Thank you. Welcome to our presentation for the half year. The meeting will be recorded, so if you don't wish to be on the record, please email your questions to Guy or put them in the chat. Please don't add any AI recording bots to this. The meeting is recorded. We'll put it on the website. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Shaun Ankers. I'm the CEO. I'm joined today by our Chairman, Andrew Bonwick, our CEO Designate, Ben Tranier, and our CFO, Guy Steel. We've got some slides to go through. Then we'll welcome questions at the end. Guy, please. Quite a lot to get through, I'll just jump over these early slides for our vision. Obviously, we're in the wholesale energy trading, software, and services business.
We are a one-stop shop for all of our customers' needs, and our vision is to be the largest such supplier in the globe, across the globe. Please delete the highlights. Keep going. We're very pleased with our recent trading period. We've got a few highlights to go through here, but we'll discuss each of them in detail through the presentation. Obviously, leading on with financial, continued strong growth in both revenue and profitability. Our recurring revenue now is at an all-time high, which is 91% of total. Has been very high for many years now, and of course, we're pleased to operate, have our operating leverage coming through, which we've talked about. Operationally, ISO/IEC 27000 , which is a cyber certification.
It's obviously a very, very big deal in the world today, certainly in our industry, where we have critical, nation-critical assets, that everyone's worried about, ensuring that they're protected from cyberattack, and with ISO/IEC 27000, we've got a differentiator that we can deal with the world's biggest companies in that regard. Significant progress with our one-stop-shop, signing and upselling large customers. We've got some examples of that for you. Particularly, we won a large account in Europe with our multi-product and service solution. Strategically, our new CEO is smoothly transitioning into the role and has been doing it for a while now. We work closely together. We can take questions on that. Pleasingly, we've passed the Rule of 40 now, both on cash and non-cash.
It's been on a non-cash basis for a while. With this 3.5, it's also passed on a cash basis. Technology, you'll be surprised to learn that we will be mentioning AI today, but we have got lots of good stuff to talk about with AI. Not to mention that, to start, also our other products, virtual trading, our BESS solution, which involves automated battery trading. Of course, we have a customer data portal that we're very proud of as well, and customers can self-serve. Next slide. Thanks, Guy. Let's look at the financial results, if we may. It's organic growth. I'd like to make that clear. We have had all organic growth for at least three years now.
That track record is showing up as organic growth revenue in revenue and in earnings. Little bit of a tailwind on the ARR, 'cause it's measured from spot to spot FX. We had a little bit of a few one-offs, about AUD 0.6 million, but even if we strip out that, the impact was still up 61%, I think. Very small one-off adjustments. Guy?
Thanks, Shaun. I'll quickly take you through these are the key metrics that we use to track the business. Shaun has talked about the ARR, right in the middle of our predicted range. It grew by AUD 10.8 million, 17.4% as I said, right in the range. Shaun did mention FX, in total terms, the benefit of FX in the current half versus the prior half is about AUD 1.2 million to revenue and about AUD 1 million to expenses, increase to expenses, increase to revenue. About AUD 200,000 favorable to earnings overall.
When we look at the individual businesses, Australia grew their ARR up by 15%. Particularly the software business had a really good half in terms of both new logos and upsells, and yeah, with upsells to existing customers, and Shaun will actually talk to an example of one of those customers, quite an existing customer who took pretty significant additional products. From a Europe perspective, and Ben will go through Europe a bit later in the deck, ARR was up 28%, 19% at what we call constant currencies, if FX rates did not change, which I guess goes to show the weakening of the Aussie dollar over that period. In a high, high interest rate environment- Isn't it?
That's a, in a higher interest rate environment, the Aussie is strengthening its euro and the GBP. We'd expect by the end of the financial year to be more consistent with where we were last year. From a retention perspective, a pretty strong result. You can see above our expected range. I have talked about the upsell to existing customers. Shaun talked in his CR report about the pipeline. The ARR pipeline's up 24%. We're well-positioned as we move into the second half, and some of those turn into project work. We do get questions around our out-of-cycle pricing. There was some relatively minor out-of-cycle pricing.
Doesn't have a meaningful impact on the result. Again, gross margin, yeah, pretty consistently, we've stated the objective is to grow revenue, control expense, and grow margin. You can see there, it continues to improve. I think pleasingly for us, we've continued the upward trajectory of the cash EBITDA metric. Shaun mentioned we have adjusted for some one-offs, including the CEO recruitment, plus Europe, France, moved into a new go-live. We've adjusted for that. I'm not gonna go through this slide in great detail, but we have stated a number of times, we have a 20... what we call a 20/10 objective, or grow revenue by 20%, grow expenses by 10%, and you can see the benefit of that.
It's a pretty consistent, pretty consistent set of results. From an expenditure perspective, it was up 16% on a statutory basis, 15% on the line if you take out the one-offs. One thing we would point out is the share-based payments are up AUD 1 million year-on-year, which is a 4% increase. When you strip that back, cash expenses are up 11%, and you will see that in the employee expenses, up a couple of AUD million dollars on some share-based payments. There is slide 37 that provides people a great breakdown if they want to go through that. Just on expenses, other expenses were up a little bit as well.
One of the things that's in there is director costs. We just reallocated them out of our employee expenses. It's a little bit of inconsistency year-on-year. That's one of the main reasons. From a free cash perspective, typically, the first half is not as strong as the second half. A number of reasons, earnings, probably the main driver, and we do see project revenue fall in the second half as opposed to the second. Also, staff incentives are paid out in the first half, which does obviously affect operating cash.
The other point we would make as we work through our as our financial leverage, strong cash earnings in the second half of 2025 and the first half of 2026 allowed us to pay out a a cash dividend, which I think is the first time we paid a cash dividend for some time. We've paid a dividend and a cash dividend. Typically, we've been underwriting reserve cash. I guess just to finish off, I have talked about the financial discipline. You can see there from a revenue and cash expenses perspective, it aligns to our 20/10 rule. Resource productivity continues to improve, and our cash earnings are significant significantly up.
I think at that point, I might pass back to Shaun to talk about ARR and also, in the full-year results of 2025, we published a, what we call a major deal pipeline, and this just reflects how we're progressing against that pipeline.
Thanks, Guy. Obviously, a key feature of the business line is in driving ARR growth. Just a little bit of report on that, how that's going. It's driven a, starting out, of course, with effective marketing and sales, which is something that Ben's really doing that for us in the last six to 12 months. We got 53,000 website hits in the first half alone. E-world, the big trade show in Europe, 290 meetings, so well upon last year. We've upsized the sales team with industry experts as well, and more to come. Investment in sales and marketing increased 13% over last year. I think you'll find the LTV, the CAC is still very strong, but we are beefing up sales.
As I mentioned, Ben has used his knowledge and experience to really reorganize our sales team. The way we do things is more effective. I'd say it's best practice architecture now, I think we can see that coming through in the results. Our ARR sales pipeline, so these are confirmed leads, is up 24% on prior period. It was up 22% the last reporting period, I think. Generally speaking, you know, we wanna do land and expand, so win an account for one new product and then cross-sell our suite of services and software. You can see that coming through in NRR being up 111% now. We're a one-stop shop, which means we're a long-term strategic supplier for our customers. We're not a one-and-done vendor.
The idea is that we do focus on things like NRR and cross-selling. The chart to the right just discusses our pipeline or order book going forward. You can see that flowing through, no doubt, Guy will get some questions on that. Next slide. Thanks, Guy. Again, go back to a recurring theme that has been for many years now, Energy One pioneered the one-stop-shop strategy that's now being copied by others. Here's a couple of examples of how it's really working. In Australia, we've got an energy utility customer, existing valued customer, already using products and services. Mainly, NemSight, which is our class-leading analytics product. I think there's 1,500 users in Australia alone for that product now.
EOT, which is a deal capture and settlement. Now they've upgraded to include our BESS solution, which is battery, grid-scale batteries. That's a fully automated trading system with human in the loop to supervise and 24/7 trading services to support. We're expecting some new ARR coming in H2 for that. Over in Europe, why don't you talk about this one, Ben?
Yeah, sure. In, in Europe, we've won in the first half a very large industrial. It was a very competitive process with a lot of competition and competitors involved. I think the key aspect is why did we win? I think the key aspect to that is our one-stop-shop strategy, as Shaun mentioned. We were able to provide a unique solution fitting their needs by combining our ETRM, by combining our gas portfolio management solutions, our nomination tools, our market access tools, and finally, and it's quite important, our workflow automation tool, which provides the ability to run algorithms and functions. The deal is significant, $0.8 million in recurring revenue and above $1 million in project revenue. We're quite exciting. We're definitely seeing a trend. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in the next slide. It's definitely proving and validating our one-stop-shop strategy.
Thanks. I'll just cover off on Australian before giving back to Ben. Australia, as you know, is, as we know, has been moving along at a mid-teens clip for quite a few years now. A little uptick here, thanks to the efforts of the team, and again, focusing on that strong sales and marketing approach that we're doing. Up 15% on ARR. I mentioned that significant account that we won, some really good upsells. The trend in the market is very much batteries going forward. There's a lot of renewables being built, but batteries are also very, very topical at the moment.
We do see on the other side of things, a little bit of gas market uncertainty here, which the government's hopefully moving to address now with the gas reservation scheme. Obviously, industrial customers have struggled with the gas prices. Within the next 18 months or so, hopefully, that's gonna resolve itself and, you know, we'll get back to normal business. Thanks.
Back to Europe. Our European business continued to really gain a strong momentum in the market. We had a few multi-product wins, which is quite important and really leading to strong growth metrics. As you can see, our revenue is up 20%, reaching EUR 19.6 million, and again, it's mainly due to recurring. That's about our core growth. We had a strong adoption of our solutions, and it results in a growth of ARR by 28%, and through a few upsells, actually, which keep our net retention rates at 111%, up 10% compared to last half year. As I mentioned before, our customers are now engaging in multi-product deals. Well, they don't want the single modules.
They actually want fully integrated solutions, combining ETRM, workflow engines, nomination tools. We also were making major progress into large industrial clients, right? As I mentioned, we've signed one. We have a few others in the pipeline for the second half, so, really, really strong into, that. On the integration and upsells, I think both France and U.K. have delivered very large upsells in the first half. We'll continue to see that trend. We now also operate as a single unified business units, so we replaced the old country-based GM models with, European-wide functional leaderships, right? For ops, sales, delivery, and training services, increasing the efficiencies, the productivities, and, we're now having a consistent execution on our operations.
Europe is really advancing from being a collection of different entities into a unified growth engine for Energy One, right, for the group. It really translates with the adoptions of the multi-product and the one-stop-shop strategy, right, with larger enterprise wins than we've seen before. Tighter operations and now consolidating operations into Europe. That really positions us strongly for the second half. Okay, Shaun.
Thanks, Ben. Okay, obviously, AI, very topical at the moment. We included a few slides here just to talk about it in the context of our business and our industry. Hopefully, you'll find it quite useful. The context for the wholesale energy industry, obviously, AI is a fantastic innovation, but obviously, we're dealing in a market that's very regulated and very governed. It's, for instance, starting off with 50 Hz in the grid. 50 Hz is the operating frequency that we have in our, in the grid here and in many other markets. The tolerance for the grid is 49.9 hz to 50.1 hz. When we switch, everyone goes to half-time in the grand final, switches on the kettle.
What happens to that is that demand causes the frequency to drop. That's how it manifests itself. Anyone who's been on a camping holiday and seen the lights dim, that's the frequency in the electricity in a small circuit. As you can imagine, if that gets out of whack too much, substations start tripping out, and all that kind of thing. That can't be allowed to happen. We get brownouts, that can't be allowed to happen. The grid operator is very, very strict about this. If you're a participant in the market, you must do as you are told. You don't mess with the operator. There's very fines for non-compliance. If they phone you and tell you to switch off, you better be there, and you better answer the phone.
These are things that there's a lot of regulation attached. We're talking about critical infrastructure here, highly regulated markets. I talked about cybersecurity a little while ago. There's no way the government can allow our grids to be hacked and power stations to be hacked. There's even laws now that they've done about making sure that this is a protected area. That's the critical side of it. We've got a lot of markets involved. There's not just one market in energy. There's so many markets, and a lot of them are OTC. They're very illiquid, and price discovery in certain areas of the market is scarce. Yeah, you know, pretty much got to phone someone up to get price discovery. There's not a lot of data that's available.
There is market data, but most of the data in the industry, I'd say about 90% of it, is proprietary and private data, and there's not a lot of. There's a limited amount of public information. A lot of that regulation and so on, flows through to our customers in terms of risk and governance, and must have proper systems. I'll talk about, in the bit in the middle here, the very large financial and physical assets. We obviously all understand about the physical side of the market in terms of the plant and equipment. The Australian derivatives market, that's the traded market for derivatives. That's swaps and options, what you call the futures market.
That face value of that, Australia alone, is AUD 110 billion per year goes through, goes through that market. There's a lot of financial assets on a lot of balance sheets, and of course, there's a lot of associated risk with that in terms of market and price changes. They'll be five minutes here and 15 minutes in Europe. You've got a lot of market risk and, of course, a lot of credit risk. That's the context. If we want to use AI, we have to do it inside a very regulated and controlled and governed industry. Next slide. In the context of ourselves, the company, we see AI as extending our competitive advantages that are already there, notably, system of record. We are the ground data for our customers, the single source of truth.
Auditors, market, regulators, all of them use the information. There's a lot of reporting that goes on. We have to have reliable information that you can stand by. I mentioned cybersecurity already. I mentioned the data. We control much of the data that goes through us, and we use our tools to synthesize and improve on that prop data that we hold and manage. We're embedded in the system already. Our customers transact through us on the way. They're putting the orders through us to market, or their availabilities, or their scheduling, or whatever it is they're doing. We, in many ways, we're the plumbing of the industry. You know, you go through us to get to the market. That shows up in network effects as well. We have strong market shares and growing.
Like in Australia, I think we're about 60% of the power in the country now goes through us in one way or another, and in Europe, it's, I think about 15% and growing. Lastly, on this page, we have supported systems. As talked before about the need for proper systems in a regulated environment, we're talking about governance-oriented businesses here with risk committees and appetites for risk and all the rest of it. We are able to provide them with certainty that a system will work and will do what's required of them.
In fact, it's one of the reasons why we've won work over the years, because the auditors will get involved and say, "Well, you can't do that on a spreadsheet anymore. You need a proper system." That's how we won work. This is more of that. We intend to see, you know, we see AI as an enabler, and we are actively using it. Next slide, please. We are using AI already. We've done a lot of groundwork in the past. We've selected our preferred tools. We've built things already, including proprietary AI forecasting modules for price. The inside product is already class-leading in terms of data, and our AI system lay-layer gives it an easy-to-use way for dashboarding and so on. Currently, we're working throughout the business with it. It's installed on every developer's IDE, Windsurf in particular, and the other ones.
We're seeing some really good productivity gains there, that I'm alluding to now, 50 odd percent gains, at least in some places. We are in the stage, I would call it, adopting and embedding AI as a business as usual process. That's showing through. We've already, as over there on the right, 1.6 million lines of code generated using AI already. Our next stage is to really sort of move to a full AI factory capability over the next 12 months or so, and that's something that Ben's very passionate about. We can really see some gains coming through for our customers. I've talked in the past about we can, with our current automation systems, which are excellent, manage 50 odd assets with one trader supervising.
We want to get to the point where there's 1,000 assets in the system that we, you know, this is when super scaling really will pay off for us, and we intend to do that, particularly with fully automated. The main benefits for us are faster deployments, quicker to market. There's no end of things that we can build for the market, and this enables us to get them out there quicker. Obviously, productivity gains across the organization. The big one for the renewables, which are fragmented market, is happening. More customers can be managed for scaling, and less reliance on the kind of semi-automatic tasks. Next slide, please go.
This one, this slide here we've used before, it's just a little bit defensive, I grant you, but I just want to make a point that wholesale energy trading isn't one thing. Customers don't do one thing, they have to do 20 things, and we focus on looking after them for all of those things. We spend a lot of time building a very diversified customer set and by size and by participation. That gives a resilience to the business. That means that, for instance, a few years ago, when the U.K. had 50% of their retailers go out of business, it didn't really affect us because we're that well-diversified. The last point here is we don't price on seats. I know that's been going around, so we don't do that.
We price on size and complexity. Happy to take questions on that. As far as we're concerned, AI is absolutely an enabler for what we want to do, and we're looking forward to using it even more. Thanks, guys. Just a quick update on M&A. As we well know, we've talked about it for years, our long-term strategy includes growth from organic and discipline in organic. We're not a roll-up type company. I've been the CEO for nearly 16 years, and we've made five acquisitions, and the last one was more than three years ago, and each of those have been well considered and have added to the business. When we find a really good acquisition or strategic partnership, we will take that, but we're not going around just hoovering up companies and competitors.
We are looking with our advisors, Lazard Australia. We're active in reviewing those opportunities wherever they may be, although we have an emphasis on our home markets, which we consider to be Europe and Australia. We do have opportunities in development, no timeline or guarantee at this time, but to answer a question we received beforehand, there's no financial commitments made at this time. We will, of course, when the time is right, enter into any agreements on that basis. Of course, as I step away from the CEO role, my ongoing role here is to help Ben and the team with M&A projects and, you know, as and when they arise. Thanks, guys.
Thank you, Shaun. I'm going to talk a little bit about the market evolution and the company strategy and the evolution of the strategy. What I wanted to do is to step back a little bit and to analyze what's happened in the market in the last 25 years. The market has gone through three different phases, right? The first phase, from 2000 to early 2020s, that was the development of the markets. Everything was centralized, all the utilities were vertically integrated, limited market access, and the trading was very manual. The technology really supported the trading but did not drive it. For the last five, six years, what we saw is really an acceleration of the electrifications and development of renewables, large scales and smaller scales.
We've also seen new commercial models through the PPAs or Power Purchase Agreements, to actually sell the production of renewable assets. We've seen the development of the flexibility markets. We saw a lot of different things, like negative prices, or an increase into the intraday trading volume, so in the shorter markets, right? People started to want availability, speed, compliance, automations. When we're looking ahead for the next five years, well, first of all, the comment is the large scale is not going to change, right? We still heavily rely on fossil fuels, so gas, we rely on nuclear plants and nuclear powers in certain parts of Europe and also in the U.S. That part is not really going to change.
The big trading firms, they're also going to continue to chase every new opportunities, and we'll be there to support them. We're also seeing from a portfolio perspective, it's becoming more distributed and asset-rich. We're seeing DERMS, so aggregation of smaller generation assets, a lot more batteries, electrical vehicles, flexible loads, the ability to cut the loads very quickly. We're also seeing the DSOs, so the distribution operators, becoming active, right? They're moving from a passive role to an active role, since they are now procuring more flexibility than accessing the wholesale and trading markets. Looking at it, right, and talking a little bit more about it. Our wholesale and trading the market, so the natural gas remains strong. We're seeing new supplies with biogas and LNG due to geopolitical constraints.
From a buyer perspective, right, they do not buy tools. They want integrated solutions. They want availability, compliance, right. The fact that the volatility and the complexities are increasing, they want to take faster decisions, and they want to automate. We're also seeing a new class of participants and new entrants, right, called the Virtual Trading Parties, or DERMS, or independent power producers, who have different names in different parts of the globe. It's really this ability to aggregate smaller scale assets and start accessing the markets, right. We've talked, I've talked a little bit about the DSO, right. About aggregating and buying flexibilities, coordinating with the wholesale players in the markets. Now, we're also seeing that there is a lot of different tools, fragmented tools. It's still very manual, and that's changing.
From a technology perspective, it's also evolving. Security is key. We talked about AI, companies, they want AI with limited internet connectivity, data security, data residency is really key. A lot of API integration, as Shaun mentioned, our tools, it's really to provide that plumbings and this market access, this connectivity to the market, and our customer, they're asking more and more API, which we already have. Now, human in the loop remains essential, right? You don't want to dispatch a power plant, and be right 99.9% of the time, especially if it's a nuclear or hydro plants. We still actually call people in the mountains to activate some power plants, and that's not going to change because a mistake will cost actually human life. It's very important we see that with our customers, and it's not going to change.
Yes, I'm passionate about AI. I definitely see it as an opportunity and a great opportunity, right, to be more efficient, but human will remain. Let's go to the next slide. Just about, you know, the market analysis. Our core market is in front of the meter. It's wholesale, and trading is how you access the market. You trade energy, gas, and power, renewables, you distribute it, you control the risk, and you settle. Our core market is actually growing. It's growing with new entrants always joining the market, but it's also growing in terms of increased spend. Due to the increased volatilities, the existing players, they actually need more technology, they need more tools, and that's really where we are, and we're seeing definitely the market growing.
We're also seeing new entrants, and that's really the exciting part. We're seeing people traditionally sitting behind the meter, aggregating the loads, aggregating the assets, creating what they call Virtual Trading Parties, VTP. Different names, different parts of the world, but it's really the aggregation of all these different assets and loads, and crossing the meter to access the trading market. We're very excited about that, and that's really generating a new target market for us. We're also having new solutions to respond to the market evolution, batteries, carbon capture and storage, biogas, LNG, so again, increasing the TAM. Last but not least, we're also expanding into new geographies in South and Eastern Europe, so new markets also joining the core market, and potential expansion also in APAC, in Oceania.
On the right, we can actually see the energy storage deployments and the future. We're seeing an exponential increase in new deployments of energy storage, and on the bottom, it's actually the increase of the trading volumes on EPEX, the major intraday markets in Europe, confirming the new entrants and also the increased spend in technology to support that. Now, in the market evolutions, I discussed about the need of the modular and orchestrated platform. Well, this is exactly the core value of Energy One and our value proposition, the one-stop shop, where you can actually see software plus trading services, right? How we map high level, the business processes on the left with our solutions and how they're actually used by human at the customer site.
Again, we do not price per user. We're not affected by the number of users at the customer site, but the customer, they are interacting with a lot of different Energy One products, being part of the Energy One ecosystem, including trading services. Next slide, please. What's coming next? Well, it's the strategy we're having of the one-stop shop, and it's actually working. I'm not planning to change it. That's why I'm calling it an evolution. We're going to continue investing into our products, the Energy One platform, approaching tier one customers, right? I spoke about that earlier in Europe, that we're getting traction with larger customers. They want a fully integrated solution, combining all our products.
We're going to continue investing in it, delivering a single user experience and a simplified customer journey for the integration of all our divisions into functional teams. Nonetheless, we're still going to continue with our global leverage. We're going to expand into new markets. We're going to build global go-to-market capabilities with investing in sales and marketing, and growing our targets, target markets. From a productivity perspective, we're going to continue focusing on center of excellence across regions, Australia and Europe, ensuring no duplication of functions, so getting more productive. We're going to push the AI adoption, keeping human in the loop. On the inorganic growth, again, through expansion into core and adjacent markets and consolidation of competition. I'm supporting with Shaun on that topic, so thank you.
Thanks, everyone. I'll just summarize now before we take some questions. The business continues to grow well, with increasing leverage. As is mentioned earlier, Rule of 40 exceeded on both methodologies. Very proud of the team and the ISO/IEC 27000. It's expected to be a tailwind, considering data security is a global focus for our customers. Pipeline's in good shape, helped by a lot of the initiatives that Ben's brought to the company, up 24% on the prior corresponding period. I mentioned the hits on the website and the web-generated leads. 53,000 website hits for a company that's in the B2B space is significant. We've got a global tailwind called the Energy Transition, which isn't going anywhere. Renewables are here to stay.
Gas is going to be here for the foreseeable future as well, which is one of the reasons why it's such an important transition fuel. There's a lot to like about the industry and the way it's going. We definitely see AI as an enabler, not a threat. As I mentioned, we're in a deeply regulated and sticky industry, mission-critical solutions, and we see ourselves as being the natural users of AI to increase productivity and then increase our customers' user experiences. Inorganic growth is in focus, both via discipline and M&A any other partnership types. Of course, the new CEO is continuing and refining our successful strategic direction. That's the presentation for today. I'd just like to make a couple of personal remarks if I may.
This is, I think, my 32nd half. It's been a while. I'd just like to thank everybody, our employees, Board of Directors, for their support. Of course, our shareholders, for a lot of you have been with us for a long time. Thank you very much. Questions?
Thanks, Shaun. We've got a couple online. I mean, if people have got questions, they can put them in the chat. What I'll do is unmute people, and then they can answer the questions. I think there's a few queued up, yeah. I think hopefully, popped up quite a few more. Unmute themselves. Yeah, maybe unmute yourself, and you can ask a question. Claude, you're the first question.
Thanks a lot for that. Thank you very much, Shaun, for your service to the company and the shareholders. You've done life-changing work for many of us who've been, like, investing in the company for quite a long time. It's just huge, like, made a massive difference in my life personally. Thank you. Just regarding questions on these results, I had three quick ones. The project implementation revenue was down in Europe, not just on the prior corresponding period, but also on the most recent half. With some companies, and I think maybe to some degree with Energy One, that project implementation revenue can be a little bit of an early indication of sort of, I guess, the license sale growth in the next half or in the next year.
Is that something that we should be prepared for because of the lower implementation revenues, or is there something else going on there?
I think good observation, Claude. Obviously, with projects and Ben talked to one of the major, the industrial we've recently won, our expectation is we will see that project revenue in the second half approach the previous half, and then that'll turn to recurring revenue as you know now. Whether that makes it in June, given that's a spot number or not, is yet to be seen. Customers typically don't move as quickly as we would like, but we've certainly got a solid book of projects and also some good customers in the later stages of the pipeline as well.
Yeah, last comment there. In all the years we've been doing this, it's defied sort of any kind of logic attached to it being a lead indicator. It does go up and down. You've got bigger customers, smaller customers. As Guy alluded to, they do their own timing. We've got to get them live, got to get them signed, got to get them live, and then the ARR starts to flow. Whilst it's good to see a good pipeline and good bookings for installations, we still focus on ARR. Again, I think as I said earlier, I don't know if it is a very good indicator. I think we still have to execute, we still have to get them signed, and we still have to get them live.
Yeah. Okay.
I don't want to say no, I mean, Australia sort of counters that to some extent up on the up on the prior half. Yeah, it's, we are diversified in that respect.
Yeah, definitely. Onto, I guess, bigger issues. With the sell-off in software companies worldwide, does that improve the M&A prospects, do you think? Also, given that there might be a better opportunity set, would you take that into account when maybe that might make you want to, say, pay less out as a dividend, so you have, you know, a stronger balance sheet to make acquisitions if that is looking more prospective? Like, could we talk about, you know, is it really do we want to be paying too much dividends if there's going to be potential M&A opportunity ahead?
Thanks. Thanks, Claude. You are straight to the point, aren't you? The board has a number of avenues of financing and acquisition. The balance sheet's very strong, the banking market's very attractive at the moment. The people that we engage with and have brought over the journey have, or been interested in our equity as well. Most of our acquisitions have been cash plus equity. We have the opportunity to raise capital in the market. The dividends are paid to reward customer shareholders for the prior success of the company. Very proud to pay the dividends, but the board will evaluate all options when deciding how to finance an acquisition and when and if to pay the dividend.
Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, I guess part of my thinking as well is when the software companies are on the nose, it's a less attractive time to raise capital as well. That made me think, oh, maybe it's better to conserve cash. Okay, cool. Thank you for those questions, and I'll, yeah, let someone else go. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, look, Claude, we are quite confident that Energy One's profitability, our growth opportunities, and our continuing to operate as we have in the past will lead to us not being on the nose. I think we'll always be in a good position to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to us.
Yeah, well, no, thanks for that comment. Yeah, these things do go up and down over time. Thank you very much. Bye.
Thanks, Claude. Maybe, Cameron, Cam, next question from yourself.
All right, thank you. Well done, team. Great result. Echo the thanks there to Shaun for everything. It's good to have you around for a little while longer. Let's start around customers and the activity that you're sort of seeing in the market. Obviously, AI has been a big thing, thank you for the color you've provided today. Have you seen from your customer base and prospective customer base in terms of opportunities, any, I suppose, stalling or reevaluation of their intentions to procure, just as AI sort of shifts the balance a little bit on certain projects?
Not really. Our customers, what they want is a reliable solution. Again, we provide deployment, so they may have AI for their forecasting, or they may have use AI for their own algorithm, but they still procure our software services because for them, it needs to be deterministic, it needs to be reliable and a proven solution. We haven't seen any customer rethinking their decision to acquire or continue with our services due to AI. Again, I would not expect that in the future either, right? AI is more about the orchestrations, it's about processing data. We provide the planning, and as I said earlier, it needs to be right 100% of the time. 99.9% is not a possibility. To answer your question, the answer is no, and I'm quite confident that's going to continue like that in the future. Not only the near future, but in the future.
Yeah. Thanks, Ben.
Yeah.
Second one I'd just like to ask on is, probably one more for Guy. Looking at, you know, some of your guidance for the full-year, you know, the first half has clearly started quite well, with where your cash EBITDA margin is sitting, your ARR growth, and the net revenue retention number was absolutely stellar. I guess just framing the reiteration of full-year guidance, you know, are you being a little bit conservative there for the second half, or are there some other factors we need to consider?
I'll get that. It's not guidance. Yeah if I may. We don't, we're not in the business of giving guidance, but I appreciate where the question's coming from. We prefer to stick to trajectory and where we're going and our goals. You know, things do move around a little bit. We're talking about big customers here, and, you know, it takes time to sign, and then they've got their own internal processes, which is what we talked about with the stickiness for many a year. It's obviously got the other side of that, is that it does, it can be a take on a cadence of its own. We prefer not to try and treat it as, you know, like just adding subscribers in a kind of controlled way.
It sort of moves forward a bit and slows down a bit and then lurches forward again. Again, we prefer to keep a range. Obviously, you can see on that slide near the front, we talked about ARR growth and how we go about doing it and the pipeline being up. We're very pleased with the progress in that regard. Again, as I always say, we've got to actually deliver it. Execution still remains one of the things we wanna do. Yeah, the goal of the company is to grow, and we're a growth-oriented company, and that is our ambition, and that's what we'll keep doing.
All right, very clear. Just last one then would be around the net revenue retention for this half that we saw. Like, that's a really strong number as opposed to what you're targeting for the full-year. Is that just a reflection of some of those deals you mentioned back in August that fell in that sort of July period, or there was just a really good broader upsell over the half that we need to consider?
Yeah, it's a mix of all of the above, and I think the, yeah, it reflects the good team, the good job the both Australian and Europe teams have done with their existing customers in selling to them. Some of the deals that we had in there actually got larger, so it's a good result from that perspective.
Yeah, that bundling is what's driving the gross margin up. Yeah?
Exactly, exactly right. That's, it's a result we're very, very happy with. That's sure given the, you know, given the strategies, the one-stop shop, land customers and then sell them up.
I think.
Thanks, Cam. Before I go on to the team, the questions, I might just knock off a couple of the ones in the chat very quickly. Was there a backlog of potential deals waiting for ISO? No, I do not believe there was. What is the potential stock number of the opportunity for European industrial customers? I think Ben answered that question earlier when he talked to the fact that, they are seeing more deals in that.
Yeah, so without giving information on our pipeline, we definitely see our pipeline increasing with potential deals in the industrial sectors. We're focusing on that, on that. We can expect more deals in the futures, in that sector, so.
I can't comment on the ISO. In a couple of years, say two years ago, we did lose a couple of jobs because we weren't ISO. It was literally, they like the software and the service, but you're not ISO, so sorry about that. And we've got to specifically answer that question, we do have a prospect here that the remaining thing, the remaining hurdle was the ISO. There's a large European customer that we're dealing with, prospect. It's the sort of thing where it's a, it's an enabler for what you need to do to deal with the larger customers, particularly, who are constrained by their own internal governance, and also in many jurisdictions, by law. Again, if the electricity networks require ISO, then you better have it.
Thanks.
I think that was my question. Did I miss one?
Yeah.
It was good, yeah. I think, just in the interest of time, if we could maybe limit the questions to one or two, the one or two key questions. Stephen Scott, if you want to, go next.
Yes, Stephen Scott from Veritas. Just on slide 27, talk about the new geographies of Southern and Eastern Europe. Can you just give us a little bit more detail? Just trying to track, like, the interval changes and the arrangement changes over there and where they're up to, particularly in Europe. Thanks.
Yeah, absolutely. I'll try to keep it quick. We can spend a lot of time on that, but, all the European countries, it's like in Australia with the states, they are all connected, and you can actually trade and move power or gas across all these countries. The most liquid markets, it's really Germany, France, and Netherlands, so it's EPEX SPOT, and then in the Nordics, with like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, mainly. What we're seeing is an increase in trading volumes in Eastern Europe. We're seeing two trends, Western companies moving power and start selling power into Eastern countries, and the other way around, Eastern utilities moving and trading into the Western European markets. It creates a lot of opportunities. They need system, they need nominations, they need market access.
They're the first part of it on the Eastern European market. Second part is the Southern European, so Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, mainly. Historically, these countries, they were kind of not able to access Russian gas, and they had to build LNG plants to import gas into their grids. With the shift, obviously, due to the tension between Russia and Ukraine, the war and all the sanctions, then the gas supply in Europe completely shifted from Russian gas to LNG, mainly U.S. gas. That brought back these countries into onto the table and also being key markets now to import gas. They operate quite differently, so the system required to access these markets are different. We do support them, and we're definitely seeing an increase in software demands to import LNG and move gas from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece into the European markets.
Hopefully, that answers your question, Stephen. Do you have further questions or?
Thanks.
Excellent. Thank you. Caleb, fire away.
Thanks, Guy. Hey, guys. Congrats on the good results. Just quickly on the attrition rate, that spiked up to 5%, and you guys attributed it to market exits. I mean, there was a lot of trading houses that opened up in the past few years, so probably a lot of them will probably go out of business. Do you kind of see that being a bit more elevated for the next few years or?
I think it's a feature, not a bug, right? It's people coming to the market looking to make a quick. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It's just the way of it. As you can see from the pie chart, slide 40, we don't really lose customers to competitors. They'll go in and sign again. They might stop trading and just go back to spreadsheets. That's sort of what happens. I'd say it waxes and wanes. It did spike up a little bit, you're right. 1% of that was caused by a manufacturer in this country who exited the market fully, right? Household name, unfortunately, couldn't get through the gas price spikes and so on, the volatility. Yeah, that's a bit of an uptick.
That's why we put the pie chart in, so you can see where that attrition goes. As I said, it's not really churn. We don't really lose customers. It's more economic. We don't lose competitors.
Thanks, Shaun. Just on the battery optimization software and service that you guys are selling quite well in Australia, have you started selling that in Europe, and what's the initial reception like there?
Australia, for market reason, has been quite advanced in battery trading, and battery optimizations. There is a lot more volatility in the Australian market due to the Australian grid, and we're actually quite uniquely positioned in Australia. Europe is a little bit lagging behind, but it's picking up. We actually started working on adapting our Australian solution to the European market, and we expect to see traction in the coming quarters or half years in the European market.
Okay, thank you. Thanks a lot.
Then I think, Jennifer, if you would, like to go next.
Thank you, team. Just a couple from me. The first one is: can you describe EOL sales team in Australia and Europe markets individually, given its upsizing sales team?
Is that TAM? Sorry, did I hear that right?
Well, sales, internal sales team size.
Oh, okay. Sorry.
Sales, yeah.
Well, the sales team is actually aligned with the size of the market. It depends really on the number of potential targets. We have that information, and it's actually quite proportional, so it's based on the number of targets, and it's placed across Australia and Europe. Different numbers. Obviously, the sales team in Europe is larger because the market is bigger, but it's aligned, so we track the number of accounts and the size of the market, and we align the sales team based on that.
I think in the last, the last reporting period, we put a chart up with the number of hire, number of people in that.
Yeah, we did. I mean, we roughly allocate about 20 people to sales. In, say, France, which is more what I call a flow product, more traditional SaaS, they have dedicated sales people with targets. The traditional model, whereas in enterprise businesses, people tend to wear two hats. You know, they do product, and they also do sales because there's less customers, less volume. What we do is go through and attribute percentages to people's time. As we did note, the sales cost up about 13% in the current period versus prior half, it's around about $4 million.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, thank you. Also because just mentioned about the last previous the presentation, I remember there was a map showing European market coverage, going to go to some countries in Europe in, during 2025. This is just a follow-up about the European market question again. 2025, that map, has EOL already covered all of those yellow areas?
Mostly, yes, and we continue. We actually have an updated map. That's true that we didn't put the map on the release. To your question, the answer is yes. We've delivered new countries, we've delivered new exchanges, and we continue to do so.
Yeah, we had 50 slots, so something had to go.
Great. Thank you, Shaun.
Thanks, Jennifer. I think, can we go another couple of minutes, guys. Amelia, how you going? Next, please.
Hey, guys. Thank you so much, team. I mean, congratulations, Shaun, on your last call for as CEO, and well done, Ben, on your first. Look, first question I wanted to ask was just on the sort of revenue growth dynamics, 'cause what I've noticed is there's been a bit of a convergence between Australia and Europe in terms of the growth, once you strip out FX. Just wanted to sort of see how we should think about that going forward. Should we think about them growing similarly, or do you expect the European growth trajectory to tick up a bit and Australia to maybe pull back a tiny bit?
Australia, so I'll get asked this first.
Yeah, go for it.
Traditionally, I'll do the backwards, and Ben can do the forwards. The Australian market grows mid-teens, and given that we've got 60 odd percent of the market, we're very proud of that result. The guys do a great job here, although we have no expectations that we'll go to European sort of levels. Europe is definitely the growth engine and the overseas growth engine, the long runway. As far as the company is concerned, Europe is where the growth is going to be powered from. There's 600 million people in Europe, and that's where it's gonna come from then.
I agree with Shaun. Obviously, in Australia, we're going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to innovate, bring new products. Good thing is we have 60% of the market, so it's actually easier to expand. We do have the contacts, so when we have a new product, a new service, we can actually do an upsell. In Europe, it's, we have, I would say, between 10% and 20% of the market, depending on how you count it. It means that we have a lot of potential to expand. Even if the growth in percentage is similar, I do expect a higher growth in Europe in the future.
You will also understand that the sales teams are very competitive internally as well. There was a great deal of joy in Australia when they sold more than they have in quite a period in the last half. They were very pleased.
Also, I think when you dig into the result, Amelia, Australia projects help them sell us the broker revenue. Brokers up about AUD 300,000, half on half, which is a, you know, a one, more one-off kind of revenue. When you get back to the recurring, it's back at around 15%, which is target range.
Terrific, terrific. Just on this, the slightly elevated marketing spend that we've seen, obviously still within the range, is that to do with you've scaled up the sales team, and, you know, they're still in their sort of ramp period, so it's just that initial, or is there something else going on there that we should be aware of?
No, it's exactly that. It's exactly what you mentioned. We're scaling up the sales team. We're implementing the best practice in sales. We're now in a place that I'm quite comfortable with the spend, so nothing really going on than that. We're trying to sell more, and we increased the spend, but again, within our guidance and financial discipline.
Yeah, I mean, we did previously flag that we were going to elevate our sales and marketing spend.
Saying that, I mean, you can also see that in the results, right? We sustained our growth, the recurring revenue is up, the pipeline is up, it's actually working, and it's definitively worth it.
Great. A very, very last question. Just on the churn, looking at the sort of causes of the churn and that pie that you very helpfully provided, I noticed that about 16% is people moving to an in-house solution. Has that ticked up versus previous periods, or has that been pretty constant over a period of time in terms of reasons that people might go somewhere else?
Look, without digging into the old data, which I know Karen may. It's 'cause, it just waxes and wanes. You know, when people often downsize their operations, they'll keep trading in France, but they stop trading in Germany, say, and then they might just bring it in-house, do it manually, whatever. I think it's waxes and wanes, probably the correct way to answer it. It just moves around a little bit. Just, you know, it is economics. There's an element of economics into it as well. A lot of, a rapidly expanding market, people piling in, obviously there's gonna be some roadkill along the way, and that's just a feature of it.
Okay.
Yeah.
We're not seeing people vibe coding their own products?
No, because at the end of the day, it's, and it's not unique to this, on any trading floor in the world, you've got traders, and then you've got their trading analysts who would love to, you know, knock things up, and, you know, they're gonna trade Japanese warrants or something. You know, when the risk committee find that out, they usually frown upon it. It's a great idea, and it's good for, when it's in control for doing your own IP and getting that sort of stuff. When you need the plane, when you need the quality assurance and the data validation, such that the bid or the offer that you're putting down the pipes is actually within the capability of the plant, for example, you better make sure you've got a proper system for that.
I think, yeah, it's next to the financial sales trading. I think there's an element of economic, yeah, trading diminishes. We'll take it in-house because it's simplified, saves some money, so they do, I think there's overlap in there. Thanks, Amelia.
Terrific. Thanks, guys.
No problem. Matt, I think you're the last with the questions.
Excellent. Thanks, guys. Yeah, I just was building on Claude's question earlier around what you're seeing in prospects to acquire. I guess my question is, software multiples have compressed in public markets, what are you seeing in private markets? Do you see a similar compression? How does it kind of affect your opportunity set?
Well, I, you have to read the newspaper to get the answer to that. Traditionally, PE came in a few years ago, there was a lot of acquisition, pushed the prices up for private assets. I think it's all possibly changing now, according to the newspaper. I don't have specialist knowledge of that, but you'd imagine that, you know, if a rising tide lifts all boats, then a declining tide makes them all drop down again.
Yeah, excellent. Just last one, just can you just talk through the value prop on the kind of entry- level? If someone's just, I guess, your kind of median entry-level customer, which might, I'm kind of seeing some of them, maybe they, you know, have a solar farm that's started, and they want to start trading it. Can you just talk to the value prop of that versus people trying to do something internally? I think it's very clear, if you're a large integrated player using everything, just how much Energy One is needed. Could you just maybe talk through why people aren't self-coding their own thing, and maybe to how much you might charge them versus, you know, what it would cost them to get a developer to code some of themselves, for instance?
Yes, I can answer that. First of all, even if you have just a small solar plant and a few batteries, even if they are small, at the end of the day, to enter the market, it's exactly the same business processes. I mean, if you have 20 of them, it's a bit more complex, but the amount of effort you need is pretty much the same in business processes. We're uniquely positioned because we're also able to price it accordingly to facilitate that market entry. When the complexity increase, then we're also able to upsell, and you see that in the net retention rate. We're also seeing smaller entrants that decide to develop one part of the problem, and they usually focused on their secret sauce.
We had one case in Europe very recently, and they said, "Well, we wanted to build a stricter algorithm to automatically trade things." They said, "We don't want to go on the market. We want to build it." They did it. However, they came back to us because they wanted us to just do all the rest. They're like, "All the plumbing, we don't want to do it. It's way too complex. It takes way too much time. It has no value for us." Now we're talking with them to just provide that part. To answer to your questions is that, so we're able to price lower when the complexity is not that big, but we're still able to capture this new entrants, smaller new entrants.
In some of the cases, when the entrants wants to build one part of the system, they still contact us to provide the rest.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thanks, Matt.
I think at that point, we're done. I don't see any further questions online, or in the chat. At that point, guys, happy to wrap it up.
Yeah.
Thanks, everybody.
The board would like to reflect all of the very positive comments that have been made about Shaun's leadership over a number of forums. We're very pleased that he's been leading our journey, and we're very excited about, promoting an internal person, Ben, with enormous capability after a global search. I'm very excited and very proud of what we're gonna be able to do in the future as well. Thank you both.
Thanks.
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
Have a great day. See you next time. Well, I won't.