Okay, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This morning, I'd like to welcome you to the Megaport FY 2025 Results Rresentation and Investor Webinar. We have with us today Michael Reid, CEO, as well as Leticia Dorman, CFO. I'm handing over to Michael to get us underway.
Thanks, Steve. We really do have an action-packed agenda here. Welcome to the FY 2025 full-year results for Megaport. What an incredible journey we've had. Company highlights is the first piece. Then we're going to go into financial results, strategic update. We're going to go deep on the strategy moving forward and then into a guidance update. All right, $243.8 million of annual recurring revenue, up 20% year on year. That's almost $40 million of annual recurring revenue that we've added in this financial year. Now, net revenue retention, we shared at the half, early signs of stabilization. We're now hitting 107%. That's up one percentage point year on year. We're considering this stabilized. This is now 18 months of stabilization for net retention and a super important mark for us.
This is a real shout out to the team in terms of customer success and all the products that we've gone and delivered. We've never shared this before. This is large customers billing over $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. 629 customers, up 18% year on year. As we bring in more products, we can sell more services to customers and access more wallets. You'll continue to see this grow. New data center additions, we're up 105% year on year. We added 115 new data centers in the year. Later in the deck, I'm going to share why this is so important and the returns that it's getting us and why we need to continue to double down and invest on this. Annual recurring revenue, I just shared $244 million. That's up 20%. If you look at the breakdown, $140 million comes from the Americas.
The vast majority is the United States. That's 57% of our growth. The U.S. is hot. This market is exploding at the moment for us. AI and all of the market dynamics are playing into our favor. This is presenting us an incredible opportunity to go big and invest for FY 2026, to then build out for FY 2027 and beyond. We are incredibly excited about this opportunity. We're going to walk you through this as the deck progresses. We've never been in this position before, folks. Let's talk through it. In the first half, I've broken this slide down by halves. In the first half of FY 2025, we saw a strong return to growth in net new customer logos as that go-to-market machine started to build out and execute. We keep sharing the story that Megaport is an investment phase of about 18 months.
When you pour gas on the fire now, 18 months later, you see a massive return. This is what we're getting here. In the first half, it was very strong. Look at the second half. We've exploded. When you add the two together for the full FY 2025 total, we're at 236 net new logos. These are big logos, folks. That is a growth of 157% year on year. This is an absolute reflection and proof points of what we've been going through over the past two, two and a half years of reinvestment and go-to-market new products in new locations, which yet again gives us extreme confidence in where to invest to pour gas on the fire. New logos set the stage for future expansion. It is probably your best insight of product-market fit. We're going to share some really interesting statistics that we're seeing of the new logo land.
For those of you who have been following us for some time, these are our traditional metrics that we've shared. We're adding a whole range of metrics that we're going to share that we actually measure the business on. These are the traditional metrics. Port count up, up and to the right. Now, Megaport Cloud Routers up and to the right. As we've launched the new platform from a ComputeStack, we're seeing an explosion in cloud routers. We're also seeing extreme growth in Megaport Virtual Edge. This is the ComputeStack that delivers very, very fast edge. On the edge is where we live: the cloud routers and the Virtual Edge platform. As we've massively increased that platform, we're seeing growth and expect continued growth in that area. Here is a very beautiful looking chart. I'm just going to walk you through what this is.
This is annual recurring revenue by customer cohort. Each color represents the financial year that the customer has landed and then that revenue tracking over time. Think about it in FY 2017, that particular color, it tracks it all the way through. If it expands or if it shrinks, you can see that play out. What does this represent? This represents the fact that Megaport is incredibly sticky and expansive revenue for our customer cohorts over time. These stack. Something that we're incredibly proud of and very difficult to see in this particular chart, but FY 2025's customer cohort annual recurring revenue, the additions of new annual recurring revenue for FY 2025 was the largest in Megaport's history. That means we are landing with significantly higher revenue from our customers, and we're getting more.
We're 33% higher than a previous record, showcasing that when customers are landing, they're landing significantly bigger with us for two reasons: go-to-market and the investment in the product and engineering. We're actually delivering more products to customers, accessing more wallets, and the go-to-market is executing against it. There is your signal right there. It is why we will continue to double down on this investment. It's a great sign. Why? Because that expands and grows. It's the first lead into it. Now, if we look back at the story that we shared, we're constantly sharing sort of the strategy around where it makes sense for Megaport to continue to invest. It's so important that you see us execute in these phases: build, innovate, and invest. If you look at the build component, I'll sort of dance through these because there's a lot of information on the screen.
We added 115 new data centers, crossed 983 in the financial year in data centers. Our 400-gig backbone, this has been a project that takes a long time to deliver. It showcases why it's so hard to catch Megaport, actually. It's not easy to roll these things out globally. That 400 G backbone is now in 29 metros across the U.S. and Europe. What does that mean? That means you can get 100 G connectivity in less than 60 seconds from 746 data centers around the world. There is no one close to what we can deliver on the planet. That is also why we're going to talk about doubling down. No one is close to what we can deliver. We've got seven plus new Internet Exchange (IX) locations, up to 30. We added nine new countries for internet services.
Probably the fastest growing product in the history of time is this really simple thing called internet. It creates stickier customers because everyone needs it and no one wants to change it. I'm going to share that with how that's played out with LTV later. We added 15 countries that we service there. By the way, we're having to invest because customers are asking for much faster internet globally as well. We'll tell that story shortly. 30 + cloud on-ramps. We were the cloud connectivity, we are the cloud connectivity kings, and we are continuing to expand in that space. Another 30 cloud on-ramps globally, taking it to 333. Brazil, Italy, now live 26 countries. AI exchange, I'm going to pause on this. Lots of companies talk about adding AI into their portfolio. Most of it may be meaningless. In our case, we connect the providers that build AI factories.
We are the lifeblood or the connectivity that enables you to get to them. When enterprises need to access AI or GPU as a service, they use our AI exchange to do that. We're also seeing some really interesting build-outs with big AI neoclouds, these new AI factories in inference that are actually building heavily leveraging Megaport's backbone. Some of the fastest cloud builds in the world have been delivered across Megaport's backbone, and they're exploding. Financial services exchange, we service 600+ financial services customers, which means you can connect directly to them. Financial services are always needing to connect between their companies, and that continues to grow. Let's talk through innovate. That's the build piece. On the innovate side, we added the new compute platform. I shared how critical that was. We're already seeing massive success.
If you looked at that Virtual Edge and those cloud routers and that growth in that space, we've got 16 to 32 cores, 16 to 32 cores of MVE. That's actually the amount of compute, significantly more than we could, which means you can deliver much faster services across that. Guess what? It costs more to deliver that, so it increases our TAM. 100 G Cloud Routers, no one can do this. This is phenomenal. These 100 G Cloud Routers are delivered across all the different locations, something like 90+ locations across those as we continue to roll out that ComputeStack. Cloud routing security products, Megaport has entered into the security space. This is a tribute to all the product and engineering team and what we're going to continually drive. You would have seen us launch a number of different security products, and we're not stopping. 100 G internet.
We've been asked for customers who have been asking for crazy speed. We thought when we first launched, 10 G would be appropriate. We're actually seeing, particularly in the U.S., a lot of requests for 100-gig internet. For those who've been on the journey, we started with 10 G Ports. We went to 100 G. We actually now have 400 G customer Ports at request. Most of this is servicing IX, but we'll see this sort of scale out as we start to see 800 and 1.6 tera, etc., as we move on in that space. NAT Gateway, whilst it's servicing a very small amount of the market, it's a very, very expensive product, but it saves your customers a fortune. We've seen some awesome success in that space.
Folks literally splitting the atom in terms of what network capability you can actually deliver across network capability, and the team is delivering it. It's outstanding. Automated cross-connects are in the portal, simplifying how our customers order. Infrastructure as code. There's something like 3 point something million downloads of our Terraform stack. Basically, developers love Megaport. Last piece is invest. We've been investing, and you've seen this, and Tisha's going to go through some of the numbers. We've expanded sales and marketing to aggressively pursue growth. You're seeing that success play out. It takes 18 months to see it, which is why 18 months ago when we were investing, people were like, I wonder if we'll see this and how every metric is showing us exactly what we want to see. This is the opportunity for us to confidently double down on that investment. We've shared that over time.
When we see the success, we're going to double down on it. This is an opportunity we're not going to miss. Increased go-to-market support roles to make that, to scale that team, a whole heap of solutions and products that actually support that globally. Expand the customer success. We launched a massive customer success rebuild two years ago. That is probably one of the most successful motions we've got, and we're doubling down on that and continuing to expand. It's so successful that we've seen all, particularly when you bring out new products, it's your machine to take that back to your customer base. AI-enhanced customer support. Believe it or not, 95% of all customer support tickets are solved via chat or with our 24/7 follow-the-sun team. AI is now enhancing the speed at which we can solve that. We expanded the product team to drive innovation.
In fact, we added 37% of headcount increase to the engineering team in the year. That's astounding. So important for the products that we're going to continue to bring. In the strategy session, I'm going to show you why that's so important. Then I'm going to show you the revenue that that brings. Proof points of what we've been telling you for some period of time. Software engineering productivity enhancements from AI. If you're not using AI to assist your coding, I think you'd be living under a rock. We crossed a big milestone. Worth pointing out, it wasn't in the financial year. It was very recently, but we are now across 1,000 data centers. We celebrated that in the U.S. with a Databank in San Diego being our 1,000th data center. 1,000th. Okay, let's talk about what customers think about Megaport.
If you look at it, we've been telling the world how great we are, and we think we're all these different things. You need someone to independently verify that. G2 ratings are, in my opinion, the best. If you're looking for a software product, you want to compare that in detail on G2. Megaport has 4.8 stars rating. We are the leader in data center networking on this space. You can see some of the awards. It's nice. I recommend anyone having a look. You'll see real customers. You can't pay to play here. Real customers giving us their detailed responses about why they love Megaport. You can see best relationship, best results, easiest admin. I'm going to walk through some of these key pieces about the products that we build in the future. Just bear this in mind that our customers feel this way.
All right, let's get into financial results with Tish. Leticia Dorman, our fearless CFO.
Thank you, Michael. Always a smooth transition, right? Financial results, my favorite topic. FY 2024, we have a slide here just on the performance-first guidance. We provided guidance this time last year for FY 2025. What I'm going to talk you through is a couple of different numbers. Revenue is the key one that I wanted to start with at $227 million. We have had an uplift thanks to the USD/AUD pairing. We've definitely had a tailwind from that. If you take it back to the same basis that we provided guidance back in August and then reaffirmed or uplifted the bottom end at half year, we're at $221 million, which is towards the upper end of guidance. EBITDA, we've got $62 million as the headline number there for EBITDA.
When we look back at the EBITDA that we provided guidance on, that landed at the $57 million, which is at the bottom end of guidance. That was a deliberate acceleration of our investment in go-to-market. It also incorporates the opportunistic hiring in the go-to-market space that we referred to for October. It's got the product development and global backbone expansion rollout all incorporated into that number. CapEx at $34 million, you'll notice that reflects some pretty significant investment in the new data centers, 115 new sites, which we talk through particularly a little bit later as well, is really that investment and where we see that benefit paying off in revenue. Early signs for us. As with Megaport, it does take time. The investment across all aspects in either OpEx or CapEx does take that time to build.
We are a recurring revenue business, so it's around that future growth. If you normalize that CapEx for some opportunistic investment that we took the time with a partner in Brazil to expand our reach in that region where we see strong opportunity, that was $32 million. A nice table of numbers for those that know me. I am an accountant at heart, will always be. I provided a fair bit of detail here because I believe it's really important. Revenue in particular, I wanted to highlight that's both expansion within the existing customer base with NRR and also that growth in new logo acquisition. That's critical. In addition, the gross margin, you'll note, is a slight uplift of 1%.
That direct network cost line incorporates the 400 G backbone rollout that we've been talking through over the last 12 to 18 months, as well as those new data center build costs incorporated. We have had an IFRS 16 adjustment, and that was around $3 million. If you normalize for that, your gross margin stayed consistent year on year at 70%. Bouncing through to the staff costs, I've highlighted the staff costs in both OpEx and CapEx for ease of reference. You can clearly see that the sales and marketing investment for the staff costs has been the number one investment and focus for Megaport in FY 2025. You can see also that the general and administration costs of staff have remained fairly consistent year on year as we prioritized our investment in the sales and marketing space.
Research and development is one item that I think really requires a little bit of color to highlight. If you look at June 2025 compared to June 2024, we have increased the R&D team, which is largely for engineering and product, by 37%. That's consistent year on year as a percentage of revenue. However, we have done the majority of hiring in Australia versus the U.S.A. in the latter part of the year. That's been the heavy investment from our focus compared to the sales and marketing, which we have been ramping up from FY 2024 into FY 2025. This R&D for Megaport is absolutely a number one focus for FY 2026, along with the continued go-to-market, because it helps us to drive the product and expand our opportunity to go into new TAMs and expand our opportunity within those TAMs.
CapEx as a percentage of revenue, for those that have been on the journey with Megaport for a period of time, back in FY 2022, we had ordered significant network hardware, and we have deployed that hardware over that period of time. You can clearly see that decline in terms of CapEx as a percentage of revenue. For FY 2025, we had returned to a normal cadence, which really supported that network expansion piece, our data center build, and our product and innovation. You'll note that maintenance, I've highlighted that maintenance CapEx is less than 3% of revenue. Our CapEx is heavily focused on the growth aspect to drive revenue. Why that is really important for a company like us is we are a recurring revenue.
You must invest in data center site expansion in particular because the ramp to get that ramp up does take that time to start to recognize that revenue. My final slide really is around net cash flow. We've talked about the heavy investment that we've made in go-to-market, CapEx, product, engineering, new data center sites. We have really focused on ensuring that we maintain discipline to achieve guidance. We've intended to maintain a strong net cash flow. Our cash at bank is over $100 million as at the end of June, which really highlights our focus on ensuring that we get good return on investment. I'm going to hand back to Michael Reid. We'll talk a little bit more around the strategic update for us.
Thanks, Tish, and congratulations to you and the entire finance team for closing out the full year. I know it's been a long run, but we really appreciate you all. All right, let's zoom out. Let's talk about the strategic update. This is the very first time we've shared this. We're going to zoom right out and give you our guiding principles for Megaport product. It's really important to understand this because it helps you understand where we're investing in many different areas, both from a product and engineering front, but also from an acquisition front and why, in some cases, it's difficult to find. When we do find opportunities, we will focus around these guiding principles. All right, automation is key. If you look at Megaport, we're in 1,000 sites. We have 3,000 physical network devices. We have 6,000 + different fiber connections running into them.
We have 30,000 + customer connections that are running across that, that are changing every second and build every second. You cannot deliver anything like this without 100% automation. Not a single human can touch our network. It is totally delivered via code. If there's one single thing that makes it impossible to catch Megaport, it is that first point because you cannot retrofit automation. That is why no one, no one has actually been able to deliver anything like Megaport or catch us. The next piece is, even if you chose to throw money at this equation and take us on, you would, and you couldn't deliver automation, which you can't, you would have to put a single human in 1,000 data centers ready and waiting for a particular call to come through to go and make some changes.
We will still win because from an automation standpoint, in 60 seconds, we are instantaneous for everything everywhere. That means we can deliver at massive global scale and, again, instantaneous. No other telco on the planet has global scale. They're all very, very strong in the country that they sort of inherited government assets from in most instances or that they've built in that particular region. Megaport's the only true global Network as a Service platform. We deliver that at mass scale. You'll see us not slow down on that. It actually links back to the automation piece. We're actually the most resilient. If you took a connection from another carrier and you connected from A to B, that is a single path of fiber. If someone drills a hole or digs up their front lawn and cuts that fiber, you lose connectivity.
Every single data center from Megaport is connected by two diverse paths that do not cross the same, what they call KMZ, actual path if you looked on Google Maps. If you dig a hole through one, we've always got another. It's always more than two. In many cases, particularly sub C, we have three up to five, all sorts of different paths that you can take. We are more resilient. We are flexible. This is very difficult to do for traditional companies. Back to the automation piece, you can buy a one-gig connection from A to B. Overnight, we want to massively increase that to 100 G. It's been the story for 13 years, but we can deliver that. We are self-service by nature. What that means is you can jump onto a portal and do it yourself. You don't have to contact humans, sign contracts.
That human on the other end gets their order, processes the order, someone prints out a piece of paper, and then sort of three months later, you get something installed. It's delivered instantly by yourself. Because of that, we wrap a beautiful platform on top of it to make it incredibly easy. We are the easiest to use, and I encourage you all to play with the portal. It is a sexy product that's showcasing some incredibly complicated automation underneath that actually drives physical infrastructure globally. Stitching those two pieces together is almost impossible, and that is some of the magic. You can be a company that is just the easiest. You could pick one of these pieces, and that is the differentiation for that company. Netflix is an example. It's very easy to use, and you love it.
If you think about stitching all of these together, it's very, very difficult to do. Let's go into support. I shared before, something like 95% of our support is accessed 24/7, around the sun, answered almost immediately. 95% of that, sorry, is via chat. We look at the disruptive pricing piece. We can be incredibly disruptive because we don't have to price the same way someone else does. We don't have to physically deploy infrastructure. Therefore, we can price per month, per second, up, down, every which way. We are, in most cases, particularly if you look at leveraging the port itself and adding multiple services, always far more affordable than anyone else. How do you do all of that and remain highly profitable? Profitable, you've got to be able to deliver all of that with profit.
If you stitch all those guiding principles together, it's so hard to find someone that's been able to do that. When we look at new products that we bring in, we align back to these principles. You'll see all the products that we've gone about aligned to that. You'll also know that when you look for an acquisition, you need to find something that fits this space. Very few can do that. If you look to acquire something, you'd need to actually go and either ensure that you could deliver that across it or find someone that's doing something similar today. Very few companies have managed to do that. All right, let's talk about the Megaport journey. I think this is really important for a lot of folks to understand the doubling down of investment in FY 2026 and where that leads.
Let's take you on a bit of a journey from the history. In FY 2020 to FY 2022, Megaport was in a big build phase. We were growing strong off a very small base. At the tail end of FY 2022, everyone went through a similar challenge. You know, we had the tail end of COVID. Companies were hand-breaking. Everything was starting to decline. Megaport entered this prioritized profitability phase. By the way, most companies did. The growth rate was in decline. Net revenue retention was declining. That is one of the most difficult things for future projections of the company. We'll talk about why we feel so confident moving forward with this change. At this point in time, net revenue retention was declining. Our only option was significant cost reductions and a price increase.
Both at that point in time made sense, but they are both seriously damaging to the long term of the company. You can see it takes 18 months to go and turn these things around. The pain that you feel from that is 18 months down. Until you start to invest to turn it, then you start to see, which is why we're in such a great phase right now. We have been, and for those who have followed us, been through probably one of the biggest transformations I've ever experienced or seen. It is a massive transform and reset. We literally, from ground up, rebuilt go-to-market, which is no easy feat. We did that across the globe, 26 countries. The majority of the focus is the United States. That's not easy to build, but that's certainly what the team has done.
It is a powerhouse in the United States today. We have rebuilt the product and engineering team, having CAM step back into the role and actually built that out. I talked about it, something like 37% increase just in the last year of engineering talent. We find world-class coders and developers that understand networking, and that is not easy to find. Net revenue retention stabilized. So important that metric to actually give you confidence in future growth. It's actually the easiest way to predict the future of the company. Annual recurring revenue growth has been improving at a rate of knots. We look at strong leading indicators for growth. Back a year and a half ago, we were seeing the indicators that you can't see, but we can't report yet because they're not, I'd say, the green shoots, as Steve would put them.
We see the indicators right now for the incredible growth in the future of this company. We actually have built the platform to go after it, and not a single competitor is close. What's happening right now is the U.S. is exploding for us. The opportunity of the AI boom is pushing companies to do the thing that they need to chase that. Guess what? The lifeblood for anything is connectivity. Network has been dragged through that. We are seeing growth in every area, and not as a result of AI, but this boom that's sort of going through, and AI is dragging it. The U.S. is so strong for us, and as we are seeing nothing but bullish signs here, we are seeing our competitors disappear. This is the time right now to go big on that investment. Now, why does that $244 million?
This is the point where we ended. That's July, July 1, that dot there. We've got this period of time. FY 2026 is this period of time. This is where we're going to go invest on the things we are certain that deliver great return. I'm going to show you that in a moment. What happens? You get that return here in the accelerate revenue zone. From FY 2027 to FY 2029, this will be the accelerate revenue period of Megaport's journey. We will continue to build, innovate, and invest. We're not asking you to trust us here. We actually know we've got the proof points around this, and we're doubling down on this investment. These investments do not come around often. When you're in the perfect position, you go hard. Let's capitalize. We're going to capitalize on the investment we've made in this financial year.
That will bear massive fruit in this period of time. We're going to continue to expand TAM. Every time we invest in engineering and add a team to go and build what we have as a huge list of products, we grow the TAM. We're going to aggressively go after that market share. You can grow TAM, but if you don't have humans to go after it, AI is not yet solving that problem. We need humans to go after that, and that's the go-to-market. Here's your engineering investment, and here's your go-to-market investment. We will continue to invest throughout this period of time, but this is the period of time where we will grow revenue faster than costs. The discretionary spend that we're pouring into the company for FY 2026 is discretionary. It's under our control, and it's the opportunity we're going after.
We will start to return throughout this time points of EBITDA percentage as we progress to the aspiration phase, which is what at that point we're going to be absolutely significant scale. We'll be a global leader in not just NaaS, but SaaS. We'll have sustainable 20%+ growth at this point with a highly, highly profitable business. That becomes the FY 2030 journey and beyond. This last piece here is the final stage of the transformation, massive turnaround and reset. This is the point that we're the most bullish because we've seen all the successes. We don't have to hope. We've seen it all, and we now know exactly where to invest. We're excited if you haven't picked it up. Let's talk through the investment in strategic pillars that unlock TAM. We get a lot of questions. What's the TAM? What's the opportunity? Let me just walk you through.
I'm not going to put a number up there because it's just billions and billions, and it just looks ridiculous. Hopefully, if you come on this journey, we'll explain it to you. There are three big pillars for us, multiple pillars over here on the right for growth. We can build, we can innovate, and we can invest. Let me draw your attention to the onion rings, or as our Chair calls it, the planets orbiting Megaport. Let's look at this is the TAM here. Megaport's total addressable market is represented by the rings that expand out here. I think before I joined, the company was basically two things. You'll note there's no Ports on here because Ports actually, it's just a means to an end. You actually, you sell a Port to get connectivity. What your TAM is, is cloud connectivity.
We are the kings in the cloud connectivity space. That was what we first entered into this market. That market is actually growing. This particular ring, when you add the innovation and the product, that ring is where you get to play. Every time you build and add a new cloud on-ramp and a new data center, you expand that ring with a TAM perspective. Also, the ring itself is growing because cloud connectivity is growing. Hopefully, sort of explaining what these rings represent. We used to have cloud connectivity and Virtual Edge. That was it. What we have launched with the innovation that CAM's team has brought in is Global WAN. When we launch Global WAN, that TAM is absolutely enormous. That is connectivity globally between any global company sub C. You go, hang on, we needed to add a data center interconnect play.
That is a play between data centers. This is probably one of the biggest growth opportunities from a revenue standpoint, data center interconnect. We added that. Most recently, we keep talking about it, it is internet. This really simple thing. It's data center internet. It's not internet for your home. It's basically every customer that needs high-speed internet out of a data center. Guess what? That is every customer that we have. This is a huge market that we can address. It's growing. It's the fastest growing product that we've ever seen. This TAM is enormous. We go and add NAT Gateway. We've added another ring to this layer. NAT Gateway, whilst it's, I've talked about it before, there's not a huge number of customers that need it, but the ones that do, it's very high revenue. This is more of a strategic sales, takes a bit more time.
When we deliver this for customers, they love it. The last piece is security. This is what we've added. The security piece we've just launched. These are all the different rings that we add. What you've got to do is invest in the go-to-market to go and access that TAM. Actually build market share in that TAM. Let's bring it back to the pillars. Build. What do we need to do? We need to add new data centers. I'm going to show you why in a sec. We need to add new markets. That adds TAM. We add more capacity. That adds TAM. We add more IX locations. Just physically building adds more. This is the investment we continue. Innovate. Product engineering delivers new products to actually add rings to this equation. We're going to go hard in that space.
I can promise you the list that we've got is unbelievable. Then we go into the invest. All right, what do we need to do? We need to continue to expand the go-to-market team. We are a tiny company delivering across 26 countries. The United States itself is off the charts big. Even though we've got a big team, it's actually nothing in comparison to what we can deliver. We're scratching the surface there. We're going to go hard. We're going to go hard because we've got the opportunity. Expand product and engineering, and then strategic acquisitions is the last piece in this puzzle. Again, I talked about those principles that we share. You don't willy-nilly make acquisitions. We've got a lot of experience in that space. You can acquire the wrong thing. You've got to be very deliberate around what you're looking for.
It's got to apply back to those metrics, those key principles. You'll see us constantly explore that moving forward. All right, some proof points. We talked about all, you know, Michael, yeah, great, you're adding all these products. What does that mean? In FY 2024, we couldn't have shown you. We knew what was happening, but we can't show you the numbers. When we launch all these products in FY 2024, it takes that time, 18 months, to start to deliver. What you saw is this represents the incremental annual recurring revenue from new product innovation, new products that are bringing new revenue into the company and each year that's associated with it. The last time that Megaport launched something was March of 2021 when we added MVE. When we jumped into the seat here, you saw this massive focus around product innovation. People were like, why?
The very simple answer is FY 2025. Look at this. 25% of our net new annual recurring revenue came from products that we innovated throughout here. It also drags through the traditional connectivity. It also makes our customers stickier. We solve more problems for them. We expand our wallet with the existing base. 150% year-on-year growth of new product innovation in FY 2025. Again, we are actually cooking with gas here. It showcases the incredible investment in engineering and product. All right, let's talk. Now, this is a bit of a complicated chart. We sort of labored over how we present this to you. I'm just going to walk you through it. This represents our data center cohort. This is new data centers that we are bringing on inside the financial year. I'll draw your attention to this sort of blue piece here. This is the FY 2022 cohort.
We added 26 data centers, and in the first year, they brought in this small amount of revenue here. What's important about this is we land, but look at the expand. It takes time to land in the data centers, to get them installed, get them set up. Look at the following year. A massive explosion in revenue, and it continues to grow. Year one, year two, year three, year four from the FY 2022 cohort. You can see that we had stopped adding data centers. We stopped adding them. In FY 2025, we only added 25. I said last year we need to go big, the year before, sorry, and we doubled. We went to 56, and we started to see that grow. Now look here. In FY 2025, we added 115 data centers. When you look at the maths on this, we're actually landing data centers with significantly more revenue. Why?
Our customer success team talks to our customers now and understands where they need us to land. When we land at a data center, we land with revenue, and we know exactly where to land. When we look at this 115 data centers, we've got a massive list that we're already executing against. If you think about it, this is year one, year two, year three, year four. It continues to grow. This highlights the critical importance of that. All right, my favorite slide. Maybe not everyone will fully understand what this means, but this is the lifetime value of the business. All of the pieces of the puzzle that I referred to before change certain metrics which are super important to understand about the health of the company long term and why customers love us. If you look through this, we increase lifetime value by 50%.
Nearly $700 million of lifetime value added in the last financial year. Why? Our customer lifetime, the actual period of time customers stay with us, has gone up two years. This is significant. What have we changed? We brought out new products, incredibly sticky products like internet, that mean that customers don't just use us for a cloud migration and move on. Love us and move on. They stay. Annual recurring revenue per customer is up 10%. We are actually selling more to our existing customers than ever before. It's increased. When you add those two together, your lifetime value massively improves. You know, we're a recurring revenue business. It takes 18 months of that lag from the investment that I was sharing sort of 18 months to two years ago to see it. Now you see it. Now let's look at this chart. Let's go back.
In H2 of FY 2023, I talked through these phases. What happened here? This is when we returned the profit, prioritized profitability, cut and increased cost, you name it. Look at the damaging impact. It's a one and a half to two-year impact over time. You start trying to right-size this here, which is the investment that we started making at the end of H1 FY 2024 and into H2. Now look, you see the return play out. For those of you on the journey, you can actually see that what we were doing here has made a massive impact. This is super important because it leads to the next slide. It leads to the opportunity to invest in go-to-market. For those of you who are familiar with SaaS businesses, this will be really easy for you to sort of pick up. This is very much a SaaS metric.
I don't expect everyone to just go, yes, I know exactly what this is. Let me just walk through it. This is your lifetime value to the cost of acquisition divided by the cost of acquisition. It's representing, it's a very good way to see where you sit on this scale. If you're spending too much in acquiring a customer and they do not stay with you long, you will land quickly in this over-investment zone. You've got to manage this really closely. The sweet spot for most companies, and particularly Megaport, would be between three to four times ratio. That means you get three times the lifetime value added for the cost to acquire the company. You want to be in this sort of range. Look at Megaport. We are significantly in the under-investment zone. In fact, you've seen this tick up.
You've seen this tick up even though Tish just showed you before the increase in sales. By increasing the amount we spent in sales to deliver, we still saw an increase in LTV to CAC. It actually indicates that we have a great opportunity ahead of us to invest significantly harder inside that go-to-market. That's exactly what we're going to do, which leads us into guidance. All right, revenue, $260 million - $270 million, an increase in year-on-year growth, 15% - 19% is the range of revenue that we're giving you from a growth perspective. We're excited about that. We can clearly give that because of all of the metrics that I've shown you, the net retention that's stabilized. It makes it easy for us to showcase that. Remember, we had the highest land in history that's outside of net retention in this financial year.
We're going to double down on that investment. Let's talk about doubling down on that investment to go after what is an incredibly hot market with all the factors in our favor. We're going to transform and reset to accelerate growth for FY 2027. That's the important part. It's hard for people to invest a dollar and they want to see it next quarter. What we've proven over the last two and a half years, if you invest a dollar, 18 months later we'll get it. You need to know where to invest those dollars. Two years ago, it wasn't clear. We are absolutely crystal clear on where to put that. Now we are going bold. Let's look at this. EBITDA will be 18% - 20% of revenue. This includes accelerated investment into go-to-market and expanding the network. Two pieces of that puzzle fall into EBITDA.
This represents 10% of the revenue actually focused specifically in accelerated investment in this space. Remember, this is all discretionary spend because we see the opportunity that we have right now. Higher revenue. This, folks, is all growth CapEx or vast majority growth CapEx. Lastly, we are going to do this. Yes? All good? Sorry, I think we had a technical issue there, folks. Okay, lastly, our remaining free cash flow, we will be remaining, we are remaining, we will, with this investment, we are remaining free cash flow break even. We are not dipping into cash to go after this opportunity. In short, we have an opportunity to accelerate revenue, not for this year, but for FY 2027 and beyond.
FY 2026, we still are accelerating revenue growth, but FY 2027 and beyond with this investment, that's where we start to go into this next phase of the acceleration zone, and we will remain free cash flow break even for it.
Can I just interrupt for a second? We've just had feedback that you cut out on the call when you explained the EBITDA. Can you repeat again, please?
Certainly. It was impressive, folks. I'm never going to be able to repeat such an exciting moment. Let's just go back to it. I'll just reiterate. Revenue grew. We're growing revenue, and we'll continue to see that accelerate. What we see is an incredible opportunity to go after accelerated growth. That means we are going to put our money where our mouth is and invest in this space. This is discretionary spend that we are choosing to go after, a market that we are ripe for, particularly in the United States, particularly what's going on from a geopolitical standpoint, particularly when we look at the AI explosion, the data centers, you name it, and we're the only one in this space. Now's the time to go hard. To do that, we are changing our EBITDA situation. We are going to 18%- 20% of revenue.
It's really important to highlight that this is discretionary spend that we are choosing to go after. It's not to run the company. This includes an accelerated investment into go-to-market headcount and expanding the network. They're the two elements that push the EBITDA metric. 10% of that go-to-market acceleration and the network acceleration represents 10% of revenue. Again, discretionary spend that we are choosing to go after. It's very rare in life you get an opportunity to see all the ducks align or the dominoes align, and you get to go after it boldly, confidently, and remain cash flow break even. I think folks heard the CapEx story, very similar story. Less than 3% of this CapEx is maintenance, and the rest of it is in growth. These two are in aggressively going after growth for FY 2027, and we've got to build it this year.
We're doing all that within the cash that we've got today without dipping into it. We really feel that this is an incredibly exciting time. In terms of the transformation and the journey that we've been through, this is the moment we get to double down from a confidence perspective. These are the easiest decisions for us moving forward because we can go after this opportunity at a rate of knots. We deserve this. We deserve to go after this growth because the company is in such a good position from a competitive landscape and the market exploding. Hopefully that all came through clearly. We're going to land with questions, and we'll pass over to Steve Loxton. Tish is going to join me here.
Okay, thanks, Michael. Just to confirm, research analysts, if you have questions, we'll let you ask those live. Please raise your hand, and we will invite you to ask the question and take you off mute. We have a number of questions. We will have until the bottom of the hour and run a few minutes longer to ask a few of those questions. If you have anything else follow up, please don't hesitate to send them through to investor@megaport.com. The first question comes from Eric Choi at Barrenjoey. Go ahead.
Thanks, Steve. I wasn't expecting it to be first, so sorry, Michael. This one's a bit of a new one. It might actually be for Tish or Kyle. The share price reaction today seems to be focusing on two things, which is the stable NRR and investment. I was just wondering if you've given us enough information to figure out maybe those fears are a little bit overplayed. My logic is you can kind of go to your annual report and figure out your gross adds accelerated in FY 2025, and then the average ARPUs you can back solve are going higher as well, which means the land part of your growth is actually accelerating. You actually don't need the NRR or the expand part to go up by very much to get to 16%- 17% NRR growth, which is what you've got for FY 2026.
When you look beyond FY 2026, given you're getting all these fresh new logos, you would have thought that NRR piece picks up eventually. Therefore, that's the kicker that gets you to your 20%+ aspiration. Can I just go quickly on the investment piece? Sorry, this is a mouthful, but there's obviously the OpEx and CapEx part of that. Just on that $27 million of GTM investment within OpEx, though, like dirty math, you've got existing FTE of 350 to get to that $27 million. Maybe you put on 50 headcount or more. I'm not sure if that's right. That seems like a significant step up in 2026. My question is, you'd expect that rate of acceleration in headcount or GTM investment to slow into FY 2027 and beyond. Thank you.
Yeah, you know, keep digging in each year. This is, as I said, the last phase of the reset, if you think about it. This is quite a dramatic lift. Remember, if you take this gently and slowly, you don't see the returns for 18 months, and you see this gentle movement towards the future. As I keep pointing out, the opportunity that we have is just so profound. It's such a unique time in the United States, particularly what's going on with AI and these other pieces. This is not the moment to gently and delicately sort of invest over time. We have an opportunity to do it now. The point is, we don't continue to add these sorts of chunks next year. As we've shared in that sort of FY 2027 onwards, we will start to give points of EBITDA back.
This is an accelerated investment that's discretionary inside our cash balance to go after a market opportunity we see now. You don't need folks to try and figure out that this market is there to try and catch you. You accelerate away. You can choose to do it slowly, or you can choose to do that with an aggressive focus. The only reason you go after an aggressive focus is if A, the market is there, which it clearly is, and B, we are positioned super well to take that market. What have we been missing? It's the investment in that space. If you look at, we're in 26 countries, but the majority focus in the United States, we are scratching the surface in that area. We're a tiny, tiny drop in the ocean, but we can go after that massive market.
There's no point in taking slowly, slowly going after that. We've gone big now because we can see it. The great news is it's all discretionary, so it's all in our control to deliver that. It's such a great opportunity that we're going to go on. You'll see us return that EBITDA over time, and then we land at that very profitable phase with 20% growth. Remember, as we land those customers, you pointed it out, our land has dramatically increased. It's not by surprise. It's because we invested in the go-to-market. I said we got it back to table stakes, but that's not a high investment opportunity. That's just getting the company to where it should have probably been from a consistent growth perspective. We're accelerating growth. That is what we're going after, not just this sort of consistent chip it along. Hopefully, that makes sense.
You've picked it up. You've figured out that it doesn't just have to be net retention to solve it. You want net revenue retention stable. Your new land is really, really important. You're seeing how we're accelerating with that. Hopefully, that was picked up through the session. That's not just go-to-market. It's also all the new products that we've added into this space.
That's good. Thanks, Michael.
Thanks, Eric. The next question we have is from Nick Harris at Morgans.
Hey, Nick. Hey, Michael and Tish. Thanks very much for the call. Yeah, sort of following on Eric's question, really. I guess a couple of points. One was just if we take that incremental OpEx, or as you call it, accelerated investment, that's obviously about $27 million. If you hadn't done that, it kind of looks like your EBITDA for next year would have been around $77 million in FY 2026. Point being, ahead of market expectations. Just wanted to understand, am I thinking about that the right way? I've got a couple more questions. Do you want me to rattle them off? They're all related.
If they're all related, Nick, I think go, but your answer to your first question is correct.
Oh, okay. Perfect. Thank you. Okay, excellent. Thank you for putting all the disclosure there around justifying the high spend and proving it's good spend. You've obviously decided to go pretty hard at it. I'm just trying to get a feel to understand the, I guess, the splits in that extra $27 million headcount versus you're talking about network. Should I read that as COGS, as in you're going to physically, yeah, COGS, yeah. Is it sort of half-half or just loose understanding?
It's heavily in the go-to-market space continuing because the opportunity is there. You have to keep investing in the network. You'll note that the 115 new enabled sites, that does start to, those just didn't happen on July 1, similar to what we were talking about last year. You keep building on that network expansion. At the same time, we continue to look at every single contract, every single opportunity to cut costs, or make sure that we're actually investing in the right space. The go-to-market is still heavily focused on that because Michael sees the opportunity, particularly in the U.S .
Two pieces, Nick. You'll see us invest in two spaces forever. This aggressive additional investment is because we see the opportunity. It's in two things: it's go-to-market headcount, and it's in engineering, product, and development. Those two key pillars will always be the investment thesis for Megaport, or should it always be for certainly a tech company. We've accelerated that investment to go after accelerated growth as opposed to just chip along. The network comes through, so there's still a CapEx involvement for all the hardware that we go and deliver. The increased investment is less about just delivering that hardware because we're going to deliver that anyway. It's actually into the headcount to build it. You need to build the product with the engineering talent. It takes about 18 months to get that return. We've proven it. The same with the go-to-market piece.
Yeah, that answers my CapEx question, which is the bulk of the CapEx is around product development, so soft or capitalized R&D style stuff rather than a bunch of hardware, although there'll be some hardware in there.
Yeah, it's where we see, we have to keep going into new sites. That's absolutely fundamental. You can see that in the, when we didn't go into as many sites, that's slowing. That's really been what FY 2024 and then FY 2025 was about, is understanding where the return on investment makes the most sense.
You increase your TAM and you increase your moat when you land in these new sites. It gets harder to go after. The other point to let you know is the requests from customers, when we talked about, as a very simple example, 100 G internet, it means we need 400 G routers to deliver the 100 G internet to our customer base. We absolutely should be upgrading that infrastructure to deliver that service. That's an example of where you would invest from a hardware perspective based upon the demand. We are going to the NFL cities to deliver 100 G internet everywhere.
That's great. Thank you very much. I appreciate the LTV/CAC measures. They're all great as well. Cheers.
Thank you, Nick. Next, we have a question from Jon Atkin at RBC.
Thanks very much. Not every data center is equal. I think under prior management, given the slowdown, it seems understandable that you would reach a point of diminishing returns. It seems like that is quite the opposite of what you've discovered. Intuitively, what have you learned over the last two years around entering new data centers and, in fact, seeing quite a large amount of revenue yield? That's kind of a top line question. Secondly, perhaps for Tish, how do we think about steady state margins, at least over the medium term, given the increased network investment, network costs, and perhaps even data center revenue costs? Thanks.
I'd say the first one. If you look at it, I don't know what there is. You'd know better than me. Is it 10,000 or 15,000? It depends on who you ask. Data centers on the planet, you're right. Not every data center is equal, and we shouldn't be in every one of them. To think that we've actually saturated that market, certainly when I first joined Megaport , I was told that. Until we started to listen to our customer base and realized, actually, there are so many locations that customers want us to be into. If you, I draw your attention back to the chart that I'm sharing, I don't have to convince you of this. You just need to look at the numbers. This is what's happened. We've exploded the first year ARR inside the data centers that we've invested in.
I couldn't deliver fast enough to what the go-to-market needed. Our team was literally, it's a small team that has been deploying data centers globally. We were running out of kit, so we needed to go and buy more kit to go and deliver that quicker. If we had it our way, we would have actually delivered more data centers. There's a list of 100 right now that they're deploying that have actually got customer demand and need to be in those locations. There is an ongoing list that continues well and truly beyond that. Zero concern about finding data centers to go into, but you also have new countries as well. Every time we land a new country, we need to enter the data centers that make sense there. That's the first one on the DC. We're, I'd say, underpenetrated. And Tish?
John, I think the key thing to bring your attention back to is this slide. I think I understand what you're saying around, you know, what's the difference in cost, where you're increasing. You can clearly see where in 2023, that period where we prioritized profitability, we did cut very hard, particularly around headcount. What we've been doing over the last two years has been working out where the investment makes sense. Network-wise, expansion, as well as the go-to-market, it's kind of all vectors. FY 2025 was really the full year where we worked out, really wanted to stay within guidance. Wanted to ensure that we hit that. The spend made sure that we controlled that spend to the way and invested where it made sense for us across everything. We talk about data center sites, which Michael's talked about.
That increases your costs from a network expansion, but we're still holding that margin. We'll continue to invest in that space. Again, it's around that product and innovation, the research and development, which sits in the CapEx, and then the go-to-market, which sits in the OpEx. Megaport is really largely about humans to help develop us and expand and grow. You buy that network kit to get that opportunity to go from 100 G to 400 G. It means then the customers can buy 400 G instead of 100 G. It just expands that opportunity from a revenue perspective, but in the long run. You can't just like turn it on now, revenue turns up two months later. I would love that, by the way, but apparently I can't have that. It's really fundamentally about all of those areas.
Maybe medium term or steady state EBITDA margins, what should we be thinking about?
I think that's really that piece that we talk in there around we will start to then see that the revenue will grow faster than the cost. That will be our intention. 2026 is a lift, but the intention is always to return that. That's kind of why we've tried to lay out our plans for 2027 2030 and then beyond what we're targeting. The earlier, the better. We just want to make sure that it's the right thing to do.
Thank you.
Pleasure.
Thanks, Jon. The next question from Paul Mason at Evans & Partners.
Hey, thanks, team. Just a couple from me. I'll ask them in turn because they're slightly different topics. Just the first one, the big surge in CapEx in 2026. You've also got some comments earlier in the presentation about sort of $30 million being back to normal. Should we be thinking about the CapEx surge similarly to the OpEx surge in that you're going to start giving points back over time on that as well? Should we think about the expanded rollout of data centers at a much faster pace as sort of a new normal?
Paul, I think the key thing to highlight is that the maintenance portion is 3% or less of revenue. In reality, all of our spend for CapEx, a large majority of our spend for CapEx, is on the growth piece. It is very deliberate. I say normal because I think what you'd seen in the previous years wasn't necessarily where we should have been going. We've also done 115 enabled new sites. That's kind of what you should start to think about longer term for us. It's largely growth. We're doing all of this to grow revenue.
One, I will add one piece, Paul. Yeah, there is an element to say that once you've invested in the team, you can get that sort of table stakes and you can start to return. The piece I would add to it, though, is we've got a list of products to go after. You add products, and I sort of showed those rings and how critical they are. If we see opportunity to go after it, we should actually be continuing to invest. If you look at this, that product and engineering team add rings. They add TAM, and then they add more wallet we can go after customers. When you've got the massive go-to-market team that we're building and this customer success machine, we can go back and sell that to that existing customer base.
You want to see that investment makes, we'd have to make it, you know, you always see it to make sense. There is a potential that we give back over time if it makes sense, or we invest if we see opportunity. That would be the way I'd play that one. Whereas the go-to-market is different. We're accelerating that investment, and then over time you'd see that peel back.
Okay, great. The next one, I just wanted to maybe get a bit more color on the contribution from the internet products. I had a related question on this. You've got two new cybersecurity products, IPsec tunnels and firewall-as-a-service. Maybe if you can just explain what you're doing there as well.
Yes, we've got some on the IPsec tunnels. This has been a big request from customers. It's actually an ability to tunnel into Megaport without needing to have a physical port anywhere. We will terminate those tunnels on a Cloud Router. That is basically a security layer inside our cloud layers. It's automated. It's very difficult to do. The team's done an incredible job to deliver that. You pay per session. It's a revenue-generating piece, but it also expands what we offer. The other piece was a firewall function. That is like access lists built into cloud routing. Lots and lots of customers needed this requirement for when you connect between clouds to actually have a firewall capability. That's actually been deployed inside the Cloud Router. Two functions that enter us into the security space, and we won't slow down, just to be clear.
Another piece to say, security is a very big, broad statement. This is a network security layer that we are playing in. First question I think I missed.
Oh, it was just sort of related to controversial. Internet,
yeah.
Yes, so internet, I refer to it. It's so funny, you know, when I, when you join Megaport, when I first joined, everyone said, oh, we provide internet. Actually, no, we didn't provide any internet. What we do very simply by adding internet onto the existing port, we save cross-connect costs, we reduce down what our customers need to manage from infrastructure and cost, and deliver this internet service. We also have Internet Exchange , as you know. By adding this into the space, it's a highly profitable, very beneficial product to add to our customers. As I said, I'm not surprised, by the way, this is the fastest growing product we've ever had. It's material, the impact that it's making to net new dollars in terms of that sort of slide that I shared, this slide here. Internet is material.
We're not going to disclose and split all of them out. Otherwise, we're going to have thousands of different metrics that we want to share. Yeah, it's material. It goes back to the importance of adding these layers and the opportunity we have to go after. It opens up massive turn.
Last one for me was just sort of you guys have historically had the Megaport Reach program. Is that still going, or is the sort of the profile of how you expand into data centers shifted? You want to be more proactive instead of sort of waiting to negotiate with operators?
No, Reach continues. A lot of these data centers, like we've got customers, data center locations actually asking us, paying us to land. We've got folks that give us free. We've got all, there's a full gamut with these folks we land in. It's a very diverse range. Reach is well and truly active. That's why you're again seeing that explosion there from first year DC spend.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Paul, for your question. Next question comes from Tim Plumbe at UBS.
Hey, Tim.
Tim, can you hear us?
Hey, guys, can you hear me? Sorry.
Yeah, we can.
Sorry. Just one question for me. Impressive metrics there in terms of incremental ARR from new products. We've seen an acceleration in terms of MVEs in the last half and then into this half again. I guess just what I wanted to try and understand, I appreciate it takes time to re-accelerate the NRR, but I would have thought that with those metrics accelerating, we would have seen some sort of flow through in terms of the NRR. How should we think about that? Is it that they're mainly going into new customers? Is there increasing scope for existing customers? Is there some sort of offsetting factor that we need to figure in in terms of NRR? Maybe still some ongoing headwind that we need to work our way through. That's the first part. The second part is NRR longer term.
How are you thinking about how that ties into the 20%+ growth?
Yeah, let me, so net retention is not free. If you think about it and think about anything in your personal life, are you going to pay more to Netflix next month? The answer is the only way I'm going to pay more to Netflix is if they're adding more value to me. That could be bringing something additional. It could be higher resolution, a new video, et cetera. Net retention at 107% is actually not a God-given right for a company to have net retention. You have to continue innovating products to sell more stuff to your existing customer base, or your existing customer base is not yet saturated so that you can sell more and more services to them. We fall into both categories. That's why stabilization of net retention is an astounding achievement at 107%.
We're going to get 7% growth on the existing base after churn moving forward based on that metric. To do that, you still got to add products and services, et cetera. That's the first one. The second one is where do you see that net retention? As you get bigger and bigger, net retention can get harder depending upon the size of the base that you're growing off. We foresee this to continue to grow. What's so important is those product rings. Net retention, this is your ability to deserve net retention, expansion, and growth. This is why the engineering investment is super key, constantly and forever. By the way, that's every tech company. Hopefully, that answers both those questions.
In terms of the 20%, have you guys kind of thought about how you split out what net revenue retention versus new customer lands needs to be?
You mean in the accelerate phase or the, sorry, the...
In the FY 2030 phase, the 20%+.
Yeah, net retention will make up a key portion of that as well. By that stage, you're significantly larger. Your product offering is significantly larger. We would be of significant scale and have many different product sets that we do not have today on offer. We could have acquired companies. There are all these different pieces in that puzzle along there. It's really hard to say what the breakdown would be. The reality is you can't have a successful business without appropriate net retention. You want to see, ideally, we want to see that net retention increase, but you still have to deserve it. You've got to keep the innovation platform on it. That investment will ensure that we do. If you look here, we talk about expanding TAM. That is the investment in the engineering team. You don't get this, you don't get that without that investment.
That's where we've got. The question for us is, do we have an opportunity to add a whole range of new products to it? The answer is 100% we do. The next question is, prove that you've done that in the past. There it is, folks. Like we did it. I told you we would do it. The engineering team delivered it. Now you see the fruits of that in dollar figure.
Got it. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Tim. Next question comes from Ed Woodgate at Jarden.
Hey, Ed.
You're on mute.
Hey, can you hear me now?
Yep.
Yes, we can.
Hey, thanks for that. Thanks for taking the questions. Great job getting the ARR reaccelerated. The lands, revenue growth's really impressive to see. I think you've been pretty clear about how hard it takes to get that to pick up again. I appreciate you making the investments for the right reasons. It would be useful to understand within that CapEx spend the type of products you're thinking about developing. Obviously, you've launched IPsec tunnels recently. Is there anything, any sort of color you can provide to what might be next and what's in your roadmap?
That roadmap, if you ever get a chance to see our roadmap, it's long and there's lots and lots of requests. Most of our roadmap is driven by customer request, which is kind of a great thing. We solve our customer problems. We're expanding into all different spaces, but we're also innovating inside the existing spaces as well. Features inside the existing sort of TAM actually expand our TAM as well. New products totally add a new ring. You'll see us bring out more and more new products. I won't go into the product roadmap, but there are lots and lots of spaces to enter. If you go back to our guiding principles, everything will come from this. There is a range of very exciting opportunities that we have that we're working on to literally add rings, total rings to that, to this, you know, where is it, my ring?
Add more rings as we continue to grow. That's totally new TAM, but inside this same mentality, same guiding principles.
Got it. I'm exploding. This is on MVE. Obviously, you've had a lot of success from the new products, but the net addition for MVE, I think it was the largest you've done on a normal basis. Is there anything you could talk about what's driven that? Is there some sort of synergy with the new products, or is it just a function of the go-to-market team?
It's a mix. It's actually a mix of all those. Firstly, MVE is a solution sale. You need humans to sell that. That is a direct reflection of the go-to-market executing. The second piece, and this is why everything's like a mix, it's a mix of your product and your engineering and go-to-market, is that the platform itself, when we rolled out the compute platform, we basically massively increased the power and the speed that you can get out of the MVE platform. A huge number of customers were waiting for that. It actually opens up a huge amount of TAM and it allows us to deliver very, very high speed firewalls, routers, et cetera. Every time we add a vendor to that, we actually increase TAM.
When we add all the Palo Alto, Fortinet, Ciscos, you name it, every single time we add another image, we expand the TAM in that space. We've continued to aggressively add those images, plus the speed. Not surprising to see, plus the go-to-market, not surprising to see that that's growing. It's a very high revenue, very profitable high revenue for us. It's super differentiated. There's really no one else that can do this. It's a really interesting market that we're in.
Okay, thanks for that. Just one last one for me. Any sort of feedback on NAT Gateway or adoption as well?
Yes.
Yeah, I understand that's a bit of a slower burn, but that'd be quite useful.
Yeah, that's always, I think when we launched it, it was always going to be a slower burn. It's not, it's unlike internet where every single customer that has a Port should have internet from us or MCR , MVE , et cetera, anyone who has total access products, everyone should have internet. With NAT Gateway, it's customers that are burning a significant amount of cost on NAT Gateway translation with cloud providers. That means they've got huge connectivity. It's basically translating an external address to an internal address. Big SaaS providers are great examples where they're getting lots of external users hitting AWS or Azure or GCP, and they're translating. When you find those customers, then our product can save them something like 70% - 80% of their costs. These costs are insane. Some of them are $20 million - $50 million per annum in cost.
When you're doing a project like that, you're touching the critical part of the business. You need to do that slowly with proof of concepts, prove it out. What we're seeing, though, early signs is that some of these customers are smashing these things. This is like the equivalent of splitting the atom in this world. We're seeing success in that space. We'll see that continue to grow. It's very high revenue when you win them, but it's lumpy and it takes time to sell. Hopefully, that covers that one off.
Yeah, that's great. Thanks, [Sam]. Great job getting the new land revenue back up again.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Ed. We have time for two more questions. Andrew Gillies at Macquarie, if you could please ask your question.
Gillies.
Hello, Michael. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I did have a few, but I'll try and keep it to two if I can. In the slide deck, you said market leader in NaaS and SaaS.
Yes.
I appreciate you won't go into detail, but can you maybe talk about your sort of priorities in developing these new products other than being customer-led? Because if I look at the IPsec tunnels and packet filtering, you seem to be prioritizing user experience a little bit over complexity, and you're solving for, effectively, edge customers who might get vendor lock-in and these sorts of things. Can you talk about why that's important in addressing a customer and how complexity might be potentially a barrier that your competitors can't solve for?
We go back to those guiding principles component for a second here. Where are we here? Whatever product that we're going to invest in needs to fall into this space. Automating incredibly complicated things is very, very difficult. Automating simple things is easier. What you'll see as we've stepped more and more toward automating IPsec and easy, automating internet, believe it or not, was not easy either. These are these sort of components to it. When you do, you get to get that instantaneous scale. The investments to basically add complex things to automation is key, but that's where the developers come in. It takes a lot more time to get it. Once you get it, if you can scale complexity and automate it and make it very simple, that's where we shine.
I just want to touch on one thing that you brought up because I actually think it's worth, philosophically, this is worth just a quick point, and Steve's going to get upset because I'm going to spend too much time, but I'm just going to try and make it quick. SaaS and NaaS. The key differentiator between a company like us and others is we are not a SaaS company. We are not a hardware company. We are both. It's actually the SaaS platform that delivers the hardware automation is so difficult. It's really easy to disrupt a SaaS company because you don't have to physically roll out anywhere. It's really hard. It's easy to disrupt a physical infrastructure company. You just pour CapEx at it and build or throw it.
When you've had to build physical infrastructure in 26 countries with all the carrier licenses and then automate it out with a very, very sophisticated SaaS product and you put it across, that is so hard to catch. When I put that statement there, the SaaS element, we will continue up the SaaS stack and continue to add massive automation and all different sorts of SaaS across the top of a physical environment. That is the magic of Megaport. So hard to catch that. Almost impossible.
Yeah, that's really helpful, Michael. If I think about the dynamics you just described, churn based on your sort of lifetime value of a customer is kind of down to 8% from 10%. Economics will sort of improve by itself if you keep building out this roadmap, won't you? It kind of reinforces the underlying value prop to the customer. Is that considered in that 20% sustainable growth target?
so important. I go back to this same message. Every time you add a ring, you add a reason for a customer to stay with you and a service that you can provide. If, for example, a customer just decided to migrate between two clouds, they love us, they use us, they move on. If they went and added a virtual edge component or a data center internet or some security element, it makes it stickier. What is so important from a go-to-market perspective is instead of turning up to a customer and saying, "Hey, have you got cloud connectivity? Who's that with? Are you using someone else? Let's move on." You do not stop. That one engagement gets you to open up the book of here. It is very much like what Cloudflare has been successful with. They started with content distribution networking, added all these components.
The same buying centers in most cases start to buy more stuff. With one physical interaction with a human, you can increase what you sell to them. That is so important. That means you reduce your churn because more customers are taking more stuff from you and you increase net retention. This is the magic behind the business. You only get this magic when you invest in the right areas.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Andrew, very much. Last question, please. Siraj, if you could please go ahead and ask your question.
Thanks. Hi, Michael. Hi, Tish. Actually, I might have three, but just plus one. Just thinking about the return and investment on this incremental, let's call it $25 million investment and go-to-market in 2026. Michael, what's the best way to think through it? I think you're sort of saying four times LTV to CAC is the best sort of return metric, or maybe that's the optimum metric. If that's the case, it sort of implies five percentage points to ARR growth. Is that the way we should be thinking about that incremental investment from this $25 million go-to-market?
Two things. I think firstly, the reason LTV/CAC was invented, the reason people even talk about it is it's an indication as to whether you should go harder or you're going too hard and invest in go-to-market. It's a very, very good SaaS metric to just keep you in check. The sweet spot is always 3- 4. I'm not saying that we plunge into that range, but what I'm showcasing is that your investment thesis, if you put a dollar into this, you get this massive LTV. Look at the LTV that we've gone and built just in that year, 50% increase. You have the right to now invest in go-to-market to go after that space because it's a very efficient way of adding revenue for the long term. It's a very long-term view to say you should be investing.
This is probably your best way to get a sense on what that return looks like, I think, if you want to use these metrics. You can sort of backsolve for these fees, so I won't go into the detail of it. That's why we've shared this LTV/CAC, I think, for the first time.
Michael, just maybe simplistically, in that accelerate sort of phase, should we be thinking this is like a mid-20%, 25% sort of grower? Is it after the investment? Is that broadly in mind? How are you thinking about the investment?
I'll draw you back to the timeframes. Remember, 18 months is the return from it. The reason we invest now is because we absolutely are clear on what works. When we were investing before, we weren't clear on what works, and we've proven that out. We sort of took this table stakes, which was not too aggressive, but actually was the right thing to do for the business to get to table stakes. What we've seen is this incredible opportunity, plus all the metrics pointing the right way. Plus, when you look at the LTV/CAC, you go, actually, you're underinvested Megaport as far as growing this company for the long term. These are long-term investments. The easy thing to do is just to do nothing and tick along from a public lens perspective. This is a much better opportunity to go and invest.
It's very rare you get an opportunity to do that. That becomes the growth opportunity. As I've said, we will continue to improve our growth, and then you go, the accelerate revenue growth is in that portion. When you land, you're at this 20% sustainable growth component. You won't see it play out until FY 2027, like we've shown you with all those previous charts.
Second one, just in terms of product investment, right? It sounds like it's $15 million incrementally in the CapEx line. Is that again an 18-month period that we should think the return of some new major new products coming through? Maybe just on exactly on SaaS, what are you implying there? Because as you said, the buying center is important. Just any color on that $15 million and when you get return would be helpful.
Yeah, two things. One, we have a huge list of products that are in the hopper right now. What happens is we accelerate how fast we deploy products. Basically, this investment isn't like, "Hey, give us this and then we'll give you a product in 18 months." We've got a massive list of products that are coming off the hopper. I think one a month is what I've charted the team with from Megaport. You'll see something like one product launched a month. Don't hold us to this. I'll put the pressure on those guys to deliver it. In short, we're pretty much on track to deliver that. What will happen is we'll accelerate how many products we can deliver, but also we'll accelerate the complexity. We can start to go after significantly more complicated products, which opens up probably much larger TAM as well.
Edge products, a whole range of different pieces into the security spaces, and we'll probably start to step out beyond that as well. Again, that will be an investment in the engineering, and then there's acquisitions that might make sense to dovetail in based upon those principles that we shared. That'll be the two pieces of that. Acquisitions are not included in that investment clearly, but in terms of where we're investing on that side. I can't remember your other question.
No, that's it. We're just sorting with SaaS, but that's it. Just last one, Michael, just in terms of looking at the metrics, right? It's interesting that Ports are flat half on half, even though you have a lot of net customer ads. I say view in MCR is pretty strong. Anything in what you're seeing in terms of customer buying behavior or the new customers you're getting, it's driven towards maybe born in the cloud native SaaS, the customers going to MCR. Just to see what you're actually seeing in terms of behavior.
Such a broad mix, so many use cases for the customer base. Most of our customers are very large, large, large enterprises doing some pretty complex things. They're always living everywhere. These sort of born in the cloud folks are usually smaller companies. We have them, and they'd connect between. If you look at more of what you're seeing play out as a thematic, folks are choosing to bring platforms out of the cloud in many instances for particular use cases. What you're seeing is it's getting more complicated than less complicated. We're seeing more on-premise data center expansion for applications that make sense for that space. We're seeing growth in cloud. What you're doing is connecting these two pieces of the puzzle.
The cloud router platform that I was banging on about for so long in terms of why it was so important gave us massive speed increase, like literally 10x the speed that we could deliver. Most of our enterprise customers need that. We're sort of finding that the second you release something at mass speed, people are like, "No, I'll never need that." We're seeing customers smash them in five seconds, which is awesome and why we're growing so quickly with it. It's also higher revenue because they need much more compute function beneath it to deliver it. All right, Steve's giving me the shorten my answer response.
Thank you, everybody, for your participation today. Unfortunately, we're going to have to call time on the questions. We obviously have a roadshow in the next little while. We're doing a number of Zoom calls in the next few days and then visits to Sydney and Melbourne in early September. Thanks again for your attendance, and we look forward to speaking with a number of you in the weeks ahead.
Thanks, James. Exciting times. Cheers.