Good morning. Good afternoon, I should say, everybody. Welcome to the Annual General Meeting of Megaport Ltd. My name is Melinda Snowden, and I'm the Chair of Megaport. On behalf of the Board and our team of Megaporters, it's my pleasure to welcome you to our AGM for 2025, my second as Chair of the Company. It's 12:00, and we have a quorum, so I declare the meeting open. We request that cameras and recording devices are not to be used during the meeting. Before we commence the official business of the meeting, I'd like to point out the fire exits in the event of an emergency or evacuation. These are located by the lifts and to your right.
I'd like to begin by acknowledging and paying my respects to the Turrbal people, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which Megaport's head office stands and where we are presenting from today. I would also like to pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to extend that respect to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who are joining our Annual General Meeting today. I'd like now to introduce the members of Megaport's Board of Directors and Company Secretary. I'm joined in person here by our Executive Director and CEO. Our other Megaport Directors, Jay Adelson, Mike Klayko, Mohit Lad, Grant Dempsey, and Glo Gordon, are joining us today online. Also here in Brisbane with me are Leticia Dorman, our Chief Financial Officer, and Celia Pheasant, our Company Secretary, along with other members of the Megaport team.
The Company's Auditor, Stephen Tarling from Deloitte Tohmatsu, is also joining us online and is available to address any questions you may have about the audit of the financial statements later in the meeting. Lewis Brimelow from Computershare, Megaport's share registry provider, is also in the room today and is our returning officer for the meeting. We have not received any apologies from shareholders unable to attend this meeting and have not received any questions prior to the meeting. The purpose of today's meeting is to do with the formal business as set out in the Notice of Annual General Meeting. First, we'll deliver the Chair's address, and then our CEO, Michael Reid, will present his address to shareholders. We will then consider the resolutions set out in the Notice of Meeting, and I will outline voting arrangements ahead of that section.
There will be an opportunity for shareholders to ask questions during the formal items of business as they relate to the resolutions being considered. I will now give the Chair's address. In FY 2025, the Company delivered exceptional operational execution. We expanded our global footprint, strengthened our financial profile, and supported more customers running critical workloads across our global platform. Annual recurring revenue grew 20% to AUD 243.8 million. Revenue was up 16% to AUD 271.1 million, and net cash rose by AUD 26.6 million to AUD 87.8 million. A strong focus on our customers and delivering the products, services, and innovations that power their growth saw total customer lifetime value rise 50% to AUD 2.1 billion, alongside an 18% increase in large customers and a 10% uplift in ARR per customer.
Our incredibly talented teams have built our global network and infrastructure as a service platform by keeping our customers' evolving needs always at the center of every innovation and product enhancement. This has been achieved with a remarkably lean and high-performing group of engineers, product leaders, and operators, and the FY 2025 results are a testament to their work and the trust that our customers continue to place in Megaport. At our full-year results in August this year, the company announced a pivot to reinvesting in growth, building on proven successes and accelerating investments in sales, marketing, and product innovation and expansion. Our intention remains clear: to build, innovate, and invest, and these strategic pillars have delivered strong returns for our shareholders.
We plan to continue with this strategy in FY 2026 and in FY 2027, capitalizing on prior transformation investment, expanding our total addressable market, aggressively growing market share, and ensuring revenue grows faster than costs. As part of Megaport's focus on making ongoing investments that drive performance and strengthen our long-term growth, the Board was pleased to endorse the recently announced acquisition of Latitude.sh. This acquisition, together with the associated well-supported capital raising, reflects management's commitment to executing this growth strategy decisively. This acquisition expands our capabilities into the CPU and GPU compute-as-a-service market and strengthens the platform for high-bandwidth, performance-sensitive workloads, including AI. It is the next logical step for Megaport as we solidify our position as a global leader in infrastructure as a service. As part of this growth strategy, we also announced an accelerated expansion into India.
This is a deliberate long-term investment that positions Megaport ahead of the region's ever-increasing cloud activity and connectivity requirements. As you would all be very much aware, the rise and rise of AI is an important moment in global technology. It is reshaping infrastructure, re-architecting networks, and accelerating the need for automation across every layer of the stack. Megaport is unique in that from the very beginning, Megaport has been an automation-first company. Automation is part of Megaport's DNA and shapes every aspect of how the network and teams operate and how the Company scales globally. As AI models grow, data volumes rise, and enterprises run more distributed architectures. The demand for high-performance, software-defined network grows with them, and Megaport is exceptionally well positioned for the future in this regard. Board Renewal. During Financial FY 2025, we were pleased to welcome Grant Dempsey and Mohit Lad to the Megaport Board.
Both bring deep executive experience across global networking, telecommunications, and digital transformation. Their insights have already strengthened the Board's capability and broadened the perspectives informing our governance and long-term strategic direction. During today's AGM, we will be considering resolutions to elect Grant and Mohit, who retire in accordance with the Company's constitution. Our Board Renewal program will continue in FY 2026, having engaged external advisors to assist in the search for a new Chair of the Remuneration and Nomination Committee for a candidate with strong ASX credentials. In May this year, I met with a wide range of current and former investors to hear their views about the Company, the Board, the CEO, and our overall performance. I'm grateful to all who shared their time and the feedback.
Following these meetings and based on the feedback received, the Remuneration and Nomination Committee undertook a detailed benchmarking exercise with external remuneration advisors, consulted widely, and we refined our CEO's remuneration structure to ensure it remains globally competitive while staying firmly aligned with Australian governance standards. As outlined in the Notice of Meeting, much of the global technology leadership talent, particularly in the United States, operates at significantly higher remuneration levels than in Australia. The proposed CEO package to be considered today has a strong emphasis on high performance, with all incentive equity subject to ambitious stretch targets, and with the CEO's minimum shareholding requirement increased to 400% of fixed remuneration. The Board strongly believes that this package reflects an appropriate balance of incentives that will remunerate the CEO in a way that clearly drives performance outcomes for the business, anchored in long-term value creation for shareholders.
Finally, I would like to thank my fellow Directors for contributing their expertise and their commitment to supporting the Company's strategic vision, guiding Megaport as a global leader in infrastructure as a service. On behalf of the Board, I also extend our appreciation to Michael and the broader Megaport team. Your hard work, innovation, and values-driven culture have been instrumental in this year's achievements and will continue to power our global growth. Thank you to all our shareholders for your engagement and your ongoing support, and I'll now hand over to Michael for the CEO's address.
Thanks, Melinda. Testing. Thanks, Melinda. You guys can hear me all right? Welcome, welcome to Megaport. Thanks for those who joined us in person and for all those joining us online. The world is moving faster than ever. AI workloads are exploding. Global cloud adoption continues to accelerate, and enterprises everywhere are looking for more speed, more flexibility, and more intelligence in how they connect and compute. This is the environment that Megaport was built for. In FY 2025, we strengthened our foundations, we expanded our reach, and we delivered record results, placing Megaport in the strongest position in its history. We grew faster, we reached further, and we innovated harder, and we're just getting started. We're already deep into FY 2026, and we are continuing to accelerate, seizing the opportunity in front of us.
We delivered an outstanding result in FY 2025, closing the year with annual recurring revenue at AUD 243.8 million, up 20% year on year. ARR, annual recurring revenue, has continued to accelerate into FY 2026, with October ARR landing at AUD 260.1 million, representing 22% year-on-year growth. This re-acceleration has been driven by significant advancements in our product offering, a step change in our go-to-market capabilities, and the relentless execution of an incredible team. At year-end, we were serving 2,873 customers across 983 enabled data centers in 185 cities worldwide and have since then passed a historic milestone with our 1,000th enabled data center at Databank in San Diego in San Juan facility. We have been expanding our global reach. In FY 2025, we saw the most ambitious network expansion in Megaport's history. We added 115 new data centers.
We extended our 400-gig backbone to 29 metros across the USA and Europe, and we made 100-gig virtual cross-connects available in 746 locations globally. Our Internet Exchange footprint grew to 30 sites, and we added 30 new cloud on-ramps, bringing the total to 333. We expanded into Brazil and Italy, with our global presence now covering 26 countries. This infrastructure growth was matched by a wave of product innovation. We launched the AI Exchange with more than 30 providers, the Financial Services Exchange connecting over 600 companies around the world, and a new Compute Platform to power next-generation workloads. We deployed 400-gig customer Ports. We introduced new 16 and 32-core MVE Instances. We enhanced our Megaport Cloud Router with advanced security, and we delivered automation capabilities such as Infrastructure as Code, Automated Cross-Connects, and NAT Gateway.
AI-enhanced customer support is now live, and we're making it faster and easier for our customers to get results. It was a strong year financially. Revenue for FY 2025 reached AUD 227.1 million, up 16% on the prior year. EBITDA was AUD 62.3 million, and net cash flow was AUD 26.6 million. We ended the year with AUD 102.1 million of cash at bank and net cash up 43% on the year at AUD 87.8 million. Our net revenue retention held steady at 107%, reflecting the loyalty and growth of our customer base, and has continued to improve to 109% as of 31 October. These results were achieved while making significant investments in our sales, marketing, product engineering, and customer success functions. The returns are already evident, with new data centers and new product offerings driving meaningful incremental annual recurring revenue. FY 2026 is a year of acceleration.
We are doubling down on the proven successes, increasing our investment in our people, our platform, our product offerings, and our network to capture a larger share of the already massive and growing markets that we serve. A key strategic step we have recently taken was expanding into compute through our upcoming acquisition of Latitude.sh. The combined capabilities of Latitude and Megaport will create a global platform that unites Megaport's private high-speed connectivity fabric with Latitude's compute infrastructure, enabling enterprises to rapidly deploy and connect critical workloads across more than 1,000 data centers in 26 countries. Megaport has long been trusted by the world's largest enterprises to move workloads seamlessly between data centers and the cloud. Bringing Latitude.sh into the fold, we're expanding that promise beyond the network and into high-performance, optimized compute, complementing cloud providers.
Together, we will not only serve the enormous traditional compute market, but we will also open the door to the explosive AI infrastructure space and the hyper-growth market of inference. This acquisition marks a new chapter for Megaport. We are building an industry-leading platform where network and compute converge globally, positioning Megaport at the heart of the hybrid cloud and AI-driven future. Our recent announcement to enter into 40 new data centers in India via a strategic acquisition is another example of rapid global expansion, increasing our total addressable market and accelerating our entry into the region by at least three years. The Company will continue to expand globally, innovate at speed, and deepen our engagement with the enterprises, cloud, and AI service providers that are shaping the future of the digital economy.
FY 2024 was a significant year of turnaround, and then FY 2025 proved what Megaport could achieve, giving us the confidence on where to double down in FY 2026 to continue to accelerate this incredible business. We are building the IT infrastructure for the world's most ambitious enterprises, and the opportunities in front of us have never been greater. I want to acknowledge the incredible efforts of the Megaport team. Every day you wake up, you punch the air, you execute, and you make magic happen. Lastly, to our shareholders, without you, none of this could happen. Your support means the world to us. Game on. Thank you for joining us. Hang around for sausages at the end. Cheers.
Thank you, Michael. Game on. I always love game on. We'll now turn to the conduct of the formal part of the meetings today. Upon registering for the meeting this morning, you will have received either a yellow, blue, or white-colored admission card. Those who have received a yellow or blue admission card may speak and ask questions. The persons entitled to vote are all shareholders, representatives, and attorneys of shareholders and proxy holders who hold blue voting admission cards, which will be used as poll voting cards. If you are attending in more than one of those capacities, you will have been issued with as many blue voting admission cards as you have separate capacities. If anyone believes they are entitled to vote in any capacity and does not have a blue voting admission card, please raise your hand now, and a member of Computershare will assist you.
Looks like everyone's good. If you're a proxy holder, a summary of the votes to which you are entitled has been attached to the blue voting admission voting card. If you have already voted, you will be given a yellow non-voting admission card. White cards have been assigned to visitors other than shareholders and do not carry rights to speak and ask questions when the business of the meeting is being conducted, nor the right to vote. If you have a question, please hold up either your yellow or blue admission card and state your name prior to the question being asked. Please direct any questions you may have to me as Chair. I will either deal with the question personally or ask someone who is better placed to respond, and we'll do our best to answer all relevant questions raised. This meeting is being held as a hybrid meeting.
In addition to shareholders and guests who join us in our Brisbane office, we also have shareholders and guests joining online via the Computershare meeting platform. This online platform allows shareholders, proxies, and guests to attend the meeting virtually. In addition, shareholders and proxies have the ability to speak and ask questions and submit votes online. To ensure an orderly process, I will first be taking questions from shareholders and proxies in the room. After all the questions in the room have been—sorry, to ensure an orderly process, I will first take questions from shareholders and proxies in the room. After all questions in the room have been answered, I will then ask for any questions that have been submitted online, and then finally, I will take any audio questions that come through. Online attendees can submit questions at any time.
To ask a question, select the Q&A icon on the virtual meeting platform. Type your question in the text box. Once you have finished typing, hit the send button. For those shareholders who wish to ask a verbal question, an audio questions facility is available during the meeting. To use this service, please follow the instructions written below the broadcast tab. Please note that while you can submit questions from now on, I will not address them until a relevant time during the meeting. Please also note that your questions may be moderated, or if we receive multiple questions on one topic, they may be alchemied together. Questions that have been submitted regarding other items of business will be held over till we come to those items, and general questions on the business of the Company will be addressed after the meeting closes.
Finally, due to time constraints, we may not get to answer all of your questions. If this happens, we will answer them in due course by email or by posting responses on our website. For those of you online, if you are eligible to vote, once voting opens, select the vote icon, and all resolutions are activated with voting options. To cast your vote, simply select one of the options. There's no need to hit a submit or enter button, as the vote is automatically recorded. You will receive a vote confirmation notification on your screen. You can change your vote up until the time that I declare the voting closed. Voting today will be conducted by way of a poll on all items of business. In order to provide you with enough time to vote, I will shortly open the voting.
The proxy votes already received are contained in our presentation today and will be displayed on screen at the appropriate time. All undirected proxies will be voted by me in favor of resolutions one to seven, to the extent that I am permitted to do so. I now declare the voting open. For online participants, the voting tab will soon appear. Please submit your votes at any time. I will give you a warning before I move to close voting. We now come to the formal business of the meeting. As set out in the notice of meeting, there are seven resolutions of ordinary business and special business to be considered today. The resolutions have been outlined in the explanatory memorandum that was included with the notice of meeting. Each resolution will be put to the meeting.
Shareholder questions that are submitted, which are relevant to the resolution, will be addressed by me. I will then advise the number of proxy votes received on each resolution before moving to the next item of business. Resolution one to seven, set out in the notice of meeting, are to be considered as ordinary resolutions, and as such, must be approved by a simple majority of the votes cast by shareholders. Once the voting is closed, Computershare, our share registry provider, will tabulate the results, which will be released as soon as possible today on the ASX. Those results will also be displayed on our company website once available. Ladies and gentlemen, a copy of the notice of meeting and explanatory statement containing the resolutions to be considered today were provided to shareholders last month.
I will take the notice of meeting as read, and I now move to the formal agenda of the meeting. Item one is to receive and consider the annual financial report of the Company for the financial year ended 30 June 2025, together with the declaration of the directors, the directors' report, and the remuneration report and the auditor's report. The reports are contained in the annual report, which was released to the ASX on 21 August 2025. I will take the reports as read and now formally lay them before the meeting. I now invite shareholders to comment or ask questions on the reports of the Company. Questions may be asked of the auditor about the conduct of the audit, the content of the audit report, accounting policies adopted by the Company, and the independence of the auditor in carrying out the audit. Are there any comments or questions?
Thank you, Madam Chairman. George Former is my name. I'm a Director of Faircade Proprietary Limited. I've only just received the annual report today, so I've just had a quick look at it. There's a few things there that confuse me. On one page, we have that we have a gross profit of AUD 162 million. We go to page 15, and it tells me we have an AUD 3 million loss. One contradicts the other. I don't understand why that's the case. I notice that there's about AUD 20 million worth of shares that have been directed to the directors in the last year, which I think is a bit excessive. The other question was, you've got a couple of new directors standing. I hear they're very into technology. Do we have any directors that are business people, know how to run a company, how to make a company profitable?
We've got a company that in one place tells me we're making a profit, but there's no dividend going out to shareholders. The directors would be better to have a dividend coming into them rather than giving them bonus shares because that's only going to create capital gains tax for them, etc. A frank dividend is a much better placement for the directors as well. Thank you.
I'll break some of those questions. I think on the financial report related to the property, it's probably just best taken offline. We can walk you through the differences there. The directors have received some shares as part of their remuneration package that was in from a prior year that they were granted some shares. That's a good thing because it aligns directors' interests with the broader shareholders. Pardon? No, it's a capital issue. This is a growth company. We're not at the stage where we're going to be paying dividends anytime soon. I think the financial results have been really excellent. That has been proven under Michael's leadership. We have had a turnaround. I think maybe we can again take offline and talk you through some more aspects of the business. Oh, sorry, you're asking about the directors' experience.
The experience of the directors is written up in the annual report and in the notice of meeting. We've got quite a few number of directors who are all business people who are all running businesses. Myself, I'm more of a governance person, but you've got Mohit, Glo, Jay, and Mike Klayko are all business operators. A lot of experience running businesses. Thank you. Any other questions?
With the recent decline in the share price, maybe the market doesn't agree with what you're saying.
There's been a general sell-off in the tech sector. A lot of people would probably have heard about people have been sort of fluctuating around with the AI sort of theme. We're not—we get caught up in that, but really, it doesn't necessarily directly relate to our own results. I think if you look at the underlying performance of the business, we're on a great trajectory. We will always get sort of buffered around to some extent, particularly by what's happening in US markets because a lot of our revenue comes from there. That is a share price thing rather than a business performance thing per se. It shouldn't stop us from focusing on performance of the business. Any other questions on it? Okay. If there's no more questions on that, I'll move to the formal resolutions.
The first resolution in the notice of meeting is an advisory non-binding resolution required by the Corporations Act in relation to the adoption of the remuneration report, which forms part of Megaport's annual report. The remuneration report is set out on page 29 to 55 of the 2025 annual report and provides information on executive and director remuneration. The resolution is displayed on screen. Are there any comments or questions in the room on this resolution? Any comments or questions? Sorry, do we have any comments online or audio?
No, there are no questions.
Okay. Thank you. If there's no questions, the proxy votes received in relation to this resolution are going to be displayed on screen. Voting exclusions apply to this resolution as set out in the notice of meeting. The directors abstain in the interest of corporate governance from making a recommendation in relation to resolution one. Thank you. We'll move to resolution two. Resolution two relates to the re-election of Mr. Jay Adelson as director of the Company. The resolution being considered is displayed on screen. Jay's background, qualifications, and experience appear in the explanatory memorandum to the notice of meeting. For the reasons set out in the explanatory memorandum, Jay has the full support of the board for his re-election. Are there any comments or questions in the room regarding Jay's re-election? No? Thank you. Celia, were there any comments or questions online?
No, there are no comments or questions.
Okay. Thank you. As there's no questions, the proxy votes received in relation to this resolution are now on screen. Are going to be displayed on screen. The directors, with Jay abstaining, recommend that you vote in favour of resolution two. Thank you. We'll move to resolution three. Resolution three relates to the election of Mr. Grant Dempsey as Director of the Company. The resolution being considered is displayed on the screen. Grant's background, qualifications, and experience appear in the explanatory memorandum to the notice of meeting. For the reasons set out in the explanatory memorandum, Grant has the full support of the board for his election. Are there any questions in the room regarding Grant's election?
I'm just looking here that he doesn't currently hold any shares in the company. Is that correct?
I'd have to confirm that with Celia, but he is still a relatively new director, so he has got time under our minimum shareholding policy to buy shares. Celia, any online or audio questions on Grant?
No, there are no questions.
Okay. Thank you. As there's no further questions, the proxy votes received in relation to this resolution are now displayed on screen. The directors, with Grant abstaining, recommend you vote in favour of resolution three. We'll now move to resolution four, which relates to the election of Mr. Mohit Lad as director of the Company. The resolution being considered is displayed on screen. Mohit's background, qualifications, and experience appear in the explanatory memorandum to the notice of meeting for the reasons set out in the explanatory memorandum. Mohit has the full support of the board for his re-election. Are there any comments or questions in the room regarding Mohit's election? None? Thank you. Celia, do we have any comments online or audio?
No questions online.
Okay. Thank you. As there's no questions, the proxy votes received in relation to this resolution are now on screen. The directors, with Mohit abstaining, recommend that you vote in favor of resolution four. Thank you. We'll now go to the special business items. Resolution five relates to the approval of the employee share plan and the issue of securities under the employee share plan. The resolution being considered is displayed on screen. Are there any comments or questions in the room regarding resolution five? None? Thank you. Any questions online or audio?
No, there are no questions online.
Thank you. As there's no questions, the proxy votes received in relation to this resolution are now on screen. Voting exclusions apply to this resolution as set out in the notice of meeting. The directors unanimously recommend that you vote in favor of resolution five. I'll now move to resolution six, which relates to the new non-executive directors' equity program. The program provides non-executive directors with an opportunity to acquire shares in Megaport through the sacrifice of up to 100% of their directors' fees. The resolution being considered is displayed on screen. Are there any comments or questions relating to resolution six in the room? No? Thank you. Any questions online or audio?
No, there are no questions online.
Thank you. There are no further questions. The proxy votes relating to resolution six will appear on screen. Voting exclusions apply to this resolution as set out in the notice of meeting. The directors abstain in the interest of corporate governance from making a recommendation in relation to resolution six. I'll now move to resolution seven, which relates to the grant of PSR used to Mr. Michael Reid. Resolution seven relates to the grant of short-term and long-term incentive performance-restricted stock units to the CEO, Michael Reid. The resolution being considered is displayed on screen. Are there any comments or questions in the room regarding resolution seven? Thank you. Are there any questions on audio or online?
There are no questions.
Okay. Thank you. As there are no questions, the proxy votes received in relation to this resolution are now on screen. The directors, with Michael abstaining, recommend that you vote in favor of resolution seven. I'd like to advise that voting on resolutions one to seven will close shortly. I now ask shareholders, proxy holders, corporate representatives holding blue voting cards to complete the card if you have not already done so to finalize your poll votes. I will provide you all with a few minutes now to allow you to finish voting. For those of you here in Brisbane, a member of Computershare will collect your voting card. Please finalize your voting now. Thank you. I now declare the poll closed. This means that the business of the meeting has been concluded and the results will be announced to the ASX later today.
On behalf of the board, I'd like to thank you all for attending and your participation today to you in the room and online. I'd also like to thank all of our shareholders, those participating or not be able to be present, our suppliers and customers, the executive leadership team globally, and our advisors and auditors. This brings the formal proceedings to an end, and I now declare the meeting closed. Shareholders are now invited to ask general questions about the business and management of the company. We'll take questions for around up to, sort of say, 20 minutes or so. If anyone would like to ask questions, I'll try and either answer them myself or direct them to the appropriate person.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to ask questions again. Earlier, you were talking a little bit about your acquisition of Latitude, and you were talking a little bit about the benefits of that in the current AI boom. I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about some of the benefits that we might continue to see after that dies down a little bit, some of the other industries maybe that that might be beneficial for. If that's okay. Thank you.
I'll let Michael talk to that one.
Just confirming the question is more after the AI boom, what happens? There is no AI boom. This is just standard practice, I think, in the world. No, I'm just kidding. The world is on fire from an AI perspective. What I'll draw your attention to is if you're familiar with the cloud boom, which occurred maybe 15 years ago, whenever it was, when AWS first came into being, that was a very similar experience to what we're going through now. The difference is it's happening significantly faster. I'd say everything's happening faster in the world. Two things is one is if you look at there's something like 200 and something billion dollars per annum of revenue, ARR, recurring revenue, and growing at 20%-30% for cloud providers providing traditional compute platforms. The AI boom is GPUs.
It's actually a very similar technology in that it's a compute function and it's servicing a different workload, which is AI. What you'll see over time is those AI workloads are becoming more and more embedded in companies and will continue very similar to what you've seen with cloud providers. Specifically on Latitude and what that means for us, Latitude has two parts of the business. One is very boring and has been around for a long period of time, and that is compute. That is basically every single application that every one of you in the room has ever accessed or utilized, every application except for one being ChatGPT, every other application runs on compute. Latitude actually delivers compute stacks automated to service applications that every single one of us use from an enterprise perspective or in our personal lives.
The application that we're sharing this video content on is all run on compute, not on GPUs. AI is leading us more to GPUs, and compute has been there for a very long time, 40 plus years, and will continue. Today, Latitude is delivering a lot of its services in that space. It opens us up to the AI GPU market as well in a very, very explosive way. We will grow both parts of that business. One is kind of boring and consistent and been around for 40 years, and one is emerging, but it's very, very similar to the same outcomes that are delivered here. It's just a different application, if that makes sense. Hopefully that and both of them are forever. These are infinite companies.
Hi, Nick Harris, Morgan's shareholder. I'm just interested. I wasn't sure if the US directors are able to talk online. I was, yeah, great. Thank you. It's obviously a great addition to have Mohit Lad join the board. He's clearly a very successful US tech entrepreneur. I was just hoping we could hear from him as to what prompted him to join the board and what opportunity he sees ahead with Megaport. Thanks.
Hi, this is Mohit. Yeah, I can spend a minute on this. First off, I do believe, and this is also the premise of the company ThousandEyes that I founded, that connectivity is everything. It is super critical to provide safe and secure connectivity to achieve not only what consumers are seeking, but also what businesses are. Even through the journey of ThousandEyes, I was constantly hearing about Megaport. Since Michael joined Megaport, I started to just pay more attention to what was happening with the business, and the opportunity ahead of providing this platform was just super compelling. In addition, I'm also excited about the acquisitions and the growth trajectory that Megaport is providing. Most importantly, I feel like the market has so much opportunity that we haven't yet achieved.
The growth and the focus in the U.S. and European markets is critical, and that's where Michael's expertise has been really helpful. Excited about the prospects of the business. I do feel like the product is very strong, and I feel the developments and the directions that the company is heading is absolutely the right focus areas. Hopefully, this helps.
Thanks, Mohit. Other questions?
I've got three questions. Firstly, is it an impact dividend? Your share price must be influenced by people doing trading the stock. The second part is eventually into India, are you going to be using facial recognition or fingerprint recognition in any of your software there?
No. Apparently, no. Sorry, what's the first part of the question? The train stop. Look, one of the things the board does monitor is short selling of the stock. There was a time last year, can't actually remember which month it was, that we did get actually quite high. That's a common feature of the Australian market that investors, certain types of investors, will borrow against particularly highly liquid stock where they see volatility. Having been in the past quite a volatile stock, that made us more susceptible to that. Particularly now where we've had a turnaround, we've had more stronger performance, we've had more consistency, great leadership, etc., that's gone away. You will always get some investors just trading stock. For now, we're actually in a really good space.
I think the last time I looked, it was something like only less than 2% potentially. It is a feature of the market. We're not immune to it. The best thing is to just deliver on performance of the business.
Thank you. Michael, you interviewed the founder of Latitude a year ago, actually. It was a fascinating clip. It's on your website. It's on YouTube as well. Did that start the interest from that point? I mean, you've had a fair few other interviews. Is that going to lead to other acquisitions? That's a bit of a joke, actually. Interestingly, it's not alone. There are other compute and service businesses that haven't been as successful as it. What do you think the secret sauce is? And is it able to be sustained as it grows 50%, 50%, 50% like they've been doing, or does it start to dilute that secret sauce?
Maybe the last question, an extension of that, you said at a conference recently that you thought there would be a lot of money to be made out of the compute, sorry, the software that sits on top of the compute with AI. Is this like a natural extension of that? So maybe.
Yes. Yeah, great questions. He's referring to a podcast that I released, so I wouldn't suggest that we're acquiring everything in that podcast because there's probably a lot of companies. Actually, I'll give you the quick story on Latitude and how we came to find Latitude. When we launched 100-gig connectivity, I can't remember when it was, maybe a year and a half, two years ago, it felt like. Someone in the room might be able to correct me at the exact date. Basically, we weren't sure whether the world was ready for beyond 10-gig connectivity. When I stepped into the role, we started building out these massive 400-gig rings all around the world. One of those things is you never know if it's really there until you've built it and you actually see the success.
We placed bets to say, actually, we believe that there's going to be this insatiable growth from a network connectivity requirement. It was early days of AI at that point in time. There was always people never sure. The very first connection that ran up was this 100-gig connection from Miami to New York. The engineering team in here were all telling me, "Oh, no one's ever going to use 100 gig. It's so big. No one could possibly use that much connectivity." The very first customer that we had on it used all of it instantly. Darren, I don't know where he's not in the room, but he came running in with this chart and he showed us that this company had actually maxed out this 100-gig connection.
To me, it was fascinating because I was like, "Firstly, we built this thing for that, hoping that it would occur, and the second we launched it, it started happening." We had never heard of this company. It is not like someone that had been working with us. They just saw the connectivity availability, procured it online, and then just actually smashed it. I was thinking I wanted to have a conversation with who it was. I was like, "If they are doing this, maybe other people would do that." That was the first time I met Guy, who was the person we interviewed. Latitude.sh was the company that was doing that. At the time, they were small. They were growing really quickly, but they were very early days.
When I first engaged with the company, what we realized was, you're right, there's lots of companies out there that do networks. There's lots of companies out there that do compute. But there's only one company on the planet that does highly automated network infrastructure at global scale. We do that with a very, very small team. We have 3,000 different physical devices deployed across 1,000 different data centers. We have 6,000 pieces of fiber connected back into those infrastructure. We have 30,000 connections changing every second with 3,000 customers. It is in 26 countries. Not a single human, not a single human touches any of that. It is totally 100% automated and delivered via code. It is the only way we could make this business successful. It is the secret sauce for Megaport.
When I met Latitude, they had the exact same thing, but for compute. They had this incredible software layer automating high-performance compute in 10 countries, in 20 locations, without a single human touching it. Actually, the two companies are identical in terms of what we do. We automate infrastructure at scale in data centers. When you look at what we service, the customers that procure Megaport, they are connecting a server in a data center to either a server in the cloud or a server in the data center to another data center. What we added is now we have compute, the servers, we have the network element, and then there is a storage element that sits in the middle that you stitch the three of those together. We are building and focusing around how we deliver storage in that element.
The question then goes, well, what differentiates them? If you have a look on their platform, and I did a few demos when we shared this, we deliver network in 60 seconds. They deliver physical compute in any of those locations in five seconds. So Megaport's got some work to do. We need to increase the speed at which we deploy our networks to catch up with the compute platforms. Just wrapping your mind around that, that is absolutely astounding. Every competitor that you typically come across in what we call bare metal space, the way you procure is you send them an order and say it's for a whole 100 Dell servers that you'd like to run. Maybe it's the Morgan's crew who wants to get their compute stack. Instead of you guys running it or having it in the cloud, you send an order to them.
They buy 100 Dell servers. Three months later, they get them delivered. That company will install them physically for you, and then they will hand you the keys to it. You are sort of three months away from ever getting that infrastructure. With Latitude, you are five seconds away. That is the difference. It is purely on-demand and scalable, just like Megaport. We come from the same ethos. When we started talking, we found this sort of connection between the two companies that made sense. Early on, they were looking for capital. They were very, very strapped for capital. The company was 100% bootstrapped. The founders had actually basically done it all themselves without any support, which is quite astounding, particularly in the market time that they did that.
As you know, it's 50% CAGR growth inside that with the capital intensity that they were funding without any external investment. Quite astounding. We give them an opportunity to not only scale that to the world, but also to our existing customers. We also provide a more consistent way of accessing capital in the business. You went to the last question, answering all four of them at once. What do you do? How do you deal with the growth and the continued capital intensity? Can you continue to grow? The answer is the market is so big. If you think of compute today, that is something like $200 billion per annum. If you look at the GPU space, which is the AI space, that thing is exploding so fast.
I couldn't even give you a number of what it is because it'll be wrong tomorrow. You have these two sort of elements that play out. The question then becomes, well, you could throw infinite capital at it. The answer is yes, but we have discretion in terms of how we control the capital allocation, which we'll be incredibly disciplined around. In effect, what you can do is control the growth, what rate, to ensure that your cash flow is covered off. Massive returns, but if you overrotate and scale too quickly, you'll have a cash deficit for that period. We have an ability to control that, which is in the acquisition details, which is online. You can see, I think for every dollar you put into this business, you get a three return.
I think it's a, I can't remember the, what's that return, Kyle, in terms of months we shared? I don't want to say the wrong number. It's 18 months, yeah. 18 months returned for every dollar of capital you put in, you get a three times return. Hopefully, that answered it. It's actually an exciting space to be because we've never found another. It's so hard to find a company when it comes to acquisition that you've got to get the Goldilocks scenario. You've got to get the right size. You've got to get the right culture. You can't pay too much for them. You've got to find a structure that makes sense when you do acquire them. If you look at the structure, the founders have made a massive bet on Megaport. They've taken all their stock, which they can't sell for one year.
They then have taken earnings. Only 50% is paid upfront, and the remaining 50% is attributed to earnings of pretty significant growth targets inside the business and retention for the third year, along with some integration. That's very hard to find.
Yeah. Thanks.
Any more questions? No? Any questions online?
Questions online.
Okay. It's the smell of the sausages. Thank you, everybody. That's been great to everybody. Please stay for lunch and please keep chatting to anyone from the Megaport team before leaving.