Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Energy One Limited financial results presentation for the full year of FY 2022. I've got a few slides to go through here. Obviously, we'll talk about the year in review and talk about the things we're working on going forward. Happy to take questions, preferably at the end, but if there's something that you would like to bring up, please do so. I'm joined today by Guy Steel, our Chief Financial Officer, and of course, Andrew Bonwick, who is our Chairman. You can ask questions of those gentlemen as well. Yes. Here we go. Oh, let me just get this thing to work.
Obviously, I'm sure most of you are aware of the company and/or, you know, the history of the place, but let's just do a little recap slide for those who are a little bit new to it. Welcome to ask questions at the end about the detail of the industry, and we've got slides at the back for that. We're a leading independent global supplier of energy trading software systems and services. We have a hybrid business model made up of recurring revenues, typically in the 80%-85% range, and one-off project T&M, which we can talk about later. We operate in the solutions business for energy and physical energy and its derivatives. We have offices in four countries, customers in 20, and approaching 200 staff across the group.
A large market share in Australia. About 50% of the energy in this country is traded using our software in one way or another, and obviously a long runway for growth out of Europe. The company's been developing, and we're in the business of rolling out a business providing 24/7 operational services to complement our software in this space. Lastly, of course, the company's got a long track record of year-on-year growth in both revenue and earnings. Here's an example of that. The last five years, growth in revenue has averaged 45% per annum, and EBITDA growth of 48% per annum. Something we're very proud of. Earnings per share has grown in that time from sort of AUD 0.02 per share in 2017 to an adjusted rate of AUD 0.16 per share now.
Again, our strategy has been underway for a while now, and we can see the fruits of it as we go on. Who are our customers? They're often large utilities, infrastructure providers and the like. People who often have a physical position in the energy market. They're part of the other long or short energy. Quite a lot of financial traders only dealing in just in derivatives. They supply an essential service for the most part, gas and electricity. It's a critical service, and our software and services are often mission critical to those customers. What's happening in the marketplace? A massive amount of renewable energy is coming into the market going forward. You've all heard about that. We've done some analysis on the market and what's happening.
Since 2015 in Australia only, just using this as an example, but Europe is very similar, 94% of new electricity generation has been via renewables. In 145 facilities built since that time, 94% of them were renewables. There were a couple of gas plants and no coal, and it doesn't look likely they anymore will build any coal plants into the future either. Increasingly, this energy is, or these facilities are being built by what we call independents who are not connected to a major utility or a big player. I think it is we've got a statistic in here. About 87% of those facilities built were built by independents. It's a feature of these smaller renewable generation type assets.
They don't often have a trading desk, 24/7 capability the way that the bigger players do. We believe that by combining our software, both in Algo-Trading and battery management and so on, as well as the services, we're well placed to assist these new entrants in getting a foothold in the market and being able to get their new green energy sold into the marketplace. A quick look at the financial results. I'll just pass to our CFO, Guy, to take you through that.
Let me just take myself off mute. Thank you, Shaun. I thought it was at this point, we just do a quick run through of the financial numbers for the year. Revenue increased 16% to AUD 32.4 million with the acquisitions. Obviously, this year is impacted by two acquisitions. Those acquisitions contributed AUD 4.4 million. The existing business was up slightly, which is consistent with our guidance at the commencement of the year. The revenue result was up despite a 45% decrease in one-off or project revenue, which was down to AUD 2.7 million, due to two large Europe projects occurring in 2021 and not being repeated.
I think the pertinent point on our earnings is the strength of Energy One is the recurring revenue base of 92, which was 92% in 2022, up from 82% in 2021. Both the businesses we acquired had strong recurring revenue bases. Why that's important is it provides a really strong and predictable footing for growth and reinvestment back into the business. Shaun will talk later about what we're doing with some of this reinvestment back into 24/7 and Follow the Sun operations. The acquisitions we talked about, they've performed to expectation. CQ's been with us for two months. EGSSIS's been with seven months. It's fair to say slightly ahead of expectation.
CQ, as I said, we've seen for two months, but exactly where we expected it to be. On the expenditure side our overall expenditure's up, excluding depreciation and amortization, 16%, AUD 3.5 million. This is predominantly due to the new businesses. We do get asked quite a few questions around, obviously cost pressures. Sorry, I might just, I'll just mute that participant. Apologies. It, as I said, overall expenditure up AUD 3.5 million, predominantly in the acquired businesses. We are seeing some increased cost in terms of the overall insurance market, and we're also strengthening our IT platforms with a particular focus on cyber, given the current environment.
From a depreciation and amortization perspective, that's increased predominantly due to the intangibles acquired with the new businesses. From an EBITDA perspective, we look at EBITDA from an underlying perspective, so we've backed out AUD 850,000 of acquisition costs. They relate to the acquisition of CQ and EGSSIS, which is AUD 760,000 post-tax. On an underlying basis, EBITDA's up 15%, which obviously illustrates, you know, strong conversion of profit through to actual earnings. From an NPAT perspective, underlying NPAT was up 16%. We do note, however, that the NPAT number did include some historical R&D claims in the U.K. business for R&D credits.
From a cash perspective, as we've said, you know, the business is a strong generator of cash. One point that we would make, and it's a question been raised by a couple of people is so effectively we cleared out our 2021 tax liability and effectively paid all of our 2022 liabilities. In a position we would expect to occur moving forward, just relates to timing of installments. From a capital expenditure perspective, that's 14% of revenue, which is fairly much in line with where it was in 2021. We should just note, EGSSIS is a software business, so we'll have capitalized expenditure. CQ Energy does not capitalize software. Obviously, the key movements outside of operating cash were the NAB facility, which was used to acquire CQ, and then obviously the payments for those business. At that point, I will hand it back to Shaun.
Thank you, Guy. Obviously, quite a lot of information there. If we've got some questions, happy to take them as we go through. Let's just look at, take a step back again and have a look at what we've been doing. The business is growing by a combination of organic and inorganic means. This chart is sort of a representation of that. The white line is effectively the Australian business, which is if you like the underlying original sort of core of the business. That's the growth trajectory we've achieved over a number of years. Obviously, the orange one deals with Europe, so both combination of inorganic and organic. Obviously, Europe being a much larger market, at least 10x the size of the Australian market. It's one of the reasons we went there.
We're expecting obviously over the course of time to have a larger growth trajectory coming out of that, the particular market, which I think this chart shows. We talk about recurring revenue, obviously. It's a key part of the business. That has grown over the period of time. The average growth rate there, 42%. The orange part of the chart relates to the one-off revenues. As I've mentioned, and I may have mentioned before, recurring revenues come from things like license fees, support fees, hosting fees, SaaS fees, and all kinds of recurring services that we will do on an evergreen basis, typically. They are, as Guy said, this year, 92% of the income.
The other, the remaining part is usually, excuse me, one-off T&M type income for larger customers who need an installation phase or if we're doing some additional customizations on a piece of software for someone. Training, consulting, all of that sort of stuff comes in under that bucket. They are usually tied to larger projects, so these one-off projects. In the FY 2021 year, we had a couple, we had a bumper year with projects. FY 2022, as we've said, and I've got a slide on it as well less so, but this one-off revenue, although it's lumpy, is very important to us because obviously it brings a tail of annuity once the thing has gone live. We can talk about that if you like. Normalized EBITA, as Guy said, grown by 15%.
That's our long-term track record again, in terms of EBITA growth. Obviously, in this case, H2 was a little bit better than H1. The business isn't really symmetrical or seasonal in that sense. It does kind of depend on how the projects wax and wane through the year. This slides I've already showed you again, but just to reinforce that we've the long-term track record here that we're proud of. I did mention the one-off reduction in revenues. Guy said it was 45% overall. Sounds like a big number, but it does relate to particularly this one-off project revenue. Certainly, dealing with Europe, E-world is a very major event in that particular marketplace, a very large trade show, and everyone attends. Well, that's been off for two years due to COVID and travel restrictions.
It came back this year, and there was a really good attendance. You know, anyone interested in looking at our LinkedIn account can see there's, you know, lots and lots of people there. Estimates of about 80% of a normal year. It's good to see everybody back. We feel that especially with larger projects where the customers like to meet you and eyeball you and have presentations, these are really important events, as is getting to their offices and seeing them. Smaller customers, usually, you know, we can talk to them over Zoom or over Teams, and we can get them to sign up on that basis. They're often quite agile and move quite fast.
Larger projects take time to develop, can take two or three years to win over a big customer. It just takes time, and you have to build the relationship. It's about getting out and seeing them. We really feel that last year was a bit of an aberration caused by these travel restrictions, and things are picking up already. Pleasingly, we've signed a very large renewables company for a contract going into the year ahead out of Europe and signed up about five smaller customers already since June. We do think things will start picking up going into FY 2023, and it's an optimistic period.
Guy did talk about this, but obviously, there's just a bit more detail for those who would like to look at that outside of this presentation or dig in a bit more. This just sort of a waterfall discussing the difference between the NPAT. Obviously, one of the things there that jumps out perhaps is employment costs and consulting costs. You know, in Belgium, for example, a lot of employees are contractors because of local just local efficient arrangements. So, some of that is explained by that. Guy mentioned the R&D tax offsets in the U.K. That's the tax effect as well. The timing of acquisitions is important as well at a macro level.
As we've said, we've received a lot of the cost of the acquisition in this year, but obviously, you know, we've only had two months of one of them and seven months of the other. That should flow through in future years, the benefits. Same thing again, the impact of the EPS. We issued 1.19 million shares as part of these acquisitions, and we are expecting that to flow through in the years ahead, where the directors have maintained a dividend of AUD 0.06. It's unfranked, but obviously, it's a maintenance level based on last year. One of the features of the business is that it's got a sticky customer base. Obviously, it takes. It's difficult to win customers, the bigger ones. It takes a while to win them, as I mentioned.
The good news is that if you're doing a good job, they tend to stick around. These are just some stats. Obviously, there's an interest in the SaaS metric side of things. What we can see here is that our gross margins, this is obviously an important line. As I mentioned, it's a hybrid gross margin based on a combination of kind of SaaS recurring type revenues, which we can report the margins for those. The GMs for that is 80%+ . Obviously, we have a professional service , one-off revenue, that also has a different margin. And as well as that, our gross margin also includes, other charges such as the amortization of the software development. It's a true gross margin.
We do seek to sell more than one product to each customer or module or service. That's the key aspect of what we're doing. It's a cross-selling type of story. At the moment, we're about 1.3 products per customer. If we strip out the tail of customers who really only have one product, the smaller end of the market, we, the penetration is, 2.3 per larger customer. The maximum penetration so far is five products for the largest customer. Okay. We can come back to that if you like. Just a Rule of 40 slide to give you an idea of the health of the business. We've continued to produce growth and EBITDA margin as we go forward.
Just to look backwards on the year ever so slightly with our operations. As mentioned, you know, we did take some of this one-off with one-off projects weren't there this year, but the Australian revenue was up. Organic ARR grew by 16% in Australia, which we're very pleased with, and recurring revenues were up 13%. As I say, EBITDA margin has remained strong, 31%-32%. We've got a good sales pipeline. We've always said we need one to two projects per year, and we're working on getting that across the business each year. FY 2022 wasn't. We didn't manage to achieve that. We got sort of some medium-sized projects, but we're working on it for FY 2023.
In June, 1st of June, we welcomed CQ Energy from Adelaide into the business. This is a business that's services related and operating in the 24/7 operational services market, but also in consulting and broking, which we can talk about as well. Europe continues to grow. It was 44% of group revenue a couple of years ago, and it's up to 54% now. Contigo was down. Contigo was down 15% lower due to the fall off in project revenue, but eZ-nergy, which isn't as subject to project revenue fluctuations, was up 18%. EGSSIS, an acquisition we talked about last year, with seven months contribution, performed better than we expected, which is typical of what we've done with our acquisitions over the years.
They've outperformed our initial expectations. Those two businesses, eZ-nergy and EGSSIS, are going together now because they're very complementary in the European sense, both in software and services. We're putting those together right now. The integration is going very well. Just a recap of our strategy. You know, traditionally we've focused on both diversification and organic and inorganic growth, and each year we renew that approach. As I said, we believe that it's a sound strategy based on successful implementation, and we have achieved that. Just a slide here about the acquisitions again. The two acquisitions we expect the pro forma here. These are pro forma here. Over the course of a 12-month period, we can look at these numbers here.
AUD 12.9 million in revenue from those two and expected to get AUD 5.5 million in EBITDA. Sort of looking forward a bit more, combining our software with a service is what we're doing to facilitate the entry of renewable energy generation into, particularly electricity markets. This obviously focused on existing software, the sort of algo and auto bidding and, you know, contracts management, but also battery software, which is going to be obviously, batteries are gonna be huge going forward in terms of storage for the market as well as arbitrage and so on. We are developing and have started implementing battery solutions out there, which combined with our 24/7 services overlay, means we are able to offer an optimized service solution for our customers.
We get questions about the margins related to the services. Obviously, SaaS margins are usually much higher than you see in the services business. Obviously, these are very specialized services. It's not a commodity service; it's a specialized business of deal execution in the marketplace and scheduling a nomination so that these are highly specialized people doing highly specialized things. We expect there to be good margins attached to that services business. Automation is key here. Our enFlow product is very much about automation, and we have automation embedded in our existing software in various jurisdictions. It's all about getting that automation piece going so that we can get economies of scale and scope. The customers are usually, again, long-term and loyal.
We're really about trying to make sure that we deliver a high-quality service, that fulfills the customer's needs and also in a profitable sense for the company. It's just a summary of that. Two essentially broad business lines, software and services going forward. What our acquisitions have enabled us to do is built on a platform we've been working on quietly for a couple of years now, which is to sort of do more than just software. The transition into this market segment of renewable energy generation is going to be the goal to globalize what we're doing and to enable us to operate for customers who may be both local and multinational in nature.
We did a PowerPoint for those who are interested a little while ago about the total addressable market that we're looking at. We estimate that for every traditional sort of software customer, there's probably at least three or more customers in the future who will be needing the physical side of the market. It's a much larger opportunity. Just looking at electrification alone, people tend to think about replacement of fossil fuels in a generation sense, but electrification of the economy is something that's gonna have to happen as well. This means at least four times the installed generation capacity. The Australian energy market are planning on doing it three times the capacity within 10 years.
Europe, of course, is building at least 40 GW of new generation per year, which is basically close to being the whole Australian fleet being built in renewable generation in Europe every year. Our goal is to address this market, address these new technologies that are coming in, and we talked about them being independent and being renewables. There's an opportunity for those customers who don't have the facility to do the services themselves. They might like the software, but they don't have the 24/7 capability to operate it. We can provide that for them as well as a package. The services support the software business and vice versa. They both look after each other.
We think it's an internal analysis, but we believe it's a strong market opportunity for us, with addressable market in the next five to 10 years of being perhaps $1 billion a year. We believe we've got early or first mover advantage in this because our competitors aren't operating in this space, but we are the largest supplier of software and solutions in Australia and the second largest in Europe. As I say, traditionally, ETRM software, the sort of historical background to this is that the companies provide software and the customers operate it themselves. We believe that our competitors are largely biased still towards that model, and we're the ones getting ahead of that by adding services to the mix as well.
We intend to capitalize on that by investing in some globalization. We have very good regional businesses. Our European business look after European customers, Australian business looks after Australian customers. The idea is to globalize that and offer a follow-the-sun style service from Europe and here in two different time zones. We've got control rooms both there and here, and this enables customers to have a perhaps a multinational fleet of assets to receive service. It's not just. It's not locked to a region. For that to happen, we have to sort of build out some of the global capabilities and harmonize them across the company, particularly technical things. I'll give you an example.
If someone's sitting at a trading desk here, they have to be able to see the same things on the screen as the person in Europe. We have to harmonize some of those things. GDPR, which is data protection out of Europe, that's something that has to sort of be universally applied. Cyber security and that sort of stuff. We plan to invest about AUD 1.5 million-AUD 2 million a year to achieve that. As it says here, some of these costs may be capitalized, but for the moment we'll bear their expense.
We've done a business case obviously internally and we've found that the ROI based on our internal calculations, if we can see a 3% increase in revenue, so a modest increase in revenue as a result of these efforts, then we have a break-even on that investment. If we can start getting sort of upwards of a 10% uplift in revenue, then the ROI starts to become much more attractive. Quite apart from accepting the new opportunity, it helps to support the existing business because we can provide to existing customers a cross-sell of service to the software customers.
If we had a situation in which we may have been in the running to win a software account, but the customer needed the service to go with it, then we won't lose that software account. That's a good example. There's an opportunity for larger players because quite apart from the renewable, the new guys coming in without resources, the larger customers, our expectation is that someone will want to outsource. I mean, at the moment, they all have to. Even if you're a large player, you still have to run a 24/7 desk, and that's quite problematic from a human resources perspective. You know, perhaps you might wanna outsource that or outsource the night shift or outsource weekends and holidays, that kind of thing. We're available to do that for them.
It's an opportunity to both support the existing business and access the new addressable market. We do expect within 12 months to be seeing some returns from this and of course, fully underway within 18-24 months. We've published some guidance for the year ahead. Obviously, you know, we are investing, as I said, AUD 1.5-2 million, and that factors that in here. Revenue predictions for the year ahead are a 37% increase in revenue and EBITA are up 33%. Thank you very much, everyone. That's the end of the main presentation. I'll be happy to take questions. I see some have been going through on the chat.
Yes. I think what we'll do, Shaun, is we'll tackle the questions one by one. It might be the easiest way to do it. The first one's from Claude. It relates to CQ. "If CQ don't capitalize software, does that mean that it does not bring any depreciation and amortization? And what would the D&A look like in 2023?" I'm happy to answer that one, Claude. I think probably the best place to look at is note 22 in our accounts. There's two elements to amortization. One is the software we capitalize, the other is the amortization on intangibles that are acquired with businesses. With CQ, we acquired AUD 12.1 millions of customer lists, which we will amortize at this moment over 15-20 years.
If we pick 17 years, that is the amortization in 2023 that will come from CQ being on the acquired intangibles. Hopefully, that answers the question, Claude, but if not, just message us and we can expand on
Yeah, that answers my question. Thanks a lot.
No problem. The next question is from Adam. I think, Shaun, this is probably for you. You mentioned Energy One has 50% of the Australian market. Is that of the total market, including companies that have in-house software or of the available market?
That's based on, if you like, volume of energy as opposed to numbers of customers. Obviously, there's a few dominant players in this country and then a long tail of mediums and smalls. We have a healthy mix of both large and small customers. Of the ones that we don't have, would be some bigger players who would have alternative solutions, often in-house built type of software. The language we use is legacy software. It's probably been there for several years. There are a couple of American bits of software that are out there as well, and that's sort of traditionally what we've our traditional business was sort of trying to knock them off sort of one by one over the years.
Yes, there's a lot of in-house, especially in this industry, there's a lot of in-house legacy systems built. In terms of the amount of energy consumed in this country, that's how we measure it.
Very good. Next question is from Arun. Revenue growth wasn't very high in 2010 to 2016, but accelerated in 2017. What contributed to this change? I'll answer that firstly. It's probably a good point in terms of overlaying the acquisitions on top of the earnings charts, and that was, Shaun, correct me if I'm wrong, but that was the acquisition of Creative Analytics, the first acquired business for Energy One.
Yeah. Certainly pre-2016, we were sort of finding our feet and establishing ourselves. You know, about that time we made an acquisition of Creative Analytics, which was a company we were competing with. They were a very good company, and so we were able to sort of get a bit of clear air after that and kicked on from there.
I guess a follow-up was that, Shaun you've been with the company since 2010, so, you know, why was organic growth lower from 2010- 2016, and why did organic growth accelerate after?
Yes, when we first started out, of course, the difficult days of starting out, we started out with one customer, and then one customer became two customers. In this industry, it's very important to be credible. It's hard when you start. It's hard for bigger customers. These customers are putting their entire book in your software, so it's a very critical financial asset for them, and they don't want to just buy from anybody. It takes a while to build up a reputation, which is good because it makes it sticky as well. Establishing yourself as a credible supplier with a reliable track record and references is very, very important, and it takes a little while to build up that head of steam.
Now, in terms of after 2016, as I said, when we were at that time, we would see a company called Creative Analytics. This is purely an Australian story, competing against them. They had great products and good people. Of course, we were held back a little bit by that. We were competing with them. Once that acquisition was made, we had access to that software as well, so we were able to offer even more solutions to our customers at different price points for entry-level customers, but also large established ones. It just enabled us to be more attractive in the marketplace and, you know, the organic revenue kicked on from there as a result.
Also at that point, Ajon, we wrote our bidding product and our automation product. There was an acceleration of the number of products that we could supply to Australian customers, as well as the amount of revenues that we could earn. It's been a long time coming to be an overnight success story.
Okay, moving to the next question. Next question is from Claude again. Even though Energy One has done a great job with acquisitions, many companies that make regular acquisitions blow themselves up with a bad acquisition eventually. How do you think about it and try and minimize the risk of a bad acquisition? Well, I guess firstly, Claude, thank you for the compliments on the acquisitions to date. Is that, Shaun, you happy to tackle the second part of the question? I'm happy to give the finance perspective as well.
Yeah. Let's look at it like we are not acquisitive in the sense that we're just rolling up. We very carefully select who we wanna work with to make sure that they have a particular set of qualities. Particularly our criteria for a good acquisition is that it must be immediately earning accretive. It must also bring some strategic advantage, be it geography, product, or other technical expertise. Lastly, the cultural benefit to the company of the mix that we can work together. We are very careful about who we select to fulfill that. Our selection process, to Claude's point, I believe has been borne out by practice.
Obviously, there's a lot of discipline involved in making sure that you don't put the effort in at the beginning to ensure that the thing will be a success. It's easier to drive success through good integration practices and the like. I think discipline is the answer to that question. We'll continue to have discipline as we have done in the past. Having said that, in the year ahead, obviously you can see from the PowerPoint presentation that we are focusing on building internal capability and building out a lot of the stuff that we've put in place with those keystone acquisitions. Hopefully that answered the question, Claude.
Yeah, that's great. Thanks. It's something that keeps me up at night, but obviously it's created a lot of value so far, so, you know, it's a, it's a two-sided sword. If you get it right, it's great.
Yeah. I think I guess the only point I would add, and maybe this leads into the next question a little bit as well, is yeah, one of the things about Energy One is we do our own DD, and we also spend a lot of time on cultural integration. I think that you know that gives the company much better insight into the acquired targets and also the transition into Energy One as well. I don't think it's happened by accident per se. The next question talks about the target return on investment for M&A deals. I mean, I think I'll tackle it from a purely financial perspective and then Shaun can talk more broadly. You know, the organization probably primarily, as Shaun said, looks at earnings. Earnings are accretive.
Whenever we've talked about acquisitions, we typically talk about multiples of EBITDA being earnings focused and the, you know, the ranges are the ranges as have been previously talked about. From a return on investment, you can have a look at our financials. Our weighted average cost of capital is around 10%. That's for Energy One. We would naturally apply a different rate to the acquisitions. It's gonna be on a deal-by-deal basis, but primarily earnings related. Shaun, not sure if you've got anything else to add.
I think you covered it. I think our track record in terms of multiples paid for EBITDA is a matter of public record as well, and we endeavor to not overpay for things as well and keep it reasonable. Again, conservative and disciplined. You know, 5x or 6x or 7x EBITDA is what we've traditionally done over a number of acquisitions.
Wasn't the last deal close to 10 x?
No, I don't think so.
I guess if you look at, I was just gonna say, we published an expected EBITDA around AUD four and a half million. We paid AUD 36 million, so, yeah, more getting around the 7x or 8x. I think, you know, CQ, the quality of the business, you know, sometimes it's not necessarily easy to get people to, you know, hand over their business, right? I think that's a reflection of the quality there, and yet the margins are in this publication.
Okay. Who are we competing with when we do these deals? Is private equity actively buying these companies as well?
Look, private equity are active across these, across this whole spectrum. I think you'd see them wherever you go. In terms of trade sales, which is more sort of what we do, there are a few global players out there, typically out of the U.S., who would be looking around. Probably not so much down under. You know, we've seen local players, local sort of, integrated business houses, integrated software houses looking around. I suppose the most active would-be private equity. They're always there or they're about. Yes, there is competition for assets, for good, for the best types of assets, and it's just a matter of being able to present a solution to the vendor that isn't purely, you know, financial. There's other aspects as well.
A lot of people who founded these businesses out of a joy of what they're doing and an interest, and they feel passionate about what they do, and they want to continue to do that. It's not always just purely a number. That's borne out by the fact that our founders stay with the company and kick on and do other things and help us build it out. That's been true of pretty much every acquisition we've made. The founders have stayed. The odd person may have drifted off, but for the most part, they stay with the business.
Just to the second part of that question was also the history behind Ian Ferrier and Vaughan Busby. Ian obviously being the predominant shareholder, about 26%, Vaughan 11%, who's a previous CEO some time ago as well. I guess that's their involvement in the company and whether you want to expand on that. Shaun, are they involved actively in the decision-making of the company? Yes. Shaun, you can talk more to that.
Both Ian and Vaughan were shareholders prior to listing in 2007, and both are active members of the board.
Thanks, Andrew. Yes, we have a very active and engaged board, fortunately. Next question from Mark is, does FY 2023 EBITDA guidance assume all of the global operations AUD 1.5 million-AUD 2 million of investment is expense? The answer is, yes. The next question is from Astian Asdison. Can you please remind us about how to think about the large renewable project win in Europe in terms of the size of the project revenue and timing and the size of the license revenue upon go live? Appreciate, yeah, go live. He has got a, they've got a second question as well, which we'll tackle in due course.
When we use the word large, we've designated that to be one. It's in the CEO report, but you can look at it. It's about AUD 1 million over about 12 months. That's usually one-off up front. Anything that we call large usually falls into that category. Of course, once they go live, then it is a trailing annuity revenue, and that just depends on when they go live. That's the sort of dimension of our European project.
The second part of the question is, I appreciate it's early days, but have you signed any new deals in the 24/7 services space in Australia since the CQ acquisition?
The answer to that is we've got interest. There's active interest in doing, in that sort of area. It's something we're working up over the next period of time. We look forward to, in the fullness of time, producing some fruits of that labor. But no, not signed as of today, but we do have a lot of interest. The market's response to our plans has been very strong. You know, people have been saying, "Oh, that's a great idea," and, you know, "Glad that you're doing it." We're really looking forward to rolling that out.
Certainly the sales process for that 24/7 operation, there would be a significant gap between when an organization comes to CQ or to Energy One and asks about how the process would work and what sort of services do we offer and how do they set up is normally at the start of their process before they even build their asset. So, there's a staged series of engagements and we're seeing those as we speak and they turn into contracts down the track. Certainly, the feedback that we're getting from customers and from people within this space, within the industry, is that this service is a great thing to provide, that we're in front of everybody else and people are keen to engage with us.
Thank you, Andrew.
The next questions are, what are the assumptions that underpin FY23 revenue and EBITDA guidance? Does it assume annualized contribution from 2022 acquisitions and project wins announced to date, or does it assume additional customer wins as well? Maybe I'll start on that one, and then Shaun can talk to it. To some extent it plays into our budgeting process. Obviously one of the reasons we produce our stat's around recurring revenue is, and that's based on recurring revenue to June 30, 2022. That flows into the 2023 year and provides a base. We will also have price increases, which regularly go through the existing customer book. On top of that, we
I guess the point is we will have some assumed level of customer wins and then we have some assumptions around project wins as well. I think it's fair to say that when we put our guidance out there, our case is what we think is likely as opposed to overly aggressive or overly pessimistic. Shaun, take your comments on that.
I think you've summed it up, Guy, but traditionally our guidance has been we've either met or exceeded our guidance over a number of years. I think that sort of goes to the nature of how we sort of construct our thought process on that. Yes, it involves new wins. Yes, it involves all of the usual uplifts and so on and so forth. We obviously have a view on how things are going. You may recall I mentioned our investment in our 24/7 business, and I said that we're expecting to, you know, within 12 months to start to see some fruits of that, and there was a question on that immediately prior to this.
Yes, things can, you know, if things really improve, then of course, we'll make some additional signings. We just, generally speaking, try and be conservative in our guidance and then always make sure that we don't let anyone down by missing it.
Thank you, Shaun. Next question is from Jason. In relation to the 2022-2023 revenue growth, how much is contributed by full year contribution of CQ and EGSSIS, and how much from the legacy business? I think this question's most easily answered by looking at the guidance we provided of 44% and then going back to the AUD 12.9 million, which Shaun's actually just put up on the screen, to be contributed by the acquired businesses. I think that's as accurate a guide as you can take.
Yeah, just to clarify that, my takeaway from that was the legacy business is growing at about 11% for the coming year. CQ seems to have gone back slightly by about 3%, and then, EGSSIS forward by about 7%. Does that feel about right?
I think you're yeah, backwards entering your numbers. When you get to the existing business, I think you're not too far away. I mean ultimately, it's a mathematical calculation.
Great. Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, what we will say is moving forward with EGSSIS, and Shaun can talk a little bit more to it, the EGSSIS, eZ-nergy. A very brief history, those two companies competed quite robustly with each other. They're actually integrating and transitioning probably quicker than we were, we thought and will fairly much be the same business in about 12 month's time . Shaun, is that a fair comment?
Well, I can say with some confidence that the acquisitions we've made have 100% outperformed our expectations when we took them on, and that's largely a result of A, being good acquisitions, and B, the integration process that follows. Now, early on, there's all sorts of things going on. You're trying to get things done, you're trying to bring things together. You know, you might have to, it might be flat for a while or whatever. The idea is that you're building out this capability going forward and, you know, we're confident in our ability to do that over a number of years. We'll back ourselves to do it in the next year and the year after that as well.
Do you have any sense of which areas you see growing more quickly than others within the business after all the acquisitions have been integrated?
We've, you know, been very successful in building out the software business. As I said, the opportunity in this renewable energy space is massive. It's enormous. If you think about the Australian grid, these are not my numbers, these are government numbers, needs to triple in size. That's just the Australian grid. There's a huge amount of development to be coming, and a lot of it is in the physical energy, physical commodity space as opposed to, you know, we'll have people who might would be having a physical position in the commodity, not necessarily a contract position, a derivatives position. Because you have to actually nominate this power and nominate, move gas around, you have to move power around, you have to be the entity in the Australian market.
You have to nominate in the European market and scheduling and day ahead and so on. There's a lot of activity, a lot of compliance style activity that goes on. If you build a wind farm, you can't just switch it on and then sit back and watch the turbines go around. You actually have to interact with the market, whether you like it or not. There's a lot of stuff that just bubbles up as a result of this renewable energy push. These guys need to be able to sell that energy because that's part of the financial reasoning or rationale for building it in the first place. They wanna make sure they're compliant, and they wanna make sure that they're getting paid for it, and that's what we do for them.
The services side of it is exactly that. If you may recall, one of my slides said we think there's probably four times as many people who need a physical service, a physical energy market service as a contracts management type of system, which is the old, the traditional part of the business. We do see a rapid growth in that area of the market, and I think everyone in the world agrees with us. It's a matter of how you access that. That's what we're investing to really present a good global solution, be a global leader. Our ambition is to be the global leader in this, in this particular space. We feel we've got an early mover advantage there.
If you're asking what the long-term trend is, it's definitely getting involved in renewable energy and physical markets. In the software side of things, the traditional, more traditional business, yes, we're seeing people come back to the market now. We're seeing activity pick up again. You know, if we just look at Europe, for example, gas. We talk about renewable energy a lot, but gas remains a vital fuel. Traditionally in Europe, gas flowed from east to west. Now it's flowing from west to east, which is an extraordinary turn of events. There's a lot more trading going on around the hubs and all the rest of it. All of that, you know, the price volatility, there's a lot more risk for customers. We'd expect people to manage their risk better, be more interested in managing risk.
It's not just waving the gas through the hub anymore. Now you actually have to trade around the hub. There's a lot of things happening out there. You know, Europe, the Q3 futures price for Australia, New South Wales, it's 300 a MWh, and it's normally a fraction of that, 40, 50, 60. There's a lot going on. There's a lot more volatility. There's a lot more complexity coming into the marketplace. Batteries are bringing a new paradigm. For us as a vendor, all of these changes are really, really good, because it means that people are engaged, they're actively doing things, and we expect to be right in the front line of picking up work on the back of that. Hopefully I answered the question. Slightly long-winded.
Yeah. Shaun and Guy, that's been very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. Next questions from Matt: With regards to the bidding of services businesses, how should shareholders, customers reconcile the fact that we provide service to both sides of the transaction, effectively compete with each other? Does the knowledge affect customer's competitor limit the potential for new customer wins?
That's an excellent question. When we use that word trading, it's not really trading. We're providing deal execution services, if you wanna look at it like that. These are operational services in the market. We're not making trading decisions on behalf of the customer. They make those. They make those decisions, and they are written down beforehand, and we execute those transactions on their behalf in a 24/7 sense. Now, just to bring it home to you, one of the elements that affects generation is the stability of the grid, and grid operators are obviously mindful of this in a 24/7 sense. If they need to switch something off or switch something on, they wanna be able to phone someone and get that asset switched on or off or adjusted.
Someone has to be on the end of the phone. Even leaving aside any sort of commercial transaction, you, it's a grid stability issue, you have to be on the end of the phone. There's been numerous examples of where the grid operator rang up, and then there was no one to answer the phone. This has been problematic. At the very least, you provide that service, that contact service. There, there's a compliance element to it as well. Back to your original premise of the question, we are not making trading decisions. We're not taking a position. We're not in the value chain. We are providing a service in return for fees that executes the strategy that the customer has already agreed to.
Each customer has their own intellectual property attached to how they want that done, and that's enshrined in the business rules attached to the contract, and we just simply execute it. Each customer can have their own strategy. We do not share those strategies between customers. That is obviously a key element to it. The customer has their own strategy, and we simply execute that. One of the ways we do that is to use automation. The rules go into an engine, an automated bidding or scheduling engine that automatically transacts according to their required business rules. That answer the question? Perfect. Thanks, man.
Thank you. I think the next question will be for you, Andrew, but I'll read it, I'll read it out. Do we expect to raise equity when we do future M&A deals, or would we reach a stage over time where we only use internally generated cash and share count stays flat?
Look, I think the short answer to that question is the board is very concerned about dilution, and we only raise equity where it adds real value to the business. Most of the equity we've raised over the last five to six years has been in vendor shares for businesses that we've bought to reduce the cash call on the company and to ensure that the vendors are as committed to the success of the transaction as we are. Yes, we're very careful about raising money.
Thank you, Andrew. Next questions from Jason. Do you expect project revenue to pick up in FY 2023 and to what level or greater than 21? I think we've talked about this topic a little bit, so I'll try and answer that quickly so we can get on to the next question. Yes, we do, and in reflection, a greater dip in project revenue probably caused by the lack of being able to travel and see customers face to face. As Shaun said earlier in the presentation, we expect that to recover and turn around, and we're already seeing that in our pipelines. I'm not sure, Shaun, if you want to add anything to that.
No, I think we've I feel like we've mentioned that one already.
The last question is again from Claude. It's, what are the main risks to the plan to grow the business in the physical gas and electricity space, especially any risks outside of your control?
That's a good question, of course. I actually think the risks are. Yeah, Chris Steptoe has his hand up as well, guys, so let's- Oh, sorry..
Thanks, Sean. I see Chris. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks a lot for that.
Thank you, Chris, for waiting patiently. We'll take this as our last question.
Yeah. Thanks.
Apologies for not getting to you earlier, Chris, but go for it.
Yeah. Just on, I guess future acquisitions and have you kind of completed your software and services, I don't know, all you need to for your future growth? I guess, how are you thinking about your debt levels currently with your future capital requirements?
Well, dealing with the acquisitions, lucky last, Chris. Well, done. The acquisitions question first. We maintain a watching brief. Our acquisition strategy is not a roll-up. It's been selected acquisitions to achieve an outcome, be it strategic or particularly advantageous in certain areas. We just keep. We've got a few irons in the fire. We're always out there, you know, just in touch with the marketplace. Having said that, we do feel that most recent acquisitions have put us in a good position to build out now, and that's what the investment story is about. We're placed to go forward.
If something really is really good that bubbles up, yes, we're not gonna turn down a great opportunity, but we're not on the acquisition trail for its own sake. We will now concentrate in the year ahead on building out that capability. I might like ask Andrew to address the second part of the question.
The second part of the question, Chris, was about.
Yeah, just how you
Debt positions?
Thinking about the debt levels.
Yeah, look, I think the principal piece there is our operational cash flows are very strong to support the business, supporting the investment in the global services. You know, we're very careful about dilution. It's tight. There's no question it's tight. It's something that we're comfortable to manage out over the next couple of years.
That's right.
Thank you for your patience.
Yeah. 92% of our revenues are recurring, so it's a, you know, fairly predictable revenue stream, which is great. I think in the normal sense of the word, we do feel we have a good understanding of the cash flow going forward. Of course, we'll look at it as, you know, constantly monitor everything that's going on to ensure that we keep the correct balance and the correct mix.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you. I think at that point, we've taken all of the questions, so we've actually cleared all the questions out. We might end there. I obviously thank you for everyone who attended. Thank you for an excellent list of questions. Hopefully, we did them justice and answered them. Shaun, if you've got any closing words, we will take them and then close the meeting.
Yes. Thank you everyone. Again, a great, as Guy said, great set of questions. Really great to see everyone getting stuck into it. You know, we've got a great opportunity going forward. This is, as I say to the staff, you know, we've got, there's a renewable energy generation revolution coming and we're helping to do our bit to help the planet. It's not everyone can go home at night and say they were part of something that made a difference. I think the employees can say that, and I think everyone involved in the company, as owners, ourselves, management can say that as well. We're doing our bit. It's a very exciting place to work. If there's a hotter sector in the world at the moment than energy, I don't know what it is.
You know, please point it out to me because we are really in where it's happening. It's a very exciting time. Thank you for your support over a number of years and, you know, we continue to do our best to build out in the future. Thank you very much.
Thanks for your support.
Thank you.
Thank you all. At that point, we'll close the meeting. Thank you.
Thank you.