Good morning, everybody. Good afternoon, I think, in some places. Look, thanks for joining us. There's a few people that are still popping in, so I'll do a bit of an intro. We'll run through a quick presentation of the quarterly results. Should go for about 15 to 20 minutes. If you can, please hold your questions to the end. Ben Jenkins, our CFO, who's on the call, will let you in and allow you to ask the question to the group. So, let's get into it. Okay, look, before I kind of get into highlights, I guess the key thing, or the key message I think out of this quarterly result is, you know, of course it's very strong, but really it's about being on plan.
We have a plan to grow our ARR better than we did last year. We grew effectively $21 million last year, and we're on plan to do that. We have a plan to maintain our cost structure where it is, maybe with a bit of CPI, and we're on plan to do that. We have a plan to unify our tech stack, and we're moving on very rapidly to do so, and that obviously creates huge opportunities for us in terms of cost structure, but revenue growth as well. We have a plan during this unification roadmap to also deliver key features to the market. We talked about that in this session, where we've released some content aware capability, which is really exciting, and we brought the Octopus business into our business.
In fact, some of the guys are here today in the last couple of days, and we're working, workshopping with them how do we bring their products into our business quickly? And so that's all going to plan. And then we've also spent a lot of time in the last year, probably behind the scenes, thinking about broadening our access to markets through partnerships, and one of which we achieved in the last quarter, which is the launch of the partnership with Schools Broadband. So overwhelmingly, we feel like we're on plan and building confidence as our business is maturing. So key highlights are, we're past AUD 120 million of recurring revenue. Our inaugural free cash flow of AUD 8.5 million is a huge turnaround.
Not a shocking one, but very consistent with what we've been telling the market we're planning to do over the last couple of years. Again, brought Octopus BI as a very, very exciting data analytics business that will... It's already a good business. It's got, you know, AUD 1 million of revenue already from its existing operations, and literally within days of that coming into our business, they've added more than AUD 135,000 of ARR with existing core clients. So that's really exciting. Schools Broadband is a huge achievement, having access now to 3,000 more schools in the UK. And then cracking 20% of students in Texas on our platforms is a fantastic achievement. We've done that in about a year.
And remember, Texas is as big as Australia, effectively, in terms of student numbers. So there are our kind of big picture highlights. I'll touch on some of those again in a minute, as I go through our overall quarterly results. So, look, 24 million kids are kept safe across our platform, and revenue's growing north of 15% year-on-year. 29 thousand schools, we're, you know, dominating in the U.K., dominant, sorry, in the U.K. and dominating the U.S., and most pleasingly, also in Australia and New Zealand, which is the key selling period coming up, for our K-12 in these markets. We're also looking at a really strong pipeline. So across all of our education segments and our consumer segment, things are looking very, very strong for our business.
Again, it's the result of hard work and discipline and focus in our business to build something that's unique and differentiated. From an H1 financial perspective, added $5 million of ARR in our education business, which is again on target. We're expecting to do better than we did last year. And over the course of the year, with the pipeline as it currently sits, we're feeling very, very confident. $120 million of ARR. We ended the year with... Sorry, ended the quarter with $42 million in cash or cash equivalents and a net debt of under $10 million. Operating cash flow nearly $15 million, and free cash flow of $8.5 million.
That's a, I think to some analysts, a surprise to the upside, but for us, that's consistent with our plans. We're very happy with that. Geographically, we're a bit of a change in the way we're reporting. We're gonna report in a local currency, ARR, now, and that just makes it easier to compare the noise of foreign exchange movements, of which there has been substantial changes since May. That's affected our ARR by in the order of AUD 2.5 million, but there is, of course, a cost saving through the natural hedge in our business, where a big chunk of our costs are aligned with our revenue streams as well.
So anyway, that's a bit of a change, but you can see across the portfolio of markets that we're in, the U.S. market for us is the absolute growth engine, and that will continue to be so for the next year. And the U.K. is somewhat held back by the fact that it doesn't have all of our product capability, but our unification roadmap is really directed at doing that and solving that by the end of this financial year. So we're super excited about the U.K. for the 2026 financial year. So you can see our ARR growth, it's increasingly our education growth is coming from existing products and price increases through our existing customer base, which is pleasing. Churn is still modest.
I think we're industry-leading in churn in the U.S. in particular, but I think broadly we're industry-leading in safety tech, and the Qustodio business is metronomically delivering on its, or above its targets. You know, that's what's punched us through 120 million of ARR. The SaaS metrics, which again, I'm hoping that the market starts to look at these or focus more on these, because these are stellar against our competitors. I think we're leading in all of these, if not most of them. You know, 99% are recurring revenue. We don't have bad debt. The people who pay our bills are, you know, governments and government funded. Our service margins at 93% and growing.
Net Revenue Retention, we're selling more and more products to existing customers, and we're losing very few of them, and for every dollar that we spend in marketing, we're getting nine dollars of revenue. These are phenomenal stats, and then the one on the bottom left, ARR growth at 20%, we're expecting that to continue, and we're expecting EBITDA margins in the order of 15% for this year, 10%-15% for this financial year, into the 20% range for the next financial year, and so we're hoping to be, you know, talking Rule of Forty type metrics, and some of our peers who are achieving Rule of Forty are, you know, they're valued in the 8-10 times revenue ranges.
So that's the kind of rerate opportunity we're seeing, and it's going, it's underlined by, you know, the substance of our business and what we're delivering. It is important for investors to recognize that there are cycles in our business, so this chart is really highlighting that the first half of the financial year, the December half, usually accounts for about 60% of our cash collections. Our cash collections, to be clear, are net of reseller commissions, and the reseller commission is in the order of 10% of our revenue. So, you know, what you see here as compared to revenue, is much lower by the order of 10%.
But you're seeing, you know, a constant increase in our cash collections and, you know, for this half, we're expecting to be very comfortably cash flow, free cash flow positive. Here's our operating cash flow. So we've been talking for a while about being operating cash flow breakeven on a run rate basis, and you can see very clearly here now that we've passed through operational cash flow profit very comfortably. Okay, let's quickly switch to our education business. Crispin Swan, who's usually on these calls, he's currently in Texas on a kind of sales, you know, set up with our US team for the next selling season, which kicks off in January. So unfortunately, he's not here to answer questions, but I'll do my best.
September quarter for us is the tail end of the U.S. selling period. It's a very low point for the U.K. It's pretty much the focus is on the U.S., and Texas in particular. Very happy with the results. Again, increasing contribution from selling additional products to existing customers, that's a really, really key for a business like ours. Particular markets where we're increasingly becoming a dominant provider, you grow not. You know, the extraction of new logos from that market becomes more difficult, so you have to focus on growing price points and growing product. So we're doing that very, very well. I'm really pleased with that.
Notwithstanding the kind of U.S. fall against the Aussie dollar in the last three months, our average sales prices and average revenue per student continue to climb. That's really, really important, you know, north of AUD 7 per student per year in licensing. It was only two years ago that was under AUD 4, so incredibly pleased with that result. Net revenue retention is lower than the June quarter, but that's always the case. It's the June quarter where the most of our sales and renewal traction happens, and that's where you get your opportunities to have a crack at new product sales, additional product sales, and price increases. So overwhelmingly, that was a very solid result. The September quarter usually accounts for about 15%-16% of our sales.
If you divide five million ARR by that, you kind of work out where we're kind of expecting to be for the financial year. Again, sold really well. One small comment here, I've touched on it before, is the introduction of Octopus into our business came with an immediate sales opportunity, offering that data and analytics capability to our biggest client, a group called International Schools Partnership. This little deal, albeit pretty big actually, of $135,000 per year, is for less than 10% of the footprint of that school. That's a really exciting opportunity, one that we didn't even know about when we were considering bringing Octopus into our business.
So that, again, shows the capability of bringing all this product capability, or sort of potential to bring all the product capability to this massive and growing customer base. Finally, Texas was a great result. Nearly 20% of students—sorry, more than 20% of students in Texas are being managed on our platforms, but business continues there. And, in most importantly for our businesses, Texas has not only, you know, a big market, but it has some very, some of the biggest school districts in the U.S. And so we're now getting to test our technology with school districts of more than 100,000 students. This is really exciting, and we're deployed into one already, and it's going well, and now we're doing proof of concept trials with a number of others.
We call them T5 districts, so massive school districts, well-known in the US, and within the top hundred school districts in the US. So again, everything in the US is going to plan. Crispin's in the US right now, working with our team to set ourselves up for a massive financial year. Just thought I would talk about student monitoring. It's definitely been a huge growth engine for our business since we brought the Monitor product into our portfolio in two thousand and eleven. Our revenue from them has grown from just under $5 million to nearly, I think, $23 million or $24 million today of ARR.
So that's outstanding growth, and the contribution is both in the U.S., which was a bit of a clean, you know, green greenfields market for safeguarding three, four years ago, and the U.K., which is buoyed by regulatory changes under a regime called KCSIE, Keeping Children Safe in Education. So both of those markets, we estimate about 30% satiated, so there's a lot of greenfields opportunities in those markets still. And we announced, and I think the market immediately understood the potential of the Schools Broadband Partnership. There are three managed service providers, essentially connectivity providers, in education in the U.K., and we've never really been able to access those massive, something like 4,000 schools and 4 million students managed by these MSPs.
And being able to now have access, not only to the biggest MSP Schools Broadband, but on an exclusive basis, we are now their selected monitoring product. That is a really good opportunity. That's in market now. We've already had sales now, nothing to, you know, move the needle in terms of our ARR, but the engine is now moving, and I'm hoping to talk more about that in the December results, which we'll announce, obviously, in January. So student monitoring, a huge growth engine. I expect that will be as big as our filtering business within the next 12 months. It's. There's a lot of room to move in monitoring. Okay, Community. So, again, cautious but very deliberate growth in this business.
To those not familiar with it, Community is the selling of our parental control product throughout schools. We've been doing that for a little while now in Australia, and we're getting north of 30% of parents in our Australian schools enjoying the Qustodio product in free and paid subscriptions. We've launched that now in the U.S., launching it, I think, to this half, something like five hundred thousand parents, and very comfortably getting north of 20% of parents in these launched school districts signing up to the Qustodio product. Those parent accounts have now passed through seventy thousand, and we've got some school districts achieving north of, in fact, one achieved 38% of parents in a school district, in a meaningfully scaled school district. That is huge for us.
That offers us the ability to make our K-12 offering more sticky. It gives us opportunity for premium upgrades, and it's an opportunity to build the Qustodio brand without spending money in advertising, which groups like Life360, their marketing spend is $90 million a year. We're spending, I think, three or four, no, maybe $4 million or $5 million in marketing that Qustodio brand, and now we've got literally hundreds of schools, school districts in the U.S. talking about Qustodio. So that's the play. That's the play here, is to make our education products more sticky, get premium upgrades, but build that cost effectively, build that Qustodio brand, and all of that's now starting to really work. The emphasis now is shifting to how do we line up that more quickly?
We've only had about 10% of our, on a per student basis, of our school districts launch this product to date, yet there's enormous interest. So now the emphasis of our business needs to be, well, how do we turn that on more quickly? And it's not just simply clicking a button. You have to introduce the concept to the executive in the school district. Sometimes you have to talk to the committees that are decision makers or influential decision makers in these schools. So how do we drive the demand and get it through that sausage machine into the hands of parents more quickly? That's really becoming the increasing emphasis. So in my view, that is an outstanding stream of our business, doing really well.
And one final point I might add is we're now finding private schools in Australia, international schools, and massive school districts coming to us because of the fact that we have a parental control offering that's beyond everybody else. So, I'm very, very excited with the community offering and, of course, the Qustodio business, which I'll talk about next, has been a, you know, probably our best ever merger. Qustodio keeps growing comfortably in the order of 15%-20% year on year. Average revenue per account keeps going up, and recurring revenue keeps going up. We are. I think I made the point last quarter. The emphasis of our business at the moment is on feature expansion.
We want to make sure that we have more features, essentially, than anybody that competes in parental controls, but most importantly, meaningful features. Beyond just blocking and allowing kids from accessing social media and porn or what have you, it's also now allowing families the opportunity to connect with a therapist. It's allowing parents to have visibility about their kids' online activity. You know, what are they seeing in social media? Reading their child's messages if they choose. Tracking, improving the location tracking features. Using AI to scan all the data that our platforms have access to, and again, provide parents with meaningful insights. That's really becoming the increasing emphasis. Next year, for us, it's about the kind of one button launch or onboarding of the Qustodio product.
Simply making the experience of using our product seamless for a less anxious customer base, which is the customer base that comes to our business from schools. So again, Qustodio, doing outstanding, fabulously run out of Spain. Okay, what's next for us? The December quarter is our attention focuses on Australia and New Zealand. Their pipelines have never been so strong. We've reorganized the Australian business model to, in many ways, mirror what we've done in the U.S., and very, very excited. I'm sure Australia and New Zealand will. And they both had their best performance last December, but without question, they're going to have their best results of all time this coming quarter. Our pipeline is strong, so supportive of hitting our budgets. There is much excitement about some new product launches.
I talked about it last quarter, which is our cloud. We call it cloud scanning. So it's being able to, in a real-time way, scan what's happening on that child's page and hide their ability to make comments on social media, hide images that are objectionable or adult, or hide the text or, you know, hide pages that have got adult content or text on them. And that is meaningful. That product has already sold before it even launched. We'd sold $500,000 worth this content and word type capability. So, that's really exciting.
So K-12, you know, it'll be the December quarter is slower than the June quarter, and our U.S. and U.K. sales teams are now in busy planning mode and pipeline generation mode for the start of that selling period from January. Qustodio, obviously it's a consumer business, so their emphasis is back to school and the Christmas and holiday selling periods. They had their best ever sales last year. There's no reason to expect that won't be the case again this year. And from a financial perspective, obviously, free cash flow positive half, and we're, you know, aiming to hit that 10%-15% EBITDA margins for this financial year. So all of that's looking pretty strong.
Again, as I said at the beginning of the session, we feel like we're on plan, and that's really my focus, is just making sure that people in this business are super clear on what their plan is, and we are, you know, working across it to de-risk that plan across the board. All right. That's me. Ben, maybe I'll let you just quickly scan through the ca-
Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Tim. We won't take too much time here so we can get into questions, but, summary here of the cash flow statement, as Tim touched on earlier, a really strong performance, record operating cash flow performance, and, free cash flow positive the whole way down that stack for the first time, really, which is really pleasing. The numbers on this page are the reported position, which includes your interest and, acquisition costs as well, within the investing and operating cash flow lines, but still strongly positive after that.
We've also included the adjusted cash flow, which reclassifies the education capitalized development costs out of operating costs into investing activities, so people - Sorry, other way around, out of investing activities into operating costs, so people can see how we historically did it. I think now that we're through that break-even point and showing free cash flow the whole way down, and we've been reporting this way for a while, we can probably just report on a reported basis moving forward, but continuing to show that transparency for the time being. Available funding includes the pro forma amount for the capital raising, so we're now well and truly funded.
We are sitting at over AUD 40 million worth of cash on the balance sheet on a pro forma basis, including that, so comfortably a way through to the future. Next slide, please, Tim.
Sure.
On this page, we have the, I guess, similar to historically with the direct cost and staff cost allocation, and then what we've done is also included hardware costs and leases. The leasing numbers sit below the investing activities line in financing activities, in line with accounting standards, but we like to show that here to show that we're well and truly covering those costs as well. A couple of key callouts on this page, really, the efficiencies that the teams managed to achieve in direct costs are year on year, notwithstanding the fact that we've added probably two million students from this time last year. Our direct costs, which is primarily data and hosting, is down 22%, which is an amazing achievement.
So you know, that will track up in line with adding students over time, but on a per unit basis, we expect it to reduce still and get more efficiency there. Really, really strong outcome there. Most other key cost lines are down year on year as well, which is really pleasing, and the other thing to call out, which is right down the bottom there, is the business acquisitions line. That relates to the Cipafilter deferred position. That's completely gone now. Last payment was made in September, so you'll no longer see that line item in our cash flow statement. That's a strong positive as well.
Arguably other costs you could normalize out as a one-off payment, but we've shown it as reported there, and it's not an ongoing cost for the business, so that's why it's sitting in the other cost line. So yeah, short story is costs remain under control, remains the focus for the business, notwithstanding the capital raise, keep strong discipline on cost control other than your typical CPI movements that you'll see in staff costs, and continuing to grow the top line and generate cash over the next twelve-month period, and into the future. So, probably the main points I'd like to call out there, Tim, then?
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think that's, it's an outstanding result. We've included what I consider as operating costs, you know, trading costs, like hardware costs, which are the hardware, the appliances that we deploy into schools' networks, and obviously leasing, which is office costs, which are bizarrely not included in the operating lines and the cash flow. So when I think about the underlying cash flow of the business, that's that adjusted free cash flow line. And, as Ben mentioned, the business acquisition cost, that's over now. The other costs are one-offs. That won't happen again. So the underlying performance of the business is actually a little bit better than what we're seeing here. So, we'll keep reporting like this.
I think the market will like seeing how we think about the underlying cash flow of the business. I feel like, yeah, I think if you extrapolate these numbers, you can see what we've been talking to the market about, which is essentially we're now on or about Free Cash Flow positive, and we will always be from now on. So that's probably it for us. Maybe I'll hand over to questions.
I'll just turn people's microphones on quickly, and Lindsay, you're first cab off the rank, if you'd like to try and unmute now, you should be able to.
There we are. Can you hear me now?
Yep.
Yep.
Brilliant. Just give me a sec. I can't hear myself.
... Can you still hear me?
Yeah.
Yeah, great. Okay, question from me. Just on costs, I'll start there. Your cash costs have been, as you've called out, kind of flat, on my math, for maybe five quarters in a row now. You've recently done this placement; you've got AUD 40-odd million in the bank. So I guess two questions. First one is, does the mindset change at all? Like, can you relax a little bit on the cost front, or is the mindset completely unchanged? and then the second question is, like, at some point the dam has to break, right? Like, you can't just keep your costs flat forever. So could you just maybe talk about how much spare capacity you think is still left in the business, and when the costs just naturally have to start creeping back in?
Yeah, it's a really good question, Lindsay. Well, let me explain, let me answer it like this. So when we, when we did that capital raising, we had a global hangout, I think the day after or two days after, and the first comment I made to the entire organization is nothing changes in our plan. That money sits on our balance sheet, it is not to be deployed for any productive purposes. It is... It's got a very deliberate purpose, which is to sit adjacent to our debt facility and ensure that we've got a net debt position that the market want us to have. So no, there is no change in our thinking about costs and investments. That does make things challenging, not without question. You know, and I don't think that's a problem.
I have no problem explaining that to staff, that we need to be very careful with the money that we've got and prove to ourselves and the broader market that we can live within our means. And as you've seen from our top line results, it's not impeding our business, it's just making us be more responsible. And in the medium term, there is still an efficiency dividend that's gonna become meaningful from the consolidation of our technologies. And I don't want to get too ahead of my skis here, which I love that expression, but it is pretty exciting having this Octopus business in our business.
There, you know, just as an example, an engineer, a software engineer in Sri Lanka is costing us in the order of AUD 12,500 a year. A software engineer in Australia is AUD 140,000 a year. So as we get the benefit of unification and then the ability to potentially move offshore development to that market, and they're very, very good. There is opportunities for very significant cost savings in this business, as well as providing more value to customers. So no, I don't see a philosophical perspective change in our thinking on investments and costs. I don't think we need to. As I said, our top line's strong and our competitors are all kind of being dressed up for sale.
So no, I don't think there's gonna be a big change there at all, Lindsay.
Okay. And then just, I mean, maybe just pushing a little bit on the second point around when the costs have to creep back into the business. It sounds like there'll be some CPI type cost increases, then you've got natural efficiencies that come in over time.
Yeah.
Should we think about the current cost base as being appropriate for the next 18-24 months? Is that the right way to think about it?
With CPI, yes.
Okay.
Yeah, and then I'd be... I think Ben, in his modeling, kind of plans for flat line, but hopes for cost out.
Yep. Yep, brilliant. Okay, and then, you made a comment that the first half will be free cash flow positive. You know, post this quarter, you're starting with an $8.5 million tailwind, so you've set yourselves basically no target at all for Q2. So could you put a finer point on what free cash flow looks like in the coming quarter? Is that kind of gonna be flatish? How should we think about that?
I'll let you, just let you sandbag that one, Ben.
Yeah. I think, like, the December quarter should be pretty close to breakeven on a free cash flow basis, give or take either side of that. And then the second half of the year, we'll burn a little bit. I mean, our view is, first half of the year should be able to provide the cash to support the second half of the year, if that makes sense. So we will end the year in a similar position to putting capital raise to one side, and the year in a similar position to what we were on a cash basis, at the start of the year.
Yep. Brilliant. All right, I'll just ask one more if I can. Just there, there's kind of a strange chart on slide 11 around net revenue retention, which looks like it's slipped below 100% for the quarter, but then all the other commentary and charts seem to run counter to that. So is there, like, some seasonal effect in the way that chart's constructed, or how should I read that?
Yeah, look, it's just the seasonal thing. That's right. So when you have your best crack at renewals, is when you have your best crack at net revenue retention, if that makes sense? 'Cause you're doing a renewal cycle, and you can add additional products. When you're doing a new logo sale, you know, you're at the kind of, at the discretion of their procurement processes. So your best chance to load up products is in renewal cycles, and that's the June period. Now, that's gonna change in Texas in the September quarter in the future, because we're building out our existing customer base in Texas. So again, it's just the cycles and our... And the September quarter for us hasn't been. We haven't had a big base of customers to have a crack at renewals for.
You'll see that change next year.
Okay, brilliant. No, it makes sense. Thanks, guys. That's it for me.
Thanks, mate.
James, you should be able to unmute now.
Perfect. Have you got me, guys?
Yep.
Yep.
Thanks very much. Just a couple from me, maybe around the pipeline. I think it looks like that's sitting at about sort of eight million weighted, just eyeballing the chart. Is there any Schools Broadband revenue factored into that number?
No, not really. If it is, it'd be $100,000. Tiny. Yep.
Yeah, there's not. Yeah, there's nothing.
And that's another point, actually. You've made this point to me today. In our pipeline and in our ARR, there's no Octopus revenue as well, so that's to come in the next quarter.
... Yeah, great. So I guess, what, that's about one point one, plus you've had some wins, so that'll come in next quarter, which sounds good.
Yeah.
It sounds like, Schools Broadband will be contributing there as well. Just on larger type deals or, you know, Schools Broadband type deals, are there any within that pipeline? I think the unweighted pipeline's pretty big. So just walk us through if there's any larger things that could drop?
There are always big things that we're working on that are binary and hard to predict, but we don't put any of those. Let's call them state type deals or country type deals. We don't put them in the pipe.
Okay, great. And maybe just one more: in terms of the upper end of the EBITDA margin target of 15% for FY 2025, I guess what needs to be done to hit that number? I think you spoke around cost out, you know, potential over time. Is there any cost out in that number, or is that just sort of BAU and continued growth of the business to get to that level?
Yeah, it's BAU. It's just keep our costs as flat as you can. And you know if we hit those numbers if we grow our ARR like we did last year, basically, so I feel like we can do better than that. But again, sorry, Ben. But yeah, so we've modeled that based on essentially keeping our achieving what we did last year.
Okay, great. That's it from me. Thanks, guys.
All right. Oh, no, you should be able to unmute now.
Can you guys hear me?
Yep.
Oh, got through this time. Thanks, guys. Just two questions from me. Just, first one's around ARR, and the second one's just about the EBITDA guidance. The first one, just on the FX adjustments. Now, just to understand, I know there's FXs moving around. You said there's an adjustment in the way that you calculate the ARR. Can you just kind of talk through, when you finish the period 116 of the entry ARR and then finish at 120 and then FX is zero, just what spot currencies you're using there? Because I guess we're Aussie, Aussie shareholders, so we're kind of, we are thinking in Aussie dollars.
Yeah. So we actually used to put the FXs in there, so we need to do that again. So sorry about that. The FX positive asset FX contribution of ARR was sub 500,000. That's why it's kind of rounded to zero here, but it was more than zero. The FX Aussie dollar strengthened against the U.S. in May, and then very sharply in the last week of June-
Mm-hmm
... if I recall, and that affected our reported 30 June ARR to the something like AUD 2.6 million or AUD 2.4 million.
Yeah.
Now, that's reversed a little bit, but only in the order of AUD 400,000, so you know, but for that movement of the U.S. dollar, we'd be currently reporting about AUD 122 million of ARR, so that's really the point of this slide. The rates that we use for reporting. That's a good observation. Ben will make sure that they're in the future releases.
The main ones are the U.S. and U.K. 67.28 U.S., so slightly worse than June, and 51.48 in the U.K., so slightly better than June, so lost a little bit on the U.S. conversion, but gained a little bit more on the U.K. It was about a cent over in the U.K.
No worries. Then just around the EBITDA guidance that you've provided. I know in the past, when you talked about EBITDA, you did include some capitalized costs in that number. But 10%-15%, you're talking about there, how much are you talking? How much of that's just, if you know what I mean, not in-
Yeah. Yeah, it'll be-
Cost.
It'll be on a reported basis. That's right.
Sorry, on a reported basis?
Yeah.
Yeah. So it's the same run rate of capitalization as FY 2024 on if you're--we're plus CPI. We're not expecting to capitalize as a percentage of our engineering costs anymore. It'll be very similar.
Hold on a second. Wait, I've. The difference between the 10%-15% is inclusive of some capitalization?
It's inclusive of capitalization, yes. The 10%-15% is purely because, you know, it's nine months out, so we're giving a range rather than an exact number.
Can you talk about that amount? It's about AUD 20 million. Is that a good proxy?
That's right, yeah.
Okay. So the 10%-15% is inclusive of the 20 million proxy?
Yeah.
Okay. Good one. All right. Thanks, guys. Great quarter. Well done.
Yeah.
Morgan, you should be able to unmute shortly. Yep.
Can you hear me okay, Ben?
Yep, we can hear you.
Sorry, my apologies. I dropped out just before, so if you did cover this, I'll pick it up now elsewhere. But just on the, obviously on the headline at the start of the presentation, where you referred to your operating, or sorry, your Free Cash Flow of AUD 8.5. And then when you go into a little bit more detail throughout the presentation, a little bit further down, your operating cash flow, you've got the 6.7 of Free Cash Flow in your financing activities, brings you up to 9.3, which obviously you referred to in the earlier one with your hardware costs and leasing costs. But I was just trying to reconcile those two numbers, the 9.3 and the 8.5.
Where are you getting, sorry, nine three.
So the net. Sorry, your net cash flow, the AUD 99,313.
... Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, so-
Just how to reconcile that to the free cash flow number of 8.5, which you reported on earlier on?
There's a couple of things in there, but the two main ones are your interest costs, which we're adding back to that eight point four number, and the acquisition costs of the Cipafilter business are the two main ones, so.
Okay.
Um, yeah.
So obviously, that variable should be less, given the pay down of the debt and then obviously without the acquisition costs in the future quarters.
Yeah, and to be fair, with the debt, we won't pay down initially. But we should be able to offset that. Net interest cost will come down as we put the cash to work in term deposits. So we expect to earn more interest income. We'll potentially look to pay down debt in the short to medium term, but at the moment, it's slightly prohibitive with make-whole. At this point, we're only fifteen months into the loan period, so we're probably twelve to eighteen months away before that becomes a little bit more palatable.
Okay, great. Thank you.
But that's a good area of focus, right? Because the ending of that Cipafilter payment and the bringing in of the AUD 23 million, it's in the order of AUD 2.5-3 million of savings, cash savings to the business. It's pretty material.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thanks, Morgan.
All right, thank you.
Ross, you should be able to unmute shortly. I'll just let you through.
Can you guys hear me now?
Yep.
Yep.
Great. Thanks, guys. Just two from me. Just, Tim, you talked earlier about, you know, planning to get more access and, and maybe quicker access to the schools. Can you just understand that? I mean, how much of that can you control? Is there a, you know, a capital requirement there to do it? Understanding the timeframes as well. Maybe just explore that a bit more.
Yeah. It's not a capital thing. It's top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel things. It's a whole series of things that need to be done from... Yeah, how do we make sure we create the momentum, the demand, it's called demand generation? How do we get districts coming to us rather than us having to chase districts? And, well, that's social media posts, media events, conferences, kind of stuff that's already in our marketing approach, but just getting that messaging right. It's testimonials, so we've had some very successful school districts, and one here, I said, it's got 38%. We need to turn that into testimonials and get that messaging out there. So that's top of the funnel demand generation stuff, and then there's the kind of execution stuff and everything in between.
The execution stuff, it's still quite manual to launch these school districts. We have plumbing to do on the School Manager system and then into the Qustodio system and into all the mailing platforms and stuff. So it's a little bit hydraulic today. So yeah, there's some systemy things to do, there's some marketing things to do, and there's a whole set of B2B2C success type stuff that has to happen. So it's just a lot, lot of small stuff.
When do you think you get kind of critical mass and momentum on that?
It's hard to say, to be honest, because-
Yeah
... you have the back to school period is when you get the most interest in hawking technology in school districts or in schools everywhere, 'cause it's the kids that are being given the Chromebook or the iPad or whatever. So that's a perfect opportunity. It isn't the only opportunity, though, right? So what we need to do better is now find you know cyberbullying week type moments or hijacking, you know, TikTok, media or whatever, and bringing those to the attention of the decision makers in school. So it's not an all back to school type opportunity, but we've been really focusing on that, you know, because, you know, we've had a huge. We're doing a huge amount of launches right now.
So yeah, we've got 90% of our students in the U.S. still to have a swing at, and I'm hoping to have a swing at most of those next year.
It's all. Well, thanks. Then, just on Texas, if we can revisit that for a second. You mentioned about 20% of the student population is now on a Qoria platform. There's a bit of an 80/20 rule in that market 'cause there are some very big school districts, and there are quite a few small ones. Can you just talk about the traction you're getting across, you know, big and small? Obviously, the bigger ones have a bit more capacity to do their own homework and, you know, outside of, I guess, what might be recommended to them. Are you still getting traction with those? And maybe some color on that. Thanks.
Yeah. Yes, you know, we're. Our bread and butter school districts across the U.S. are in the order of four to 20 thousand, let's say, and that's slowly climbing. Our biggest deployment is with a group called Northside in Texas, which is 100,000, 104,000 students, and that's really challenged our platform. You remember our Linewize platform, which we sell in U.S., was built for New Zealand schools, and a typical New Zealand school is 300 or 400 students. So we've had to scale out the potential, the capability of that unbelievable technology. We've had to scale it out and have these little appliances that used to manage 300 students, now deploying in networks that support hundreds of thousands of students. So, that's been a big process, actually, getting Northside to run and deliver.
Now we've displaced from Northside, ContentKeeper, which is the go-to appliance, you know, network-level filter in big school districts, certainly in the U.S., but also in Australia and U.K. And we've displaced it and done so, and the client's very happy. So now I think that's... There's some excitement now about us having a swing at these bigger school districts across the U.S. And as you see at the bottom here of the comment, that some of these T-fives that we're working with in Texas are equivalent sized to Northside. There are two massive districts in the U.S.: LA Unified, which is, I think 900,000 or 1.1 million students, and the New York Independent School District, which is a similar number.
We're not yet ready to tackle those things, but almost all other districts now in the U.S., we now can credibly say that we can support. So yeah, it's not just in Texas, sorry, but Texas now pretty much across the board, we can support Texas customers, and we can now demonstrate that. So it's a very good spot.
That's great. Thanks, guys.
You should be able to unmute now.
Hi, Ben, Tim, you guys hear me?
Yeah.
Yeah. Awesome. Just one from me. Just in terms of, Qustodio and the growth outlook, for that part of the business, can you give us some color on how we should think about that? Thanks.
Yeah. It's growing. Their plan, it's always the same actually. Their plan is fifteen percent growth, and they just seem to always beat it. So look, that's why I say in here that they're comfortably growing their direct business at 15%-20%. We're now starting to see some resonance of our schools, Australian schools, US schools, talking about Qustodio. So we're now starting to get better performance in the markets where our schools are talking about the product. It's constrained, though. I touched on this at the beginning of the presentation. We don't have the money to spend in marketing, above the line marketing, of Qustodio like with like. We're dealing with that in two ways.
You know, one is, we expect as our margins grow and our service margins are 90-plus%, which will build capacity for us to spend more and more on marketing spend, you know, social media posts and media events and PR and so on. In fact, in Australia, we used to do radio ads for our Family Zone product, which are incredibly successful with, you know, the home score runs. So there's a lot more to do in terms of traditional marketing spend, hard marketing dollars to be spent. I'm hoping for, you know, three- to four-fold increase in ability to spend in Qustodio marketing in the coming years, okay, margins permitting. And then the other piece is just getting schools talking about it, 'cause that's almost like a negative cost of acquisition.
The schools are solving a problem, promoting our product for us without any direct marketing spend by us. So at the moment, we're gonna leverage the B2B2C, our school promotion, as all of our business grows, and then we'll have margin in our business to spend more in traditional marketing for the Qustodio business. While doing all of that, as you see here, there's very much an emphasis on building out the features, feature capacity of that product, so that you know, as I said earlier, it's none converts with the breadth of features in our product. So yeah, I mean, the thing that's holding us back, I had somebody raise this with me the other day, you know, "Why can't you achieve the results of Life360?" Well, they spend $90 million on advertising.
If I had that money, I'd be achieving it, too. But I think in the long term, actually, us getting schools talking about our products free is probably a better business model, which is really an emphasis.
Okay. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And right now, just in terms of that growth that we're seeing regionally, is that all kind of like the EU region that we're seeing the growth? Or, if you can give some color on the regional-
Yeah, moving around a lot. I mean, the Australian market has been a stellar performer for Qustodio since the merger. It used to be top ten, now it's comfortably top five performer market, and again, that's because private schools are very vocal about Qustodio. The US has improved in the last six months. Spain has been a huge performer recently. We've got a number of telco partnerships, which kind of launch, get good traction, and then kind of get into a steady state. We've got a few more of those that we're working on, which are pretty exciting, and they're outside of Europe, which is exciting for us as well. It kind of moves around, and it depends on some of the competition, too.
Like Bark is our biggest product competitor in the US, and if they've got a big war chest of money to spend, then now, you know, that market becomes a challenge. And what's brilliant about Victoria and her team at Qustodio is they are literally monitoring that stuff real time, and if they're finding that their cost of acquisition, you know, they measure everything LTV versus CAC. If they're finding that equation isn't working in a market, they just divert the resources somewhere else. They are brilliant. So they don't kind of think about it like a enterprise SaaS business of, you know, approach this market and invest in it and build relationships and blah, blah, blah. They are searching for an LTV-CAC equation, and that customer could be anywhere.
You know, they support a hundred countries and thirteen different languages and stuff, so they have enormous flexibility in how they run that business. That's why I think they never, they never really miss targets, is because they, they aren't focused on a particular market. They're focused on a particular customer who's available in all markets, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, it does. That's a good way to penetrate the market. Very commercial. Maybe one last one from me. Sorry, I know I said I didn't ask one, but just in terms of Japan, I think we spoke about some potential opportunities there. Would we get good to get an update if there's anything there? Thanks.
Yeah, I'm really excited about it. Look, I'm hoping to talk to the market about this in coming months. We've been working with some distribution partners in Japan for a while, trying to, and there's a number of opportunities from consumer to schools as well, and it's a. If we can crack it, it's a really important market, 'cause it's big, of course, like, it's 100 million people. It's also the best telco market for value-added services. Like in Australia, if you're selling Spotify with your Optus account, if Optus can get 3-5% pay cut of that VAS product, then they're really happy. In Japan, it's 60%, so their attachment rates for value-added service in Japan from telco products is massive.
So for a business like us, which is increasingly becoming a partner-driven business, Japan is sensational. So really excited and working very, very hard. So I look, hold your breath, we're hoping to announce some things in coming months.
Perfect. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Ben.
Yeah, Jules, you should be able to unmute shortly.
Great, guys. Can you hear me?
Yes.
All right. Fantastic. Tim, one of the things that sort of stuck out to me here in the commentary is just the performance of Octopus BI post-acquisition. If I heard you right, you said, 135,000 of incremental ARR within days. I mean, that's probably 13% of their total.
Yeah.
Could you just sort of, maybe provide some color around, was this already in the pipeline? Is this you activating sort of cross-sell? And are you seeing it, you know, coming, you know, the demand out of the U.S. or the U.K.? Just thinking of sales seasons here and, you know, what's relevant and what we can read the tea leaves moving forward on this, please.
Yeah. Yeah, so this, this particular deal became alive as we were getting into the final stages of the merger. I wasn't aware of it. I mean, other people in our business were, but no one told me, so it was a pleasant surprise. So they, we, you know, this is a big client of ours, International Schools Partnership. I think it's a... Don't quote me on this, but I think it was a GBP 750,000 deal with ISP. Like, that's a, it's a meaningful customer of ours that's run out of the UK business, our EMEA business. So they've got international schools spread throughout the world. And, in the last few months, Octopus started talking to them about their capability. And this, this sale that we're talking about here is less than 6%.
It's about 6%, actually, of their schools, International Schools Partnership's footprint, and if it works, you know, there is a real chance of that being rolled out across the entire footprint, and that would be a very meaningful deal if that happens. I'm not promising it, but that's kind of why we noted it here, 'cause it's a big win. This is International Schools Partnership, a very meaningful player in schools globally. Now, in terms of what happens next for the Octopus existing business model, they. Hans is here at the moment. We're kind of working through all that at the moment, and to be honest, the focus for me is more about how do I put product in the hands of our US team, run by Harrison, our UK team, run by Gav?
How do I make sure that they've got product that they can demonstrate at FETC, the conference at the end of January, and BETT, which I think is the end of January or early February in the U.K.? Now, that might mean that we're somehow somewhat constricting, you know, Hans' existing go-to-market, but that's okay, because Gav and Harrison can sell ice to Eskimos. If we can get them product, these guys will make it rain. So, that's really the emphasis. So their existing business, it's not gonna be destroyed in any sense of the word. They've still got existing relationships and sales capabilities, so that will go. But the emphasis of our business has to be putting product in these events that we can demonstrate to customers and turn into millions of dollars of ARR this financial year.
That's really the focus. So you'll see that. We'll actually have beta-ready products. Per yesterday's plan, we'll have beta-ready products by the end of January. So we'll be in the market properly with an integrated Octopus Linewize product or Qoria product, now literally only four months.
Excellent, and, you know, great start. Fantastic start. Yep.
Thanks, Jules. All right, is that it for questions? It is. Okay, look, thanks, everybody. I'm just scanning through the names of people on this in the session today. So thanks for our existing investors for being along this journey with us for so long, and for the new names that I'm seeing here that have joined us only recently in that recent capital raising again, thanks for joining this journey. Again, I feel like we're very much on plan, and I'm hoping in January I say the same thing, that we're on plan. I'll see you all very soon. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Tim.