year Q4, 2023, that's where the softness started. Q1, 2024, was one of the worst quarters we've ever had. We knew it's going to be soft. We knew we're moving into a decline market. We did not anticipate such a decline in those markets. Those segments went into a very sharp decline. So if you remember after the Q1, we had a double-digit decline. Q2, double-digit decline. Q3 started to get better. Now, the positive news. In Q4, which we're always called, every time we've met with you guys, we've said, "Q3 is going to get flat.
Q4 is going to go and grow." That's exactly what happens. Q4, October, November, December, three consecutive months of both of those categories back into the growth. January, fourth consecutive month into the growth. So we started to see the trend. We are moving into the growth markets. My Endpoint Solution computing, back into the growth. Advanced Solution, back into the growth. Software. Software is one of those category and segments were never in decline. Not in 2022, not in 2023, not in 2024. We would have actually delivered a good double-digit growth if it wasn't for losing $100 million of Autodesk business, which was a one-off event. Last year was one of the best years for our software business. We've added a couple of new, very, very good vendors like Adobe. We've locked in exclusive relationships with large vendors like VMware and Cloudflare and a few others.
We started to really see some good growth. If you add AUD 100 million of loss at Autodesk business, we would have grown close to AUD 170 million year- on- year, which for a AUD 900 million business, it's a significant growth. So this year, we're moving in with a huge enthusiasm and hope. I think software business is going to continue to be a dominant growth area as the Endpoint Solutions and Advanced Solutions are going to come back to growth. Access and Surveillance. Look, growth is not bad. It's not bad, but it's not where we really anticipated. So we've done a lot of operational work, a lot of changing and chopping and culturally. We picked up the company with 120 people of a very strong established culture for many, many years. Now, we have reshaped some of the businesses. We've reshaped some of the thinking.
So hopefully, we'll start seeing some more aggressive growth. However, there is a growth there. In terms of our market share in Access and Surveillance, we still are not there. So it's not only the market moves into the growth, but also for us to take share. Audiovisual, I think we need to be a little bit more aggressive. Audiovisual actually had quite a soft year as well because, once again, small and medium didn't spend as much on audiovisual. They didn't spend as much on Endpoint Computing. Limited budgets they had. They spent on cybersecurity. They're trying to play with AI. They're experimenting with that. So we've seen a limited amount of spend by our core customer base. And we've seen an increased number of spend with our Enterprise customers. Last but not least, our fastest and biggest growth segment was Retail. Retail comes from a very small base.
So when you look at the landscape of IT distribution, there are major two players who are playing in the Consumer Retail space, which is Ingram Micro and Synnex. Between them, they probably hold somewhere around AUD 3 billion in consumer spend. So we're currently around 10%, give or take, of the market. The important thing for us, we do want to continue to grow, and we will continue to grow, but it has to grow with a strong margin attached to it, with a strong value that we can add to it. And we're working on bringing more vendors at a high double-digit margin. So it's a really good work in progress with Retail. Exciting segment, good growth segment. You can see our market share is very, very small, but we have to be really, really careful not to get engaged into larger opportunities at a low margin.
So we're currently doing what we're supposed to do, and I think we're very, very happy with this progress. Our Services number is down. Part of our services is what we call our telco going to market with Telstra. We've been with Telstra for many, many years. Unfortunately, Telstra, again, on the tough market conditions, they're losing their market share a little bit. There are other players coming on board. We have adapted to it. We have re-thought our strategy of how we play with Services and telco, and we're going to produce something very, very soon, something very, very exciting for this space. Okay. So this is the Category Performances. Okay. 2025. Let's move straight away into page 21. So we are moving into the growth markets. We had an interest rate cut. Hopefully, inflation is under better control. We already start seeing small business spending more.
Indication of January and February is incredibly positive. So we have a really good feel that what we call a core customer base started to increase their spend. Are we completely out of the woods? No. Election is coming. So a lot of people want to come into the election with a really healthy balance sheet, so they don't really mean overspending right now. So there's lots of other sort of things that are influencing. But all in all, the idea for our business this year is to, if we can maintain our level of Enterprise customer spend with us, we will be fine with that so long as we continue to grow our small and medium patch. That was in a very strong decline last year.
So with that coming back into the market, with all segments going to come back into the growth this year, if we continue to hold our Enterprise spend and if we continue to grow double digits in our software and our Retail strategies, I think we're looking at a very, very good position for 2025. What will drive this? Yes, improved market conditions is very important. But also, we have very transformational things happening in the industry, exciting things that are happening in the industry. Windows 10 Refresh. We've been talking about it for a long time. That's it. This is the year. In October, all corporate and commercial PCs have to be refreshed. We started to see that cycle. We started to see some really good growth from the mid.
Mostly at the moment, from the mid type of customers refreshing their fleet, we will start to see some small businesses refreshing. So that's going to drive growth in our PC segments. Cybersecurity ever-growing. We're strengthening our position in Cybersecurity. We actually, as Dicker Data, while we have the largest software business, particularly in cybersecurity, we hold a fair share, but we don't hold the majority of the share. I feel this year we're going to move into the leadership position, very strong leadership position. Some of the existing vendors, but we're also working on bringing some of the larger, stronger players in the markets to really strengthen our Cybersecurity practice. AI. We've talked a lot about AI. I was saying last year, with deals happening, we're quoting, we're doing things. Guess what? We've landed a couple of really, really good deals. I mean, we're talking about multi-million dollar deals.
We have the biggest pipeline of quoting AI work and opportunities that we've ever seen. We've seen other regions booming with AI investments: Singapore, Malaysia, United States, other territories. We're only starting to see some good investments happening in this market. Our government finally, finally, after two years of talking about it, is putting really good, healthy grants for a lot of AI factories to be built in Australia. We, of course, are in an incredible position, being an exclusive distribution partner for NVIDIA, being a chosen, authorized AI distributor for companies like Dell Tech and a few others. So we are in a great, great position to take advantage of that build of AI. And we obviously continue watching that market convergence and seeing where we can bring it all together. Well, for example, Audiovisual category used to be standalone completely.
We would have Audiovisual distributors on the ton, partners on the ton. We brought it in. We developed it. Now, if you look at the top five customers who are spending on our audio-video integration, it's actually IT customers. So convergence is there. It's happening, but it's not moving probably as fast as we want, especially when we look at our DAS business, Dicker Data Access and Surveillance business. We thought that convergence was going to be a lot more integrated by now. It's not quite there. It's definitely moving. And I think AI is going to really drive that transformation, but we'll have to see. Just before I end, I just wanted to say a couple of more things about AI. If we look at digital space, if we look at global performance, I can bet you've never seen so much investment going into AI.
If you look at big companies like Microsoft and Google and Meta and all the other big giants, global, billions of dollars getting invested. Now, from talking about it, I'm really starting to see it happening. So that's why us being up front of mind, us being investing in this cycle prior to any other distributors, really, who were kind of watching this space and seeing before they invested, they kind of left behind. So I'm very, very happy with the way that we work with our vendors and the opportunities we're landing are fantastic. So I think AI is going to drive a lot of change in our world. If we think back, internet, mobile phone, cloud, multi-cloud thing, it's only been happening the last 30 years.
I think that AI is going to drive that change, that transformation, the way we live, the way we operate, the way we collaborate, the way we do things. I think in the next five years, we will see more change than we've seen in the last 30 years because I can see from the front lines what it means for the organization. Look, we can probably skip Slide 22. It's all about how do we see AI and how does it play. I think I've explained to you. Everyone who's on the call, in one way or the other, is already using AI, whether you're using ChatGPT or Copilot or you're introducing some of the enabled AI functions within your organizations so that it can streamline your processes, make you more effective, more efficient, or you do all three, then it makes you unique.
It makes your value go up because you can do a lot more with a lot less. That's how we see it. We internally at Dicker Data are trying to drive a lot of innovation and automation using AI tools so that we can then train and enable all our customers and partners to do so as well. Okay. Now, we're at Slide 23, and I pass back to the moderators and back to Mary and David.
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 Apoorv Sehgal from UBS. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good morning, Vlad, Mary, and David. First question, just on the sales growth. So Q4 sales are up 10% year- on- year. You said PCs contributed to that growth. Software is back. You've made a pretty robust start to January, February. So I guess taking that into account, would that 10% type sales growth rate be a reasonably fair expectation for calendar year 2025?
The way we see the market at the moment and the early signs of the growth are very strong. However, there's one thing: Q1 2024 was very weak. So delivering a similar type of growth in Q1 probably is not going to be unreasonable. Delivering those types of growth year- on- year, absolutely within our aim, absolutely that's what we're going to drive. It feels like we have a lot of really good tailwinds. But remember, 10% growth on AUD 3.4 billion, it's close to AUD 500 million, though. So it's going to be challenging. We would need to see how quickly the market is going to recover, how quickly our customer base is going to recover, how much more small business will start to spend.
If small business goes back into the normal spend, I think somewhere close to 10% could be reasonable, but I don't particularly think that's going to happen. The other thing is how much of those AI deals we will land and how many of those new vendors we're going to bring. All this is the components. So we are aiming for good growth this year. Whether it's going to hit 10% or going to be above 10%, we'll see.
Okay. No, that's fair. Appreciate the comments. And just on Endpoint Solutions specifically for calendar year 2025, I mean, in this sort of refresh cycle, it's been pretty compressed in a pretty sort of short timeframe. You've talked about in the release how you're outperforming quite strongly the AI PCs, which presumably have a bit of a higher price point. Just curious in your thoughts on how that category specifically should be growing in a year like this that has such a strong refresh cycle?
Okay. So interesting. I'll give you some stats. Globally, last year in 2024, AI PCs represented 8% of overall shipments. For Dicker Data, last year, AI PC represented 23%. It's not a surprise to me. We always work on a higher ASP model. We always outperform our distributors. Other distributors are playing with a low-end volume kind of play. We do a lot more value-based selling and computing. This is where a lot of our value is coming from. I think, well, IDC and Microsoft, they all believe that AI PCs are probably going to represent about 25% globally. We're already at 23%. So I think we're probably going to go close to 30% AI PCs. AI PC is around 10%-12% higher in the price, but also it's incredible in the features-wise and what people can do with the AI PCs.
We're pushing really, really strongly with the whole AI PC motion, and we are absolutely outperforming our competitors.
Okay. And maybe just the third one from me, just on gross margins. So the second half was a little bit softer, 9.5% versus the first half at 9.8%. Just curious how we should think about gross margins into calendar year 2025, particularly taking into account, I guess, three positive comments that were noted on the call. The first, that SME sector is starting to pick up. That's obviously high margin. The second, that comment that Mary made that New Zealand PBT margins should rise to over 2%. And then the third comment that new retail vendors, you're saying, are at pretty high double-digit margins. So, I mean, just taking all those comments into account, how should we think about calendar year 2025 gross margins for the group?
Exactly what you've said. And that's exactly how we see things. We see if I can potentially maintain my Enterprise sales at the level where they are so they don't further impact my gross margins. The small business, again, the recovery of small business depends on the rate of recovery. We know it's going to recover. We just don't know, is it going to be 10% more small business coming through, 20%? I mean, when we look at the small, small business, it's somewhere around 20%-25% of our overall spend. But a 20% increase in that is going to drive a very significant up in our margin structure. So that's going to have a positive impact. Look, we always guided the market that we're going to maintain our 9.5%-10% margin profile. You obviously have seen we have elevated inventory levels.
With the increased demand, we will probably end with the small business coming back. I think we will make getting into doing some deals and moving some inventories, getting in a better capital position. So that can influence slightly margin. We will balance it out. The more we go with the small, the more aggressive we'll be able to drive our inventory down. So all in all, it's going to have a very positive and healthy effect on the business. But I think the gross margin is probably going to stay somewhere at a 10%, maybe just maybe 9.8%-9.9%. That's where we were aiming for.
Brilliant. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the time.
Thank you. The next question comes from Bob Chen from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Bob Chen, your line has been unmuted. You may proceed with your question.
Hey, morning, guys. Sorry, I was muted. Just a quick one on OpEx. Obviously, seeing a little bit more reinvestment this year. How are you thinking about that pace of reinvestment into 2025 and 2026?
Do you mean in terms of where OpEx came in overall, Bob?
Yeah, overall.
So I think, like I've called out, impact on our OpEx was there was a significant impact from, I wouldn't say one-off, but higher than normal write-offs in respect of bad debt. But other than that, all other categories were relatively similar. Some increase in headcount costs driven by a little bit more provisioning around there and also increase in superannuation levy. So we're expecting the costs to be relatively similar as a percentage of sales.
Okay. Great. And then just those familiar comments about maybe looking at international or offshore opportunities. Could you elaborate on the thinking around that?
I mean, obviously, you've seen we've established incorporated entities in Singapore and the Philippines. We've always had the aspiration to seek growth outside of Australia and New Zealand, and we're just exploring some opportunities in respect of those, but preparing ourselves for that by having established the legal entities in each of those regions.
Okay. Great. But should we expect any movement on that this year, or is it still in very early stages of planning?
I think, I mean, it's probably more than early. There's been significant positive discussions with some vendors.
Okay. Great. And then maybe just a final one. I think Microsoft's pushed through some incentive plan changes sort of kicking off this year. It looks like some of those changes are trying to sort of fire up the SMB segment. Do you see any benefit from that given your heavier SMB exposure?
Yes. Yes. We've seen some benefits already. It's early stages yet, but we are expecting our Microsoft business to be doing really well. So basically, what they've done, they've removed some of their very strong rebates and incentives for the Enterprise Agreements for the larger partners. Now, in the past, those Enterprise Agreements were done direct with those partners and Microsoft. The reason why Microsoft has done it is because they want to move most of their AI agreements, EA agreements into CSP motion. We are, of course, a CSP indirect provider. So a lot of those opportunities, those larger Enterprise businesses, are probably not as competitive as before. So a lot more Mid-Market and small business winning those via CSP motion rather than enterprise agreement motion. And of course, we become a beneficiary of that as well.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft is empowering and enriching Mid-Market and small businesses to go after that business. And while we're on Microsoft, I just wanted to mention as well, we are now absolute leader in Microsoft CSP, Azure, and Modern Workforce across Australia and New Zealand, not only with the largest indirect provider in this region. We are the 15th largest indirect provider globally. So putting us in a very, very good space obviously opens up a lot more opportunities with this particular vendor.
Great. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from Edward Woodgate from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Hi, team. Good morning. And yeah, great fourth quarter results. Just wanted to drill into that a bit more detail. You just talked about the performance by region. Was New Zealand still a drag? Which were your strongest customers with SMB, Enterprise? And if you go into January, you said it sounds like that was strong. Was that more education or SME? Just any sort of color on the fourth quarter in January would be helpful.
So I'll give you a general statement. I think the market is back into more decisiveness and commitments. We've been through a couple of quarters of quoting and re-quoting and providing different solutions. And customers would chop and change. And it's understandable because they have a limited budget. They wanted to make sure they get into the right solution. And outside of the cybersecurity protection, some of the experimental things with AI, they try to sweat their assets for as long as they can, as they can. So they may require a server and storage refresh. And we could have done so many quotes, which resulted in either no spend or very insignificant spend. We've seen that start changing in Q4. More orders started to come. I think some of the price increases anticipation moved them in a little bit more commitment. And we're definitely seeing that momentum in 2025.
All segments are doing good in terms of Small, Medium, and Enterprise. I think software has continued to be a flagship and a real strong growth area. PCs are growing, and it's in a growth mode, but too early to determine, obviously, given that weakness in the Q1 last year. New Zealand Government spend is insignificant. Oh, by the way, if I can mention, Federal Government spend is the weakest point for both Australian and New Zealand business. Gladly, Federal Government spend is only like a couple of % of my overall revenue. If anything, I'm more dependent on the local government spend, which is actually upticking. That's probably to give you a color with the election and everything. In New Zealand, I think rate cuts were a lot more aggressive and a lot earlier. We started, but it took longer as well.
So we're kind of starting to see that uptick in the growth market, both Australia and New Zealand, at about the same time. Yeah. So to answer your question, it's good to see that the Q4 strong performance is kind of continues into this year, gives us a lot of optimism. But also the effects. We're looking at conversion. We're looking at quoting. We're looking at how many orders placed within the quote period of time. So we track all those details, and it's all tracking very positive.
Absolutely, thanks. That's very helpful. And then maybe a scenario that I'm happy for you to jump in, Vlad, just on the bad debt. It looks like there was AUD 2.3 million expense in half two. Just given some of the commentary you made about the Q4 profit, just wondering, could you talk about where those second-half debts fell? Was it mostly in Q3? I don't know if you can break that up by quarter.
Yeah. Yeah. I would say predominantly, yes. So we had an increase in provisioning for bad debt based on sort of where the ledgers are at the end of the year. However, there was also an increase in the amount of bad debt written off, where the debt became uncollectible. The first half of the year, we had already provided some the year before. So the impact, it was split between sort of taking some of that cost in the first half and Q3. Hence why Q4, in terms of profitability, is even stronger. But on a comparative basis, it probably wouldn't have been as relevant.
Yeah. Okay, and so, I mean, I don't want to get too positive just because there's a lot of talent that is, I guess, a big business like this is always something that can be a slight headwind. But it sounds like the bad debt environment has improved in Q4 and into January, and so that should potentially be upside into Q2 and 2025.
I mean, obviously, we've got sort of provisioning around an increase in our provisioning, so that's already taken in the expense in FY2024. I mean, a lot of this small business that's going into administration is driven a lot with the Australian Tax Office collecting debt, so we've definitely seen an uptick in the amount of companies going into administration, but equally, they do end up settling part or, in some cases, all of their debt with their suppliers, but it's just been a process that means we have to probably provision more, so I'm counting on that getting better for FY25, but we have taken some sort of forecasting around that there's likely to be a little bit more to come.
Okay. Got it. Maybe there's some seasonality with that then, I guess. But okay. And then working capital is the last question for me. It was up a little year- on- year. But given the strong Q4, and it sounds like PC sales were a decent part of that. I guess if you think about your Days Inventory relative to the Q4 sales, is it actually trending in a better direction than what was maybe implied by the full- year numbers?
No. I think our inventory days are still out. But that's got to do a lot with where we close at the end of the year. What was sort of another feature again of last year was a lot of deliveries happening within a short space of time and in significantly bulky quantities arriving within a period. So when you close at an end of year, it's reflecting elevated inventory levels.
Cool. Okay. Thanks, team.
Your next question comes from Aryan Norozi from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. How's it going? Just first one. If you end up growing 8%-10% this year, do you have enough liquidity to fund that growth in terms of debt facilities and just working capital commitments?
Yes. I believe we do. I mean, there's capacity within the current facility. The type of facilities is geared against our receivables balance. We've got strong relationships with our current bankers in Australia and New Zealand that have indicated support for more funding. Obviously, on our balance sheet, we've got an asset being our building that's unencumbered. It's valued at cost on the balance sheet, but significantly higher market value. So there's definitely capacity.
Great. And then just on the PBT margin, so if I just paint the picture of the year, so first half 2024, you had 3.2% margin. Second half 2024, it was 3.5%. Is that normal seasonality with second half being higher than first half? And maybe moving into calendar year 2025, how should we be thinking about a sort of adequately conservative PBT margin, please?
I mean, we're probably sitting around that 3.5%. Just fell a little bit short for the year in respect of where we finished for FY2024. Obviously, if we can get any sort of gains and improvements in terms of some leverage from costs, we'll continue to do that work. But expectation, probably around that three and a half.
Great. And then just to comment on your OpEx margin being flat in calendar 2025 on 2024, considering your bad debt charges will be probably less, as you mentioned, in calendar year 2025 and revenues growing relatively strongly, shouldn't that drive lower OpEx margins year- on- year?
That's correct. But I mean, yeah, I'd agree with that.
Great. Last one.
Adjusted for the bad debt relativity.
Okay. So if you exclude the headwind from bad debt, it's flat like-for-like. If you just take what you reported, it's actually down because the bad debt's one-off.
So we should get some leverage from costs.
Yeah. Perfect. And then just in terms of January-February, if you look at the year-on-year revenue, gross sales growth rates in January-February, is that still around that 10% mark year on year?
Yes.
Okay. And then the comps obviously get materially tougher because last year, as you mentioned, it's either cycling a very steady stage.
Yeah. It's strong Q2.
Yeah. So is the way to think about it, all else equal, that 10% will probably be closer to 6%-8% for the rest of the half, given the rest of the year, just given the tougher comps?
Hard to say. But yeah, it's probably not unreasonable to think of it that way.
Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.
Your next question comes from Olivier Coulon from E&P Financial. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Just on those large AI/DC deals that you mentioned could land, what sort of gross margin and PBT profile could that deliver on an incremental basis?
Depends on the deal and the construct of the deal because each AI deal requires and includes some hardware piece, includes some software piece as well. And normally, it's like a 70% hardware, 30% software. But the blended margin at the moment we're seeing is in part of our gross margin that we're delivering as a company. So it's not normally on big volume deals, we would expect to quote at a much lower margin. But those, even though they're very, very large deals, we're continually sustaining sort of our between 8%-10% gross margin.
Yeah. Okay. So presumably, if you do get a few of these or some acceleration in that trajectory, because you're saying that it sounds like it's starting to ramp up now, that should drop through to the bottom line at a reasonable kind of incremental margin.
Yes. Yes. Yes. So those deals are quite significant. And these deals are, they're quite material. So the question is, how many of them will drop and how long will it take for us to drop them? Some of the deals that we've just received, we've been working for the last 12 months. There is another few deals we've been working for about 18 months. And there's new opportunities arising as well. I mean, the greatest thing we could have done last year is position ourselves and build expertise so we receive those deals. So the vendors, when they choose a distributor to work with, they're choosing us. So we're very, very proud and happy with these developments. So I feel it was all about, is it real? Is it not real? Is it more hype? Are we going to invest before the curve?
And we decided to invest before the curve. And now, I think it's a payoff, which is really good.
Yeah. Just maybe on Singapore and the Philippines, I mean, in your discussion when you're talking about PBT margins, etc., is there any drag from the early investment potentially in those territories? Or for the moment, you don't think that there'll be actually any revenue or cost or meaningful cost kind of from those territories in the calendar year?
You go. You go, Mary.
Yeah. I was going to say, I mean, there's a little bit of investment, but not material, and the idea would be we would only invest if we were to land an opportunity and hope that or the way we're thinking about it is that it won't be a contributor to profit, but it'll give us access to a territory to grow into.
Yeah. Okay.
It won't be a plus or minus, hopefully.
Yeah. And I mean, one of the large ICT resellers did suggest that some of the small, medium customers may be so late to the party around the PC refresh cycle that it's a bit of a logjam, and they struggle to actually get PCs. I mean, how good are you in a position to actually meet that demand when it does come when the realization that they've got a bunch of PCs that they'll even need to pay really expensive extended support for or actually get them out of their fleet?
Yeah. Look, we are in a very good position. That's why you probably see a little bit of elevated inventory, in particular around sort of a HP and Lenovo side. I think between HP and Lenovo, we have the biggest market share in our Small and Medium Business. You're absolutely right. Only 10% of the small business is refreshed. A lot higher percentage of the enterprise already refreshed. So the opportunities of the refresh in the small and medium is significant. We're ready. Absolutely. We hold a very, very good inventory level, not only by the volume but also by the SKU level. Also, we drive a huge amount of incentive programs, training enablement sessions. And Microsoft is investing and sponsoring these events with us.
We're about to launch another very, very strong program specifically for small businesses to even incentivize them even further to get into the refresh cycle earlier rather than later.
Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it.
The next question comes from Claude Walker from A Rich Life. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the presentation, Vlad. Mary, perhaps one more for you. Over the last year or so, a couple of years now, I guess increasing interest costs has been a thorn in the side of the company's profit growth. What are you seeing in terms of the interest cost, the cost of funding going forward? Are you seeing any opportunities to get better rates on the company's borrowing? And I guess what plans, I guess, do you have to try and address that expense line?
Sure. So the way our cost of funds is, it's BBSY plus a margin. I feel the margin's quite competitive. So any sort of reduction in BBSY is going to be a positive contributor to profitability. All indications are that there are expected rate cuts. So we would be a beneficiary of that. But you're right. In sort of the prior years, it's been definitely a factor in terms of impacting our profitability overall. Should rates continue to rise, if they're not going to be declining, then we would have to reconsider sort of our capital structure and how we fund going forward. And we do have that lever to sort of consider that as well. But we just haven't felt that that was necessary at this point. We feel it's more efficient to fund the working capital via debt.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Yeah. Next question comes from James Lennon from Petra Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my call. Just a quick one on the New Zealand margins. Just keen to know, I think the GP margin jumped quite nicely there year- on- year, and that filtered through to the PBT. Just curious to know a couple of things. First is, I think you mentioned you've got a number of vendors you've recently signed that are due to start doing business in New Zealand. So keen to know whether that's going to have a further impact there, maybe not necessarily on the GP margin, but sort of more at the operating leverage line?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, we're trying to drive new vendor adoption in New Zealand. If we look at our portfolio in New Zealand, it's nowhere near as close as we have in Australia. Last quarter, we've made a few strategic changes where we aligned our New Zealand business and Australian business a lot closer together. So that will drive a lot of new vendor engagements in New Zealand as well. It will. Absolutely. The issue in New Zealand still is our scale. We need bigger scale with large high-margin vendors. And we need to reduce our reliance on some of the larger low-margin consumer retail business in New Zealand. That's probably the biggest prohibitor. As we continue that, we will continue to improve. So operationally, we improved really well. The gross margin is in the right trajectory, but we need to accelerate it.
So it was quite hard to accelerate it last year. I mean, I think we've done incredible job in New Zealand last year, but it was a tough environment. So hopefully, that newer growth market environment is going to assist us to do it more efficient this year.
Would you also say that economically, things are turning a corner over there or still as bad as it is in Australia? How would you sort of distinguish between the two regions that way?
Slightly. Slightly. I would probably say this is the same. I would hope that New Zealand would recover sooner because they've had cuts sooner. But I think they were in much more deeper decline for longer. So I think the recovery will take longer as well.
Okay. And just in terms of the currency impact there, obviously, the New Zealand dollar has obviously been weakening. Was that a factor as well in terms of that? I mean, obviously, the margin performance was good, but would it have been better had the currency not been as weak?
Not necessarily because with New Zealand, our contracts are sort of with either New Zealand-based entity or where we're paying in foreign currency, we would take a forward and then lock in our buy price and our margin is added on that.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. Next question comes from Edward Woodgate from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Hi, team. Thanks for hanging up. I'm just conscious of time, so I'll just ask a big two-parter. Have you seen signs of PCs at average sales price increasing through the half? And then just for the vendors that you want in the second half of 2024, which are the ones that you're most excited by?
The PC prices have increased already. Majority of the price increases have been happening throughout Q4, somewhere around between 4%-6%. The ASP drives up due to the AI PCs and increased take-up. So that's also helping the whole thing. But the number of units we ship is also up year- on- year, which is even more encouraging. What am I excited the most about 2025? AI deals. I think everything else is same old, same old. Refresh cycle, okay. Well, it comes and goes. We've been there. I've done many refresh cycles in my career. Data center infrastructure, look, good space, interesting. Are there fundamental changes to the server and storage and sales? I don't know. Maybe a little bit of move back into the on-prem versus cloud just because of the people love to hold their data in where they live. They don't want to.
But again, nothing new there. To me, what's going to really move it up? What is a big opportunity, strong opportunity? What beat can change our structure and our revenue growth opportunities? And AI is a big deal. It's really a big deal. So that's the most exciting thing. Opportunities are there. I know from a distribution landscape, we're doing the best. There's no question about it. From an overall point of view, 90% still go outside of the distributors. I've just met with the guys from Dell Tech. They've landed a $400 million deal and a $600 million deal. All of those direct. So people investing millions and billions. And I think the AI workloads are very heavy, so they require a huge deal of those GPU compute power. So NVIDIA is miles ahead of all their competition, doing exceptionally well.
We see those deals through NVIDIA relationships, through our other AI-focused vendors. And if we can land two or three of them, that's going to be a meaningful change in a direction and in what we do. Yeah.
All right. Thanks, Vlad. Appreciate it.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Dicker for closing remarks.
Hi there. I hope that's been informative for everyone. And I'd just like to reiterate that we're confident that this year is going to be a much stronger year than last year, all things around. And as always, we're working as hard as we can to get the best outcome we possibly can. Thanks, everyone, for coming on the call, and have a nice day.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.