and Letitia Dorman, interim CFO, with us to take us through the presentation. This will be followed by Q&A. For those that would like to raise your hand, we'll let you ask those questions live when we get to questions. We might hand over to Michael to take us through the presentation.
Fantastic. Well, thank you, Steve, and thank you all for joining us online for the investor presentation, FY23 full year results. We've got a packed agenda, so we're going to go straight into it. We're going through company highlights. I'm going to pass over to Tish, sitting next to me here, for the annual results. We're going to walk through the business update and straight into outlook and guidance. All right, let's start off with FY23 highlights, and what a call out here. Revenue $153.1 million. That's up 40% year-over-year, an additional $43.4 million coming in from a revenue perspective.
What you'll note here, which is incredibly exciting, is gross profit is growing faster than revenue at 52% year-on-year growth, up to $103.9 million, up $35.6 million. Normalized EBITDA, I'm going to talk about this shortly, but this is a monumental milestone for Megaport. $20.2 billion, our first ever full year of positive EBITDA, up $30.4 million. Our net cash flow position, whilst down $34.5 million, saw a massive turnaround in the latter half of the year, and particularly in Q4. We're going to walk through that. We're up 31% or an additional $15.4 million from a net cash flow perspective year-on-year. Breakdown from a revenue standpoint, we talked about the $153 million.
North America is our largest market. $85.4 million of revenue coming from that region. That represents 56% of our global revenue, and it's our fastest growing market at 48% year-on-year. Folks, we're only just scratching the surface, which is why you'll see us continually investing in that space moving forward. Asia Pacific, which is our most mature market, $43.4 million, up 30%. That represents 28% of the global business. EMEA up 32%, $24.3 million, clocking at 16% of our global revenue. Our normalized EBITDA, I called it out before, this is our highest on record. What a turnaround and attribute to the success of the Megaport team. I want to thank everyone for their efforts here. Up to $20.2 million.
You can see the turnaround between FY19, 2020, 2021, and 2022, just that great green line there that we're incredibly excited to share. Moving into the net cash flow. As I, as I've mentioned, net cash flow for the year was down $34.5 million. The real story is when we expand that out and we start to look at. Sorry, Steve, I'll get you to move over a little bit there. If you get to, we've expanded out the FY23 number and broken it down by quarter, you can see Q1, Q2, Q3, all negative. The turnaround that occurred late Q3, big shout out to our Chairman, Bevan Slattery, big to help us turn that business around clocked in at $2.3 million of net cash flow positive.
I want to call out that that includes the redundancy payouts of $2.6 million. After paying out $2.6 million, we clocked at a $2.3 million net cash flow positive position for Q4. We are calling net cash flow positive for FY24, and we're going to talk about that further in this, in this, in the deck today. That leaves us with a net cash position of $33.3 million. All right, let's move into the annual results, and using some very advanced AI technology, I'm going to beam in our CFO.
Thank you, Michael, for that incredible demonstration of technology. The financial results for Megaport for FY23 are impressive. The revenue growth of 40% is really driven by the organic growth and then some Cloud VXC price increase, which we announced in March. The direct network costs, in contrast, have only grown by 6%. That's incredible, and that really reflects that drive of the business, particularly in the latter half of the year, across all contracts and every negotiation, to really take that down, to manage that cost control efforts to pull us into FY24. The partner commissions are only up 1% when you compare that to as a percentage of revenue year-on-year, that does see new partners and managed service providers bringing us those opportunities throughout FY23.
Operating expenditure is also a very amazing turnaround story, which is driven by the cost control across all areas, which we'll touch on in the next slide. Now, employee costs, in particular, is not just the reclassification from the decision to pay staff their performance incentives with stock instead of cash. It's also part of that continued cost reduction activities and really reassessing how we pay our staff and key executives. Marketing costs were up, which is really, you can see, driven by return to conference activities. It's also some third-party consultants in the first half of the year going into FY24, and in the latter part of FY23, we have really focused on investing in those activities that give us an incredible ROI.
Professional fees, travel costs, other operating expenditure, has also been driven by the focus on cost reductions, so you have seen all areas reduce compared to FY22. The cash flow is also a key highlight for me. In particular, the operating cash activities is the net inflow for the full year of $10.2 million. That is a direct result of that correlation of higher revenue for the year, but also the lower operating costs from the cost out program. Investing activities are also down, which is a direct correlation to that lower expenditure on actual equipment compared to FY22 as we make use of our inventory stock. Financing activities have increased, which is a direct result of the increased net repayments under the vendor finance facility. However, there is also reduced proceeds from exercise of employee share options in comparison to FY22.
Capital expenditure is another area which I know we've touched on previously. However, I do want to highlight that we had invested heavily in the inventory stock levels to support the rollout of equipment to deploy to the network, which is not just upgrades, but also replacement for existing locations. We have continued to invest by holding that stock within our , so we will continue to do so in FY24, utilizing existing stock and making purchase of key items of technology as required. The financial position, the call-out here again, is that net cash position that we're now in for as at 30th June 2023. That cash is in, you can see in that line item, however, the vendor financing liability sits between current liabilities and non-current liabilities.
The overall story, from my view, would be really that you can see that incredible performance compared to FY22 in the revenue line. When you contrast that to the minor growth in the direct network costs, which is the cost of operating that entire network to support that revenue growth, and also the activities of the entire organization to really focus on that cost reduction across all OpEx activities. Majority of that revenue growth has really hit that bottom line for both gross profit and EBITDA. The operating leverage that we're leaning into for FY24, when you look at that month of June compared to previous years, is again a really telling tale across all those categories. Revenue has gone up, gross profit has gone up, and the EBITDA has started to come up, particularly for the normalized EBITDA.
Not started to, you can really see the journey there. I'll hand over to Michael for a great business update.
Fantastic. Thank you, Tish. All right, you go seamless. Okay, of course, we should kick off with what is a pirate's favorite metric? Arrrrr. Just pause and give you a chance to stop laughing, and then we'll keep going. Obviously, a little dad joke there. We're, we're known for them here at Megaport. Annual Recurring Revenue, folks. We shared this at the 27th of June, but we-- I will, I've got a little laser pointer. They've allowed me to have a laser pointer. So over here on the right, you'll see $179 million of Annual Recurring Revenue for Megaport. If we break it down to $100 million of Annual Recurring Revenue for North America, that's a significant milestone that we've crossed. If you look at that, we're up 45% year-over-year.
It's an amazing achievement to cross that $100 million mark. Nearly $50 million in Asia Pacific, our most mature market, up 25%. Again, a significant milestone there as we get close to crossing that $50 million mark, and $29 million in EMEA, up 46%. Customers. One thing that astounds me, I get an opportunity to go and meet a whole range of our incredible customers, our partners, our managed service providers, et cetera. Just the sheer diversity of our customer set is astounding. From the largest of the Fortune 100, through to government critical infrastructure around the world, to small businesses who leverage the cloud, to cloud-native companies, you name it, across the board, Megaport has 2,856 direct customers on Megaport.
That's 1,600 in North America, 1,051 in Asia Pacific, 578 in EMEA. You can see that they track very similarly to the annual recurring revenue. We're going to pivot or change gears, should we say, just for a moment, if you can bear with me. I wanted to give you a perspective of what it's like for a customer without Megaport, and transition you into a customer that does have Megaport, to articulate the value that we provide, but also share the product standpoint so that we're going to go into those product KPIs, et cetera, moving forward in this session. I want you to be aware of what that means.
I understand that not everyone on this call is going to be in tech, but what I would do is just, just walk through this with me if you're okay. I'm going to draw your attention down to the bottom left. This is our customer data center. These data centers sit inside colocation facilities, so all of our data center partners. We have 800 of these. If you didn't have Megaport, you would have a customer facility that sits here. What you can see is this is compute, storage, and network that a customer has provided, and you can see it's broken down in all these different hardware investments. They're running their applications inside their data center, and for the past decade, we've seen this connectivity towards cloud, Azure, GCP, AWS, and there's no one cloud to rule them all.
There's this space that you're constantly having to connect to multiple. If you look at this breakout here for the business, they're going to have to connect a whole range of carriage and service provider contracts. This is their one data center. They probably have others. They need to connect to those other data centers. They need to get prices for connectivity for each of these clouds. It could take you roughly 2 weeks to get a price. It probably takes you 2 weeks -3 weeks to actually go through a procurement process with that particular telco. You then probably after, let's say, you've made a decision, you've then got 6 weeks -7 weeks to go and deploy each of these services. You've also to go and connect inside your branches as well. What you have is a whole range of contracts.
Most of them are going to be multi-year contracts. Each of them are going to be different, depending on the carrier in each location. You're physically connecting them into your infrastructure. You're managing all of that complexity. You're buying infrastructure inside your data centers to run that, it takes a long time to go and execute against that. That's a customer that basically doesn't have access to Megaport. I'm going to mix this to a bit of a busy slide, I'm going to walk you through it slowly, stay with me. This is a customer that has Megaport, just contrast that. We're in the same data center over here on the left. However, what you see is this Megaport infrastructure that we've invested in. 800 data centers we connect into Megaport from. Here is that customer.
You'll see a reduction in the infrastructure that they need to procure, and all they need, instead of all the previous connections that you saw, each one with a different contract, each one in a different country, could be different carriers, et cetera. All they need to get to Megaport, around 26 countries around the globe, is this one connection. This is a cross connect in the data center, and it comes to our port. This is the port that Megaport constantly refers to. Megaport. This is the Megaport. Once you're in this port, you'll see our two diverse connections into this massive Megaport network that we've spent the past 10 years building out. This is incredible for competitors to try and access what we deliver. It's a phenomenal investment that's continuing to grow.
As Tish said, the operational efficiency that we have on that existing investment is astounding. Once you're inside that network, you can see we do all the complexity for you. We connect you to every single cloud provider around the world and across the globe in many different ways. We connect you to 800 different data centers. Here's that one connection. You grab that port, you spin that port up in 60 seconds, and then you take what we call a VXC or a Virtual Cross Connect, and then you can connect into any 1 of those clouds and spin that up. I'm going to also talk about Megaport Virtual Edge, MVE. Now, what you have down here is customers that have branch locations that need to...
They might be running SD-WAN, as an example, and they're crossing into the Internet. How do you go and access all of these same cloud providers? With Megaport Virtual Edge, in less than 60 seconds, you can spin up all the major vendors inside our platform and give a direct connection into our network. What's interesting about this is there is no need for a Megaport port. You can actually access it through this MVE. The same from a Megaport Cloud Router perspective. This gives you access into the Megaport network. As I mentioned before, there's no one cloud to rule them all. You might have had a decision to go down AWS's path, and then you've got Office 365, so you've got Azure, you're going to expand into that space.
GCP is adding a huge amount of value in different areas, and you're constantly managing those different ones. Oracle steps into the scene, IBM, et cetera, and you tag, and, and, and it continues. What happens is you've got data that sits in one cloud, and then you need to move it to the other cloud. Now, you can do this without Megaport, of course. You can leverage the Internet, but you have to pay for the exit costs, which are called egress. MCR reduces your egress costs by up to 40%. You can spin it up in less than 60% seconds, and you can connect it to any one of those clouds. So we also have some other, other components called Internet Exchange and our ecosystem.
I won't go into that now, but what I am going to try and do is switch this to a demo and show you the power of the platform. Now, bear with me, I just have to stop screen sharing. Make sure I don't cancel what I'm doing. Change the screen. All right. Let's bring up this. Okay. All right. Hopefully, you're seeing what I've got here. This is the Megaport Portal. You can see it's a very clean portal. There's not much going on. What I'm going to go and do is I'm going to add a port. Let's start by creating a port. I click that Create Port. I'm going to pick a location. We'll go into the United States. I'm going to now choose a data center. 800 data centers to choose from. Let's go to CyrusOne. Let's pick CyrusOne 1 .
Let's pick Austin. We'll click Next. All right, let's pick a port speed. We'll go 10 gig. We'll give it a port name. Michael Anthony Reid , that's my name. I've just approved this as live. It's 10:49 on my iPhone. There we go. We'll scroll through. This video is in my way. Let's move that to the side so I can see the screen. All right, there we go. Click Next. I'm going to click Add the port. Over here in our cart on the left, you can see that port-to-grid race order. I click on Order. There it is. We're ordering that service. Ordering now. As you can see, we're deploying. What have I done?
I've gone into a data center in Austin, into CyrusOne, and I've gone and deployed a port on inside our physical infrastructure that our customers can now connect straight into. Once you've got that port, and it takes 60 seconds to go and deploy, you can then access anywhere inside that Megaport network. We're deploying. Let me just give you a viewpoint on our... I'll talk you through this. Sorry, is it better? Too many things to share. Regardless, let's go here. It's all been deployed. I'm just going to grab our service. There's the Megaport, Michael Anthony Reed, 10:49 deployed. That's the port that's been deployed inside the CyrusOne, Austin. We're obviously just waiting for the resource to be allocated, but it's up and it's running.
What I wanted to do is basically connect a connection from that port for our VXC to AWS. I can click on this connection up here, we can add there's 1,000 different connections we could go to, or I can just quickly go down here and click AWS. I'm going to go through here, I'm going to scroll down, I'm going to click Hosted Connection. I'm going to pick I don't want, I don't need to, not go into the United States. We'll keep it in the same terrestrial land, we'll go... Let's go East Coast, we'll go, there we are, Virginia, East Coast, we'll deploy that. We're connecting into AWS, and we're going to do that in less than 60 seconds. Let me just connect the name. Let's call it MIR VXC.
We're going to pick a rate limit. Let's go 1 GB. Click Next. Give it an AWS account. This is your AWS account specific to you. Next, add the VXC. It goes into our cart over here. We order the VXC, and away we go. There it is. We've actually-- What we've done is ordered a port, and then we've connected a VXC into that AWS platform, and we've done that in probably a couple of minutes. Now, compare that to possibly 10 weeks of time to work with your existing carrier, and the fact that you can spin those up and down. There you go. It's done. It's very, very simple. It's CEO-proof, evidently.
Under 20 seconds.
Under 20 seconds. Okay, there you go. Let me, let me go and get this sharing sorted out again as I switch you back. Oops, new share. Okay. Bear with me. How does that look? We're back? We're back! We did it. I think, when I first stepped into the role, I basically sent out a questionnaire to all of our customers, asking them one word to describe Megaport. It's always good when you step into a company, you ask people: "What do you think Megaport is?" Everyone tells you, "It's easy, it's simple, it's flexible." This is from 227 customers of ours, responded to that survey with one word to describe Megaport. As you can see that: easy, simple, dependable, reliable, flexible, agile, amazing.
You can actually see that, that's in the deck, and you can look through some of those one words. We've also got customers that added multiple words because they loved us so much, and you can see that through there. We're going to go down a little bit, another slight rabbit hole, shall we say. I want to go into detail around cloud service provider, 100 gig port expansion, and then the 10 gig consolidation. If I look back to a number of the different earnings calls prior, I will see that it got confusing around what is cloud service provider port consolidation, how does that play out from a port count perspective? I'm mindful that there's a lot on this slide, so I'm going to walk you through it slowly. There's 3 phases: Phase one, phase two, phase three.
Let's just start with phase one here on the left. When we look at a Megaport data center, that's this bottom dotted line here. This is where we put our physical infrastructure into a data center. We allow a customer to access that port. Now, I just showed you how quickly a customer can access that port. That's a 10 gig port that they've just gone and turned on. We did that in less than 60 seconds. They get access to the Megaport network. What I did is I ran a VXC to AWS, which was from this customer through, into this cloud service provider that we have at the top. The great news is, clouds actually don't live in the sky, they live in physical data centers.
They are physical infrastructure, as someone would say, it's just someone else's PC or computer inside a physical data center. Well, we live inside those data centers, too, and we provide the connection. We have a port that connects into that cloud service provider. That sort of orientates you. Phase two, what happens? We start to grow customers inside that data center. More take out 10 gig ports, et cetera, et cetera, and we need to increase the capacity that we have into our cloud service providers. You now see 6 10 gig connections into that cloud service provider. Just to be clear, these purple lines are costs to Megaport. The purple lines down the bottom are actually, the customers would pay for that access to us. We pay for this connectivity into the cloud service provider.
We charge a VXC to a customer to go across it. Let's go to phase III, where we've scaled the business appropriately inside those data centers. This is where we take 10 gig ports, consolidate them down to a single 100 gig port. Obviously, that gives you 10 times the capacity. In this particular example, we've actually reduced six ports and added one. It looks like we're short five ports, but the capacity has gone up. If you look at how that plays out, CSP port consolidation across the top, our revenue goes up, our capacity goes up, our ports go down from a quantity of ports, and our costs also go down. This is a really good thing for Megaport, continuing to consolidate those costs down to bigger links.
It also gives our customers the ability to scale up significantly larger connections into those cloud service providers. Moving into growth in customer ports. Let's walk you through what that looks like, and we've broken out for the first time those cloud service provider ports, CSP ports, and our customer ports. Getting a little bit technical, but I think it's worth going into, folks. The darker blue represents the customer ports. The lighter blue, white, if you want to call it that, represents the cloud service provider ports, and you can see those compressing at the top. That's a very good thing. When we look at the total customer ports and talk about year-on-year growth for total customer ports, we're at 9,172. That's 8% year-on-year.
If we go into total cloud service provider ports, we're at 791. That's actually a reduction of 26%. That is a good thing because it reduces our cost. Here's, here's where it should come home. Aggregate cloud service provider port capacity, whilst reducing the number of ports by 26%, we are up 32% from a capacity to 27 Tb. Hopefully that gives you a perspective on it. I've, I've broken it out here. Here's an FY22, 278 cloud on-ramps, FY23, 284 up. 10 gig cloud service provider ports, down 383 from FY22 to FY23, and yet up here, 100 gig and 400 gig ports in FY23. Taking that capacity, as I talked about before, from 21 Tb, up 6 Tb per second to 27.
You can see we've increased the value that we can offer to our customers whilst reducing our costs down. I think this is the appropriate focus point here is growth in total services. Remember, you can access Megaport not just by a port. You can use MVE or MCR from an access perspective, and then it's the total services that you run across that. We're at 30,516 services, up 11% year-on-year. 10.7 services per customer, and you can see AUD 5,853 is the annual recurring revenue per service, up 25%, and you can see how that's been trending over time. It's a beautiful slide. Megaport Cloud Router and Megaport Virtual Edge. You indulged me before when I talked through some more technical slides.
This is the Megaport Cloud Router and the Megaport Virtual Edge product set. The darker blue is MCR. You can see when we introduced that product set in June 2018, you can see how rapidly it's been growing inside the business, and you can see the same when we added in MVE. Now, what I do want to highlight is this average services per customer. If you're a port-only customer, only have a port with Megaport, you have about 9.6 services. If you're a more sophisticated customer in terms of your engagement with Megaport, you've understood the value that we provide. You look at going to MCR, you've got 15.1 services. If you go to MVE, we find that customers take out 20.5. The more sophisticated they use...
The customer that uses our technology in a more sophisticated way, I should say, gives us an opportunity to add more and more services. Well, how does that translate from an ARR perspective? $54,000 is if you just have a port and a VXC. You 2x that, nearly 2x that when you add an MCR to the equation, and you can almost, or you can over 3x that when you get to the MVE equation. What does that mean? MVE and MCR are significantly more bang for their buck, and it's a great opportunity to help go back to our customer base and articulate the value that we bring there. We're getting into, quickly, some key metrics. We're nearly towards the end, folks, so thank you for hanging in there. Let me just draw your attention to the right. Aggregate customer lifetime value.
This is the lifetime value of all of our customer base added together over time from June 2019 to June 2023. We've crossed over $1 billion of aggregate customer lifetime value. Let's switch over here to this top left box. The average customer lifetime value is nine years. Nine years. We're only 10 years old, so that's an astounding number there. Our customer lifetime value is $384. Our LTV to CAC ratio, a measurement of the efficiency to bring new customers into Megaport versus the value that they provide over time, that's 5.5, an appropriate industry standard there. Our Rule of 40%, that's based on EBITDA, Rule of 40%, is at 53%.
You want to be this is a measurement of the, again, the efficiency of the growth that you're bringing into the business, versus the costs associated to access that growth and gives you a perspective. The goal here is to be over 40%, for those of you not familiar with Rule of 40%. We're at 53% for the year. Sorry, and I might call that out, up from 31% year on year. Let's go into the annual recurring revenue contribution by cohort, one of my favorite representations of the business here. Now, what you're looking at is each color on this graph represents a different cohort of customers, depending upon the financial year that they came into Megaport, and how they progress over time from an annual recurring revenue perspective. You can see when we've added in different products along the way.
What this chart represents is an incredible net retention ratio and value for Megaport from our existing customers. Our customers are incredibly sticky and expansive. You can see each one of those is expanding over time and then stacking on each other to deliver what is this annual recurring revenue, which is fantastic. We've shared these similar dot slides in the previous year. If you look at it, it starts at FY14 here on the right and then progresses to the latest years here. You can see each one of these breaks down the year. This is average services per customer, and then the average ARR per customer. These are pretty much intrinsically linked.
The point of what we're showing here is, over time, our customers add more and more and more services, they continue to expand from an ARR perspective. Lastly, from a customer cohort and survival perspective, you'll see a similar breakdown in FY14 here, FY23 on the left. Our customers that sign on, if we go take to FY14, we still have 51% of that cohort of customers inside Megaport today after 10 years. We have incredibly loyal customers with resilient business. One thing I'll also point out is once you cross the first two-year mark with Megaport, your retention inside that business stays. Our customers get stickier over time, which is also worth shouting out. All right, into outlook and guidance.
In the previous July 27th session, I talked in detail on the re-reigniting the sales machine. I'm not going to go into that detail here, but what I will do is give you a bit of an update. It still remains our number one priority from a go-to-market overhaul perspective. As I mentioned on the Thursday, on Monday, we opened up 20 new roles publicly on our website. We've had over 1,000 applications. I actually called out to the investor community to help us tell the world that we're hiring. I think you've done an amazing job because we've got 1,000 applications. We've interviewed for 13 different roles. My CRO contacted me before and said, "Actually, not even got three offers on the market.
We've got a person who started, left Megaport, has come back to Megaport. One of our top reps has actually joined us. It's his first day today. Welcome back to the business. Customer success hiring is underway. One thing I'll point out here is, as I mentioned, in July, we had one single customer success person servicing 1,600 customers in the United States. That does not make sense, just to be clear, but that's what we did have. We're investing to grow out that team right now. My point around that is we continue to expand and grow that business, showcasing the product-led growth nature of the platform inside the existing portfolios that we've sold. The go-to-market breakdown functions matrix is rolled out. Compensation plans have been issued to the sales team, driving the right behavior.
Territory breakdowns are complete. Tim's done an incredible job across the US, breaking down sustainable patches that ensure that sales folks can be successful when they come inside our business, have the appropriate customer base, and also have an opportunity to scale with our partners, et cetera, in those regions. FY24 guidance. We're calling $190 million-$195 million of FY24 revenue. EBITDA, by the way, that's growth of 24%-27% in revenue for FY24. Our FY24 EBITDA is graded to $51 million-$57 million. That's a growth, an astounding growth, I might add, of 152%-182% year-on-year growth in EBITDA. Our FY24 net cash flow, as we called out, is positive.
Basically, including all the investment that we've got from a sales perspective, Megaport is now in a very strong financial position. This gives us an ability to breathe. It's an incredible turnaround that the team's gone through, and it also gives us an ability to invest. We are a growth business. We have only just scratched the surface of the customer base that we can access, particularly in the United States, but worldwide. We've continued to invest in that go-to-market engine to drive that top line revenue growth, and we're returning to a culture of innovation. You would have seen us launch Megaport Reach most recently. You'll continue to see us launch new products in FY24.
Just to give you a visual representation of the revenue guidance, you can see how that revenue's progressed from FY19 to FY23, and that $190 million-$195 million is represented there on the right. Also, if we, if we go and look at that EBITDA updated guidance, what a turnaround. We've come from -$24.7 million in FY19 to $51 million-$57 million, calling from an FY24 guidance perspective. All right, we made it, Steve. We got there. I'm going to pause. I'm going to stop sharing. We're going to hand over for questions. Thank you all for, for bearing with us and hanging in there throughout that presentation. I know we went deep on a few pieces. I think it's worthwhile.
Okay. Thanks, Michael. Just a quick reminder to those on the call, to ask a verbal question, please select the to raise your hand button. For those who are dialed in, please select star nine to raise your hand and star six to mute or unmute your call. If you would prefer to submit a typed question, please submit this via the Q&A feature. Both of these options can be found at the bottom of the Zoom interface. If we could move to our first question, please, Kane Hannan from Goldman Sachs.
Morning, guys. Thank you for the presentation. Maybe just starting with the FY24 guidance upgrade, I suppose, can you just step us through some of the main changes in your assumptions that have come through since that original guidance? How much is the pricing churn benefits that came through in the fourth quarter, that annualize versus, you know, offset by, I suppose, the step up in investment sales that you've been talking to?
I guess in terms of the, the key driver is the revenue growth, I would say, but also seeing that full cost out come through, offset by knowing that we will have to go invest in the sales team and then the go-to-market strategy.
Yeah. Is that revenue growth specifically, I suppose, less churn, you know, better pricing outcomes in full view? Yeah.
Yeah.
We, we expected a higher churn or, or, protected ourselves by having a look at a higher churn based on the price rise, and that, that was the change that we saw in Q4.
Yeah.
It wasn't nearly as high as what we expected.
Yeah. just in terms of currency, obviously 67 cents in the guidance. Just a sense of what, I suppose, the EBITDA benefit would be if you, if you were to run spot FX in your guidance?
I think probably not. Well, I think, I think we'll try and predict the FX movements inside the business. Hard to give forwarding guidance on that or predict it. What you can see is the percent breakdown of the revenue that does come from the US, and you can sort of run your modeling based on that. You can also see the ARR % of revenue based on the US, based on our exit, which would be an appropriate way to sort of measure those fluctuations in FX.
Is there much, I suppose, from a corporate cost base in the U.S., though? By translating the U.S. revenue back to Aussie, do we have to think too much about the cost base that is offshore?
The, well, the, the, there's obviously the, the largest portion of our revenue comes from the US. We service that revenue base or with, with, expenses or folks based in the United States. So those, those two would be linked in terms of the, there's no FX benefit of having the folks here. What I will say is, what's different to most of the Silicon Valley sort of companies that I've had experience with at a global, our cost base here in Australia is really impressive compared with trying to hire, folks inside Silicon Valley, inside San Francisco, particularly developers, et cetera. The other piece that I, I thought I'd just sort of aside, is that one of the challenges with being based in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, is your team's constantly getting, poached.
You end up in this cycle of folks moving in and out of your organization, constantly trying to meet pay increases, et cetera. It's like this, it's very disruptive. We're based in Brisbane, and we have this, we're one of the very few global tech businesses that I'm aware of that's been founded and, and grown out of Brisbane. Our cost base is not only lower compared to Silicon Valley, and by the way, our team have great lifestyles because it's a, it's a great place to live. But also you're not getting this constant churn where Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, et cetera, are sweeping through talent constantly. It's actually sort of two benefits there.
Yeah. Just lastly, just talk about the compensation plan that's been issued to the sales team. Can you talk about what the key KPIs are that we'll hopefully see, you know, come through your reported metrics, that we can see that this sales investment is starting to pay?
Yeah. The goal for us is to grow annual recurring revenue and to do that in a sustainable fashion. If you look at when we talked about the accretive nature of our business, so that net retention, basically, it's like, it's like compound interest. You put it all into the machine, it starts to expand. It's. That is a new logo. We are hunting new customer logos to add to that expansion machine, but we've got a significant customer base, over 2,800 customers. Servicing that existing customer base to continue to get expansion and improve net retention ratios over time, to actually take...
As I was sort of articulating those product sets, we've got a huge amount of customers that just bought a Port and just bought a VXC, and have no understanding that we have all these, MVE and MCR platforms and, and other products that we'll, we'll look to launch moving forward. We've got an ability to expand within our existing customer base. Now, if you look globally right now, expanding inside your existing customer base in the market conditions that you've got, is significantly easier than hunting new logos. What we've done is balance the two of those equations, ensure that we're incentivizing new MRR, new, annual recurring revenue growth inside existing customer base and, the appropriate hunting of new logos into business. That, by the way, comes with our partner engagement, too.
It's not just, just the frontline seller, on that. It's actually a huge partner community for us to deliver that as well.
Perfect. Thanks very much, guys.
Thanks, Kane. Tim Plumbe from UBS, go ahead with your question, please.
Hi, guys. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Hey, Tim.
Great. I'm sure there's loads of questions, so I'll just ask two and get back into the queue. A little bit further from Kane's question. You guys had identified $10 million of cost out. Can you give us a sense for how much of that $10 million you are planning to reinvest? Then, I guess, on a time-weighted basis, how much of that is impacting or going into FY24 guidance, please?
In terms of the FY24 guidance, Tim, the, the real reinvestment of that is back into the sales team to ensure that we are ready for that go-to-market strategy. That's the key reinvestment piece.
And so-
Yeah, in terms of quantum, though?
Let's not go into the, the detail of the quantum, because it's related specifically to headcount and when we bring the, that headcount on, so there's a timing element to it. I.e., we've opened the head directs. Depending upon how quickly we can fill those roles, have people start in those roles, will depend upon how that flows, as opposed to just saying we're going to spend, you know, $1 million for the year. It needs to be weighted through there. It's hard for us to give you guidance on that. What we have been clear on is the increase in 20 heads into the business from a sales perspective. We've been clear around where that's going. Majority of that goes into the US, so you'll see a US exchange rate paid out in appropriate pay levels for folks inside those regions.
Gotcha. Just to clarify on that, so that 20 heads is taking the direct sales team up, back up to 30?
The, when you look at... Yes, but when you look at the investment, from a sales perspective, you've got to be careful not to throw everything in frontline sales without the appropriate support. So you've got to balance the investment. The majority of that investment goes into frontline sales, revenue generating, quota carrying, capacity-led sales teams, which are supported by solutions architect at the appropriate ratio, and also our customer success, as I've mentioned before, expanding out our customer success teams, that we ensure we're bringing so much more value to our customers and servicing them in a much better, proactive way versus what we're doing prior.
Gotcha. Then just the second question, that revenue growth of 40%, if we were thinking about in three different buckets of pricing increase, new customers, and increasing revenue from existing customers, as the customer maturity profile improved, are you able to give us a, a broad breakdown of how to split up that 40%, please?
I want. Yeah, let's not go into.
Yeah, I would say the majority of the revenue growth this year, Tim, was from organic, so it was over 80%. The VXC pricing increase has kind of come through in the latter part, so you will see more of that drive through into FY24.
That, that VXC price increase because of where it was late in the year. affect revenue as highly. Even that, the, the price increases on existing customers. Again, that with the organic growth inside the existing customer base we've referred to before, those two coupled together give a, a larger portion to, to existing customer base growth.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys. I'll jump back into the queue.
Pleasure.
Thanks, Tim.
Thanks, Tim. Roger Samuel from Jefferies, you can go ahead with your question.
Oh, hi. Morning. two questions as well. First one is on your CapEx. Can you give us the guidance on your CapEx for FY24, please? What's the breakdown between capitalized wages and PP&E?
I guess in terms of there's no change to what we've previously discussed on the FY24 CapEx guidance. That does exclude any specific strategic initiatives that we may come up with throughout the year, which is AUD 28 million- AUD 30 million.
Yeah, okay. Any, any breakdown between the capitalized wages?
Will be fairly consistent.
Pretty consistent with that part 23. Okay, great. Second question is on your installed data center. Obviously, it's it's been coming down. Any plans to increase that number going forward?
I-
I'll get into that. Roger, yeah, great question. I think Megaport's story over history has been, is getting to as many locations as possible to get that reach. Eventually you get to a point where you've got the majority of the, of the opportunity covered off. You're touching the majority of the customers that you want to go after, except you can get to that point. Sort of the law of diminishing returns, you just constantly add data centers. It's probably not a good metric just to say data centers is up or down in terms of whether that will be a huge revenue driver. What we've said is we've reduced down some of those data centers as part of that cost out.
There are data centers that we've invested infrastructure in, taking out operational leases and expenses that didn't make sense. When we build a data center, we look at a business case, and if that business case wouldn't come to fruition or it doesn't make sense for us to be in that region, you could invest in a data center and not have a single customer in, as an example, because it didn't make sense actually. What we've done is we've launched Megaport Reach, which you may have seen, which gives us an ability to go and aggressively expand the data centers, but do it in a very different operational expenditure component from our side. We can reduce our operational expenses by opening up new data centers and new markets.
That's a totally different story to where we were by having large costs in data centers without customers, as an example. We're sort of balancing those two equations, reducing where it doesn't make sense from a, from an expenditure perspective, and adding we can into with data center partners that really want Megaport to be there, and that's Reach. Hope that gave you a deeper insight there.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you. Darren Leung from Macquarie, you can ask your question.
Good morning, guys. Thanks for the opportunity. Just two from me, please. I might have another go at this, the staff cost and the EBITDA guidance, please. Maybe if we pose the scenario that if we were successful at adding the additional 20 headcount over the next few months, could we expect an uplift in revenue associated with that? Or do we have to factor in a delayed start time?
Let me take that one. Revenue is always the lagging indicator, and your recurring revenue is a little bit earlier leading indicator. However, if you think of where we are and where are we? August, we've opened the recs. We've had... We need to get those roles closed to people inside Megaport. For folks who are coming back who are fully, who knew Megaport really well, obviously, like, the gentleman I referred to prior, it's a very fast ramp because they understand what we're doing. For the folks that are brand new, it's going to take three months to understand the tech. It takes three months then to ramp. You think of that time to just get your o-opportunities and customers and so forth.
You'll see green shoots starting to appear towards the end of Q3, and Q4, you'll start to see the metrics turn. However, that won't result in revenue, because your revenue is, is going to be the lagging indicator of that factor. We'll see the metrics and as green shoots, and then this story really is an FY25 story.
Got it. Thanks, Michael. That, that makes sense. On that basis, if, if those said 20 salespeople are added in the next quarter or so, is it, is it correct for us to assume that there may be a downgrade to the EBITDA guidance then, given that the cost base may be more inflated than expected?
No.
Okay.
No.
Got it.
The only reason that would change is, is for some reason there was a change in revenue, but they're not expecting that. That's all within the budget that we've that's just provided.
Got it. Thank you. Just another one from me, please. The equity settled compensation costs of $3.5 million, so we think about the building blocks into FY24 for that line, please. I appreciate it doesn't affect the EBITDA, but obviously impacts channel and solution.
It will be probably... It was AUD 2.3, but you'd probably see a similar kind of amount, maybe a little bit more, given the increased headcount.
Most of the sales are not, are not PBI, so it shouldn't impact on the sales folks. They're commission-based rather than PBI.
Got it. Okay. Thank, thank you, guys.
Thanks, Darren. Paul Mason from Evans and Partners, go ahead with your question, please.
Hey, thanks. I've got two. The first one, I was just wondering, I saw sort of a headline that you'd released a Firewall as a Service product on LinkedIn. I sort of wanted to check whether that was actually you guys getting into direct-... security products, or whether that was sort of just a, like, a, a relationship with a partner like Fortinet or Cisco or something like that?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yep. Sorry.
No, sorry. You go, you go, please.
No worries. I can let you ask another one. Only do one at a time. Megaport Virtual Edge is what you're referring to. If you remember that sort of diagram that I gave you. We can spin up other vendors inside our platform, inside our data centers, and we can spin them up in 60 seconds, as an example. We've got a range of different partners in that space. What we launched was Megaport Virtual Edge. That was Palo Alto's firewall, can now be run inside that Megaport Virtual Edge and spun up. In effect, you can spin up a virtual firewall on our platform and connect in through the internet and expand that across. In effect, Firewall as a Service. Just to be clear, we haven't gone and built a firewall platform and entered in that security space.
That is us running our, our partners or our vendor partners inside our platform.
Yeah. No, great. Okay. The second one, probably for Letitia. Just, in the receivables, there's been a bit of a tick up in, like, the age receivables that are more than 60 days. I think you guys made a comment on this in one of the more recent quarterlies, but if you can just, like... Was there anything that was, like, one specific customer where you've changed arrangements? Or is that just sort of, like, the current environment getting a bit harder to collect? Or what, what's going on there?
There, there is an uptick from prior year. There's no significant issues from a recoverability standpoint.
Okay. Thank you.
Sure.
Okay. Thanks, thanks, Paul. I think we have Eric Choi on your mobile. If you could hit, star six and unmute your phone.
Morning, guys. Hopefully you can hear me. Good results, and thanks for lightening up reporting season. The jokes as well, Michael. I'll stick with 2. The first one.
Eric, Eric, how about this? I'll only let you do the second one if you get my, my dad joke. Is that a deal?
Done. Fire away. I'll go with the first one first.
What do you call a deer with no eyes? You can think about it.
Done.
Give me the first question.
Okay, well, the first one, I was just wondering if you could expand on your, your comments about sales being an FY25 story. I'm just looking at your 24 guidance, and you're going to deliver a $35 million EBITDA delta without the benefit of the new sales force. I'm just wondering, you'd be pretty disappointed if you couldn't hold or accelerate that growth into FY25?
Into... Yeah. The, the challenge is it's lagging. The revenue component is lagging. You'll see, similar to the price rise that we did in the latter half of, towards Q4, the start of Q4. You don't see that effect for the full year. You only have, obviously, a quarter of that period of time. By the time that you've got the, the sales team ramped, in seat ramped, and actually executing those green shoots, let's say new customers are landing at the start of Q4, you've got a small period of time where you're billing. From a revenue standpoint, you don't see as big a hit to the revenue, which is why the story for FY25, from a, from a revenue, and then all that, that all flows through to the numbers there. Annual recurring revenue is slightly different.
Yes, I, I'd be disappointed to say, to think that if we've added that appropriate investment, particularly given that we moved from four frontline sellers in the US for an annual recurring revenue of $100 million. You would, you would think between 20 people -30 people in any other organization is the appropriate investment. You would have to believe that that growth investment in the region, particularly given that the product is red-hot, should be looking forward to, to see us improve those metrics. Did I cover that?
Very helpful. Is the answer... I've got help with this one. Is it, is it no idea?
It's no idea. You get to ask the second question.
Awesome. Next one, just for Tish. No one, no one's really asking the free cash flow yet, and I know there was, like, a $4 million-$5 million vendor financing tailwind in FY23, and that was mostly first half weighted. I'm just wondering, does this need to normalize in future years? If there's any other factors that will drive a difference between operating free cash flow and EBITDA, that we should be thinking about?
I guess the key thing to highlight is that we did pay out quite a fair bit during FY23 for redundancies. That will be a key differentiator as well. Just to highlight that. We also We're managing supplier or vendor payments back in FY22, so you do have a little bit of an uplift, a decent amount of uplift in FY23. It will normalize out into FY24 a little bit. That's the kind of key drive. Those are the key drivers. The receivables coming as well, previously as well, that's increased.
Thanks, Tish. Thanks, Michael.
Sure.
Thanks, Eric. Siraj Ahmed from Citi, you could ask your question.
Hi, can you hear me okay?
Yes.
First thing, in terms of gross margin for next year, how should we think about that? I mean, you have pretty good cost control this year. Should we expect it to expand further in your guidance?
I guess in terms of what we've provided, we've provided EBITDA guidance and revenue guidance. The gross margin is probably pretty straightforward in terms of your modeling.
Okay, got it. Second one, Michael, just in terms of reach, right? How is this different from enable data that you typically have as well? I mean, is it different from that, or is it the same thing, really?
No, it's different actually. Good question. enabled data center is an ability to connect to a data center you're very close to. So, for example, we're in Brisbane. If you're in one data center in Brisbane, and you've got direct fiber connection to another data center, not far away, that is extended in effect, you can extend into a data center. Reach is and this is one of the differentiating points of Megaport. We've got so many points of presence. We're physically inside those data centers. That's that investment in that platform. I'd call that a massive moat to try and compete with us and catch up. Reach actually is not looking to just extend connectivity to, it's actually physically installing Megaport inside those data centers. It's actually. Again, it's not just getting carrier connections.
We're putting a full platform in, full courts, all inside those data centers, wherever they are. That's why it gives us an ability to go and access new markets. That's what's so important with that space. Markets where we don't have access today, even, even geo related, if you think of here in Brisbane, if you just wanted to connect across, we're actually going to totally new markets.
Is it lower OpEx just because of the kit, or is it just the data? Yeah. How is it lower OpEx compared to install?
I won't, I won't get more commercial in confidence. What I will say.
Okay.
is that it allows us the ability to reduce down the operational expenditure. When you look at in the past, from a business case perspective, there's a whole heap of costs that come into it. It gives us an opportunity to look at where our partners at data centers want us to be there. When I stepped into the role, I turned up at ITW and was approached by a whole range of data center providers and owners who were like, "We want you to come into our data centers. We need you in there." We just weren't looking at it because we didn't build a business case through an appetite.
We've changed how we think about that with Megaport Reach, which gives us an opportunity to go not only to new data centers, smaller, remote data centers, if need be, but also new countries, et cetera.
Got it. Thanks. Thanks, Michael.
Thanks, Siraj. I think we have time for two more questions. Nick Harris from Morgans, if you could go ahead first, please.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my call. I put one through on your net revenue expansion, but I think you've answered that, so I'll just quickly ask two. One was just the Rule of 40, Michael. I just wanted to understand, is your focus on the Rule of 40 using EBITDA margin going forward? The second one was just following up, I guess, on that Reach DC installation. Is a Reach data center the same as a traditional install, or is there actually, like, physically the same as a different commercial model in terms of the cost of OpEx and CapEx?
Nick, to, to answer the second question, you're going to have to answer my second joke. What, what do you call a deer with no eyes and no legs? I'll let you think about it.
Mm-hmm.
What was the first question?
Rule of 40.
Rule of 40. All right, Rule of 40, you can think about, give me just a second. Rule of 40 is not based on free cash flow. You can measure... Rule of 40 has gone through sort of an evolution. You can either measure it from EBITDA or free cash flow positive through Rule of 40. You can get both of those metrics from the information that we're sharing. What we've just done is highlighted the EBITDA Rule of 40, which is the traditional, I think, measurement for businesses. The world is changing from a free cash flow perspective. You can measure it in both ways. That information should be provided for you to work it out. All right, second one was-
Just, just wanted to understand, your focus is on the EBITDA bit, not, as, as you look at it.
Well, sorry, let me... You asked, like, where is the That is a metric to measure the efficiency of the business from a sales perspective versus the growth in revenue. It's a great way to constantly keep yourself in check. There was this sort of period of time where there was this growth at all cost mentality through the Bay Area, where companies saying we grew 200%, but actually their costs were so high that actually the Rule of 40 would have you well and truly below 40, which is basically saying you're spending way too much on your, on your growth, but celebrating this huge growth number at this huge cost. Rule of 40 is a way to just ensure you're monitoring the investment that you're putting in from a sales perspective versus the growth that you're bringing.
You, you can look at it from multiple avenues. I would say that we measure this business from a huge range of different metrics that we look at on a daily basis. The outcome is to grow our annual recurring revenue, ensure that our costs remain under control, and then our net cash flow is appropriate with growing that EBITDA perspective. Hopefully, that's helpful. Did you get my answer?
Yep, that's great. The answer to your question, still no idea.
Okay. That's it. Still no idea. You asked.
I've got a way for it, which I can't do on a public call, so I'll show you the third one later. Question was, Reach DC. Just trying to understand, is it basically the same infrastructure as a physical install, but the, cost, the COGS, the OpEx model is slightly different?
Yes, exactly. We're not having to rebuild or redesign anything. It's just, it's the commercial modeling and the partnership arrangements that we go put in place. We have, we have an ability to execute it extremely quickly. We have suppliers of infrastructure throughout that COVID period, so we can. That's why we can execute it in less than 90 days. It's a really great story. In less than 90 days, from start to finish engagement, you could have Megaport Reach inside your data center, giving you that access to over 1,000 connections like we just through, through, through that demo, to give you a perspective. There are so many data centers that are excited to have that ability because it gives their customers. Think about it from their perspective.
They only sell power and space and convince the customer to come. If a customer can't access all the different cloud providers and all of those different other elements that we're referring to easily, it's a barrier to entry for them, and then they end up going towards maybe a larger data center, for example. This adds huge value for smaller data centers to come and actually convince customers to come. It also helps them keep their customers moving forward. It's a great story. Thanks very much.
Okay. Thanks, Nick. Tim Plumbe , final question, please.
Hi, guys. Most of my questions were actually asked, so I, I, I might just throw one last one in there, if possible. Just in terms of that LTV to CAC calculation, Michael, I think the footnotes note that partner commissions are excluded from the calculations. Presumably, the, the customers coming from the third-party partners are also excluded from the numerator as well?
Yes. The, the, the measurement comes from the CAC as a cost to acquire the customer versus the ongoing commissions that are paid out. If you think about it, if, if a partner brought an opportunity to you and you weren't giving them a revenue share, as an example, the cost to acquire that customer falls into that piece. The margin that that particular partner makes is separated out of that, out of that measurement. We're really looking at the cost to bring the customer to Megaport versus the, the ongoing cost to service, I suppose. Does that make sense? That's the.
The CAC component is looking at what does it cost you to get a customer in, and compare that to the lifetime value of the customer as a comparison to ensure that you're not spending too much to bring customers in, which is why you see us above five from a multiple standpoint, very healthy.
Gotcha. I might just throw one very quick last one in, if, if possible. Just in terms of the MVE pipeline, you guys delivered a pretty good number at the last quarterly, but obviously, that's got a materially longer sales pipeline than the other products that you're selling into the business. Do we need to think about maybe a little bit of a, a lag, as in you'll need time to refill that pipeline up and get through that sales pipeline, before we see?
I wouldn't say that there was a bunch of pipeline, it all just executed again, so now it's clear. If you think about it, we've had the same sales force in place for the past year, I would want to say, and so that would be consistent from a pipe perspective, i.e., people have been building. What I will call out is that it's just been a very small sales team. You know, as I, as I referred to, four frontline sellers in North America. It's hard to go and drive lower, longer sales cycles when you have a very fast, easy sales cycle with a port and a VXC, you can execute against that really quickly, very quick time to market.
The timeframe, the reason Megaport Virtual Edge, whilst it gives a significant increase in the revenue, they're longer cycles because you're actually linking into carrier contracts and what they're, they're rolling out from a. You think about it, you've got a big global WAN that's rolled out, that might be coming to fruition in a year's time. You've got to go and work through that opportunity. They're going to make a decision to go to an SD-WAN provider, like Cisco is a great example. That takes time. There's a big process for that, then you're building out that design. There's just more energy that goes into it, but they're big, and they drag through so many more VXCs and connectivity for it. I wouldn't say that the pipes just disappeared or anything like that. It's always consistent.
What I will say is our goal is to increase it. We've got big investments inside the, the, the vendors that we partner with, if you think about it. Each time we bring on a vendor into that space, into the MVE space, it gives us another sales force to go and access that they're working on inside their customers.
The real story, I think the biggest opportunity Megaport has, sort of that, when I showed you the customers that don't have Megaport and the customers that do have Megaport, we sort of joke internally, it's like, "This is a customer that doesn't realize Megaport exists, and everyone that realizes Megaport exists is a customer." Now, it's sort of a, you know, a bit of tongue in cheek there, but the reality is our challenge is showing the world that we exist, and we can solve these legacy problems. What's great about that, that MVE piece is we can go and sell into all these different vendors that have huge sales forces. We still have to articulate the value of that. Once they get it, the light bulb comes on.
You'll see, in fact, some LinkedIn posts of Cisco example, understanding the value that comes, and that's, you know, viral sort of posts going out there. It takes that time to sort of build that momentum.
Yeah, I saw that, but that, that, that helps a lot. Thanks, guys, appreciate it.
Yeah, it was a great post, wasn't it? Yeah.
Thank you, Tim. Thanks, Michael and Tish, and everybody for attending. Just a quick call out that we're going to be doing our FY23 results roadshow to Sydney and Melbourne on the 18th to 20th of September. There's a bit of delay to get through the rest of the reporting season. If you have any questions in the interim, please reach out, and happy to connect and answer those. Thanks very much, everybody, for attending today.
Really appreciate your time. Thank you all for your support.
Thank you.