Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Smart Parking Post AGM Investor Conference call. This morning, I've got Paul Gillespie, CEO, and Richard Ludbrook, CFO, on the line. Paul and Richard will present the slides from the AGM, including Q1 updates, and then following the presentation, we'll be delighted to open the line for questions. Thanks again for joining us, and on that note, I'll hand over to Paul.
Thank you, Michael. Before we get going, could I ask everybody to give me quite a bit of feedback? I think someone with their iPhone XS is still online. She can mute and read. We're good? Okay. I think we've now got a clear line, which is fantastic. Thank you very much and thank you, Michael. Good morning to everybody, and thank you for joining our call today. I'm here with Richard Ludbrook, our Group CFO, and we are here to talk you through our Post AGM Investor Update.
Today, we're in our Auckland offices, which is a change of scene for many. I'm not often here, well, not here as much as I used to be, but it's good to be with the team in New Zealand and seeing how this business is growing. I guess we'll start off just by saying the purpose of today's call. It's really a recap on the AGM presentation and the Q1 update that we announced recently. I'd like to welcome new shareholders to the register.
So given that, we want people to want to provide the opportunity for investors to learn more about our business model, performance, and our growth strategies. On today's call, as Michael mentioned, I will refer to several pages of the AGM presentation, which we released to the market in the ASX on the 15th of November. As usual, after the presentation, we'll be very happy to answer any questions that you may have. To start, I'd like to highlight the three key messages and takeaways from today's call that I'd like shareholders to remember.
The first point, actually, can we go to the first slide, please, Stacy? Thank you. The first point is the momentum from the record results of FY24 has continued through Q1 of FY25. We've delivered strong ongoing growth across all markets in the quarter. Revenue was up 24% versus the PCP, and EBITDA has increased by 30%.
We can continue to deliver strong growth, margin expansion, and positive free cash flows. The second point is the results demonstrate that we have a highly scalable, capital-light business model and track record of solid execution. In October, we achieved an important milestone of surpassing our global target of 1,500 ANPR sites under management. We did this ahead of time.
Over the last three years, we've increased revenues by over 140%, completed four acquisitions to supplement our organic growth, and more than tripled our addressable market to over 150,000 sites. We are highly focused on execution at SPZ and very well placed to sustain the growth for many years to come. On the point three, we've raised our ambitions. This is an important signal of our confidence. At the AGM, we announced a new global target for ANPR locations.
We now have an organic growth target of 3,000 sites under management by December 2028. It took us over 10 years to get to 1,500 sites. We now expect to double that over the next four years. In short, SPZ is accelerating its growth journey. I'll unwrap that further and how we expect to deliver that growth later in the call. But first, if we can go to slide three, please.
I want to take a step back and explain why Smart Parking exists and what it is we really do. What's the problem that we solve, and what value do we add? Now, I will apologize to those on the call that already understand our business model, but it's important given it's the key foundation of our growth and our recent results.
We can then assess the scale of the problem and, from there, the size of our market opportunities. To put it simply, we solve a critical problem for car park managers and site owners. We ensure that car parking facilities are used by people they want in them, or as the headline says here, "We ensure there's always a place to park for genuine customers." This service is incredibly valuable to the landowner as it increases the footfall and, in turn, retail sales.
These are real and measurable economic benefits. How do we do this? We do it by maintaining compliance standards. We leverage the advanced activity system, the deep domain expertise, and proprietary technologies we've been investing in and involved in for years now to make sure car parks are used only by genuine customers and illegal parkers are disincentivized in a professional way.
This slide maps out our workflow system. We've created a highly efficient, industrial-strength, and scalable activity solution. We can process, analyze, match, and enforce enormous volumes of data and images with great speed and accuracy. We've created a deep moat that sustains our competitive advantage and drives our superior performance. So let's take each system or take the system in each of its major parts. First, we've extended our sales capability to accelerate the addition of new sites to the estate.
We've developed an effective account management team that engages with customers to demonstrate the value we add and support clients through their partnership. We manage sector risk by ensuring our portfolio includes a diversified mix of sites across numerous sectors, including retail, hospitality, and entertainment, to mention a few. We then work with the site owners to survey the new site to install our Smart Parking Camera solution.
This is the hardware to complement our software and data analytics skills. In order to understand the scale, let me quote some numbers at you. These stats demonstrate the strength of our systems. We recorded and matched images to 189 million vehicles last year in multiple countries across our estate. We manage around 55 million exemptions for customers or legitimate parking for permit holders, staff, etc., and we process over 4.6 million payments for compliant parking transactions. Smart Cloud and Smart Hub are the proprietary technologies that are the keys to our growth. Each product is essentially the front office and back office of our business.
If we take each in turn, Smart Cloud enables the collection of huge amounts of data from the whole estate, processes plate images and payments, generates all contraventions, communicates with government agencies, issues the breach notice, manages the appeals process, the customer interaction, and will finally deal with the debt recovery process. This is the back office solution that drives our business across all territories and also allows fast mobilization in new startup locations.
Smart Hub, which we launched last year, is the customer-facing portal that provides our clients with data analytics, flexibility, and deep insight to their parking location. This is a unique level of control that we give back to our customer that allows them to see exactly how the site is performing. It also provides instant access to data, something the vast majority of landowners have never had before.
This separates us from the competition and gives us a significant competitive advantage across all markets that we operate. To complement this highly scalable technology, we've also developed over a decade of domain expertise in understanding customers' needs and the compliance and regulatory frameworks in the markets we operate. Added to this, we have the team and the bench strength to continue to execute well.
As I mentioned at the AGM, we are about execution, and we are all about execution at SPZ, and I believe the results over several years demonstrate that. So in summary on this slide, the problem we solve is large and complex across all our jurisdictions. Our technology, systems, and processes are well developed and advanced, and this allows us to deliver great service and outcomes for our clients. We can go to slide four now, please. Stacy, thank you.
Slide four, this is obviously our strategy slide. We've been following for some years now and communicating clearly with the market. This slide shows the three drivers that will accelerate our growth well into the future. The first point is the organic growth in our existing territories. This will be driven by a disciplined sales approach of winning new locations and delivering great customer service to our client base.
We have proven our ability to leverage our proprietary market-leading technology, deep domain expertise, and operating model into new markets to build successful and profitable businesses. The second point is new territories. With our success across existing markets, we're now busy looking for new areas where we can leverage our IP and market-leading scalable technology.
While expansion to new markets does cost money, it's a cost we can manage and fund from existing cash flow, and the returns on capital are attractive. Denmark is a great case study of our land and expand strategy. We commenced operations there in February. We quickly started winning customers and generating revenue through management contracts and issuing PBNs. The PBN payment period is short in Denmark, so cash flow has been good.
Denmark is a great example of how we can quickly and successfully enter new territories. It sets us up well for entering new potential markets in the near future. Recently, we made good progress with some new opportunities in Scandinavia, mainland Europe, and the USA. We've spent a good amount of time in the States in particular. We've invested in understanding the regulatory frameworks, site owners and their needs, and the competitive landscape.
Florida and Texas, with a combined population of in excess of 50 million people, in particular, have constructive regulatory frameworks and attractive market dynamics. There is more work to do on this, but I will say we have a significant interest, and we are firming up the business case for a carefully controlled market entry. And the third driver is M&A. We've demonstrated with a series of acquisitions that we can successfully find, evaluate, execute, and integrate M&A opportunities.
Last year, we integrated the Local Parking Security acquisition in the U.K. and the ParkInnovation deal in Germany. We're pleased with these acquisitions, and they're both performing well. We'll continue to build the pipeline and maintain a disciplined approach, ensuring we look at deals that will be the right strategic fit and deliver a good return for shareholders.
So Smart Parking is well placed to continue to grow for many years to come. Of course, as we grow the number of sites under management, our revenue and earnings will also grow significantly from where we are today. We can go to the next slide, please, and I'll hand over to Richard, who will talk you through the Q1 numbers, but also some of our leading metrics in our business.
Thanks, Paul. So as we announced at the AGM, SPZ has started the new financial year well and is trading in line with our expectations. We've maintained our strong exit run rate from FY24, and growth is continuing across all major markets. I'll remind you that Q1 is a seasonally strong quarter, with the peak of the northern hemisphere holiday season increasing foot traffic across the estate.
However, in Q1, we have delivered good growth versus the prior corresponding period. So revenues for Q1 are up 24% compared to the prior comparative period, and adjusted EBITDA is 30% higher at AUD 5.4 million, and that's after stripping out the new Denmark territory. PBNs are up by 18% in line with our expectations.
We have 28% more sites in the estate on average this quarter compared to Q1 last year and closed the quarter with 1,485 sites under management. In Q1, the UK revenue is AUD 13.7 million, up 19% on PCP. New Zealand revenue is AUD 1.6 million, up 47% on PCP. In Germany, German revenue is AUD 1 million, up 66% on PCP. Excluding the new Denmark territory, which is currently margin diluted, we continue to see margin expansion in the rest of the business.
Moving to slide seven, I'm pleased to report growth has continued since the end of the quarter. Can you just flick on to the next one, please, Stacy? At the AGM on the 15th of November, we had 1,529 sites under management. So what is the significance of this extra recent growth? We have achieved ahead of time our long-term target of having 1,500 ANPR sites under management by December 2024.
We have beaten expectations by enhancing our sales capability, entering new markets, and improving our operational strengths to support this growth. These foundations stand us in good stead for ongoing growth and profitability. Stacy, can we turn to slide eight, please?
I think we might have an issue. Can you... We might have a technology problem here. Try to keep going. Yeah, for some reason it's not... Zoom isn't trying to unmute Michael or just keep going. I think unmute Michael, yeah. Michael, can you hear us?
Yes, I can, Richard. I suggest you carry on.
Okay, no problem. So we continue to diversify into new markets where we can leverage our IP and market-leading scalable technology. We launched parking management businesses in New Zealand in early 2021, Germany in early 2022, and Denmark in early 2024. We have substantial runway in all markets. Now, back to you, Paul.
Okay, thank you. All right, so we've gone through. I'll take you now to slide number nine. We seem to have some technical issues with our screen. I'm not sure if you guys can hear us okay, but we will push on. So slide number nine highlights our growth priorities for the future, and in particular, our new growth targets for ANPR sites that we communicated at the AGM.
As with last year, FY25 promises to be another successful year of growth and record results for SPZ. We've expanded our pipeline of opportunities across all our major markets and enhanced sales capability to convert interest into new partnerships. We'll continue to drive growth in existing markets with a long-term growth runway. We have years of growth ahead of us in the U.K., Germany, New Zealand, and Denmark.
We'll continue to deploy capital carefully as we invest in growth and make further disciplined acquisitions to build our scale and strengths. We are evaluating new territories to enter to continue to expand our addressable market opportunities in a low-cost, low-risk way, and looking further out, where will this growth get us? Where will we be in four years' time? As mentioned a moment ago, at the AGM, we set a new long-term organic growth target.
Through our organic sales activity, we now expect to have 3,000 ANPR sites under management by December 2028. As I said earlier in the presentation, it took us 10 years to reach 1,500 sites, and we expect to double this number in the next four years. We're accelerating our organic growth through a focused sales effort, which we believe has years of opportunity ahead of it.
So thank you very much for listening. I hope this provides some clarity on our business and the strategy and the plan for the next four years to all shareholders. It actually concludes my presentation, and we'd be very happy to answer questions from shareholders right now. But I do apologize, we seem to have a problem with the screen not changing, but hopefully people can see on their screen. But do we have any questions from... If you do, you can either send us a question via the chat function or perhaps via unmute yourself and ask a question directly.
Yeah, G'day, guys. It's Sam Christie here from Shaw and Partners, Sydney. Just wanted to... Yeah, G'day. Congratulations on the year so far. I just wanted to talk about the M&A strategy and obviously your geographical expansion. In terms of, let's say, for instance, the U.S. as an example, is it a multiple kind of... Would you look at a land and expand via just your organic growth, or would that be M&A?
Well, we're still evaluating that at this time. I mean, there are opportunities in the U.S. to do both, as we've done successfully in other territories today, where we've, for example, New Zealand, where we are today. While we did have an office here through our technology business some time ago, we've been very successful in repurposing a lot of the cost base and going out and winning business and actually winning customers. And today, about over 200 sites that we're operating.
So that's a really good example of how we've opened organically and grown, and we're doing the same in Australia, doing the same in Germany, and of course, Denmark. And could we do the same in the U.S.? Absolutely, yes. It does take longer, of course, to go through an organic model, but it is more cost-effective, I would say. However, there are some interesting opportunities in the U.S. from an M&A perspective. It is a different market. I think local knowledge, personal brand, or the brand is very important.
So we're just evaluating those sorts of opportunities and really trying to work out what's best for us, whether it be an organic startup or whether it be an M&A opportunity. At this stage, there's nothing on the desk, so in terms of our M&A transactions, I guess at this moment in time, we're still evaluating what's the best way forward for us.
Okay, yeah. So in summary, you have experience in both and whatever looks the best way forward. And in terms of the change in leadership over in the U.S., is there any kind of... Has that going to change the strategy, or is there going to be any... Is it going to make it easier in particular jurisdictions or in any states or whatnot?
I don't think it'll have any change. I mean, what we're seeing is really interesting in the U.S. at the moment, actually, that the regulatory framework is very important. So shareholders will know that, of course, where we have the ability to access the local driver vehicle license agency, that's very important for our business. And you can actually access that DMV across 48 states of the U.S., but it's not common practice in all of them.
But places like Florida, Texas, Washington State, Carolinas, those sorts of areas, it is commonplace. So these are things that we're looking at and trying to understand. And these state legislations are set by the state. So from a federal perspective, I don't see that as having any particular impact.
What we are seeing more of, though, is these kind of rules of engagement or a code of practice that we operate to already in the U.K. and New Zealand and elsewhere, where they're being implemented in these states, and that's really interesting to us because obviously it opens up great opportunity. Okay, so there's a question in the chat from Steve Shearman. Can you help us understand how you see operating margins evolving as the number of sites expand?
Yeah. So for incremental sites that we bring on in, let's say, New Zealand and the U.K., the U.K. being our biggest market, incremental margins, EBITDA margins are in excess of 50%. So we will continue to see margin appreciation. I guess offsetting that, obviously, we're entering to new territory. So Denmark, for instance, will be margin dilutive in the near term until it reaches break-even.
But yes, we will see margin appreciation. Any other questions?
Richard, there's another question in the chat box.
Yes. Hello, and thanks for the update. This is from David Tidmarsh. Could you please comment on the current revenue mix between PBNs, payments and debt recovery versus landowner contracts, parking payments, etc., and trends towards or away from PBNs? So I guess on some sites, a very small number of sites, we receive a management fee. On our lease sites, we obviously receive pay and display revenue as well as parking breach revenue. But by far and away, the majority of revenue is from parking breach revenue. David Kirk, can you give us an update on the Queensland business?
Yes, I can, David. So what's happening right now is we've engaged a new lobbyist who is more Liberal Party-focused. The last lobbyist we used, obviously, had a sort of Labor experience with the Labor Party, and what we find is very positive feedback so far from the new ministers in charge. We've had significant ongoing dialogue with them over the last, obviously, since they've been in power,
I suppose, but also prior to that, the shadow, when they were in opposition, the shadow ministers, so we're in a positive situation with regards to communication, the communication channels, and also the level of communication we're having, the type of people we're talking to is all very positive. In terms of when will we get access restored to the state database, I can't answer that directly because we don't know at this stage.
What I would say is, given the positive dialogue, given the fact that we have a new government in place and who are more pro-business and understand retail, understand the importance of the car park plays with all retailers or fast food or entertainment or hospitality, that's all very positive for us. So we expect to have some more feedback of a positive nature early in the new year is where we're at today.
Okay, next question from Milton Player. Are you affected by new parking technology, e.g., Westfield, Sydney? It won't let you out unless you pay, and it's all digital.
Yeah, obviously a very different system. So Westfield, Sydney obviously has boom gates and barriers, if you like, in place. So we have no boom gates, no barriers. We wouldn't deal with someone like a Westfield, or they wouldn't have a solution like we provide.
They would always go for some sort of barrier solution. The majority of our customers are people like supermarkets or Coles or Woolworths Bunnings, those sorts of people, or a McDonald's or a KFC or other fast food restaurants. These are very much like the type of customers that we have today, and that's where our product really does accelerate and win. There aren't that many Westfields around, but the ones that you see, they will always have a barrier solution. That's just the way they are, and that's what they like. So no, that's not the sort of technology that's going to disrupt us, if you like, because it's nothing new.
Okay. No other questions in the chat. Any other questions? Nothing else coming through. Is that the final one there? No, no, we've done that one. Yeah, okay.
All right, well, if there are no other questions, I'll just sort of finalize, really. I'll just sort of take you through the last few closing comments, if you like, and really sort of reiterate the key points of our business, and as I said a moment ago, FY25 or this year coming really does promise to be another successful year for us and growth for Smart Parking. Given the fact we're expanding our pipeline of opportunities and also looking at new markets and expanding our addressable TAM, the TAM that we can go after significantly with these new addressable markets is obviously a positive thing.
We're going to continue to focus on that organic piece, as I mentioned a moment ago, reevaluating and rebasing our growth target from 1,500 sites, which we achieved ahead of time, up to 3,000 sites inside of four years, where it took us 10 years to get to 1,500. We see our growth is really accelerating over the next four years, and that's an exciting time for Smart Parking. We'll continue to look at new territories. We'll continue to look at M&A opportunity, but obviously ensuring that we do this conservatively and making sure it's the right strategic fit for our business. That's what we're really focused on.
So taking those three key things away, the organic piece is very important to us in getting to that 3,000 number, 3,000 sites under management, looking at new territories, looking to expand our addressable markets is something that's worked very well for us over the last four years. We continue to do that. And of course, we're going to look at disciplined execution of M&A. These are three key points, three growth areas for Smart Parking that we'll see as growth in many years in the future.
And thank you very much. I guess we will wrap there. If there are any questions come through, please don't hesitate to email them through or give us a call directly. We'd be happy to help you out. But thank you very much for joining, and I look forward to speaking to you all again in the new year. Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.