Good morning, everybody. Good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are. Welcome to the Energy One Limited earnings call for the financial year FY 24, finishing on thirtieth of June. Thanks for your attendance today. It's good to have a good turnout. We've got a presentation for you, and we're happy to take questions. My name is Shaun Ankers, I'm the CEO, and we've got Guy Steel, who's the CFO, also on the call. Again, if I could ask everyone to go on mute for me, please. Make life a bit easier for everyone. That'd be good. Thank you. Okay, so straight into the FY 24 highlights. Had good strong organic growth of revenue, up 17% and ARR, the forward-looking measure, up 16%. Recurring revenue, of course, the rear-looking measure was up even higher, and that's to do with timing.
The results were affected by the one-off restructure, which we talked about at the half year and everyone knows about. We do have some information on that. I'm happy to dig into that if you'd like. Net debt was decreased during the year, which is a good sign, by 28%, helped along by our equity raise earlier on. We have invested during the year in people and in systems, and we've got some information on that. I want to point out that all of our business line operations are profitable, and going forward, increased profitability and margin growth are, of course, the focus of FY 2025, and we've touched on that before. We do have great offerings. We have good differentiators and a great brand position in our markets.
Our diversified revenue base gives us opportunities to grow, and we've got a large and growing total addressable market, TAM, which is something that we intend to exploit in the years ahead. Next slide, please. So I'll just hand over quickly to Guy to do the next couple of three slides on the results, and then we can get back to the business. Thanks, Guy. Over to you.
Thanks, Shaun. I'll just quickly take people through the financials. So from a revenue perspective, revenue was up 17% overall. Recurring revenues grew slightly higher than that at 19%, and ARR, which is obviously a spot number at the end of each month, was up 16%. So if we break down that result into the business units, we have Australia. Sorry, I've just got some background noise. We've got Australia software recurring increased 9%, which is slightly down below their five-year run rate, and there is a slide later in the deck specifically on Australia. So yeah, slightly below expectations, but still performing yeah, quite well.
Our project revenue was slightly down as a percentage, about 10%, but yeah, AUD 100,000 on 2023. With the Australian business though, we are seeing the pipelines being built gradually through the year, and they're well positioned going into the 2025 year. From a CQ perspective, recurring revenue grew by 13%, which is a solid market. You know, a lot of their business is renewable, and we have seen, yeah, some you know, some slowing in that market in terms of projects mobilizing. So, yeah, really good result there. People will note, you know, with our project revenue overall, Europe had a really good year.
CQ Advisory, which is primarily the risk brokerage, revenue, was down AUD 700K, 47%, largely due to the market temporarily closing due to pricing volatility back in 2023. We are seeing strong signs that the market's returning back to normal. As I said, the pipeline for both you know for the Australian business is growing, has grown throughout the year and is in a good good position. From a Europe perspective, Europe grew 27%. All businesses had you know strong years. And if you look at you know retention, which is a key measure of what existing customers are doing, that was 108%. Yeah, the Europe business was generally in line with that.
Shaun talked to the wins in Europe in his CEO report, which was published by the 4E, so I won't go into that. If there are questions around that, people can ask Shaun through the presentation. Project revenue in Europe, as I said, was really strong, and that was across the businesses. Yeah, and with Contigo, we did see a number of existing customers, yeah, either upsell or move to hosted solutions. From an EBITDA perspective, it was flat and below on an underlying basis, and Shaun will talk later. You know, a lot of that was due to, while we grew revenue, was investment in staffing. Shaun will talk about that strategic investment later on in the presentation.
From a PBT perspective, it was down AUD 1.2 million on an underlying basis, 21%. So due to the factors in EBITDA plus, depreciation amortization, which is a resultant from the, you know, the timing of the ten-year amortization life catching up, as well as increased interest payments due to underlying, rate increases, as no doubt everyone would be aware of. From a net profit after tax perspective, a couple of things I'd call out there. We did book, R&D claims in France and U.K. of about AUD 300K, and we also booked a AUD 600K, item relating to our our acquisition, balances.
So basically, the way the accounting works is, if you're affecting your acquisition balances, on acquisition, you book it to goodwill, but once a twelve-month period has occurred, you book those entries to profit and loss. So when we revalued our acquisition tax liabilities, that went through a profit and loss, not a cash impact, primarily an accounting acquisition-related adjustment, so very much a one-off. Just probably look at it from a half-on-half perspective, comparing to the December half. Revenue obviously, the profitability of the business has turned around considerably. We made a small loss in the first half, so revenue was up AUD 2 million, 8%, ARR up AUD 3.2 million, 7%. So yeah, the continued revenue growth, or revenue growth continues to be strong.
Expenses are actually down by AUD 1.3 million, assisted by the lack of one-offs and also restructuring benefits, leading to statutory profit before tax up by AUD 3.3 million and AUD 2.8 million for the half. So yeah, a solid half after the first half, which was really about positioning the business for growth. Just in terms of cash, operating cash continued to be quite good. Higher finance costs and operating cash were offset by lower tax payments, primarily due to the timing of R&D credits for the UK, which we booked in 2023, banked in 2024. CapEx around the levels that we've typically done. From a balance sheet perspective, we obviously raised capital in June.
We've had a number of questions around: Was that NAB directed? No, it was not. More around keeping our borrowings in a target range compared to earnings. People will also note that we extended the NAB facility to April 2027. Yeah, that recognizes NAB's continued support for the business, and the relationship continues to be strong. And since we booked the NAB debt, it's effectively half. So people will remember, we put the NAB debt on book to fund CQ, AUD 30 million facility at the time, and we're down to literally half of that. So we're obviously going to pay that debt down further in 2025, and look to clear it completely in 2026, current trajectory.
Just in terms of the next slide I will actually move to will be. I've got a slide on the underlying adjustments. I don't think there's anything we need to go through there. So the next slide I will move to is the bridge, and I have talked to a number of these items already, as I said. Shaun will talk to the investment in staffing. A couple of points we would make is hosting fees obviously grow with customer volumes, although we have seen some, I guess, vendor pricing pressure, which anyone who uses cloud providers would have seen.
From an IT expenditure perspective, there's been a pretty significant investment in corporate systems, so CRM, HR, finance, finance and risk. We've obviously got merit and promotions in our existing staff, and as I talked about, we've got some pretty reasonable savings from the restructuring activity, and that's a mix of the region CEOs exiting the business, as well as the French founders. So at this point, I might move on to the metrics slide. A couple of points we would make on the metrics slide. I've covered ARR. From an installed customer base, we grew by thirty-seven, and that-- and when you look at underlying that, that's an addition of fifty customers. Average ARR we added was around seventy K, and we lost twenty-two customers.
ARR loss per customers, similar, similar numbers. Across the overall customer base, the average ARR is about 150K. From an attrition perspective, 3.5%, a little bit higher than we've seen, traditionally, but, still, you know, very low, and obviously, with such a low attrition number, the loss of a single customer can, can move that, you know, fairly reasonably. I've talked to retention before, and most of the business is actually pretty consistent around that 108% retention mark, and there is a component that's CPI pricing. Obviously, the low attrition rate assists that as well.
And probably the last point I would make on the slide is the LTV to CAC has improved against 2022, and that's really the impact of winning more accounts, reducing the cost of acquisition per account, and that flows through to the valuation. So I think at that point, I've covered off the financial slides, and I'll hand it back to Shaun, who's going to talk about both, you know, the implementation of the strategy through 2024 and looking out into 2025 and beyond.
Got us a question there.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, from Chris: "Can you comment on GM, please?
Yeah. With the GM, we have seen it, I guess, slightly decrease, plateau. Primary reason for that is, and Shaun will talk about it, and you'll see it as we go through the staff resourcing slides, in CQ, particularly, we've increased the staff in trading staff, and we've also had to respond to market forces on the amount we pay those people. So the CQ margin has definitely decreased during the year, but we believe that business... And we also put additional compliance resource in as well, just really around trading resilience, and that comes down to margin. So we think that business is where it needs to be now, and the margin will improve going forward.
Yes, Ryan's question. Ryan, I'm gonna come to that, if I may, on a few slides. Got quite a few slides on salary costs, so if you-- I'll ask you to just hold fire on that one, please, and we'll get to it. Okay, so let's just, I think an opportunity to get back to the business for a minute and discuss the strategy. And just to recap for you all, our goal here is to be the, a one-stop shop for all of our customers' wholesale needs in the energy and renewables market.... But, we wanna build a strong, profitable, and stable platform for growth, to have and to grow a comprehensive coverage for a physical and a contract energy needs. That's, the both commodity and its derivatives. Again, the one-stop-shop argument comes through here.
We wanna service multiple customer types who are present in the market, be they retailers, generators, traders, or industrials, for both the main commodities in the area called power, which is also electricity and gas, and ancillary products and services like carbon and environmentals for large and small customers. We're really looking to look after the entire wholesale suite with a variety of solutions for different needs. We offer software plus service. That's part of the strategy as well for customers who don't have that capability or intent to sell this around twenty-four/seven desks. Those things are symbiotic in terms of providing that service to enable us the software sale as well. We set our cap at building global capability to service increasingly global landscape, so the markets are becoming less regional and becoming more global.
So the assets could be anywhere nowadays. That's via market growth, but also to be a partner for multinationals and the like, especially in new territories. And what do we mean by that? You know, traditionally, non-traditional markets where these assets are popping up, like, Asia and South America. Part of the strategy is to invest and stay ahead of new technologies, which is AI, of course, batteries, DER, which is about the distributed energy resource, side of it, VPPs and the like that everyone's read about. That's part of the innovation part of the business. We wanna service our customers and help them grow and manage their risk.
It's a very sticky sort of customer base, and it's important to grow with our customers as they go on their journeys, and provide them with the risk management and also opportunity for growth in their own right, and that's a key part of what we do. This is not a fire-and-forget type of sale. It's a relationship built over a number of years, and that's the service of stickiness that you saw on the prior slide. We assess there's a very large TAM for this kind of activity. Of course, that's based on providing all customers, all kinds of things, which is exactly what we've set our caps at. Next slide, please, Guy. So I just wanna go through those sort of one by one and sort of talk about where we're at with each of those strategic intents.
We do have, in fact, a strong, diversified revenue base. If you look at these charts here, 78% of our revenue comes from, you know, the customers who aren't in the top 10, and even the top 10 is fairly well diversified. We have a geographic concentration showing that now 54% of our revenue comes from Europe and 46% from Australia. Go back a few years, it was 100% Australian and nothing from Europe, so we've built that out to have geographic representation as well as products and customer size. Next slide, please, Guy. This one-stop shop approach that we put forward means we're not reliant on a single type, customer type, or a single product, or a single business line.
As we can see here, our revenues are spread evenly over a large customer base. We do get asked this question quite a lot, in terms of who do we service and what's the break-up. As you can see here, we're not solely reliant on retailers or generators, or renewables, or traders, so we've got a good spread. I've got a question here: Do you see any competitors moving in the same direction as with you with respect to your offerings, like one-stop-shop, software, Follow the Sun? Or are you seeing different competitors on different tenders? So there's no doubt that we're trailblazing a bit on the services, but when you go to the trade shows, that sort of language is popping up amongst the competitors as well.
The one-stop shop is something I think we pioneered, and a couple of other vendors are trying to sort of get into that space as well, which is, I suppose, quite flattering in terms of it means that they obviously think we're on the right track as well, so they are offering that, but I think we are out ahead of the pack in terms of what we've really promoted that. A lot of the vendors in this space are sort of pure software vendors pushing one or two products, and so the idea that you're a one-stop shop is a fairly, fairly unique positioning for us, and certainly the global capability is something as well.
But I think, yes, there are people playing in the same space or trying to, but still a lot of single pure-play software technology kind of things, which are good. They're good if you just want to sell one product, but of course, you can't sell anything else to the same customer. So we've gone a different road, and I think in that road, we are absolutely one of the strongest competitors in the space. Next slide, please, Guy. So there was a question on staffing. Let's have a look at what we've done, right? And obviously, 28% staffing growth is much higher than we would expect. We've had a long history of disciplined growth. We have been tooling up for the growth of the future.
And we can see here on the left-hand side that most of those resources went into Europe, which we do and have said is the bigger runway for growth. Australia is a great territory, and I've got a slide on it as well. But obviously, Europe is ten times the size, and we see a lot of growth there, so we wanna make sure that we're ready to go. Including senior management as well as sales resource, you know, there's a good example there, sales and marketing, the orange bar, beefing up the sales. Energy trading teams were definitely a thing, but that's the capability that we're building out for the future.
So, in that respect, there was a bit of catching up to do, but we feel that we're kind of right-sized there more or less now. As we've said elsewhere and on this deck, margin growth is something we definitely need to demonstrate to the market now and to you all. So, we feel like we're more or less right-sized, and we need to just do some leveraging now and maintain cost growth as a percentage of revenue growth rather than any additional big leaks in terms of building up. But we've definitely invested, and we will always continue to invest because we're capitalizing on a future opportunity, growing with the customers and with the market and with the opportunity. We all know about the tailwind called renewables, and you need to be there and ready to do it.
If you play catch up, then you've missed the boat, so we'll always invest when we need to. Next slide, please. Let's look at where that resource base was, right? So it's localized for delivery. It's not all concentrated in head office or anything of that nature. It's spread around. But whereas, of course, that was a large increase in resource cost during the year, our revenue per employee has consistently increased over the years. Now we need to, of course, show you even more of that, but it has increased. We're not just loading up on overhead or anything of that nature. A lot of these are direct resources. Next slide. Let's get back to our capability and the one-stop shop story. Looking at Europe, we really have an extensive European market coverage. These are balancing markets.
They're scheduling physical energy into the market, and we have, I think, not quite unrivaled coverage, but there really would be barely one or two vendors who have got close to the same coverage for us for Europe. And as you can see there, it's fairly extensive, and there's some... The orange ones are coming online this year. We talked before about a customer, you know, a few months ago, about a customer that we got. They're helping to get us into those, those oranges and those reds. That was what's important about the customer, apart from being a good-sized customer. It helps carry us in there because, you know, we've got a vehicle to, to, to do those changes and to expand. But if you did the research, you'd find out there were barely any, barely any other vendors who offer this level.
There's local heroes, of course, but we're the guys that you come to if you want to get European coverage. In Australia, of course, we have complete coverage. The markets are sort of slightly structured, slightly differently, so we can cover all markets already for all commodities, and have been able to do so for a long time, but Europe, obviously, is the subject of this slide. Next slide, and that goes to the spot markets, so the prior slide I showed you was the balancing, scheduling markets. These are what we might call energy exchanges or spot markets. It's really expanding now as the market opens up.
Those markets have been there for a while, but liquidity has increased in those markets, and a whole bunch of market changes, of course, have made the trading across Europe much more easier to do. There's a lot of players coming in, wanting to trade, and we're able to offer really, good coverage of those markets as well. As you can see, it's predominantly Northern Europe has been the traditional markets, but of course, Southern Europe now is opening up, so very exciting.
But even now, we offer 75 of the volume traded. In terms of contracts, we offer coverage of 75% of the volume traded in these markets already. Again, a significant offering. Next slide. Let's have a look at the trends going forward and why we're doing a lot of this, what's happening in the market. This slide I've taken from the AER. This is an Australian-based slide, but it's fairly true for other markets. This is what's coming into the market and what's going out.
The black bars are on the bottom part, that's coal exiting. Traditionally, the orange ones and the colors at the top are all about renewables coming in. There's a bit of gas in there as well, but largely renewables going up to now and going forward. That's predominantly the future and the story that we all know about, that the new generation is mainly renewables. There's no mention of nuclear in here, but you know, this is wind, solar, batteries, that kind of thing. So the number of generators also increased along the way. Certainly in Australia, now we're up to 250 odd generators, and they are up, you know, there were 150 in 2018.
A lot of these are independent-type players who are coming in, perhaps project development teams or external parties who aren't the sort of traditional utility base. And so it's fragmenting somewhat, and we're getting medium and smaller players, hence our offerings that are more related to dealing with those guys. So digital bidding and scheduling in these markets is essentially physical activities. It's an intraday or day-ahead type markets, where we're doing something in the pool or balancing energy market requirements, very much related to transactional stuff in the pool.
This differs from contracts and derivatives trading, so that's where we separate physical from contracts trading. So physical markets are interacting with the market, transacting with the market, whereas contracts trading is something that's to the side. We supply software and services for customers both in Australia and Europe, who need these requirements.
So when we say the market is becoming more physical, what do we mean by that? It means that interacting with the market, communicating with the market, is something you need to do in a day, in an intraday and day-ahead type of approach, where we're moving the logistics of the energy around. Next slide, thanks. So we see the services plus software as this white space for growth. I don't know if you're familiar with that term, but quite a popular term in the space.
So it's white space there for people who don't necessarily have the ability to consume the software and want the services going forward.... It's a core business line for us. We have invested in that. Obviously, you've seen that with some of the acquisitions and the developments we've made and the focus we've put upon it.
We feel we're well placed to capitalize on it. We can see from these diagrams that the physical contract, physical market, logistics and trading is obviously the lion's share of our revenue at the moment. 66%, perhaps two-thirds of our revenue, comes from the physical side of the market versus the contract side. So the contract side is sort of the longest serving part of the market. Derivatives trading, very important, risk management tools for our customers, but a lot of the growth is coming into that physical energy side. So that's where we are. That's where we're well placed to be with it, and we're offering additional services to help customers get into it. Next slide, please.
So that's where we are in terms of developing our strategy, but there's a bunch of other things as well that I just want to touch upon because obviously they're of interest. We are trying to do much better at our marketing and so on. We've done a big effort on that in the past year. We've got a great team. We've 89,000 visits to our website, I think must be a record for the company. We've picked up 290-odd leads. There's more data in my CEO report. I'd encourage you to read that. We've got a global CRM that's really giving us much more insight now into what's going on, what we're doing well, and what we're doing less well, and that's all feedback.
We win about 50% of our opportunities, and as Guy's data shows, where we picked up 37 new organic growth installs during the year. So it's the one-stop shop again, that's more a differentiator against pure-play competitors. We do have evidence of that being it resonating with our customer base. The statistic I use for that is that at the big trade show in Europe, 40% of visitors to our website, to our stands, tick the box saying they're interested in more than one thing. So our customers do have more than one challenge, and they need more than one solution. It's not a one piece of software and arb trading. It doesn't work like that. We're big on cybersecurity, as we all know, anyone who's followed the company.
We are now live with our 24/7 SOC, which is a great development, and we continue to invest in that going forward and get into ISO accreditation soon thereafter. We have done a lot of integration of global IT and improved all those back office systems. That's something that's ongoing as well. So this is really a step towards globalizing the business, building that capability globally, and being the vendor of choice for larger players who are interested in developing assets around the globe. One tangible example of that is in the quarter ahead, we'll commence the Follow the Sun trading desks, both to Europe and from Europe. So it's a work in progress going forward, but we'll actually sort of open up and go live on a full cutover night shift coverage both ways.
Literally, no other vendors offer this type of service going forward, and this will allow us to compete for work in areas we might not have the capability. We do have, indeed, more than one prospect, whereby this capability will allow us to actually offer them a solution, whereas, you know, go back six months, we would have had to say no, so we'll continue to invest in our products and services and our people to maintain our strong reputation and our solution set going forward. Next slide, so just to summarize, and then we'll happily take some questions, and we do have some detailed slides as well. You know, after a bit of volatility in the, a lot of volatility, in the markets in 2022 and 2023, for reasons we know about, fewer customers are opening.
We've had a good year for organic recurring revenue growth. I really think that that demonstrates to people that we had a clean set of books here. There's no inorganic additions. They're all organic revenue growth. Guy pointed out that we've had a strong return to profitability in the half from the first half. That just shows how resilient and underlying the good underpinnings of the business. Reduction in debt, which hopefully will give comfort to some of those who are concerned about that.
The pipeline is good, and the interest is building. We have a great opportunity here, and we've really positioned the business to tackle what we consider to be our view of the future of the business. Given that we've got all these things going on, the Board declined to offer guidance, but, of course, we'll just review that as we go through the year. Thank you very much. Questions?
We do have a. So we've got a question from Matt. The first question, I think this is the first one. Is second half profitability representative of run rate profitability? In other words, can we double the half-two profitability? Well, I think to Shaun's point, yeah, we're, we're not offering guidance, but if you look at the performance of the company, I think the mathematics are pretty simple, and it's a pretty reasonable proxy of the, you know, the business, the business moving forward. So, you know, form your conclusions from there. The second point is, or the next question is from Claude. Good, Claude, that you appreciated the presentation. Hopefully, that's some very useful information there. Lease payments seem to go up. Yeah, everyone likes to work from home.
I think the one thing I'd say on leases is, previously with our France building, we actually didn't have a lease. We had a month-to-month. We changed that in the 2024 year, and we booked a lease. So that's primarily the reason for the lease payments going up. Other point I would make is, yes, we certainly are. We have a couple of buildings looking to come off lease. You're exactly right. I think the yeah, the market is far more, you know, in the tenant's favor than the landlord, and we are negotiating reductions.
We did Melbourne about eighteen months ago and received a pretty material reduction in rent rate where we were, so that will be realized through the results over the next couple of years. The next question is, "Can you make comment on what we are seeing in NEM registrations in Australia? There has been a material increase in batteries applications. Is EOL seeing this, in our order book for 2025 ?" That's one for you, I think, Shaun.
Do you want me to just say it again before we go, please? I was just reading that.
Yeah, no problem. "Can you make a comment on what we are seeing in national energy market registrations in Australia? There has been a material increase in battery applications. We've all seen that in the pipeline/order book.
Yeah, that's a very good question. Now, maybe I can ask you to jump forward a couple of slides for me, 'cause that was an Aussie-based question, and I've got an Aussie-based slide. Just jump through to that for me. So this is the Australia business. Australia are only software. We're not-- there's no trading services in here, but... So we get asked a lot, and I will answer that question.
I'm just gonna answer the question before it. We get asked a lot, you know, Australia's a mature market, what's going on with Australia? So what we see here is a consistent result for that market, there's that business. So 13% CAGR over several years, consistently produces a result that's largely as a result of us having a great position and great products, and we continue to make cross-selling and so on, and winning new accounts.
But the opportunity there, the absolute opportunity there is for is to pick up this tailwind for renewables. Now, we all turn on the news every night, and it's on again, off again on the renewables stuff. But there's no doubt there are things coming forward, and batteries are one of them. Batteries are, if I could if I went back to that prior slide, when we looked at new generation, batteries are absolutely coming. They are the hot topic of the moment, and we do have great technology for that. We have some stuff in development, which I hope to bring forward when we, you know, when it comes to fruition, and I'll mention that at the right time. But we do have the technology for this. Batteries are definitely the go at the moment, the hot topic.
But, you know, for us, there's a lot of hot topics in the market over the years, right? There's always something that's the latest, greatest. So we make sure we're servicing all of the components of the market, not just one of them. So batteries is important, but we also have solar, we also have renewables, we also have environmentals, but then we also have traditional sources as well, gas and coal, and all the transition that's attached to that. So yes, we all hope that the trend and the tailwind increases, but I can certainly say from the Aussie business that we have a really good business there, and if we pick up a tailwind and it accelerates, then the Australia business will benefit from that.
No problem. I think the only thing I'd add to that is when you look at the pipeline for CQ, and I think that it might be one of the further questions, is there are a number of battery opportunities in there. Working through the question.
On that one-
Similar vein. Two of your customers have commissioned new assets in Australia recently, EnergyAustralia gas and another customer, a large solar battery asset in New South Wales. What is the revenue opportunity from existing customers bringing new assets online? In particular, could you walk through the unit economics of the CQ business? Is revenue charged on a MW per hour basis? I can probably... I'll answer the first one, the last point quickly, because, yeah, we've said a number of times, we don't take positions on energy. We, we charge either on a resource being available basis or a basis. So that answers that one, and then, Shaun, I think you can take care of the next question in there.
Which one am I replying to now?
The EnergyAustralia gas and the solar battery asset in New South Wales. What's the revenue opportunity from existing customers bringing new assets online? I mean, I think the answer really to that is, we typically, you know, when you look at our retention stats at 108%, that's exactly what comes out of our customers bringing new assets online and the revenue opportunities. So yeah, we do very successfully our existing customer base. Not sure, Shaun, if you have anything more to add on that one.
Yeah, I do. We grow with our customers, right? This is the point about the thing. It's not a fire and forget single software sale. It's a growing with you story. So even big customers wanna grow, and they wanna have new assets, and they want development, and that's where they are, we're there to help them. So that's the cross-selling, that's the upselling, whatever you wanna call it, but growing with our customers. So it's a very important part of the whole story for us, and it's important to have the technology to offer them, because if an existing customer, and I'm not commenting on these guys in particular at all. But if an existing customer wants to build a battery and say, for example, we didn't have battery tech, then we wouldn't be able to help.
So it's important to be going forward at all times. You can see on this slide here, we talk about the fact that in aggregate, we're the fourth largest generator in the NEM. Now, we don't take a position. This is very important to understand. We are not prop trading. We're not trading on behalf of in that sense, right? We follow instructions from our customers. They're their assets. We get paid by the month to do the work, flat amount per month. So it's not profit share or anything of that nature. We're completely honest brokers in this. There's no moral hazard. We provide a service to those guys who want to outsource that service to someone else.
This is something we can offer to new entrants who may not have the capability to get involved and actually be active in the market on a 24/7 basis. Of course, you need software to actually interact with the market, not just people. So we do these things for them. It's a very important service, and as you can see, we're doing pretty well at it. I mean, we've got the fourth largest generator in aggregate. And something like 13% of the East Coast gas—we exclude LNG import-export—is being managed by us on behalf of our customers. Next question.
Next question: Is CQ classified as recurring or non-recurring revenue? So to clarify, CQ, all of the trading services that we do for customers is recurring, and the advisory, which is a mixture of our broker and, of CQ broker, which is broking risk products or advising on risk products, and also just general advisory of the energy market, is classified as non-recurring. And we do actually split it out, line by line in our financials. If you go to note two of the 4E, it splits it out, in that nature. Next question is from, Steven at Veritas: is the CQ insurance market set to normalize?
Let me explain a little bit about how that works. We offer a brokerage service to customers, between buyer and seller. We're neither the buyer nor the seller, we're the broker. And during that massive volatility during 2022, 2023, obviously, the supply. There's plenty of customers, plenty of demand for these types of contracts, these risk transfer, insurance style reinsurance contracts. There's plenty of customers for those, but there weren't that many sellers. And of course, they're coming back into the market slowly.
We've said this in the report, that we anticipate the normalization of that. It is an important business line offering for our customers, you know, a very important aspect of their trading businesses. And we're pleased to be able to supply them with that. But yeah, it does rely on both buyers and sellers as well as the broker. As all brokers will tell you, absolutely vital role in all transactions, so, that's what we provide for them. And we expect that market to return this year.
Next question relates to the pipeline. So what's the pipeline looking like in Australia? If I look at the overall pipeline, it's grown across the year, pretty materially. A lot of that growth, yeah, Europe's had a really strong pipeline all through the year. A lot of that growth has actually come out of Australia in terms of the software business, and CQ. Not sure, Shaun, if you want to comment, but certainly the pipeline is a lot stronger now than it was twelve months ago.
Yeah.
And that's your recurring revenue and projects as well.
We've made comment of this in the CEO report, Claude, about the pipeline improving. We did debate actually publishing the pipeline coverage type stats, but we decided not to, 'cause there's a lot of, you know, it's a small enough market where the competitors might get a sniff of what we're doing. You know, please just accept the response that the market, that the pipeline is growing, and we're getting better at marketing and sales, and the expectations will continue that way.
Next question is: Does gross margin trend down as services grows over the years ahead? I mean, as I talked to CQ previously, you know, it's a temporary dip in margin. The margin will improve in CQ, and we certainly see... Yeah, CQ was pretty reasonable margin, very close to the software business. If you go back to 2023, 2022, when we acquired it, we certainly see that turning around over the, you know, 2025 and going forward. So we would see margin improving. And, you know, we've talked about that.
I'd like to make a comment on this. The word CQ comes up quite a lot, and obviously, it's in the financial accounts we talked about, but I don't see it like that. This is Energy One offering a whole of market solution to our customers. We offer services and software which equal a solution together. So one thing leads to another thing, and overall, the margins for the business, we've made it quite clear that we plan to grow the margin for the business and demonstrate to the market that we can do that. I don't wish to keep parsing out individual business lines because I think it's counterproductive. We offer a solution to the market.
When you take our services, you're also obviously taking our software, and if we didn't have the service, you wouldn't take the software. So they are symbiotic. I'd like to move towards maybe looking at the business as a whole going forward, but certainly, just for the year just gone by, as Guy said, yes, there was this blip, but as a whole, our goal is to grow that margin and demonstrate that we can do so.
Next question is: Given the rapid expansion of data centers and the increasing demand for energy to support them, how does this growth in energy consumption influence Energy One's product development, market strategy, and long-term growth prospects?
Well, the market, this is kind of wrapped up. Specifically, data centers, they would fall into two camps. One is the contribution they make towards the DER side of things, which is behind the meter, distributed energy resources, virtual power plants, all of that stuff, all of that good stuff. And we're obviously moving towards that in the future and having solutions being in development for that.
But generally speaking, there's an electrification of the market going on, as we move away from gas, as we move towards EVs, because every time an EV is purchased, we replace petrol with electricity. So the general consensus is that the market, the grid, in most Western countries, needs to triple in size over the coming years just to cope with electrification. And, you know, these kind of data centers contribute to the increased load as well, going forward.
Next question is: Your comments around paying down debt imply positive free cash flow for 2025 , but cash flow is typically weaker in the first half. Can we expect positive free cash flow in both half one and half two for 2025 or only the latter? I expect to see positive cash in half one. And we look at it from the perspective, we take EBITDA less CapEx, software CapEx, less leases. So that's how we measure it, which effectively gives us cash to pay into the bank debt. It's interesting, yeah, we've talked about not being a lot of seasonality in the business.
If you look historically, yes, the second half is stronger, and that's because obviously the recurring grows through the year, whereas our staffing, typically, the merit increase, that kind of stuff goes through earlier on in the year. So the second half tends to be stronger, and the project revenue tends to skew towards the second half as well. But to answer the question, overall, positive cash flow in both halves, stronger in the second. I believe that is the limit of the questions that we stand at the moment.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Well, thanks, everybody. We had 65 attendees. Appreciate that. Good turnout. So thank you for your interest in the company. Are there any more questions just before we close up?
Hey, Shaun and Guy, do you mind if I jump in with a question?
Sure, sure.
No problem, Caleb.
Yep. Just I guess, touching on the differences between the margins and the geographies. So I think Australia had about 32% margin and Europe had about 18%, which I guess makes sense, reflecting the growth OpEx and just the maturity stages of the businesses. But over time-
So you're talking EBITDA?
EBITDA, yep. So over time, do you kind of see Europe kind of catching up to Australia's margins as it grows? Or is there a environmental factor which kind of prevents Europe from posting as strong margins as Australia?
Australia is a business that's, you know, mature market in good shape. We've got it, you know, been doing it for a while. It's in. So obviously, the margins are in good shape, and Europe's more kind of expanding, if you like. And to a certain extent, the ticket prices are smaller because it's a different type of product set over there. So yes, we're gonna get to some point where we expect that leverage to kick on, and we do, and generally expect the leverage, our operational leverage to improve now.
But I just think that just reflects the relative stage in the life cycle of the two businesses. And at some point, you know, there will be a leveling or equivalating or whatever the right word, is that word, between the two. They'll trend towards each other, because at the end of the day, similar customers doing similar things, it's just a matter of how long you've been doing it.
Thank you.
Yeah, I think, I mean, you'll see that start to equalize through the 2025 year.
All right. Thank you.
Andrew's got his hand up. Andrew Tan? You're on mute.
Yeah, I'm not sure we can hear you, Andrew.
Did I say Steven had his hand up? Yeah, maybe not. Sorry, Andrew, we can't hear you, mate.
Yeah, he's, he's put it in the chat. So any color on the specific products that drove the sales growth? I mean, yeah, we've talked at a effectively a geography or business line. So, Shaun, whether you want to expand any further on that.
In Europe, our physical scheduling products are obviously selling very well. ETRMs tend to be a bit larger and a bit more of a slow sell. You know, you're more of a project-based sale, but we, you know, one of the diversifications that we've come across, that we've developed, has been to have large and smaller products that are some things are always selling. And so there's no doubt that scheduling is day ahead, and intraday. I showed those two graphs from Europe, those two maps. It just shows that, there's a lot of interest in those markets for the kind of physical day ahead and intraday markets. Huge interest. So that's what's selling over there, as well as, not to mention our traditional cross-selling, to our existing customers, which is still an important part of the business.
Next part of the question was, FY 2024, an unusual year for new customer wins. Are you confident this level of sales growth can be sustained or increased over the next three to five years? I think, I mean, I'll cover the backward-looking or maybe the current backward-looking first, then Shaun can talk to the forward-looking. But if you look at our growth, I mean, it's been pretty consistent for a couple of years now, or four halves, however you want to phrase it. So I think, yeah, we're pretty confident around that. We look at the pipeline, we've got good cover for our revenue going into 2025. So from that perspective, we are. Shaun, I'll let you comment further.
I'll take you back. Can you go back to the metrics slide for me, please? So...
Oops.
Too far. Right. So if you look at customer installs, the growth through there, that's 37, 38 actually, customer installs in a purely organic year. The year before, okay, it was a bit suppressed, but we had a bit of inorganic growth in that as well. So we set our cap at increasing our sales and our margins, and that's what we intend to do. Am I confident we can do that? Well, if I wasn't confident, we would continue to grow the business, then we would be on the wrong track. So yes, we are consistently. We are confident we can grow, and we're investing for growth. Thanks very much. Someone's starting a motorbike in the background there for a second.
Next question is: Could you please describe to us how you about cyber risk, and also how confident you are on the timing of achieving ISO cybersecurity certification? Is it in your control?
So cyber's topic du jour across the globe, and we're no different. We focused on the cybersecurity aspect rather than the accreditation part, because at the end of the day, accreditation accredits what you've got, rather than writing policies that and not having the measures in place. We've concentrated on really beefing that up, and the accreditation part should follow more naturally. It is somewhat in our control, but it's a matter of what priorities we put in place, and we're putting a big effort onto it. We have a full-time CISO now, which is something we didn't have in the past, whose job is to push that through. I'm being a little bit vague on timing because there's always stuff that we need to get on with, and there's other priorities as well, like customers to look after.
But we want it as much as everybody else wants it, and it will help us kick on in the future as well. So it's a, it is a very high priority, more than AUD 1 million being spent on it this year, much more. And so I can assure you. We see it as a high priority. It's not a, it's not a housekeeping thing. It's a critical part of the next twelve months or so.
I think at that point, we're
Oh, there's one more.
Oh, sorry, hang on. There's another question. Re the impairment testing assumptions, what is the basis of the growth rates in your impairment testing assumptions? What has driven the changes from the assumptions to 2023 to 2024?
So basically, our assumptions are built around historical revenue growth projections. And the reason we used those was we thought they were as good a proxy as we could, you know, ascertain of the growth moving forward. And if you look at the rates, traditionally, we actually have exceeded them, so we view them as somewhat conservative as well.
Okay. Thanks, everybody. So hopefully, that was useful. The recording will be up on our website. Thanks for your interest in the company and continued support. You know, we're really looking forward to getting stuck into the year ahead and looking forward to reporting to you again at half year. So thank you very much, and have a great day.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, Shaun.
Thank you. Bye.