Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the SEEK Limited full-year results call for 2025. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a question-and-answer session after the presentation, at which time, if you wish to queue for a question, you will need to press * followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. I will now hand the call over to SEEK Limited CEO, Ian Narev. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and thank you all for joining us. I'm here with the usual crew: Kendra, Peter, Simon, and Grant. We're in SEEK HQ on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-w urrung people of the Kulin Nation, and I would like to pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. You've all had a chance to click through the results. I'd just categorize it by saying that probably the headline is, "We did exactly what we set out to do, and now we need to do it again and better." And that's pretty much the headline of the result. You can see the highlights on page six. And just to sort of reiterate, these are outcomes we aimed for and achieved, and we're pleased about that. There's a lot of hard work to do.
I think also the thing I certainly would point out is this was the first full year of the business post the completion of unification, and the benefits that investment has given us is just right through this result. And for me, at the core of that, we've done small investment, some important kind of reorienting of the business, restructuring of the business. But the standout element of the year is the fact that we delivered and shipped innovative product at a speed and quality we just have not seen before. And that is due to the quality of our people. I'd like to call them out. And likewise, the fact that we were prepared to make the big investments behind their capability. And you can see what that led to in FY25 on slide 6. ANZ placement share is higher. The leadership extends.
Asia is the highest in recent history. We've done what we said we would do in yield growth and probably a shade more. Asia is a topic that many of you were by no means anywhere near declaring victory there, but we've got high yield and added volumes, record candidate visits, and we'll come back to the freemium performance later, but this is one of the biggest changes again in our marketplace for a long, long time. There's a long way to go, but it couldn't have started better as far as we're concerned. The yield growth offset macro and freemium impacts, and so we got revenue growth, and so we got operating leverage, particularly in the second half that you can see there, and that went down to the free cash line as well. I won't spend time on slide seven.
Kendra will take you through the details of that, including the split between sales revenue and net revenue, which will be new to many of you post Sidekicker. I'll just say overall that the headline numbers here are pleasing, but recognizing from an investor perspective, until you really see the lift in even underlying adjusted profit, EPS, and those things, it's never going to be the kind of trajectory you want to see. I also feel pretty confident that you'll see that the path we're on now feels like we're at the cusp of being able to deliver these strong numbers right across the board. With that, I will hand over to Simon, and I'll come back a bit later on in the discussion.
Thanks. Thanks, Ian. On page nine, we laid out our strategy, which, as you know, is to grow placements this year while becoming a more efficient, scalable business. In the last year, when it comes to placements, we've really been focused on three pillars. We're deepening candidate engagement and building stronger understanding of the preferences of our candidates and hires. Our second pillar is then to use that understanding to deliver more high-quality matches with placement rates and reduce the effort to place for both sides of the marketplace. And then finally, we're building a uniquely high-trust, pre-validated environment where candidates can stand out and hires can select with confidence. And this is important because the world is getting increasingly noisy. In terms of yield, we're focusing on breadth and scale. We want every hire and every role represented on our platform.
With freemium, as Ian mentioned, we're moving towards a single marketplace where the full breadth of labor demand competes for talent. And when we get there, we want pricing to reflect the differentiated value of each role. With variable pricing now fully rolled out, we're optimizing algorithms, and we've been releasing new features to give customers greater choice in how they compete for talent. And this year, we started the journey on automation by releasing some early features, reference checks, which are helping increase the speed and certainty of placement. When it comes to operating leverage, we've made really solid progress on operating leverage by continuing to simplify our environment post-unification. So that's both technologically and organizationally. And as Ian mentioned, that's increasing our speed and impact. We've really focused this year on linking priorities across the business more tightly to our strategic objectives to drive greater alignment and accountability.
And that's allowed us to free up capacity to reallocate investment towards core product capabilities such as AI, data, and trust. We've moved to slide 10 for a little bit more about what we've done a bit more specifically. Over the past year, we've delivered hundreds and hundreds of feature releases across the SEEK platform, and it's pleasing to see them driving results for both candidates and hirers. On the candidate side of our market, more people are applying to high-fit jobs than ever before, and each person is applying to more jobs than ever before. This has been central to our placement share gains across the region. Our search has improved with more relevant results and personalization features underpinned by increasingly advanced algorithms. Our engagement and reach with candidates has grown through mobile app adoption and more timely personalized notifications.
And over 3 million Australians are now verified through SEEK Pass, which is also launched across Asia. And we're increasingly releasing new features that put identity and trust at the core of our marketplace, like Verify and Apply. And this is essential because, as I mentioned, bots and automation are increasingly fueling spam and scam in the online environment. Most significantly, this year, we've scaled a new feature called the Career Feed. This personalized experience generates a tailored list of job ads and content based on everything we know about a candidate. And it's now delivering between 20% and 50% of all job applications across our marketplaces and growing. It's the most material shift in how people discover opportunity on SEEK since our founding.
It's creating a low-friction, hyper-personalized experience that serves active job seekers very well, but is increasingly allowing us to meet the needs of monitoring candidates on an ongoing basis. And within this product experience, we've been experimenting with LLM capabilities to drive even deeper personalization. We're summarizing jobs, surfacing contextual market insights, and enabling tailored conversations with candidates about their preferences. On the hire side, we've been investing in improving our ability to predict and explain high-fit applications, which is critical to our targeted capability. And we're investing in greater ROI transparency because we believe that when hires allocate more of their recruitment budget to SEEK, the average cost to hire decreases.
Going a little bit deeper on the hirer side on the next page on 11, many of you know that this year we refreshed our job ad proposition, which we think lays the foundations for ongoing improvement and innovation. For the full year, we've been rolling out freemium in Asia, which is enabled by the Lite Ad, and it's on track and performing in line with expectations from a product perspective. And in late FY25, we launched a refreshed Job Editor, which we outlined in detail earlier today. But just to give you a bit of a reminder of the objectives, the first was to give hirers more differentiated choice, to use AI targeting and new performance features to ensure that placement speed and likelihood to place improves as our hirers move up the Ad Ladder.
A second priority was to provide clearer performance expectations so hires can make informed decisions about how many high-fit applications they require to make a placement, and the third, through the Advanced Ad, was about offering hires greater control and flexibility on how much they're willing to pay to reach high-fit candidates. It's early days, but performance in Australia and New Zealand has been encouraging. Uptake of the Advanced Ad has been strong and largely complementary to the Premium Ad, which has maintained its penetration levels for the most part. We move forward. I'll just talk a little bit about an acquisition we made this year in Sidekicker. Sidekicker is a business focused on flexible labor.
Flexible labor, as you know, is a material part of the workforce, but we expect it will grow as new technologies remove friction and risk for SMBs on the hire side and give employees greater control over their working life. Our SMB customers tell us flexible hiring breaks down in traditional sequential processes. It's simply too slow. What they need is an online, sorry, an on-demand solution that brings labor requests, candidate vetting, trust, matching, and scheduling together in one or two clicks. We've observed the Sidekicker model for a while now. It's a self-service digital model that has demonstrated strong product-market fit in the last few years. What we've observed is SMBs typically start with occasional emergency use and then expand their reliance on Sidekicker as the convenience and benefits of on-demand labor become clear.
With the emergence of new automation technologies in recent years, we think now is the right time to accelerate the on-demand labor opportunity across Australia and New Zealand. We expect automation and self-service to create marketplace-style economics where service levels improve and unit costs fall as liquidity grows. And full ownership of Sidekicker will let us fully leverage our core assets and capabilities, such as SEEK Pass for onboarding, trust and compliance, our AI capabilities for matching and automation, and deeper integration into our product experience and commercial constructs to drive further liquidity. Our objective is to expand the adoption of flexible labor among SMBs by introducing them to the benefits of an on-demand hiring platform for the first time. We think we can grow the market. That's my section. I'll throw to Peter now, and he can take us through operations.
Hello, everyone. Thank you, Simon. So I'm going to try and, over the next couple of slides, link the product development items that Simon and themes that Simon talked about, as well as the stuff we talked about at the investor day, to the actual marketplace results for both ANZ and Asia. So I'll start with ANZ. And if you were to characterize the big picture, volumes down 11% due to the macro forces in the economy. And we were very pleased to be able to grow revenue despite that downdraft, which is actually one of the first times we've been able to SEEK to grow in a down cycle year. So revenue was up 1% for ANZ. Volumes down 11%. Year-on-year, placement share is up, and we held throughout the year. And yield, you can see, was very pleasing, 13%.
On the bottom right, we break out a little bit differently than we have in the past. The revenue profile of the business. We often talk about depth revenue in the past. This gives you a little bit more accurate read in terms of how the business actually behaves today, and we're going to be building on this going forward, so I'll take a moment, given some of you have models built to calculate yield this way, to explain the bottom right table because it's new, so we take our total revenue. It's net revenue. Kendra will explain that a little bit later. The net revenue categories are Core Job Ads and Ad Enhancements, as well as Expanded Sourcing Solutions and Other, so Expanded Sourcing Solutions and Other includes Sidekicker, includes Talent Search, and also includes Job Editor.
We take the first line, which is the Core Job Ads and Ad Enhancements, which are the boosters and things like that, and break that out in terms of the revenue profile. And you can see the depth ad change year-on-year from FY24 to FY25, underpinned by the introduction of the Advanced Ad that Simon talked about in that product development that we talked about a few cycles ago. And you see that a few slides ago. And you see that in the bottom right-hand mix. So we'll be building on this more and more. We're going to be tweaking it as we get our product suite a little bit more involved. So I welcome any feedback to Dan after this on that table. What that translates to on the next slide on slide 15, you can see in the top right, the macroeconomic volumes down 11% year-on-year.
I'm sure we'll get lots of questions about that. Despite that, the work on the product side drove monthly unique visitors. You can see that up and the application per ad. And those two things are material inputs to the placement share, which you can see on the next slide on slide 16, which has been trending up for the last several years. And it has been up two points against FY24. So very pleased there. And then on yield, driven by two predominant forces, variable pricing, which this group knows relatively well, and depth adoption increase in ANZ, which we're really pleased, particularly in the second half, driven by the introduction of advanced and other features. So a really satisfying result for ANZ. Asia, I will turn to now.
There's a lot going on in Asia, and this builds on our discussion in both the investor day and previous analyst calls. So I'll go through them. As you know, or many of you know, we are midway through a freemium rollout, and I'll update you in a couple of slides on where we're at with that. Flipping the model in Asia from a pay-to-access the marketplace, so every ad is free, to a model where you can come and post any job for free and choose which roles you choose to pay for. So it's quite a dramatic shift, and it's been something we've been working on now for over a year. The results of that and the strategies in Asia more broadly, as well as the work on the overall marketplace post-unification, are starting to show momentum.
So we've worked for about six markets over the past year or so in the freemium. And as many of you know, we've been talking about Hong Kong macro decline. Despite those two things, we basically were able to hold revenue flat. And if you had asked me personally a year ago, would you take that outcome? I would have said yes. We've got more work to do to get it growing, but for this past year, we're very pleased with the results. So what that breaks out in, paid volumes are down 16%, driven by two things. Hong Kong does contribute, but then the freemium launches now are a major contributor of that. The flip side of the paid volumes on the far right-hand side are the yield offset. And we've been talking about that in Asia now for the last couple of cycles.
What is most pleasing about this result, we think, is the strength of the flywheel itself and our market share. Its placement is at, as Ian mentioned, recent highs and trending upwards. And I'll talk to that. So you'll see depth penetration on the bottom right, very similar trends to ANZ. Although we haven't yet rolled out a lot of the features and functionalities that ANZ got in Q4, that is coming in the next couple of quarters. Hong Kong just launched a few days ago. So if you then double-click on that and look at the flywheel itself on slide 18, top right, you can see the dynamics of freemium playing out, where we've launched four markets now. We are now reporting the Lite Ad and total ads. So you can see the total ads on the platform increasing, which is the purple dotted line.
You can see the paid ads coming down as some ads will go down to free, and they should be because we were over-monetizing them. And the flip of that is the bottom left, where we've seen really dramatic improvement on the candidate side by both the function of having more ads on the platform and a full year of Unification. Both of those have driven a 25% or 26% increase in MAUs. And as a result, the value in applications per ad is up substantially. And if you look at two or three slides forward, I'll talk about placement. In terms of where we're at in Freemium, we've got more work to do both on Freemium in Asia. So obviously, with revenue flat, that is not our ambition. We still are committed to getting to double digits in Asia. This year is the last year of the Freemium rollout.
We've got two markets to go. Hong Kong went live last week. Malaysia is coming soon. So the two biggest markets will go live this year, and Hong Kong already went live. And so we've got four markets down and, well, actually five, if you include last week and one to go. All of that is showing good signs on the placement and market share trajectory. Just closing out on slide 20, you can see actually, you can really see the story of the legacy platform. You can see the impact on unification in FY24. And you can see the results post-unification and freemium playing out, where we've seen dramatic uplifts. And this is pretty broad-based in most of the markets and same dynamics of yield.
So we have more work to do in Asia, but a lot of progress consistent with what we talked about in both previous forums as well as the investor day. So I'll toss to Kendra now to unpick the financials at the group level.
Okay. Thanks so much, Peter, and good morning, everyone. I'll begin with slide 22, which outlines our financial results for FY 2025. We reported net revenue of AUD 1,090,000,000, up 1% compared to last year, or flat when you exclude favorable FX. We had positive momentum through the year, with half-year revenue up 5% on the same time last year. As both Ian and Simon mentioned, following the Sidekicker transaction, we are now reporting both sales revenue and net revenue. So sales revenue includes the revenue that Sidekicker receives from its customers but then pays out to the contingent labor or Sidekicker employees when they complete their jobs. That's noted here on slide 22: the Contingent Labor Fulfillment Cost. Sidekicker's share of that revenue is what's then included in net revenue.
Net revenue is aligned with our historical disclosures of revenue, and moving forward is the metric we will provide guidance against. So these results include just one month of Sidekicker results post the acquisition, which are break-even at EBITDA. And you can see more detail in the appendix for the detailed Sidekicker business in a like-for-like comparison with our guidance. Staying on page 22, total expenditure declined 2% year-on-year, primarily due to declines in CapEx following the completion of unification and reflecting good cost control. EBITDA did decline 2% to AUD 459 million. However, free cash flow, which represents EBITDA less cash CapEx, increased to AUD 203 million, growing 41% year-on-year. Our adjusted profit was AUD 155 million. This adjusted result excludes the impact on our financials of the SEEK Growth Fund .
Once you include the valuation uplift from the fund and other significant items, we reported a statutory profit of AUD 238 million on continuing operations. With strong free cash flow and the balance sheet in good shape, the board announced a full-year dividend of AUD 0.46 per share. That's 100% of our dividend policy formula of cash profit less CapEx and is 31% higher than last year. Turning to slide 23, where we look at our total expenditure and operating leverage. We know it's early days, but our commitment to operating leverage is coming through. Full-year revenue was up 1%, and total expenditure was down 2%. In the second half of the year, operating leverage was even more clear, with revenue growth up 5% compared to the same period last year and total cost growth of 3%. In FY25, we controlled costs, absorbed unfavorable effects and inflationary movements.
There was benefit from unification costs rolling up from the prior year, and we've seen efficiencies in our run-the-business spend, including some restructuring as we moved to a fully APAC organization. This enabled us to increase the investment we put to our grow-the-business areas, product AI, all the great work that Simon mentioned earlier, while keeping total costs down. In total costs, you'll see a 3% increase in OpEx and a 19% decline in CapEx. Included in these numbers is the shift from AUD 11 million from CapEx to OpEx, which is approximately what we spoke about at the half year. And just to remind you, as a management team, we make our decisions based on the total cost base and aim for operating leverage at the total cost level.
The percentage of our cost, which is capitalized, is an outcome of which activities our people spend their time on through the year and has no impact on our total cost target. Moving on to slide 24, this is the drivers of adjusted profit, which decreased 13%. The decline was led by lower EBITDA and higher D&A, which reflected the first full year of platform unification amortization. These movements were partially offset by a reduction in tax in the year. Slide 25 highlights free cash flow and a significant improvement year-on-year, up 41%. This increase is driven by higher operating cash flows and the reduction in CapEx. Additionally, we received AUD 153 million in distributions from the seed growth fund, which, as we see on the next slide, we put to reducing debt. Slide 26, then, our debt position.
You'll see the proceeds of the fund reduced consolidated net debt to AUD 947 million. Our net leverage ratio now sits at 2.1 times. That's comfortably below our target of less than 2.5 times. In FY25, we refinanced our debt and are very comfortable with the position and tenor. Moving to the SEEK Growth Fund on slide 27. In the table on this page, we're looking at the fund's total portfolio value, which includes the portfolio valuation plus distributions from the fund. In the event the fund sells an asset or part of an asset, as was the case with Employment Hero in March this year, the portfolio valuation on our books will decrease, but this will be offset by the sale prices we receive. So looking at this set of total portfolio value, this increased 7% year-on-year, bringing the ROI since the fund's inception to 32%.
The fund's four largest businesses account for 80% of the portfolio valuation and remain well-capitalized, and you can see further detail on those in the appendix. Slide 28 is just a reminder of our capital management framework and how that's come to life this year. In addition to our strong operating cash flow, during the year, we received that AUD 153 million in cash from the fund. Excluding the proceeds from Sidekicker, that was AUD 107 million. With this additional liquidity, we invested a net amount of AUD 17 million to reacquire Sidekicker, and that reflects a total valuation for Sidekicker of AUD 71 million. The rest of this liquidity was used to pay down debt with our operating cash flow and used for our full-year dividend.
Looking ahead, if more material amounts of cash are distributed by the fund, the board will balance investment and balance sheet priorities with returns to shareholders, using this framework. Finally, for next slide 29, we reiterate our continued commitment to sustainability. Our primary social impact is the placements we make. We help individuals get jobs, and we contribute to more efficient labor markets. During the year, we also advanced our social impact strategy by ensuring rigorous fair hiring standards across all of the job ads posted on our platform. We reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 40% compared to FY22 levels. Following a science-led review, we have revised our emission targets for 2030 and 2050. You can read more detail on that in our sustainability and climate reports, which have also been published today. I'll pass back to Ian soon to take us through the outlook.
Thank you, Kendra. On slide 31, you can see from the updates that the team's given you, Simon on product, Peter on the sort of market performance, and Kendra on the finances, that the kind of operational outcomes and the financial outcomes are looking good. Our energy at board level and a lot of our focuses, when we look at that, are we doing what we need to do to make the right investments in the foundations of future growth? Because we never want that kind of short-term performance to be at the expense of the long-term value creation. And the answer is yes. And to me, that makes the underlying operating leverage and productivity story even better because this isn't a year where we cut investment and future competitiveness. We actually just kept going. And those foundations we've talked about, you know them well.
Market leadership, we've talked a lot about platform and innovation. I've mentioned that with unification. AI and data, obviously, companies love talking about the latest and greatest trends in AI and what they're doing. We just sort of remind you that Grant Wright, who's sitting on my right here, has been our head of AI since 2017. This is not obviously the rate of innovation development over the last year or two has been the highest we've seen, but this is not a new theme. The consistency in the approach and the investment showing up in the marketplace, I think Kendra's talked a lot about the balance sheet flexibility. If you look at the underlying combination of the cash flow, the debt, the way we've turned out the debt, the undrawn lines, it's just a very healthy balance sheet giving us lots of options.
Taking a view of how these things play out over two or three years, we feel, certainly I feel, even better than I do about the current year result. On page 32, none of this will surprise you. You've read up against ASX release. We're not going to keep reporting against the AUD 2 billion revenue aspiration or have that as a discussion. We've mentioned for a while and most recently in May that we'd take a look at that. We've got a lot of feedback from you folks. And really, what it turned out, because of the nature of that sort of number, we were all spending too much time on long-term macroeconomic forecasting in these discussions, which is sort of pointless.
Instead of that, our own focus now, discussions with you, should be about growing placements, growing yield, delivering operating leverage, and that's what we're going to focus on. So we won't be talking about that. I will say what I think is clear from the ASX release. I think as a board and as an executive team, we are more confident about the prospects of the business than we were when we announced revenue aspiration. The stuff that we control has gone as well, if not better, than we expected it would. So it's certainly not a sign that we're walking back our confidence at all. It's just a very pragmatic view of the outlook. I know there'll be questions around slide 37 in the appendix. I note the words "one-time example." Don't try and extrapolate numbers from it. It's really meant to illustrate what we've said.
The point I take out of it is this idea of saying, assuming we, which is a big assumption we need to work out, deliver on placements, deliver on growing yield, then what you will see there is that the uncontrollable, which is the volumes, is that to the point that we expected we could do a little bit more of investment and vice versa. But actually, the more that happens, the more operating leverage we deliver. And so the more positive people are about the macro, even with our investment aspirations, the more operating leverage you're going to see, and that's obviously good for the business. Finally, on the guidance for FY26, you can read it for yourself on page 33. I'm not going to go through the chapter and verse. You can see this time for the first time, we know to emphasize two things.
Number one, the net revenue total expenditure EBITDA adjusted profit range is a range. The guidance we give it is a range, not a number. We also know that inevitably people say, "Well, what does that mean if it's the middle of the range?" So we've helped you a bit with that to show you what kind of year-on-year growth rates we'd have if we had the midpoint of the range. But that's an illustration, not the guidance. The guidance remains the range that we've got there. But it gives you a sense of which, if you believe you can get sort of flat market volumes in ANZ combined with the ongoing yield, mid-single-digit revenue growth versus prior comparative period in Asia, which is the emerging market split and the developed market split that you can see there in freemium, and the ongoing focus on investment but productivity.
You end up with double-digit revenue growth, 8% total expenditure growth, with a nice lift in EBITDA and adjusted profit, and that's really designed just to give you a sense of how that should all play through the P&L if things go as we hope and expect they will. That's it from us in terms of the overview. I'm happy to hand over now, as always, for the questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the number one on your touch-tone phone. If you hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. If you're using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Your first question comes from the line of Eric Choi from Barrenjoey. Your line is now open.
Oh, thank you. Hey, guys. Great result, and thanks for the questions. I've just got one on operating leverage, one on Asia, and then one on your long-term targets. Do you want them all at once or one by one? Sorry.
Go through all of them, and then we'll probably go to Kendra, Pete, and then I might come back to the long-term one.
Okay. Thanks, Ian. Well, just on the first one on leverage, so for FY26, you're guiding to 10% revenue growth, and then EBITDA growth above that at 15%, and then NPAT above again at 32%. And I don't think I've seen that sort of cascading leverage profile outside of the rebound and the great resignation years. So my question is, given you're doing 32% NPAT growth in a freemium disrupted Asia and flat ANZ job volume environment, and you're clearly committed to letting leverage flow through now, isn't PAT growth potentially better than 30% if the cycle improves? Second question on Asia. By the way, well done, Peter. Sorry for ever underestimating you, but it looks like Asia's outlook expectations at investor day. And at that time, we were probably thinking it would take markets 6-12 months to get back to pre-freemium levels.
For the guidance map to work, I think it means break-even times for markets like Singapore is more like six months. And if that's true, what's driving that outperformance? Is it better yields on your remaining paid base, or are you getting more free customers converting back to paid than you thought, or is it something else altogether? And then just, sorry, lastly, on long-term targets, sorry, Ian I'm going against your express wishes here, but you knew we were going to try and do numbers on it. There's no timeline on slide 37, but I think we can work out it must be around FY30. And getting the ruler out, it looks like SEEK gets to AUD 1.7-AUD 1.8 billion revenue, even if there's no volume rebound. On 50% margins, that's AUD 900 million EBITDA. If you'll get consensus, it's exactly AUD 1.8 billion revenues and AUD 900 million EBITDA by FY30.
So my last question is, does that slide infer you get to consensus even if there's no volume rebound? And then you'll beat consensus if volumes return to this cycle. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Eric, and thanks for the questions. So first, on operating leverage, just a few points to make. The first is just to emphasize that our FY26 guidance is the ranges, not the midpoint. And so while we do maintain our very strong commitment to operating leverage, the nature of the NPAT that falls through to the bottom of the line obviously depends on where we land in those ranges. As always, we let you know what our assumption or our base case guidance is in ANZ volumes because that's the biggest unknown uncontrollable that impacts our results. In this guidance, we've assumed a base case of largely stable volumes through the year for ANZ. Asia is much more mixed given the different status of different markets on freemiums, so we've given you a total revenue guidance number range rather there.
Obviously, if you put in more positive assumptions on macros, then that would get you to a higher NPAT growth than the 32% we have there, and certainly, that's possible within the ranges we've outlined, but I will just remind everyone on the call that they are ranges and that midpoint is illustrative.
Thanks, Eric. On Asia, certainly, we feel, at least I feel, certainly accountable to finish what we have committed for a very long time on Asia. We're showing results, but don't understand any skepticism historically, right? So we're pleased to drive a little bit of momentum towards our long-term ambition in this result. In terms of specifics, what's driving the FY26 Asia numbers? Yeah, I would say you asked Singapore specifically. I would say we've been four months in Singapore now with freemium. We are ahead of track in terms of that 12-month mark. So that math is correct. I would also say the emerging markets, we are holding them accountable. And if the emerging market teams are listening, I hope they are, they are very accountable for now driving growth.
What we are seeing, you asked about the drivers. It is not yet coming from convert to pay or small business acquisition. That is, in terms of the revenue line, that is work we have to do in order for Asia to get double digits. What we are seeing is two things. Firstly, as we launch freemium in, what we can extract on the ads that remain paid, as expected, is proving out to be very pleasing results and performance. And the second thing we're also seeing is, as we grow our share within accounts, in certain markets and situations, we do have many accounts now deciding to spend more with us at the renewal point as they see more value through SEEK overall. So those two trends are starting to play out. We have more work to do.
On the last one, Eric, good try.
In terms of getting your ruler out on slide 37, you may have studied engineering, but I've studied English literature. So you won't get much out of putting a ruler against a conceptual chart. Look, obviously, if we do better than we hope and the world goes better than we hope, we might do better than consensus, and if not, we won't. We don't sort of manage the business to Visible Alpha. What this is really saying is we're really focusing on. We're going to increase placement share. We're going to grow yield the way we say we're going to do. If we get more or less help from the external world and we achieve our own very challenging aspirations in a competitive world on what we control, then we can deliver really good outcomes.
The whole notion behind no longer talking about the AUD 2 billion target was we just can't work out what the macro's going to do. Therefore, all we can do is show conceptually how different things might interact. How people want to plug them into their own models is really just a case of your own macroeconomic forecasting.
Fair. Thanks, Ian.
Your next question comes from the line of Entcho Raykovski from E&P. Your line is now open.
Morning, everyone. I'll give you my questions at once as well. So the first one, I'm just interested in the rationale that you're expecting a moderation in SEEK ANZ yield growth in the second half. Is it primarily because you're comping the launch of the new Ad Ladder? I know that sort of came in later in the half, though. So conceptually, it seems like you should still be seeing a reasonable benefit in the second half. And perhaps in the answer to that question, if you can talk to what are the circumstances where you could see yield growth in the teens continue into the second half at SEEK ANZ. So that's the first one.
And second one, and I'm sorry, this is the obligatory question on volumes, but if you're able to give us some indication of where SEEK ANZ volumes are tracking at the start of FY26, I mean, I assume slightly down, but further color would be useful. And then I assume you're factoring in an inflection point at some stage over the course of the year where volumes start turning positive, just so we can comment on the level of comfort that this can occur over the year. And then the final one is on Sidekicker. Are there any specific synergies that you can quantify just from bringing Sidekicker back under SEEK ownership rather than being part of the growth fund? And you've sort of commented on this.
I know Kendra made some comments as part of the prepared remarks around FY25, but how is the earnings profile of the business likely to look into 2026? Is it reasonable to assume break-even EBITDA and just slight dilution, say, a couple of million to NPAT? Then, again, as part of the answer to that question, Sidekicker was loss-making back in 2024. If we look at the ASIC accounts, sort of what have been the key initiatives over the past 12 months to bring it back to break-even? Thank you.
I'll get Peter through there and zip things, and then maybe Simon and Kendra can talk about Sidekicker.
Yeah, thank you. Just quickly on ANZ yields, you actually have two dynamics. You mentioned one of them happening. The other dynamic is the timing of kind of variable price movements and things of that nature. So just the way the math works out between variable price movements and the timing last year of the FY25 and the introduction of Advanced Ad and the new Ad Ladder that happened in April, the combination of those two things, you get the year-on-year comps in the second half that generate the guidance that we have here today. So that's kind of two factors. You picked one of them. You just didn't have visibility on the second. The second part of that first question, which was under what circumstances would we see? So we've been pretty open over the years.
We always say we will look for opportunities to take value when we're adding value. We'll do that opportunistically, and we look at that based on the macro conditions, our placement share trajectory, and obviously down in the detail working with Grant and Simon, as well as my team, on the increases that we are able to do on the probability to place and actually drive good value. So we constantly look at those three things. When we see the opportunity to actually grab more value, we will do that, as is evidenced by FY25, and you can see the placement uplift and all the things that Simon talked about, so that's kind of the situation question you asked. As to ANZ volumes, two things. One, July is in line with what we thought, and it's based into the guidance.
If we thought differently, we wouldn't have given the guidance the way we did. It's assuming flat for the whole year, and that's kind of about it.
On Sidekicker, just to answer your second question first, is what brought them back into line and kind of break-even with. Mostly, it was about pulling back on growth investment that was ahead, and partly, it was efficiency. When we look through that, that's reflecting the fact that they probably didn't grow as much as they might have had they been investing harder, but when it comes to synergies, they're a small team. We don't expect large hard synergies, but obviously, we expect soft synergies in distribution. It's our goal to help them accelerate growth again. They really need to get to SMB audiences. That's very expensive. When they do, they deliver high service levels, great repeat usage expansion, and so what we bring to them is an ability, we think, to reignite that growth.
And then longer term, I think some of the technologically enabled kind of capabilities that we have around SeekPath and AI will deliver kind of obvious scope economies.
Just to wrap up on the finances of Sidekicker and FY26, it's about a AUD 10 million addition to net revenue, about a AUD 10 million addition to cost, which means break-even at EBITDA. There's a very slight NPAT dilution just due to some DNA that they bring across, but broadly break-even.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Kane Hannan from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.
Morning, guys. I had three as well. So one on Asia, just picking the placement share there and some of that commentary on the freemium benefits that have come through. I mean, if I break down that improvement in Asia, it looks to be all driven by the developing markets, which went 25%-29%, despite freemium not really having been into those markets during the period. So I mean, I know it's a survey, but just interested if you could talk a little bit about what's been happening there. Secondly, just the AUD 8 million revenue benefit for every 1% change in ANZ volume, obviously a helpful comment. How do you think that will translate to EBITDA? I mean, the guidance range is implying a 40% drop through, or is it more accretive to say where the ANZ margin is? And then lastly, just the medium-term scenarios.
I mean, one obviously has ANZ volumes 31% above the other, yet the yield growth outcomes are the same. I mean, is that reflecting a view you don't think the macro cycle basically impacts demand for your products anymore? Or is it you think in that scenario where you're making a lot more investment, you do get a better return, and therefore the yield outcomes are the same, if that makes sense?
We'll get Peter to do the placement share. I think Kendra can talk about the numbers.
Yeah. On the placement share, so the first comment to make is always it is survey-based. Our sample sizes at the country level are smaller than we use in ANZ, which actually will be increasing later this year, so they do jump around a little bit more, so take everything with that. However, over time, we do see very high correlations with the strength of the flywheel, and so we're confident in the trajectory over time, so that's kind of the broad caveat. To talk specifically, in essence, you get two things happening. We've executed freemium very well, and post-unification, both the commercial business and tech and product have delivered really great results. Both of those things mean more placement outcomes, more ads on the platform, more companies on the platform, and more applications going to the right companies, and all of that is driving the outcome and the placement.
We do see it broad-based as well. Although the emerging markets had a particularly strong year on placement, we do see strength in placement in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, despite the fact that Hong Kong didn't have the benefit of freemium. We definitely know the APAC platform and our execution is driving improvement there. It's more broad-based than just emerging markets. Emerging markets did well. It's driven by freemium and the APAC platform, and we've got to keep going.
Thanks for the question, Kane. On the question of sort of a point up in volumes on revenue and what that means for ANZ margins, the way I think about it is less about the specific margins in ANZ and more about how we think about the relationship between the revenue and cost ranges for guidance. So you'll see that our revenue range is from 6%-15% growth approximately, whereas with that 10% kind of illustrative midpoint, whereas our cost growth ranges from 6% to just under 10%. So to the extent that there is upside from volumes, that does not directly translate to additional cost. It may mean we head higher in the range of cost growth, but still delivering operating leverage.
On the downside, if there is less volume growth in ANZ and that drives revenue down, we'll manage costs accordingly, but likely not below that 6% that we're guiding to in the range.
Is it worth maybe, Kane? Do you just want to repeat that last question of yours?
Yeah, sorry, guys. Just saying, I mean, your scenarios basically have no change in the yield growth despite volumes being 30-odd% higher in one of them. So just is that saying that you think the yield outcome will be the same regardless and that demand for your products doesn't change? Or are you getting a return on the higher investment you're making, therefore the yield growth is the same?
I think broadly, as we spoke a bit about before, a lot of the yield growth in ANZ certainly for next year is based on changes we've made in 2025, and therefore we feel really confident in that 10% number. The yield growth number is much more decoupled from volume growth than it has been in the past, as you can see in this result, and I think is increasingly the case moving forward.
And I'll just add one thing, which is to the extent you're innovating a lot and you're delivering new products, we obviously don't have longitudinal data about how they respond to different product cycles. So as you know, when you go into the correlation between volumes and yield, on the one hand, there's volume discounts. On the other hand, there's depth and all those sorts of things. And we think we've got a pretty good sense that the yield outcomes can balance each other, and it can be roughly agnostic to the volume environment. But we'll just have to watch that as we see cycles go up and down.
I think. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Bob Chen from J.P. Morgan. Your line is now open.
Hey, morning, guys. Just a few questions for me. And apologies, I'm a little bit new to this stuff, but looking at that sort of guidance for stable volumes in ANZ through to next year, it might take that as flat to get to sort of the midpoint. Is that the way to read that sort of guidance statement? And then on your total expenditure guidance as well, we're obviously seeing CapEx still picking up a little bit next year. I think it's like 18%-19% share of your total expenditure. Do we expect that to be broadly flat going forward, or do we expect CapEx to continue growing sort of ahead of underlying OpEx growth? And then maybe just finally on the slide on your medium-term sort of illustrative operating leverage numbers, I mean, what's driven you to sort of put that slide into the pack this year?
I mean, has the business shifted a lot more to focusing on delivering operating leverage rather than focusing on just top-line growth?
I'll get Kendra to talk about the CapEx. And the answer to your first question on the stable volumes is yes, you're correct. Kendra can talk about the expenses, and I'll come back to that as well.
Yeah. So we see a higher growth in CapEx from 2026 to 2025 than OpEx for a couple of reasons. First, CapEx did drop this year more significantly with some of the shift in how we classify CapEx and OpEx, and also the reduction in unification. The way we think about our spend is not CapEx and OpEx. We think about the total expenditure, where we are aiming to put more investment towards our growth business areas, the products and AI that delivers revenue and growth now and into the future. That does tend to be more CapEx. We are deliberately holding and controlling spend more on the more OpEx areas of our business in order to invest more where our business can grow. And that does tend to be more in CapEx.
In slide 37 . Why is it in there? Largely to help people with their withdrawal symptoms from the AUD 2 billion target, but all joking aside, the major reason this is in here is because you will recall that we had the AUD 2 billion revenue opportunity and a comment about margin, which we said we're going for 50% above margin as part of that. What we wanted to be clear about is that because of the macroeconomic aspects, we're not going to talk about a AUD 2 billion target. We wanted to be very clear still about our expectations relating to margin, and the goal of this was to show again, I just want to come back. We sort of talk about growing placement share and growing yield as if it's a given. We believe we can do it.
We're showing we can do it, but we've got to work really hard to do it. But assuming you believe that, then we're really showing the balance between more or less optimistic volume assumptions and a bit of the investment flexibility we have. And we're showing even whether you or not, you believe in current volumes, yield unchanged, or you get a bigger uplift, we're going to deliver aspirationally, or our intention is to still be delivering margins north of 50%.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Tom Beadle from Jarden. Your line is now open.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. I've just got two questions. Just the first one is a follow-up from Entcho's question on ANZ yield. I mean, if I'm just to be really simplistic about this, obviously growth in yield accelerated in the fourth quarter. Is it fair to assume in your guidance of 10% that you've just taken that Q4 exit rate and you're assuming no incremental price increases or mix shift throughout FY26 versus that exit rate? Second question is just on SEEK Asia. I found that guidance for developed and developing markets very helpful, but just can you talk about the phasing of the growth assumptions in FY26 for each of those markets? Just obviously, it's probably fair to assume that developed will be down in the first half and up in the second half, but just to what extent? Thanks.
Yeah, thanks. I'll take both of those. So just on Asia yield, so it is not a true statement that we have no ambitions for further depth penetration and further optimization of price. However, it is true that there is a carry-in effect that you're seeing in the second half that we aren't going to repeat. It was quite a large improvement in the second half in ANZ, particularly the Q4, as you call out. And as I mentioned earlier in one of the questions, there were also different pricing actions taken in the first half of last fiscal. So we do have and we will improve depth further is the ambition, and it's just not to the same extent. And that's what's driving them. That's what's driving some of it. As to the Asia numbers, we don't break out guidance between emerging and developed and different markets.
What I would say is, obviously, Malaysia we count as a more mature market. We have. Yet it's our largest by revenue now. We have yet to launch freemium there. That was a material impact. We, as a whole, want to get the emerging markets to strong growth, and the net-net outcome, the math, if you do the math, is kind of mid-single digits, so it is true that we launched Indonesia in February, so that just washes through in the first half. That's just a true statement of fact, so that's probably all I'll say on that.
The only thing I'd probably add a bit in relation to that, but more broadly just to emphasize because it's always nice to rain on the parade. Freemium is a really big change in the business model. I mean, it's the closest we get to creative destruction as a market leader, and while we're very happy with the early performance, there's a long way to go to see how this is going to play out, and I think even this time next year, we're not going to be declaring sort of victory or loss or whatever on freemium, even in a year's time, but for now, it's going as well as we had, better than we had expected, but I just want to emphasize there's a long way to go on that, just seeing how it plays out in the market and customer behavior.
Great. Just sorry, just to clarify. So just for ANZ, what you're saying is that in your guidance, you are assuming a little bit more, I guess, benefit from mix incrementally in FY26 and just no change to pricing. Is that correct?
For members of the ANZ team that may be listening to this call, they are accountable for improved performance year on year in both depth penetration and yield. It's just not to the same degree.
Okay. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Roger Samuel from Jefferies. Your line is now open.
Oh, hi. Morning. I've got three questions. First one is on your marketing cost, which came down a little bit in FY25, which is a good outcome given the higher placement share. Just wondering if you think that the lower marketing cost is a reflection of the macro environment in ANZ where volume dropped by about 11% year on year, or do you think that you spend more on marketing when the macro improves? Second question is on pay-for-performance. How do you think about the evolution of the revenue model in ANZ? Are you working towards that pay-for-performance model? And I noticed that yesterday, JobsDB launched something around pay-for-performance. So, how soon can we see that sort of revenue model in ANZ? Third question is on ANZ yield. How long should we expect you to generate double-digit growth in ANZ?
Obviously, you've got medium-term targets there, which is for high-second digits. But given that the application per job ad is at record high right now, do you think that's a relevant metric that we should be looking at, or maybe we should just rely on the performance and the value that you deliver to your customers? Thanks.
I'll get Peter to be marketing and yield and then come beside them for the pay-per-performance.
Yeah. So just on marketing costs, actually the biggest driver of marketing costs was internal restructure. We had two. So throughout FY25, we had, if you recall, at the beginning of the year, two different organizations. We had an ANZ organization and an Asia organization. We put those two together, including a single marketing team. And probably the biggest driver was our internal work that we had to do to actually create a single marketing team. So we weren't firing on all cylinders throughout the entire year. So we're committed to overall operating leverage. So I don't by any means want to indicate that marketing is going to shoot up. But nevertheless, if you're asking what is slightly down in marketing, it was actually due to the internal restructure. On ANZ yield, we're staying firm to long-term high single digits. We're absolutely pleased with the last year or two.
We'll continue to look at opportunities where we improve placement and where we can take value, we'll take it. We're not changing our long-term view. And the last thing I'd say is application per ad is one factor. And as you're mentioning, internally, we're really interrogating a lot more detailed factors that we don't disclose: high-fit ads per application, the probability to place, the amount of how hard it is to find a role in the overall market. So there's a whole bunch of factors internally we look at beyond that.
So thanks for your question. I think I'll just back up a bit and say everything we're doing is trying to get our monetization as aligned to the value of placement as possible. So you can see us doing that through the core ads, through targeting, through high-fit. When we understand a placement is made, we understand our hires have a high willingness to pay. And when it comes to our pay-per-hire experiments, we're taking another path to that placement by delivering more services and more support to help them convert to placement. In the last year, we consolidated three experiments down to one, which we've rolled out across APAC. And we have validated that there is demand for this type of service. There is a high willingness to pay. But we've still got more work to do on how we convert to placement.
We think, and we've talked about automation playing a role in that, so what I would say is still an experiment. We are progressing. We're validating more. I wouldn't put a timeline on it. I don't think we necessarily see this as long-term, a very high volume relative to our job ads, but of course, at very low volumes and very high yields, it could be a material contributor. It's just too early for us to put timelines on it at the moment, and I would just say it's not the only way we're getting to a value-aligned model. That's what you can see us doing with aligned targeting, premium ads, etc., and the last thing I'll say just to add to that is, and you'll see in the detail of the accounts, we try stuff. If it doesn't work, we write it off.
And you can see that in the accounts. And we try not to do that, but we can't push the boundaries of innovation, experiment, and everything works. And so again, the stuff Simon's talking about, we try multiple ways of doing it. We see what works better. We see what doesn't work so well. And then we consolidate around a particular view. Yeah, but we feel good about where we've got to on that and the opportunity ahead.
All right. Got it. And can I just ask a quick follow-up question on New Zealand, which is about 10% of ANZ revenue, roughly? Is that still a headwind to the business, or is it stabilizing?
No, it's starting to turn in the macro. The market performance of the business there is excellent. The economy there you've all seen, and in terms of whether it's a headwind or not, depends on your view of the economy because the business is performing very well, and I think most consensus general views in New Zealand at the moment is it's kind of flattened out and might edge back up.
Excellent. Thank you.
This is the end of our Q&A session. I will now turn it back to Ian. Please continue.
That's it. Thanks all again for your time and attention. I know that we'll be seeing and hearing from many of you over the next couple of days. And hand through to our team to take any follow-up questions you've got. So thank you all very much.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.