Good morning, all, and welcome to the call. Thank you for taking the time out. We'll be recording this webcast, so we can place it on the ASX site when we're finished. Could you please all mute your microphones until you're ready to ask a question? We'll get started. The purpose of the raise AUD 4 million net, AUD 4.345, is to reduce our bank debt slightly, ease our covenants, and facilitate the negotiation and replacement and renewal of- sorry, not replacement, but renewal of the facility, which is in process as we speak. The facility has been underwritten by institutional investors and three of the board's directors, who are therefore taking substantial equity positions in your company.
It's a fully underwritten rights issue with all the normal terms and conditions. So we'll take some questions. Are you gonna read out the first couple?
Yeah. So we have some questions, obviously, that we published this morning on the ASX. So what we might do is just run through them first, and then we can take questions either via the call or via the chat, and we'll read them out and attempt to answer them as best we can. So the first question was around participation in the offer, and can I participate if I'm a non-Australian or non-New Zealand based shareholder? And the answer to that is the offer is restricted to people with an address in Australia or New Zealand, and the primary reason for that is just the-- So we're utilizing a low doc offer regime, which is obviously cost effective and efficient.
When you look at the costs of offering in foreign jurisdictions versus the number of shares that sit in those jurisdictions, it you know, it doesn't economically make sense. That's the rationale for limiting it to Australia and New Zealand. The second question was: "Is there an opportunity to participate in the offer via being included as a sub-underwriter?" I might let Andrew talk to that one in terms of the process we went through in terms of obviously utilizing Unified and then the result in sub-underwriting.
Yeah. So the underwriter had a very short process on last week to identify sub-underwriters, which they did. There are two institutional investors as sub-underwriters and the three directors identified in the material. So that underwriting is now closed. So no, there's no opportunity to participate as a sub-underwriter.
Question three was: "With an offer price of AUD 4.05 compared to a trading price of AUD 4.44, the Friday before we announced, is the, I guess, is the discount, too, too favorable to, potential new shareholders?
So, there's a number of ways of assessing relative price, and, it's a balance between the discount to the, to the most recent price and to the, volume weighted average price over a longer period of time. 15-20 days is normally the, interval taken for that. We have achieved an underwriting at a 4.3% discount to the 15-day volume weighted average price, which is considered to be a very tight, discount. So, you know, the shareholders should be very pleased about the appetite for the underwriters to participate at that level. That's very favorable. Yes, the price went up in the last sort of three or four or five days, associated with some large blocks of, stock going through and, people looking to buy into the, the share.
The discount is quite shallow from that point of view, and previous underwritings that we've done have been at 12%-14% discount. And other underwritings done by other parties in the last couple of months have been similarly larger than the one we achieved. So it's a good price. It's not especially favorable to shareholders, but I'm pleased to say it is at a discount to the market price, and so shareholders will get an advantage from that that we think is appropriate.
Question four: "Can, you know, can Energy One provide an update on the NAB debt facility and timing of document execution?" Obviously, when we announced the raise, one of the key points was with NAB. So just for background, the facility if we did nothing, the facility actually ends in April of 2025. One of the practical implications of that is when we report at 30th of June 2024, because the facility has less than 12 months to go, we would need to current all of our debt, which is one of the reasons why we approached NAB to extend the facility.
At this point in time, the term that we extend for has been undecided, will be decided by the board, and obviously, you know, pricing plays into that, and also our cash flow and debt repayment profile. I did notice we got a separate late question in terms of when do we expect the NAB debt to be fully paid down? We, I think, yeah, we've previously said many times, yeah, end of calendar 2025. And yeah, we're, yeah, largely on track for that. Maybe, yeah, maybe a little later, but, yeah, it'll depend on cash flow and other investments in the business. So it hasn't really changed. So I think that, apologies, there's another question, question five.
I think it probably plays into what Andrew talked about earlier, but did EOL consider a larger capital raise than AUD 4.3 million? I'll let Andrew talk to that.
Look, we did. There's always a consideration as to costs, relatively fixed, or mostly fixed, and so larger raisings are ostensibly cheaper. However, every unnecessary dollar that we raise dilutes shareholders, and that's something that we're very sensitive to. So AUD 4 million was a prudent number that we felt, and we discussed several times whether to raise the size of it, but we settled on AUD 4 million after costs.
Very good. Thank you, Andrew. Now, I do notice there is a number of questions in the chat, which we will move to. So I will, I will go through them in order. Sorry, I'm just pulling them up. And, the first question's from Claude, which is: "Could you please explain more about the ramifications of achieving ISO 27001? How long, how long it has taken so far, and whether it is proving to be more expensive to achieve than originally envisaged?" And I think, Shaun, I might pass that one across to you if that's okay.
Of course, Guy. Happy to, happy to answer that one. Good morning, everybody. Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. So ISO accreditation, ISO 27001 is when we're talking about that. What is it? It's a, it's a information security standard, international standard. It's about accrediting your information security protocols and processes to the, to the highest quality. You can have very, very high quality information security standards, but then you can also apply the, the ISO on top of that, which gives you the accreditation. So we already have good cyber, cyber quality, defenses. We're building them up.
We're investing in that, and of course, towards the end of the process is when you start trying to get it accredited, because what accreditation gives you is both a certainty that you're doing it right and it's being audited every year. But in a marketing sense, it gives you the advantage of being able to say that we have it. And so as this topic becomes more and more important going forward, we're able to say, especially to larger clients, "Yep, we've got ISO." And they, and it sort of answers the question for them in one go, ticks that box. But before that happens, we obviously wanna make sure we're operating to the highest levels of cybersecurity.
If you know, we had an incident last year, and that always makes you go back and look at it again, so we were working through that. And we are doing lots of things at the moment, and we're gonna continue to invest. Has it cost a bit more? Yes, I think that's a fair thing. These things tend to find out when you initially do it, you have a budget, and then there's always something that pops out of the woodwork. But it's an ongoing process. It's a vital process for a business like ours to continually be looking at whether or not we've got the right electric fences up, and whether we're monitoring those electric fences and stopping intruders. It's just a very prudent thing to do. We take it very seriously. So yes, we're working through it.
If we had... Everyone's got a story of someone they knew who got it done in about six months, but usually that's one instance. If we just had one office with one set of IT, then we would be able to get it done quite quickly. But we're operating in multiple countries, and there's some legacy things where two different countries have two different bits of kit, so we need to work through cleaning all that out and standardizing as best we can. It just takes time, and when, at the end of it, we'll have a really good marketing advantage and a really good level of confidence.
Thanks, Shaun. Next question's from Daniel. In the trading update, it stated that the Australian business experienced contract delays. What gives management confidence this will return? Is this dependent on the National Energy Market or dependent on National Energy Market registrations?
Well, there's a general trend towards national NEM registrations, call it the tailwind, the renewables tailwind, which we're working with. Now, specifically in the short term, we're talking about contracts that are sort of of a size where you know the delay sort of affects the one-off kind of results, one-off sort of revenues and so on. So we're just this is not about the general tailwind, this is about just trying to get signatures on you know medium, medium-sized contracts.
About every time-
Thank you.
Yeah.
Sorry, I skipped over a question. So, David, has a question: You mentioned in the trading update that one of the main areas of focus for 2025 will be on margin growth. What EBITDA margin do you hope to achieve in 2025, and in the medium term? Thank you.
You skip over on that one on purpose?
No, I, no more, more on competence, not purpose. And,
So we're focusing on margin growth. We made that quite clear. We are not usually in the business of forecasting these types of things, because there's a few moving parts, and we try and be conservative and then stick to our word. So we're not forecasting a margin, although we are indicating to you that we are focusing on improving margins, and that just, you know, the good way to do that is to grow sales for operating, operational leverage. But also try and make the best use of our resources that we can, and that's internal efficiencies. We had a bit of a restructure to try and help with that. We're introducing automation to help with that, and standard processes and procedures, and the shared services model.
All of these things are intended to try and make better use of our cost base, and to experience margin growth from there. So I can assure you we're working on it. We're just not in the business of predicting margins until we report our results.
Thank you. Next question is from Sean. Not Shaun Ankers, one of the other attendees. It is a bit unclear why NAB wanted more security through a cash raise, while you expect it to be repaid by the end of 2025. What concerns NAB? So I think it, you know, I'd firstly say, you know, certainly it wasn't NAB forcing us to go to a cash raise with the facility. You know, what people need to remember is pricing is based on risk when a bank looks at your facility, and part of that is debt levels. So it's, you know, one of the considerations for us is pricing, which has driven the raise to some extent.
As is noted, you know, the debt will be gone by the calendar end of 2025, or soon thereafter at current forecast. I think the relationship with NAB is very strong. They certainly wouldn't be renewing the facility if they had any significant concerns with Energy One. So that's a really positive sign. That ends the questions in the chat. Now, we did get... Sorry, Andrew has just asked another question. What is the implied 2024 ARR guidance, given that FY 2024 recurring revenue is AUD 46 million?
We're not implying any guidance for that, Andrew. We'll announce that when the results come out.
Yeah. I mean, clearly, we'd expect the ARR to be higher than the recurring revenue for the year, given it's a, it's a spot at the end of June 2024.
Forward looking.
Yeah, forward looking. We had a couple of other questions that came in very late, on an email, which I know, Shaun, you've got in front of you. The first two related to the NAB facility. The first question was: What is the current balance? And as of today, we don't really look at it. We look at it on a month-end basis, 'cause a lot of our collections are very much weighted towards the last couple of days of the month. So that's the point to look at it. What I would say is that it's lower than where it was at December, so net debt.
So, debt minus cash is lower than where it was at, December. So as we've stated, the business has returned to profitability, it's returned to, you know, it's generating cash, and that's seeing, debt being retired. The second piece, second question related to when the debt would be paid off, which we've also answered. So I think, Shaun, are you happy to take, questions three, four, and five, from that list?
Okay, I'll just read it out. Can you please elaborate on the makeup of the pipeline? Are there any many medium and large contracts that are close to execution, or is it predominantly SaaS type deals, for example, eZ-Ops? Well, as longtime observers know, we've got a mix, and we've got a mix on purpose of small and large accounts, because that's diversification 101. So we do have all sorts of things going on. When we talk about things that move the dial, obviously, they're more at the larger, larger end. We're not talking about smaller ticket sales. They usually, you know, they sort of keep moving, so that's good. So these larger ones, like, we've said before, they usually pop up in the one-off revenues, are... It's a bit more lumpy.
It's timing related to customers, not necessarily about the quality of our products or anything. It's about when they make the signatures happen, and as I've always said, they're a bit like buses: There's nothing for a while, and then three come at once. So it's just the nature of that particular segment, and we continue to work through it. So we always have a mix of small and large sales in the pipeline. Obviously, as the revenue grows, as the total pool of revenue, the impact of one-off projects becomes less and less significant. So obviously, when we started out a few years ago now, it was a bit, you know, up and down, but now we've got sort of 90-odd% recurring revenue.
These one-off larger accounts are not so pivotal, but they still affect the short term, half to half type result. That was question three, I think.
Question three.
We've answered four. I'm not gonna answer that one.
We have, yeah.
Number five: The project delay in Australia, have you previously qualified these as small, medium, and large? What bucket does the delayed contract fall into? Medium. Have commercial terms been agreed on this contract, start date been confirmed? So these projects are in development. You know, we've usually got projects in the various states of, you know, we're on the final list or in signatures being done. So, in this particular... Well, there's a couple of mediums in here. One of them is in a position where we're just waiting for a signature, and another one we're in final negotiations.
Thank you, Shaun. I think at that point, unless anyone who is on the conference has got any questions, there's no more-
I think there's one. David, there's one, David.
Sorry. It's just popped, just come up. David said, "Thank you for doing the raising via a pro rata rights issue rather than a placement. Can shareholders apply for additional shares above pro rata? If not, wouldn't you want shortfall shares going to your shortfall shareholders rather than the underwriter?" So I think I can answer that one, and Shaun and Andrew may have comment as well. So we didn't provide an oversubscription facility. So yes, where our shareholders don't apply for their pro rata entitlement, they will fall to the underwriters. And I think, or sub-underwriters, when you look at the sub-underwriters, you know, the comment I would make is the bulk of the sub-underwriters are existing shareholders, so they are going to existing shareholders.
Then obviously the three new directors taking shares is obviously a very positive investment in the business. That's something you would want to see happen as well. So to speak, they're all people within Energy One existing shareholding or board membership.
With a strong interest in the company.
Yep. Um-
Claude?
... Claude just stated, "Appreciate the pro rata nature of the offer," and yeah, that was clearly done to ensure that, yeah, existing shareholders, yeah, could participate if they so choose.
Look, the structure that is best for a capital raise depends very much on the circumstances. In the past, we've done SPPs, and the feedback from shareholders was that that didn't work because of a large number of medium-sized shareholders that basically got diluted. So that's why we've gone for pro rata in the last two raisings, and we hope to tune our behaviors to the feedback that we get from shareholders.
Thank you.
Is there any questions on the call itself?
I think it looks like that's the end of the questions. So I think at that point, yeah, we can probably say thank you for attending. Hopefully, yeah, we've answered the questions that we got by email or people yeah asked us verbally, and yeah you understand the background to the raise. And I think at that point, Shaun or Andrew, unless you've got any other comments, we can we can wrap up.
Thank you very much for your time, and we'll do another call after the results in August. Enjoy the rest of your financial year. Thanks, guys. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone.