Very short period of time. Just by changing a few levers, we've been really able to completely change the direction of this business moving forward, or at least the performance of the business moving forward. Key KPIs for the quarter, as we mentioned, Monthly Recurring Revenue was up 40% QOQ, up AUD 1.7 million, driven, as I said, by that one price change in Cloud VXC. The revenue for the quarter was {AUD 38.1 million}, up AUD 1.1 from previous quarter. EBITDA, what we call, like, a statutory base, was actually AUD 7.2 for the quarter. When we take out some accruals and things like that, we really wanna get to a more normal base in how we report, and how we so we take fluctuations out.
Our normal EBITDA was AUD 5 million, but our statutory was AUD 7.2 million. And these results really combine to give a strength and positive growth with our EBITDA of AUD 10.6 million year to date. From the customer standpoint, we had good customer traction in Q3. Ports down to 188 from 368. MCRs were up quite strongly, which is great. 34 MVEs, 25. A total of 607 services during the quarter. And as I mentioned before, Monthly Recurring Revenue went from AUD 12.4 million- AUD 14.1 million. Revenue AUD 38.1 million, EBITDA AUD 7.2 million, and normalized EBITDA is AUD 5 million.
One of the things we really wanna kinda highlight here, we're gonna highlight through the presentation, I'm sure some of you have seen it already, is the kinda journey that we're on in terms of improving our cash performance in the business. One of the leading indicators of that is EBITDA. Really what we're kinda showing you here is we're on a certain trajectory, then we came with a scale-up, scale-out approach.
The exec were kinda saying, "Hey, we've got this really great opportunity." Board endorsed it and said, "Let's give this a good shake." Then it kind of came off, and then really what we realized is that the kind of returns on it weren't quite there, but what we've actually had now is a $5 million normalized EBITDA just in the last quarter. You know, the main drivers of that improvement include the VXC price change, the cost outs element, and some even the OPEX side in terms of travel. Really, this journey, and we're gonna show you a bit later in what we're looking at in terms of Q4, as some of these cash flows and things flow through.
What we mentioned in the Q1 presentation is that we're gonna do an operational and organizational review. We're looking at getting a third party in. I think with the changes that actually happened, I became nominated a third party. Really, at least I have a lot of domain knowledge of the business and the opportunity, I think. I involved myself incredibly deeply in the business. I started in November last year doing the cost set review and understanding where the costs of the business were in a COGS standpoint.
You know, I think end of January, I realized that there was a misalignment between all the cross-connects we were doing in the cloud for our customers that weren't really capturing with our VXC pricing. We tweaked that one price to capture that, which is what we saw the revenue kick in. The revenue kicked in in March, because we sent the notices out early February, the 1st of February, whatever it was. You have to give 30 days notice to do that. The price change took effect from 1 March, but they never really got the invoices until the end of March. We had to make sure that...
We were always worried a little bit about churn, but we had to see how that actually impacted later in April as people started paying their bills. Now that we're obviously pretty comfortable where that landed. Had a lot lower churn, but I'll talk about that a bit later. That was the second part. Obviously, over the last seven weeks, been very, very deep in the business, right in the weeds, and this is the outcomes of that review. The scale-up and scale-out initiative that was much talked about, didn't yield the expected results we expected from the investment in headcount, and also the increase in operational costs.
The opportunity to improve the team cohesiveness, we think could be improved significantly by centralizing more of our core back office functions back here in HQ in Brisbane. In the end, we had a very geographically dispersed leadership team across the world, which actually really led to kind of reduced interactions, partly just simply because you're in a different time zone. You know, we had chief people and still have chief people in London, but we have, you know, some one person in L.A., one person just outside of L.A., one person in San Francisco, person in Chicago, a person in New York, and obviously someone in Sydney and someone in Brisbane.
I don't think we actually had anyone in the same city as things evolved over COVID. We really wanted to bring kind of some of the core functions and some of that leadership back here. We're always gonna be a global company. We're always gonna have leaders around the world, there was an opportunity that we think that we can improve that efficiency. Working from home also, we found had an impact. We had less interactions with team members outside their immediate circle. People became more siloed. That kind of coordination and combination where people had more empathy, I suppose, in some ways, business empathy at least, to the impact of what I'm doing, how can I make your life easier in terms of your department or your section?
You know, we found that people who were in provisioning were provisioning, people that were selling were selling, people at engineering were engineering, people that were deploying were deploying. You know, people became very siloed in what they did. We really wanted. We saw how much of an impact that's had because people just became very task-oriented rather than kind of team-oriented. We're kind of improving that. We're not expecting everyone to come back to the office five days, but we are looking for more collaboration with teams, with more in-person meetings. I think there's a really significant opportunity to improve our back-office automation and implement scalable business systems with modest investment. I'm not talking of an entire new CRM or entire new something.
Some of it's actually just around enforcing simple rules about what type of business we do. There seem to be a lot of loose business kind of coming through that was, you know, square pegs for round holes type of situation. We're gonna make sure that, you know, 80, 90, 95% of the business fits the model, and less exception because that allows us to scale much better. One of the things we wanna call out, and we've called out in this presentation, and we found out, certainly as part of this review, was we're really focusing on building sales momentum and getting that back. One of the things I'll say up front, the market demand for our product is still really strong.
We just need to better focus our resources with the right go-to-market motion and hire more salespeople in the right areas with the right incentive plan. I'll talk a bit about that in a moment. The channel program that we put in place hasn't delivered the targeted return on investment we were seeking, right? Basically, what we're looking at doing here is saying if... Almost Moneyball. If we sit there and look at the spend that we're making there, can we implement some of that spend somewhere else to get a greater return? The answer to that is yes. Really that's one of the things we're looking at doing, is pivoting some of those resources into direct sales.
Part of the reason for that is that when we looked at the channel model, there was a simple principle the board gave to that, which was one which was this one principle. The direct sales engine has been the sales engine of this business forever and a day. We're okay to spend the money on channel as long as it's incremental to that. What we actually found when Jeff did a full sales review of the organization, his plan moving forward, a headcount plan moving forward, presented to the board, one of the things that really actually surprised us as a board is that we actually saw that our direct sales team was down 50% of where it was 12, 18 months ago.
There is a direct correlation between sales and salespeople, especially in the direct space. We actually had actually reduced some of that headcount through there. Really a big focus for us is on the direct sales machine. We're gonna use a combination of recruiting new team members. We're committed to buy to bring back headcount to 100% of where it was. That's the combination of recruitment and also realignment, putting people in different areas back into that space.
Questions at the end. We're gonna be providing next-generation sales tools to help the sales be more effective and efficient in what they do. Also we're gonna get the commission plans much better aligned to the company objectives. I think the benefits of what we're doing in terms of the sales build out of the sales team and the tools, we're gonna see in Q2 of next financial year. We're expecting to see that in the October to December quarter. Obviously, the incoming CEO's got an impeccable track record of building high-performance sales teams, and so has Jeff, who's our CRO.
Really happy with Jeff and the plan that he's put forward. Michael and I spent a lot of time through this with him, and we're really excited for the investment and the return we expect to get from that. As part of the organizational review, we've made a few changes. The review's now largely complete. Unfortunately, there's been a reduced headcount of 16% across the team, which is about 50 roles, in April, only yesterday and overnight, that we could not reassign within the organization. We've got the organization now back to about a headcount of 250. The important part is, you know, that's still 10% above where we were pre-COVID.
We're not taking the headcount way back to where it was. We didn't have a target in mind. We literally sat there and said, "How can we get this organization back to the efficient operating function that it was?" That's where we got to there. The one-time redundancy payouts and things relating to that headcount reduction is around AUD 3 million. We recognize this financial quarter with an estimated reduction in annualized staff costs of AUD 10 million commencing in May. Really, this is what probably one of the things that we really wanted to show, and that's a big impact on me, but just the level of cash flow improvement that is being undertaken right now.
Leticia Dorman, who's to my left, Interim CFO, poor Leticia, she's been absolutely hammered by me, you know, getting spreadsheets and data and things and a big also thank you to the ops team, Darren, who's given... The level of data we have in the business is exceptional, and it's really helped drive a number of these initiatives. A big thank you to the team for doing that. Here's where we are. The workforce reductions really already happened. It happened now.
We expect to see, apart from the one-time payment that will happen next month in May, the impact of that from a P&L and cash standpoint, other than that, will be felt from May onwards. The Cloud VXC repricing, we have one month of revenue in that in this last quarter's result in March. We'll get the cash impact of that starting in April, May, June. We get the full impact of the cash of that starting this quarter. The cost out's not half, but AUD 3 million, that's already kind of started feeding in. You would've seen that in the Q1, Q2 result, Q3 result. And there's still more to be done on that. We've mentioned a bit later in the presentation.
Really, in terms of cash flow improvement, nearly all of it will be. Well, certainly the workforce and Cloud VXC repricings pretty much will happen from May in full capacity, and we've kind of achieved about probably about 40% of our cost out program already, and the other remaining 60% will happen over the next quarter. What has that really done for us? You know, it's really completely fundamentally changed our outlook and guidance. That, that kind of chart that I showed you before where we had AUD 5 million of EBITDA through there, you know, we're kind of giving you a bit of an idea of where EBITDA we're expecting to kind of looking at the range in terms of this quarter.
It really is such a stark difference because, and why is that? We've got two extra months that will happen in this quarter of the VXC price change that didn't happen in Q3. We'll have the full impact of the staff cost out that didn't happen in Q3. We're kind of really. That will happen for two months of the two of the three months. We'll actually see this really strong, I think, sorry, improvement in Q4's number. We kind of put that out there for people to see as well. As the details are there that speak to that.
As a result of that, to give people greater transparency, as a result of that, we've had to for the first time issue guidance because we were materially outside of consensus. We're looking at, as I said, market consensus is, was $9 million for this year and sorry, $30 million for next year. We're looking at $16 million-$18 million, what I call normalized EBITDA, which is taking away the one-time factors. Takes away, obviously, the payment we'll do this quarter for staff, but also takes away some of the accruals that have taken before on things, whether it's commission or bonuses and things that's being unwound.
We're stripping that out because we wanna make sure that our investors and potential investors get a much better handle on what normal looks like versus kind of these one-time things that are normally in there. Of course, we report statutory that's there, but we're really focusing people on a consistent approach to how we do this, so you can measure things much more much better without kind of significant variations. We're looking at AUD 16 million-AUD 18 million normalized EBITDA this year. We've given guidance of a AUD 41 million-AUD 46 million EBITDA next year, which is you know, 78%-100% uplift this year and a 37%-53% next year.
I think the call out to that is with AUD 48 million cash at bank, as well as that, and now a significantly improved cash flow, you know, the company, we don't foresee any reason to do a capital raising for a need for additional capital raise, for the normal operation of the business, other than for strategic or opportunistic reasons. That's really the presentation for today. We wanted to keep it very short. Not short, want it very succinct, focused on the things that really matter. Do the mea culpa in terms of where the business has been. Focus on the items and the changes that we've made, and, you know, we'll certainly invite a few questions from people.
I think Steve Loxton, who's on the screen, so help us out. Steve's, we pulled Steve off the bench for the next three months to help us get through the annual reporting season. He was thinking of taking cocktails, and I said, "No, mate, you're coming back." Thanks for joining us, Steve.
Thanks, Bevan. What we might do is move through to Q&A. If we can just get this working. Just one second.
The first question we had from the floor here.
Why don't we start back-.
I was questioning-.
Yeah. Just what your sales force looks like number-wise?
Yeah. Direct sales was down at 13, 14 people globally. You know, there is a direct correlation. Obviously, the channel sales had increased massively, but, you know, there's only so much that that number of people can do. It was a really material difference with that. We're looking at pushing that back up to around 30.
With that guidance you've given, how do you see your growth? 'Cause you know, you're obviously a growth company. Are you factoring, you know, what sort of growth figures are you sort of... Do you think you're being conservative in your estimates on growth, or you think these new sales, direct sales people can sort of get you back on that previous trajectory you were on a few years ago?
Question from the floor. Last one we'll take. We'll have to get Steve to do the rest. We've put the growth and we've put things in the results we've given in terms of forecasts in that space. The thing that we've mentioned in there, we're kind of saying that we expect the investment that we're gonna make and the re-upping of that, we expect to see green shoots of that, really starting to kinda kick in in Q2. Really the thing with next financial year, and FY24, after that, there's actually not a lot you can do to materially change the impact of FY24's numbers. You know, my goal here is to get the company in a really good shape, financially strong position.
You know, we're already in an exit run rate. Well, we're in exit run rate right now, AUD 14.1 million. You know, you're probably looking at the high AUD 160s if that recurring revenue continues. You know, it's we're already kind of a bit ahead of where we expect to end this year, obviously. My focus is now is to look at an FY25. You know, I think we haven't given any guidance in terms of top-line growth revenue, but we've given in terms of profitability. Certainly comfortable with that profitability. I think what you've seen in the slide deck here, you know, we're expecting, you know, around AUD 9 million or whatever it might be this quarter in terms of EBITDA.
You know, 41- 46 seems certainly achievable, but we're gonna be reinvesting in people as well. For us, you know, we're in such a great position with cash and our cash burn profile now, that we're gonna make this year a much better investment year for a much better yield. Yeah, that's all I can really say to that. Go for it, Steve.
Bevan, if I could just add, clearly the EBITDA guidance for next year has a number of moving parts to it. There is the prices increasing, increase that we've only seen a single month come through. We've got the COGS and OPEX savings, we've got the headcount reductions. We've also got slowing momentum in the go-to-market engine, right? If you look at the customer net add ports for the past four quarters, that has been declining. One of the key outstandings is going to be how quickly Jeff and Michael can turn around that ship. It's fair to say that we have assumed that slide is arrested but not heroically. That's been baked into the EBITDA guidance for FY24.
Let's go to the questions.
Okay. Suraj, I think you're first on the list, if you want to go ahead.
Thanks. Thanks, Bevan. Steve as well. I'll ask three questions, if that's okay.
No, no. Probably, have to cap you at 2, I'm sorry.
Okay, two. All right.
I've got to cure people, so.
Sounds good. This is the first one. In terms of the go-to-market strategy, right? It sounds like there's been a surprise on the direct sales team for me as well. It seems like you're slightly changing the shift away from the channel. Is that the way we should read this? The channel is supposed to be, you know, 70% in three years' time. Just keen to hear your thoughts on that, Bevan?
Yes, correct.
That's still the focus, the channels?
No, no, sorry. We're gonna reestablish our direct sales force, and we actually expect direct to be the majority of our new Monthly Recurring Revenue moving forward. As we've mentioned in the slide that we're retasking some of the channel people across to the direct side. 'Cause what we've actually seen in practice is that direct salespeople, Sorry, we have a higher effective rate of recurring revenue with a direct salesperson than a channel salesperson. A direct dollar than a channel dollar.
Okay. Focus back into the direct side. All right. The second thing. On the ports number, Bevan, in the quarter, in the last few quarters, just, what's the churn looking like there, and are you seeing some impact from competition in here? I know macro is weak, but is there anything else that you're concerned about other than the direct sales team?
There's really been no change in churn. The answer to that's actually really simple. Well, I think it is. Let me give you the kind of answer that I hope helps people understand what happens. Our gross port adds used to be around 4% per month. Our churn used to be roughly 2%. You know, call it 3.5-4, call it 1.8-1.9. Let's go with those numbers. If you have gross port adds of four and churn of two, you know, and if you end up halving your sales force, and they're selling half the number of ports, your gross adds turns to two and your churn stays at two.
You know, what happens is that when you actually have a reduced sales force and it reduces your gross adds, your gross port adds, but the impact of that on your net ports is actually quite significant. The, the decline that we're seeing in that, like I said, there's almost a direct correlation in that. That's a direct correlation to gross port adds. We've actually, we haven't seen anything from competition. Certainly I haven't in the numbers. The churn hasn't changed. That stayed the same. It's the gross port adds, and the gross port adds are a direct correlation that I've seen in plus six months because of how you build a pipeline. It's a direct correlation between direct sales force.
That could help us. Thanks. I'll jump back in the queue.
Thank you.
Next question we have is from Bob Chen.
Hey, guys. Bevan, just a comment earlier around bringing headcount back to 100% of where it was. Can you sort of elaborate on that? Is that bringing back, so the 16% headcount reduction you've outlined there?
No, no, no. No, no. No. We've reduced 50, we've reduced the headcount by 50. If, let's say, direct sales are at 14, there's probably six or so from channel that are gonna be moving across, then we'd probably hire seven-10 salespeople. It's only a 10% increase.
Okay, perfect. Just thinking about reinvestment across the business going forwards, like what's the cadence of OPEX growth we should be thinking about over the next few years?
I'm not gonna give you the OPEX growth numbers for next year. That's a bit of a forecast from my side. The thing I can tell you, though, is we're very focused on costs. Already I've seen a really great adoption of that by everyone in the business. It's really incredibly important. I, you know, I'm not expecting. You know, I shouldn't say. Let's see where, let's see where we get to it, but we're very focused on costs. You know, and we genuinely need two quarters to really get comfortable about, you know, the impact of what we're doing. I'm not saying this in terms of we expect it to be spiking or anything.
You know, when there's a different focus on OPEX, when there's a different. I mean, you know, I put a travel policy in. You know, no one flies more than economy in certain situations, premium economy in certain situations. You know, it's team. It's not what I call normal kind of policy in a business that's, you know, where we are in our cycle. You know, everything from entertainment type stuff, it probably got, in my opinion, got a bit carried away in some respects. The reason that's important is that when you kinda see, you know, expenditure that's probably not normal, it becomes normal, if you know what I mean. What I've seen is a really great adoption by people.
You know, everyone's raising POs now, everyone's doing things, everyone's asking questions about, "Should we be doing this, or should we be doing that?" This isn't gonna be a kind of a dictatorial state at all. That's not what I'm referencing there. People are now focused on this really good. We're giving budgets out to leaders on all the right elements next year. There's gonna be much, much better discipline. I can't tell you what OpEx growth or OpEx is gonna be, except to say there's gonna be much better discipline around OpEx and COGS. Now that the team has seen the benefits of what we've actually done and how the organization is set, you know, certainly from what I've seen, they're embracing it.
Perfect. Thanks for that.
Thanks, Bob.
Only one question from here, Steve.
Okay. Thank you.
One question. Just we can only do one question at a time now for people.
Okay. Kane, give us your one question, please.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, guys. Just a comment around your churn on the VXC pricing was a bit lower than.
Sorry, what was that? Churn on the what?
Sorry, is it coming through now?
It is coming through.
Yeah. Just the churn on the VXC pricing, you're saying is a bit lower than your modeling. I mean, does that give you more confidence to reprice any of your other products going forward? If there's any numbers, I suppose you can wrap around the churn that you did see in the quarter?
Look, we're not looking at modeling, changing pricing. It's not... That was really a price correction. It wasn't about taking an opportunity to sting people. It was the fact that... I'll give you some numbers. You know, our annual spend on cross-connect spent from AUD 4 million- AUD 10.7 million in the space of about two and a half years. That was most, which is extraordinary. That shows you how much growth we actually had in the cloud product in terms of most of that was being consumed on 10G ports to cloud. That kind of port consolidation program work that we're doing is actually consolidating 10 of those 10G ports down to 100G ports, right? To the cloud.
We're using less ports, we're using less cross-connects. There's been some efficiencies in that. What we're finding is even still with that when you actually consider the software development, it's not just about the cross-connect, it's the software development, the cost of the routers in all 100, what, 200 locations around the world where we connect 150 or whatever it is, we connect to cloud, the network redundancy we put in that, all the infrastructure that goes behind that, AUD 100 a month just wasn't cutting the mustard. We pay some agents fees or revenue share and those types of things. Yeah, I don't want people to think, and I certainly don't want our customers to think that we're gonna be using this as an opportunity.
Hey, this has been low churn, we're gonna sting them for that. We think our products are reasonably priced now. I think they're very well priced to the market. We're not here to look at stinging our customers or our partners any extra money. I'm not saying it won't happen, but, you know, once a year, I think we'll do a recalibration of pricing and we'll compare it to cost. We always wanna make sure that we're good value to our customers.
Perfect.
Thanks, Kane. Lachlan Brown, a question from you.
Sorry, just give me a second. Hi, Bevan. Welcome back, Steve.
Thank you.
just wanted to confirm if the projected CapEx of $28 million-$30 million in FY24 still holds. Also, just how soon do you think you'll need to upgrade to a 400G, 800G backbone given the anticipated growth of, AI integrated, cloud applications from the hyperscalers? Thanks.
We haven't changed any guidance or anything around our CapEx so far. We've already have a whole bunch of 400G devices that are coming in and already pre-committed in, that are turning up in Q1 that we gave the forecast for, back when we last did the update. We're, you know, at this stage, I haven't dove incredibly deeply into the anticipated arrival of equipment, except that there hasn't been any material change to the arrival of equipment. At the moment, we're still in that range. If it changes, if it changes or changes materially, we can let people know, but at this stage, we're still around the same number.
As I said, we already have, either, I think it's another 20 device, 24 100G devices, maybe even 40 100G devices turning up in Q1, which will have an impact on cash.
That CapEx guidance provided in the first half, results presentation.
Thank you.
Was $32 million in FY23 and $28 million in FY24.
Thanks, Steve.
Okay. Tim, your question, please.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Just one for me, please, Bevan. Cash burn of AUD 8.9 million in that quarter, but that was abnormally high given, you know, some changes in payment of invoices. How should we think about the underlying cash burn? Given the additional momentum that you guys are getting in the fourth quarter, further cost out, how are you thinking about cash burn trajectory into FY24?
Intently.
Bevan, would you like me.
From a cash flow FY24, I'll let Tim through. We're not giving any forecast on cash flow or cash burn. You're right. And the reason for that, again, we want some really consistent quarters. We're not expecting surprises, but let me give you some examples. Cash flow this quarter is gonna be improved. Obviously, we've already told people about the, you know, the AUD 1 million a month of, you know, of improvement. Currently AUD 1 million. There might be still a bit of churn, you know, we're not expecting something material. AUD 1 million a month improvement in VXC cash flows starting from this. That's billed and should be paid this month, but some people pay a bit late. You get the idea. There's that.
There's a staff cost out that we mentioned. We've given the numbers to the market. That really starts in May. We'll go through there. There's two kind of items there that, you know, how do I think. That's probably how you should think. We've given data and guidance on those kind of two numbers that's there. You're absolutely right that. This is the issue. It was an abnormal quarter, and this quarter will be a little bit abnormal because we've got staff cost outs. The payments we need to make for the redundancies. Next quarter is a little bit wonky because we've got not wonky, but we've got the 400G equipment that's coming through which we've projected for people.
We've given them that forecast. Also we do pay bonuses and things in that period as well. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to make sure we get this thing normalized in a really good way. Yeah. How do I think about it, is significantly improving. The data points are there to show some of that improvement. Once we actually get through this quarter and next quarter with those takeouts, we'll be in a better place. Again, for people's benefit, one of the reasons, you know, when I came in and I was looking at cash flow, I looked at the last. Actually, I was looking at every single vendor and payment we've made for the past 12 months.
I was going through everything. I found it even difficult to model it because what we kind of realized is that at the end of Q4 last year, there was a holdback of payments to suppliers that kind of happened there. What do you then do? You know, which on the scheme it looked like it was an improvement, but it when I say holdback, there was some delays in some payments that were made. Of course, in July it catch up, in August then it kinda happened. I don't want that. I wanna make sure that we are a smooth operating business. We do things very seamlessly. We get a consistent cash flow, consistent revenue flow. You'll see that we were open about it.
We paid, Leticia, was it AUD 5.4 or AUD 4.4?
Four.
What?
5.2.
Yeah, AUD 5.4 catch up in from Q2 payments. Some of those would ordinarily come in Q3 anyway, we made sure that all our payments are up there. I wanna make sure that we've got two quarters of normal cash flow, of normal operating and functioning. Once we get all the VXC revenue through, all the staff costs through, finish with the CapEx next quarter, finish with the bonuses next quarter, and have paid all their bills and everything on time, at that point, we'll be able to make a proper informed assessment of where we are in free cash flow. You know, things are projecting very well at the moment.
The only thing, Bevan, I'd probably add is, for those who haven't seen on page 13, there is a comment made that based on the current sort of normalized trajectory of financial performance and cash flow, the company does not foresee a need to raise additional capital. That's not a statement obviously made lightly, and that reflects the better than AUD 8.9 cash burn number, on a normalized basis, and then, a number of the improvements that Bevan's just talked through.
Next one.
Okay. Just one second. Roger, if you have a question.
Yes, I do. Thanks, guys. In terms of the net adds for ports, do you foresee that you can go back to the 400+ net adds per quarter? Would you report the net number post the consolidation? What is it? 188 in this quarter, or is it 22 going forward?
Sorry?
I can answer that, Bevan, if you would like.
No. I can answer. I just wanna make sure I understand the question correctly, the last part.
I mean the last part of the question was around would you disclose the net number, which is 22 in net adds for customer ports, or would you report 188 going forward?
I think the thing that... This is the reason we actually didn't report that separately is because people are getting confused. Out of those ports that we've... The reason we haven't given all the totals, we're probably gonna be focusing in FY 2024 and reporting metrics that are much more clear and much more understandable. Those ports at 22 that you're mentioning, they were pretty much all ports that we had actually implemented into the cloud. That's part of that Consolidation Program. It wasn't that we actually churned out 160 customer ports or whatever it was, 160 customer ports.
It's actually that we turned off 160 ports that we enabled on an aggregated basis to the cloud for our customers. When you look at that, it's we actually added 188 ports certainly on the base of the customers. We saved, you know, 160 cross-connects and port counts because we did 100 gig consolidation for clients. One of the things moving forward in terms of the KPIs, we're gonna be working towards to make sure we get very clear KPIs about what has historically been a customer port or a customer revenue generating port or whatever it's gonna be. We're to come through with stats. We didn't add 22. We added 100.
There might be a couple of cloud ports in there as well. You know, it's 188, whatever the number is. It's not the 22. I think we saved about 150 odd ports just in the cloud aggregation mode. Yeah, it's not 22. The fact you asked that, which is actually a good question, actually shows a confusion about what the net port add is and the reason why we're gonna be changing the metrics. Not changing, we're gonna be clarifying with better metrics certainly next financial year. Anything else?
Okay. Paul Mason, do you have a question?
Hey, thanks for the question. Just in terms of the direct sales force, Bevan, I was hoping you could give us a little bit of historical context because, you know, obviously everybody's surprised by the number. And depending on when this started, some of the actual sales stats that the much smaller teams put off were actually, like, rather impressive in the scheme of things. So, like, do you have a feel from your review when this, like, halving of the sales team actually happened? Like, is this two years ago or one year ago or six months ago or?
No, it didn't happen on a day. It probably started.
Yeah
... you know, one or two people here or there, 12, 15 months ago, something like that. Then, like, literally, you know, we kind of as a board, we understood what the number was in February, and then dug back and looked at it. You know, some people just leave, but it wasn't that some of the roles weren't backfilled. And the really important part about it is that you're absolutely right that people have done a pretty good effort, but at the same time, they're getting such a big pipeline given to them in terms of sales of people sometimes walking through the door that it's actually kind of easier in some ways to do sales when you've got, you know, 3x, 4x of pipeline that probably used to have.
Some of the salespeople have done an outstanding job. They've done very well. The second point to that is the interesting part about the declining is saying people have done well. What actually also happens is that it takes six months to build a really good funnel that's at the point of closing on average. That's at the point of closing those deals. Even though as people were exiting the pipeline that the person had built previously kind of got handed to someone else. That's why I kind of... it was a lagging indicator. The port sales was a lagging indicator of what actually happened in terms of some of the direct sales force.
Thanks, Steve.
Okay, thank you. Next person I have, sorry, is Darren.
Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for the opportunity. I'll stick to the one question. I just wanted to unpack the FY24 guide EBITDA guidance, please. Obviously you've done a good job in terms of the cost out program, OpEx, COGS, et cetera, also the VXC pricing. If you sort of add the full year benefit of all those, it looks like you get into the low AUD 40 million range from an EBITDA perspective. I guess my question is, does that imply that you're expecting essentially, you know, year zero revenue growth into FY24, please?
You're saying you're thinking we'll be around 40, then you're saying something about revenue growth. Is that right?
Well, the $40 million of EBITDA for FY24 is your guidance, so the $41 million-$46 million.
Yeah.
A lot of that looks like it's just driven by the cost out piece. Is that implying that there's not, like in your guidance number, it's assuming that there's no revenue growth?
No. No.
Oh, okay.
It's assuming there's revenue growth. It's also assuming that we're gonna be rebooting the sales team and hiring more people in that space and investing more money in that. What we have indicated is that in Q4 of this financial year, Q1 next financial year, we don't expect that benefit to be appreciated or attributed until we actually get to Q2. Once you get to Q2, and then really start kicking in Q3, well, that recurring revenue really only impacts FY25. You're absolutely right that if we sat there and did nothing but retain our existing revenue and customers, we'd be in a pretty healthy position. What we're also doing is reinvesting in that sales force and reinvesting in some areas.
We're certainly comfortable with the numbers that we've given. As I said, we will be growing revenue, and we'll also be growing our sales team as well.
All right.
Which cheeks up some of that, hence the range.
Got it. Thank you.
Thanks. Wade, do you have a question?
Probably the last one, Steve.
Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, thanks, team. Just wondering for the FY24 EBITDA guidance, are you able to provide the quantum of direct sales investment, either, you know, a rough dollar figure or percentage of sales?
We're looking around 10 people, and, yeah, you can have a fair idea what a salesperson costs. It's, it's there. Yeah, yeah, salespeople in the different regions. I mean, yeah. I'm not gonna give a quantum.
Great. Thank you.
One last person. Anyone from the room? Is that it?
I had one more from Chris online, who'd raised his hand.
Okay. That'll be last one.
Good day, Bevan. I noticed MVE's result was pretty strong there. Can you just talk through some of the trends you're seeing around SD-WAN and if some of those supply chain issues that were impacting the hardware component starting to ease off?
Sorry, the line was a bit scratchy. What was that? Does someone have better hearing of it?
Yeah, the MVE part was really strong there. I was just wondering some of the trends you're seeing around SD-WAN and if some of those supply chain issues that you flagged around, you know, the half year result, if they're starting to ease on the hardware component?
You know, I think we're really good with the hardware in terms of servers now. We've got plenty of servers to roll out for that, the software is all good. We had a poor showing in MVEs in Q2. I think what you're seeing there is some of that hard work there is actually, you know, obviously closed in Q3. I think we're seeing some of the result of that. Also, you know, again, I certainly come back to, you know, I'd like to see a much more steady, consistent rate in terms of MCR and MVEs.
It's, it's not great that it was, you know, quite good in one quarter, down another quarter, so good another quarter. The things that I'm seeing there, I'm absolutely still seeing demand. And, but the demand is somewhat tapered by how effective our sales force is because partly because of the size of it that's going through. Some of our partnerships that we're working with some of the parties, is looking good. It's actually starting to, I think, bear fruit. Again, you know, I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic. I think we've been there before. It was a good result and, you know, I want more consistency in it. That's, that's my only, my only part. I'm not saying it's a trend. One quarter doesn't make a trend. That's it. Okay.
Okay.
look, I think I just want to say thanks everyone for joining. Leticia, Norman, Steve Loxton, Adam, who's the CRO he helped put the presentation together. look, everyone, thank you very much for all your support. It's been, you know, it's been a fairly, you know, busy and interesting change. I certainly want to thank all the team members, and certainly we let go of some really great people and it wasn't a reflection on them or whatever it was. It was just where it was. thanks to all the team members today, and also thanks to the team members all their contribution over the last 10 years. Thanks, everyone.