All right, it looks like we've got a quorum here. Okay, welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Megaport first half FY25 Results update. Today we have Michael Reid, CEO, and Tish Dorman, CFO, who are going to take us through the first half results. We'll have Q&A afterwards. Can the research analysts please put their hands up or ask their questions using the Q&A function once we've concluded the presentation? Handing it over to Michael.
Perfect, thank you, Steve. All right, welcome to the FY25 Half-Year Results for Megaport. This is our investor presentation, and we're excited to bring you the updates for the past 6 months. We're going to take you through company highlights, business update, financial results from Tish, and then we're going to finish on guidance update. Let's start with the highlights. Annual recurring revenue at $226,6 00,000, up 18% or 14% in constant currency, a $34,9 00,000 increase year on year. Let's talk about net retention. This has been a story for some time with Megaport.
This is the first signs of stabilizations: 107% net retention, up one percentage point on the half. We're going to talk about this as we go through the deck on the reasons why we've seen that turn. It's the first signs of those stabilizations, and we're very excited to share that number here in the highlights. Gross profit is AUD 74,7 00,000. We've sustained 70% gross margin throughout the half as we've continued to invest. That gross profit is growing in line with revenue and is up AUD 8,1 00,000 year on year. Net cash flow of AUD 15,7 00,000, up 26%. We continue to deliver profitable and sustainable growth from Megaport, up AUD 3,2 00,000 year on year.
Let's go into the business update and probably the most important slide in this deck, which is talking about the execution against the strategy and the investments for the future. This is important because the remainder of the deck is really talking about the news, reporting the news, and this is about making the news. We've broken into three different buckets: greater network presence, product and innovation, customer and ecosystem. Let's start on the greater network presence. We've been sharing this 400 Gb backbone story since I landed in Sydney, actually, about 1.5 year or a bit over 1.5 year .
That 400 Gb backbone was executed and rolled out through North America and also globally most recently, but it continues to expand. The importance of this investment actually leans us into the second point. We announced throughout the half that we can deliver 100 Gb VXCs, or in effect, 100 Gb connectivity from all of our different data centers. That is 597 data centers that we can deliver 100 Gb connectivity. That makes us the largest network as a service platform on the planet that can deliver 100 Gb connectivity in 60 seconds. This number continues to grow and was actually only at the half. It's continued to grow since then. Strategic DC expansion.
The team has been very, very busy. We've added 82 new data centers onto the network from a deployment perspective inside that half. Yes, that's in 6 months. A big shout-out to the team that's been executing fast there. We've added four new Internet Exchange locations. These are really important for the health of the internet globally. We're now at 27. We added 25 Cloud On-Ramps to land us at 315 globally. We actually added 2 countries. We added Brazil and Italy, now in 26 countries around the globe. Our story of internet, the Internet product that we rolled out about a year ago, we continue to innovate and expand.
As we land with, we need certain regulations to be solved for in all these different countries. We've added France, Japan, and Germany in the past 6 months as we roll out that platform globally. Let's talk about product and innovation. Probably the most important discussion when it comes to a tech business. Without product and innovation, you aren't a tech company. And boy, have we made some incredible strides in the past 6 months. I started with this point. It's something we didn't share publicly, but it is probably the most important note. Megaport, for the past sort of year and a half, has been working on our new compute platform to be rolled out.
We launched that in the last half. This is incredibly important for the future. This is a platform that enables us to deliver huge amounts of innovation in all these different locations, well and truly beyond what the product set that we have today. And since that rollout, we have already been able to, on top of that platform, deliver 100 Gb Megaport Cloud Routers. That is a 10x leap from where we were prior. So that is 100 Gb connectivity from the cloud providers to other cloud providers delivered in 60 seconds, and we can deliver that globally. That is one example of the new compute. The next example is NAT Gateway.
And for those of you who follow me on LinkedIn, you'll see a math tutorial, I suppose, on a whiteboard of me explaining the value that NAT Gateway brings. The Megaport launch of NAT Gateway is a 70% reduction in your NAT Gateway costs. And that is also delivered on that new compute platform. So we're just warming up on what we can deliver there. BGP on internet. We continue to innovate on the platforms and the products that we have. By adding BGP, it opens up the TAM, or the addressable market, to what we can deliver for internet. And by launching BGP early on in the half, we've seen tremendous results as that product's starting to scale.
We've launched what is a very simple thing, but actually important for customers, a platform called Managed Cross Connect. So when you order a port with Megaport, you also need to get a cross-connect inside that data center. And the admin of trying to order 2 things, manage the contracts, etc., is tricky. And so what Megaport has inside the portal, one-click, a cross-connect. It's actually a great revenue source for Megaport, and it saves our customers time and effort. I talked about the new compute platform, and I'm just going to keep reminding you how powerful it is. Megaport Virtual Edge also resides on that compute platform.
And with that new compute, we can provide faster virtual edge platforms and more. And so this is exciting. In the past 6 months alone, we've added Palo Alto Prisma, Aviatrix, and 6WIND. So that continues to grow. In fact, I'm going to show you a chart later on. We grew 90% in the half in MVEs, which is an awesome product. Let's talk about customer and ecosystem. The AI Exchange. We launched AI Exchange in the half. Now, I'm mindful that there's a lot of hype around AI, and people just stick AI in front of things and call that their entrance into the AI space. This truly is us providing GPU as a Service. So the things that make AI, the farms that make AI.
And so what's been happening is all these companies have been buying NVIDIA chips and others, actually now, putting them in data centers all over the place, wherever they can get space, and then they land providing the GPU as a service for customers, only to realize that customers don't live inside their data center. So how can you get there? And for Megaport, in 60 seconds, we can connect you to 30-plus GPU as a service providers around the globe, and we can deliver most of that at 100 Gb, which is outstanding.
Financial Services Exchange was also launched in the half. Financial services companies, and for those of you on the call, you're probably familiar with this, there's a lot of connectivity between other financial services companies. As you're doing transfers, you're sharing information, you're sharing market data, you're accessing exchanges, etc., not actual ASX, as an example. So then you'd say, we've got 600-plus companies on that platform, and we can actually access each other, and that is continuing to grow. That's 600 financial services companies. The Partner Portal co-branding was also launched.
This is inside the platform itself for our partners to be able to sell Megaport and brand that appropriately to help us scale was launched inside the half. Big work from the development team. Big congrats there. The sales headcount expansion is ongoing. As we continue to grow, we've got this awesome opportunity to take what is the most revolutionary product you've ever seen, really, and disrupt what is traditional telcos around the world, and to do that, frontline sales is a key part of that story. I'm going to share with you later in the deck how that's performing from a net new logo perspective.
Super important to actually bring in new logos into the business, proving out not only that the sales team's working, but also that the product is hitting product-market fit. Customer success roles have been probably one of the most important factors that was missed before I joined Megaport. These are the folks that actually impact net revenue retention, and we talked about that one percentage point increase to 107%. These are the folks that call our existing customers, make sure they're happy, talk to them about our incredible new products.
They protect the churn inside the business, and they help us expand, and we've built out what is an incredible team there, all ramped now and making a real big impact. We'll continue to invest in that space, and lastly, customer support for Megaport is really important, like for most companies. Interestingly, over 95% of our customer support tickets are actually managed by chat. And so what we've added into that is an AI-enhanced chat component from one of our providers that actually is going to improve the way in which customers engage with us from a support perspective and speed up those tickets even more.
Let's talk about annual recurring revenue. This is strong growth, 22.7 ,000,000, up 18%. We've got some tailwinds from FX, what we called out in the first slide. But you can see the breakdown between the businesses here in terms of between the regions, I should say. 227 ,000,000 overall, $131 ,000,000 for Americas. It wasn't that long ago we were sort of talking about the $100 ,000,000 mark that we crossed in the Americas. That's 58% contribution from the US. We're just scratching the surface.
It's where we've put a huge amount of investment, and that's where you'll continue to see us not only grow, but grow the fastest, I suspect. $59 ,000,000 in ARR for Asia Pacific, our early market, and continues to grow, and $36 ,000,000 in EMEA. All right, quarterly net new logos, customer logos. Quarterly net new customer logos. It's a mouthful. What have I done? We've broken down this metrics, and I've given you it in quarters versus halves. Of course, we're reporting in the half, but I wanted you to see how this is playing out quarterly and give you granularity in what has been a massive turnaround inside this business.
For those of you who have been following for some time, you know that we've had a massive investment or turnaround, I should say, in basically all go-to-market, marketing, frontline sales, customer success, you name it. And also, in the product and engineering space, that has been, I'd say, some incredibly heavy lifting that sort of came to fruition in June. Now, what you can see in Q2 FY25 is a really massive improvement in net new customer logos. This really does showcase that the go-to-market is performing.
And instead of talking about green shoots that we've been sharing in the past that you couldn't see in the metrics, you can now see what I'd call saplings on their way to trees showing through here with a great result. New logos do 2 things. It proves that you can win new customer logos, which means your product is still making a massive difference. Companies want to be with you. The product hits product-market fit, it's priced appropriately, all those pieces. It also means that your existing customers are staying with you. So it's a really important measure that we're seeing there. We talk a lot about ports because we are Megaport.
And I've been sharing that a port is not a port is not a port. I'm going to take you through that on the next slide. But let's just walk through the quarterly net new port adds. And since Q3 FY24, you can see this trending in the right direction. And it is a true reflection of the investments, not only in go-to-market, but also product. Product's so important because you only buy a port when you want to do something with it. And it's the something that pulls the port through. And then the connectivity is that something. And so by adding more and more ports, we build for the future in connectivity and expansion.
But let's jump on this next slide, and I'm going to show you a breakdown. It's the first time we've shared this, so I'm going to spend a minute sort of explaining it. The light purple, so this light purple, it represents 100 Gb ports, and the dark purple represents 10 Gb ports. Now, it's capacity. So it's net change in provisioned port capacity. What does that mean? On the side on the Y-axis, what you've got is, so to say, it's one gig is one tick. A single 100 Gb port would be 100 ticks. A single 10 Gb port would be 10 ticks. And it's breaking down the difference between what is on the previous slide, counting both of them as equal.
They are not equal. One is 10x larger than the other, sort of fairly obvious math here. But you can see how, as we've been investing in this turnaround, this has been growing in the right direction at a rapid pace. And you can see in Q1 FY25, we had our largest net change in provision port capacity in Megaport's history, in our history. And then we backed it up with Q2, beating it back to back, largest capacity contributions in our history. Why is this important? Because this dramatically increases future connectivity revenue potential. It means that if you've got 100 Gb port and you want to do a 100 Gb connection, you can now do that.
Not possible on 10 Gb, and it's significantly more expensive to do a 100 Gb long-haul connection than it is a 10 Gb, as you can imagine. So hopefully, you can flow that math through and why that's so important. The next slide, as I mentioned earlier, is virtual edge. We have seen 90% year-on-year growth inside this platform. It's an incredibly disruptive product. It's a much more sophisticated sale. It results in almost three times the ARR per customer when the customers take that on. So $203,000 of average MVE ARR for a customer on MVE versus a port-only customer at about $71,000 in ARR.
This growth highlights that not only, I said before, that's more of a sophisticated sale. It means that solution selling, you actually need to get the entire sort of group together. A solutions architect becomes critical in how you design this, along with the frontline seller and engagement with the networking teams of our customers. So it's very much a solution sale engagement, and it's showcasing that investment in the go-to-market with all of our solutions architects as well is paying off. And the last slide, which I think is probably one of the most important to get a perspective of utilization.
You can grow revenue in Megaport and not increase the utilization if you just increase prices. But the customer utilization is probably the most important signal to showcase that customers are getting value out of Megaport and adding more and more connectivity. And you can see this line up into the right from a trending perspective since this sort of time frame here. And this is showcasing that customers are loving what Megaport is offering. The new products are enabling our customers to take out much higher-speed services. The higher-speed services bring in more revenue. And this is a really important signal inside the business.
This is a metric that I get to look at that I was very proud to share with you all to give you some perspective on how the underlying trends are performing. This is no doubt a direct result of all that go-to-market investment, but also a huge part of the product investment that we've had over the past year and a half now. All right, let's go to the financial results. I'm going to pass you over to Leticia Dorman, our CFO. She's going to slide in next to me.
Thank you, Michael. Michael's talked through the turn in the metrics. What that really showcases is that we are really starting to see the strategy of Megaport for growth be reflected in ARR and NRR in particular, which is our key metric, as well as revenue. It's a solid financial result, and we'll continue to invest to drive future growth. In reality, the strategy that we set over 18 months ago is really proving out in the numbers. We're seeing revenue up 12% and gross profit up 12%, showcasing our operating leverage. The gross margin staying stable on 70% is also a key indicator.
While EBITDA is slightly down year-on-year, you will recall that in the August Presentation of the Full-Year Financial R esults, we were highlighting the June 2024 exit. This was in line with planning for our future growth, which was really around reinvesting back into the business, particularly in the go-to-market function, which, as we've indicated many times and particularly further earlier in the slide by Michael, is that ARR turn.
I would like to draw your attention to the bottom section, which highlights around the EBITDA in particular, and really showcasing that if we had not taken the opportunistic investment in a go-to-market of AUD 1,5 00,000 throughout the year, then it would be AUD 29,100,000 from an adjusted EBITDA standpoint, which is again really consistent with that June 2024 exit when you're comparing the 2. With regards to cash flow, free cash flow, combination of operating activities and the investing activities, is showcasing that it's positive, and it will continue to be positive. This includes investment in three years of equipment licenses within CapEx of AUD 6 ,000,000.
In addition, our cash is sitting at around AUD 19 ,000,000 for the half. Again, showcasing talking around FX movement that is driven largely by the USD/AUD pairing. The net cash improvement versus this half last year in FY24 is AUD 31 ,000,000. On to CapEx. Now, our guidance for the full financial year of FY25 remains unchanged. You'll note that the H1, the CapEx spend, was AUD 19 ,000,000. However, within that AUD 19 ,000,000 was the AUD 6 ,000,000 in the equipment licenses that we will utilize over the next three years for our network.
We've maintained inventory in order to support the continued expansion and upgrades across the network, and we also have included major projects, including that 400 Gb backbone rollout that the team have executed on throughout the half. We've got new locations as well as network operations interface tool. Our CapEx, these really predominantly reflect our efforts to continue to enhance the network, the product development that Michael's referred to previously, as well as deploying to the new sites, upgrades, and is in line with the FY24 spend. So a short snapshot of the financials for half one. Back over to you, Michael.
Beautiful. Thanks, Tish. All right, we're just about there, folks. Guidance update. So FY25 revenue at the full year, so in August, we called out that we would be landing between AUD 214 ,000,000 to AUD 222 ,000,000. With that net revenue retention stabilization and actually the tick up, what we've done is we've tightened the lower end of that revenue guidance, bringing it up to AUD 216 ,000,000 to AUD 222 ,000,000. In EBITDA, FY25 EBITDA, it remains unchanged between AUD 57,000,000 to AUD 65 ,000,000. It's worth noting that that range includes opportunistic investment in key go-to-market roles, which is expected to be about AUD 4 ,000,000 for the full financial year.
We've managed to remain inside that guidance that we gave prior to even realizing that investment was an opportunity for us. Now, it's worth noting that the foreign exchange rate between AUD and USD is something that I don't think anyone's done a good job of predicting. We won't try and predict it. So what we've done here is given you some guidance around how to model the math, shall we say. So FY25 revenue guidance is locked in at 0.668 AUD/USD. That's what we've assumed, and we've kept that.
That was at the start of the year. It's obviously not that today. The same is true for EBITDA. So we're holding that consistent because we can't predict the AUD/USD. And what we're doing is giving you this movement. A single cent movement in AUD to USD results in revenue of between AUD 2,000,000-2,2 00,000 as an estimate, and EBITDA between AUD 600,000-8 00,000.
So there's sort of some math that you can roll out depending upon how the AUD/USD continues to play out. All right, that is the end. Let's land with some questions, Steve. Why don't we and Tish, why don't you join me over here? And Steve, I'll hand over to you, and we'll see where we land.
Okay, thank you, Michael. Just a quick reminder, we've got a number of research analysts that have put their hands up, and we'll go to those in a second. If you could please keep your questions brief and to the point, and to a single question, we're happy. We've got 35 minutes to go through, so we're happy to come back to you again. Feel free to join the queue again. I will go to Tim Plumbe at UBS, if you could please ask your question.
Hi guys, thanks for taking my questions. Can you hear me?
Yep, got you loud and clear, Tim.
Great, thank you. Michael, just 2 questions. First one around the NRR recovery profile. Good to see that it's stabilized and starting to increase a little bit. And it looks like you guys have got strong momentum in terms of new customers. They should start funneling down into existing. You mentioned that you've increased your customer service team.
So how do we think about these changes that you've made flowing through the reacceleration of that NRR profile? And how are you thinking about the reacceleration profile? Yeah, so we've been sharing the story around net revenue retention for some time.
There's multiple levers that move net revenue retention, and there's some we can control. Market is one of them, and so we obviously can't control that. But we believe we can outswim the market because we are not saturating it, so to speak. But to do that, you need to have world-class customer success, folks, protecting and calling on our customers.
You need to have new products to take to that customer base. Probably one of the most important things is to take a new product to the existing customer. It's very hard to sell someone something if they've bought everything that you've got. If you've got something new, you can expand.
So that's why we've had this huge focus on product innovation and the amount of launches that we've had from a product set across all different parts of the business. We've been doing that for the last year and a half, I think you've been on that journey, and you're starting to see that pay off now. That never stops.
So what you'll see from us is a continual investment in new products and new revenue-generating products that can make a difference for our customers, and a constant investment in sort of the go-to-market when we can scale and expand into all these different locations.
So the goal is always to push that net retention higher, as high as possible, obviously, along with growth. But you need to be doing the things to do that, which is why, if I just sort of, I'll just take you back to this one piece, which is why this is the most important part of this deck because it's around what you're doing for the future and to ensure that we continue to enable that.
And this is where I'm incredibly proud of what the team's delivered. And so all of this is lining up to help drive more net retention and new logos. Hopefully, that gives you some perspective.
Got it. Thank you. And the second question goes back. I think you put a bit of a call out to customers of distressed competitors a while ago, come across to Megaport, and you can move across for free for a period of time. Presumably, these aren't showing up in the fourth quarter KPIs, but any color you can kind of provide in terms of uptake of that offer and potential ARR that might just be sitting in the background and working their way through that free period?
I won't comment too much detail on that other than to say that we are constantly taking business off, what I would say, traditional competitors in the market and also those that are similar. Those offerings are always in place. If you look at what we've taken on that go-to-market investment most recently that Tish has sort of pointed out, obviously, those folks start hitting the ground running, but it wouldn't be showing through in the metrics yet.
You're right. It takes time. I won't give you insight into sort of any of the free services that are coming off. We'll wait until they flow through, but I'm very happy with the results that we're seeing with the new folks that have joined the team. I'll leave it as that.
Understood. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Tim. If we can get to Siraj Ahmed at Citi, if you could ask your question, please.
Thanks. Can you hear me okay?
Got you.
I guess the first one, Michael, just in terms of net revenue retention momentum through the half, is it fair to assume that Q2 was better than first quarter?
Hang on. Sorry, Suraj, we lost you just at the start.
Can you hear me now?
I think so. Yes. Sorry, mate.
Yeah, no problem. So just on the net revenue retention momentum through the course of the half, Michael, just is it fair to assume that Q2 was better than first quarter? And then just confirming any impact from the back book sort of repricing where your front books cheaper than the back book? Are you matching the price? Just need to understand that. Thanks.
Yeah, so I think you're 2 things. You're referring to we made significant changes out of the back of last financial year from a product perspective, including a lot of pricing. We kind of, as I shared, we pulled a lot of levers at the same moment in time. When you pull lots of levers, it's always difficult to predict how things will flow out. We had a view. We had a sort of a thesis around how it would play out, but there's always risk that something doesn't play out. And there was always a potential to think that I didn't feel that that was a great risk, but there's always potential that you can't see with all these changes occurring.
So one of the things we haven't seen is any churn from that customer, from that pricing that we put in place. I didn't expect to because of the way we'd structured it. It was quite sophisticated. I think we've sort of shared that on some of the roadshows around how we went about that. But we haven't seen any of that play out in a negative fashion. If anything, we've seen it play out in a massive positive. And that is we can take products to our existing customer base at red-hot prices that make a massive difference for them.
And that's what we've started to see. And that is why you're seeing that net retention change, because you can see customers taking out long-haul connectivity, global WAN, internet, and a whole range of other things that we've got priced appropriately, still very profitable for us. It's something that we couldn't do before. So that's played out as we hoped, which is really nice to say. The second thing is you're asking about net retention. It's early signs. We've got 6 months of what I would call stability.
The tick up of 1% is fantastic, but it's one point. And so it's important, incredibly important, but we need to see this play out over time, which is why we're constantly saying early signs. I'm confident with all the energy, all of the changes, all of the innovation and go-to-market, it makes sense that we're seeing that turn, to be clear. But as always, you shouldn't call something out until you start to see it, which is why we've shared it on this Call.
Okay. Tish, can I just ask a quick question on the EBITDA guidance? Can you help unpack? Because it seems like you're trending towards the bottom half of the EBITDA guidance based on the cost reinvestment. Or do you reckon gross margins can improve from that 70%? That would be pretty helpful. Thanks.
Sorry. I think, Suraj, the key thing to note for us is if you refer back to the June 2024 exit margin in particular, that's the key comparative that I refer back to. When we were setting the guidance, we did not plan for or factor in that opportunistic go-to-market hiring, which we're estimating to be AUD 4 ,000,000 for the full financial year. So I think that's probably your key items.
But in terms of upper or lower end of guidance, the thing for us around putting out their EBITDA guidance is that the second half of the year costs are fully within our control. And so if we decide to invest, we will invest. If we don't, we won't. So that's why we've retained that guidance range to allow us that flexibility.
Thank you.
Pleasure.
Thanks, Siraj. I have Kane at Goldman's. If you could ask your question, please.
Morning, guys. I just suppose we'll look at that customer cadence that came through in obviously the second quarter and really ticked up. I mean, you would have seen most of that at the AGM in late November. So just trying to think about those comments you were made around the FY26 growth expectations. Is it reasonable to assume that they still stand, or are we potentially a little bit more upbeat on the growth outlook into FY26 given what you've delivered today?
I'm not giving guidance for FY26. I think that what we've seen is a great result, and it's important that we continue to see that, and we'll continue to report against that throughout the half. We'll update FY26 guidance in August, or unless we see some material change between now and then.
Yeah, awesome. And maybe just, sorry, just quick on guidance this year again. So appreciate the FX comments, and it's obviously impossible to forecast. So you're saying that the change in revenue is purely reflecting the early signs of NRR stabilization rather than banking in sort of FX today to sort of where the first half numbers have landed. Is that the right way to think?
Correct. So if we just focus up here on this box, which has got zero impact from FX, i.e., we've assumed a constant 0.668 exchange rate. When we were at August, the range that we provided in terms of revenue guidance had 2 elements. One is, or three, actually. Sort of mid of the guidance was that we actually flattened or held NRR. The top end was that we increased NRR, and the bottom end was that we would see a continual decline in NRR, which is why net revenue retention is so important. So the lift or the tightening from the bottom end is a bullish signal from our side to you all around the fact that the risk associated with the bottom end, I don't see that.
We're quietly confident, I should say, not quietly, we're publicly confident that that net revenue retention has stabilized for now, at least leading into the back half. And that's why we've tightened the bottom end of that range, irrespective of the foreign exchange. Happy to take your FX bets on this call if you like, and we can test them at the full year.
Okay. Thank you, Kane. Roger Samuel from Jefferies, if you could ask your question, please.
Yes. Thank you, Steve. Not sure if I can find the run rate margin for each region in this result, but can we assume that they're pretty stable from June 2024?
Yes.
Okay. A good one. Maybe just to follow up on a new product, especially NAT Gateway, since you described it in quite a long way in your social media. Can you just describe that product a bit more? And as far as I understand, it allows you to land and expand the products across your customer base?
It is a totally new product, and it's solving a challenging problem that most customers don't realize that they have. That is you're familiar with the egress story that Megaport's been solving for some period of time, which is basically you get charged 9 cents per gigabyte when you leave a cloud provider through the internet. The NAT Gateway is an addition to that, and you get charged 4.5 cents for any Gb of data processing either in or out of the NAT Gateway. Now, we're in a bit of a technical space.
NAT is network address translation. So it's basically if you're receiving a whole heap of information from different sources outside of your cloud, and it's coming in through the internet and then landing inside your cloud platform, you need to actually use an address translation from public addresses to private. It gets a bit technical. But the point of that is, and the reason I did that sort of mathematics lecture, I would say, on my LinkedIn is because it's a pure math story. We literally reduced the cost of NAT gateway expenditure by 70%.
And the point is, if you're up around a petabyte of data processing per month, we're going to save you about $500,000 per annum just in NAT gateway cost reductions. So it's not for all customers, but the customers that this does make sense for, it's incredibly impactful. The challenge is actually getting the story out there. I think a lot of folks don't realize that what you're paying just to leverage the platform in a NAT component. Now, we solve that by we're in 320 different cloud on-ramps.
We live right next to those clouds. We have massive pipes that go into them. Inside that new compute platform, we can spin up incredibly high-speed NAT gateways, very, very clever NAT gateways inside our platform. You can split them across multiple data centers and have them fully redundant, have the different pipes go in. And then through the internet platform that we've rolled out, you can then punch that through to internet.
So you save both on NAT gateway, which is the processing, and you also save the internet component. I suggest you're super technical, and it's very mathematical, but a little, I'm disappointed you said it was a long lecture. I got that down to 3 minutes. So in 3 minutes, you can watch that on LinkedIn. I suggest you have a look because you can sort of see how the numbers play out.
Okay. Thank you, Roger. Next question comes from Eric at Barrenjoey.
Thanks. Thanks, Steve. Hey, and well done, Michael and Tish as well on the customer turnaround. Can I ask 2? So my first one just on that subscriber momentum into the second half. It's probably a bad way of looking at it, but if we monitored the traffic to your login portal, it was a pretty good leading indicator for your first-half customer growth. And if you look at that same traffic data, it shows positive year-on-year growth again in January and February. So I'm just wondering if we can infer that positive subscriber growth has continued into the second half. If I could do a second, just following up on NRR trends.
Like Michael, you've always said there's a cyclical versus structural element to NRR. And if you look at your NaaS peers like Cloudflare, their NRR probably picked up a percentage point as well in this quarter. So to me, maybe most of that stabilization may be cyclical. And does that mean there's still more of a structural improvement possible from, I think you've previously talked to getting fresh new logos to sell to? And since customers have only just started to pick up, that more material NRR step-up is still to come. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. Yes. We should call you on the monitoring our platforms to figure out future growth. I'll put it into the forecast with the sales team. I won't comment on changes in the first half. We're obviously just talking about the prior half, but we obviously wouldn't have tightened the range on revenue if we weren't confident. We wouldn't have also shared the net revenue retention if we weren't giving the right signals and signs from what we can see inside the business unless we were comfortable. You've referred to sort of Cloudflare, some of our peers globally. As I've shared even just before, but on sort of the previous calls, there's multiple factors that move net revenue retention.
One of them is market. And what we did see, we followed Cloudflare closely. We saw that their net revenue retention turned up in the last quarter as well. And that had been, I think, on a constant decline from memory from 2022. So there is going to be an element of market. There's going to be an element of product. But one thing I can tell you is you can't get net revenue retention to turn up unless you have world-class products that customers want to choose, want to purchase, and want to procure inside your business. So you have to do all of it. You can't get one piece and just reside from it.
The only way that that would be true is if the product didn't need any changing from a year and a half ago. And by the way, the product underlying is world-class and has been forever. What we changed was the pricing and the products that we offer. They're the 2 things that were changed, and the product platform couldn't deliver upon that. So I would argue that if you hadn't made those changes, if you hadn't started communicating with that customer base, think about it. We had one customer success person talking to 1,500 customers.
The amount of churn and the fact that your new products that you're bringing out, you just wouldn't be able to take them to that base. So I would argue that it's definitely both. But remember, swimming against a stream that's flowing fast against you is difficult. And so if that stream is changing across the market, that's going to be beneficial for us as well. Thanks, Eric.
Thanks, Eric. Bob Chen. Bob Chen, if you could ask your question, please.
Good day, guys. Just a question on the greater network presence. I mean, obviously, you've expanded into a couple of new countries. There's been a lot more strategic data centers of expansion happening as well. Are those regions contributing to the new logo growth yet, or is that still yet to come? And then if they are contributing and you're getting sort of these new logos from these new regions, can we assume that they've sort of come on a little bit under-penetrated and over time they'll purchase more? So it could be a net benefit to your net revenue retention going forward as well?
The typical trend, and this is back to, I mean, I think I've shared the sort of five points that drive Net Revenue Retention. One of them is new logos expand faster than old logos, which sort of makes sense. You sort of land and then you expand. You land small and expand. We are selling far more strategic sales with contracted terms. So that could slightly change that, but we still see that new logos expand faster than old, which makes a lot of sense. The only thing I'll argue with that is when you add a whole range of new products, you have the right to go back to that existing portfolio and expand that again.
So that's why it's so important to have both of those pieces. The new countries, they're small. We've landed in the majority of the largest countries. You can see that the United States is 58% of our revenue. Brazil and Italy are unlikely to surpass that ever, just based on the population, not population, based on the GDP, I suppose. Brazil is a really exciting land for us. Brazil is massive, as you probably know. It's hard to land there. There's a lot of regulatory challenges to get through, and it took some time. So we're really proud to land there. Actually, the cloud providers dragged us down there because they're seeing tremendous growth in Brazil.
Italy is smaller, but it just makes sense to continue that expansion inside Europe, and we are landing new logos already from those, but one thing I'll note is that when we land in a new country, one of the there's lots of countries that we have on the list. They're obviously the harder countries to land in, otherwise we would have landed there. But what we're following also is our existing customers that need connectivity there. So for example, we could land in Brazil and not sell to a single Brazilian customer and just sell to multinationals based out of the U.S. or elsewhere that have presence there.
So when we look at landing, we're also listening to our existing customers on where to land. Having said that, we then invest with local headcount to go and sell into that local market and disrupt that space as well. So it's sort of covering off both ends of that. I wouldn't say that the 2 countries are skewing those new logos, though. It's not percentage-wise enough to make a dent I would say on the net new logo chart that we shared.
Thank you.
Thank you. Nick Harris from JPMorgan, did you get asked your question, please?
Thanks very much. And great result, guys. Really nice to see that NRR and customer growth firing up. So just really 2 questions for me. Maybe one just following up on the question about Brazil and new data centers. Just trying to understand, as I look at it, it seems like you've added quite a lot of new enabled data centers, 82.5 versus not really too much change for quite a few years.
So just trying to understand, is that sort of a step change or are you back into a cadence of expanding into new data centers? That's the one question. The second one was just on the opportunistic hires and your competitive position. So I guess my digging into that sort of suggests you've hired a lot of those frontline and support salespeople from one of your closest competitors. So it feels like they're kind of jumping ship. I'm just wondering from your perspective, do you feel Megaport's gap or competitive advantage versus closest competitors is getting bigger? Any comments on that would be helpful? Thanks.
Beautiful. All right. Let me start on the DC expansion component. Megaport, for, I guess I'm not sure why, but we turned off the DC expansion mission. And so one of the very, very early things that we turned back on, and if you recall, sort of a similar slide to this, the strategy that's important for us is about greater network presence, and we shared that in the past. And you should be measuring us against how we execute against these things, which is why this is probably the most important slide for me. It's like you're seeing what we're telling you what we should be doing, and then you see how we execute against that, and that will play out in future metrics.
There are thousands of data centers globally. I think I saw a chart of tens of thousands. I don't even know. But we will constantly focus on the data centers that make sense for us to land in, and we have plenty more to go. Every time we land in a new country, we're going to have to go and light up a whole range of new data centers inside that country. Brazil, as an example, I think landed with 2, will end up with 6, probably go to , keeps going, and so forth. There's still plenty of expansion inside the existing markets. So the United States alone continues, if you're sort of following this DC space, there is a huge amount of CapEx being poured into DCs.
Granted, most of it's probably going to hyperscalers, but there is still a huge push for Colo, and that's where we live. So we'll constantly follow where our customers need us to be. And usually, if our customers are in there, there's more customers, and we'll also assess each data center based on the number of customers they have in there. You'll also remember that we launched a thing called Reach, which Megaport Reach, which enabled us to land in a whole range of data centers that we typically wouldn't have landed in because we could actually partner with the local data center and land in there in a different fashion and a different cost set.
So that is helping us expand as well. So those 2 things, you'll never see us slow that down until such time we're saturated, and we're a long way away from that. The second point around competitive comparisons, it feels like Megaport's global competitive strength is just improving. There's been a lot of change, I think, in that space in the past year, even 6 months, I would say. We've seen some competitors that were getting acquired, not get acquired, that's changed their strategy. We've seen some competitors make some big changes in terms of their business, probably related to fiscal challenges, etc.
The point for us is we remain consistent, dominant, and growing. We're still the largest network as a service platform on the planet. The only one that would be similar is Equinix, but Equinix lives inside Equinix data centers, and we partner very closely with them. So I'd say it feels like we're getting a lot stronger. Having said that, we were already the most dominant from a global perspective anyway.
Thank you.
Thanks, Nick. Andrew Gillies from Macquarie, if you could go ahead.
Thanks, guys. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Perfect. Thanks very much. Most of the questions that I would have had have kind of been asked, so maybe if I can just focus on Australia just for a second. It seems like some recent regulatory changes kind of made large financial institutions have to kind of push a little bit more into multicloud, and there's been a bit of activity there. Can I think about that new Financial Services Exchange as kind of meeting what is effectively regulatory push demand rather than you having to pull those customers to you, and any other commentary you can give on sort of the change in that landscape would be really helpful, and then I'll wait to ask my second.
I'm not familiar with the regulatory change, but we see this in the United States. We see different regulatory pieces globally. And I suspect it's, is it about redundancy, making sure that you've landed in more than one cloud in place as an outage? Is that what the.
Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm referring to APRA's new CPS 230 standard and the Privacy Act changes as well.
Oh, the CPS 230 standard.
Yeah. That's why I didn't put in my question.
Yeah. No, no. So that makes a lot of sense. So one thing that makes tremendous sense is having diversity and redundancy built in. So if you're all in one location, in one thing, I mean, if you think about it, if you think of a traditional data center, you don't stick all your eggs in that basket in case the data center goes down, there's a fire, there's power outages, whatever it is. In most cases, they'll deal with a power outage. And in most cases, they're very, very redundant and resilient anyway. However, if the thing did go down, you would want something secondary.
Now, inside the big cloud providers, they build a lot of redundancy inside what they've got, but there's always the risk that the cloud provider goes down or has some challenge. You can't access that. In fact, at a previous company, I spent my life monitoring that. So we do know that that occurs. So by having diversity between the clouds makes a lot of sense. The challenge with that is it's very difficult to have an entire system replicated between 2 clouds. So I don't know whether that's going to solve the problem. But if that regulation plays out, it just plays beautifully into our strengths.
The reality is you need to have high-speed connectivity between the cloud providers. That Megaport Cloud Router, so if you look at that 100 Gb router that we've got there, that gives incredibly high speed between the clouds. And so that's a great example that would solve that CPS 230 regulation and help those financial services institutions. So we have a huge number of existing FSI customers. We have some of the largest banks here in Australia leveraging us for huge amounts of connectivity, not only between cloud, between data centers, but also global WAN, etc. as well. So we're very strong in that space, and we're very strong globally, which is why we've called out 600 companies.
The Financial Services Exchange is the ability for those banks to communicate between each other as opposed to communicating to the cloud providers. The cloud providers you can get to on any of our 320 on-ramps. The Financial Services Exchange is an example. You're probably needing to access market data. You want a private connection to that. You want high-speed and resilient, ensuring that you've got that. Now, a lot of that's delivered across our MCRs that they're sticking inside these banks.
So some of our biggest customers have asked us, "Please, please solve this problem for us because we're managing all these random routers that other banks turn up and give us, and it still has Y2K stickers sitting on them." I mean, I'm exaggerating there, but the point is, I'm actually not. But the point is being able to connect across Megaport. You're already on Megaport. You want to connect to the bank, a VXC, spin that up instantaneously, make it private so that no one can see that or access from a security perspective. That's the FSI Exchange.
Perfect. Thank you. And then just on the kind of recent, kind of stepping back kind of a long way, right? Recent product releases, like you've upgraded the global backbone, and with the upgraded compute platform, it kind of feels like you're moving in the SASE direction. Do you have any kind of comments around that? And it seems like there's a lot of scope for sort of more SASE style or cybersecurity style products that could potentially be in the pipeline. Can you maybe give us an indication of kind of how far along that product roadmap you are? Are you short of ideas? Is there a lot more to come? How should we think about sort of the product roadmap?
Yeah. I'm sitting in our boardroom, actually, and we recently just had a board offsite and went through some of the strategy that we've got for the future. In answer to your question, we're running out of ideas. No. We have an incredible list of highly disruptive products that we will bring to market that we are innovating on right now. And the importance of that new compute platform, you've sort of picked it up and figured it out. This is the platform for us to go and roll out very quickly in every single country, diverse across every region inside that country, new products that can be deployed on that platform.
We've got a huge range that are in the pipe, some longer term, some shorter term. My constant message will be that focus on product and innovation, so long as we're in this, so long as I'm here and the team is focused on it, we will never stop innovating in this space because it's the only thing you need to focus on to remain as an incredible tech product. If you stop the innovation, you fall out of product-market fit. If you keep the innovation, you keep adding value to your customers. If you extend and expand products in line with what makes sense with your existing go-to-market and the sellers and the buying centers that you deal with today, that makes a lot of sense.
And that's why you've seen a lot of our products are sold to the existing buying centers that we talk to today, so you don't have to roll out a whole new sales team to go and execute against it. So watch this space. And again, we're excited about some of the further disruption and simplification that we can add. Everything will be incredibly highly automated, very well priced, and delivered globally. So that is this constant focus that we have.
Thank you.
Thanks, Andrew. A question off the Q&A function.2 parts. The first one is the new hires that have come on recently, what was their contribution to the December quarter run rate? Tish, I think this might be a good one for you. And then the second thing is, if there were early signs of NRR improvement, how come you moderated FY26 expectations with the AGM?
So with regards to the new hires that came on, there's an element of ramp period that happens. So you will not see that immediately in the revenue. I would say that fundamentally, we're happy with the return from those new hires, both within monitoring early hires, which Michael is obviously very focused on, as well as starting to see that result in terms of the compensation piece.
I've commented already on FY26. I won't give further guidance on that. Suffice to say that what's really important, and I've shared this before, it takes time to see a trend. So I think when we were referring to that, when you look back, we've said 6 months stabilization. You're at the AGM in November. It's not a trend until you start to see that play out.
And so we really need to see that constantly trending before you go and make a call. It would be too early to make any changes. What we did share was similar growth rates in FY26. And if you remember, we gave a range. So you could take that growth rate off those range. It would already have covered in net retention in there anyway. So hopefully, that answers that question.
I think an important thing to note, though, at the time of the AGM, not just we hadn't seen a trend yet. The FY26 revenue had baked in a significant growth in NRR, and we had not seen that yet.
It's shown consensus. Yes. Yes. We were solving for consensus at that point in time.
Okay. Thank you. Fraser McLeish at MST, if you could ask your question, please.
Great. Thanks. I just want to echo the comments about good to see the turnaround and the improvements in the half. Just 2 quick ones from me. Just in terms of the addressable market for your core virtual cross-connect services, there's obviously some good drivers of growth in that market. Are you seeing any sort of offsets from maybe cloud service providers offering more on-ramps and more data centers, which might lead to less usage potentially of virtual cross-connects?
That was my first one. And then second one was just on the margin profile of your new products, which is where more of the growth is going to come from. Is that particularly different from the margin profile of your current base of products? Thanks.
I'll answer the margin one first. Margin is going to be very similar for all those products, excluding managed cross-connects, which is a very small part. But yeah, the remainder is in line. VXCs, so what you're referring to is you take a port, you take a cloud router, and then you take the connectivity. The question is, is by more cloud providers rolling out cloud on-ramps and data centers, is that activity. There may be a small portion of that which would slow that down. However, the growth is outstripping it. So they're still growing at such a big rate that I'd say that we shouldn't see that as a major issue.
We're not seeing that as a major issue. The other important piece is that when we talk about VXCs, it's connections. And so as we launch more and more products, remember, Megaport came from a cloud connectivity company. We are still the world's best cloud connectivity company and delivered in 60 seconds and all that magic and automate the entire thing using code. But they have very low-cost connections. And so we've got 30,000 plus of those.
When you take long-haul connectivity, when you take DCI, which is our VXC connectivity between data centers, it's significantly more expensive because you're running very, very long distances at very, very high speeds. And so that revenue itself will dwarf any revenue inside just the cloud connectivity space over time. So the market is significantly larger from a revenue perspective to go after, which is why I've shared in the past that, and I sort of shared it on that chart with the comparison of a 10 Gb port and a 100 Gb port and what it means from a connectivity perspective.
One connection, like one port, is not comparable to the other connection. It really depends on the speed and the distance that you're traversing. So by opening up all of those markets globally, that is an awesome path for us moving forward. So that would far outweigh any loss that would come from what you sort of potentially describe as the cloud piece, which we're not seeing.
Thanks, Fraser. Paul Mason, if you could ask a question, and we'll take one more after that. Thank you.
Hey, team. Just wanted to ask generally around your strategy around internet. You've got a couple of new internet products that look pretty exciting, and then you're expanding the IX locations as well. Just maybe first of all, sort of how has the initial phase of offering internet-based products gone with customers? Are you getting much traction incrementally there? And then sort of secondly, how are you sort of thinking about the size of your IX business over time? Megaport originally bought a whole bunch of IXs, but then sort of left that business on the sidelines for a while. But it looks like maybe you're thinking about that strategically quite differently now. Yeah.
Good question. So on the IX, IX is a really, I mean, they're a really impactful thing in the world. They actually shorten the distance for internet across countries. They make the internet better. And they've been doing that for some time. They're probably one of the most sticky businesses I've ever come across. They don't grow super fast, but they're very sticky. And what we do is we provide that totally automated. So we have a platform that really no one else on the planet has figured out how to deliver. And it's because we deliver it in so many locations. Most IXs are run locally, and the vast majority are just represented in a country.
So we will continue to provide internet exchange locations wherever it makes sense. The cool part of our IXs, back to our, I'll keep referring to it as that new compute platform, the new IXs can just literally be run inside that existing platform. So instead of having to roll out additional infrastructure, we could spin up IXs wherever we choose, and we can spin them up really quickly. It just needs to make sense for us to land there. Yeah. So there's still a lot of focus on that. The customer base on that are the largest companies on the planet. So we already have those relationships. It makes sense to continually grow. And it's cool.
It's a cool space. It's not going to change our revenue dramatically, but it is really important to have. It also drives a lot of connectivity and also covers that sort of speed space. Your first question. Sorry, I went through it. Internet, yeah. We've added a bunch of functionality. BGP is an example. Internet, to me, is a really simple product. It's super simple. We all know what the internet is. And Megaport never offered it. And so the mission that we should be on is how much more valuable things can we add on the platform, totally automated and delivered to the existing customer base that makes sense.
Internet is by far the easiest discussion to have with an existing customer. Hey, you've got a port with Megaport. You connect to the cloud. It's in a data center. I'm sure you have internet in that data center as well that you're paying someone else with a cross-connect and the connection. Wouldn't it make sense to put that on Megaport? And then we provide that as an automated service. So we needed BGP to expand into a different market set, expand that offering.
That launched early, and we've seen great traction. So if you look at the chart, it's up and to the right in terms of customers adopting. It's decent revenue, and over time, it could be massive. And I'd love to. I'm very keen to put comparatively to the IX, which will only grow so much, internet could grow dramatically over time. So we're putting a lot of energy into that.
Okay, t hanks, Paul. We'll have one final question from John Atkin.
Yeah, I'll make this maybe multi-part. But one thing, maybe just on that last answer, what are the products you mentioned going to countries, and sometimes that geographic decision is based on where your customers want you to go. On the product side, what do you not offer today that customers are inquiring about?
And then secondly, on kind of new logo generation, I'm curious if you could drill down a little bit on how much of that might be coming from inbound inquiries versus aggressive outbound direct sales efforts, agents, indirect, as well as when you don't win a new logo, what's the reason? Is it DIY, or is it an offering that a CDN company or a fiber company or one of your direct pure-play peers or Equinix might be offering? Thanks.
Good question. Sorry, I'm down. So I'll start with the last one. Logos come from many sources. And so we actually, if you look at the go-to-market function, it's broken down into many different functions inside that, each one servicing different either channel, which is in the United States very different to the rest of the world when they have agents. And we also look at managed service providers. And actually, then we have all of the cloud providers. And every MVE, every time we add, say, like a Palo Alto or Cisco or Fortinet, Meraki, name it, every time we add one of those, we actually access their sales forces as well.
The data centers are very strong for us. So each one of them contributes to this pool of folks that are bringing us or supporting us to bring business. But you've got to feed and water. You've got to love those relationships, give them a lot of energy. And we've been doing that. If you remember the world tour, that was about revamping that. I'll say outbound is not easy in the world today. I think one of the biggest challenges Megaport has, and it was sort of to your point before about, like, would you lose?
We very, very rarely lose if a customer realizes what Megaport can do. Because in short, what we do is totally automated, delivered in 60 seconds, solves the customer problem, is better priced than the competitors, and far more resilient. And so you go, how do you have all of those pieces of the puzzle playing out? And so therefore, so long as it's on net, so long as what they're trying to do is connect on net, Megaport should never lose, ever. The challenge we have is we're 300 people. We're in 26 countries, and it's a bit like that LinkedIn video I just shared. People just don't realize we exist, and as soon as you realize that we exist, that's the game.
Now, the challenge is that it's very hard in today's AI world, and I'm sure you'll all appreciate this, how often do you get pinged on an email or a text message or something trying to sell you something, and it's just becoming noise, so it's tricky to take that to market, which is why you need to constantly focus on organic inbound. The internet website is super important, and we're still seeing awesome inbound from that, and also, you still need to focus on outbound and with all those partners, so that's key.
On the product front, I won't give you the insight into the products we're missing because I don't want to alert our competitors to where we're thinking of going. But what I will say is, back to the original point, there are so many paths that we can take that leverage a network-style solution that can live both in security of network and network security in that vein. That makes a huge amount of sense for us to land. And that new compute platform was really the key to unlock that, which will enable us to do that in a far more rapid pace. It's exciting times.
Thank you.
Okay. We might wrap things there. Just a reminder that Michael and Tish will be in Sydney on March 3rd and 4th and in Melbourne on the 5th for the roadshow with some one-on-one meetings and a number of group meetings. Reach out if you'd like to join some of those. Thank you very much for your attendance today, and we'll end the Call there.
Thanks so much.