If you can hear me, can someone just say yes?
Yes. We can hear you, Shaun.
Thank you. That's good. So just formalities, if I may. We will be recording the meeting, and that's about to start now. So if you have any questions, you can either email them or put them in the chat or indeed present them at the end if you would. So I'll ask Anastasia to start the recording.
Done. Thanks, Shaun.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Energy One Limited half-yearly results presentation for the half-end of 31st December 2023. My name is Shaun Ankers. I'm the Group CEO. I'm joined today by Andrew Bonwick, our Chairman, and Guy Steel, who is our CFO. We'll be going through some slides, explaining the results, and then you're welcome to ask questions, as I said before, either via email or the chat. Or indeed, please raise your hand in the meeting. Well, great. Thank you very much. You'll see the disclaimer there, and I'll move on to the first slide. If I ask you, please, to go on mute, do you mind? Okay. News and highlights. As you will know about the company, our vision is to be the world's leading supplier of software and services to the wholesale energy industry. That's what we're moving towards.
The world's an exciting place, moving towards net zero, and we intend to be absolutely at the forefront of that. And we are working towards that, and I think we're doing a great job in the process. The testament to our strategy over recent years is showing through right now. You can see the revenue growth up 22% on the prior comparative period, being 12 months ago at 31st December 2022. Recurring revenue, which we focus on strongly, another great result, up 23%. And ARR, which is a forward-looking measure for recurring revenue, up 23% as well, with a little bit of tailwind from the FX, which does move around from half to half. But again, 20%-23% up on the prior year. That's two really good, strong periods of organic growth. I want to point that out. That is completely organic growth.
We haven't had any acquisition activity for a while now. Our recurring revenues are at 90% of the total in this half, which means that we do have less reliance on project revenue. We do welcome project revenue, but recurring revenue is the key in a business like this, and that's what we're working towards at all times. Again, organic growth, great result, testament to the strength of the company and the opportunity that we've got in front of us and the way we're addressing it. We did have some investment in the half. EBITDA is reduced 35% on a statutory basis. We invested in human resources during the half, some of which was due to market forces, but most of it was because we decided to help gear up for growth.
But even then, the growth consistent in that growth, in that expense line, is consistent with our revenue growth, which meant that margins were preserved for the last 12 months. Comparative EBITDA, I'm going to try and back out some of these genuine one-offs, which I will discuss in a bit. Was AUD 5 million. Hopefully, that gives you a better idea comparatively on the prior year. It was an eventful half, as observers of the company will know. We had a mooted acquisition by STG during the half. We had a cyber attack because that came in sort of September last year. And we did have a modest internal restructure, and I will talk about that as well. But suffice it to say, a great half-end year for revenue growth.
We're doing a bit of restructuring to leverage for growth and a couple of events that happened to us that resulted in genuine one-offs. I do regard the modest loss at the half to be a genuine blip. There's some 10 years now of profitable halves. We will return to profitability in the next half, so I see this very much as a blip. But happy to talk about it and dig into the detail as you wish. So I'll hand over to Guy, please, to go through the numbers.
Thanks, Shaun. Just to provide a bit more detail in terms of the numbers, as Shaun did allude to, yeah, the 12-month period did see the Australian dollar weaken slightly, about 6%-7%. It's both the euro and the British pound. Obviously, we have operations overseas, so there's a little bit of a tailwind on the revenue numbers, but conversely, also impacts the cost numbers. And overall, on the result, it doesn't affect the profitability, particularly materially. As Shaun said, we have seen what's really pleasing is we've seen consistent growth across all of the businesses. That's not one business having an outstanding period. It's all of the businesses contributing very strongly. And one of the things Shaun did talk about in his CEO report was CQ, and timing of broker revenue has them slightly down, but the recurring revenue, again, good growth.
So from a total perspective, Sean talked about a 22% growth. Just to break that down, Australia was at 13%. And our 4D does contain segmented results, so the numbers are in there. But I'll do the mathematics for you. CQ, we talked about, was slightly down due to broker revenue, and Europe was actually up 39% on that basis. Recurring revenue up AUD 4.2 million, 23%. So Australia was up 16%, CQ 13, and Europe 31. So again, all the businesses performing pretty consistently well. And just on recurring revenue, it was up 9% versus half two June 30th. So as Sean said, when you look across the last three halves, the momentum has continued through.
From an ARR perspective, we added close to AUD 9 million of ARR, 23%. We talked about the impact of FX, so 20% constant currency. Again, Australia up 17%, CQ 13, and Europe up 30.
And again, ARR against the 30 June half or half two 30 June 2023, up 7%. Project revenue pleasingly performed where we have talked about broker. We did see through timing, Australia slightly were down on projects, but Europe had a really strong half in terms of project revenue, probably and largely driven by existing customers. What we say about project revenue is we expect an improvement in the second half. Just on some of the other finance points we would make, if you do look through our financial statements, you'll notice receivables aging driven by a little bit of timing of billing. And our receivables are now pretty much back in order, so more a timing item than anything.
We did increase our net debt, and we did mention that we renegotiated our NAB facility agreement, and that was really to accommodate timing of the restructuring cyber costs, some of the items of that nature. The net debt has increased, but conversely, we've also reduced our trade payables and other liabilities by a similar amount. From an operating cash perspective across the half, it's actually pretty similar outcomes. I guess given the underlying result, people would say, "How was that eventuated?" We did receive in the half an R&D refund or credit in the U.K., about AUD 500,000, which has assisted some people to notice the tax paid line is quite different between the two periods. Then the restructure cost that we've talked about, about AUD 800,000, was not paid out in cash in the half. At that point, we'll move back to Shaun.
Yes. Thanks, Guy. Obviously, you'll get the opportunity, please, to ask detailed questions about that if you like at the end, to go through that. But just looking at obviously, we talk a lot about recurring revenue yet. And as Guy has pointed out, rebounded strongly after a sort of a flat period post-COVID. It's really come back well now. It's giving us a 25% CAGR since December 2021, and most of that's organic. Strong growth in Europe, as Guy alluded to, particularly strong growth in Europe. And that's a good, solid result coming out of Australia. The point we've made for many years is that Europe has a much bigger runway for growth going forward, and of course, that's why we are there. Australia's a great economy and a great market.
But obviously, there's 600 million people in Europe, so we see opportunity there, and I think the numbers back that up. There's no doubt that we just continue to go from strength to strength over there. The combination of software and services gives us differentiation. I talked about it in the 4D in some little bit of detail, but our strategy over many years has been the one-stop shop for our software and services to provide people all of what they need. And that message is getting through, particularly coming back from the market. They do appreciate that you can have one supplier for all of your needs as opposed to just trying to have one product that you're pushing, and hopefully, that's the product that everyone wants. So it doesn't matter what you need. We can supply it to you.
The market, I think when we came back from E-world, some 40% of the customers had expressed interest in more than one product and service. So there's definitely a differentiator there that we're developing for the marketplace, and I think that's the key to our continued steady and stable growth. Thank you, Ana. Please, next slide.
Thanks, Shaun. Just take you through the comparative profit bridge that you've had. People feel for the items that are moving the result around. So I think comparing to the previous half, we obviously had one-offs in that half. Then in this period, we have a number of one-offs around restructuring, cyber, and STG costs. Shaun talks about them in some detail in his CEO report, and we've got a page later where we can go into more detail if people want. I think we've talked about the revenue pretty significantly. Data hosting and IT costs. The hosting component is obviously hosting customers, and that's obviously going to increase with volume. There is also customers who have their own environment, so effectively, we incur costs and pass that through to customers as well. Then what you'll also see is investment in IT systems.
So yeah, as the group has increased in complexity, we've needed to invest in our systems. That includes ERP, so our finance system. It includes expense management, our sales, so our sales tracking and lead tracking, and also our risk management, which has been a particular focus over the last 6-12 months as well. The other component in there is global operations. So there was a slight increase across the half, and that was mainly global operations. It just wasn't fully operational in H1 2023. It took a while to ramp up and really got going in about September of that year. So that's more indicative of just not a full year. I guess to nobody's surprise, we've increased our interest payments through rate changes, obviously being an increase in interest rate environment, slightly more with debt, but it's really rate-driven.
Shaun has talked about the salary and wages, and that's an investment in existing employees. So we have seen some, as Shaun talked about, quite extensively in his CEO report, some cost pressures in the Adelaide business. We've got highly sought-after staff. And also if we replace roles as well, we're tending to, I guess, trade up given the greater complexity in the business. And we put significant roles into the business as well, and they're all predominantly front-end, so they're certainly not back-office admin roles. They're typically business development, product, customer-facing roles. And then when we look at the other boxes, there's a number of items in there such as employee incentives to staff share scheme, less capitalization of resources, facility costs, and obviously recruitment costs to bring the resources on board.
Hopefully, that gives people a bit more color in terms of how the P&L's being impacted across the halves by those items. Back to you, Shaun, if you want to comment on the non-recurring.
Yeah. Thanks. Obviously, the slides provide a bit of clarity. We did have some genuine one-off costs during the half and some things that we chose to do as well, but we regard them as sort of non-recurring. In the genuine one-offs, obviously, we had to deal with the SDG arrangements, and that required some costs for us that we do not expect to reoccur. We had a cyber incident which we genuinely expect not to reoccur and certainly hope the same. So those are some of those genuine one-offs in the half that we wouldn't necessarily see again. We have made some choices to restructure ourselves, and I've got a slide on that coming up. But again, some of these restructuring costs are one-offs or non-recurring items that won't occur again. In fact, we do expect to make savings on the back of that.
This is just a reconciliation. As you can see, there is an AUD 1.74 million array of expenses that would not necessarily reoccur. Some of these are, for accounting reasons, only taken up in the half as opposed to spread over the year. So again, we're not expecting to see them in the second half either or in another year. Yeah. So the message there is please have a look through them. Hopefully, it's nice and clear as to what we've spent the money on. But again, we expect these to not reoccur in the second half, and obviously, that's a big part of that profitability swing that we expect to come back. Slide, please, Guy. So we've talked a little bit in the 4D about restructuring that we've had, a modest restructuring of the business.
We've grown up from specialist software businesses and services businesses that have focused locally and regionally. For a while, we've run the business on a federal type of structure where we had regional CEOs who were in control of all resources in that particular area, and that served us really well. I think especially during COVID, those shareholders who've been with us during COVID remember that we did get through COVID really well. I think that was due to the strength of that model, people acting locally, doing what they did well. I speak for myself when I say I couldn't travel for two years to go to Europe, and we still managed to maintain really good business outcomes there. A really strong asset to the way the business has grown up.
Although, as we continue to grow and try and leverage into the future to be a truly global business, the shared services, the more conventional model, is the one that we need to move towards and move away from the federal-type structure and more into a shared functionally-oriented structure with a matrix approach with local country managers driving sales and customer success and shared services throughout. That's a modest restructure. We have been working towards that for a while now, but the outcome of that is that we, in the half, made the change to actually going away formally from regional leadership. This means that both Dan and Simon, who are regional CEOs, are now in the process of leading the business. They've both been absolutely pivotal in building the company up.
Dan's been with us for 16-odd years, and Simon started when we made our first four entries to Europe, and between them have absolutely built up the reputation and success of the company. But obviously, as times evolve and we move to a more functional and flatter structure, those roles are not required any longer, and we wish both of those genuine best wishes and our thanks, our heartfelt thanks for everything they've done for us. But again, as I say in the 4D, we do have a highly competent layer of senior executives who are very good at their jobs and country managers who are very good at their jobs, and we will move forward seamlessly into the new future for the company.
So obviously, restructuring's had its impact financially, but of course, we do expect that there will be some savings going forward, some long-term structural savings, and we're anticipating that's about AUD 2 million per year starting next year. If we redeploy, some of that capital would be likely into direct income-generating costs. So we've slimming overheads and moving towards any additional expenditure would be into income-producing direct costs. Thank you very much. So thanks to those two gentlemen for their efforts over the years. Next slide, please, Guy. So we produce this slide each time. It's some SaaS-style metrics because they're obviously quite informative for the community. As you can see, there's fairly consistent growth throughout. Again, ARR, AUD 46.4 million for the last 12 months. Well, sorry, that's not as forward-looking. So we've got 46.4 on the books. LTV per customer, you can see that growing steadily.
Churns, again, always stay low. Net Revenue Retention, that's a relatively new measure for us. Guy can dig into the definition of that if you like, but you can see that that continues to grow. LTV to CAC, we have invested a little bit more in marketing and sales now as we are focusing more on the customers who don't know us, if you like. The customers aren't aware of as the market changes and becomes more fragmented, it's important to reach out to customers who might not know the name. And so that's what we're spending a bit more money on that. Gross margin, we'll talk about that. We'll preserve the margins for the year.
I think obviously, everyone's looking for operational leverage in a business like this, and I think that's something that we do expect to go forward, and certainly, that's some of those changes that we will see more of. But in the footnote there, you can look at some of the evidence that it is happening in terms of localized GM for the Aussie and the European business. But obviously, as revenues grow, we do expect margins to grow with them, and that's what we're increasingly setting up to do. Next slide, please, Guy. So a relatively straightforward and concise presentation for you this time, but I do want to just summarise for you. Again, we're very pleased with the revenue growth.
I really feel this demonstrates the strength of the model and of the opportunity and of the quality of our teams that we have with some great people and great services and great products. That's showing through in the revenue, particularly organically. I mean, for not many years, but some years, we had some mixture of organic and inorganic, and it was perhaps difficult for shareholders to determine where the true organic line was, but we're looking at 23% in the last 12 months. Some modest restructuring and investment in our people to get growth. We've pointed that out. But again, mainly in the half, and we feel we're more or less right-sized now going forward. As I pointed out earlier, absolutely expect to return to profitability in the second half. This is the blip as far as I'm concerned, and we'll get back to it.
Again, wonderful, exciting opportunity for the company, made up of great people, some 180 people now, all knowledge workers with a great deal of experience and talent. And we continue to get signals from the market that we're on the right track. And finally, the board has offered revenue guidance going for the full year of AUD 51 million, of which AUD 45 million will be recurring. And we can take a question on that if you'd like. But again, great company, very pleased and excited about the opportunity. I hope you are too. And we just continue to move forward and go from strength to strength. Thank you very much. Any questions there?
Okay. There are a number of questions. Just move across to them from people on the call. So first question is from Claude. Has the company geared up for growth in anticipation of contract wins that are uncertain? If growth turns out to be a bit slower than expected, could that cause a problem for the company?
As a compound question, Claude, but so hopefully, I'll give a straightforward answer. There's always uncertainty, but the signals we're getting are that and the evidence that we're showing is that revenue growth is there. You need to be a little bit ahead of the game. You need to overhire and get over-resource. We're never that far from the fine line. We don't grossly do one thing one way or the other. We do expect the revenue growth, and we've geared up for it. Now, of course, we'll just tweak and adjust as we go, as we've always done. So I am very optimistic about the future of the company, and we've put our money where our mouth is to a certain extent by making sure we have the teams right-sized.
It's not reliant like it used to be on winning some big whale once or twice a year, so that's changed as well. A lot of this stuff is recurring revenue growth now. Hopefully, that answers the question.
Another aspect of that, Claude, is that the increase in cost is in line with our revenue growth over the period, so that can be tuned. And to go to a question that Andrew Tan posted later on, management structure is an overhead, and it always has to be assessed as value for money. And the federal structure served us really, really well when we were basically operating as an Australian region and a European region, and we are now increasingly operating much more as a global organization. And so that's where the restructure came from, was to tune the management structure and the cost of management to the way the organization's functioning. And in that respect, Claude, the restructuring has taken out overhead. So. Improve the alignment of the company towards the market. So if things change, yes, we can tweak in the future as well.
I think basically, the changes are in line with the way the company is seeing the market at the moment, for sure.
Next question's from Andrew Tan. How do we look at the level of OpEx going forward? Is the ongoing cost base now largely in place after the organizational restructure, or will there be further increases in OpEx in the second half of 2024? Can we expect that in FY 2025, the level of OpEx increases more business-as-usual in line with CPI of more than 5%-7%?
We'll look without getting into percentages, Andrew. We do expect more business-as-usual type growth going forward. Of course, we are responsive to our market, and if the opportunities arise and the needs are there, we will reserve the right to actually upskill some more. But yes, to answer generally speaking, business-as-usual is what we're getting back to. We've done some right-sizing. We held onto some talented people and recruited some more. And so apart from some investment in cyber going forward, the business is in good shape to move forward now.
Thank you. Next question, probably a bit of a similar thing from Shaun. Could you add more detail on employee expenses from a go-forward view? Are there any expense pressure issues expected to continue for EOL and the industry? So probably the expense pressure issue is the differentiator of this question.
I think we're going to keep investing in cyber. I think these days, you can't invest enough in cyber. That's probably a notable item, and that'll become clear as we get into the end of the year, and we'll obviously share what we can going forward with that. But I think in terms of the business itself, as I alluded to earlier, we expect the margins to increase, which suggests that we feel that the business is in the right size. And so without, again, trying to do specifics because I reserve the right to respond to the market as we find it, it's definitely a business-as-usual with expected margin growth now that we're fully into the organic phase of our growth pattern.
Okay. Next question's from Ryan. What's the ideal steady-state level of debt? How long do you expect it will be until you expect to reach that level? Probably if you ask the question to CFO Walker, he's actually got a different answer, but I might pass that one across to you, Andrew, if you don't mind.
Oh, okay. Look, we're very comfortable with where the level of debt is at the moment, which is repeating the comment we made six months ago. Capital structure is a balance between cost of debt, cost of equity, and working capital needs. In a period where there's no acquisitions, we think we're very well placed. Most importantly, the company is cash positive, so we don't have the pressures on our capital structure that other growing organizations might have. I'm personally, and the board is very comfortable with where we are at the moment.
Yeah. And I think one comment I'd make is obviously, during the half, we increased our limit with NAB, so increasing liquidity. And that was more just to provide a buffer in line with the day-to-day liquidity we see. We're not even in the business. We didn't expect to utilize it, and we haven't. But as I said, it's more against just the target levels of liquidity we like to see. Next question is from Andrew Tan again. What wasn't working with the region CEO structure? Is the restructure more about structural cost savings or more about having a structure that can drive increased sales growth?
I don't contend that it wasn't working. It's worked brilliantly, and the company evolves, though, and I think stays the same. It's time to move to a different structure that facilitates our global ambitions. So all the strengths of a federal structure remain those strengths. And if you wish to leverage growth going forward, shared services models are an absolutely conventional way of doing it, and other software companies and services companies do the same thing. And so we're really moving and evolving towards that. The strength of shared services is that you get economies of scope and scale related to your resources. We can't share all resources, but there are groups of resources that can be shared. A good example of that might be in IT and operations technical type of space where a number of people can service more than one business.
If you think about it, to plagiarize someone else's comment, you've got two restaurants, but you've got one kitchen. So the idea is that you can service more than one business, and the resources aren't constrained to a certain area. That's a very conventional way of thinking about it. We haven't done anything untoward here. This is an evolution. I'm incredibly proud of the federal structure and where it got us, and we're just simply gearing up to the next day via the evolution.
The executive management will still be focused balanced between Europe and Australia?
Well, yes. I make the point, thank you, Andrew. I make the point in the 4D that we are relocating some C-level personnel to Europe or roles to Europe. I think Europe in this report is at 55% of revenue now, so obviously, more than half-share in the revenue for the company. So try and make sure that we've got plenty of support there for that business in terms of senior roles. And everyone understands that, and everyone's comfortable with it, and I think it's just a natural evolution.
Okay. Next question. Sorry. I'm going to lock this question.
We locked it.
Recurring revenue of AUD 45 million, company guidance for FY 2024 is no growth in second half 2024. Is there slowing growth overall to forecast no recurring revenue growth in the second half?
I'll answer that. Obviously, when we do these things, revenue guidance is well, guidance of any descriptions are obviously a difficult thing to do because you're asking to look forward into the future and in order to help inform the market. So we do work out what we think it's going to be exactly like anyone else would do, and then we have obviously try and be a little bit conservative about what we put forward. So I wouldn't read anything into it other than what it says.
Fair answer, I think. Topic of great debate. Andrew Tan, again, something I know you covered in your CEO report, Shaun. How did EOL go? Any color on the sales pipeline? Historically, the level of project work is a lead indicator of ARR growth. Is this link less relevant now given the global services offering?
I think it is less relevant. I think that's a good question, but it is somewhat less relevant. It's relevant in the areas for which, for example, which is now not the greatest part of the business. I thought E-world was fantastic. It's unbelievable how busy it is over there. We have a fair amount of trade shows in Australasia as well, and we have a lot of response there, and they're going really well. We had one just a couple of weeks ago for batteries, and we attended, and that was fiercely popular, and a lot of people were interested in that. But since the question's about E-world, yes, a lot of people at E-world. We're fully booked for demos, lots and lots of interest.
As I said, the differentiator over there seems to be emerging that you guys are one-stop shop, and we get a lot of people, a lot of traffic coming through in that area. We've got products and services for all your needs and a lot of cross-selling type going on. Yeah, it's very exciting to be there. I'd say flat out, fully booked, lots of walk-ups. It was great, and just very energizing to see everyone interested. But again, not isolated just to Europe. We have a lot of interest in our services and products here. We've been handling with aplomb, and so we keep moving forward. So I'm very optimistic, and apart from very sore feet from being on your feet for 16 hours a day for two or three days, it's an incredibly rewarding experience.
You can get more information from. She's got some photos of the stand, what it looked like, how big it was. But also the ETRM Centre is a podcast information centre run out of Europe. It also had some material recently which had quite a bit of content on Energy One.
Very good. Next question is from Matt. Can you walk through the main sticky points that result in the STG acquisition not proceeding? Are any changes being made to address areas of improvement found through the due diligence? Nick, second part of. I'm chunking it into two questions. Let's answer that one first and we'll do the second part of the question next because they're quite different topics.
Yeah. So from the board's point of view, we needed to have confidence before we spent a significant amount of money on a scheme booklet and all the legal processes associated with that that the bid that we saw from STG would turn into a bid at the end of the process. And the way that the process turned out, we lost confidence in the way that STG would continue to bid for the company, and it just got to the point where it wasn't a bid of sufficient robustness for us to put to shareholders, so we've proceeded accordingly. On the second item, Shaun's talked quite a bit about that, the opportunities that it gives us for improvement.
We've taken the input that we got and the questions that we got and the processes that we saw and have used those to improve a number of aspects of the company.
Yeah. I think that's about some extent, if I may. I mean, bear in mind you're dealing with these guys who are, that's what they do, right? They come in and they look at companies and try and pick them apart and find out what works and what doesn't. So obviously, you're having the mirror held up to you, and you have to explain yourself as to why you do things in certain ways. And I'm pleased to say that we emerged from that with them thinking that it was a great business, and then we were talking about objective outsiders here. But sure, they spotted a few things that we can do better, and we've taken that on board. So these processes aren't entirely without merit or are not useful. They are useful, and it's good to hear that you're on the right track.
It's good to hear that you can do a few things better, and here they are, and we're certainly pursuing them anyway. So in that sense, painful though it was, it's been worthwhile in the long run.
Good. Second part of the question is Net Revenue Retention was 104%. Was this increase in ARR largely driven by price increases? Maybe price increases. Maybe I can provide some context there. I mean, I guess when you look at the calculation, it's your opening ARR plus upsell minus downsell minus attrition. And if you think about it on that base, with attrition of 3%, so you need 78% growth in your existing customer base to get to the 14% and then the remainder 6%.
The average price increase was around 6%-7%. So on that basis, you would say predominantly, yeah, price increase is an important factor but not the predominant factor. Hopefully, that answers the question. Next question is, can you provide the podcast link? I assume that's the link to the LinkedIn page.
Yeah. I'm sure that's going to pop up on our LinkedIn page pretty soon. Make sure it does.
That is the end of the questions that I can see in the chat so far. Hang on. Daniel Ireland's just put a question in. Can you talk about CQ? What was the revenue weaker? I guess let's isolate that component. The recurring revenue was pretty reasonable. It's more, obviously, the project broker revenue which Shaun didn't want to talk a bit about. You did cover it extensively when you said.
Yeah. I covered it extensively in the 4D report. Obviously, CQ's a highly professional business. It's operated as a broker in complicated risk transfer products. In the last year or so, the well-publicized energy market disruption, including the situation of the Australian energy market completely, electricity market led, there's a lot of disruption in the marketplace. And so as a broker, you're reliant on the business traffic between buyers and sellers. And so there was a hiatus, if you like, in amongst that where a few of these buyers or sellers of these products were withdrawn. And so we do expect that's well, that's steadily righting itself as they return to market, and so that had quite a big impact on us in terms of the brokerage. Nothing to do with anything to do with us in terms of the quality of the work.
We still continue to be highly regarded and a leader in this area, and we just expect the market to normalise, and in the coming months that to restore an awesome run rate in terms of what we've been expecting to get from that business unit. I should point out that that side of the business is something that's got an opportunity in Europe as well, and we're exploring that. So it's not just an Aussie story. It's something that can be taken overseas. But again, financial kind of advice and brokerage is obviously a complex subject, and so defies a simple answer here. But suffice to say that there was a hiatus. It's now somewhat restored.
We did preliminary work about taking that product or that service into Europe prior to that disturbance in the market, and the sellers all disappearing. We'll just brush that off and work that up as the opportunity presents itself.
Good. Next question's from Johan. Should we interpret the price increases being tied to CPI? The answer is typically yes. Most of the businesses tie their pricing on anniversary of the contract to local CPI, with the exception of France which typically go 3%-5% depending on the age of the contract. So I think, yeah, CPI's a pretty reliable way to look at it. The next question is, eZ-nergy founders non-compete ends in March. Do you have any sense of their intention to start a similar business?
We have no indication they will be starting a similar business. They've put a lot of work into it over many years, and my feeling is they want to do something a bit different, so they're not certainly going to, my feeling is they're not going to try and compete with us. Anyway, we're in great shape, and one of the great strengths of this business is the moat. It's not as easy as you think to start up in this business and get going. You might think about it. You might win a couple of customers, but that's not the same as building a business.
It's one of the reasons why M&A is such a strong feature of the business, not just ours but the market, is because customers are very sticky, and it's one thing to say, "Well, I've got a brand new product." It's another thing to sell more than a couple of them to your mates. It's not as easy as people think. The moat is definitely there, whereas I wish that the ex-founders all the best wishes in the world. I don't think we'll be seeing them in our space.
Next question's from Andrew Tan. Again, any update on the Shell Energy Framework Agreement?
Yes, that continues. We're continuing to build out functionality for Shell Australia. As I talked about at the time, our ambitions are more ambitious than that. So we have been talking to Shell, but obviously, their business needs, of course, are paramount, and so we'll continue to work with them and hopefully roll that over as the years go by.
Next question's from Claude. It's quite a long one, so bear with me. Is there some way the company can have some sort of internship program at CQ Energy to try to grow the number of graduates considering a career with Energy One? Can the company target potential employees who are aligned with the vision and most likely to have job satisfaction? What strategies does the company have to try to grow the pool of up-and-coming young professionals who can value working for the company for reasons other than salary?
Gotcha. That's 3 questions. We do employ graduates. Graduates are fantastic because in this industry, you can sort of teach them the way that you do things. They come in and they're suggestive. We have graduates across the business, but particularly the question was asked about CQ, and in fact, yes, Claude, we have put on some graduates, and they're fast learners, and they're good to have on board. We have, as a business, generally flirts with internships with a greater or less degree of success, but we do focus on graduates, and we have had a lot of success with graduates over the years. It's sort of the nature of the business.
If you're a medium-sized business, it's that you tend to train people up for a few years, and then they might move on to some bigger company in the big city or something like that, so London or somewhere like that. So we see a bit of that, but that's just the nature of it, and we do focus on getting graduates, but we also like to have a mix, right? You're going to have a mix of seniors who understand the market and have experience as well as graduates, which is a good place to be. It's definitely something we want to work. What's the third question?
What strategies does the company have to try to grow the pool of up-and-coming young professionals who can value work for the company for reasons other than just salary?
Well, first of all, to answer the second part of that question first, I think a lot of people love working here, right? This is an interesting industry. One of the reasons why they don't just disappear for money is because the work's interesting. So I want to make that one clear, Claude, though. It's absolutely, "Why wouldn't you want to work in this industry?
Our value proposition of facilitating renewables is very important to people in our offices.
Absolutely. So we do have an active cultural improvement program across the company and cultural support. We do try and keep it exciting and keep it interesting and give especially the question was kind of referring to young people, but I suppose they're good candidates. The fact that we're a global business means we can offer them opportunities to travel overseas. We've got a couple of young Belgian guys here in Australia at the moment, and we can return the compliment, send someone off to Europe, and that's what we're working on. We wouldn't want the chance to go and work a young person go and work in Europe for a couple of years. So it is more varied and interesting, and I am very proud of the people we have working here across the group.
As I say, what we can do is give them opportunities to travel and do interesting things and move around, move around from product to product if they're sort of a technical person or a desk to desk if they're more in the trading side of things.
That is the end of the questions. Yeah. That's the end of the questions.
Okay. Thank you very much, everybody. This recording will go up on our website.
I think there is another question. So Ryan has asked, "EZ Junior operating lead?"
Absolutely. Yeah. We use a lot of automation. Automation is key, and automation helps you to get that average as well, but not quite apart from anything else. Just the fact that people are highly trained and can work on more than one customer at once is part of the story as well. So yes.
Yeah. And I think particularly on the liquidity side of the business as opposed. They do gas as well.
Yeah. Okay.
Thank you for listening in. We hope you've found the session interesting and informative. We welcome questions at any time, and I'd like to thank you on behalf of the board for your support of the company. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you, everybody.