All right. Good morning, everyone. Well, morning from Western Australia. Good afternoon for those on the East Coast. Thanks for joining us today. We are pleased to present the FY 2026 results. You have here Matthew Lamont, Managing Director and Founder of DUG, and then myself, Daniel Lamont, Acting CFO. Without further ado, I think we have a good cohort, so we will get into the presentation now.
Good morning, everybody. Thanks very much for joining us. I have to remember to look up, the camera is up there, not down there where the laptop is. We will get into the presentation. We have had a great year. We are really, really pleased with our results, so it is a pleasure to share them with you. We will touch on what things might be concerning people because we do not think they are valid.
We are really happy with where we are at and where we are going. Just to remind people, we are a big compute, big data company, big algorithms, physics-based algorithms. We are now in 330 employees. We are really building a base to grow significantly. We are not in the realms of focusing on profits at the moment. We are focused on building a big company because we believe there is a great deal of growth that we can achieve.
38% is great, but we think we can do more, a lot more. Over the last couple of years, we have opened two new offices, Abu Dhabi and Rio de Janeiro, and both of those offices are going really well. That has added to our offices in London, Houston, KL and Perth. Multi-client has really kicked off very well for us this year, but that is who we are. We are basically a technology company. History according to DUG, as you can see, in the last couple of years, we have opened Abu Dhabi and now Rio. Caleb, you want to-
No,no.
We will do questions.
We'll do questions at the end, Caleb. That's the history of DUG. I'll whiz through this. You've seen these slides before. That's the world according to DUG, and now you can see the new Rio office and the new Abu Dhabi office. We've hired people, a lot of the jump in people costs is getting those offices fitted out with people, which has been a massive undertaking, getting them up and running, but we're on top of it now, and the work is there. The work is really coming into those offices, and the opportunities look great. It's a record full year revenue. It is what investors expected, and we delivered.
The EBITDA is perhaps slightly lower than we would've liked because, again, we settled on the MP2 dispute, but we also had to use a bit of third-party compute again, because we just couldn't keep up with what was going on. But we're now on top of compute, and we've just got another month or two of third-party compute to move on to being back all on our own compute. If you're wondering what happened to EBITDA, that's what it is. There's nothing fundamental there. It's just what we've been coping with internally, to deliver that 38% growth. What's really, really pleasing to us is our focus on software and HPC, and multi-client is really delivering. The reason we love services, that's where we come from, but we really love software and HPC and multi-client because it's got such a great margin.
It's got just great margin, great business. That release we put out yesterday, again, is a business, with really terrific margin, better margins and services. That's really significant, that release yesterday, and we're certainly expecting more of that type of release over the coming 12 months. The emerging regions have really kicked in, as I've already touched on, and again, multi-client has been great and really starting to find its feet, and we've been building that business and we've got quite a few assets now, and we're looking at ways to really improve that business going forward, to grow it. Again, they're the businesses we love. We love services. That's fundamental to who we are. But the businesses we really want to grow, number 1 is software because of the terrific margins, and that's really going well.
It's HPC because of the margins, and multi-client because of the margins. One of the highlights of multi-client is Venezuela. We really got in early on Venezuela, and now it's opening up and that data is looking like it's going to sell many, many times over. That's a real highlight there. Total revenue up 38%, which the market expected, and we delivered, and I think it's a great result. I believe we can do better this year, but it's still a bit up in the air. There's a lot going on in the pipeline. It's complicated, but there is fantastic scope out there. The normalized EBITDA is up significantly. It would've been up significantly more if we hadn't incurred that third-party compute. But it's, again, it really shows what this business is capable of delivering.
But having said that we're delivering this while we're growing at 38%. If we were focused on profit, we would deliver a lot more than that. But we're not. We're focused on growing because there's such opportunity out there. NPAT, again, is up and could be up more. Services revenue up 23%. HPC, again, you can see this is one of our focus areas, and it's really, really starting to take off. Again, another nice release yesterday and we certainly expect more. Software revenue up 33%, another great result. Just to remind people of who we are, and currently what that makeup of our revenue is, because it is changing, and changing for the better. We've got this common intellectual property, which is throughout everything we do. It's not like these things are totally independent business units, they're not.
They're all different ways to capitalize and build on the same intellectual property and the same knowledge base, basically. So seismic imaging is we've got the best seismic imaging in the market and have done in the last. We've just finished our. I'm just back yesterday from our big U.S. conference, which went super well. Again, just reinforced how we are leading the market still by a couple of years, in MP-FWI. Just two or three months ago, we had our big European conference. Again, same result and excited clients, great opportunities. It just looks fantastic. The interesting thing that's happened that's played out now in those marketplaces is that all of our competitors now use the term MP-FWI, which is our term. It's like us being Hoover now. Everyone acknowledging that that's the future, which is not what we've had before.
We've had the muddying the waters, fighting against it, and now really working hard to get on top of that. The difference is that we've been focused on what I term efficiency, productivity, and quality. So efficiency is let's get jobs through the machines. How quick can we do it? Productivity, how quick can we get jobs through people? So less people time. Quality is just getting results coming out of the algorithms looking fantastic. There's a few different interesting areas that plays out. So you can't focus on efficiency, productivity, and quality if you're still scampering around adding functionality. Which is what everyone else is doing. You need fairly stable functionality in order to focus on those. You can't have code that's changing rapidly.
That's where we're at, compared with all our competitors are scrambling to catch up and get that functionality in the code. It is a great place to be, and that impacts everything from services to people using our software to every aspect of DUG, and we will see that coming through in that bottom line margins over the next 12 months. You've seen it coming through already over this last six months, but really, it's really starting to hit its straps now, and you're going to see it coming in for the next 12 months and more beyond. Again, the software, we love it. The software is at the heart of services. It's the heart of what's really driving the HPC. The HPC infrastructure, of course, these things are so interlocked.
You've got to have the HPC, you've got to have the software, then the services rides on top, as well as those other two being business units on their own. You can see the different makeup now, which we're really pleased about, in that software is now 13%, HPC is now 13%, and seismic imaging has grew by 23%, but has dropped as a percentage of our revenue down to 74%. This is a great outcome, and we hope to drive that further and further. We're still hoping to grow services and believe we can grow services significantly. But we're driving to push software and HPC as a bigger percentage of our overall revenue. Seismic imaging, we talked about this. We're still really driving it. We've still got a really big team working on this with that efficiency, productivity.
As you get it more efficient and as you get more productive, we'll get better results coming through as well. That's the quality piece. It really endorses that we've been working on this for 14 years now, and we're well out ahead of our competitors. To have these massive companies coming out over the last couple of months and say, yes, that is the future. All oil companies, major oil companies saying that is the future is really quite a feather in our cap that it is us that have identified that 14 years ago. We're going straight to rock properties, which just means that we're really able to produce better outcomes for clients, and we're able to get there in a lot shorter time frames, which is what everybody wants to see.
Multi-client, again, it's just such a great business, and we see that from our other competitors, how good multi-client is, and it is something we probably should have done years ago, but we're really on it now, and we've got a really great multi-client strategy in play. They're our assets. So, they're assets that we either own totally or we have a share of as a partnership now. We used to have a share of revenue share, not a partnership in the underlying asset. Now we have a partnership in the underlying assets. We've been building that. We've been investing in it. We've been building it. It's brought great rewards, but the better and better rewards are going to come in the future. It's getting great momentum. It is just a terrific business.
The thing to remind everybody is that that multi-client business, that total addressable market, is way bigger than the underlying services business, right? That's what we're chasing. That market now is dominated by TGS. You've got TGS, you've got Viridien in that market, you've got WesternGeco, but it is really dominated by TGS, and clients are really unhappy with that, and that's creating great opportunity for us. The software, again, we love the software business. It's an annual pay-as-you-use business. There is consumption billing on certain HPC things. There's a lot of really lovely development work that's been done in the software around the AI space where clients can, if you're doing AI interpretation, for example, which is all now baked into the software, you can just hit the button, and you can go off and train your own models on our HPC.
You can be sitting there wherever you are in the world, you can say, I want to train a new model, and you can just hit the button, and it instantly goes out and runs on our HPC in the background and comes back, and you are not even aware that it has done that. Well, you are aware that it has done it, but you have not had to jump through hoops to achieve that.
There is a lot of work been done in the development back end of this to integrate AI seamlessly into all our products. The processing and imaging software, which does, it might appear to everybody to cannibalize our services business, is going really well, and we are really, really happy with that. That is in all sorts of different jurisdictions. We have got a really great company using that software and our HPC in Mexico.
Pemex is really using them a lot and really working with us now to get us integrated there, and it is a really great outcome. Other clients of that business are running in the STAN, so Turkmenistan and Pakistan and other places. They are based in Pakistan and Poland, and they are using it. RockWave is using it, and they are sitting in England, just south of London, and they are doing a whole bunch of wind farm work. That business is going great. The projects that these guys are getting, by and large, are not projects that we want for our services business. They are either a bit small for what we would like or whatever, some other issues with them. It is just a great business.
Our goal and what we are working on and what we are thinking about strategically is how do we become a very, very significant software player, so many, many, many times bigger than what we are today. Nomads, again, we keep talking about Nomads and DUG Cool every year and how much we love it and how important it is. Let me try to give you some clarity on what is holding it up and what is going on in these business lines and why we are still doing them. What is holding it up is that the very high-end NVIDIA equipment does not immerse well. We can immerse the stuff that we need for HPC, but the stuff that companies want for training for their AI models and stuff does not immerse so well.
BAC have licensed our patent, and they have partnered with NVIDIA to see what they can do about getting NVIDIA's blessing on immersing their equipment, and that is underway. But that is what holds this up, to give you some clarity. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we are having to really put in place a big Nomad team because there are so many Nomad inquiries coming in.
It is a really strange thing where we are not selling many Nomads, but actually, the pipeline for Nomads is growing very rapidly, and so we see great opportunity, and we do expect it to start selling. It is a bit frustrating that they are not selling, but the pipeline is growing, and we are having to put a lot more resources into dealing with it. It has got to either start selling a great deal, or we have got to shut it down. It is actually pretty exciting at the minute, and it is all over the world. I am now going to pass over to Daniel. Do you want to do questions now, Dan, on what I have talked about, or you want to wait right to the end?
I think we will wait right until the end. For those with your hands up, thank you. We will get to you after. I think Matt has already talked on the revenue piece, so I will not dive into that. I think I will go through the cost bit and then hand over Matt to touch on the order book as well.
Oh, yeah, I need to talk about order book. It is not something that concerns us, by the way, everybody.
You want to just take it away?
Order book? Sorry. Sorry, Dan. The order book is down. The order book doesn't cover a lot of what we do. It's services only and a little bit of multi-client in a particular way. It doesn't cover the big pipeline of multi-client. It doesn't cover the big pipeline we have. It's a funny time at the moment, and everybody is seeing the same thing. Order book means a little bit different to different companies, right? The sentiment in the industry, having just gone to our big two conferences, is the same. The industry is up and about. There's a great deal of energy. There's great opportunities. The pipeline is going really well. We are winning work, but it's more replaceable work at the moment.
The dam wall's going to break because of the energy we see growing, and it's exactly the same sentiment that we're seeing in our competitors, is that they're saying to us exactly the same thing. Large pipeline projects are just not dropping at the minute. A part of it is probably to do with the uncertainty in the Middle East. It's always bad for people getting on and doing stuff. But it doesn't worry us because, again, the large margin areas of software and HPC are going really well, and we see great opportunities there. We see services sort of keeping its head up, and we see. We just see so much opportunity out there. It just feels totally different than it has in other years when the service book dropped and we're concerned about what was happening. That isn't where we're at internally.
It's mostly around Houston services as well. The other business units are doing really well. We've also swapped some service work in Malaysia into other business as well. As we grow HPC and software around the world, we're turning a little bit of service revenue into that sort of revenue, and that's a better way. It's a higher margin business. I'm sure we'll get more questions, and we can play with that more as we get questions later. But I'll let Daniel finish off the talk first.
Okay. Thank you. We saw employee benefits rise through the year, and part of that is just to deliver on the higher revenue. We also, as Matt touched on, had really the build-out of our Brazil office, which has gone really well and delivered just a little bit shy of $6 million in revenue this year, which was a great result from going from zero in July to $6 million for the full year with a really great run rate entering this FY 2027. We also had some staff through in the software HPC and just helping us deliver through on some of those big contracts that we won this year. In other expenses, we had a few items which caused the 38% growth. The first one, which we've excluded for our normalized EBITDA, is the MP2 settlement.
What we're excluding there is the 1.5 million that was paid out in the fourth quarter of this year. Otherwise, the normalized EBITDA doesn't have anything else carved out of it. In the expenses there, we do still have some of the legal fees relating to that case. We're also, through that line, seeing the partner costs come through for some of those big contracts that we won earlier this year. The final bit that sat on that EBITDA margin a little bit in Q4 then as well is we had, as Matt alluded to earlier, some third-party compute costs. In June, we had a few projects where their peak compute usage aligned, and so we had to make the decision to utilize some third-party compute so we didn't impact on the timelines of those projects.
That cost came through in June and sat on that fourth quarter EBITDA margin. The other bit that we had come through in June was some conference expenses as we entered into our big conference period, and that money ended up also having an impact on that fourth quarter margin. But there's nothing there that's, as Matt touched on earlier, nothing there that's systemic, and a lot of those costs are truly one-off, and we're back in a position now where we won't need to incur them moving forward. On normalized EBITDA margin, 32% was a great result for the year, up 7 percentage points from last year. As Matt's already talked through, we're seeing the benefit of that changing sales mix and the increased software and HPC revenue really helping us shift into a better quality, higher margin kind of business.
We saw that really come through with the operating leverage in particular. What I'm referring to there being the fact that we're able to grow revenue at 38%, which was a great result, but simultaneously grow EBITDA, normalized EBITDA at 78%. I think that really shows the quality that we're bringing to the business, and finally capping it off with a $7 million improvement to NPAT and getting back into being profitable again, which was a great result for, and a great way to cap off a great year. Moving into balance sheet. We finished the year with net debt of $13 million, so there was a few little items here that came through.
Some of the asset financing relating to the equipment that was purchased in December didn't end up getting finalized until April, and so that's where we saw some of that additional financing come through in Q4. We had contract assets increase during the year. We had some big invoices go out in the last couple of months, so that balance has come down, but we just had a big balance at June 30 due to just timing of those projects and when those milestones were ultimately achieved. One shift that we've made in our balance sheet this year from previous years is shifting HPC right-of-use assets from PPE into the right-of-use assets category. Previously, this is HPC infrastructure that we buy and then asset finance.
Previously, we've been putting that through PPE, but with that balance being significant, we worked through with the auditor and made the decision to shift that through to right-of-use assets. Same balances, we've restated that through the accounts so we get the appropriate comparables. PPE, we had a big step up there, and we had the equipment purchased earlier in the year to service those big contracts. We also had some equipment that was delivered on June 30. Part of that equipment is to give us a bit of headroom for all these exciting HPC and services opportunities we're seeing coming. It also helps us deliver on the contract that we announced yesterday, which was the $9.3 million software and HPC contract, with the two-year term, which will commence straight away.
That $12.9 million then we see come through trade and other payables, this is just a timing element where financing is arranged after the equipment is delivered, and due to the equipment being delivered on June 30, we have that appear through in trade and other payables, albeit now the financing has come through. On cash flow then, really great receipts from customers and a big step up on last year, which really helped us drive that improvement in net cash from operating activities. Net cash and investing, we saw the $11.6 million, which was, as we've talked about, HPC infrastructure and data storage infrastructure that was added during the year to deliver on those contracts that we won and the heightened increase in revenue through this year.
Net cash flow from outflows from financing is fairly straightforward for us, and is just repayments on our asset financing facilities. The nice thing for us as we enter FY 2027 is we're starting, this will be the final year of the equipment that we purchased in mid-calendar year 2024. This will be the last year of those financing repayments, and so we're going to start to see some of these financing facilities wrap up at the end of the year, which then places us really well from a cash flow and free cash flow perspective as we generate income and revenue from those units which are fully paid for. I'll hand back over to Matt for the outlook, and then we'll jump into questions.
Yeah. Thanks, Dan. Software and HPC, we are set for continued growth, and so we're hoping that we can bring out some more releases and you can follow along our journey there. The compute capacity is now in place to support growth. There's a bit of new compute that's just being installed at the minute, and we're in really good shape now. We've got another couple of months to go on the third-party compute, but we'll be off it and we've now got the capacity to drive that business without the third-party compute. The industry's really up and about, right? There's a lot of excitement out there. There's a lot of projects, there's a lot happening.
The sentiment amongst us and our competitors at the moment is that we're all sitting on these pipelines and we're waiting for things to drop. I think it's an uncertainty issue because the Middle East is what the obvious thing to us that we think it probably is. We're not seeing clients bury their head in the sand or anything. It's quite the opposite. Everyone's up and about, and that's why you see multi-client going so well across the board for everybody. We're really excited for the following year. We don't quite know, there's some really big projects we've got, and if they drop, then we're going to see very significant growth. We believe we'll grow regardless.
Great. Thanks, everyone. We'll shift into questions first. Milo.
I think we have the Caleb question first.
Okay.
If Caleb still has his question. Yep, there he is.
All right. Thanks, Caleb.
Thanks, Matt and Dan. Maybe just on the order book and the pipeline, I think, you mentioned a lot of the peers are also seeing strong pipeline growth. Do you see that converting into order book over the next six months, or it's just too hard to tell?
I think that there's, yes, I do think it'll convert, Caleb. I think that we're not going to see the order book drop from here, is my expectation. We're seeing it maintain. We also eat through the order book a bit quicker now because projects go through the system a bit quicker. The MP-FWI projects now, we complete on a shorter timeframe. But I do see it. I do see it dropping. We're waiting for the dam wall to break, to be perfectly honest, and there's some projects where, very large projects, where we're up to our sort of seventh clarification, which is sort of strange. It just goes to the uncertainty. Normally, if you're in clarifications, it's a really good sign for winning project. Yes, I do see it converting. I see it changing rapidly. It's very akin to what we had in, was it 2024 or 2025? 2024?
December 2024 into January 2025.
Where we won, like, $20 million or $18 million worth of work in one month. It feels like that. It feels like the dam wall needs to burst. Whether it does or not in a hurry, I don't know. But there are some very large projects in the pipeline as well.
Yeah, helpful. Just on the U.S., I think second half, that fell, went backwards a bit. Just then you said also Houston contributed a lot to the order book falling. Is that just weakness in the Gulf of Mexico, or is that you guys becoming uncompetitive, or how should we interpret that?
It isn't us becoming uncompetitive, Caleb. I think our competitors would love that. We're extremely competitive. We are fighting a battle every day, right? We're fighting against very large companies, and I've said this to you before, and every now and again they get the upper hand. But having said that, their sentiment is what we're hearing is no better than ours. It's just this uncertainty. Yes, a lot of stuff happens in Houston, and we're seeing London maintain its order book quite nicely. We're seeing Malaysian office being a little bit different. We're seeing lots of opportunities in Middle East and Brazil. Houston is in an interesting place at the moment.
Houston is also where our competitors are at their strongest, and they're really fighting hard at the minute because we've got such a lead on MP-FWI. But having said that, it's good. I'm rambling now, I'm sorry, but we're not seeing anything that's. We are extremely competitive. That isn't an issue. We're not losing projects. We're not losing projects. That's the point I would make to you. They're just tending to be sitting around. Our percentage of win versus loss projects hasn't changed.
Oh, thank you. That's very good color. And just lastly, on multi-client, you mentioned TGS and Viridien, they do large CapEx programs and buy the rights to that multi-client data. And you guys mostly do, I think, partnerships at the moment. How do you plan to develop that segment over time?
Through opportunity, Caleb. We just see what opportunity comes along. The thing about multi-client is it delivers quickly. If we could even buy a multi-client business that is cash generative in the short term, then we would certainly consider that. We're considering all avenues to growing that business, but we're not interested in growing something just to grow it for long-term strategic reasons. It has to be cash generative in the short term. But we're looking at all sorts of opportunities for growing multi-client.
All right. Thank you, guys. I'll jump back into the queue.
Thanks, Caleb.
Is it Milo next?
Milo next.
Are you there, Milo? We can't hear you, Milo. You're on mute. Maybe he's gone to get a coffee. Maybe we should move on to the next person for a minute.
Yep. All righty.
Callum? You're on mute, Callum, as well. No?
That's fine. All right. Third time's the charm.
Declan.
Hi, gents. Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you, Declan.
Oh, excellent. Thanks, Matt and Dan. So another good contract win in the HPC software part of the business yesterday. How are you viewing that pipeline going forwards?
Yeah, really good. We think we'll manage to win other work in that space. There's other opportunities in the pipeline, significant opportunities that we're working on, and we expect to be able to convert them. But there's no guarantees. But that's what we expect to be able to do. Yes.
Excellent. Just on the multi-client, obviously quite a nice run rate in Q4, $ 2.6. Do you see that sustaining over FY 2027?
Yes, we do. Yeah.
Excellent. Well, thanks very much, gents, and congrats on-
We've got some really great assets, Declan, in Venezuela. Well, you've got to be in it to win it, but we got fortunate in it. We got in really early, and those assets look fantastic. Every multi-client company on Earth is looking at them going, you got lucky there. We did. That's the multi-client. We're even selling our assets in Australia really well. So we have a nice book going for us there.
I think that's the nice thing for where we are now, and we use that term library in the slides, and that's something we'll talk to more in the future as well. That idea of building out a whole library of projects, it also gives us more opportunity to get upside and smooths it out, and that's what we're seeing it all just contribute really strongly. So it's a really exciting business.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thanks, Declan. Go, Goppers, Declan.
That is all right.
We will go.
To Jules. Going to Jules?
Yep.
Okay. Can you hear me, guys?
Yep.
Great. Just a couple of questions. You mentioned there, Matt, that you saw the services business keeping its head up, I think, was how you phrased it. You have been here before. You sort of alluded to the fact that we could be rerunning that late 2024, early 2025 period. As you sit here, how do you think the services revenue shapes for the business, mindful of the demand, but also the intent of the business here to maybe prioritize other areas that are higher margin as well? I am just curious. We have got a lens of the order book, but I guess you would have a better perspective on where you think revenue lands for the year ahead from services.
Those businesses are quite independent. Right? Independent sales teams, independent people. When we say we are prioritizing software and HPC, all we are allowing is competition for our services, if you like. But they are separate teams, and so services will grow as fast as we can grow services independent of software and HPC, although we do love the software and HPC businesses. What I am feeling, and when I go out and I poll our BD guys out there regularly when the order book and jobs are not winning and jobs are not losing, they are just sort of sitting in the pipeline. I go out there and poll our BD guys, and I chat to them regularly, and they are not feeling pessimistic at all. They are quite optimistic. We expect companies to start things to happen.
There's other jobs we're actually waiting for data to turn up and they're moving. That services business can be a bit cyclic in that they do acquisition and then you follow that with processing, and it can tend to be a little cyclic, and we're in a bit of an acquisition mode at the moment. We're seeing companies acquiring quite a bit of data. I think you saw that coming through in the TGS books where they say their bots are 90% busy, which is amazing. Then you see the OBN companies are really busy acquiring data, and that data is going to come out and all need processing, and we've sort of got those processing jobs sitting in the pipeline.
So it's really hard to put a number on it, Jules, as to where we're going to end up this year. I'm trying to give you a bit of the feeling for it. But we've got some really big jobs sitting in that pipeline. You just need one or two of them to drop and we'll be growing by multiples, which Daniel's going to elbow me, tell me not to say. But I expect to grow services again this year.
Yeah, okay. All right. No, that's helpful. Just as we think about the year that's gone and into next, are you able, Daniel, at all to share just the impost from the third party compute on the accounts? Or is it actually relatively immaterial?
It's relatively immaterial overall. I think we saw in the range of AUD 700,000 come through in June. We've probably got another couple of million, which will come through as we kind of start the next couple of months. Well, the couple of months just gone and the few months to come, and then that'll be fully round up. So it's not completely immaterial to the business, but it's certainly not overly significant in our view.
Yeah. Got it. All right. Just the last one, Matt, you mentioned that immersion cooling is not as conducive for training with NVIDIA hardware, but I just wondered, as it pertains to inference and that sort of specialist infrastructure that we'll increasingly see being deployed in that area, how does immersion cooling sort of sit there, and do you see it as being more applicable?
Yeah, it just depends on the level of equipment. We put in the H200s, which is a really high-end GPU, and we have no problem putting that into immersion. But we're very comfortable with immersion, having said that as well. It's not that they don't warranty. I had a really good discussion with the NVIDIA guy just recently. But their top-end DGX type stuff, they have a lot of networking on board, so very, very low latency, whole rack type equipment. That networking is a lot of fiber optics, and it's not all been sealed up ready for immersion. It's just hard to see at the minute, but there's a lot of discussion going on around it, and BAC are of the magnitudes of company to really carry it. It's not over yet. We'll see how it plays out.
Got it. All right. Thank you very much, guys.
Thanks, Jules.
I wonder if Milo's back. We'll go to Alan Franklin next. He hasn't had a chance to chat.
Thank you, gents. Morning, or yeah, morning for you still. Appreciate your time. Can we step into a bit of detail, please, on that multi-client business? There are differences between late-stage sales, late sales, and pre-funding. Maybe just define to us how that flows through the business, if you are focusing on one area in particular, and just the extent to which we might be able to annualize Q4, or how should we think about the, yeah, scaling of the business moving forward.
Pre-funding is if we have a project which we wish to do, and it could even be acquisition, it could be, but most of our, all of our so far are all processing ones. Then it is about finding companies that are willing to pre-commit to data that you are going to produce six months down the track or whatever, or four months down the track. That is called pre-funding, and so they pay in just the same way as a normal services project by monthly payments or whatever. That is what pre-funders do, and they help you get the project up and running. For doing that, they get a discount on what you would pay if you bought into the data later.
Once you have produced the data, it then sits there on the shelf, and you can sell it to anybody that comes along, and they are called late sales because they are after the data has been produced and it is sitting on the shelf. You will love late sales because you do not have to do any work except for delivering the data. That money is all profit sort of thing and all the late sales. So that is the difference between the two.
When you are building up a library, you basically got all this data sitting on the shelf ready to be delivered, and it is very high margin because all you got to do is deliver the data. In the past you had to, and sometimes you have to still put it on tape and pay for tapes, but increasingly now you are just delivering it over the fiber, so there is not even that cost.
Yeah.
Anything you want to add, Daniel? Anything I've missed?
Well, from a revenue perspective, I guess, for the pre-funding, that will be recognized through revenue as the project is processed, and those committed amounts will come through into the order book. For late sales, those just are recognized and invoiced in the month that they're contracted, so they don't flow through to the order book. They're recognized fully at the time of invoicing or contract signing.
Generally, for pre-funders, you try to get the project at least two-thirds funded. So you try to get your really underlying costs covered by the pre-funders so that no matter what happens, you're not out of pocket. If you can't get that sort of pre-funding, then you don't go ahead with the project because it doesn't have the interest, right? Unless there's some reason why you think it's going to really gather interest later. But the guys coming in later, like in Venezuela, oh, crikey, I don't know what we're up to. We must be up to seven or eight sales now for that data. Typically, it's between two and three sales pay for the underlying data. So if you're in seven or eight sales, you're in really high margin territory. Does that help, Alan? Is that a bit of help?
It does. Yeah, I was just going to sort of follow on and say, well, which is the most interesting data set? I think you've obviously clarified that pretty clearly. But yeah, when we look at Q4 and there was between $2 million and $3 million of sales, so I assume a chunk of that's obviously Venezuela flowing through. But with 12 data sets there, you're obviously confident we can start to see a more normal flow through and/or benefit from multi-client in FY 2027?
Yeah. There's sales every month. Some months are a lot bigger than others. There is a bit of cyclicity to it. Also, often your projects are over areas that are going to come up and be released by governments, so you're a bit waiting for that. But yeah, it's just a great business. It's a really great business that we really want to grow.
It's had a very good start to FY 2027 as well, absolutely.
Yeah.
That momentum is really carrying on.
Thank you.
We've got a number of projects in really great areas in Africa as well as Venezuela. Even Australian assets have sold. We've just sold a big one to Chevron on the Northwest Shelf, which is terrific.
Just my second one, please. Probably helicoptering up a little bit. Appreciate margin was, call it 30-odd percent for the full year, but we did see quarters within that that were more sort of mid-30s, 33%-35%. If we roll in the contract you announced yesterday, which should be incremental strong margin, if we contemplate the efficiency drive that you're trying to get out of your algorithms, I guess, and that you've now opened these two offices and made investments in the second half, just the extent to which you're feeling comfortable with the margin profile going forward, or how we should think about the margin profile going forward, please.
I think that the margin profile will maintain or improve. Obviously, the more we can do software and HPC, the better the margin will get. The more that we can do multi-client, the better the margin will get. But even services now, because we're the multi-parameter FWI is where we're at with that, compared with our competitors, which is now around efficiency, productivity and quality, they just go straight to the margin, right? We've got some aspects of running MP-FWI that are going multiple times faster now, and that's what we think we can continue to do. As that code is made more efficient and more efficient, which comes about because you're not adding all the functionality to it, then that goes straight to the bottom line.
Just to give you some idea of the complexity and capability of this code, there's all these different options in that code for different anisotropy. Anisotropy is the sound going at different velocities in different directions, right? There's different models you can have for anisotropy. Then you can have viscoelastic or not viscoelastic. So that's absorption. You stand outside a nightclub and you hear this boom, boom. You go inside the nightclub and you hear a much broader spectrum of frequencies, and that's because the higher frequencies are being absorbed preferentially over the low frequencies. That's why you get that big boom, boom when you stand outside. That's the same in seismic. So you include that Q modeling, that absorption modeling, and so on and so forth.
There's all these options, and there's in fact about 500 different ways of combinations of these options in our code now. If you look at our competitors, they're probably up to six or eight combinations in their MP code maximum, absolute maximum. Most of them have one or two options through. Ours is very rich, which is enabling us to go down that efficiency, productivity path, which will just go straight to the bottom line as well.
Thank you. Hopefully, you've been getting into a nightclub or two of late, Matt, but appreciate all the context. Chat later.
It's been a while, Alan. It's been a while. That's why I can talk about what it sounds like standing outside as I drive past.
Yeah, correct. Exactly right. Thank you.
Is Callum back?
Well, we'll give Callum one last shot, then we can-
Be good to hear from Callum. Hey, Callum, are you there? You're on mute still, Callum. We can see that here. Maybe is there any other questions?
He might have been an inadvertent hand raise. If there's no other questions, please raise your hand if you do, but if there's no other questions, I think we'll call it there. Thank you to everyone for attending our FY 2026 results webinar. Thanks for your support through the year, and we're really excited, I think it's safe to say, for what's to come in FY 2027.
Thanks, everybody. Bye for now.