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Good morning, and thanks for joining us for hipages Group, hipages Group half-year results for the six months to the December 31, 2025. I'm Roby Sharon-Zipser, CEO and co-founder, and joining me on the call is our Chief Finance and Operating Officer, Jaco Jonker. I'll start this morning's presentation on slide six with a brief overview of the company before touching on the highlights from the first half and our ongoing sustainable growth profile. Jaco will talk through the financial performance in more detail before I provide some color on our strategy, execution, including some of the recent platform updates and AI implementations, outlook for 2026, before opening up the Q&A. As a reminder, hipages is ANZ's number one platform, connecting households and trusted trades and home improvement businesses.
Our purpose is simple, is to transform the tradie industry and build better lives for everyone. For the first half, we continued to execute on our strategic evolution from a pure marketplace to a software-led platform, while delivering double-digit top-line growth, EBITDA margin expansion, and significant uplift in free cash generation. This year, so far, we've achieved several strategic milestones, including completing the Australian pricing plan migration onto a single platform and providing access to all our job management features to all our subscribers. We launched the rebranded hipages for Business app, formerly called Tradiecore, and hipages Perks, formerly known as hipages Toolbox. We also added a ton of new functionality and AI integrations. In New Zealand, we had our first full year of post-migration optimization, with revenue and ARPU growth accelerating, really strongly, both up over 40% year-over-year.
Now, on slide seven, I think this is the slide I'm most proud of. Four charts with one real excellent story. From recurring revenue through to free cash flow generation, every line is moving up and to the right. These outcomes are strategic choices we've made over several years around pricing, operating discipline, and capital allocation. Jaco will unpack the half-year numbers in more detail, but I just wanted to show and let you see the trajectory firsthand, because it's the clearest proof that our model really works. I'll hand over to Jaco to talk you through our financial performance in detail.
Thanks, Roby. I'll start by looking at the financial highlights for the half on slide nine. As Roby said, we are pleased to have seen profitable growth continue in Australia, with New Zealand showing exceptional growth in its first year of post-migration. At the top line, MRR closed at AUD 7.5 million, up 9% on the PCP, with total revenue up 11% to AUD 44.9 million. The business maintained its strong gross profit margin and delivered a record 25% EBITDA margin, up 4 percentage points. Net profit after tax was AUD 2.7 million, significantly ahead of the PCP. On our key drivers, subscription businesses are up slightly at AUD 35,000, and we saw strong ARPU growth continue, up 10% to AUD 2,497.
Our marketplace facilitated 1.4 million business household connections, down 4% versus PCP, in part reflecting subdued consumer confidence in Australia. Cash flow was a standout, with operating cash flow up 37% to AUD 12.9 million, and free cash flow stepped up to AUD 4.3 million, leading to closing cash and funds on deposit of AUD 31.1 million, with no debt on the balance sheet. Slide 10 shows how our record deals continue to drive MRR growth, with all Australian customers now on new pricing plans and continuous matching engine enhancements driving healthy ascension volumes. Similarly, in New Zealand, customers are joining and ascending at higher price points as we optimize the full subscription model post-migration. Slide 11 illustrates how operating expenses continue to reduce as a percentage of revenue, as we remain disciplined in our expense management.
Marketing expenditure reduced by 3 percentage points versus PCP, as H1 2025 included planned investment in new creative assets to support brand initiatives. Sales efficiency improved, with double-digit revenue growth delivered off a stable cost base. Operations and admin costs saw a modest increase, largely from non-cash ESOP expenses and planned increased subscription costs as we invest in better tooling. Importantly, this was more than offset by efficiencies in sales and marketing. Looking ahead, we expect OpEx as a percentage of revenue to continue trending down, driving further margin expansion and cash generation. Slide 12 provides an overview of the group's technology spend over time. In H1, our spend continued to reduce as a percentage of revenue while delivering platform enhancements, including new self-service pathways for sign-up and upgrades, enhanced job management features, and new perks.
We apply a disciplined capitalization approach based on detailed activity tracking translating to roughly 70% of spend for H1 2026 being capitalized and amortized over three years. We will continue investing to support the delivery of our roadmap. We expect technology spend as a percentage of revenue to reduce over the medium to long term. Now, turning to our Australian operations on slide 14. On the left-hand side, you can see business household connections softened in the first half and were down 5% on the PCP. This was driven by two main factors. First, we're seeing the impact of subdued consumer confidence, reflected in a 2% dip in job volumes. We also experienced a short-term impact from mid-period updates to our matching engine, which was subsequently recalibrated, and performance has returned to baseline levels.
As you can see on the right-hand side, connection rates for households remained strong at 83% when considering normal H1, H2 seasonality, reflecting solid marketplace efficiency. Slide 15 shows our continued ARPU growth and resilience of our subscription customer base. Starting on the left, with all trade businesses now migrated to our new platform price plans, ARPU grew by 9%, driven by pricing optimization and planned sanctions. Importantly, subscriber numbers were broadly stable at 32,200, but the number of businesses served over the last 12 months reached 48,600 and represents a meaningful reactivation opportunity and the cross-sell of value-added services. MRR retention remains stable at 58%. We see further upside as adoption of our job management tools deepen the value proposition for subscribers.
This is illustrated nicely on slide 16, which shows our monthly active users of our job management features continue to grow, now approaching 15% of our total subscriber base. For February to date, we're seeing good traction and estimate approximately 5,000 MAUs by month-end. On the right-hand side, you can see the early data that confirms our thesis that higher job management platform usage drives better retention outcomes. We are highly encouraged by these results and expect the retention benefit to amplify as we roll out new functionality and continue driving adoption across the base. Moving on to slide 17, our brand ranks number one for both homeowners and trade businesses across key metrics like awareness, preference, trust, ROI, and business growth. On the homeowner side, total brand awareness for households sits at 66%, supported by a long-standing partnership with The Block.
On the tradie business side, we've introduced new messaging, reinforcing our leadership position as the number one platform for ROI on digital lead gen platforms, and the number one platform to grow your business. As you can see on slide 18, this resulted in significant increases across a variety of metrics, including a four percentage point increase in total awareness to 72%. We also released a new interactive feature page to highlight the full functionality of hipages for Business, way beyond just lead generation. Turning to New Zealand on slide 20, we applied our learnings from Australia and introduced a full subscription model to improve the quality of the customer base. As you can see on the left, ARPU growth has accelerated strongly, up more than 40%, as we continue to optimize the subscription model.
On the right, subscription business numbers grew 17% year-over-year, reflecting the quality of demand. Total businesses served declined as a natural lag effect of the migration to full subscription, more importantly, and similar to the Australian operations, it presents an opportunity to introduce additional products to these businesses beyond the current lead gen subscriptions. With that, I'll hand over to Roby to provide an update on our strategic evolution and our FY 2026 targets. Thanks, Roby.
That's great, Jaco. Thank you. Let's zoom out to strategy and product now. We've evolved from a directory and marketplace business into a single platform that now layers job management and a vast growing range of services. We'll continue to expand our TAM by adding new services for our tradie business customers, and we're helping them manage and grow their operations. We will also monetize household users in the short term through perks and offers, and in the mid to long term with everything related to managing and improving their home. Slide 23, we go through and talk about some of the expansion services. We'll be rolling out services to engage both sides of the marketplace, extending our value proposition by moving beyond lead gen and job management in a fast and capital-light way, delivering it through partnerships and bolt-on acquisitions.
Concrete examples of services we are considering include insurance brokerage and financing, services which are relevant for both the business and the household side of the platforms. Procurement services is just another vast area of opportunity for our trade business customers. This includes construction materials, of course, but also goods and services they require to manage their businesses. Slide 24 is just a quick reminder of our overall job management roadmap and shows our continued progress in H1. During the half, we completed a customer migration to new pricing plans. We re-released platform enhancements, which I'd like to show you over the next few slides. Let's go over to the next few slides, I'll talk you through 'em. First of all, we have, what we call Smart Quotes.
Slide 25 shows new Smart Quote features which helps tradies quote on the go with AI-generated market rate guidance. This not only reduces admin time for our tradie customers, but also delivers a more professional, accurate, and a great experience for households when you receive it on the other end. If we go to slide 26, which is, looks at scheduling. Slide 26 shows an improved scheduling function, which now syncs with the user's personal calendar to remove duplication, avoids double booking, and improves job pipeline management. Over onto slide 27, we've introduced an estimates function. This is something that addresses a common practice in the industry, which is to provide informal cost estimates as an admin-light prelude to, like, formal quoting and invoicing.
This feature delivers a semi-automated estimate SMS, allowing businesses to respond to a household within seconds with professional pricing. It improves the conversion and time to hire with simple personalization via the in-app templates that we provide to customers. On slide 28, I'm gonna go into quite a bit of detail now around how we're applying AI across the business. AI is clearly a major focus for all companies at present, and certainly for technology and software companies. Slide 28 outlines how we think about AI at hipages. Fundamentally, it's an opportunity across three components of our business. We frame AI across search, product, and operations, and we're using it to acquire and convert more efficiently, to deliver a more seamless experience, and to improve the internal productivity and quality.
Why don't we start off with on slide 29, AI in search. AI is significantly changing the search behavior and the way in which people find us. LLMs and AI have disrupted and are impacting what we would call traditional SEO channels, and we've had to adapt to ensure we make it easy as possible for people to find us. We've begun by optimizing our website to ensure our content can be found by our LLMs. For example, via Google's AI Overview and AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. We've also begun using tools that allow us to track our visibility across new channels to the extent that it is possible, given how fast this area is moving. We're also leveraging AI-enhanced opportunities to evolve our approach to SEM.
On slide 30, AI in search, I just wanna go through in more detail how we see things. LLM visibility measures is how it measures how likely a brand or product is to be mentioned or recommended by an AI assistant in response to relevant user questions. hipages now optimizes for traditional SEO, as well as AI and LLM visibility in Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Our optimization efforts have established and maintain a visible lead versus peers across tracked LLM channels. On slide 31, we've built a custom hipages ChatGPT app, which is now live and is 1 of the first to be approved in the ChatGPT ecosystem as apps in Australia. The app allows ChatGPT users to search the hipages directory and links directly through to our directory profiles and job posting functionality. It's accessible via the desktop and mobile.
On slide 32, I'll just talk a little bit about how our product is interacting and using AI. We've also created the hipages AI Assistant. This is the household's always-on home improvement companion. It helps them research, plan, and then seamlessly hire the right person when they're ready. On slide 33, in H2, we will continue to introduce exciting new AI-enabled features in job management, including location tracking, route optimization, follow-up prompts, and voice in Smart Quotes. On slide 34, I just wanna go into a bit of detail how we're using AI in our operations. As I mentioned, we think about AI across search, product, and operation. When it comes to the operation side of things, we're embedding the new AI workflows into our tools across sales, customer service, and engineering.
From call summaries, to next best action suggestions, to automated QA, prototyping, bug triaging, and code review, all of this is lifting the velocity and quality of everything we do. We're keeping a close eye on AI developments, and we'll be monitoring the winning user cases as they emerge to continuously improve our operations over time. We expect this will enable us to materially enhance our efficiency and deliver further margin benefits for hipages. Okay, why don't we go to slide 36? Finally, it's just really the outlook for FY 2026. We're targeting total revenue of AUD 90 million-AUD 91 million for the full year, reflecting current macroeconomic conditions that continue to impact marketplace activity.
With the benefits of the group's operating efficient model and operating leverage we have demonstrated, we're on target for EBITDA margins of 24%-26% and free cash flow of AUD 8 million-AUD 10 million, a significant increase on last year. Before I open up to questions, I'd like to thank all of the hipages team for their huge efforts again this year. They are critical to our ongoing success. Thanks also to all our shareholders for your ongoing support. Operator, please open the line for questions.
Thanks, Roby. Our first question, who'd like to speak is from Richard Harrisberg from Canaccord.
Richard, if you just unmute yourself, you should be able to ask your question.
Hey, team, can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Yes, we can.
Great. Thanks very much, guys, and congrats on a really great result. I just have a quick question around the guidance statement and revenue. Obviously, that's a little bit lower than you previously were guiding for. Granted, you know, I'm assuming that's maybe lower matching volume. Maybe can you just unpack a little bit more detail around that?
Great. Thanks for the question, Richard. Yeah, I sort of expected that one. What we've done is we're reflecting for the second half, effectively what we're sensing in the macroeconomic environment. We definitely can see some softness there. There are some specific markets that we're seeing, particularly Victoria, where there is, like, higher softness, and we can clearly attribute that to economic activity. We also had a softer Q2. We, we made some amendments to the matching algorithm, which subsequently reverted back to that, but unfortunately, that's had an impact on some of that MRR for the go-- on a go-forward basis. We are seeing strong, strong return to normal activity and growth in January and February. We should see that start to accelerate as we get into the back end of the second half.
We just wanted to reflect that in, in, in terms of that guidance. I think it's important to call out that, because of the operating leverage of the business, we've got a very, very healthy 25% EBITDA margin and good movement there, and very, very strong cash flow generation for the business.
Yeah, no, it's really great, and great to see you maintain the free cash flow guidance as well, despite that. Maybe I'll just shift a little bit to touch on the marketing spend. Do you expect to see sort of similar levels in the second half? I was also just curious on the split of marketing that's targeting more sort of consumers versus targeting trades and, and, yeah, if you expect that to sort of understand, just around that.
I'll hand that over to Jaco to answer on the on cost side for marketing.
Yeah, sure, Richard. On the marketing side, we expect cost to be fairly consistent from an H1, H2 point of view. We don't see any particular spikes that we are expecting to go through. When you're asking about the split, we typically spend approximately 60% of that sort of spend we attribute to the consumer side, which is the homeowners on the job site, and then the balance to more of the tradie acquisition side.
Great. That's helpful. Thanks. Maybe I'll just ask one more. You had a slide in there just mentioning future household monetization strategies. I think that's a really exciting development. Obviously, I understand it's very early days, can you just unpack, like, what is your thinking around that and your plans going forward?
Absolutely. Just a little bit hard to hear, just gonna play back the question from the way I heard it or understood it. You said it was exciting to see that we're starting to talk more about multiple products for the tradie and the household, and moving into that part of the ecosystem, and wanted a bit of color around how we're thinking about that opportunity. I just think that was the question. Just confirmation. Yep, okay, got heads nodding that that was the question. Sorry, it's a bit muffled, the sound, I'll answer that now. Essentially, what we've been working on is building out the platform on the tradie side, but we're gonna start evolving and building the platform for the household.
We've started to introduce, and we did the renaming of Perks, because Perks for the trades, there's also relevant perks for the household, and so we will be introducing new products to the household over time. Currently, we are building out some back-end technology, so the customer won't necessarily see any major changes, but it'll allow us to make a much more seamless experience for the household around preference centers and CDP software to allow us to create a very personalized experience for the household. The way we're thinking about it is effectively giving the household the ability to have effectively a control panel or a logbook of how to manage their property, give them inspiration on the pre-hire and the hiring phase, managing their property, and everything in between.
Effectively, it'll be the repository on the property or the household, or the properties for the household. We see lots of opportunities for that down the track, whether it's insurance products, or, or lending products. Just to be clear, that's gonna take a bit of time to build out, but we're starting to move closer into that strategy. Something I've been talking a lot about over the last few years, but that's coming to life.
Great. Really appreciate that. I might just ask just one more. Hopefully, you can hear me a little bit better, but, a really great result in New Zealand. Really strong revenue growth there, and more than doubling, you know, despite a very weak economy. Maybe you could just touch on, you know, your expected sort of future performance there.
Yeah, obviously, New Zealand was a really outstanding result. I mean, it's, it is a still small, small part of the overall group's business, but what we've demonstrated internationally, which I find very exciting, is that we have found the perfect model. The subscription model clearly works. We've captured a lot more value that we've created in that market. We've created a lot of value over the years, but haven't been as effective in capturing the value, and the subscription model does, does that really well. What that now allows us to do is to start to continue to optimize on the yield in the category. I, I expect probably not as much accelerated growth is what we've seen.
The same thing happened in hipages in Australia. Very, very healthy growth is still anticipated into FY 2027 and beyond. We still leave an incredible amount of value on the table that we're not capturing in that engine. The strategy for New Zealand is gonna be identical to Australia. We'll be introducing in that platform solution, so job management, we plan to roll out in, probably by the end of FY 2027. That will impact subscription pricing and packaging and inclusions. The benefit of having the know-how in Australia is we know how to do it, and we can do it in a much more accelerated way in New Zealand.
That gives us a lot of optimism around the continued accelerated growth in the New Zealand market, despite, yes, a softer economy in New Zealand, but showing signs of recovery.
That's really great and great to see. Well done again, guys. Appreciate the questions.
Thank you.
Thanks, Richard. We've also got some questions from Olivia Coulon, from Evans and Partners. Olivia, I'll just put you on speaker now, if you can just unmute.
Sorry, can you guys hear me?
Yes.
Loud and clear.
Okay. Sorry, to dig in more on the revenue guidance. Just wanted to get a sense. How much is a weaker macro? How much is, I suppose, a self-inflicted injury around the algorithm? I guess, you know, you learn a lot more, in my experience, from your failures than you do from your successes. What have you learned on the algorithm side that, you know, may prevent a future kind of issue like this arising?
Probably, I mean, Jaco will have a much more specific number on the split. I'd probably put it at 50/50 if we just keep it high level for the conversation. In terms of macro, obviously, investing further in our marketing and the product is gonna be key to address that, finding new channels that we have historically not sort of managed to optimize. Since, you know, having some new marketing people in the business have identified that there are opportunities there that we can definitely take advantage of and get growth there. On the learning side of things, yeah, you know, we obviously are experimenting and trying lots of different things to optimize the funnels that drive our growth.
Over the course of the year, I think, while it's quite a technical thing, we, we ask a lot of high quality questions from households when they post jobs into the hipages engine. So if anyone that's listening on the call has done a job, you'd know you typically ask about half a dozen to a dozen, depending on the type of job questions, that, that you, you need we need to know to get the algorithm to optimize. One of the things that we did was, in the effort to drive jobs growth, is we reduced the description length on one of the, on the job posting flow, and thought that that would just make job posting easier for the homeowner.
That description length is absolutely critical for our algorithm to actually optimize the pricing and the way it distributes the algorithm. I think what we learned is that we've really spent the last three-four years optimizing that funnel. We probably maxed out the learnings on that, and we need to really focus more on making it an AI Mode, product only, where voice works, where an AI can enhance the job posting flow. So that, that tinkering sort of did have an impact in Q2, to be transparent. We've reverted back to the old flow and allow our customers to add the larger descriptions, and we saw a very quick recovery on that connection engine, which is strong.
We obviously, we learned a lot in that, in that journey, and I would say that the business is, you know, heading into a much stronger growth over the end of as we get to the end of H2 and rolling into FY 2027 because of that. Yeah, I appreciate the question, and we always will be transparent about, you know, what we've learned, and that was a really good learning. The back of that, just to remind everyone, we took measures to ensure that we generated the margin and the free cash for the business, which I believe is the best we've ever done. Really, really strong there, and we'll continue to deliver on those metrics going forward.
Now, that's great. Can I just dig in? So you expect stronger growth in, you know, I suppose, your exit rate in H2. So do we expect an uplift in the MRR growth rate from, you know, what is a, I guess, a low point, at H1 2026?
Jaco, if you wanna just-
Yeah, sure.
Put a color on that.
We typically, what we find is that when you look at H1, H2, there's typical seasonality in our business. For us, H2 is generally stronger because you don't have the extended holiday period over December and that early in January period. Yes, we believe that, and as Roby Sharon-Zipser said earlier, we have now got our matching engine to fire on all cylinders. Again, we are seeing the activity coming back. That naturally helps stimulate our retention volumes, particularly when we get those connections, we get the credit utilization going. And also with a typically more bullish H2 compared to an H1, you should start seeing that MRR actually coming back, where you will see the acceleration on H1.
Yes, we should be looking at accelerated growth in H2. That will set, that set us up for really good momentum, especially as we get into, into FY 2027. Unfortunately, by missing, missing the sort of the Q2 MRR that you set for yourself, that, that has a massive flow and effect into, into H2. Now that we're sort of getting back, we should see that momentum coming back in H- in H1 FY 2027.
I might just jump on and add a little bit more on terms of what we're executing on. We have some really exciting new products that we'll be rolling into our products into FY 2027, that's coming in due course, which will also be an accelerant in MRR in FY 2027. The other thing I'd like to probably add, and I think what is often missed about how, how our business operates, is we create an incredible amount of value for our tradie business customers. We also create a lot of value for the household, which we have yet to monetize, as one of the earlier questions alluded to.
For the tradies, where we have-- that's our key monetization channel, the value that we charge for our services over the value that's created is very, very low single-digit percentage points. That's very unusual for a marketplace to be taking such a low rate for the value that's created. I think what we'll be looking at is trying to demonstrate more of that value to the customers over the next couple of years, but certainly, you know, moving very strongly into FY 2027. Once we've demonstrated that value to the tradie business customers, it gives us an opportunity to extract more yield, and ultimately, more MRR growth. Those are really exciting opportunities that I see in the business.
Yeah. No, I appreciate that. You've mentioned in the past, especially the recent past, that you're looking at kind of adjacent M&A. Is that still on the cards, or have you kind of pushed that to the side while you kind of, you know, invigorate kind of organic growth?
We, we've made, very detailed plans for the, core business and the organic growth. We, we see, as I've just talked about, a lot of opportunity there. On the inorganic side, no, we haven't pushed it aside. As you can see, we're generating, very, very healthy cash and cash margins. We've got a very healthy cash balance, on our balance sheet. We need to deploy that capital, and, we are actively in market looking for inorganic opportunities. We are, you know, we are working on those things. Anything that supports our strategy or that will accelerate our growth into the future are things that we are in active discussions with, with various different parties at the moment.
Okay. No, that's terrific. Thanks, guys. Yeah, appreciate the transparency.
Thank you. Thanks for the questions.
We've also got, Roby and Jaco, some written questions, some during the webinar and some that were pre-webinar. The first is, "You've introduced the new concept of service businesses. What does that mean?".
Oh, fantastic. I'm very thankful for that question. That's good. At the full year results, we had a slide at the back of the deck, which didn't get a lot of attention in the last discussion, and so we've elevated it into our communications, and I think that serves two parts. One, as a marketplace business that's known for lead generation and advertising services for our, for our customer, what people don't fully appreciate and what this metric now allows us to talk about is that we have a very high reactivation rate with customers. We often get told, "Oh, your churn's high," but our reactivation is very high. Talking about service businesses, as a platform today gives us the ability to demonstrate the high reactivation rate.
What often happens is customers come into our platform, they come to us for leads, they buy our subscription, they get their work from their customers that, that they're generated from our leads, this is the trade businesses, that is, and then they, then they leave. Obviously, we have a long-term strategy where we want to become a platform, a system of record, that's job management solution, hipages for Business, and we're making excellent progress in that, and we've got a presentation in there showing about the activity of our power users and the retention rate, which is now formally being validated through some statistical analysis. It's no longer a correlation, it's a causation, which is fantastic. The thesis has been proven, but we wanted to demonstrate that high reactivation rate with that metric.
Now, there is a secondary, and more strategic reason why we're talking about service businesses. We will be offering, through the platform, other services, such as products and solutions that will help trade businesses manage and run their businesses. That's been in our mission and our purpose for a long time, and we're now starting to see some activity there, and there will be an acceleration of activity in businesses that may be buying insurance solutions or web, web, web design services or Tradeware, and they, they are gonna be very transactional in nature, and what it does is it talks about our TAM expansion. Up until now, our SAM, which has been for advertising services, is about 175,000 businesses in Australia, but we know that TAM has over 300,000 businesses.
Being able to be a platform that offers these other services to our customers, we now access the full TAM of 300,000 businesses. Talking about service businesses is becoming more and more important, and we feel that that needs to take an elevated look through into the business as a leading measure over the coming years. We've started to talk a lot more about it.
Thanks, Roby. Another question, "how do you think about buy versus build versus partner for adjacent services?".
There's obviously some services that require, you know, a high setup cost. For example, if you're going into market and wanna offer a lending solution, you've got regulatory compliance, AFS, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you need to do. We wouldn't probably go in and build something like that from scratch. We would go in and either do a partnership or a joint venture with a third-party provider that already has a relationship, preferably knowing how to work with trades, and we would look at something like that from a partnership point of view. Anything specific that relates to our core capabilities, for example, a marketing service or marketing solutions, or anything to do with our directory or marketplace solution, we would probably have to take ownership of that.
We've created unique algorithms, unique, unique ways of working, so that would fall into what we would call our core business, and we would do a build for that. We know how to do that really well. We have already signed a huge number of partners in the Perks solution. We're gonna continue to grow those partners, whether it's design, services, Tradeware, insurance products. We're partnering with those, and for some of those, we may actually, actually buy, and we'll be looking at those as part of our inorganic opportunities.
Thanks, Roby. Last question received during the webinar, and then we'll turn to some questions that were received before the webinar. This last question is, "you mentioned a plan to monetize households. Does that mean charging a subscription for consumers to post jobs?".
Okay, I sort of touched on that on the earlier question that came through. At this stage, I can't see a fee to charge for households to post jobs or consumers to post jobs on hipages. It's always been free for households to post a job. Historically, other businesses, it's very dif... and I've seen in other businesses, when something's been free, to put a fee on that service is difficult to do, although some marketplaces do do it, and it works. My view on that is, is, provide better tools, better application that the household sees value.
So for example, anything that helps them get better knowledge on the pre-hire phase, maybe it's design or it's ideation, or it's content, or if it's a digital record for the property, so that, so the household can keep an accurate sort of logbook of everything that's been done on the property, to down to the appliances or the works that have been carried out. Is there value there? I think what we need to go on a journey as we build up the capability through preference centers and CDPs, is to see what value our households put to those things and determine if there's some sort of subscription or monetization opportunity.
I think there's a no-brainer on some of the perks, where we'll offer really, really great quality products and services, like our energy solution. There will be an opportunity to monetize through some sort of commission or affiliate fees. That's a no-brainer, but is there any more embedded, more creative solution to come? Absolutely. That's probably a big focus for us over the next year or two.
Thanks, Roby. We received a number of questions from investors ahead of the webinar. One key focus area has been AI. I think Roby and Jaco have addressed that substantively in the presentation. The other area of interest relates to capital management, particularly the potential for a share buyback. Roby, could you please share your and the board's perspective on capital management?
Absolutely. As the market can now see, hipages is sitting over, well over AUD 30 million in cash and on its... well, cash and cash equivalents, I think. I'll get corrected for that if I don't say that. Obviously generating meaningful cash each month. You know, we're expecting a balance sheet, closing balance, if you use the, the, the, the numbers there, somewhere over AUD 34 million-AUD 35 million + in cash. That, that's just me estimating. I'm sure probably somewhere in that zone, I would say. The point being is that we have a healthy balance sheet, and I think it's a totally fair question to ask: What is the business gonna do with shareholder capital? The board takes that really, really seriously. It's, it's one of the most, most regularly discussed topics in our board meetings.
We cover, we cover options, such as a share buyback regularly. I can say now we have not approved to do any sort of share buyback of any kind at this stage, but it is an ongoing discussion at the board meeting to consider our options, and we will be monitoring how things progress over time and come back to the market with a decision on that at some future date. We are really just focused on generating the growth from our core business, so organic growth, and ensuring that we have sufficient capital to deliver on inorganic opportunities as they arise.
That's probably the main focus of what we're doing with our capital at the moment, is to focus on core, core, core growth support, and the additional cash generated is to support any inorganic opportunities as they develop.
Thanks, Roby and Jaco. I don't have any more... Actually, there's one question, one further question that's come through on the chat, that is, "Are you actively pursuing M&A?".
I think I've made that clear in a few, few times. We absolutely are actively pursuing M&A opportunities.
Thank you. I think that's all the questions that we've had from our investors.
Awesome. That's great. On that note, I'll just do a quick wrap-up. Thank you everyone for your time and support today. We look forward to speaking to a variety of different investors and sell-side parties over the next coming days. Happy to answer questions that might come about. I'm really, really excited about our products, partnerships, and developments. The growth is really been strong. The cash generation and the profit, the EBITDA is very, very healthy, and we're gonna continue our growth momentum going into the end of H2 and into FY 2027. Really, really appreciate, again, everyone's time, and thank you to the advisors and the team and the board. I appreciate your time. Thank you.