Thank you, Anastasia. That's done. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Energy One Limited half year results presentation and discussion. My name is Shaun Ankers, I'm the CEO. I'm joined today by our Chairman, Andrew Bonwick, and Guy Steel, our CFO, and all of us will be available for questions. We will have, if we can, have Q&A at the end, but if something occurs to you, please ask as we go along. Let's get started. Obviously we're here to discuss the results in the half year and how it's going. I thought I'd just take a moment to remind ourselves why we're here and what we're doing here.
The world of energy is probably the most exciting sector in the world today, and the push towards net zero is obviously highly topical and something that's in the newspapers and in front of us in our daily lives. We're at a very exciting space to be in, and Energy One is, and intends to be a leading provider in that. We're certainly in many ways the most capable provider of our, in our particular area of expertise, and it's an exciting marketplace. We've got great solutions, great people, and a great opportunity. Before I just wanted to get that thought before we start on going through some highlights.
Obviously, we will discuss the financials in some detail, but recurring re venue is up 42% on the prior corresponding period, and big revenue, total revenue up 41% on the prior year. Our integrations in, of CQ in Adelaide and EGSSIS in Belgium are progressing very well indeed. Those are great companies, great solutions, and that's going well and well. We can talk about that. I'd like to congratulate CQ Energy and Risk Solutions International, the JV team, for winning 2022 Broker of the Year in weather risk. It's a great achievement in a specialized industry. In other news, we're about to go live with our battery auto-bidding.
Obviously, you only have to open the newspaper to understand how important batteries are, and our battery auto-bidding solution is about to go live for a multinational customer that signed, and we can talk about that. Recent go live on a fully automated dispatch and control system for a peaking unit. Another example of our capability that's not matched by other vendors in the space. We have a good pipeline of projects and customers, including a proof of concept for a major utility in Europe. Of course, good market feedback and progress for our globalization program. I will update you about how that investment's going and the progress we're making. Let's dive into the financials. Obviously, increased revenue was aided undoubtedly by the acquisition of CQ Energy and EGSSIS for the full period, as expected, really.
Project revenue within that's a small percent. Existing business impacted by project times. We've a large project that in Europe that's we're looking to get going on and obviously that affected it as well. We're 19% down on project revenue, which is sort of one-off type implementation revenue. Recurring revenue was likewise aided by in the half by acquisitions, but the existing business ARR was up 8%, which is obviously quite a long way off our normal run rate for ARR growth, and we will discuss that in some detail a slide on it. Profit Before Tax has obviously impacted the interest amortization, which is an accounting charge, non-cash charge. Travel obviously came back and investments and so on, and employees, and we'll dive into that as well.
The employee costs, obviously not just t he sort of natural salary pressures we and everyone else are experiencing in the market and business and the projects plural. I talked to them. We'll note that over the years ahead, capitalization will fall as an overall percentage of revenue. We're still investing in apparatus, but obviously services doesn't have the level of capitalization attached. I'm sure that if there's a question there, Guy can answer that in some detail. I just wanted to point out that we've when we talked about our investment in global operations, which was AUD 1.5 million to AUD 2 million a year, we did mention obviously that's gonna have an effect on the profitability, and that's sort of noticed here in this line.
We invested about AUD 481,000 in global ops. Of course, another charge there was the amortization of acquired intangibles, which is an accounting line. If both on a comparison basis with this time last year, if we took those two out, statutory NBT would be up 26%. Just to give you an idea of the effect of investing in the future and for future growth. Here's that normalization to take out the AUD 875 ,000 for EBITDA. There was a question about this in advance of the meeting. Happy to sort of discuss it again further.
We did include the global operations cost in the guidance, but obviously for the purposes of this PCP to normalize that bridge. There is a bridge, we can go through it. We had one-offs attached to audit activity directly related to acquisition and legal costs and other charges associated with those acquisitions. They're only being acquisition costs 'cause technically they're a different category, but they are related to those, to those acquisitions. We have some legal fees attached to Europe in terms of cleaning up a few things there and establishing an integrated European management team with various regulatory changes in country registrations and so on that we needed to make sure were done properly. We can come back to that slide if you like. What about the revenue?
This is half to half from this time last year. As I mentioned, project revenue, that's obviously the bit that affects us. The business is still despite having 85% recurring revenue, is still affected by project timings and project revenue. That's the blue, the blue slice up there. You can see it's down on the time before. That's obviously has a, you know, a leading indicator as well for some of that, some of that recurring revenue. We've invested in people ahead of project wins, as I said. The overall, the licenses and the support lines, which are the two ostensibly recurring ones, excluding CQ Services, excluding particularly CQ because it's new, they're up 19% on the prior corresponding period.
As I said, we have a proof of concept with a major European utility, and if that's successful, we hope to close it by the middle of this calendar year. Of course, that would be the good account cluster win, but we're working on that one. I'd like to hand over to Guy for maybe to go through the bridge slides, then obviously there may be some technical questions then. Guy?
Thank you, Shaun, for that. Just in terms of the bridge, what we've tried to represent is obviously the impact of the change in business due to the acquisitions on the overall business. As we move through the bridge, we've talked about the revenue in the existing business. The second one is the contribution of EGSSIS and CQ and EGSSIS. The key point here is if you look at the guidance we gave when we acquired those business, this is consistent with that, and they are on track. Shaun talked to the acquisition intangible amortization, and that is effectively. When businesses are acquired, we go through a process to identify the intangibles acquired. They're predominantly software and customer lists.
In the case of CQ, we actually used an independent expert to come to those valuations due to the acquisition size. You saw the cost of those, that independent expert, in the normalizations. We obviously incur costs with respect to NAB and the AUD 30 million facility. Just on the AUD 30 million facility is a AUD 20 million amortizing component and a AUD 10 million revolving component. The depreciation and amortization is the remainder in the existing businesses. As we move through the costs, you can see there the impact of increased travel on the P&L as it's been a particular focus through the half as obviously the borders have opened to get our business development teams out with the customers.
They're the key points. The next, the next bridge is an EBITDA bridge, but it really is just a replication of the previous page minus obviously the interest and the depreciation amortization components, and put in for completeness just so that people can understand the different levers between PBT and EBITDA. Thanks, Shaun.
Thanks, Guy. This, re-recurring slide that we produce is our SaaS metrics slide, emphasizing the changes to those SaaS metrics. You know, there's a couple of things to call out here. The blue column is obviously the most recent. ARR has increased 86% since FY 2020. Less so in the last six months, as you can see. Of course, that's been mentioned already. Churn's slightly up. European market disruption, obviously in Europe, it's one of the biggest energy crisis in the last 40 odd years easily. Not everyone's made it through. Market exits and so on. That churns up slightly for that.
We published some more information this time on gross margin because obviously it's front of mind for a lot of observers of the company. Our SaaS gross margins are in the order of 80%, which is very typical of a SaaS, pure SaaS business. That SaaS business line, 80% is a typical sort of gross margin. We're right in the zone for that one. Services and software, which is our newer business line, which is related to providing software with a service, or however you wanna say it, software and services that use our software. Those gross margins in the order of 65% and capable of being grown, and I'll talk about that.
Implementation, which is often T&M, highly specialized one-off services involving putting things in, writing customizations and so on. That's a 40% gross margin. Overall, we've got a sort of a hybrid business model. It gives us a net gross margin across the business of about 63%, 62%. Net revenue retention, we get asked about this one, so we've done a bit of work to put that in. That's a 105% in the most recent reporting period. If you like, we can dig into that a bit later. Note the CAC, broadly, customer acquisition costs dropped slightly. Obviously, we're investing in marketing and getting back out on the road now, is part of that process.
I did talk about recurring revenue at the 8% pit on PCP across the business and looking at the underlying rates across the business for organic, because obviously some of our recurring revenue growth, well, a lot of it is often affected by short-term inorganic acquisitions and the like. Just trying to strip that out, make it simplified for viewers to understand is looking at the recurring revenue growth that is organically generated. This is products and services, business lines. The top one is software and service. That's been growing an average of 24% per year. Revenue growth for our traditionalized, the dark green, is our traditional SaaS style business that is been growing at an average of 19%.
Obviously, you've got a bigger data set for that because it goes back four years instead of the more recent ones. Our software for niche and specialist products, which are very important products to us. They're, you know, obviously cash generative, but they are by definition, specialist or niche. They grow at a more modest rate. There's an overall rate that's affected by a number of different things. What we're doing here, as you can see, is investing in the higher growth, recurring revenue type business lines, which is particularly software and services. This will help serve to reduce our reliance on project revenue as time goes by. Whilst project revenue is important, it'll become less important as the picture develops.
Stick it in proper.
How have we been going? Well, electricity and renewables customers are forming a big part of the market segment growth. CQ Energy of all the new entrants into the Australian market in the last several years, has won 35% of them. That's one in three. It's a very good number given that some of those entrants have got existing solutions that they roll out, and perhaps in-house solutions as well. Again, for that same customer set, this software business has won 30% of those accounts. Generally speaking, Europe has a success rate in excess of 50%, particularly with our physical software and physical scheduling software and services business, like in France. U.K. has won a large European renewables customer.
As, as I've mentioned before, the timing on that has been delayed and those revenues fall into the second half and we're trying to get that signed off. That's just one of those things related to large and important customers. We need to make sure that everyone's happy with the specifications and the like. Just wanna mention global 24/7 ops, if I may. Our global business model is developing nicely. Obviously, this is what we're investing in this new business line. The globalization piece that involves services as well as software and those two things supporting each other. We are, as I've said before, we're talking about a follow the sun model. It's been well supported by existing customers. Our European customer base has agreed to allow the Australian business to do the night shift.
In fact we do have two Belgian transferees who are now operating out of Adelaide and enjoying the weather compared to Belgium. They're a lot warmer now at the moment. I think it's 40 degrees there today. They're operating the night shift from here. Of course, we'll start doing that, rolling that out on a vice versa basis across the globe. Very exciting developments there. As I said, we have proof of concept with a large, very large European customer, which we hope will come to fruition within a few months. Mention again, battery bidding. Obviously we only have to open the newspapers to understand how important batteries are.
The CEO of AEMO was in the newspaper yesterday talking about whether by 2027, New South Wales may well have an electricity shortage because of the closure of coal-fired stations and the need to replace that generation capacity with firming type generation, which invariably means storage assets like batteries or pumped hydro. There's it's obviously going to feature very heavily going forward. The fact that we within four years we may have shortages means that things do have to happen, they have to happen quite quickly in a soon period of time.
It's very important for us to have solutions for customers for battery bidding, and I'm very pleased to say we're about to go live with a multinational customer with a view to being able to do more work for them as the time goes by. It's an impressive piece of software. Obviously, batteries are operating in a very fast timeframe. They're fast start. There's a lot of fast start assets, but batteries are very much in and out of the market, and so it's important to have a highly sophisticated software to help you manage that, manage that process, and we do. There's a pipeline of interest developing around our software of course. As I said, out of our services, particularly is it of interest and outsourced models in general.
The feedback from the customer base and from prospects is very promising towards us being able to build these kinds of framework and partnership agreements going forward. Our global outreach program has kicked off. I talked about a marketing investment. I just wanna put the slide out there, give you a feel for what we're doing with our widespread marketing campaign. Lots of social media. We've got a really good team of marketers now working together on a global coordinated basis. Once we've got some awareness building, we obviously can reach out directly to them and introduce them to our other services across the group via cross-selling and a bunch of other techniques as well.
We've got a new website that's just been launched, which I hope you'll go and have a look at, which brings together all of our European brands in particular. Those brands in Europe are not being separate, marketed separately now. It's all under the Energy One brand for Europe. We've got a really sophisticated website there, in my opinion, that shows the breadth and depth of the company's offerings. Another question. Claude, do you mind if I just wait until the end to answer that question?
Yeah, I assume she'll move.
Of course, that's fine. Sorry, I was just putting it in there so you can, you know, address it when you feel appropriate.
Thanks very much. All right. Okay, good. Let's look at our software and services a bit more. Again, why are we investing in it? You can see the growth, we already talked about that. The addressable market overall for software and services in a combined sense is going to be well in excess of $2 billion U.S. per annum in 2020 to 2032, just based on projections for growth. It's already, you know, over $1 billion anyway. Renewables are what we need for electrification. We talk about coal-fired stations closing. Predominantly, these stations are closing because they're reaching the end of their useful lives, and they can't go on forever. Inevitably, they will exit the market. Of course, we're not building any new coal stations, so that electricity power has to come from somewhere.
It's going to predominantly come from renewables going forward. In the Australian market, we had a short period of time, we had 30% of the power generated by renewables. In the U.K., they had a short period where they had 100% of their power generated by renewables. These things are evolving in their own right, and will continue to do so. The inevitable part of that is there's some fragmentation into smaller customers. Whereas there's no doubt that bigger utilities will build renewable stations and so on, a lot of the development is being undertaken by what we'd call independents. In addition to that, there's a lot of transitioning occurring in bigger utilities who are building out their portfolios of renewables and so on and so forth.
We all know and read about that in the newspaper. Of course, distributed energy resources is a wide title. It covers a lot of things, but it's fundamentally changing the way that the market works, not just on the generation side, but also on the demand side. If you like, controllable loads behind the meter, if you think about large solar PV installations on factory roofs and that sort of thing that can be aggregated into a fungible load that can be traded. These things are going to happen, and they're gonna happen, they're happening right now and will continue to do so. Of course, gas remains a vital transition fuel for many, many years to come. It is essential.
There's a lot of volatility in the, in the gas market in recent times. Being able to manage that is important for our customers. Gas remains front of mind. We have very good capability for helping our customers with their gas trading needs in services and software. As I said, we want to, we wanna be at the forefront of this energy revolution and providing services to the wholesale market. This is just a recap slide to talk about how we pull together our bits of software and services to provide a solution for customers. Just in summary then, I did mention the project revenues were affected by the timing of large projects. The pipeline is good and interest is building.
Last time we came out, I said that the pipeline after COVID was in fact growing, we need to get people off the sidelines. Since then, the pipeline has got even stronger, but we do need to close them. People have been somewhat distracted by the energy, you know, the energy crisis going on in, particularly in Europe, but also here in the Aussie market in terms of prices. There's a couple of things that have impacted that there, but the pipeline is good and strong, and we. It's up to us to go out and close some of these accounts. As again, the one-off stuff is trying to move towards a more recurring, you know, focus on recurring revenue as we have done for many, many years.
As I say, margins remain strong and the opportunity to grow services and margins mainly by automation. I talked about that in our previous presentations, 0.4, running at 0.4 operators per site, which means we can put on two or three new sites before we need to, you know, put on some more operations staff. Obviously, automation is great for that. We already have a good degree of automation in our services and products, but obviously, we're gonna focus on building that up even more. It's an exciting global opportunity. Energy One is ahead of the others to realize and supply these solutions. When I say the others, I mean the traditional competitors of ours who are, we believe, software-focused, not software and services.
Lastly, the board maintains its guidance into the second half. We're well aware of the fact that obviously that means we've got to have a stronger second half than the first. Our view is the pipeline is there, the opportunity is there, and we're working towards that. With that, we need to close some things and deliver some projects, and of course, we'll continue to monitor that as we go. Thank you. That's my presentation. Shall we start addressing some questions? Maybe start with Claude. Back to that one with Claude. I'll read the question out. Regarding the one-off AUD 500,000 spend on 24/7 service desk, as I understand it, total spend on this project is AUD 3 million-AUD 4 million over two years.
Please, could you give us a sense of what these actual costs are and why they will drop off after the AUD 4 million total? Guy's talked about, you know, what we're planning to spend in the financial year, but what I think we said at the beginning of the year was about AUD 1.5 million, Guy, for this particular year?
Correct. It's, yeah, it's AUD 1.5 million. Yes.
What are we spending it on? Right. That's an excellent question. Importantly, one of the projects we're working on is ISO 27001, which is cybersecurity. Absolutely front of mind for our customers right now. We do have very good cybersecurity processes in our company, but obviously 27001 is the global standard that people recognize and bigger customers demand for your cybersecurity. That's a reasonably cost-intensive exercise to get that thing in place. Lots of policies and procedures, and we need to work with specialist consultants to do that. That's one thing we're working on. We're investing more in marketing spend, and you'll see that coming through in the CAC as the months go by. We're investing in some technology stuff to go standardize our global operations experience.
The software in each country will continue to be the software in each country because it's a very good software, class-leading. Some of the stuff that we can standardize on, like the look and feel of dashboards and all the rest of it, that's something we're working on right now as well. We obviously have some legal costs and things like establishing transfer pricing and global pricing solutions and standard contracts that operate in multi-jurisdictional areas. There's some legal stuff attached to that. Of course, the implementation, the human implementation aspects of pulling all this together. It's a very specialized team to do that. Why will it fall off? Why will it fall away after a couple of years? Because you can see it's more project-oriented, these costs.
Once these things are in place, yes, there will be a residual expense attached to them, but we're really putting in place frameworks to allow us to be able to leverage and scale up so that we can deal with many, many customers coming online in the future as opposed to dealing with them sort of on an individual basis. Does that answer the question?
Hi. Yes, John, that does. Thank you. I just wanted to zoom into one little aspect of your answer, which was the marketing spend, which doesn't feel very one-off to me, generally speaking. How much is that, and is that gonna stop after two years? Is that just associated with letting people know that the offering exists? Is that really one-off or is that ongoing?
Yes. Right. When I said I wasn't very precise, was I? Most of it will fall off.
I just wasn't sure what you mean.
Yes. Most of it will fall away, Claude, but obviously, marketing is something that we'll see as being that will remain. As to how much that is, I'll swap my head. I can't say, but obviously we are going to we're ramping up our marketing spend now. When we get to that ramp up, you know, soon-ish, that will probably stay consistent over the next couple of years.
Right. I guess, Okay, I'm just trying to figure out, I guess, you know, if, I guess, how one-off, because there's AUD 481,000 in the global operations initiative that we've normalized. You know, if there's an element, like how much of that is marketing that might continue to ramp up and even continue after in two or three years? How much of it is like one-off stuff like the cybersecurity process?
I think to answer the question, Claude, in the current half, the marketing's negligible.
Okay.
I think it's actually pretty much close to zero.
Right.
In the AUD 1.5 million, it's an immaterial amount. It's certainly not a substantial part. Maybe, yeah, AUD 100K-AUD 200K.
Okay. Thank you so much.
At most.
Thank you for that detail.
Obviously a fair component is the initial investment. John's talked about the website and also building the processes to manage, yeah, search optimization and those kinds of, those kinds of activities.
Yeah. Great.
The majority is true one-off.
Okay, brilliant. Thank you.
What do you get? What are we spending it on? That sort of stuff. More trade shows, more, you know, social media, obviously a low-cost way of doing things, but we're having, we're putting on some more heads. There's another marketing person starting in this country for the Australian operation, things like that. These aren't major sales and marketing costs. They're an enhancement to what we're already doing.
Yeah. Cool.
To be clear, though, the trade shows are covered in the business units themselves, not in global ops.
Yeah, yeah. That's what I figured. Yeah, great. Actually, while I've got your attention, is it all right if I sneak in another question?
Of course.
Go for it.
Just great to have the slide about more of those recurring revenue kind of metrics. Just because you've put it forward, I really wanted to just delve into how recurring in nature that revenue is. Because sometimes you see very different definitions of recurring revenue between different companies. Now, you've given us the key metric there, which is the churn, which basically if the churn's below 5%, then that's pretty high quality recurring revenue. What I really wanted to explore with you is, like, is there ever a scenario, like have you done it all like annually, so we should always basically see recurring revenue go up? Is it fair to say we should always see re-recurring revenue go up half on half? Is there like some unevenness to it that means that you might see ups and downs in recurring revenue even though it's recurring?
Well, first of all, on an aspirational basis, we all want it to go up half to half. Let's just clear that one up right away.
Yeah.
These projects, when they come online...
I was just gonna say, there might be like a pattern where you always get a higher recurring revenue in one half and not the other half so that...
It's not, it's not cyclical or, you know, it's not symmetrical like that.
Yeah.
What happens is there'll be a steady. Let me explain it how our recurring revenue builds up. We've got, let's say, smaller, easier to understand product lines, business lines that, you know, we can sign customers up quite quickly. That's sort of, you know, France and, you know, things like that where we can sign them up quite quickly when they come online. A few products do that as well, and services. You've got that more lumpy stuff that's where it's customers, a big implementation, then they suddenly go live, and of course, because they're larger, they have a larger license fee. That might kick on in one of the halves, but we can't obviously predict which half that's going to be on.
One year it'll be this half, and next year it'll be the other half. They still... That's semi-lumpy, but there's an underlying steady growth of picking up new accounts at the smaller, I won't say smaller end of town per se, but they're generally smaller accounts that are easier to sign. The reason we have gone down that road is because of the lumpiness or the uneven nature of projects. I tended to focus on recurring revenue that's, it's an annuity style that's easier to get hold of. It's a diversification of big and small customers, large and small products and services.
Great. As I understand it with, you know, they're a part of the recurring revenue is service revenue and part of it is software revenue. Thank you know, you've broken out for everyone else. I think you've talked about before the different margins on that. What's the proportion? What's the over? Oh, there you've got it. Right. This is I guess what I'm not quite getting. When you say at the bottom of the line there, it has the gross margin 62% in the, in the recurring revenue. Is that recurring revenue gross margin, or is that?
The whole business.
Oh, okay. Sorry. Yep. Sorry, I just didn't figure that out myself. All right. Is there some way of you can give us some guidance of where the actual recurring revenue gross margin sits at the moment?
SaaS is at 80%. You can see that on the right side.
Yeah, yeah. Isn't the overall recurring revenue a mixture of SaaS and the software and services and software margins? It's average rev margin. Yeah.
All right. Can you make an estimate of that or is it on the fly?
I think given that the, yeah, the SaaS licenses is, if I were you to split the room, is about 60%.
Yeah, got you. Okay. You can put it together from that slide.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's in the Appendix 4D. That's right. It'll be in the Appendix 4D one.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Trying to work it out. We've had a deluge of results the last couple of days. I couldn't figure that out myself.
No, no. No, you're fine. I guess the one point to note is the 62% margin includes amortization. When Shaun's talked to the margins, by effectively lines of business excludes the amortization, which is based on feedback from a variety of people that we should be looking at the cash costs consistent with the what the market does generally.
Yeah, that's fine. Cool. Either way, now I see how I can piece that together. So basically the overall thing that I wanted to test there is that, you know, over time, if the, if it all goes to plan, you use the automation, we're gonna see, those recurring revenue margins sneak up.
Well, that's a very good observation. Let me explain because I've talked about a point four, right? In a line, let's say we have 1,000 customers, we obviously can't have 400 trader operators. That's not practical. For leaving aside the margins, automation is really important in that space to be able to focus on the machines doing most of the, if you like, the legwork, and then the humans supervising the machines rather than rather than doing it manually. It's a really important operational practice, as well as providing, you know, the sort of conversation about operational leverage for margins. Definitely automation. This business lends itself to automation, and you can automate. Even if you can't automate the entire task, you can automate chunks of it.
We do already have a good amount of automation. CQ is highly automated. France has got automation. We're rolling out other elements of it as well. As I said in my highlight slide, we've just gone live with a full control and dispatch project, which actually doesn't just do the deal execution, it actually controls the plant as well. Switches it on and off. Of course, that's more or less what happens with batteries as well. It's a key element too, is that control. Of course, in a market that operates in five-minute intervals, as you can imagine, that you need to rely on machines to get that automation piece done for you.
Thanks. It is fair to say that the overall-
It's absolutely our goal to grow those margins by using automation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right. Great. Thanks.
I think, Shaun , Steven Scott has a, has a question. He's been patiently waiting. Thanks, Steven.
Thank you. Hopefully, you can hear me okay.
Yes.
We can.
Just with the battery dispatch business, can you give us a bit more or software, can you give us a bit more sort of details on what it does and kinda how it works and what it looks like? I know it might be a commercial in confidence, but just a bit more of an understanding of that.
Yes. I can certainly have a go. I've got on call, Ross Attrill, who's an expert on this. Ross, chime in if I say anything incorrect. Obviously a battery is a storage device, and, you know, storage devices have a limited amount of power generating capacity over, you know, it might be two hours, it might be longer, but, and certainly with Snowy 2.0, you know, it's a very large amount of storage time. They tend generally short-term in and out. They're either charging or they're discharging. When there's an optimal behavior pattern for that. You don't, you know, if, very simplistic sort of arbitrage conversation, you wanna charge the battery when power prices are low and discharge when power prices are high for maximum commercial optimization.
That whole process of determining when to come in and out is important. There's a bunch of optimization tools that we have for that. Of course it's the control, the sort of bidding control aspects as well. You know, putting that bid into the market in the Australian context, putting the bid into the market, then the, you know, the market operator sends you a signal saying, "Come on, turn on please." You then obviously have to instruct the battery to turn on or instruct the battery's control system to start turning it on, which, you know, is a separate piece of software that usually is supplied by the battery supplier themselves. Ross, how did I go on that one? Do you want to jump in?
Very good. That's, yeah, that's it, Shaun. I think frequency control also. The batteries, a lot of the revenue comes from providing frequency control alongside of energy arbitrage, which I think you mentioned. Our optimization software looks at whether to dispatch for energy or to provide frequency services and works out the best way to get profit from the battery subject to the battery's constraints. Shaun described it very well there.
What would they have used in the past, and what's the sort of investment case for using yours versus maybe something else?
Batteries, dispatching them manually is really difficult. I guess they are a relatively new asset to the market. Given that you can make a decision every five minutes around what you're doing with the battery, automation is really essential. I think we've got a variety of differentiators. The fact that we can link our optimization software to services is one. We are responsive to the market. Our optimizer works in the context of our automation platform, so we can do anything really, in terms of information technology with our optimization software. There's a whole bunch of things that I think differentiate our product from the competitors. Being built here is another.
One of the other things, Steven, that differentiates us from the standard vanilla battery software is that you can think that the battery software looks at the market price or the frequency control price and decides whether to turn on or turn off. Our software actually looks at both prices and optimizes across those. Also, and more particularly, because it integrates with our automation product, it looks at your business rules and your business position, because there may be some parts of the day where you don't want the battery to dispatch. You want it to keep absorbing or whatever. It's the interface with your business rule that makes our product really valuable. Any more questions? I see Chris is asking a question. You're on mute.
Yeah, hi there.
Hi. Yes.
Just had a quick question. Talked about the making the global dashboards consistent. How 'cause you got the two different software stacks in Europe and Australia? I suppose it just got me thinking about how users, if they are doing operating, how they're gonna manage the two stacks when you're in global operations?
Well, like, trading desks the world over, you tend to have a specialized desk. You'll have, you know, a gas desk or a European gas desk or, you know, that kind of thing. You'll have operator traders there who, you know, understand those things, the Aussie power or Aussie gas. You're gonna be focused on your area of control. You know, the interchangeability of having standard suites of dashboards and behaviors, the way we represent information is important. You can have. There's a way to. If you imagine if I asked you to design a dashboard that made you so you could monitor 1,000 assets, you would have a thought experiment as to how to, how am I gonna monitor 1,000 assets?
You'd wanna represent that in a certain way. I'm sure you'd conclude the same things that everyone else concludes, which is that you don't wanna look at every piece of information. You know, you wanna make sure there's a good alerting system. If it's running fine, you know, you wanna know if it's not going fine. There's a whole bunch of standardization there which really improves optimization and scale. Scale is the other piece of it as well. It's not like one trader's gonna be doing gas and power in four more, 'cause at once, it's more about standardizing the experience so that people can move around, and we also can scale it.
Okay, thanks.
Does that help? Yeah. Thanks, Chris.
There's also a question from Matt, who has his hand up.
Yeah. Hey, guys. Just curious about the energy crisis, what you guys are seeing now, and obviously it seems to have died after Europe's got through the winter. Just what you're seeing, you know, maybe thinking a bit longer term, there's a lot of talk that next winter could be just as bad. Some of that might be coming from fossil fuel companies that would like it to be bad. Just interested your thoughts on the ground. What are you kinda seeing? Should we be prepared for more disruption next winter in Europe from everything you know about the industry?
Well, obviously we're just none of crystal ball and, you know, it just depends on what happens. You know, just, and, expressing a personal opinion, obviously it will rear its head again come wintertime next year. It has sort of the worst has passed in the short term, certainly in Europe, although prices are elevated across the globe still. Of course, that creates a lot of, a lot of kind of trading uncertainty and the requirements, going forward. Now, I talked about how people were focused on their day-to-day in the last six months, but obviously, our expectation and hope is that now they can catch their breath, they decide that they do need to have new and improved systems.
You know, they're gonna look to us to see systems and solutions, and they look to us to get those things. You know, we would expect as a company to profit from the permanent change in that market. You know, we all know that Germany used to get something like 60%, more recently, less than that, of gas from Russia. Now it's zero. They do not get any of their gas from Russia. That has changed fundamentally the landscape over there. It, obviously, it means with the use of more LNG, there's more complexity and inherently more cost in the system than there was before. Yes, to answer the question as succinctly as I can, probably next winter it would be reason to assume there would be another kind of bit of drama. You know, they've got several months now to try and sort of settle things down.
The other way to look at that, Matt, as well, is that in 2017 when Hazelwood closed for the East Coast electricity market. It became the new normal, so that when the major disruptions to supply over the last six to eight months came about, it didn't really affect the way that people thought about the market because it was part of the new normal. I suspect there will be a lot of price effects in next winter in Europe, but it will be the new normal because people have had six to 12 months to think about how they deal with it. To look at the way that they've moved gas completely the other way in Europe than they did for the 10 years before then.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Matt.
Just, we've got a another question in the chat, from Claude. I understand that the company has sacrificed net profit margin to fund growth in this half. Could you please talk about longer-term net profit margins? For example, what kind of sustainable net profit margin ranges do you think we should expect in the next five years? How do you think about the balance between profit margin investments and scaling?
There's it's a semi-permanent addition to the to the P&L called amortization, which as we know, is a non-cash item that's affected the P&L. There is obviously a few more years interest, bank interest. Those things, and I'll ask Guy to comment and correct me, will be are semi-fixed items. Our growth of the business will overhaul those within the short to medium term. Of course, interest itself will decline in time as well over the next two to three years. Those fixed items we expect to be overhauled. To your question, Claude, the net profit margins will improve starting very soon. We will work back towards a number that you're that we would be expecting from before.
None of the above we've talked about do we expect to have a margin erosion. In fact, the goal is to have a margin growth. We put on, for example, more resources recently, but they are to facilitate the growth at the normal margins. We're not applying more cost to the revenue. For us, margins will either maintain or grow, and we talked about the growth side. Some of the stuff below the line is what we're talking about now, and we will work back towards it. There's no doubt, for example, that the amortization is a feature of for the next 10 years, which I think is the amortization period for those intangible assets. Guy, do you wanna comment?
Yeah, correct. I mean, Claude, I think in the current period, obviously CQ was a significant acquisition. The amortization flowing from the intangibles has had a disproportionate impact compared to previous periods. All the acquisitions came with some form of, some form of amortization. That's why it stands out in the current period. To Shaun's point, it's locked in. The amount won't change. Seven and a half years for the customer contracts to amortize. They're there for a fair period. In terms of the bank debt, you know, we see that being paid back in full over the next four to five years. Removing it. It will obviously reduce as a % as we pay down. To Shaun's point, as the revenue grows, it will more than cover those fixed costs, getting back to the margins you expect and the profit margins you expect.
Thanks both of you for that one.
Are we doing any more questions?
Not seeing any at the moment.
I've got another one since, no one else is jumping in.
Oh, sorry, just call. We'll take your question first, but we do have a question from Stella, afterwards on the chat.
All right. Well, I look forward to Stella's question. She's a lot smarter than I am. I was just wondering, in terms of the rate of contract wins, obviously, you know, 30%, 50%, what can you do to improve that rate of win and what's the plan? I mean, obviously that might be considered good. You know, the very top software companies, if you really wanna dominate your niche, that is a number that you probably wanna, try and improve. What can you do to improve that? You know, what's the plan there?
What happens is, when an asset gets built, let's say you built, you know, let's say we talk about a renewable asset being put into the marketplace. You know, to a certain extent, these are also owned, as I said, by sometimes owned by another utility. Well, they may already have a license with us, and they just add that asset into that license fee, and we'll get an increment for that. That's a feature. They may not use our software, and they may have their own in-house stuff, especially if they're a larger utility who often have a full service. They probably wouldn't talk to us at all. Some of the guys are too small. They're trying to do everything on spreadsheets and don't want anything, don't wanna spend any money.
You know, there's a bit of that. Then there's a little bit of competition where software perhaps is fine or there's a someone who's an aggregator or a middleman who's providing some level of service, some level of it middleman work on that. That's who the competitors are that we get 1/3 of. To your point, what can we do to improve that? I think we have the best software in the market.
It's more a matter of the commercial solution being right and us being able to get that, get awareness of the products, services that we provide and the solutions that we can do for you, and giving a full service to those customers who are in a transparent way so they can see that they're getting a fee for service, not a black box between them and the market, and demonstrating the commercial proposition. It's not a technology question. I understand how you're talking about in SaaS software, but I'd sort of contend that this is more than that because when you are doing this, there's this kind of services element to it as well for these smaller accounts.
For bigger accounts, absolutely what we're doing towards doing that is to become more credible on a major multinational level. You know, this, our globalization piece, the security of the business, the balance sheet, our cybersecurity, all of these things are the standard operating model and global contracts are absolutely prerequisites for dealing with multinationals 'cause they do want to see those things. I've had direct feedback from the some of these multinationals saying, "We are very impressed with what you're doing. This is a key element to, you know, us helping make a decision to go with you." At that end of the market, we are doing those things to improve our ability to win accounts on an outsourced basis or on a partnership basis, whether it's like specialist renewables developers and the like.
Thanks.
Thanks.
There are no competitors in that spac e, in that large customer space.
Well, other than incumbents, yes.
That's cool.
Yeah. Stella, would you like to elaborate on your U.S. expansion plans? Right.
That's the question.
Yeah. Thank you. It was about the U.S. and what should we do. Thanks, Stella. We've in the short term, we're focusing on existing trajectory, which is Australia and Europe. We very good offerings there, and we're building that out. The U.S. is obviously a massive market, and getting in there, we've said we would do that via an acquisition so that we've got the wiring delivered straight away. It's a big market, and we would do that as the opportunity of it presents itself, as the capital is there and as the management resource is there as well. I can say it's not on the immediate short-term radar, but it's definitely there. And it's something that we are willing to take an entrepreneurial approach to it if some great opportunity comes up.
I think for the next few months or year, we're sticking to our knitting and working on making sure that we get the fire going on our existing opportunity. Andrew, do you wanna add to that?
Yeah. It's very much the amount of growth that's available in building out the software and services and our software is going to dominate our attention for the next 12 to 18 months. Once we start showing success and revenues and cash from that, we can again start thinking about what's available in the United States. It's very much we've got this opportunity, we're gonna kick it out of the park.
Thank you. The other way we can get into that is obviously being, you know, sort of getting there organically via a large customer, which we may do as well. That we might end up being sort of taking, not taken there, but going in there to help service that customer, which would be the more organic way of doing it. Okay. Thank you. Hopefully that was helpful, Stella.
We have a further question, Shaun.
Yeah.
Which is from Steen. Can you please elaborate on the pipeline? When should we expect to see material customer wins from the global operations initiative? Has this strategy gone to plan as it relates to new customer wins?
Well, when we started this thing a few months ago and talked about it, I said that we would expect to see tangible returns within 12 to 24 months. I still believe that's true. I also said that we, within 12 months, we'd start to see some indicators that we're on the right track, you know, green shoots or symbolic wins, and they're absolutely coming through right now. As I say, we, you know, there's in here, we've talked about a couple of large opportunities, framework agreements and the like. We are getting interest for renewables developers and other things to talk about as they roll out. You know, to a certain extent, this is market dependent on the rollout of renewables.
The, again, in the article yesterday about AEMO's talking about energy security, it's quite clear that we need to accelerate the pace of renewables development. We, for instance, have contracts, that when the asset is built, we actually sign contracts right now, where if the asset's built and when it works, we will pick up that work. Obviously, you know, you have to wait for the metal to be erected first and so on. That's the rate determining set for the growth of the piece as well. I can say right now that we are absolutely expecting to have partnership style agreements going forward. The indicators that I talked about are very definitely there, which I'm pleased about.
As I said, you know, 12 to 24 months was our original expectation for actually receiving tangible revenue. Hopefully, that helps, Steen. Yeah.
Assuming, yes.
Good. Thank you.
To respond. Thank you. Yeah.
Yeah.
I think at that point we're probably got limited time to answer any further questions. Doesn't seem to be any coming through. Shaun, gonna leave it to you to wrap the session up.
I'll just wrap up if I may. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for attending, for your valuable time and for asking some really good questions. As I say, we're the company's in the cusp of something really important in the world today. We're making a difference both to the planet, via our assistance for renewables and the transition to a net zero economy. We're also operating in the most exciting sector in the world today. We do have leading positions and very capable growth capability happening as well. This is a very exciting opportunity. I thank you for joining us on the journey and we look forward to it unfolding out in the months ahead. Thank you very much.
Thanks all.
Thank you. This recording will be available on our website if anyone wants to revisit. Thank you.
Great.
Sarah, if I could ask you to stop the recording, please.