Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Superloop 2023 Investor Day. I would like to welcome those of you that have joined us here in the room today. We also have a number of people who have joined us live on the webcam. Thank you very much for your interest in Superloop. My name is Luke Oxenham. For those that I haven't met, I am the Group CFO of Superloop. I'm just gonna run through very briefly the order of proceedings for today before handing over to Paul to start the presentation. The legal people would like us to read this very quickly, so we can move on from that. What you have up on screen at the moment is the Superloop executive team.
Unfortunately, we didn't have time for everybody to be speaking today. Those people that have a little red microphone next to their names will be presenting, but other members of the executive team have also joined us here in the room today. We're joined by Tina Ooi, our General Counsel, Paul Smith, Chief Operating Officer, and Ben Colman, our Chief Marketing Officer as well. If we just look at the agenda for the day today, Paul's gonna begin by talking a little bit about where we have come from and the turnaround journey that Superloop has gone through over the last couple of years. We're then gonna hear from Nick Pachos and Daisey Stampfer in relation to the system and our network transformation.
The segment leads will then take you through a little bit of a discussion on the opportunity that they see in each of the segments. I'll provide some insights from a financial perspective, and then Paul will come and wrap up the presentation at the end. We just ask, if anyone has questions, that you hold your questions till the end of the prepared presentation today. For those people online, I understand that you'll be able to type your questions in and enter them in. I will read them out here in the room and various people will answer those. Obviously, for people in the room, we'll take your questions here on a microphone so that those on the webcast can hear.
With that out of the way, I'd like to hand over now to Paul Tyler, Managing Director and CEO of Superloop.
Thank you. Morning, all. Let's get on. Today's the second Investor Day we've held since the commencement of our three-year turnaround plan. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. We're all good? We've got a lot to update. I think it's fair to say we've made a huge amount of progress, but also that we've got a lot of optimism for where to from here. In January 2021, we launched what we called our 3 in 3 growth plan. That was a plan that was aimed at addressing some of the strategic and operational and financial challenges that the business was facing at the time. The primary ambition of that plan, as we've said many times, was to grow the business threefold over a period of three years.
We're now coming up to around about two and a half years since we kicked off that plan. As you'll hear today, a lot's been achieved. An immense amount's been achieved to the point that we're now declaring that plan complete and delivered. The turnaround in financials that we'll show today are obvious. Our revenue growth, the strengthening of our balance sheet, our cash flow generation, they're all clear and they're published. The turnaround's been a lot deeper than that. As you'll see, we now have a thriving business and fantastic customer momentum. The quality of our offerings, the opportunities for our people, our contribution to our industry are all things we are immensely proud of. Let's start with our purpose, who we are. This is not new.
It's a reminder that we've set out a renewed purpose for the company to enable better broadband through competition. Today's market conditions favor the challengers. We'll talk a lot about that today. We're one of the challengers. Much so that when we launched our 3 in 3 plan, if you remember, we set out a vision for the challengers' collective share of the market. We said the challengers would take 30% of this maturing broadband market in line with other industries. That 30% share will be taken up by challenger telcos such as ourselves, but also a raft of new non-traditional brands that are entering the space. When we set that vision, as a reminder, the challengers collectively held around about 8% share. That had doubled in the previous 12 months when we set that vision from 4%.
Now, collectively, the challengers hold over 15%. We remain true to our vision that the natural level of share for challengers, non-traditional brands, non-traditional or non-incumbents, is 30% and more, you know, another doubling of opportunity for ourselves as a challenger. As I said, we've set ourselves up to be enabler of challengers, not just through our retail brands. Of course, we wanna take our fair share through our direct retail brands, but we also wanna enable other brands through our wholesale offerings. We leverage our Tier 1 assets, our networks, our systems, our resources to catalyze that market and ultimately, of course, to deliver strong financial outcomes. The company's come a long way. It's been a long journey. Only 10 years, but it's been a long 10 years.
We see that evolution in a number of distinct phases. Company started its journey building fiber assets across the Asia Pacific region. At the time, the main opportunity pursued was selling wholesale capacity on those fiber assets around the region. We sold it to other telcos primarily, and then the company moved into the fixed wireless business, all prior to 2021. As we got to 2021, for a mixture of internal and external reasons, we needed to reset the strategy of the business. In 2021, we launched that 3 in 3 plan, setting ourselves that ambition to grow threefold over three years. Having achieved that goal, we're here. We're in 2023. We're now at the next phase. We have a company with solid financials, clear market momentum. We'll unpack that further today, but we also wanna give some reflections on what's next.
What's the next phase? Before we get to the next phase, of course, let's reflect on the plan itself, the 3 in 3. Threefold over three years. Pretty bullish aspiration. Taking stock today of the market consensus forecast for FY 2023, which is, you know, aligned with our guidance, we're declaring that in FY 2023, we will more than threefold... Sorry. We will exceed more than threefold the revenue, the EBITDA on FY 2020. Of course, for customers, the growth is dramatically higher than that. You immediately say, "Well, what about the other financial statements? It's not just about the P&L." You're right, of course. Today, we'll unpack the dramatic improvement in our balance sheet, in our cash flow as well. I'm immensely proud of what the team have achieved over, you know, a relatively short period of time. More ambition...
more bullish about where we're gonna go from here. What did we do? What was this plan? The turnaround has been extensive, and it's touched on all elements of the business, from its leadership, its target market segments, portfolio, systems, operations, and network. We did have great fiber assets. We started with a great physical asset. Its growth, the growth of that asset was limited by the limited market that it was exposed to. We've since completely restructured the business around three scaled market segments. Those segments being our consumer segment, our business segment, and our wholesale segment, and you'll hear more from those segment leads today. We simplified the portfolio a lot with both divestments and investments.
We invested in our networks, in our systems, in our people to ensure that we had a compelling proposition in each of our target markets. We rebuilt the go-to-market. We invested in sales. As a consequence of that, we've been able to turn all three segments to growth, organic growth. Then we accelerated that organic growth with strategic M&A. To the point that M&A has actually gone from being a challenge for the company to being a real, a real strategic strength. Not only have we captured all of the synergies we identified in each of the business cases we set out, and you can see the synergies in the P&L, we've also tackled the legacy M&A projects that had not been integrated in the business. It is a key strength for the business, and it will continue to be part of our future.
Perhaps the most obvious demonstration of our progress is in the turnaround of our market share, our customer success, our customer momentum. These customer growth metrics, of course, speak for themselves. They speak volumes about the improvement in the quality of our proposition and in its competitiveness. Our share continues to accelerate towards that 5% market share target that we outlined a couple of years ago. I'm also really proud to point out that the growth is across the board. It's not in one segment. Each of our three segments is delivering organic growth, reversing the trajectory that was in previous phases of the company. I remind you that a key element of the Superloop business model, in fact, a key strength of the Superloop business model, is that balance across all three segments.
Seeing all three segments growing strongly organically is really important to our future. Share gains cover, of course, our lower margin resale businesses such as NBN, Uniti, Mobile, but also our higher margin on-net businesses such as Broadband Aggregation, our managed Wi-Fi business, our new Fibre to the Premises business. The common thread that ties all of those offerings together is they all utilize the single network, the single set of processes, systems, tools, and workflows. As we gain share, of course, we put traffic on the network, and we've obviously grown a lot over the last couple of years. You wonder, well, how full is it? In Nick's presentation later this morning, we'll talk about that. We'll talk about the quality of the asset and how we still have a huge amount of latent capacity in the network for future growth.
With all that progress, where does it leave us? Well, we're a much simplified company. We have a simple strategy, and that strategy is centered around being a high-growth, low-cost enabler of better broadband. We've made a lot of progress in the digestion of the many companies that have made up the Superloop journey to date. We're passing key financial milestones, and we're delighted to forecast that in this current half, half two FY 2023, we'll pass the key milestone of going true free cash flow positive, unadjusted. Our CapEx envelope holds flat, and OpEx as a % of revenue continues to decline. Our path to true profitability is clear. We're also expected to deliver a positive NPAT-A in FY 2024. Our leverage is low. It gives us a lot of optionality for further investment from here.
To recap, our 3 in 3 plan is complete and has been delivered. We've created a solid foundation. We have a well-functioning, well-resourced company with a simple strategy and clear market momentum. We have ample capacity for further investment from here. Of course, the story doesn't end here. We're immensely proud of the journey to date, but we're more energized about the opportunities for the future. Each of our segment leaders will unpack some of the opportunities in each of their segments. If I touch on a couple of the more exciting ones, the first one is that vision that the challenger share of the marketplace is going to double, and we wanna be a key enabler, a catalyst of that growth in share. Our own retail brands, excuse me, as well as our wholesale offerings.
The next major opportunity is that NBN's replacement of their copper technologies, their Fibre to the Node and Fibre to the Curb technologies, and replacing those with true Fibre to the Premises, is gonna create another discontinuity. It's a discontinuity that we're super well-placed to take advantage of with our high-speed credentials. A third opportunity is the momentum that we currently have in our small and medium business sector. There is a real opportunity to become a scaled player in that really underserved market. We're excited about the strength of our managed Wi-Fi offering and taking that leadership position that we have in the education vertical to a number of adjacent markets. Our new Superloop Fibre to the premise offering, with the capability we recently acquired, is also really quite exciting. We're quite bullish about where we're gonna take that.
Finally, our expansion of our addressable market to non-traditional brands through our white label capability is something that we also remain very bullish on. Each of these opportunities are real, and they're immediate. We have all the resources, the skills, the portfolio. We have the network, and we have the channels to take advantage of all of them, and we're going to. With that, I'll ask Nick Pachos to cover the systems and network transformation.
Thank you, Paul. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nick Pachos, and I'm the Chief Commercial Officer of Superloop. This morning, Daisey and I will be taking you through our Infrastructure-on-Demand platform and provide an overview of our digital transformation and how it's been an integral part of our physical network of our success to date and underpins our growth ambitions. That's right. Okay. First up, as you can see on screen, we have a great physical asset, a great physical network made up of assets we have built up over the years. This includes our extensive Fibre assets, both domestic and international, and the large numbers on, of on-net data centers and buildings, all of which form part of our Tier 1 network, which is in place today.
which has significant headroom available to serve more than 1 million subscribers without going beyond our existing CapEx envelope. I like to think of our network as having three distinct components. Firstly, our international backbone, which consists of our own subsea INDIGO cable, which connects from Sydney to Perth and then into Asia, landing in Singapore. In addition to our own INDIGO cable, we have points of presence across the globe connected using fiber in Europe, U.S., and Asia. Domestically, our national infrastructure footprint consists of a combination of both, of fiber, both dark fiber and Fibre to the Premises, fixed wireless towers, and an extensive Wi-Fi network serving hundreds of buildings and all major data centers in the country. Lastly, our highly resilient NBN backbone, which connects to all 121 NBN points of presence via physically diverse fiber paths, maximizing reliability.
The investment in our network ensures we have control over the end user experience, and at the same time enables our exponential growth demands of our customers. Traditionally, traditionally we, or as all telcos do, have made network available through classic piecemeal products and commercial structures to the market. At Superloop, we've broadened our approach beyond the traditional piecemeal offerings and have built our Infrastructure-on-Demand platform, which is a single platform with native automation, a single set of systems, workflows, and infrastructure, which is exposed to our customers via APIs and easy-to-use segment-specific portals. Starting at the bottom of the screen, you will see that we have augmented our on-net infrastructure, such as our Fibre and fixed wireless, with all major access providers, including NBN, Uniti, and of course, Telstra.
Our single layer of augmented access technologies provides our users a simple service qualification interface to identify and select the access technology available at the location. This approach allows us to preference our on-net locations and broaden our customer reach via third parties, which increases penetration of our on-net infrastructure where it's available, and ultimately maximizing our margins. The middle block is really where the magic happens. The seamless integration of both our network and software stack, our Infrastructure-on-Demand platform, as we like to call it, does three things. Firstly, it maximizes customer reach by augmenting all the various access technology. It also seamlessly integrates them into our fiber and net, and backbone networks, and through automation, embeds our end-to-end workflows, and ultimately, it serves up a unified product and service stack.
This unified product and service stack is made available to our customers, whether they be consumers, businesses, or wholesalers. In simple terms, we're using the same fabric of technology and processes to serve the needs of our customer segments. By way of example, this platform is the platform that's used by customers when they transition from a competitor to Superloop in minutes, regardless of whether they're a business or a consumer. This is the exact same technology that is used by wholesalers, who in many cases integrate via APIs to offer broadband services under their own banner. Similarly, it's also the same technology that is used to enable white label customers. These are examples of how our customers interact with our platform. We use the same platform to integrate our company acquisitions.
For example, both Acurus and MyRepublic were on competitive networks at the time of acquisition. By using our Infrastructure-on-Demand platform, we were able to transition them onto our network, and importantly, our software stack immediately. This ensured our synergies are maximized quickly and services are moved to our single stack at the same time. This platform also allows us to rapidly plug in new product and service offerings without the burden of legacy systems. Making this available to our customers removes the complexities and barriers to entry and opens the opportunity to address a broader market, the broader markets in consumer, business, and wholesale space via one-stop shop. Thank you. I'll hand over to Daisey Stampfer, who will take you through the digital transformation.
Thanks, Nick. All right. Hello, good morning. I'm Daisey Stampfer, and I am the Group Executive of Strategy and Transformation. I'm going to take you through a little bit more of the detail behind our network and systems transformation and how that's enabled us to have a low cost to serve. I'm going to start by acknowledging that at Superloop, automation has always been at the forefront. We don't have those legacy systems that hold us back and slow us down. We've instead been able to design a system stack that works with the technologies of today, whether that be on our own fiber, on the NBN, or on Telstra or any of the other access technologies that Nick has spoken about.
One area of inefficiency that required our focus and our investment has been to resolve the lack of integration of the past mergers and acquisitions and the systems associated with those businesses. It's not that the systems weren't fit for purpose, they were, and they were functioning well. In some cases, we had multiple systems performing the very same function, which of course brings about an inefficiency. Two years ago, we launched our systems and network transformation project with the clear objective of consolidating those systems to Tier 1 stack or retaining our own proprietary systems that gives us a unique position in the market.
The reason why that's created a low cost to serve is that we reduce the number of hand-off points between systems through the automation. We reduced the wait times in process steps, and we've also been able to reduce the amount of rework that comes about due to human error. Therefore, creating automation, we can reduce that amount of rework. We made further investments in our Infrastructure-on-Demand platform that Nick spoke about earlier, and I'm pleased to say that our efforts have been recognized internally, but also externally. I'm very pleased to announce that Superloop has been shortlisted for the highly prestigious AFR's 2023 Digital Transformation Leaders Awards, and we're eagerly awaiting the results of that competition in June.
The net effect of this project and this program of work within the business is that it's reduced our costs and our cost to serve, but it's also reduced our time to revenue. The quicker we can spin up those services for a customer, the quicker we can get paid. I spoke about consolidation of systems, I'd like to take you through a little bit more of the detail of that. I'd like to draw your attention to the top left, sorry, of the screen, where we've got our High-Level 1 process for the business, from selling a service, to provisioning that service, bringing that service up for a customer, through to supporting that service on our network. Beneath that process, you'll see a number of boxes that represent the components of our system stack that is required to fulfill that process.
In some cases, we have segment-specific systems such as consumer, business, and wholesale. In other cases, the boxes represent systems that are across the whole organization, systems such as ticketing and NetSuite, our ERP system. When we began this project two years ago, we set out to reduce the duplication of systems and reduce to one, in some cases, one or a few systems to provide that functionality for the business. On the right, you'll see the to-be state. Some of the capability that remains is our proprietary, unique propositions in consumer business and wholesale. In other cases, we've moved to best-of-breed Tier 1 systems such as Salesforce and NetSuite, with the primary objective of setting us up for scale. The best part is we're well and truly progressed in this transformation.
The green represents the projects that have completed, and the white represents those projects that are still work in progress. We have clear line of sight to completing our transformation of systems. I'd like to take you back to 2020, when the business was providing piecemeal backhaul services to challenger telcos in the market. It was a niche market, but it was one that Superloop understood well. We expanded our offerings and also our capability to be able to address a broader market. We could provide that broadband as a service to our internal segments in business and consumer, and we were also now able to provide a service to other telcos in the market. That increased our total addressable market significantly.
If we look at where we are today, we're not only able to service those telcos, but we're also able to provide that broadband as a service to the non-traditional telcos that have recently entered the market, the banks, the utility providers, et cetera, that don't have the technical infrastructure or the support capabilities to service that industry. We provide that to them through our white label capability. We've invested. We've invested in this capability, and we've seen many returns of that investment already. I'd like to share four with you today. Customer acquisition for consumer can be done in minutes. When a subscriber decides to leave their existing provider and churn to Superloop, we can spin up their service in just 10 minutes. The same capability can be leveraged at scale and in large quantities, which really works well for acquisition of businesses and subscribers.
We take the example of MyRepublic, the 50,000 subscribers that Superloop recently acquired. Using that capability, we were able to get all of those subscribers onto our network in just three weeks. We're not just talking about the services on the network, we're also talking about all of their billing history, their tickets, operational support tickets that they've had, all of their history that will enable us to provide a seamless customer experience. It's as if they've never migrated at all. If we look at our wholesale segment, we see similar results with our white label capability. If one of those banks or utility providers comes to us to put an offering into the market, we can spin up a proof of concept for them in just 1 week using their own tailored products. We can have them in market in less than four weeks.
If we look at now at our FTTP, our Fibre to the Premises offering, we have a similar result. We can onboard a retailer to sell services in our footprint in as little as four weeks, and we've actually got capability underway to see that timeframe reduced to just days. We've had one single investment. We've seen the returns of this investment in these four areas and more, and the best part is we continue to use this technology to evolve with the market. I'm now going to move on to the operating segments, starting with Mehul Dave. Thank you.
Thank you, Daisey. Good morning. My name is Mehul Dave, and I'm a Group Executive Consumer here at Superloop for the last three years. My presentation today covers a view of the residential broadband market, the trends and opportunities in it that excite us, and those unique strengths that we've turned into competitive advantages at Superloop that are helping us win. Let me start first with the market. The biggest shift in the market, and the one that we're excited about the most, is the growth in the challenger market share. The combined market share of the Big Four continues to fall, while the challenger market share has doubled from 7.5%- 15% in just two years.
Citing on examples from the retail energy market here in Australia, the retail banking market in Australia, and retail internet market in other developed countries, we believe the rightful position for the challenger market share in Australia should be at 30%. The NBN Fibre upgrade program and the macroeconomic conditions here in Australia, we believe, have the potential to double that market share yet again over the next two years. Currently, there are 1.7 million premises in Australia that have a Fibre connection directly to their premise. Under the Fibre upgrade program of the NBN, an additional 3.7 million premises that have a Fibre connected just to their curbside or to a node nearby and copper thereafter, will be able to be upgraded to a Fibre to the Premises connection at no extra cost. This is a huge change.
What that means is the footprint of the NBN that has already got a Fibre to the Premises or eligible to upgrade to one will increase dramatically to 62% by the middle of next year. This also means that an additional 3.7 million homes can now access internet speeds way faster than they were able to before. Collectively, this technology change and the growing awareness of this program, we believe creates a disruption in the market, a disruption that will increase the consideration amongst incumbent customer bases to switch, to switch to challenger ISPs like Superloop that can offer the best of the NBN at a relatively lower cost. Alongside the macroeconomic conditions and the rising cost of living pressures on everyday Australians, we believe that particular consideration will get fueled further. Of course, just favorable market conditions isn't enough.
Alongside, we have an award-winning portfolio and some clear competitive advantages that have helped us win so far and will continue to do so. The first is our brands. Superloop presents two brands in the residential market today. Exetel. Exetel offers an attractive option to those that want a reliable broadband connection, high speeds, but at a low cost. Exetel consistently gets recognized for doing just that. The recently refreshed Superloop brand is for those that want perhaps a bit more than just price. It is all about customer experience, and it's about launching game-changing solutions that solve customer needs. Together, these brands provide us with a very broad coverage of the residential broadband market. Underpinning the brand strength is the infrastructure and demand platform that Nick and Daisey spoke to earlier.
From a consumer perspective, this platform allows us to launch market-first propositions into the residential market, such as My Speed Boost. My Speed Boost is a simple proposition where a customer can double the speed of their internet with the flick of a button in their mobile app on any day that they choose to. My Speed Boost recently was awarded the Canstar Innovation Award in the telco category. The same platform also allows us to migrate seamlessly large volumes of customers from inorganic customer acquisitions such as MyRepublic. The platform is also underpinned by a network second to none. It is reliable, and it is fast, and we're proud to consistently top the fastest ISP charts in the ACCC Measuring Broadband reports. Another part of our focus here at Superloop is on building and delivering on very strong unit economics.
Superloop's always been known for high-speed broadband, and 36% of our customer base is on plans greater than 100 Mb ps . That's compared to just 20% of the market being on those plans. What this means is should the NBN propose cost reductions to the high-speed tier plans go ahead in FY 2024, it puts Superloop in a very favorable position compared to incumbent custom bases or incumbents that have a larger volume and mix of lower speed tier plans where the NBN has proposed a cost increase. We believe the incumbents will be forced to push the cost increase to their customer bases, further fueling the intention to switch. Our cost of acquiring new customers remains on target, and we believe below our key competitors.
Our customer retention rates, as our brand awareness grows and the size of our subscriber base grows, start to resemble market levels, and our goal is to reduce our customer retention rates to even lower than market rates. Large underutilized Fibre assets means the incremental cost of network for customer growth remains marginal. Put together, these set of competitive advantages mean that we can cover a large part of the residential broadband market, we can place in it innovative products, but most importantly, we can do that at a lower cost compared to our competitors, and yet hold our margins at 25%, which is what we have been delivering on.
These competitive advantages have put us in a really strong position organically and have also helped us absorb high quality inorganic acquisitions. Our subscriber numbers have increased sixfold in the last three years. Favorable market conditions and strong unit economics gives us the confidence to keep going for high growth and high profitability. New areas of investment for us include increasing our brand awareness, which we believe can create linear growth. Investments in delivering a delightful and intuitive customer experience at a lower cost. Investments in data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, all those things that can help us understand customer behavior and deliver on their needs. Investments to increase the multi-product holding within our customer base, focused on mobile, VoIP, and security. Market conditions continue to favor challenges.
We see two clear inflection points on the horizon that have the potential to double challenge and market share yet again. We have competitive advantages, clear ones, that can help us win in that environment, and we have strong unit economics and a tremendous amount of customer growth momentum. With all of that, we set our eyes on a new goal of getting to 500,000 subscribers, yet maintaining our margin at 25%. With that, I'd like to hand over to Dean.
Good morning. My name is Dean Tognella. I'm the Group Executive for Business. I'm looking forward to sharing some of our achievements and our plans moving forward. The business segment story very much reflects the broader Superloop story. We have turned the business segment around. Today, the business segment has a strong set of capabilities and strong sales momentum. At the macro level, following the acquisition of Exetel, Acurus, and VostroNet, we've added the product capabilities needed to compete within a total addressable market of nearly AUD 9 billion. Within this broad market, we have a clear focus on four key opportunities. Firstly, we have a clear ambition to be the small business experts. There are 1.2 million addressable small businesses within Australia that we can connect to the Superloop network.
Superloop has a complete product portfolio of data, voice, and mobile to be able to provide a leading experience for small businesses within Australia. We are demonstrating momentum with small business internet services increasing by 26% over the last nine months. Today, we have a base of 34,000 small business internet services that have a materially lower churn rate than what we see in the consumer markets. Our growth in services has been predominantly achieved through our partner program. This February, we launched our new Superloop small business internet product online. We are really pleased with the results we have seen in March and April. The timing of this launch is also being supported by our broader brand investments. The small business segment also benefits from our infrastructure on demand and our common systems with our consumer team.
This allows us to benefit from developments such as My Speed Boost, our new mobile app, and SuperScan, as examples. The small business segment also benefits from resources in Colombo and Adelaide, which helps us deliver quality service at a low cost. Importantly, market conditions are favorable for Superloop and small business. As we have seen in the consumer market, challenger brands are taking market share as consumers seek value. This also applies in the business segment. In addition, the NBN program provide Fibre to the Node and Fibre to the Curb premises with a no-cost upgrade to Fibre to the Premises, provides a clear opportunity for Superloop business.
The fiber upgrade program will enable high speed, 100 Mbps through to 1 Gbps, at no cost to be delivered to more than 250,000 businesses today that cannot obtain these speeds. The ability to upgrade to a more reliable, higher speed will create an important switching event in the market. With our new Superloop business plans and favorable market conditions, now is the time to increase our performance marketing and take market share. We are excited by what we can do with our new partnership with Palo Alto Networks. In the past, the buying decisions for network and security were separate decisions. Now, medium and large corporates are looking for a platform that can be used to both manage both the networks and the security.
What this means is that for every AUD 1 in network sales pipeline, we are seeing AUD 2 in security pipeline. With our Tier 1 network and high-quality data products and our Palo Alto relationship, we are excited by our progress and most importantly, our wins to date. Our unweighted pipeline for security products has increased substantially, and now it's more than five times the value of what we ended into at the start of the financial year. Our progress has been recognized by Palo Alto Networks, who awarded Superloop its Managed Services Partner of the Year in 2023. It really is fantastic to have a security leader such as Palo Alto Networks recognizing what we have built to date. This recognition gives me great confidence that we will make the most of this market opportunity.
Thirdly, the managed Wi-Fi market in purpose-built student accommodation is an important part of the existing Superloop business, where we are the market leader. We have seen an increase of 6,000 services, being 17% in Q3 from new locations and higher fill rates across our on-net buildings. As we now exit COVID, there are 16,000 student beds in development. We're seeing a strong, renewed focus from investors looking to expand their pipeline to meet rising student accommodation demand. We are confident we'll continue to see revenue growth from this product and good margins from our on-net economics. The skills we have built in managed Wi-Fi also provide us with an opportunity in adjacent verticals. We have a clear focus on expanding into health, the broader education market, and aged care. I am confident we can grow revenues in these adjacent verticals.
The build-to-rent market has reached a turning point, with recent analyst work suggesting the market size will jump tenfold, 6,000-16,000 units in 2027. Superloop, through its acquisition of VostroNet, has a compelling technical product and white label capability that will help us to win in this market. The experience and skill set we have in the managed Wi-Fi market is also highly complementary to the build-to-rent market. In fact, we have more than 50 heads focused on the managed Wi-Fi for PBSA and the build-to-rent opportunity. To date, our build-to-rent pipeline is over 11,000 beds, and we have a strong engagement with all the key players in the build-to-rent market. We are confident we can be a very strong provider in the build-to-rent market. Over the last three years, we have rebuilt the business segment.
The Exetel acquisition in August 2021 has enabled a step change in our capabilities, giving us voice and mobile offerings and a strong channel and partner program. We now have a significant channel program with 500+ partners that provides us with significant sales distribution for our products. We have built a go-to-market team focused on building strong value propositions for each sub-segment, and we are seeing strong sales momentum. We have re-energized the account management teams and made big steps forward in securing our base. Our churn rates are low in small business, and we have a high percentage of our medium and large corporate customers under contract. Pleasingly, we have been able to improve the gross margin post the Exetel acquisition. The business segment is tracking to its midterm ambition of 40% gross margin.
Over the last three years, we have demonstrated the ability to acquire capabilities, integrate them within the business segment, and drive both revenue and gross margin. Our ambition is to drive harder by focusing on three key priorities. Firstly, we will significantly scale our small business revenues by leveraging our brand investments and the product and operational capabilities we have as a Tier 1 provider of NBN data products. We'll also keep focus on the mid-market and drive more volume through both direct sales and by leveraging our 500+ partners. Secondly, we'll build upon our success in networks and security, and we have a clear ambition to be recognized as secure connectivity experts. A focus on network security will drive volumes onto our network.
Lastly, we will grow our number one position in PBSA to become a leader in build-to-rent, and we'll leverage our Wi-Fi product into adjacent verticals. Superloop business has demonstrated growth in both revenue and margin. I'm looking forward to doing more of the same. It's now my pleasure to introduce Adrian Luciano, the Group Executive for Wholesale.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Adrian Luciano. I'm head of the wholesale segment here at Superloop. Wholesale has been an instrumental part of the Superloop journey to date. We've really built a solid reputation as one of the wholesalers of choice in the industry with our products and services. We've invested in the network. We've made strategic investments in software automation. We've made synergistic acquisitions in businesses such as Acurus and VostroNet that have now been integrated. We've set the foundation for the next phase of growth. The wholesale journey has evolved over time. Traditionally, we provide component services to our customers, sort of point-to-point and IP Transit services to companies like Macquarie, Equinix, Google. This gave us a great business foundation.
We saw a gap in the market about 18 months ago, where our customers were looking for a fully digital end-to-end customer service experience. We invested and created Connect 360, which has had fantastic growth. We're now up to over 37,000 users on the platform. Customers such as Buroserv and Symbio have fully embraced it. Through leveraging the same infra on-demand technology, along with our strategic acquisitions in VostroNet and Acurus, we have now opened up a much larger addressable market with these broader product offerings, which is accessible on one single platform. Through this evolution, we can service a more complete stack of customer requirements. If we had not evolved and kept our original state, we'd only be able to address a smaller part of the market. We have a more holistic offering for our customers.
From component services to automation consumption models via our Connect 360 platform and now into white label, all leveraging the same underlying technology, helping us drive volumes with economies of scale. Our infrastructure has enabled us to launch new product initiatives, which are more sophisticated ways to consume our assets. As a wholesaler, we enable our customer solutions and our customers then put a broader solution together and add their value on top with products such as voice, unified communications, software-defined networking, security, and support. Software automation is the key for the future of Superloop Wholesale. We're a leading infra on-demand player, and we aim to be the most leading wholesaler in the market. We'll continue to invest in the platform and when required, we can seamlessly add new features and products and be quick to market to meet the changing requirements of our customers.
The next phase of growth is getting deeper for us with our customers, multi-product sales, increasing share of wallet, and excitingly bringing new customer relationship pipeline via these new broader capabilities. Superloop Wholesale will continue to leverage our comprehensive Tier 1 national and international network for future growth. We run through all major capital cities and connect to all major data centers. We provide all NBN's fixed line products and services, and as mentioned earlier, we connect diversely to all the POIs. We're very data-focused in our offering. What is unique to us is that we can service any wholesaler, from an emerging player to an established player on the journey, which is exciting for us.
The traditional products have given us sustained growth to date. They include our Superloop Fibre, IP Transit, our international services via our INDIGO assets, NBN, Enterprise Ethernet, NBN Backhaul, and Broadband Aggregation. We have now moved beyond just selling traditional telco with our white label offering and VostroNet Fibre to the Premises new development capabilities. This new scalable infra network means we can be nimble, agile, add these new consumption models and products. Some of these examples include full network aggregation and integration of key Fibre to the Premises third-party providers into our ecosystem, like Uniti, Telstra, and VostroNet. Superloop's aspiration is to be a one-stop-shop aggregator. The VostroNet new developments Fibre to the Premises is a large greenfield opportunity for us. It's high margin and it's quick revenue activation.
Connect 360 automation platform for NBN services, we now offer two flavors of that, of network aggregation. We've been an industry leader in this particular service, and we offer an end-to-end service from qualification, ordering, provisioning, modifications, service assurance, and we're always looking at new ways and new features to drive a better customer experience. white label is an incredibly exciting opportunity for us. We're still at the early stages at adoption. Leveraging obviously our Acurus investment, we're seeing interest for a number of key verticals. I know utilities, finance, and retail were mentioned earlier. They all want to incorporate telco into their portfolio to reduce churn and bundle their services for, to get multi-product sales. They will play a key part of moving that challenger market to 30% over the next few years. Our wholesale ambition.
Superloop Wholesale have really high growth ambitions, and we're excited about the journey ahead, and our four pillars are up there. We'll continue to expand our addressable market through innovation and capabilities, leveraging our Tier 1 network, our automated infrastructure, and continue to adapt and evolve as required with economies of scale. We wanna be the leading white label provider of telco services, continue to leverage our work with partners like Officeworks. Uniquely, we know we're one of the quickest to market with POCs and product proof of concepts in production environments. And we can also offer customization and integration when required. We wanna be number three in new developments, and this represents a huge opportunity for us, and we believe we can achieve that behind NBN and Uniti.
We've got a really strong footprint of buildings and lots of greenfield fiber projects in scope with a consistently growing pipeline that we want to monetize. We also want to increase the utilization of our domestic and international fiber assets, scale up on Superloop Fibre, our INDIGO cable, and VostroNet. These products are very high margin and have strong on-net economics. They will play a key role in us maintaining our target 60% gross margin. In summary, the investments in our network, our infrastructure automation, our key strategic acquisitions, and leveraging third-party fiber providers and bringing them into our ecosystem has given Superloop a much larger addressable market, and it's an opportunity we are excited about and ready to capture. Thank you very much. I'll hand over to Luke.
Thanks, Adrian. Let me just go back a step. The financial presentation today is gonna be aimed at addressing two key topics. Firstly, I'm gonna spend some time looking at Superloop's approach to investment decisions. The growth ambition that Paul is gonna lay out in a little while is going to require us to make capital allocation decisions on both organic and inorganic investment opportunities over the medium term. Secondly, I wanna highlight how our focus on digital transformation, our unique Infrastructure-on-Demand platform, and the resultant cost leadership will play out in financial outcomes over the medium term. Let's begin with our approach to investment. As I've mentioned, making sensible investment decisions in the medium term will be critical, not only to the success of the organization, but more importantly, to the creation of shareholder value.
When we evaluate investment opportunities, be they organic or inorganic, our first and overarching principle is to ensure that each investment delivers an appropriate return on the capital deployed. From a Superloop perspective, we target a multiple of our own estimate of our weighted average cost of capital, and that means we're targeting a mid-teens hurdle rate. In addition to the return metrics, there are also other filters that we apply to capital allocation. Quantitatively, price is obviously critical, and similarly, with every investment, we carefully consider the accretion impact that the investment will have on the externally, sorry, observable metrics, including EBITDA, cash flow, and NPAT. It's just as important to assess the qualitative impacts of potential investment opportunities as well.
Our strategy provides for our success stemming from competitive advantage, which is grounded in efficiency and cost leadership. We are always carefully considering the operational impact or ease of integration of any new opportunity. Over the last two years, as Paul mentioned, we've been building a core competency in integrating new investments into our simplified portfolio. With any new opportunity, ensuring that we leverage that capability is paramount. Finally, we've spent a significant effort in the last three years on rationalizing and simplifying our business model. New investments need to be aligned with the three segment business architecture that we're now operating within. On this slide, we've given a depiction of the five transactions that we've undertaken since the middle of 2021.
What I wanna highlight here is how the investment considerations that I've just spoken about have been brought to bear over the last two years. On price, all of the acquisitions have been executed both pre and post synergy on a single-digit EV to EBITDA multiple. Obviously, the internal business case on each of these acquisitions met or exceeded our hurdle rate of return. In respect of the Exetel, MyRepublic, and VostroNet acquisitions, our ability to deliver the synergies that were an important element of pricing, has been the result of deploying the Infrastructure-on-Demand platform that we've built. In both of the scale plays, Exetel and MyRepublic, we've delivered synergies in line with or higher than our business case, and we've delivered network integration and synergy realization ahead of time.
We've also made some capability acquisitions over the last two years that the team have already spoken about. In the case of both Acurus and VostroNet, there had been a specific gap in our desired capability set that we wanted to pursue. These acquisitions, though, only went ahead after a rigorous buy or build analysis was conducted. Whilst we as an organization had the wherewithal to deliver these capabilities organically, the financial business case, coupled with the time to market, meant that acquisition was a more sensible path to filling those gaps. We're now poised to leverage an extremely strong financial foundation to achieve our growth ambition. On the left-hand side of this slide, you can see the revenue profile of the business as we strive toward delivering our ambition.
The chart represents our current view of the business's organic growth potential, which, whilst impressive, will not carry us all the way to the ambition that Paul is going to lay out. The delivery of our ambition is going to necessitate further investment in acquisitive growth, and the application of our five key investment principles will underpin our ability to translate that into shareholder value in the medium term. On the right-hand side of this chart, the two lines represent the current organic opportunity of the business. Green line is the EBITDA margin. Having studied both our local and global telco peers, we're striving to deliver a low to mid-teen EBITDA margin over the medium term. The purple line on the slide represents operating expenditure as a % of revenue.
Again, the opportunity that we're striving to deliver is for this ratio to decline, and we believe that we can achieve an outcome in line with global peers in the mid to high teens. Creating balance sheet flexibility and strength has also been a key outcome of the 3 in 3 strategy. The chart at the top of the page shows very clearly the paradigm shift in the balance sheet strength that was created through the divestment of the Singapore and Hong Kong assets. Coupled with the reinvestment of those funds into opportunities that are delivering a meaningful improvement in EBITDA. As at the 31st of December 2022, the business's leverage ratio was around 0.8 x. In the three months since that time, the ratio has fallen to around 0.5 x.
Medium to longer term, we believe that the business has the strength and predictability to support a leverage ratio of around 1.5x - 2 x EBITDA. The March outcome that's on the slide here is a function of improved net debt position, built on a higher cash balance and the increasing EBITDA outcomes of the most recent last 12 months. On the cash position very quickly, it's obviously a positive outcome for the third quarter. There is always an element of timing in the cash flow, and it's not necessarily prudent to expect that the fourth quarter will generate cash in the same way that the third quarter has. As I will touch on later, though, we do currently foresee the second half of FY 2023 as being free cash flow positive.
We also maintain significant balance sheet flexibility. We have undrawn debt capacity of AUD 48 million in addition to our cash reserves. We are currently in the progress of renegotiating our debt facilities with our lenders. Whilst we're not looking to change the size of our facility in any meaningful way, we have been working with our lenders to revisit the facility in light of the significantly improved financial position of the business. On this next slide, I'm gonna take some time to unpack the depreciation and amortization components of the Superloop income statement. Over the last couple of reporting halves, we probably have not done as good a job as we should have in explaining the moving pieces in the D&A line. Here, we've broken out the D&A into three elements: depreciation, amortization, and the amortization of acquired intangibles.
As you can see from the table on the left, there's been a relatively significant increase in the amortization lines in the last year. This is a direct consequence of those recent acquisitions and the arrangements entered into with Uniti in the first half of the financial year. As you can see from the graph on the right-hand side, the value of acquired intangibles has therefore grown significantly. These intangibles typically relate to either software assets, particularly in the case of Acurus, or customer-related intangible assets in the cases of Exetel, VostroNet, and MyRepublic. Given that we amortize most of those customer-related assets over a two to three year time horizon, all things being equal, the peak of amortization will be the FY 2024 financial year.
Following the last half result, many in the investment community suggested that we provide some insight, sorry, into what the company's NPAT might have looked like, adjusting for the non-cash amortization of acquired intangibles, a term that many people in the market refer to as NPAT-A. The table on the left shows that NPAT-A posts these adjustments. This metric has improved from the first half of last year to the first half this year. We would expect that on this metric that we would be NPAT-A positive in FY 2024. Just gonna take a look at cash flow as well very quickly. From a cash flow perspective, Superloop is now a story, sorry, of greater reliability and transparency post a resetting in FY 2021.
The diagram on the left-hand side of the page here shows the actual cash flow outcome for the first half of this financial year. As a reminder, we had very strong EBITDA to operating cash flow conversion at just over 100%. Free cash flow, however, was impacted by the investments that were made in VostroNet, Uniti, and MyRepublic. It's also worth remembering that the financing cash flows in the first half were abnormally high by virtue of the on-market buyback. The two charts on the right represent a more theoretical exercise. What they represent is the potential cash flow outcome for the business for the second half of this year and for the full financial year FY 2024. There's a few key assumptions that we've used in bringing these charts together.
Firstly, we've started with the analyst consensus forecast both for the second half of this year and for FY 2024. We're not necessarily saying they are right, but they're certainly a good assumption on which to start this exercise. Secondly, the ongoing conversion of EBITDA to operating cash flow will be in the range of 80%-90%. The overall level of CapEx will remain relatively consistent at AUD 20 million per annum or roughly AUD 10 million per half. Lastly, as I mentioned before, we're not expecting any meaningful change in the level of debt that the business is carrying. So financing costs on a normalized and annualized basis would be in the order of AUD 8 million per annum.
The key takeaway from this slide is that the business is now very well-placed, absent further acquisitions or material investments, to deliver free cash flow positive outcomes moving forward. Drawing all of this together, what does the next three years of the Superloop journey look like from a financial perspective? The ambition, sorry, for the business is to deliver more predictable profitability with strong growth. We will be striving to achieve a low to mid-teen organic growth in revenue, an EBITDA margin in the mid to high teens, and from FY 2024 onward, NPAT-A positive, ahead of actual NPAT positive outcomes within the medium term. These outcomes will be underpinned by the focus and effort we've applied to operating efficiency and cost control in the last two years.
Our digital transformation journey and our Infrastructure-on-Demand platform will support a strategy of cost leadership that will provide us with a competitive advantage in the markets that we operate in. Importantly, the current business has built a solid foundation on which to generate cash for future investment. In the absence of any future investment opportunities, it obviously provides us with potential capital management flexibility. What's happened there? Lastly, for the avoidance of doubt, three months from the end of the financial year, we're taking the opportunity today to affirm the guidance that we provided in the market in relation to our underlying EBITDA outcome for the FY 2023 financial year. We continue to expect that the FY 2023 underlying EBITDA outcome will land between AUD 33 million and AUD 36 million for the full year. Thank you, everyone, and I'll hand back to Paul Tyler.
Thanks, Luke. Everyone had enough slides yet? Only a couple more, don't worry. All right. We've spent some time talking about the past and how we've improved the business. The completion of the 3 in 3 plan, the delivery of its ambitions, the growth that was promised. We reflected on the power of our network, its elegance, its flexibility, as well as the simplicity of our system stack, and how the combination of those things create our unique Infrastructure-on-Demand fabric. We've talked about our market segments and our financials. The question we all have is: Where does that take us? It's always pleasing to acknowledge the journey, but of course, we wanna consider where to from here. In my opening, I highlighted a number of key areas of opportunity that exists across all three of our segments.
We've reflected a lot as an exec and with the board on the strategic settings of the company and whether we're equipped to capitalize on those opportunities and other opportunities. With the completion of our turnaround and that improvement in our financial capability, we have a lot of optionality. We could explore lots of different things for the next phase of the company. We did. We considered lots of different potential changes in strategic direction. I'm pleased to say we've concluded on a strategy of consistency. We see that our current settings, our current strategy is the right one to give us the necessary firepower to succeed in each of those opportunities, each and all of those opportunities that I highlighted. Those opportunities as a reminder being that continued growth in the challenger market share, the doubling from 15% to our vision of 30%.
The discontinuity that the shift from NBN's copper technologies to NBN's true Fibre to the Premises opportunity creates and our relative strength with those high-speed offerings. Our plans to grow our SMB business to be a real scaled player. The strength of our managed Wi-Fi offerings and the opportunity that taking them into adjacent markets represents. Our new Fibre to the home business and how bullish we are about where that can potentially take us. Finally, the large market opportunity that we see our white label capability presents to utilize our existing assets into a broader marketplace. We've concluded that our current strategy is the right strategy to take advantage of all of those opportunities. We've decided to double down, to reinforce our current strategic direction, reinforce our current momentum. That's our next ambition.
It's an ambition that's centered around maintaining the balance across all three of our segments. It's to maintain an operating model which gives us sustainable cost leadership. It's to drive deeper into each of our segments, driving our market share and adding portfolio, adjacent portfolio where we see it's attractive. Finally, it's an ambition that centers around organic growth, but with acceleration through strategic M&A where we find appropriately accretive opportunities to do so. That was our ambition. Where will it take us? In the short term, as has been highlighted a couple of times, to be free cash positive, a milestone we see us passing in this current half. In the midterm, to true profitability, starting with NPAT-A positive in FY 2024 and then ultimately true NPAT in the future.
We see that our OpEx as a % of revenue will continue to decline and our CapEx will remain flat. Growing top line, obviously significant leverage will be created in the business. Importantly, when we fulfill this next ambition, we intend to have doubled our FY 2023 revenues and see our EBITDA quality rise towards the mid to high teens as a %. Of course, at that point in time, the business will have substantial opportunity for capital management options. We've come a long way, but we genuinely believe our best years are ahead of us. Thank you. We're gonna open up to questions. We have a microphone here in the room, I think somewhere, so that we can Oh, Tina's got it. That's great. We'll take some questions firstly in the room here.
We just ask if you wait for the microphone to come so that the people on the webcast can hear those questions. We'll take some questions from the webcast as well. Paul, did you wanna sorta pick out someone if there's anyone here who has a question?
Please.
Thanks.
We're gonna take this off.
No, thanks for the presentation, Paul. It's Bob here from JP Morgan. I've just a couple of questions around the consumer segment. You've obviously got that ambitious target to get to that 500,000 subs, in 2026. I mean, what's the mix of that through like, you know, organic, Superloop versus, maybe wholesale or a white label agreement? What's that mix look like?
That's it in our consumer segment. Only in our consumer segment, all of our retail, consumer customers. What happens in wholesale is reported separately. There's no white label ambition in that.
Okay, cool. I guess you've been growing the consumer segment a little bit ahead of that challenger share over the last few years. This sort of implies that you sort of grow in line with that doubling of challenger share over the next few years. Why, why are you growing sort of, you know, in line versus maybe ahead of share? Like, what's happening on the competitive front?
Look, Mehul, can reflect as well, but We genuinely think there's real power in maintaining the balance across our three segments. We could grow faster in any one of our segments through over-indexing or over-investing in that particular one. We think maximum leverage is created on the asset, and we get maximum reuse of the systems, the investments, the processes, the tools, et cetera, and maximum flexibility to respond to market conditions as they change by maintaining that balance. We think doubling over the next couple of years is still a bullish ambition for the consumer business, but it's the right balance of investment versus return. We could grow faster, but then we'd have to sacrifice margins, and we choose to maintain the balance. Mehul, do you wanna comment further?
Yeah. I mean, we've been growing faster because of those competitive advantages that I spoke about earlier, and we don't see them going away. We're genuinely offering a better experience and a better product on a level playing field than most of the incumbents do. There's a natural move towards us, I think, but we're honing in on those strengths. Specifically about that cost leadership thing that you saw come across in most presentations is it is a utility market, and, you know, being able to offer a quality product at a competitive price, is a winning factor.
Maybe just a final one. In terms of the churn rates you're seeing in your consumer business, like how has that sort of trended or changed?
Yeah. I think trending towards market levels is all I'll say for now. Our ambition is to drag it down lower. We think it's also a function of scale. You know, when you're smaller in size, you attract a certain type of a customer, and as you grow, you represent the broader market. We think market levels is a benchmark that we'd like to beat.
The 30% target, where did you pull that number from? I, you know, I'm interested in that and, you know, I guess in terms of, you know, reaching that number as well, you know, and wanting to actually lower your OpEx also. I'd imagine, you know, you're obviously looking at smarter ways to market to acquire customers, to obviously have less churn, so you don't need to look for new customers. I guess, you know, for a lot of other marketplaces where challengers have come in and taken market share, you know, historically it's been driven by sharing economies and lower costs with their customers as well. Maybe if you could expand ...
Quite a few questions there, I guess, bundled into one.
I'll reflect on the ambition, but I'll throw to Mehul on the acquisition channels. You're sitting just behind two of our directors, so let's be clear, it's an ambition, not a target. Where did we come? We made it up, right? We've made it up with some science. The comparable industries we look at are things like the financial services industry in Australia, where it's around about 25% of the market that sits with challengers. The retail energy industry in Australia, a similar utility, similar sort of share, slightly higher. The retail broadband industry in the U.S. sits around 40% market share.
We think 30% as an ambition, as a vision of where this market will naturally sit, where the kind of equilibrium between the traditional brands that have invested over a very long term in their brand equity will ultimately be versus the newer startups like ourselves. We think that is a reasonable ambition. It's kind of proving itself out, right? As we were building that ambition, we were, as I said, we'd started from 4% when we were thinking about it. When we launched the ambition, it was 8%. It's now 15%. It seems like a reasonable destination to think that that 30% equilibrium is achievable. Will it be 30%? Will it be 29%? Will it be 32%? Who knows.
We wanna over-index, and we wanna be a catalyst for that change in the market. In terms of where we position ourselves, we do position ourselves at the value end. There's no question that we utilize our lower cost base to provide a more competitive proposition. Price isn't something we want to lead with indefinitely, but price is one of the tools that makes a challenger attractive into the marketplace. Mehul, on the acquisition approach.
In terms of marketing, obviously there's many ways of doing it. Some, you know, mass media broadcast bombarding of entire markets and advertising space is one way to do it. We've chosen not to do that. Smart acquisition is what we're about. The unit economics that I spoke to earlier give us the guardrails of what those envelopes are and should be to ultimately drive a 25% gross margin level. When you think about things like the NBN upgrade program that I spoke about, it's a very specific event at a specific premise level that we can go about getting in a very targeted way, as opposed to just continuing to grow our marketing costs in a linear fashion. Lastly, the refreshed brand.
You'll see a lot of expression coming on the back of that brand about us being a challenger trying to solve everyday broadband difficulties in a different way, in a unique way. We're backing ourselves in the Infrastructure-on-Demand platform to truly put something in the marketplace that doesn't exist currently.
No? Yeah. Sorry about that.
Just with regards to, you know, life after COVID. You know, COVID, you know, introduced us to new technologies, and people became very, very comfortable and familiar with them, and I guess Teams is a classic example. You know, we're here now, 2023, there's a lot of hardware sitting on small business desks and larger business desks and, yeah, it's probably fairly out of date. I mean, VoIP and telephone use through the internet obviously could be a b ig driver for Superloop, as people transition from more traditional telephones. Am I right in thinking that or is that probably thinking a bit too optimistically?
No, no. Definitely, there's a change in ways of utilizing the internet, if you like, for work from home, work from offices, different ways of using offices, the growth in Teams practices, Webex, whatever it may be. They're definitely changing use cases. We're a new player. We don't have a lot of history in some of the traditional products. We're able to invest in the contemporary technologies. The way that interactive video is driving uplinks plays to our strengths. We are a company that prides itself on our high speed credentials. All these sort of changes in market conditions obviously play to our strength. Homes are no longer just about, you know, streaming Netflix at 6:00 P.M. on a Sunday night.
They're very much about people working from home and needing quality internet connections 24/7. This is what we're about, enabling better internet through competition is our core purpose. Yes, it does play to our strengths. Anything on the... Sorry, we have another question in the room. Cam.
Thanks, guys. Cameron Bell from Canaccord here. Just a couple of questions to run through. Firstly, Paul, at the start, you talked about your latent capacity in the business, and you talked about holding your CapEx steady. I've been cautioned by previous management teams not to think about the business in utilization-wise. Could you give us an idea on how much this business can grow without CapEx? Like, what's it utilized at now?
Yeah. It is a very hard question to answer as we've known, because you can continually make small incremental investments in the network that delivers a lot of incremental capacity once you've built the basic level of infrastructure, which we have. To try and answer that question, the way that we've approached it is we've said within our capital envelope, our AUD 20 million of CapEx a year, we can easily see a path to create capacity in the network for 1 million customers, right? We're currently sitting at 350,000, thereabouts. Even at the 1 million, it's a bit of an artificial ceiling. There are ways of expanding the throughput of fiber through changing lasers and things like that on a very cost-effective basis.
The message we're trying to give, Cam, is there's ample capacity in the network to fulfill the vision that we've set out here.
Luke, maybe coming at that question from a similar way. You talked about getting your OpEx as a % of revenue as low as possible. Do you have some kind of longer term target that you'd like to get it to?
Ambition, Luke.
The ambition. Yeah, we do. I mean, we think from sort of the analysis we've done of, players in the Australian market, in the telco space, global peers as well, that a mid-to-high teens sort of, number is what we should be striving for. Certainly our organic plan at the moment would have us, you know, getting close to that outcome, I think there's opportunities for us to continue to drive that moving forward.
Thanks. Coming back to the consumer side of the business, what are you seeing at the moment in regards to the trajectory of customer acquisition costs?
I mean, we're at target levels again, guided by our guardrails, as I speak about. We are investing in brand awareness, right. We look at training it. We recently launched a refreshed expression of our brand. As we grow brand awareness, we use types of media that we haven't used traditionally. We do expect to see it go up, but not on a sustained level. I think as our funnel increases, we expect those efficiencies to come right back. Once again, the unit economics create the guardrails, and that's what gives us our targets, and we're sticking to that.
Yeah. Thanks. Paul, maybe a couple for you. Firstly, there was an earlier slide that said something along the lines of INDIGO had, I think it was 4 Tbps available for sale. I suppose it made me think about that asset, how it sits within your business, how core is it, and what's the strategy there, and how is it actually tracking?
INDIGO is an absolutely core element of the network, and it's one of the anchor points that the company started with, where it's providing capacity, for those who aren't aware of it, between Sydney and Perth and then Perth to Singapore. We utilize that asset to do a whole pile of things. We started off just selling capacity. We'd go to a Google, and we'll sell capacity on that route, you know, X megabits or gigabits of capacity on that route. We then utilized that, our ownership position on that asset to swap capacity on it for other systems that we've utilized it then. That's created part of our international network. It is a fundamental part of our network for sure, and we continue to sell piecemeal capacity on it.
We also utilize it very heavily for our own retail brands. We utilize the ability to carry traffic into Asia, and on all the other routes that we've highlighted on the previous slide, to provide amongst the fastest route times for internet traffic for our consumer customers. We have a lot of gamers on our network, and we're very proud of the way our IP Transit network performs with the lowest possible ping times to, you know, gaming servers all over the world or, you know, many other use cases. It is a core part of our network. It absolutely is critical to us going forward, both for selling on, you know, capacity on it in and of itself, but also to service our retail offerings.
The absence of a buyback at the moment and fair bit of commentary on M&A, can we interpret that as your clear preference right now is for, you know, balance sheet uses M&A?
We executed the buyback last year when we had an excess of cash. We concluded it once we had completed three distinct transactions over the period of time, being the Uniti transaction, the VostroNet transaction and the MyRepublic transaction. We thought it was prudent to cease the buyback at that point in time. We still had ample capacity for reinvestment. I think we were pretty clear that we see M&A as a core part of our future. Without taking the conditions that we consider M&A, you know, in any lighter way, right? We're very rigorous about the way we consider M&A. If we find appropriate opportunities that increase our share or increase our capability on an appropriately priced, accretive basis, simple digest, all those sort of things, we'll do them.
We've shown we're good at it. We capture the synergies very well. We may do nothing. We may find nothing that meets all of those requirements. We are growing very well organically. Yeah, we think that M&A will be part of our future.
Last one, Luke. Your mid-to-high teens EBITDA margin ambition, I think it is. Not a target, ambition. When would you like to achieve that ambition by?
Look, I mean, I think, you know, you can interpret a little bit from the slides here in terms of where we're at. We've sort of spoken about a horizon which is three years from now. FY 2026 is sort of, you know, the timeframe in which we would hope we'd be able to deliver on our ambition.
Any online?
There are a couple of questions online. Let me just remind anyone who is online, if you do have a question, you can type it in and we'll take it from here. The questions that we have are sort of fairly similar ones, the first one, comes from an investor. They're just asking the question about the 500,000 consumer subscribers, and the mix of sort of achieving that target between organic growth and potential acquisition.
We've not given a specific answer to that in the slides deliberately. We will see how we go. It's pretty clear that the acquisition of MyRepublic was a really sensible acquisition. It was purchased at appropriate pricing, I would say quite attractive pricing. The immediate leverage created on our network was clear. 2x post-synergy basis delivered over a period of three weeks. We haven't done any other recent acquisitions in that space because we haven't found bases that we thought were appropriately priced. That may change, or we may invest further in organic opportunities. We'll find that balance over time. It's an ambition. It's a, you know, it's a reasonable period of time. We'll just have to see how the market conditions unfold.
I guess a similar question to Cam then in relation to where things are sitting at the moment. With the share price where it is, what has been the considerations in relation to restarting a buyback?
Do you wanna answer that one, Luke?
Look, I mean, I can. I think that, you know, you've sort of answered it obviously in Cam's sort of question before. The only thing I'd add to it is, you know, obviously, if we were to make an investment in Superloop shares at the moment, it certainly would be something that would meet our return hurdles, most definitely. You know, it is one opportunity that's in front of us relative to others that we would potentially be looking at as well. You know, it's certainly something that's always in our mind. I think, Paul, you can, you can attest to the fact that we regularly have people reminding us that it would be a good investment if we wanted to make it. It's not far from our thinking.
At the moment, you know, it's part of the mix of other opportunities that are, that are in the consideration set.
Just a quick question to that answer. You must be pretty confident then with the opportunities that are in front of you and the payoff metrics, you know, given how supportive buying back your own shares would be or the payoff of buying back your own shares at these levels.
We're considering opportunities all the time. I'd be lying if I didn't say that we're considering things right now. If we were to land the things we're considering, they will be very accretive. There's certainly no certainty of anything happening, and you know, we may take a different position in the future. We have executed a buyback, we have returned capital, and we have got our sort of excess cash down to a level that we think we're comfortable to hold for the time being while we see how some of these things pan out.
Just on the business side, can you talk about the market dynamics, like the incumbents and the challenges, and who are the main challenges that you're competing against?
Dean, do you wanna have a crack at that?
Yeah. If you look at the small business side, we're really trying to take share off the large incumbents. I think it's the right time. Historically, we've driven a lot of volumes through our partners. We're very much getting into the online game now and creating awareness and demand. I'm really pleased with what we're seeing in March and April since we relaunched. As I said before, we leverage a lot of the developments, a lot of the work that Mehul and his team does. I'm very confident we can drive volumes out of the small business space. At sort of the medium and larger accounts, we're really competing against the largest, probably largest four players.
What they're looking for in the market today is that most people understand the network components, but they're looking for something different. What they're looking for is more of a platform approach. We're all seeing the prevalence of security issues. When you talk to the large corporate, security is their number one concern, far more of a concern actually than the pipes that connect to their locations. Having worked for two and a half years with Palo Alto, we feel like we're really well placed to have those conversations and win in that market. Today, the logos there, we're winning. We're winning primarily through having a Tier 1 network, but doing exceptionally well in convincing those customers that our security and our partnership with Palo Alto is what sets us apart today.
Just while you've got the floor, Dean, there's a question online in relation to the business space, and it comes from Nick Harris. Just wanted you to talk a little bit more about servicing the SMB channel. How material is it now, and do you need to do much more work to get this part of the business growing?
Thank you for that question. No, we don't need to do a lot of work because all the components have essentially been built for us. We have the call centers in Adelaide and Colombo, and we have the product offerings. Most of our focus is really on the go-to-market piece. We take the inputs, which is the NBN products. We leverage our call center and operational processes, but what we're really focusing on is how we bring it to life. What small businesses really want is they want a high-speed product, and they want good service, and they want good value. We see this switching event that's being created because of the NBN upgrades as being a really important opportunity, and we're encouraged with the results we're already seeing today.
We're seeing really good results in upgrading our existing customers, so we're gonna be running a program of upgrading our existing base, and we see substantial increases ARPU. The early signs from just harvesting our base are positive, and the next step really for us is to harvest that change in the market as these 250,000 businesses go through a switching or a disruption, and we wanna make sure we take good share of that space as well.
Daisey, a question for you. Regarding the digital transformation, with the bulk of the upgrades needed, will they be completed shortly, or is there a medium-term process when considering recent M&A?
Right. The first part of that question was, what timeframe are we looking at?
Yeah.
To complete the rest of the transformation? We've already managed to pick off, I guess the big pieces that support our segments. The remaining pieces, it's not gonna be a big bang. It's gonna happen over time, which is why we've still got some room to go. The short term would be about six months to having the systems bedded down, but then after that, we need to continue to optimize those over time. I would say six months to get the bulk of the rest of the program completed, and then optimization thereafter. What was the second part to that?
Just in relation to sort of recent M&A, is that wrapped up in that?
Yes.
Does that continue to be longer?
All the recent M&A is already fully absorbed and integrated. The delta is just the legacy that we're still working through. Yeah.
Thank you. Paul, a question for you in relation to the revenue and margin sort of targets and I guess the overall medium-term objectives and ambition for the business. What do you see as the biggest risks to achieving this target?
There's, I mean, there's execution risk across any business. We're very mindful of the risks that are prevalent in ours. We run quite a tight risk process. In fact, the chairman of our risk committee is sitting here in the room. We've identified our risks. We've put mitigations in place to manage them. There's obviously market risk, there's macroeconomic risk, there's execution risk, there's competitor risk. You know, any business will highlight the same set of risks. We think our aspirations are reasonable and realistic. We think we do have the wherewithal to deliver on them, and we intend to. You know, we feel good about the future.
Is that it? All right. Well, look, thanks everyone for joining in the room, and thanks everyone for joining online. Hopefully, this has given you some insight as to the way we think about the business. We spent a lot of time talking about the progress. The progress is history. We're obviously very proud of the progress that's got us to here, but the more interesting thing is where to from here. We've set out a bit of an ambition on where we think we can go, we are certainly proud of the set of assets that we have, and you as shareholders should be proud of those as well. We feel really bullish about where the future's gonna take us. Thanks for your time, and hopefully, this has been of some use to you.
Thank you.