Welcome to everyone joining us today in person and online. Carry on, come in, find a seat. My name is Tudor Maxwell. I'm responsible for WiseTech Academy. I've been in WiseTech for seven years. My teams create learning and certification for the industry, for our software users, and for our staff. We translate our content into 30 languages, and we build the platform on which we do all of that. I'm going to be moderating some of the sessions today. But before I invite Zubin to officially welcome you to our event today, I want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're meeting, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and extend my respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are with us today, both here in the offices and online.
For those here in the building, amenities are out past reception and around past the lifts. Exits are clearly marked, and our team members waving at you now from the back are available if you need anything. For our online audience, all sessions are being streamed and recorded, and you can submit questions along the way. We'll address them in our Q&A session at the end of the afternoon. Now, welcome, Zubin, and I'll hand over to you.
Thank you, Tudor. Good afternoon and welcome to our 2025 WiseTech Global Investor Day. It's fantastic to have you here with us at our Sydney headquarters, and to everyone joining online, thanks for shipping yourselves in virtually. We've planned a fast, efficient, fully optimized session for you today, and just like the efficiencies we deliver to our customers across the global supply chain, today's Investor Day will be just as streamlined. No queues at the doors, no lost paperwork, and absolutely no unexpected delays. You guys are a tough audience. Today is really important. It gives us space to step out of the day-to-day and show you exactly what we've been building, what's changed, what we've delivered, and where we're taking the company next.
I want to acknowledge the WiseTech Global people here today, including our board, our leadership team, this year's presenters, and many of last year's presenters who helped lay the foundation for the momentum you're about to see. Their work powers everything you'll hear today, and I'm incredibly proud of what they've achieved. We've designed today's program to reflect the top priorities that are shaping WiseTech right now, our big rocks. These are the initiatives that move the needle, drive value, and define our future. These big rocks and everything we do anchor back to the why we exist. We build products that solve the most complex high-stakes problems in global trade and logistics.
For our customers, that translates into two things that matter above all else: efficiency and throughput at levels they could not previously reach, and compliance and risk reduction in a world where global trade is only becoming more complex. You'll see how our new commercial model, the CargoWise Value Packs, align value, technology, and long-term customer relationships in a way that strengthens both our economics and theirs. We'll take you through our work on container transport optimization, a major industry pain point where WiseTech is uniquely positioned to deliver real industry-wide disruption. We'll show you how we're harnessing AI to drive productivity across our products and inside WiseTech itself, building on three decades of automation leadership and pushing it far beyond what the industry has today. You'll hear an update on our integration of E2open and what it unlocks for us.
The breadth of problems we can now solve across the entire global supply chain is unlike anything we've tackled before. You'll also hear from our independent directors. They bring diverse and significant global experience across technology, supply chain, compliance, and governance, and we're genuinely excited for you to hear directly from them today. When we look back even just two years, WiseTech is almost unrecognizable. At that time, our core focus was primarily international freight forwarding and customs. With the acquisition of E2open, that's changed significantly and deliberately. We've expanded our total addressable market in a meaningful way. We now have the reach, the data, the network, the capability, and the technology to operate across the entire supply chain, from planning and procurement through transportation and visibility, all the way to execution. This is transformative, and it opens the door to a much larger long-term opportunity for WiseTech.
Our work on container transport optimization is another major step in expanding our total addressable market. By solving one of the industry's most persistent and costly pain points, we're opening up an entirely new segment of value that WiseTech Global is uniquely positioned to lead. Throughout these transformations, we've remained anchored on our three P strategy: product, penetration, and profitability, and we always come back to the fourth P that enables the other three, our people. As we bring our expanded portfolio together, including E2open, and as a product-led company, we're aligning our work under a set of product pillars that will shape how we build, how we integrate, and how we scale from here. These pillars will provide clarity, discipline, and direction as we drive the next phase of WiseTech Global's growth.
This approach will enable us to deliver a platform that is simpler, more powerful, and more connected for our customers and partners globally. And none of this is possible without the strength of our team. Our wide-spanned management model gives people real ownership, real accountability, and the freedom to drive meaningful outcomes all aligned to our big rocks: outcomes for their teams, for our business, for our customers, and ultimately for our shareholders. When you put this all together, the scale of our market, the evolution of our product strategy, the depth of our technology, the breadth of our data, and the caliber of our people, the opportunity ahead of us is extraordinary. This next chapter is about execution and long-term value, taking everything we've built, everything we've acquired, and elevating it into a true global end-to-end supply chain marketplace and the operating system for global trade and logistics.
I want you to walk away today with three clear messages. First, we are deep innovators. We are not just a software vendor. We are redefining the industry. We disrupt legacy thinking. We disrupt ourselves, and we consistently convert the massive efficiencies we create into meaningful customer and shareholder value. Second, we said we would deliver, and we are delivering. We have made strong progress integrating E2open and shaping our future product strategy. We're advancing the rollout of Container Transport Optimization with ACFS. We have built AI capabilities that materially improve efficiency, accuracy, and throughput. And we have already transitioned around 95% of our customers to our new commercial model. Third, we are uniquely positioned because of the unparalleled data flowing through our platform. No one else has the depth, the breadth, or the real-time visibility across global trade than we do. And that advantage compounds every single day.
Thank you again for being here. I'm excited about what we're sharing today and even more excited about where we're headed, so on that note, let's get started.
So welcome to our first session on the new commercial model. I'd like to ask our panelists to come and take a seat. Can you move down one? Thanks. Good. So on the 31st of October, we announced the release to our customers of the CargoWise Value Packs. Last week, we announced the pricing, and on Monday, it went live. This is a very significant change for our company. And in this discussion, we asked, why did we do it, and what are the benefits? To answer the questions, I'm joined by Zubin, our CEO; Caroline Pham, our interim CFO; and Gene Gander, who is general manager of global sales, joining us from Chicago. Zubin, what is a CargoWise Value Pack?
It's a great question, Tudor. So the CargoWise Value Pack is really multiple benefits for our customers and for the industry as a whole. The first thing is that it delivers significantly simpler billing, moving from a price list of roughly 150-200 items down to now a handful of items that are on our price list. This means that customers are being charged for the core logistics transactions only. And the 200 or so additional modules, many of them being very new, are included and bundled into that pricing. This means billing is simpler. There are reduced overheads. In fact, in most cases, there are no overheads. There's no seat fees. There's no standard cloud hosting fees. This moves to a truly transactional basis only. And then part of those capabilities, we're delivering many, many AI features.
We have a separate session on AI, so I won't go too much into detail on that. But many of the features listed in that 200 and a lot of our future development is based on AI driving even more automation and efficiency into the industry. Then the last point I'll raise, Tudor, is that this model allows for the very easy recovery of that CargoWise fee from the actual beneficiary of the benefits we deliver. That is, the end customer, the importer or exporter. That's a true game changer. That means that for logistics service providers like freight forwarders and customs brokers, who are actually agents acting on behalf of importers and exporters, the benefit they get is directly aligned to the value they're delivering to the importer and exporter.
So it's a very reasonable thing to say that that charge should be recovered from the importer or exporter. And you can see that if we do that, then that means for our customers, the freight forwarders, the brokers, the logistics service providers, CargoWise is available at no cost. That's a real game changer and a very powerful concept.
Zubin, you've mentioned the many features bundled into a CargoWise Value Pack. Could you focus on a handful, two or three of those that are now available as of Monday for those who are on the Value Pack?
I could list all 200 if you like.
Just the top three.
OK. Look, there are some really impressive features in this set. Things like ComplianceWise, which is for export compliance, which we'll take you through in the AI session. The AI classification assistant, which solves the most complex process in the supply chain, which is import customs classification. The greenhouse gas emissions calculator, advanced order manager, electronic bills of lading, many other features. And there's a lot in that 200, more than 200. There's about 100+ features in there that are actually brand new and have not been released to customers except on a trial basis in the past. So as of Monday, those brand new features that we've invested in heavily over the last 12-18 months are now available for customers. And these features, like the rest of CargoWise, will deliver two things: efficiency for the industry and risk reduction or compliance for the industry.
Thanks, Zubin. Gene, you're the voice of the customer often. What are the customers saying?
As far as the CargoWise Value Pack, the idea that we have an inclusive group of functionality that's all for a single price. So the customers have been asking for simplified pricing for quite some time. When we take a look at this from a new sale, we've worked to minimize the friction of bringing customers on board monthly, no commitment, pay as you go. But we had this price list that Zubin talked about that was STL, which was very granular and very complex. When you take a look at it, it was closer to 200 line items versus 100 for that 150. The idea that we've boiled this down now to four value packs makes it very simple math. So as far as acquiring new customers, the idea that we have the simplicity of the CargoWise Value Pack pricing.
And even with existing customers, they've constantly been coming back and asking for simplified pricing, simplified, transparent pricing. So a large global forwarder who's looking to expand next year, helping them going through the budget process of what would this look like in order to use more and more of CargoWise. That exercise is boiled down into minutes of very simple math.
Gene, another reason why we had to move on, and I've heard you talk about before, was adoption of the full power of the software suite. Can you talk a bit more about that?
So we put AUD 1 billion of R&D over the last five years into the product. And many of these features, items, modules have a price point. And that price point has a bit of friction. There's the psychological behavior that I see value in what we've offered. I see value in what you're offering. But I also see a cost line item to consume that. This basically eliminates that. We've added extensibility to CargoWise for all, but not everyone has been using it. So we made a commitment to change the world of logistics, and we're doing that. Building it is not enough. We need to partner with our customers to change that behavior. When we take a look at that behavior, that's a psychological impact I had talked about.
But I think it was last year when we were at this conference that somebody quoted one of our customers as saying, "Every time I hit the space bar, I feel like the cash register rings." So now, although we've made every module, feature, functionality available to all customers to date that they can consume it under STL, now it's included with the CargoWise Value Pack. So I have a shipment. I have a shipment fee. I have a customs entry. I have a customs entry fee. All of that flows through. And then there's not that à la carte decision of functionality, module, value, cost.
So simplified pricing, higher adoption, those are external needs we've met. There is an internal need because of AI changing the world.
In 2026, we can't have a license model that's based on users whatsoever. It's changing things. We've taken our customers through this journey. So through the years, we had one-time CapEx licensing per module basis. We started to make that transition where we can no longer be based on users to see transactional license. And each time we made this movement and leap with our customers, they were able to get more and more value out of their system, out of their CargoWise system from day to day. And AI is even more tangible and bigger than everything that we've done to date with that. Instead of looking at it in IT cost, customers are starting to look at it from an operational cost.
And the operational cost savings of what we can do and what we can do with AI, with doing more, with fewer, is huge, that the IT cost pales in comparison to the operational cost savings.
Thanks, Gene. Caroline, we've bundled the CargoWise Value Packs with the new commercial model, or it's a package deal. Please drill into the details of the new commercial model. What is it? How does it work?
Yes, sure. So the new commercial model really hinges on two things. The first one is a concept in the industry known as disbursement billing. And what this is, is it's really the concept of cost recovery and, as Zubin mentioned, recovering the cost from the ultimate beneficiary of the good or service. So examples of fees that are treated as disbursements in logistics are customs fees, biosecurity fees, gate fees. And so what we're trying to do here is help the customer, our freight forwarder, understand what CargoWise can do for their end customer and therefore help them with that value proposition in terms of getting the cost recovery from their customer. The second thing that we've done here is actually enabled the ability for our customers to disburse these costs and without essentially having to do anything.
So we've built functionality in CargoWise that over 95% of our customers have access to now, which means that automatically the system will calculate the charge that they're incurring for that specific transaction, put it on the invoice that they're generating to their customer without our customer having to do anything. So ultimately, what we've given them is a choice to opt into disbursement billing and really align themselves with how the industry treats these sorts of fees anyway.
Caroline, we've also called it community pricing. What does that mean?
So community-based pricing is not a new concept. It's something that we've spoken about pretty much ever since we launched the MUL model back in 2008. And it's really about ensuring that there is a standard price list for all of our customers. Now, there's obviously sales benefits from doing that because you can focus more on the value instead of price. But what we're doing with the new commercial model is leaning in even more into that concept. So with STL, we had a standard price list in terms of all the list prices being equal for all customers. But what customers ultimately paid us did vary depending on how much they took up of the behavioral discounts, volume, prepayment, CargoWise certification, et cetera. With the new commercial model, we're taking community-based pricing kind of all the way to the end, which is everyone pays the same price.
There is no discount anymore, and what that's done is it's really leveled the playing field in terms of allowing smaller and medium-sized customers to actually compete against the larger guys because there is no differentiating factor on the CargoWise fee. They can differentiate themselves based on the quality of their service, customer service levels, global capacity. There's different ways that they can now differentiate themselves as opposed to just a fee from CargoWise that they ultimately couldn't control.
It's a big change. But we've made commercial and pricing changes before. We've changed our models in 2004 and again in 2014. What did we learn from those industry-wide changes? And how is this one different?
So I think the biggest learning that we've had from the previous two transitions is really about how do we help our customers understand and maximize the benefit from the change. I think all of the transitions that we've done, the biggest challenge has always been about change management. I think the value has always been there because we've always been a product-led company. And so that's not in dispute. It's more about how do we get customers to quickly understand how they can best benefit from the new model. And in this case, how can they benefit from the 200+ features? How can they benefit from AI? And more importantly, how can they frame up the discussions with their customers to ensure that they can take advantage of disbursement billing?
So I think the key learning for us here is to rely on one of our mantras, which is to lead with content. So we've put in a lot of effort in creating written content for our customers and for our internal staff in terms of what the features actually are, which features are actually beneficial to their customer, so the importer and exporter, and more importantly, how do they frame up that discussion. So it's the content piece. And then in terms of what's different, I would say with the previous models, it's very much been a transition over a number of years. So MUL to STL took us probably anywhere between three to five years. With this one here, we've already moved about 95% of our customers. And that's a big change.
The reason we did that, though, is, as you mentioned, this is an industry-wide adoption that we're trying to drive, and that's why moving the majority of our customers is actually a big piece of helping deliver that.
Gene, can I come back to you just on the customer piece? So we've been pushing out content about how this works. It's nonetheless something that we're going to have to work on for a while. What are you hearing? Have you had interactions with some of the big customers?
All size customers. So the first part of it, once they get their hand around it, that simplified billing we had talked about, the idea that I get this full functionality, everything that's offered, these 200+ features for that simplified price, that's the second one. The idea that for most of these customers, it's largely the same price as what they're paying today, total cost, even though they're able to pass it on. For these customers, excuse me a second here. I'm losing my train of thought. The big win is the simplified pricing, the all-in feature functionality of the 200 I's. The cost recovery aspect is huge.
Once they get their hands around the idea that this is a per cost per shipment, so some of the overhead costs that we might have had in the past, such as a database fee or the container automation, this boils down to a single shipment fee. And when that shipment fee equals what they're processing as an agent on behalf of their customer and that they can pass that on as a recovery type fee, a disbursement fee, that's kind of the eureka moment with the customers. They're also taking a look at everything that we're offering. Zubin had talked about the mega features and everything that's included within CargoWise Next and the CargoWise Value Packs.
Customers through the years have had to or have taken a look at some bespoke log tech solutions to put on their system, whether it's the visibility allocation management for ocean contracts, the greenhouse gases that you had mentioned, or even AP invoice ingestion in order to suck that data into their CargoWise system. The idea that that is now included as part of that single simplified fee of the CargoWise Value Pack is additional IT costs that they can rip out of their system.
Just before I leave the new commercial model, Caroline, we've spoken about 95% of our customers, but I'm sure many of our investors are asking or would be asking the question about some of the big customers that haven't yet moved. And that 95% is by number, not by number of users in total. So talk us through what are the implications for that other 5%, some of whom are our biggest customers.
Sure. So that's right. The 95% that we've moved over as of the 1st of December, they're the customers that are on a standard contract, which is a month-to-month contract that gives us the flexibility to make changes with 30 days' notice. So that's the majority of customers by count. In terms of the 5% that are not yet on the new commercial model, they're mostly our larger customers, which I'm sure many of you know are on a commitment or temporary transitional pricing arrangement, which means that they're essentially on a fixed-term contract. So there's a little bit less flexibility.
But I think the key thing here, and this is all about the communication that's gone out to all customers, not just the 95%, is that there are many features that are only available in the new commercial model, one of the most powerful ones obviously being the ones backed by AI. And the fact that we've enabled our customers to easily disburse the cost, which is an industry-wide adoption for other types of fees, we think that there's very big incentives for those customers to actually want to come over to the new commercial model. And that's definitely an opportunity for us that we're actively looking at in terms of how to help them. And really, if they're looking to come over, we're more than happy, to be honest, to let them come out of the fixed-term contract because it's a win-win for us and for them.
Thanks. Zubin, I've got two questions for you. I'm going to come to the question of revenue and what it means for us. But before that, please talk us through a little bit about the scale, the magnitude of the costs, and how big is that for the end shipper or importer?
Sure. So if you think about what we're saying here, we're really boiling it down to we're giving customers, our customers, freight forwarders, customs brokers, and other service providers access to hundreds of additional features, more than 100 being new. We're giving them access to many, many AI benefits. We're giving them simplified billing. And we're giving them the option to recover that from their customer, which we think is the right way forward and where most customers will move to. And when you put that charge on the customer's invoice, on the end customer's invoice, that is the importer or exporter's invoice, we're talking about a charge that is likely the smallest charge on the importer or exporter's invoice, the smallest charge.
In terms of quantum, for an average containerized Shenzhen to LA type shipment, we're talking about a charge that is less than 0.1% of the landed cost of goods, less than 0.1%. We can very openly talk about the pricing because, in fact, it's on the website now and it's available to everyone to see as community pricing. We're talking about in those four value packs or in the forwarding and the customs value pack, depending on the containerized mode, depending on import-export, we're talking about a charge somewhere between the $2 mark and the $19 mark. We are talking a very small charge, yet we add arguably the most value in that supply chain movement.
And I think it's reasonable to say that for all of that R&D work that we've invested in for the efficiency, productivity, and throughput gains that our software delivers and the risk reduction in this increasingly complex world of global trade, it is a reasonable thing to say that we should be able to capture some of that value that we deliver.
So what does it mean for revenue?
It's a good thing for revenue, really. 95% of our customers have moved across. So that's obviously a really big step. And as Caroline said, that's a lot faster than we've done prior pricing model changes. It's also important to know this is not just a pricing model change. This is unlike prior transitions. This is, sure, there are different numbers and different dollar numbers, but they can be recovered. But there are new features. But there's AI. I know I'm sort of repeating that, but this is a really important point. This is a whole new way of CargoWise operating in the market. This is not just a pricing change where we're coming out with a new price list. In terms of what it means for revenue too, we've guided that in FY26, there'll be revenue from new commercial model.
We believe that the steps we're taking are in line with that guidance. And we're very excited by the fact that 95% of customers are on this model. We've had conversations pre-1st December and post-1st December with customers of all sizes, as Gene said. And the idea of using these AI features, the idea of being able to use these 200 other features that many companies wanted to use but were prevented from using because of that friction, because of finance teams and procurement teams putting limits on what they were allowed to use, the industry sees this as a positive step. But let's be clear, this is a really big change that we're pushing out. And just like we've done for 30 years, we are disrupting the industry. But it's the right step for us to take. And it's the right step for the industry.
I'm going to come back to you for final comments. But first, I want to go to Gene again. Gene, you spoke about adoption of the software platform. You spoke about simplification and the need to move because of AI. But there is also the fact that with the new community-based pricing model, small and medium-sized enterprises have new access to our software. That wasn't always easy before. What are you expecting to see with your sales teams and interacting with small and medium-sized enterprises?
So we're hitting the street with simple, transparent pricing. And everything I said earlier, lowering that friction to sale is a big win. We're hitting the street with the idea for this single fee, you get these 200 items of functionality within CargoWise. That's huge. So the differentiator out there is everybody has the same tool at their disposal. It's how effective and powerful that they can use that. We have the WiseTech Academy that you run with deep content for CargoWise operational and certification that Caroline had talked about. We also have industry courses available through the CVP CargoWise Value Pack for that. So that makes the users much more powerful. We also have the strong relationships with our CargoWise service partners.
So when you think that everybody has access and included to the same module, how can I use that more effectively and competitively as a differentiator down the street, but yet I'm not paying incrementally more for that. We see the people working closely with service partners in order to use that deeper and faster and wring out more value. Basically, with what we're doing here, this is kind of the next step of everything we're doing to build the operating system for CargoWise trade and logistics. Basically, this is a game changer for the industry as far as a new norm to wring out more and more productivity.
All of that value available to small and medium enterprises, and they're not paying a seat fee, which would otherwise have locked them out potentially.
A shipment is a shipment, whether you're Bob's forwarding or a large global forwarder.
This is massive, Zubin. It's a big change, and it's launched.
It's exactly right. We've launched 95% of customers live on this as of Monday. Revenue in line with what we were expecting, feedback in line with what we were expecting. Again, though, this is a big, complex change. But that's what we do really well. We drive change in the industry. And we know how to do this. We have done this for 30 years. The benefits that this model brings to shareholders, but more importantly, to the industry, this idea that all of the R&D that we've invested in that we know will transform the industry and we know will drive efficiency and risk reduction, not just risk reduction in terms of let's reduce fines for freight forwarders, but actually, let's protect the borders and let's make sure we're doing the right thing in terms of duties and taxes and border security. These are meaningful things that we're solving.
And the fact that friction is gone, the fact that seat fees are gone, the fact that standard cloud hosting fees are gone, and there's now a single price that is directly tied to the value that we actually deliver and that that price can be recovered from the end customer because it's so transparent now, that is a real game changer. And it's a very powerful step we've taken. And we're very excited to see how much further we can add value in the value pack over the years. And of course, as we add more value to that value pack in the long term, there's an opportunity to monetize that.
That's a good note on which to end. Please join me in thanking Zubin, Caroline, and Gene. They'll now exit. And we'll welcome our next panel for the session on AI in WiseTech. Next to me. Thanks. All right. Welcome to our session on AI in WiseTech. We're excited to share what we've been working on since we had our annual results briefing in August, what we'll be focusing on next year, and what we're learning along the way. To cover the topics, we've got Zubin again. Mirta Fagundes-Dos Santos is our AI team leader. And Andrew Cumming is our senior product manager for ComplianceWise and denied party screening. We're going to focus in this discussion in two parts. The first part is, how are we using AI to make our customers more productive?
And the second part will be, how are we using AI to make our own delivery more productive? Andrew, making our customers more productive is at the center of everything we do. The first and the least glamorous task that they have to deal with probably is data ingestion. But they've got to get the data into our systems if they're going to benefit from the value we create. And they need to do that efficiently and accurately. What functionality have you released in the CargoWise Value Packs as of Monday that helped them to do this?
Yeah. So I'm.
Is this working? Oh, there we go. So I'm really excited to share this product with everybody. And I think our customers are really going to love this one. So in international trade, there are a lot of documents. It's the lifeblood of the process almost. And unfortunately, many of these documents are not digitized. We're working on that. But many of the documents are PDFs, or they are images of a printout of a scan of an image. And somehow, the forwarder then has to get this information into CargoWise so they can use it in their workflows. And we just saw a video that sped by up on the screen. And that was our poor old operator doing the data entry. And I don't know if you saw it, but it took him about five, six minutes to do that.
You might be sitting there thinking, well, five minutes, that doesn't sound like much. That's not a big deal, is it? But if you just take the global freight forwarders and just the commercial invoice, which was the document that was up on the screen before that they were doing the data entry for, they have to deal with about 10 million of those every year. So if you just do some basic math, 10 million times five minutes, that's 95 years of data entry every single year.
Just on commercial invoices.
That's just on the commercial invoices. So that's a pretty huge burden. Now, our customers are aware of this, of course. It's pretty obvious, this issue. And so they would have offshore registration data entry teams that would do that. And they probably use some technology as well, like optical character recognition, OCR technology. But this kind of software also has some problems. It's not particularly reliable. It often requires intervention. It doesn't deal well with a sort of huge variety of formats that these documents have. And I can tell you commercial invoices are all over the shop. And it's a bolt-on to CargoWise that needs to be dealt with. So what we can now offer and is now available is a document ingestion system that is native, built into CargoWise, and all of the benefits that that brings. And it is built using the latest AI technology.
It's moving up on the screen here already. Yep. So a user has just attached the document. And that was actually the end of the process. When they attached it and clicked OK, that's the end. And the data is simply then available here on the customs job, accurate, without any data entry required.
Andrew, accuracy is critical, and everyone knows that AI can hallucinate. Talk to us a bit more about accuracy in this case. Are we driving accuracy up, or is there some risk left relative to OCR or manual data entry?
So the accuracy of the system is really very good. And one of the ways that you do that is you have your models very targeted to the document that you want to bring in. And so we have AI models that are really nicely tuned to be really great at processing these kind of documents. And because it is the latest AI models, they're, in a sense, able to kind of understand what they're looking at on the page. They're not just translating text. And this allows them to make sort of human-like decisions about how to structure the information and what to do with it. And if the model does pick up that there's some uncertainty about the data, it will flag that uncertainty to the human operator and direct them towards that element so they can review it.
So a massive potential saving. And that's just the commercial invoice. Now, that's one agent deployed. We've got another one for accounts payable and many more being created.
Yep. That's right. So both commercial invoice and accounts payable will be available in the GP1, but it's available now to test for clients.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. That's data ingestion. There's another area that you've addressed as part of the CargoWise Value Pack launched on Monday. And that relates to risk and screening. Can you talk us through that example?
Sure. So forwarders have a very important responsibility when it comes to global trade compliance. And here, I want to talk about a little bit the export controls. So the forwarder needs to be on the lookout for red flags on the shipments that they're involved in. So this could be that the parties on the shipment are subject to their own government denied party lists or they're sanctioned parties. The locations involved in the shipment might be subject to embargoes or other restrictions. And then the product on the shipment may have something restricted about it, or its end use, its possible end use, is prohibited. And ComplianceWise, which we have up on the screen now, is great at giving you a nice overview of these risk categories: the who, the where, and the what. But the what is actually really, really tricky to get right.
This is where we've had a breakthrough with using AI agents recently. So why is it tricky? So if I asked everybody in this room if a rocket launcher was a restricted item, probably most people would say, yes, it is. And you'd be right that it is. But there are many more items where it's not so obvious. So if I were to ask, is high-purity nickel powder, is that a restricted item? Or is a metal bar made from tungsten, is that a restricted item? Some of you here, if you've got some ex-customs brokers here, might know the answer. In fact, they can be restricted. So this is really hard for our customers to deal with.
And if you were a global compliance officer working for one of our customers, probably the way that you'd deal with this is you'd try and sort of empower your frontline teams with knowledge and hope that they can sort of detect these kind of risks. So you might make them do an e-learning course tutor, or you might give them an SOP or do an annual roadshow or something like that. But this process doesn't really work all that well. There's several examples of logistics providers, despite having a program like that, still being hit with fines. So this is not really the answer. And this is where the agentic AI can really come in. So what we've built, and it is available now, we've built a series of AI agents. And you can think of them sort of as like a virtual compliance officer, I guess.
They specialize in different jurisdictions. We have an AI agent that's really good at risk assessment for U.S. export controls on munitions and dual use. We have another one that's very good at EU export controls on dual use and so on. These AI agents are able to make really quite intelligent and very precise assessments that would just be impossible if you tried to do that with a rules-based system. Up on the screen here is actually an example. I really like this example, actually, because it shows how the AI can pick up on sort of the nuances and connect the dots. I don't know if everybody can read down the back. But so this is a shipment from France to China. We've got the three sort of risk categories there.
And the AI has flagged a risk on the goods, which are described as metal bars. And the AI has provided some notes down there in the bottom corner. And it said it has a concern with the vagueness of that description because you can't exclude restrictions within sort of the family of metal bars, let's say. But what it's also done is it's researched the parties on this shipment. And it's determined, it's figured out that the consignee is a manufacturer of high-grade industrial tools that are made of tungsten. And it's gone, OK, well, that then raises the risk level, also because the receiver is in China, which is a sensitive destination for dual-use goods. That raises the risk level. And so that's why it's given a red flag. So I really like this one.
I think it's like it's going to enable our customers to massively scale up the expertise that's going to be available to the frontline operators on tap 24/7 without scaling up the actual experts.
Yeah. Andrew, very quickly, precision is of high importance when it comes to risk. It's easy to identify risks if we don't mind false positives, identifying risks that are, in fact, not risks. That's critical. How well are we doing?
Pretty well. So we've done a lot of evaluations on these agents. And I'm fortunate, as a product manager at WiseTech, to have a lot of colleagues who have very deep expertise in customs and compliance. And they're tough, like they're hard markers to sort of clear the hurdle, which is great. So the AI systems here can achieve a 96% precision. So for the operations managers out there, that's great because that means less false positives. But for the compliance managers, I think the more interesting thing is that it doesn't miss any of the red flags that are raised by the human expert.
Excellent.
Yep.
In a similar vein, also with a human in the loop, Mirta, you've got an example which relates to the classification of goods moving through customs. And this is critical to the entire supply chain. What have you deployed?
Yeah. So we announced in August that we would be deploying agentic AI across workflows. One of those workflows specifically that we showed at the results was on slide 21, which was the import customs workflow. So that's exactly what we've done. We've developed a classification assistant that basically does 90% of what is quite a time-consuming and laborious task for a customs broker. And then it leaves that 10%, as you said, the human in the loop. And that's the verification that the code assigned is correct and submission.
I happen to know that in the course of doing that, you became an expert on classifying ceramic pepper grinders. Please take us through that example.
Well, we all have one of those in our cupboards, in our pantries. Yes. So classifying goods is not as simple as it sounds. It's not a simple look-up. You do not just look something up in a book, and it's right there, and the code is so obvious. What it is, is quite an interpretative task. So with the pepper grinder example, there is a very specific chapter among the 99 chapters and thousands of subchapters that is specifically named ceramic tableware and kitchenware. But that is not where a ceramic pepper grinder goes. It belongs in a faraway chapter, chapter 82, which is tools and implements. And then a very specific subchapter within that, which is handheld mechanical devices under 10 kilos used in the preparation of food.
So it's very, very ripe for AI picking because there's a lot of interpretation of what this good is, how it is described, reading all the legal notes, and deciding where it actually belongs.
Similar to Andrew's example, where precision is a key success factor, talk us through classification accuracy in the industry as a whole, and then what are we achieving with the new agentic AI.
Absolutely. So before I answer that, because I have my mic on, it's my five minutes of fame. Why is this important? And it is very important because, yes, there are fines. Andrew mentioned you get something wrong. There's fines for you, reputational risk. But this extends beyond just a customs broker as an entity. So we have national security at risk if we do not get these codes right. We have trade policies that are affected. We have revenue that's affected, which is very tightly coupled with the codes that we assign. So currently, global reports are that accuracies lie between as low as 20% and as high as 80%.
As low as 20% globally classifying and as high as 80%. Who determines that?
So the 20% reports come from private audits that customers do on their customs brokers. And the 80% is the official customs authorities' published reports. The 80% is actually quite a cap. That's a caveat because it is interpretive as to where you're going to classify the goods within the Harmonized System. So 80% is sort of a norm because any two customs brokers might disagree.
So if the distribution is between 20% and 80%, the midpoint would be 50%. And if we were doing better than that, on average as a country, we might be somewhere between 60% and 70%. And what we're saying now is with agentic AI built into the workflow, we can be lifting that accuracy level to 80%. Are we seeing that in practice?
Yes, so we obviously take safety when it comes to AI and building AI solutions seriously. We do monitoring and testing all the time. It's continuous for us, and what we're saying is in our internal evaluations, we're doing around an 80% accuracy mark with external evaluations, so we've actually had this piloted with some lucky customers, and we are reporting 90% accuracy.
Excellent. One thing before I let you go. I'll leave that for later. Zubin, these are examples that are deployed in our software now. And there are others. But what are we focusing on for 2026? What opportunities do you see for agentic AI as part of our workflow next year?
Before I answer that, Garry, I might just point out two things. First of all, who thought pepper grinders and document data entry could be so exciting? But second, we said in August that we were going to build agentic AI to solve the most complex process in the supply chain, which was import customs classification. We're sitting here today in December, early December, telling you that's done, and that's available to customers. That's a really remarkable outcome, Mirta. So well done.
Give it a round of applause.
In terms of what's next, so we have a strong view that actually, maybe let me take a step back. For 30 years, what we've done with CargoWise is build automations, automations that drive efficiency and productivity and throughput, and automations that de-risk the industry. AI is a massive leap forward that lets us build automations for efficiency and for risk reduction in a way that was simply not possible for us or for anybody before large language models sort of became democratized. So the solutions that both Andrew and Mirta showed you, they were very difficult for us to build without large language models. Large language models is a massive unlocker for us to build these features and deliver them to industry.
We have a very strong view that over the next couple of years, as we release more and more AI agents to the industry, we will have a significant impact on labor in logistics service providers. We think we can remove about, possibly more, than 50% of labor in logistics service providers through the use of AI agents. And to be very clear, that is the labor that is very likely in a shared service center or a BPO, a business process outsourcing center, in an offshore, lower labor cost country. The really highly skilled logistics service provider operators that are local to the operations and local to the import and export supply chain, their roles become even more important. Their roles are to verify and to partner with the AI agents to make sure that we're delivering or that they're delivering high-quality outputs.
So this is a real game changer in terms of the profitability, the margin, and the performance of our customers, of freight forwarders and customs brokers. This is why I've said a couple of times in the earlier session that we are not just a software vendor. We are a company that is selling success to these companies. We're giving them the recipe that helps them become really efficient, profitable, smart operators. Now, in terms of workflow, Siraj, you talked about workflow. In our results in August, we talked about an AI workflow engine, which is up on the screen, and an AI management engine. We have made progress on this. We are working on releasing more and more agents in our workflow engine. Let me just explain what workflow is to us. Workflow engine sits under every single operational job in CargoWise Next.
So every forwarding shipment, every standalone customs declaration, every warehouse receival, it has this concept of workflow at the lowest level, at the most fundamentally important level of that job. And workflow is a way for our customers to define standard operating procedures, SOP, about how these really complex jobs need to be completed by humans. Step one, step two, an if condition, some logic, a check. It then branches off, quite a complex SOP. And those tasks on the SOPs until now have been done entirely by one or more humans. What we have now proven and what we've shown you through what Andrew and Mirta have shown you is that some of those tasks, and over time, many of those tasks can and will be assigned to AI agents.
So these are very specific agents built by us on top of large language models and AI models that big tech companies in the U.S. have released. So we're able to leverage all of that, those billions of dollars' worth of investment by big tech companies. We're able to leverage that for cents on the dollar, have processes that can scale agents that can scale up and down infinitely and very, very quickly, agents that work weekends, agents that work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, agents that can operate much faster than a human can operate, and agents that are much cheaper than a human. This is why we could spend an hour on this session, because this is such a powerful game changer for the industry.
As I said, as we roll more of these agents out over the next two or three years, we believe we will reduce labor by about 50% in the industry, increase productivity, increase accuracy.
Just before we leave the customer productivity part of the discussion, Andrew, Mirta, how much of the work is building the agent, and how much of the work is testing the agent and then embedding it in the workflow or in the standard operating process for the operators using CargoWise?
So just so we're clear, what we are not doing is writing a prompt and sending it to an LLM and calling it an AI solution. So we have really taken the mantra of slower today, faster forever seriously by building the foundations and actually having an architectural design to our agents that is a multi-agentic design. So that has taken us quite a bit. Obviously, once you've done it, it gets a lot faster to then repeat in the future.
Andrew, how much work goes into testing and then building it into CargoWise?
I would say that's probably about 90% of it, just about. Yeah. And I mean, as Mirta said, it's not just prompting and you're done. So for the compliance area, you really have to make sure that you're feeding the AI the right regulations. And so for us, we're using BorderWise. So the compliance AI is backed by BorderWise. And with E2open, I guess that sort of base of knowledge will only grow even more.
I think that just calls out that we are well placed to ride the wave that Zubin described because we can use our own data. We build it into the workflow that is used by people all around the world. And we do the testing to make sure that accuracy and precision are high when they're deployed.
I'd like to just add one thing there, Siraj. There's two important points to make. The first is that many of you would have used large language models, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, all these sorts of tools. And there's this well-understood concept when you're using LLMs called hallucination, where when you ask a broad question or even a general question, at certain points, the LLM or the AI will not know the exact answer but will draw connections between pieces of information that it's been trained on that don't really make sense and that a human would not normally draw connections between. And it hallucinates. It makes up answers that don't seem logical. Now, it's a very valid question to say, well, aren't we going to have that problem? And the answer is no. We're not going to have that problem because of two reasons.
The first is that we have such vast data, and as Andrew and Mirta just said, we can test these agentic AI personas that we create against those data sets and tweak them and train them and make them better, but more importantly, when we build these agents, and to be clear, we're best placed to build them because we have the logistics and the technology expertise, but when we build these agents, we make them very narrow. We make them exceptionally good at one thing and one thing only. We don't try and build something broad, so what both my colleagues showed you here in ComplianceWise and Classification Assistant is not one monolithic thing that does everything. It's broken up into a series of steps, and each of those agents or each of those steps knows how to do their one job extremely well.
And by building these agents narrowly and by giving them guardrails that they operate in, the agents can't hallucinate. They can't go outside those guardrails. So that's a really powerful concept and why we can get to these sorts of levels of 90% or 96% accuracy. It's a really important concept. And I think the way to describe it is it's the responsible way to use AI to grow our product.
Good. Shifting now to how are we using AI to make our own development, design, development, deployment of software more productive. That's a critical thing for our investors. I know in my own team's Zubin, we've been tracking our progress for a couple of years. Just in the last six months, there have been a range of interventions, AI being one of them. We've seen our work item check-ins rise from the long-run average of 100 a month to 150 a month and no increase in defects. So more throughput of quality code. Are we seeing that more broadly in the business? Are there other ways in which we're seeing improvements of the use of AI in accelerating the rollout of the operating system for global trade and logistics?
Absolutely. AI, and specifically large language models, impact probably every single part of our business. The most obvious place is customer service. We've released a chatbot called ACE. I always forget what ACE stands for. AI CargoWise Expert.
We'll get there.
Sorry. I'll get to that. Sorry. But this chatbot means that the number of incidents or the number of requests that we receive is significantly reduced. That's a massive impact for us. Then in software development, it's a real game changer. Partnering really senior or principal-level, very smart professional engineers, or any professional really, with a digital twin, an AI agent to work with them, accelerates them sometimes exponentially. In some cases, for really creative work, it isn't the right answer. In fact, it might slow them down. But for a lot of the work we do, such as the rollout of global customers where we're building customs connectivity to a new country where there's a well-defined spec published by that customs authority, we've done it hundreds of times over, so we have multiple examples. We have our own documentation.
That's the exact kind of use case that we can, and we are, feeding into large language models with all of the content we've built over the years and seeing significant results. So this is already causing a productivity improvement at WiseTech. We've been on the AI journey at WiseTech for probably a couple of years, but really accelerated rapidly in the last six months. So it's early days in that sense. There is a lot more efficiency within WiseTech to still unlock.
Thanks, Zubin. Mirta, I do want to talk about ACE. You've worked on a chatbot. It ingests our own data and information and makes that available to our customers as well as our staff. Talk us through that one.
Yes. So AI CargoWise Expert, basically, CargoWise is a vast piece of software with gazillion, don't quote me on that, functionalities. And it is a bit hard to know, especially if you're using a new functionality, a bit hard to know how to use it. ACE is basically embedded into CargoWise Next, into the home screen. You're in your workflow. You get stuck on doing something, and you ask ACE, and it will give you an answer, again, backed by the WiseTech Academy content that we have.
What impact have you seen specifically on numbers of queries that we're having to address from our customers?
So it is still early days. ACE is only a baby. He's a month old. But we are aiming we're looking at around 20,000 incidents. I call them incidents. They're support tickets where somebody has asked a training question. So we're looking at about 20,000 of those that we currently have a human send a piece of content as an answer to the customer. We're looking at offloading that to ACE. So that is equivalent to about 18,000 18,000? No. That's a bit much. 18 full-time product managers who, by the way, currently answer these support tickets. So instead of developing product, they're answering support tickets.
And so with ACE working well, that time will go into developing the product and accelerating the throughput. And as our developers work faster, the constraint that we'll face increasingly will be the product teams. So it's a critical support where it matters. Zubin, Mirta, is our chatbot as multilingual as you are?
No. It speaks way more than four languages, actually.
So it can answer in as many languages as we really need.
It's just the perk of the LLMs. We're still going to be working on fine-tuning that. But you'll know that from WiseTech Academy and the language teams that you deal with, I'm sure.
Yes. We translate the majority of our content using engines. More than 80% in normal work would be translated by engines before it's reviewed by one of our experts and then committed to a translation memory so we can reuse it if we've ever translated and reviewed something previously. There are a couple of places where we can't do that successfully, particularly user interfaces. If you've got similar user interfaces, it's very difficult for the models to determine the context and therefore get the translation right. So we find we're still doing a much bigger portion of those.
Jira, you've previously talked about how those language translations that used to take six months or a year in some cases are now taking two to three days. I mean, that's the extreme of what we can see in terms of productivity.
We love the example. The languages team, as you could imagine, was very nervous when we spoke about AI a year and a half ago. So we got the team itself to test the models, and they quickly understood that different engines perform better or worse depending on the language you're going from and to and the context in which you're doing the translation. So they've become experts in driving the engines and knowing how to review and correct them when they're not good. We thought that we would be ahead of the game, and then we purchased E2open, and we now have much more work to translate. So there's a massive amount of work to do, and the same team doing a brilliant job of getting through that work. Zubin, let's wrap up on your thoughts for what excites you most about our prospects in 2026.
Look, I'll keep it brief because this big red clock here is flashing at us in front of us. Look, this is a really exciting opportunity for us. It is, as I said earlier, it is a leap forward, a massive leap forward in the types of productivity that we can now deliver to logistics service providers and ultimately to importers and exporters who are the real beneficiary of all of the work that we do. The work that we can do to deliver more efficiency, more throughput, more productivity, more risk reduction is drastically amplified, and you can see that in how fast we are now executing on many of these projects. For WiseTech itself, as we've just talked about, this will mean that we are a more productive business and a more efficient business.
That's a very important thing for all of us who work here, but also for shareholders. I will say that for the industry, the Agentic AI that we roll out is going to really change how logistics service providers operate. For logistics service providers, freight forwarders and customs brokers, et cetera, who are not using CargoWise and do not have access to the features within the Value Pack, particularly the AI features, they are simply going to be left behind.
Thank you, Zubin. We now have 20 minutes for a tea break, a chance to stretch your legs, use the restrooms if you need to. Please join me in thanking Andrew, Zubin, and Mirta. We'll see you again at 2:30 P.M.
You're doing more for customers today than you've ever done before and than you were ever expected to do. When I came up in the business, the steamship lines provided the chassis. So basically, you got a customer, you quoted them a rate, you approved the rate, you got the booking, you went to the pier, you picked up your setup, which included the chassis. Today, now that everything's flipped, you're doing the work of the freight forwarder or customs broker, updating their systems. You have to update their portal. You have to go into steamship line portals.
The needs are greater now from the customers because they want real-time updates. They want the information before it really happens. Before, it was all pretty much up to you to get all that information. Everything had to be pieced together, and it was time-consuming.
Now, add your email and rates to your customers. You're just locked into communication all day. DrayMaster, that took that piece away. All those back-and-forth emails about rates, you just go into the system. Simple. We sometimes left things out that we needed to have in, and what DrayMaster does, it helps us be more specific and include everything we need to include in our rates.
I'll quote up to 200 rates a day. DrayMaster allows you to put in the accessorial, all of the different things. For different terminals, have different rates. It puts in if it's a refrigerated container, if there's overweights or what have you, it'll automatically populate.
So you don't have problems with accounting and collections.
You sent the email, and the customer comes back, "Well, you quoted, but you didn't put the reefer charge in. I'm not going to pay you." You don't have that with DrayMaster.
We've now gotten to the point where a lot of the rates that I quote, two minutes later, a delivery order is coming in. So we know we're right there.
Feedback from the customers. They love the presentation of the rate, the map, the miles, the route. I mean, it's top-shelf what's out there.
I have more time for other issues than the rates. I couldn't even see going back to the other way.
I used to do all the proposals, so when we had an RFP with maybe 200, 300 rates, it would take hours, maybe days, but with the bid tool, everything could have been done within one day. Today, we're doing 50,000 quotes a month. Probably 30,000 of those quotes are direct quotes from the pricing department, and the other 20,000 are coming in from customers that we gave access to DrayMaster.
For a lot of the larger customers, they will get their own rates, and they'll be just sending us the delivery orders with the rates on them.
They see absolutely everything in there, so they can just grab what they need, and it makes it that much nicer for them.
We pride ourselves on getting back to the customer within 20 minutes to a half hour. It improves your accuracy and your efficiency big time. We file it and put it in our system. We just go right into DrayMaster, and I search it in the filter, and it tells me that that rate was already quoted at this particular time and this particular date.
The rate quotes are so much neater when they go out, when you get something professional. There's no miscommunication there.
Customers love it. They say when they get our quote from DrayMaster, it's everything's on there. Professional, it's accurate, and it's timely. Perfect. You don't get anything better in the industry than this.
Eu acho que a CRAFT é uma organização muito vibrante. Ela é uma organização que cria muito, que transforma, que busca se reinventar, que busca ser melhor do que ela mesma todos os dias. Então, a CRAFT é uma empresa que tem infinitas possibilidades. Estamos em 10 países, em mais de 35 escritórios. E nesses últimos três anos, a gente está fazendo uma grande jornada de transformação por aqui. Durante muito tempo, a CRAFT tinha sistema legado, e esse sistema legado atendeu. Mas ela chegou num ponto de crescimento que o sistema já não lhe atendia mais. Então, crescer mais exigia mais pessoas, exigia mais controles.
Foi por conta disso que a gente buscou uma plataforma e uma ferramenta que nos permitisse ter toda a segurança que a gente precisava de todos os nossos dados para todas as nossas pessoas, para todas as pessoas com as quais as nossas pessoas se conectam. Nós somos consolidadores de carga. Então, os nossos clientes são os clientes da CargoWise. Se os nossos clientes são clientes da CargoWise, já faria pouco de sentido a gente estar ali de partida. A gente montou o time, que hoje é o nosso time que faz a implementação e sustenta o sistema.
O e-learning do CargoWise é muito importante para quebrar a primeira barreira. E como é sistema muito flexível, ele te dá o básico para começar. Então, nós tivemos time inicial, que era o time piloto, que a gente tinha essa informação. Eles começaram a fazer a certificação até para começar a implementar o sistema dentro da Kraft.
Então, a gente se desafiou a implementar dentro da agilidade em três meses para todo o Brasil. E a gente começou rollout em 2023, onde a cada mês a gente incluía dois países dentro do CargoWise.
Hoje, o time tem uma produtividade muito grande. É muito bacana que, uma vez a informação colocada dentro do sistema, eu não preciso mais colocá-la duas vezes. Tenho como fazer isso de uma forma automática.
Desde as coisas mais simples, como ter os documentos anexados no sistema e todo mundo conseguir acessar, as informações não ficam mais perdidas em vários portais. Então, isso consegue dar muito mais agilidade para a gente tomar decisão mais rápido, para a gente consultar processos. E a comunicação melhorou assim 100%.
Todos os dias, a gente responde três perguntas para os nossos clientes. Onde está a minha carga? Quando que a minha carga chega? E qual o custo dessa minha carga? Então, o CargoWise permite que a gente tenha visibilidade para dar resposta dessas três perguntas. A gente tem uma visão do embarque desde o momento inicial da cotação até o nosso processo de pagamento e recebíveis. É fundamental para que a gente possa gerar uma boa experiência para o nosso cliente, trazer previsibilidade e trazer muito conteúdo.
O CargoWise, no primeiro momento, ele já traz essa expansão, esse pensamento global, processo global, cadastro global.
Hoje, a gente já olha uma visão integrada, uma visão sistêmica. Hoje, a gente já fala de processo único, não mais por país ou não mais por departamento. Essa é a visão que a gente tem do CargoWise hoje. Essa é a entrega que a gente espera colocar em todos os nossos clientes, eles participarem dessa mudança junto conosco. É processo contínuo. Eu acredito bastante no CargoWise. Eu realmente acredito que essa é a melhor ferramenta que a gente tem para os nossos planos de futuro, que não são menores. Eu realmente acredito.
Para quem quer crescer globalmente, para quem quer se posicionar globalmente, o CargoWise é imprescindível.
When we decided to switch to CargoWise, we understood that we couldn't keep different software to communicate operations with the warehouse. The need for a change in the software was more in the operational level than in the warehouse level.
We decided to go ahead and move forward with Transit Warehouse to meet the needs of the growth that we have. It's a matter of having the technology at hand and being able to see everything that you need in a matter of minutes. The ability to be able to visualize the cargo the moment that it touches our dock, being able to see documentation, to see pictures, to be able to not wait for us to provide you the details of knowing how much cargo you have in our warehouse. The ability to communicate with the forwarding system. The customer can visualize the house bill of lading in that particular shipment they departed with. It can also go back into the system and see how it was packed because we take pictures once the container departs, and those pictures get uploaded immediately.
CargoWise did expand our capabilities to work in the warehouse and to combine that tool with other software that helps us process more workload in less time.
We have an AI system read the actual box or the crate. It picks up the information. When we scan it, it sends it to Transit Warehouse and goes into the system.
By the time that the cargo arrives here in the warehouse, we had already the information in our system, and we only need to cross-check the information with our dimensioner and with CargoWise. And for some specific customers, we have been able to increase our productivity by 300% at the warehouse, and we can expand that solution to other customers as well.
In a matter of less than two minutes, you have a full warehouse receipt with pictures, data, DINs, weight, and documents because the system already uploads it, and once it goes into the system, that's it. All we have to do is for someone to come and put it away. It is amazing to see how fast something can get processed, so when you bring someone and you show them how quick a shipment works, how quickly you will be able to resolve a problem in the warehouse, for them, it's like, wow, this is a company that is investing in the future. Hey, and I am the future, so I want to be part of it.
Here at Alliance Shippers, we started with what we call a perfect shipment. We're picking up a shipment on time. We're delivering it on time, getting an accurate freight bill, and no damaged freight. In the intermodal business, the customer demands for timely information continues to grow. People want to know where their shipments are. They want to know if there's a problem with them and what to do. Technology has changed a lot of that. There's a lot of moving pieces in our business. So Blume really helps us with information as we move equipment across the rails. It helps us get data to manage our business on a day-to-day basis and also to our customers.
Every load I have, my equipment comes from Blume. We rely so heavily on that system. There's really no other way to get that information without having access to it and that website.
Before Blume, there were a lot of inaccuracies with the billing cycle. I'd have to go load by load by load, compare the billing with our system. When it became Blume, it's now more easy to reconcile. If there's a discrepancy, it's easier to find the information I'm needing.
Every five minutes, 10 minutes of my day, I'm in there. Whether it's looking up a policy, just checking on containers, making sure they're terminated, I have to keep track of my truckers, and to have it all streamlined in one place makes our job so much easier.
We can run any report we want. It comes right to our desktop, and we're able to go ahead and supply that information to our customer. It's also become a tool now with some added features that we are able to go ahead and either geofence or track and trace or map their containers. Prior to these new tools that we have, we would lose visibility 100% to where the container actually was.
The GPS on the containers is a major project with railroads. Us being able to get data from Blume on that, where a box has been sitting, where it's been, that type of stuff is very helpful. And I think we're just in the infant stages of that, that we're going to be able to do things for real time. We would be able to give our customers better visibility of where their shipments are.
We just use the portal, click on a button, and then we have visibility, and we can send that to our customers directly, and they have full visibility at any moment, 24/7, of where their freight's at. Helps the customer manage the cost of the container or the per diem all the way from the origin point to the destination. It allows them to see how long something's out on the street, how long something's on the rail, how long something's at destination, so it can point out any issues or any outliers that maybe need to be addressed.
Every little bit of information is helpful to the customer, so that's a huge bonus to have that available to us.
If the Blume website suddenly went away, there would be no way of pulling up information that would be needed.
As we continue to grow, we're looking towards the future. We continue to invest in the new technology that comes with that. I think that's going to continue to help us bring a lot of value and really concentrate on, again, concentrating on that customer and what their expectations are.
Customer service is number one. At the end of the day, we're here to satisfy the needs of the customer.
The seed that started this program, I have to say, takes us back to our European roots, so in Europe, apprenticeship programs are really popular, and our CEO is German and actually was an apprentice himself, and when the opportunity came up with HCC to create an apprenticeship for freight forwarding, it was very interesting to him and to the executive team. Also, when we learned of their partnership with CargoWise, that immediately spiked our interest because CargoWise has been a huge investment to our operations. It's been a wonderful partnership and has really propelled us from where we were six, seven years ago to who we are today.
When a company like Fracht wants to embark on an apprenticeship, we sit down, we have a discussion, we ask, "What kind of education do you want your folks to learn? What kind of industry certifications do you want them to have?" And then we demonstrated what we have in class inventory and the current two-year degree, and then they developed and helped us build the International Freight Forwarding two-year degree.
This is very new for us. It's new for the U.S. to create the first apprenticeship freight forwarding program registered by the Department of Labor of the U.S. government. So the first six months have really been foundational, learning the basics of what we do, starting in CargoWise at an operational level.
The apprentices use CargoWise every single day. We send them stuff we need to update in the system or things for them to go track in the system. They know how to use all of the filters and the customized columns, and we kind of taught them all the ins and outs, at least of the part of CargoWise we use when it comes to the shipments and the consolidations.
This program is a combination of the classroom learning and hands-on training here at Fracht.
Working in a workplace is completely different than reading a book or having a teacher kind of tell you how it works. Doing it yourself and actually getting hands-on with the work, it's a million times more beneficial.
First of all, it was a little bit challenging how to use the CargoWise, but now I feel more comfortable, and I'm holding a CargoWise specialist certificate.
Having the CargoWise certifications gives me a leg up ahead of anybody else just because I'm familiar with the application.
They completely are enthralled that they got a certification out of an academic class, that they can actually go now and apply for those jobs in the workplace.
By the time an apprentice finishes our program, they will have learned ocean, air, import, export, project forwarding. They will have sat with our marketing team, our IT team, our finance team, our customer service team. They are getting a very well-rounded experience to what it means to work at a freight forwarder.
This journey has been life-changing for me. It's been incredible. I've met great people here. All this helped us get all this knowledge and the skills we need for the industry. I do feel more confident about my career.
What's been really interesting is to see how the apprenticeship program has given back to Fracht. I find that the leaders are really inspired to teach and give back to a new generation to show these apprentices how interesting a career in logistics could be. The apprenticeship really gives them the opportunity to discover what their passion is, and once they discover what their passion is, we are happy to fuel that passion and open up the opportunity to build an employee and collaborate with an employee on their future for decades to come, hopefully.
My name is Nicolette Genis. I am the Corporate Support Manager at SEKO Logistics. I am kind of the front line of any questions, training, problems, issues, the go-to. Getting everyone certified into CargoWise was one of our big goals. We were pushing for every branch that has five or more loggable users to have at least one person at second-level CCS certification. Everybody else achieves CCO.
Part of the driver for incentivizing people to get CargoWise certified was to really have a lot more expertise at the local level. Having them have that knowledge would help them support themselves or respond quicker to support their clients, standardize our processes, improve productivity. So that was one of the drivers, but also, and we do get top-tiered service with the CCLP, so a lot of those things really helped us incentivize people to do that. And I think a lot of people were able to find the time within their regular workday to get it done.
The neatest thing was the aha moments. It was like, "Oh, I didn't know I could just click this box and preview an EDOC without having to double-click and open the EDOC." And it's nice to get that feedback. There were a few that did reach out and say, "I'm glad you guys made me do this because this is so much easier, and now I know why you're asking me about that in order to accomplish building a good organization.
The reaction from the staff was they were excited to have that CargoWise certification. We have a lot of people that actually put that in their email signature. It's something that we also told people, "Hey, you know if you leave SEKO, we don't want you to, but if you do, you have that as a certification on your resume that you can take anywhere." So I think people were very proud of that once they did have that certification.
After more of the certifications were coming in and coming in, the questions change in our ticket system or somebody sending you a Teams message. So they get more detailed, and there's more comparison. "Oh, hey, yesterday I could do this, and now today I can't. Did something change within the system?
People think a little more clearly before they came to us and asked for support, where they were able to kind of check a couple of different boxes off. "Well, hey, I looked at this. I looked at this. I'm still stuck. I'm going to contact corporate for support." But it did open their thought process before they came to us for support.
Knowledge is power. Just knowing that you're a little bit more well-versed in the different aspects and the different modules within CargoWise, I think helps you to understand how the system works and then how you can kind of blend that all together. So when we bring on another module and say, "Hey, we're going to start using transport bookings," you've got an idea because you've seen it in the training, and you see how that organization affects this module differently than that module, and those relationships and building that really good organization really plays a huge role in either being successful or not so successful.
Pushing our team to get CargoWise certified, improving our workflow, standardizing our operations from a global perspective is only going to help us be more productive, be able to take on more volume, more clients, and be able to continue to grow as a company.
In my opinion, LaserShip is different from the other competitors. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the snacks and the drinks. So welcome back. And for our next session, we're going to focus on Container Transport Optimization. I'm going to ask our three panelists to come up and join us on the stage. Right. This is Container Transport Optimization, undoubtedly one of our biggest initiatives, breakthrough products. Today, we are discussing the opportunity, the progress we're making on technical development, and then on commercialization. With us for the conversation, we have our founder and Executive Chair, Richard, our CEO, Zubin, and Michael Tulin, who is Product Portfolio Leader of domestic delivery and multimodal shipper platform. I know him as a product portfolio leader. Thank you for joining us. Michael, please remind us what is Container Transport Optimization.
In all fairness, Judah, that is a very long title for somebody, and I cock it up all the time myself. All right. So before I explain container transport optimization, I probably need to give you a little bit of background. The container transport industry is a complex and hugely inefficient space. There are many parties involved with getting your container from A to B, and all of these parties have competing and conflicting interests. They are all trying to optimize and streamline their own business processes using localized thinking. It's these local optimizations that are causing the inefficiencies in the broader system. When you think about ocean carriers or, say, marine terminals, these are large organizations that have invested very heavily into expensive infrastructure assets. These businesses are trying to maximize the return on their investment with these assets.
If you think about the ocean carriers, they have large vessel fleets. They have extensive fleets of shipping containers. The marine terminals have their docks, their cranes, and they're also constrained heavily with real estate space. Empty container parks are also constrained with real estate space. In many port communities around the world, it is the local transporter that acts as the buffer between the competing interests of these large asset-heavy organizations and the demands of the end customer. I think we have a slide here, so what we're seeing here on this slide is a typical import shipment. This particular example, the container is landing here in Port Botany in Sydney. The information on this slide is being powered by our development partner in ACFS. The data's come from our development partner in ACFS.
So while this seems like a relatively straightforward container import, it's important to note that the container is traveling from the terminal to the transporter's yard, from the transporter's yard out to the importer, importer back to the yard.
As a dead leg.
As a dead leg.
Well.
Back to the yard as a dead leg.
The container's traveling, yes. There's some dead legs involved there. And then finally onto the empty container park. The point here is that the transporter's yard is clearly acting as one of the many buffers in the system between the parties involved. Every time that container enters a yard, the container is being loaded and unloaded from vehicles, creating unnecessary storage and handling. Every time a truck visits a stop, the container, in this instance, it's a drop trailer shipment, is being unloaded from the vehicle. And to Richard's point, the vehicle then has to travel back to the transporter's yard, and that's effectively a dead leg. That's where there is no container or trailer on the back of the vehicle. What we are doing with Container Transport Optimization is we're looking at these inefficiencies across the entire port community. We're not using localized thinking.
We're looking at the system as a whole. To use theory of constraints terminology, we're looking for the global optimum. Our software with CTO will orchestrate the movements of these containers through the port community in the most cost-efficient and effective manner. Okay. Just as a little bit of context before we move on to the next slide, this is a typical export. You'll notice that it's almost a mirror image of an import container. So imports and exports suffer from the same inefficiencies.
Right. I just want to say just go back to the previous slide just for a second. In both the import process, there are seven legs, of which three are dead legs, and they're all quite long legs, and both in imports and exports, a total of seven legs, all of them quite long legs.
And there is only one container being unloaded from import, and there's one container being loaded for an export. So that's what you're seeing in those two slides.
Sure. So if we move on to the next slide, it will give a good example of what we're doing with Container Transport Optimization. So from the system, we intend to remove the unnecessary stops at the yards. You'll notice that we've gone from effectively those seven legs that Richard just spoke about down to a number of concise legs that bypass the yard. We are compressing the distances between the stops. So the truck is now making multiple stops between parties, very short distances. This is reducing the number and the distance of these dead legs that are traveled. The other important thing to note here is that we've removed empty container park storage altogether from the equation. This is effectively powered by our first optimization that we spoke about around this time last year, which was our triangulation or container reuse optimization.
This is central and pivotal to the power that drives our optimized run sheet that you see on this presentation. So from this simple example, you get to see the power behind what we're trying to achieve with Container Transport Optimization. But effectively, this is just the beginning. There's a number of optimizations that we want to do, but I'll need to talk about those, I think, at another investor day. Sorry.
Cake day.
Cake day, I almost mentioned. Yes.
It's quite important to know that we went from the previous two slides, which each had seven legs, and of those seven legs, there were very long live legs and very long dead legs. And on this slide, there are a total of seven legs with a full container being emptied and a full container being packed and returned to the port. So this you can keep on that slide. Yeah. Thank you. So this, as a function, is doing what the previous two slides were doing with seven legs, of which four of them are very short. So 14 long legs have become seven legs, of which four are very short, and one trip to the container terminal with a full in and a full out, which is usually not what happens. And at the container park, no return of container, no pickup of container.
So we can see that on the next slide, you can see the juxtaposition of these two things together. The before is the worst-case scenario, and the after is not the best-case scenario that we can deliver, but it is a very substantial advance on what is going on today. We have more to do. As Michael said, we'll do that at another time. But this covers a really deep capability. If you look down the bottom, you've got a number of direct cost reductions, and you've also got a number of second and third-order benefits as well. I want to take us through those. Richard, is the opportunity as big as we first thought it was? We were announcing this a year ago. Is the opportunity as big as we thought it was then?
Just based on current volumes of containers, I can sort of give the math to explain the opportunity. This is a piece of thinking that we've been working on. We have the statistics. It's about 800 million TEU of containers moving through the international supply chain on an annual basis. A TEU is a 20-foot equivalent unit, so it's not representative of the number of containers. It's representative of the unit size of the containers. You divide that by about 1.5, and you come up with approximately the number of actual containers. Divide 800 million by 1.5. Of that, about 80% of those containers, or a little bit more perhaps, but 80%'s a conservative figure, are optimizable. The others are things like flat racks, reefers, open tops, tankers, and so forth.
While they might be optimizable, we're not trying to include those in the model because they're at the extremes. 80% of that container volume is optimizable. If you look around the world at the high-volume terminals and ports, about 60% of the world's container traffic passes through very high-volume ports where the optimization opportunity is very large and has an enormous amount of capability to be optimized because optimization in this form requires volume. It requires a significant number of jobs being run on a daily basis so you can see the optimization. The next thing is so let's go through the math. 800 million TEU, 1.5 divided by 1.5, that's about the number of physical containers. About 80% of those containers are optimizable, and about 60% of the ports that run those containers by volume are the low-hanging fruit of optimization that we have.
And right now, if you look at Matchbox and you look at Blume and you look at other optimizers that just do the container reuse, they charge about $50 for that reuse. So that would be a, that's a sort of an arm's-length way of thinking about the value of that reuse. You could multiply those out, and you can get a revenue number. I can't do that in my head, but it's a very big number. It's huge. I want to go back, Richard. Between the years of 1998 and 2002, we, the core WiseTech team, re-architected the solution that we were selling at the time to make it global. So for forwarding and customs, we rebuilt the solution. And by 2004, that was in the market. And between 2005 and 2009, Röhlig and DSV had signed up and rolled out. So it was a massive transformation.
Is this for container transport something like what we were doing back then for forwarding and customs?
Yes. I remember between 2002 when we started building the design that we'd been working on from 1998- 2004, I got a lot of customers telling me that I'd lost my marbles and it was crazy and that no one would use this. It's a completely nutty model. And what are you talking about? How can you have a single system for air-sea imports and exports and road and rail? It can't be done. It's impossible. Even though you could show this. So they show them on the screen. They say, "No, no, I don't believe it." When we got customers live, and in particular, Röhlig, this is a medium-sized global forwarder, went live with it and had really impressive performance results, massively better than they were getting before.
We were able to show that. Once we were able to show that, everybody sort of piled in pretty hard. It did take people to go, "Okay, I've got to forget the past, and I've got to really think about the future." We actually even had a similar thing when we went to STL billing in 2014. We had a lot of people really up in arms about the billing change, and now we don't like this. We want the old way. What are we doing? We lost almost no customers, and we had a massively improved financial outcome, and we had a much better model because we started on what was a transactional model rather than a seat model. Of course, we've done that again today. We are transforming in a number of areas, including the new commercial model.
To answer the question about CTO, this is a fundamental change to the way people think about container transport. And it does require people to understand that it's inevitable that this optimization will happen, but you need partners like ACFS who can think outside of the box and work with us on ameliorating the problems of a transport company making themselves more optimal, is that most transport companies today actually make money out of the inefficiencies in the industry. And so when you say to a transport company, "We're going to make you really efficient," it sounds like we're going to make them much less profitable. Of course, that's not true if you take the larger picture and you understand that the optimizations and the yield from those optimizations can be reused and monetized.
But that requires a partner that has great partnership values and trust, and it also requires us as a partner to deliver to that partner an additional amount of business to fill up the space or the equipment utilization that's been yielded.
I'm going to come back to the commercialization challenge. But before I do, we've said that the logic is compelling and that the opportunity is enormous. So Zubin, there will be competitors eyeing this. What gives us an inside track in competing for this market?
Sure. I think the first thing is I'll reiterate what Richard just said. We have spent really 30 years building complex solutions for really complex problems in freight forwarding and customs brokerage. It would be wrong to think of CTO as just a new module of CargoWise. It truly could be bigger than CargoWise. That is what this opportunity is. And to answer your question, Chuta, we have that innovation culture. We have that capability, that curiosity, that challenger mindset where we have the culture to build solutions to these problems. And in fact, Michael will show you soon that we have built a solution to this problem. The other part of this is that we have the reach. We have the customers. We have the data. Through INTTRA, which is part of E2open, we have access to more data than we've had before.
Through CargoWise itself, we have access to rich data. We now have the partnership with ACFS. So we have a customer that has chosen to be the innovator and to see the big picture here, to see how in the long term and even in the short and medium term how this is such a fantastic opportunity for them. And then again, as Michael will show you, we have the technology. So we have all of the ingredients here, CTO, to make this very, very successful.
Thanks, Zubin. Let's go to the technology, Michael. A year ago, we had our first-generation product. We were ready to go. What are the milestones that you've covered in the years since then?
Yeah. Sure. So the product has continued to evolve. We've got lots of optimizations that we need to do, particularly in order to reach our goal of being that global optimum for the port. So the product has definitely continued to evolve. That said, there have been effectively two major milestones that we reached. Around this time last year, we were delivering our triangulation optimization. We started with triangulation primarily because of the experience and technology that we had through Matchbox Exchange, but also because, as I spoke to earlier, it is fundamental to some of the things that we're doing, particularly around building run sheets and optimizing the movement of containers through the community.
We built a system which captured the transport bookings of our import and export customers. It fed those into our decision-making algorithms, and it formed bundles of jobs that we could distribute to a network of transport providers. When we took that solution to market, we got significant feedback from our transport partners that they didn't have the technical capabilities to perform those bundles of jobs. Given the nature of the industry-shaping change that we've just spoken about as well, it would be fair to say that there was also some change resistance to it. Significant amount, actually. A significant amount. Pretty powerful. Consequently, because of that, we fast-tracked the development of our intelligent mobile app solution. The aim of this was to give the drivers the capabilities that they needed in order to perform these complex jobs that we were giving them in these bundles.
This actually has the added benefit for the transporters that it removes significant amounts of administrative overhead for their business. So today, we have a solution that accepts jobs from importers and exporters, goes into our algorithms, and the next time those jobs become visible is on our driver's mobile app. This is the solution. This solution is ready, and this is effectively what we're implementing at ACFS as we speak.
So that's rapid progress for groundbreaking technology. That's rapid progress in a year. Richard, I would argue that the commercialization is the bigger challenge.
I think the first thing you must do in any industry change like this is you have to have innovators and early adopters take hold of the model and go, "I get it.
I can do this." Once you can do that, you can show others, the late adopters, the laggards, the people that don't like change, to really look at that and go, "Oh, okay. I get it now. I guess I better do it too." So I think it's very important to have a partnership with ACFS. This is a very strong privately owned, it's actually the largest privately owned transport company in Australia. This is a quote from Arthur, actually. I think one of the important things here is fundamentally that you have to have a partner to prove that. That's what we had with Röhlig when we first took the early models of CargoWise live in the world. And I literally had customers telling me, "It can't work. I don't believe it." And meanwhile, Röhlig's actually running it.
We will get there, but it's kind of noisy when you do these things. However, once we've got a customer here live, we will move immediately to the U.S. West Coast initially, where the volumes are 20 times the size of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and where there is a natural urgency to drive costs out of systems. I mean, the American market is much more entrepreneurial. It's driven by multiple competing factors. And I think we can, and we've already got a very, very strong customer base through our acquisition of. I've forgotten the name of the company. I went to you there. Trinium. Trinium. Sorry, guys. It's Trinium. I shouldn't forget your name. And also Blume. We have a lot of reach in that marketplace, but you do have to have a proof point before you take it to them.
A lot of people have been trying to do something with effectively container reuse, and what we're doing is container reuse is kind of a catalyst for this whole thing, but it's not the solution. It's just a little byproduct of the solution. The fundamental is getting rid of so many parts of the inefficiencies that run across the whole industry. The industry itself, and Michael, you might want to talk to this a little bit, when you take a job as a transport provider, you are kind of driven by the design of the transport software that exists in the industry to pick up the container, take it immediately to where it's supposed to go, drop it off, and drive back to the base or drive to the next job empty, and the systems themselves have been built to ingrain that one-on-one delivery model into the system.
So even this is our own software that ACFS run. It's not going to do this job. It's got to be replaced by the CTO. The CTO is effectively an entire TMS system in itself. I don't know if you want to—I might have probably said it all, but yeah.
Okay. Zubin, anything else that you want to talk about going global? So.
Yeah. Look, before I talk to that, Chuta, I think if we flick back to that slide that had the pre-CTO, post-CTO, if we can, please. It's easy to sort of think about, "Well, okay, this is one import, one export.
A human could sit there and optimize this in a piece of software or in Excel or something else, but when you think about the volume that is flowing through ACFS or through any other container transport operator, and then you think about the fact that these transport operators have more than one person doing this scheduling task, there's two or three or four or five, correct, allocation job. It is impossible to get to the level of system optima that we can get using algorithms. It is literally impossible when you have that level of volume and you have that many people separately scheduling. You will always end up with a suboptimal solution, so I brought people back to this slide because I think it's really powerful to see just how important this is and just how revolutionary this is.
This is not something that another product can do or someone can do without CargoWise's CTO. To your point, Chuta, about globalization, Richard talked about U.S., 20 times the container volumes. But really, our focus right now is ACFS. Our focus is on implementing with ACFS, implementing the software, training their allocators and their staff, dealing with the sort of the human. Actually stopping the allocators. Well, actually stopping the allocators, replacing the allocators with this. That's right. And dealing with the human change management that comes with such a complex piece of work. It's, I think, reasonable to talk about the fact that we've been talking about CTO for some time, and it's been delayed. It's been delayed because of that inefficiency that Richard and Michael spoke about, that inefficiency that companies monetize.
When they drive to the empty container park, which no longer exists in this model, and they drive in there, there's a charge the container transport operator pays. They likely have to. A couple of hundred dollars per person. A couple of hundred in and out. That's right. They add a margin to that, and they make profit on that. We are displacing that. So you can understand why this is a challenge. This is a complex piece of work to implement. Just like it took some years for EDI Enterprise and then CargoWise to really roll out and become a global system and for industry to adopt it, this is the same kind of thing. We have to start with ACFS, and 99.5% of our focus is on making this work really well with ACFS and then having them as an exemplar to go global.
I might just want to—I want to give a couple of breadcrumbs to people. If you look at the side-by-side, because it's a great thing to have, and you look at the cost reductions below, I just want to give some quantum to this, so on the left-hand side, you're seeing 14 legs, most of them quite substantial in terms of distance, and on the right side, you're seeing seven legs, a good four of those seven.
So sorry. It's my turn to correct you, Richard. There's more than 14 legs on the left-hand side because the run sheet isn't a direct comparison to the import and export that we saw. That was only half of the equation. The run sheet that we've actually introduced there has legs from other jobs as well. That's the power behind this system.
It's got a number of other jobs that we're pulling in and performing in that optimal manner, so those lines are way more than 14,
so we should say more than 14 legs, most of which are quite long legs and many of which are dead legs. That's in the worst-case scenario, and most companies can do a little bit better than that with some human optimization, but on the right-hand side, you are dealing with 7 legs, of which 4 are very short and quite optimal. And I don't know what the percentage is, but you can do it as a rule of thumb. It's probably about 30% of the travel cost, and we've potentially removed at least one half-full visit to the terminal and an in and an out at a container park, which they are worth more than $200 each.
So the math of this, which I'm not going to give in detail, I'm just giving you the breadcrumbs, is very fundamental. But then you also have second and third-order derivative benefits, which are things like CO2 emissions. The wear and tear on the vehicle is much lower because it's traveling far shorter distance to do the same work. The wear and tear on roads and the traffic on roads is much lower. And the container storage requirements for the shipping lines, their container fleet turns much more quickly and has a lower requirement for container volume, for container fleet. And the containers themselves are better utilized because they're quickly reused. So this is pretty huge when you think about how much you can take out of what is a very old-world and complex process.
To the point that we were talking about before, you really can't do this in the head. The best allocator in the world can't envision this. You have to have geographical point connections. You've got to get time delays. You've got buffers involved. You've got all these moving parts. And some of the algorithms here, we're going to keep the secret sauce way inside the product so that no one else can see it. But it's also very data-driven. We are very data-rich these days with both E2open, ourselves, CargoWise, and BSM and ImpactStocks and Amber Road from E2open. So there's a lot in this. It's a very powerful idea.
Can I just ask you, Zubin, to clear up any lack of clarity there may be about whether or not optimization is live in North America?
Yeah.
I know we had some analyst questions that came through over the last month about customers saying they were using CTO. They are not using CTO. They're using Matchbox Exchange or Aventida, other platforms that we own, or Blume, that have some level of optimization or triangulation. CTO is a product that is launching with ACFS. They are the partner we're working with, and we are in the throes of that implementation right now. Really important, I think, sorry, Michael, really important to point out that the data we're looking at here, maybe this is what you were going to say, Michael, is ACFS data. We are working with ACFS right now on implementation. This data isn't just prepared for Investor Day. This data is prepared as part of our implementation process that we're undergoing today with ACFS.
It's not what I wanted to point out, actually.
Damn.
I was going to point out the difference between CTO and those products that we just mentioned because those products that we just mentioned are looking, as in my opening explanation, they're looking for local optima within sight of singular individual businesses. It's very different to what we're trying to achieve with container optimization, which is where we're looking at the global optima across the port community. So that's just another very important distinction.
Matchbox Exchange, or you look at any of these exchange or reuse models, they get about 5% of containers maximum, which is a significant value to the transport companies because it's all margin. But we're talking about 5%, whereas we think we can get 80% of the containers to be reused. There are some additional optimizations that would have to come in to get past about 40% of containers. But nonetheless, those optimizations we have planned.
We've got a lot of sophistication we can do with empty container repositioning, with container stacks at the terminals, and various other things. There are lots of opportunities here to keep the optimization getting better and better over time. But what you see in front of you is massively powerful as it stands.
So in our session, I think we've gone back to the opportunity. It's massive. We've seen that technical progress is on track and going really well, and that our strategy for commercialization is to get it to work really well for ACFS and then let the invisible hand of the competitive markets drive that when we launch it into a much bigger market in the U.S. Please join me in thanking Richard, Zubin, and Michael. All right. So as this panel exits, we're going to welcome the e2open panel, and Mark's going to be the moderator.
Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. My name is Mark Hall. I'm Chief Acquisition and Integration Officer at WiseTech Global. I'm also proudly CEO of E2open. That's a role I've held for the last four months since we acquired the business. I'll talk to you a little bit about the progress we're making on the acquisition shortly, but I'd like to introduce our panel here. I'm joined by Pawan Joshi, who's our Chief Strategy Officer at E2open. Pawan has over 20 years' worth of experience at E2open and deep knowledge across the supply chain. I'm also joined here by Adam Henry, who's our Product Portfolio Leader for Supply Channel and Planning. Adam's got a range of operational experience in past roles that he's had and has been a number of years at E2open. And also Anthony Hardenborough, who's joined us over from the US as well.
Anthony has been working at WiseTech for the last five years on some of our global trade management products and initiatives. In the past, he also had roles at Amber Road as well, which was eventually acquired by E2open, and so over the last four months, he's been doing a lot of connecting with past colleagues, which has been great, so first, just an introduction and reminder to the acquisition and why we were so excited about it. One of the key things that E2open brings to us is a significant expansion of our addressable market. For the last 31 years, we've been developing solutions, achieving organic and inorganic growth from a market which is primarily focused at logistics service providers. Over a similar period of time, E2open has been developing solutions largely targeted at beneficial cargo owners.
That's the direct importers and exporters of goods, the manufacturers, and the brand owners. So now, under one corporate ownership, we have a significant network of hundreds of thousands of connected enterprises, customers, suppliers to customers, carriers to customers, alongside the logistics service provider network that we've built over 31 years, all under one corporate umbrella. During that period of time, the solutions that have been developed are significant and expand our product offering. They both expand and complement things that we've had in the past. Adam will talk a little bit later about Supply Channel and Planning product portfolios, which expand the breadth of products we have to offer. Within global trade management, we also have products which supplement things that we were already working on. And across logistics, we have businesses such as INTRA and TMS for shipper, which also expand our logistics offerings.
This isn't just about expanding our addressable market with one plus one equals two. This is about much more than that. You'll hear later about how connected the logistics industry and the supply chain industry and networks really are. Across that, we have trillions of dollars of goods moving and cost of logistics that we now have the opportunity to make significant material impact and difference to. It's not just about the building blocks either, the products, the addressable market. It's also about the toolkit. That's what WiseTech brings. Over the last 31 years, we've developed ways of working which have helped drive our success across the industry. We've proven that in the integrations that we've done over the last number of years.
If we combine the toolkit, the ways of working, the disciplines to do the hard things, the small things that make a big difference, that's things like focusing on quality over speed, on focusing on standardization versus customization, and focusing on scaling with content. These are some of the key toolkit items that, combined with the building blocks that we've collated, are going to drive our future success. Now, in terms of the progress we've made to date, as I said, it's been four months since we've owned the business. We've spent a lot of that time getting to know the business and its people. We've already started on organizational alignment. That's really about focusing our resources behind product and becoming a product-led company. We've also made good progress on our cost synergies.
We had targets that we announced to market of $50 million of annual run rate synergies that we would achieve by the end of FY27. And I expect to be very well progressed towards that target at the end of FY26. It's not just about cost synergies, though. This is really about our growth opportunity. The cost synergies and the things that we're doing now about making our business more efficient and more aligned and positioning it well for growth in the future. That's really what this is about. It's a growth opportunity, not a cost-out. Over the last four months, we've confirmed our expectations about the quality of products and customers that E2open has, as we've started to get to know the various product managers and solution consultants and other experts across the business.
We've seen that there's a huge range and diversity of talent across the organization, and we're starting to align that with the resources that we already have within the WiseTech group. We've also identified, as we expected, a lack of deep level of integration across the businesses that E2open has acquired over the years. This is a good thing for us. This allows us to integrate things deeply and properly at our own pace rather than have to unpick integrations that other people have done. We've also identified high levels of alignment from both team and customers in what we want to do and what we want to achieve. And that's specifically around being a product-led company and pursuing standardizations versus customizations.
In many ways, I think the business and the team at E2open have been held back by pressures they've been under over the last number of years, both pressures to grow as the business became quite sales-led and also, during the period of the strategic review over the last few years, financially driven, and that focus has really stopped many of the decisions that the team wanted to make actually being made. It's nice, therefore, to be able to lift that weight from the team and really start to unleash the potential the team has. We also have started to understand the complexity of the supply chain, parts of the businesses, and that addressable market that we're less familiar with. While we're doing that, we're starting to identify common problems across that area that our logistics customers also face.
That's not only complexity, lack of standardization, but also siloed decision-making, which holds companies back. It means that they're focused on pursuing local optima, not global optima, and that's one of the things that, with the portfolio of products that we have, the people we have, the network we have, we can start to change. We started by setting out our strategic objectives. This is really, as I said, to become product-led. It's to build products that have features that add real value to our customers. It's about integrating our products to an extent that competitors cannot match, and it's about focusing on delivering network problems, not local siloed decision-making. We're also focusing very much on revenue growth. That's about reducing churn. That's about focusing on recurring software revenue rather than services revenue.
And it's about penetrating the network that we have, the extensive network across E2open and across the rest of the CargoWise and WiseTech group. We're focusing on how we can deliver cost efficiencies. That's about promoting a high-performance culture within the business, really helping grow our talent, and importantly, empowering our talent to make decisions and achieve more than they could achieve in the past. It's also about the way we deploy our products, making them easy to onboard, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade, and easy to expand. And there's an element which is us using our productivity initiatives that we've had and developed over that 31 years, that toolkit, to make the business perform more effectively and more efficiently. As I mentioned, we're in the process of reorganizing the business. A lot of that is about moving our valuable resources towards product rather than other areas.
Examples of that are our industry expert solution consultants. We're moving from sales-focused roles into product-focused roles to make sure that the products we build are suitable for different industry verticals and the complexities that they have. It's also about moving our professional services engineers from focusing on developing customized solutions to standardized solutions which we can productize and deliver at scale in the future. We're also looking to flatten our leadership structure. That's not just at the top. That's across the organization. This is really to empower our team to be able to make decisions themselves, to do more than they could, to make decisions more quickly and therefore be more effective. Some of our current focus areas are around customer attrition, which remains higher than we would like.
That's an area where we're focusing on ensuring that we're solving the core problems rather than the superficial symptoms that we sometimes see. We're focusing on delivering professional services commitments that have been made prior to our period of ownership. That needs to be done, and that's out of the way, but some of those commitments are significant. And we're also starting to look at how we leverage growth opportunities. Many of our large and exciting growth opportunities are in the second and third horizons from what we're currently focused on now. But there's a lot that we can do now, both to plan for the future and also to take advantage of short-term opportunities. To talk a little bit more about the opportunities we have, and particularly across the supply chain, I'd like to ask Pawan to talk a little about his experience.
Perhaps you could introduce yourself for a minute or two, and also how you see some of the opportunities.
Absolutely. Thank you, Mark. My journey at E2open started a little over 22 years ago. And every day, it's a privilege to learn from some of the best that are there in the industry, but also work alongside some of the professionals and practitioners that exist at some of our largest customers. They're all the same, big and small. But my journey before E2open started in academia, where first learning what supply chains were. It started how to make products, designing products, but then how do actual products get made and delivered into the market. And through that course of not just learning, but also teaching, it became very obvious that the world of supply chain is not just about bringing products and services to market. It's also about understanding the economics behind it. It's also understanding the business behind it. It's also understanding the mathematics behind it.
It's also understanding the practicality of change management and things like that. Right? That, to me, is all encompasses supply chain. Before this small thing that hit the world happened, if I stood up and said, "What do you do?" and if I said supply chain, I had to explain to 80% of the people what supply chain was. Fortunately, now you all know what supply chain is. I'm referring to COVID in case you didn't get the hint. But this is what the world of supply chain looks like. And we're sitting here very comfortable, right? It's 80 degrees Fahrenheit outside. We all are enjoying the air conditioning. We take it for granted. But have you ever thought about the air conditioner that's cooling this thing down? Have you ever thought about the people that actually installed it? Which brand the air conditioning equipment was made by?
What components were used? When did those components start their journey? What components are actually making their journey in terms of getting manufactured so that at some point in time, the equipment here can be serviced so that we can continue to provide the school atmosphere? That's what supply chain is all about. It's not about just how you bring products to markets. How do you keep those products going over and over again? And if you start thinking about the number of people that have actually touched that particular equipment and what is going on in this thing, chances are that about 95%-99% of those people do not belong to the brand whose air conditioning system we have. That's what supply chain is. It's highly distributed, extremely fragmented, and it has got millions and millions of handovers that happen.
That is not very different if you imagine yourself receiving a package earlier this day or last week. You ordered it online, or you ordered it at a store from a brand, or not from a brand, from an open market e-commerce marketplace. That was produced by someone, far, far away, transported by somebody else, using trucks that belong to someone else, and at your doorstep. That's the world of logistics. Somebody else owns the container that we're trying to optimize. Somebody else is sailing the ship on which the container moves. Somebody else is moving the truck, and it finally arrives at our destination. That, in my mind, is the sandbox that E2open and WiseTech have been operating for the last 25, 30 years. It's that complexity that we're handling for the people that are delivering products and service to us as end consumers. That's the complexity.
That's the challenge. But more importantly, that's the opportunity. You saw some small use cases earlier today around leveraging AI, around Container Transport Optimization, around some of the other areas. Those are important things, but the most important thing is to look at the problem holistically. And I believe that across the WiseTech Global group, we have the opportunity to do that. Right? If you move on to the next slide, it begins to summarize that complexity that I just described into nodes through which physical flow of material happens. Each one of those nodes has their own systems, their own ways of making decisions, their own people that oftentimes don't understand the bigger problem, the complete problem, more holistic problem. What does that result in? It results in data that is trapped inside those systems.
It results in individuals that are not aware of the broader picture that they have an impact on. Right? And that is the problem that we have the ability to solve. Over the last 25, 30 years, both E2open and WiseTech have carefully curated, through organic development and inorganic additions to the portfolio, the capability or the building blocks to solve this problem. Right? So if you want to put some method around this complex madness, think about the world in five major groups of people that are involved in supply chain: people who make stuff, right, the brand owners; people who sell stuff, because not everybody who's making stuff is actually selling them directly to us end consumers; people who move stuff from where it is made to where it needs to be. Right?
These three key stakeholders actually physically touch parts of their supply chain, either in terms of design or in terms of movement of goods. We have solutions for that. WiseTech has focused on the movers. E2open, for the last 25 years, has focused on the makers and sellers. But there are two other more important stakeholders. One, the group that finances all these operations. We have capabilities in the group that actually address that through the Bolero portfolio. We also have people that regulate that stuff, the government agencies. And we touched upon some of the core innovations that have happened there. And we have capability for that.
So all of a sudden now, if you start putting the global map on the picture that you see on the screen and you start thinking about crossing borders, you start thinking about transportation, you start thinking about manufacturing, and you start thinking about today's problem. If you can discover three, four tiers up in the supply chain and you can solve it today, you won't have that problem tomorrow. So we have the opportunity to actually sit down today and be able to solve tomorrow's problem or day after tomorrow's problem. We have the opportunity to start looking at this entire network holistically, much like the container transport optimization, but at a much broader scale, to start thinking about, what if I, as a freight forwarder, had visibility into what's happening at my customer's location?
And if the customer was able to share that with me, I can make my decisions more intelligently. That's the promise that we have. That's the capability that we're building. And what we've really realized is, for us to do that, you need to be able to tap into the underlying systems, which is the network, the foundation that we built, both as WiseTech and E2open, be able to abstract that information out, be able to make decisions holistically, and present those decisions back to the people that are actually running the processes. They may be the brand owners. They may be our customers, or they may be customers' customers, or customers' suppliers, or customers' transport service providers, or even regulatory agencies and brokers and customs agencies that they rely on. That's the promise. That's the challenge. And I think that's what the opportunity we're sitting on.
Yeah. I think you make a good point as well in terms of the, in the past, when we've been speaking to investors and customers, we've talked about the complexity of the logistics chain, and the previous slide you had on, you saw all the different components. But really, when we start to think about the supply chain, this exists between almost every node of the supply chain. It may or may not cross an international border, and that depends on some of the requirements, but fundamentally, that exists all over this diagram.
Absolutely. And I think the interconnectedness, Mark, is very, very important. Right? Each node is trying to do its best. But as a collective, you may not be doing the best that you could. Right? So if you think about supply chains, they're not as strong as the brand. They're really as strong as the weakest link in that supply chain. That's why it's called a chain. Right? And the weakest link is the one that makes or breaks it. So if I'm moving shipment and my core KPI in my transportation department is on-time delivery performance, the first thing I'll do is look at every shipment that's running late and try to make sure that I expedite it to get it there at destination on time. Well, in some cases, it may be the wrong decision to make because you might have excess inventory sitting at that destination.
Your warehouse might already be full, and the fact that you spent money to expedite it actually resulted in spending more money because now I have to go across the street and rent more space to move something that got there that could have gotten there two weeks later or one or two days later and still have space on it, so all of a sudden now, I'm making these suboptimal decisions because I just have one view of the problem. The exact opposite could be true as well. A shipment that's running on time, it's perfect. Nobody's doing anything about it. Everybody's happy about it, but guess what? It actually causes a disruption or a line down because that critical component is not there. Why? Because maybe a lot got quarantined because of quality issues.
And everything that was supposed to be supporting that manufacturing line is no longer available and I actually need to expedite it. So that awareness of the bigger picture is really where the opportunity is to start thinking about supply chain holistically. And the last point I want to make is, look, we are all getting our products today delivered. Right? The machinery is working, but it is working with a lot of inefficiency. Inefficiency in terms of excess material, inefficiency in terms of a lot of expedites and de-expedites and changes, and a lot of human and manual spreadsheets and manual intervention happening. That's the opportunity. The opportunity is, how do you actually take all that waste out of the system, the inefficiencies out of the system, to optimize the supply chain much more holistically?
Yeah. I'll ask Adam's comment a little bit later on the cost of some of that. But just before we pass on to Adam, Pawan, I'm interested in your thoughts about sort of the power of visibility and execution ability because, again, that's a topic that we've talked about in the past, in previous years, when we've been talking about the logistics chain. But again, that's a single logistics chain we've typically been imagining. When you start to think about the ability to see where your goods are and be able to influence what happens to those goods across something that's more complex like that, then presumably you can start to see the value is much greater.
Absolutely. I think when we talk about visibility, we should think about visibility in terms of what is really happening. Right? That situational awareness is important. And we think about visibility in the logistics world as, where's my stuff? But that visibility also is, if I'm on a production line, am I actually producing the right thing of the right quality? If I'm on my design line, am I producing the right design specs that are producible or not? If I'm on the channel side selling my products, are my products actually selling through, or am I just selling to my distributor and the distributor's sitting on it to return it back to me the next quarter? Right? Those are all aspects of visibility. So the question to really ask is, A, do I have situational awareness? So what's happening?
And once I know that, the question to answer is, okay, so what does it mean to me? If a shipment's running on time, what does it mean to me? Well, in the example I gave, it could be a bad thing that it is running on time. It could be a good thing that it is running on time. Right? The other aspect to this is, once you know what's happening, then what do you do about it? Right? So where's my stuff? So what? And now what do I do? Now what do you do is, the earlier you know, the more degrees of freedom you have. The earlier you know about two, three, four tiers up, the more degrees of freedom you have to plan this out. So if I'm sitting here today and I know that two tiers up, I have a semiconductor shortage. Right?
And as a result, I won't be able to produce cars next quarter or next month. All of a sudden, I have degrees of freedom to understand, where do I actually get that memory chip that is super critical that goes into my controller that sits on my dash panel without which I can't ship cars out? I now have two months to solve that problem. Right? I don't have a line down situation as it occurred during COVID. And that's the opportunity. And it's not just around transportation, which we now have very powerful capabilities with the biggest logistics service provider network from CargoWise, WiseTech with the largest brand owner network on the E2open side. Tremendous opportunity.
But to be able to do that at scale, at a global scale across not just one industry, but multiple industries, not just one tier, but multiple tiers all the way from how products are made, three, four, five tiers up into the supply chain, to how they are sold, three, four, five tiers down into the supply chain, all the way down to us as end consumers. That, I think, is the potential. I strongly feel that we have all the ingredients and the building blocks.
Now the question is, how do we actually start putting it all together as a true platform with an underlying network of providers that we can connect that unlock the data that's sitting in these silos or these nodes and really be able to create something that is end-to-end, that is meaningful, that really starts to optimize the supply chain at a global level?
Thanks, Pawan. And Adam, you've worked in operational supply chain roles. So you've probably got some of the scars from some of these challenges. Maybe you could just introduce yourself initially, and then you can start showing us how complicated things really are.
Yeah, sure. Thank you. Actually, if we just move a couple of slides on to one more. Yeah. So Pawan's diagram is very nice, but is a rather oversimplified view of the world. This is actually the reality of the level of complexity when we talk about these end-to-end supply chains. Before I get into dealing with that complexity, yes, a bit of an introduction for myself. So I've come to WiseTech through the E2open acquisition. I'm just shy of half a decade, one month shy of half a decade at the company. And I've actually come from the pre-sales organization. This is helpful because I'm familiar with some of our largest, most broad deals. At E2open, this means we're selling platform deals already.
So the concept of selling a platform as opposed to just selling an individual or discrete solution is something that I and E2open are very familiar with. It's my third pre-sales role. Prior to that, and in nine years in total, I've worked for another two companies. Again, this is useful because I've had probably around meaningful conversations with well over 150 enterprises covering multiple industry major and micro verticals. This allows me to first understand the nuance of the challenges they face, but also recognize the commonality across them. And again, the combination of the platform that E2open and WiseTech is going to be offering means that we can deal with so many of those customers, support many of those customers in the challenges that they face because there is that commonality across them.
But then, yes, as Mark has said, I did do 15 years in supply chain management operational roles, all the way from my first job as a packaging buyer to my final operational role as head of the supply chain planning function. So I really have lived, breathed, and I dare say suffered through the challenges that our customers and future customers are facing. And yeah, you could look at it like that. So yeah, that's very, very true. I mean, and this is really important because it's important to understand the things that you face. I have had an argument with a commercial director because he's started running a promotion without checking if we have the stock available. I have butted heads with the procurement director because she made a cracking deal and bought a year's worth of stock in one go, stuck it in the warehouse.
And of course, when you include the cost of storing that, total cost of ownership, the benefits are erased and then some. And I've been a master production scheduler. I've sat next to a production line as it's ground to a halt because we are missing a key component. And that's something that you really, a place you really, really don't want to be. Now, back to the diagram. Not that one, the spidery one. Back to that one. So what is this showing? This diagram is showing the flow of material all the way from a tier two supplier right to the end customer. It's showing the fundamental raw material component, a tier two. That is moving to the tier one. The tier one is converting that into a subassembly. The subassembly is then going to the manufacturer or the brand owner's facilities to convert into a finished good.
That finished good is then going to their distribution facilities, and then finally, it's going to the customer's distribution facilities for the final consumption by the consumer, so as Pawan has pointed out, it's inherently multi-tier. It's inherently multi-enterprise, very long lead times when you add it up cumulatively, but the biggest problem, and therefore the biggest opportunity that there is, is that everyone in that chain is buffering against uncertainty for the next stage in that chain. What I mean by this is, if you look at the tier two supplier, they are holding extra, and when we say buffering, we're talking specifically about the extra inventory they are holding, so they are holding more stock to account for the demand volatility of the tier one supplier. They don't know what they're going to order.
So they're holding stock to account for what they may or may not be, what the demand may or may not be. Similarly, on the other side, going up or downstream through the supply chain, the players there are having to buffer for supply volatility. It's not the case that every supplier is going to deliver 100% on time and full. When is something going to arrive? How late is it going to be? How much quantity am I going to get? These are the questions that are being asked, and they are buffering for. So they're having to take into account the supply volatility. In addition to that, every single little dot that you see on that pretty diagram is a physical movement of a good from one place to the other. There's transit volatility.
And whether something takes three weeks or four weeks to cross the ocean, that is a huge deal. The amount of buffer stock you have to hold, an extra week's worth, seven days of stock that you have to hold because something may be a week later than you planned, that is just driving enormous amounts of cost, enormous amounts of waste into the business. And that is where there's a huge opportunity. If we can provide, as Pawan has alluded to, the visibility, the connections, the end-to-end supply chain planning, management, and execution functions, that is where the opportunity is. Because what we've got to do for these customers is take out the risk of doing that. If you think about, it can be a food and beverage manufacturer making sandwiches. They cannot afford to not meet the service levels of their customers. They will receive heavy penalties.
It's actually cheaper to make a bit more and then throw it away. We all know how that works. In the automotive industry, if you stop a production line, you're talking millions of dollars per hour. Millions of dollars per hour. And it's not just the automotive manufacturers that are buffering for that. They're going to hold the tier ones and the tier twos accountable if they do stop production lines. Obviously, that means that everyone is very afraid that they don't want that to happen. So that's the opportunity. When you look at the combination of e2open and WiseTech together, the breadth, the depth, and the capabilities that we offer can really deliver some results.
And again, if you think about just taking out, if we took out for a major manufacturing enterprise just one day of inventory, the benefits on the profit and loss statement is huge in and of itself. Then you take into account the reduction in the cost of holding that inventory, the reduced exposure of excess and obsolete stock, the reduced risk of having to throw away short-expiry inventory. The cost you can unlock are just exponential. So if we move on to the next slide, this is what we can, with our capability footprint, this is what we can offer our customers. So a lot on here, but let me take you through it. If you look on the right-hand side of the diagram, what you're seeing is the channel side of the applications.
So again, when a brand owner or a manufacturer is making something and selling it, they're selling it into the channel. So local example, brand owner is selling it to Woolworths. So they know what they're moving into the channel. What they don't know, typically, is what is actually moving off the shelf from Woolworths. What is actually selling and when is it selling? And that being able to have visibility of the consumer demand means that you have a much better chance of predicting what that's going to be. And that is a really unique capability for E2open and now for WiseTech, is that not many platform providers have that capability to see into the channel in that way. When you look on the left-hand side of the screen, going back to this nature of the multi-tier network.
But before we even get there, and I'm not going to steal my colleague Anthony's piece around restricted party screening and the value that that brings into the platform. But yeah, whether you're selecting suppliers or whether you have suppliers that the circumstances have changed, for example, the war with Russia and Ukraine as an example, you want to make sure that you're able to deal with. You should be working with those suppliers. You don't want to fall foul of any compliance issues. In addition to that, of course, you all know the volatility of the current climate around tariffs. So having a good understanding of the constantly changing total landed cost is really important. Because you consistently want to optimize your supply chain and make sure that you're optimizing your supplier footprint and who you're working with.
And then it's about you don't want to be in a situation you're just throwing a purchase order over the fence and hoping that your supplier can make it on time, in full, at the right quality. It's much better to be connected, not just to that tier one supplier, but from tier one to tier two to tier n, collaborate over those requirements, work, and to see well in advance if there's any misalignment between what you're demanding of your tier ones, what they're demanding of their tier twos. And that information will then feed back. So you know you can get very advanced warning if you have to make a change.
And Adam, it's easy to kind of assume these days when we're used to clicking something online, it arrives a week or so later or days later, that everything's very sophisticated. In your experience, what are most supply chains like for retailers, distributors, manufacturers?
Yeah, you'd be surprised. Even some of the best companies in the world, in terms of the recognizable names that you'd all be familiar with, everyone would be surprised by the lack of sophistication in the system they're using, the heavy reliance on spreadsheets, the manual effort and manual labor required to get those things working. They do. As Pawan says, they get things working. These supply chains do work, but they're not working anywhere near the level of efficiency and sophistication that we would expect to see.
And Pawan, one of the things that we've seen in the past in talking to customers and others is there is a tendency for a lot of siloed decision-making, and there's pressure on individuals with different sort of personas within organizations that should be working together for the interest of the organization, but actually their interests don't always fully align.
Absolutely. And I think this is really how we've kind of broken down work over the last 50, 60, 70 years of building products. We've created specialists, and we've not created a layer that actually ties it together. And if you start looking at the pyramid of decision-making, sometimes you have to get to the executive level, the C level, or sometimes even all the way up to the CEO to tie these things together. You have your chief procurement officer who's trying to figure out the cheapest deal you can get on components. You have your head of transportation that's trying to figure out how to best negotiate your transportation contracts. You have a production line guy who's trying to make sure that the production lines and high-value assets are running at the highest asset utilization.
And all of a sudden now you're trying to make decisions that are very much in their own silos, and you have conflicting KPIs. Like the example I gave you on on-time delivery performance being a KPI, where something running late is being expedited and you're spending more money to expedite it and then spending more money to store it, not to mention the fact that you don't even need it to begin with. So those are all conflicting KPIs, and that's where the potential is. I mean, you look at some of the companies that are looking to transform themselves, they're really trying to look at these departmental silos and enterprise silos.
I mean, we just talked about the procurement department, but that's the same. I'm using a contract manufacturer to produce something, and behind the contract manufacturer are my tier one suppliers and my tier two suppliers and my tier three suppliers. Those are all trying to optimize their own business. We now have the opportunity to look at these functional silos and enterprise silos and really tie them together with a digital thread or a digital fabric. That's the technology. That's the platform we're enabling. The idea really here is that thread needs data, which we are trying to unlock using our network. That thread, once you have the data, needs to have decision-making, which is all the applications we are building and have.
And we're trying to now automate that with the use of pretty advanced technologies that AI and other things can enable now. And the most important thing is really to bring the humans back into the loop that are able to look at that problem holistically, not look at my shipment and say, "Expedite it." That, I think, kind of summarizes on this particular slide. There are a lot of stakeholders that are buying software. They want to buy software for their own thing. But if you can show them the promise that if you buy it for this particular thing, it solves your problem, and the next person upstream from you or downstream from you, next department, buys it and it is enabled on the same platform, powered by the same set of networks, that is really what you need. And that's the power.
An assumption that we're probably all thinking about as well as you're talking as well is that within a business, all of their operations are the same and standard and that they're not particularly growing. But we also see from customers as well that a lot of our customers are growing quickly. They might be growing because they're growing organically. They might be growing because they've acquired something which has different ways of working, different systems.
Absolutely, and I think that's really the real-world example that we live in. That's the reality of the world. Nothing is uniform. There are divisions within companies and within the divisions are different departments. And that's really the real world. And our promise really from a technology standpoint is to be able to provide a platform on which they can slowly increase their level of efficiency and then continue to drive more waste out of the system.
Okay. We're talking of real-world things. One of the real-world things we have to deal with is regulation, duties, taxes, complexities. So Anthony, maybe you could just give us again a little bit of background, but also a bit of insight as to what global trade management is and why we have it.
Yes. Well, thank you, Mark. As Mark mentioned earlier, I'm Anthony Hardenborough. I've been with WiseTech for about five years now. I joined WiseTech after selling a company I co-founded, Cypress Global Solutions, which was a global trade management company. My path was a little different. I began my 31-year journey actually as a government official at the U.S. Department of Commerce. And it was there that I really could see what the impact of the regulatory environment for exporters and importers was having, and so a lot of those policies originate from not only commerce, but customs and many of these same equivalent agencies around the world, but it presented quite a bit of complexity for the exporters and importers.
And so after about six years at the Department of Commerce, since I helped create a lot of this complexity, I decided to jump on the other side and try to help solve some of these issues. So my first venture was with Frumptoo.com. We developed one of the first landed cost solutions. And the challenge that we were trying to solve there was providing, particularly for e-commerce customers, visibility into the total cost of cross-border trade for a particular good. That total cost included the duty, taxes, and fees that you just mentioned. In 2005, I joined Basterra. I bring that up because Basterra was an import-export software solution company that also engaged in managed services and consulting. Two key things happened with Basterra. First and foremost, you've heard us say global trade management.
We had a successful IPO with Vastera, and we needed to have a new sector that differentiated ourselves from transportation management and supply chain management, and so that's where we coined the term global trade management. The second key event that took place while I was at Vastera was 9/11. The terrorist attacks that took place in New York and the Pentagon forever changed the way that the governments around the world looked at global trade, the supply chain, and the financial sector. There was a lot more interest and keen interest on understanding who you were doing business with. As Mark mentioned, I joined Amber Road in 2007 as a member of the senior management team company. The real focus with Amber Road was to be software only. I mentioned Vastera had been in the managed services business.
I was more interested in software, and I wanted to be software-focused. The second part was it needed to be global. You had to import-export solutions, but you needed to be global in your scope and coverage. And then the third was we wanted to sell the software as a subscription. So as Mark mentioned, I think I've come full circle here. Being part of this portfolio, the GTM portfolio leader, and kind of summarizing the background, I think I come to both the government perspective as well as the private sector experience. So what is global trade management? The easiest way to describe global trade management is if I put my government hat back on. And if you start with the exports, who are you doing business with? Where are you doing business with? What is my product and can it be exported?
I think you heard earlier during the AI session, the term dual use came up. Not only what is the product, but what is the ultimate end use? And that matters because the laptop that you guys are using today that is helping you with your business and as you're taking notes can also guide a missile into a building. I don't mean to be overly dramatic about that, but governments around the world, when they're looking from an export standpoint, they want to know what is the ultimate end use of those goods. On the import side, again, the governments want to know, hey, who are you doing business with? Where are my products coming in from? Can my product be imported? And what are the government requirements around that?
So, for example, if you had a children's toy that had lead paint on it, that would be something that would be prohibited from coming into most countries. But you need to identify that, and that's done through the government regulations, and that's done through association on the product and classification, and we'll get to that in a minute. And then most importantly, the governments around the world, from an import standpoint, they want their money. That's where the duty, taxes, and fees come in. They want that tariff revenue, and you need to be able to present that. Next slide. So what does this mean? Well, from an automation standpoint, what it means is the building blocks are first and foremost, after 9/11 that I mentioned, literally hundreds of lists have been published around the world with thousands of names on there.
You need to have an automated solution to help you with that. And that's where restricted party screening comes in. You heard Zubin and Mirta talk about AI classification. AI classification is to help you ultimately identify what your product is. That laptop, the government calls it a portable automatic data processing machine. Well, that's not how we talk. And so the trade community wants to know, hey, I want another classification for my product. And then once you have that classification, then you can make the determination processes and all of this is fully automated. The duty, taxes, and fee that I mentioned earlier, that's that landed cost. Ultimately, what you need to be able to do is have your good, understand the destination and the origin pairing, understand whether or not a free trade agreement may apply.
But at the end of the day, it comes down to what is that duty. And then most importantly is the documentation behind it. Much like when you file your taxes, you have to do a document. The government also says the same thing on exports and imports. They want you to report to them that you've adhered to the regulatory environment that they've set out for the exports and those imports. And then within the GTM solution, and this is most important for the BCOs, is to have an audit trail of that. Because if the government shows up and knocks on your door, which you hope it never does, but if they do, you want to make sure that you have an audit trail that delineates all of the decision-making processes along the way. And that's what we provide.
Anthony, that's important as well for the potential and risk around penalties and fines, but also to continue to do business.
It is. There's my former agency that I work with, the Bureau of Industry and Security as part of commerce, and they put out a publication that says, "Do not let this happen to you," and what it is, it's a book that identifies all of the different companies. Gene, if you're still out there from sales, that's a sales lead document for you, but it publishes all of the companies and entities that have been fined or penalized, lost export privileges, and in some cases, jail time if you're intentionally trying to do it, and one other thing I think that's worth mentioning here. In my time at government, we often think of the government's here to get you. That's not the case. In most instances, what they want is to help promote those exports. They want you to do it legally.
They want you to adhere to those rules. They want you to have global trade management software. They want it automated and effective. But if you do have a mistake, oftentimes what will happen if it's an unintentional mistake is they'll ask you to go take that fine, take that penalty, and then go put in a proper export management plan or a proper import management plan.
Okay. And this year has been a year where tariffs have been front and center for a lot of the time. Talk to the audience a little bit about how that's impacted the business as a whole, E2open business, and how that complexity impacts us and our customers.
So like Mark mentioned, I'm from the U.S. I live right outside of Washington, D.C. I don't claim it. My house is about seven miles from the White House. So you guys may have heard a little bit about some trade policies that have been taking place with the tariff and the regulatory environment, but specifically putting up what we would call tariff barriers. And those tariff barriers, if you were to go back, Mark, four years ago or longer, when businesses were making their sourcing decision, typically what they were looking at is what is the political stability of the geographical location that I'm sourcing from? What is the infrastructure? Do the people, does the population have the skill sets necessary to manufacture and produce? And is the infrastructure there from a transport standpoint?
Fast forward to you hit Mark's point and what's been going on in the news, the top thing that folks are looking at is what is that tariff implication? Because we're not talking small numbers here now, right? We're seeing tariffs that are 25%, then there's a little argument in the spat, and then all of a sudden they become 50%, and then there's another little argument in the spat, and then it becomes 100%-150%. And so these are significant numbers, and it's bringing a lot more visibility to this. The beauty is that this is something that we automate and we provide that to those BCOs.
At the heart of that is what we refer to as global knowledge. Maybe just explain to people what we actually mean when we refer to global knowledge.
Absolutely. Within the global trade management software, we support over 200 countries. So think about that in terms of jurisdictions. It's roughly 3,500 plus government agencies that you're dealing with around the world. By the way, most of them are not English speaking, so you have to deal with that native language. I mentioned that restricted party screening earlier and the hundreds of lists that are there. We produce roughly 73 million, a little bit more, and it'll be even more this year, updates on an annual basis. So it's very complex, and we call that global knowledge. All of that maintenance of that content and those rules and those regulations, that's what we're referring to when we say global knowledge. It is a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace. So it's something we're super proud of.
It's something that we have a very large dedicated team of trade professionals that have not only the international trade in terms of a regulatory background, but also the language skill sets to be able to interpret those rules and regulations. We have an ISO 9001 certified process, so every update that comes through goes through this process and has checks and balances along with audits, both internal and external. So it's something that we're super proud of. Again, it gives us a competitive differentiator, and it really is the heart and soul of the global trade management software.
All right. Thank you. Thanks, Anthony. Thanks, Adam and Pavan. Message to leave you with is that we're progressing well with the integration. We've assembled the component parts we need, and we have the toolkit to put them together to make a transformative change to our business and the industries of which we serve. And hopefully, through the discussion today, you've seen how interconnected and complex they are, and therefore how valuable the opportunity is. And I think we're moving on to a Q&A session now. Thank you.
Thanks, E2open team. The really exciting thing I think with E2open is what it means in the hands of WiseTech. And when you think about what our colleagues just talked about, they talked about how we really focus on logistics. We do that really well within the CargoWise product suite. What E2open brings us is these self-filers, these really large importers and exporters who can add so much more value and where we can add value to them. And then, of course, what Adam took you through was the deep focus they have on supply chain management. And in WiseTech's hands together, that really transforms the ecosystem. So we are now on Q&A. I will ask that before you ask questions, please just state your name and where you're from.
I'll field the questions, and I'll either field them with my team up here or with one of my other team on the floor. There are roaming mics in the front over here. Yes, there's a roaming mic coming.
Hopefully it's on. It's Roger Samuel here from Jefferies. I've got two questions. First one is on E2open, and based on the features that you listed on your new value pack, it looks like customers will have access to some features from E2open, albeit it's express or trial versions of the products. So do you think you have any cross-selling between your existing forwarding customers and E2open and generate some revenue synergies? Second question is on CTO. What's the actual revenue model of CTO now? Because it looks like from your new commercial model, you're charging per container optimized. And this time last year, you mentioned about potentially taking a cut of the direct cost savings that your customers can realize. So yeah, and maybe just for the record, is CTO product is actually available out there currently? Yeah.
Okay. Thank you for the questions. First part of your question. So yes, in the CargoWise value pack feature list that you've seen online, there are a number of E2open modules and products listed on trials or single user licenses. But you have to remember something we talked about in the commercial model session. A lot of the benefit that we're including in the CargoWise value pack is for the direct benefit of the importer and exporter. So those E2open products that we have included in the value pack are for the value of the importer or exporter. It's for their benefit. They could choose to use those features on those modules and those products on a trial basis or a single user license basis.
To your wider point about cross-selling opportunities, what Mark and the team talked about and what we've spoken about previously is that Horizon One is really about cost synergies and integrating the business. There are many revenue and product synergies here. This is part of the rationale of buying E2open, but that's not a Horizon One thing and not something that we have spent much time talking about with the market for FY26. That's a medium-term and longer-term proposition. We have been very impressed to see the quality of their products, the reach of their products, and the depth of their products. And we can start to now see how these product pillars fit together and how it builds the future WiseTech product strategy. On CTO, so yes, you're right on the CargoWise value pack price list.
There is a line item there, but that line item is for freight forwarders that would use the option of booking their transport movement through CTO. That's not the charge that we'll be charging a company like ACFS. That's still in commercial discussions. To your second part of the CTO question, yes, the product is ready and Michael took you through that product, but it's a product that we are implementing with ACFS only, and we will implement with ACFS, prove the model, iterate the model like we do with everything else we do, and then look at rolling that out. The front over here.
Thanks, Zubin. It's Kane from Goldman's. Maybe just coming back to the commercial model as well. If I read a bit of the feedback online, it does seem quite a bit of angst around how it's been handled, some of the implied price rises they're talking to, sort of north of 30%. Just help us reconcile that, Gene or Zubin, or just how that reconciles with the comments around being roughly the same. And as some of the larger forwarders come off who probably have the biggest discounts, I mean, are they going to be wearing a much bigger price rise? I suppose just trying to understand this from a financial perspective and.
I might talk to that and then throw it to Gene for your thoughts as well. The first really important point, Kane, is that for all of our customers, if they choose to recover the cost from the importer or exporter, which is the model that we think the industry should adopt and will adopt, then for all customers, the CargoWise Value Pack is a really strong financial proposition, let alone the 200 features, let alone the AI, let alone all the other benefits that we're delivering as part of that package. Yes, it's noisy, and we knew it would be noisy. These are big changes we're making, and this is what we've done well for 30 years. We have made disruptive change. We know that there will be a human change management process in this, and we know that any change is complex.
It is wrong to say that. Let's assume no customer recovered the cost. It is wrong to say that all customers see a price rise. There are some customers that see the same price they've always paid. There are some customers that see a small price rise. There are some that might see a larger price rise. It really depends on their usage patterns and how they've been using CargoWise to date and how they will use CargoWise going forward. But you're absolutely right. There is noise on LinkedIn. There is noise on Reddit. We've seen it. Some interesting comments there, but we know that this will take time to be adopted.
The fact that we have 95% of our customers on this model and that we've communicated now four times since October 31st formally with all of those customers and provided more and more content each time to take them on that journey and to give them the required information means that we are very confident that this will be successful in the market. Gene, you talked to customers. Anything you want to add?
It's change, so day one, new commercial model, seeing line items on the invoice. This is a new way of licensing CargoWise. The question is, can I recover this charge from all my customers on day one? And having that discussion, this is December 3rd, so we're starting to have these discussions. And just the conversation I had this morning is, I don't know if I can recover this from all my customers on day one. Maybe half of them. I'm asking them why that's the issue. And I've got some large complex customers. So then in that case, it's, well, then you're recovering half your cost of CargoWise, which Zubin was alluding to. It's a recovery cost. And then the discussion goes, well, other than maybe my top tier of my customers, I can recover this cost based on that.
So then the question is, you're recovering 75% of your cost of CargoWise. It'll get to 100%, but that's probably the day one friction point.
Thanks, Gene. Richard, do you want to add something?
I think there's a couple of ways of looking at this. The first is that in the value pack and for the last year, we've been building a lot of componentry. And certainly because of the E2open acquisition, we've got a lot of value that is directly consumable by or to the benefit of the importer and exporter. And that is now in the value pack. And one initial problem is our customers are thinking about what's in it for me. They really have to be starting to turn to what's in it for my customer because that's actually where they really create value anyway. That's the first thing. The second thing is that I don't actually agree that it's half recoverable or 75% recoverable.
This industry has for more than decades had various infrastructure costs and fundamental costs put to the forwarder to be passed to the importer and exporter, and they are unconditional. You have to pay the gate fees at the terminals. In 2019, when we bought ContainerChain, the gate fee at the terminals and at the container parks was $8. Today, those charges are around $230. That's five years later. Now, did you think that they couldn't pass those on? They were provided by a third party and said, "This is what we're being charged you," and they didn't even blink. They just passed them to their customers and they got paid. Detention fees get passed to the customers every day and they have no discretion. Storage fees get passed to customers every day and they have no discretion.
I understand that they don't like it because it's a change of model, but the model is valuable to the importers and exporters. And what forwarders and customs brokers do is create value for those importers and exporters and pass that value on. If you didn't have a highly automated system like CargoWise, their labor costs would be orders of magnitude larger than it is today. And frankly, it's a ridiculous idea to say that I won't put it on my invoice because I don't like the change. The change is actually beneficial to them more than anything else, and it's very beneficial to the importers and exporters. Now, we have to have this discussion. It's going to take time. It's going to have some people saying, "I don't like it." That's already happened. We've also had people saying, and I'll give a quote. I'll paraphrase a customer.
Said, "Please withdraw my request to remove it from my billing model. I love it. I looked at it over the weekend. I read all the documents. I realized this is a fantastic Christmas gift from WiseTech. Thank you so much for doing it." Now, all they did was read the documents. I can guarantee you that a lot of people haven't read the documents. We communicated for some months before that the model was coming. We communicated very strongly across October and November, and we're continuing to update and give a lot more content to help people. We will have to have some difficult conversations with people who don't want to listen or don't get it or haven't read the documents or don't think that the model is right. This is a model which the rest of the industry already uses.
It's just that software providers don't use it. This is the way to do it. The people who are receiving the most value should be the people paying for most of the license. That's what we're doing.
I'll remind you, the charges that we're talking about range from the mid-$2 up to about $19. So again, likely the very smallest charge on the importer or exporter's invoice.
Zubin, we have a question from Andrew Gillies from Macquarie. You mentioned the residual 5% of customers are on term-based deals with historically attractive pricing. What percentage of volumes are represented by these larger customers, and how are you managing churn risk with a larger effective price rise for these customers? It sounds like they're weighing upside from products they'd elected not to consume under STL with the certainty of further price increases in the new revenue model. What are the puts and takes to get to FY26 sales?
Thank you, Andrew. That was a long question. Let me just try and break that down. The first thing is, again, we need to get away from this idea that this is a price rise for logistics service providers. It is not a price rise for logistics service providers. It is a massive price reduction, if not price eradication for freight forwarders and customs brokers. The point about not using certain features, I think that was part of the question. It really goes to what Gene was talking about in our CargoWise value pack session, where there are a number of features that we know are not being used by many freight forwarders and customs brokers, but we know that when they are used in those few customers that do use them, it does drive a marked improvement in productivity or in risk reduction.
So the argument that they're not using them is actually an argument for the CargoWise Value Packs because now they can and they will and they should use them and become more effective businesses. We don't disclose the volume from different customer segments. And you're right, Andrew, in saying that there are commitment agreements and other agreements that are longer term, which is why that 5% have not moved. But we also know that some of the largest freight forwarders and LSPs, logistics service providers in the world, are the ones that will benefit most from these features. They're the ones that will benefit the most from the AI and the agentic solutions that we're releasing because these are the really sophisticated operators that will be able to leverage all of these features that we've invested nearly $1 billion in over the last five years.
Anyone want to add anything?
I might just add one of the ways of looking at this is to think of labor cost because ultimately our goal here is to dramatically, from now, dramatically further reduce labor. Now, we're saying more than 50% of the labor within two years. I think that's one of those goals that is important to have. But when you look at this, Chris Charlton and I were chatting with some other investors just a minute ago. At UPS, they had something like 18 classifiers classifying customs entries for import all day, every day, and then one customs broker who would review the classifications and press the button. Now, in the agentic model, that 18 classifiers don't exist. There's the one customs broker still exists, but the 18 classifiers go away. So that's a bit better than 50%.
Across all of the workflows, we think we can get similar goals out of it. Now, we're talking about between $2 and $20. We're removing hundreds of dollars' worth of labor on every job already, and we're going to be reducing substantially more. So I think this is really the strange question is we start thinking about cost, but the cost of the software is the smallest of the costs across the supply chain. And the labor cost is one of the largest costs across the supply chain. If you take out the direct cost of goods, that is the cost of a container, the cost of the truck, and so forth, and you just look at in the overheads part of the P&L for our customers, 70% of that cost is labor.
Reducing that is a massive improvement in their EBITDA margin and in their bottom line profit. And that's what we're really focused on here.
Caroline?
Yes. I might just add two points here. So I think the first one is, I think, Andrew, you asked a question about churn risk for the largest customers. I don't think there's actually any churn risk for the largest customers, not in the context of the new commercial model. What the new commercial model gives them is an opportunity to come onto the new commercial model. At this stage, we've not done anything to have them move across. We've moved across the ones that have flexibility in their contract to do so, but the larger ones obviously still have a fixed-term contract. So it's really just an opportunity for them to come across. And so I'd say there isn't really any churn risk there.
And in relation to the large customers, and when they do come across, we know from the previous transitions that they're usually the ones that take the longest, right? They're sort of much more sophisticated. There's more sort of levels of review and rigor that need to go through. And we expect the same here. The difference is, though, with each large customer that comes across, there is a significant contribution to revenue. And as we get each one, that's what's going to help us drive that long-term revenue growth.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Somewhere in the front, I think I'm being instructed.
Yeah, Gary Sherriff from RBC. Two questions. One on the commercial model and the other one on AI. With the commercial model, there seems to be a marked shift in terms of historically how you've transitioned, how it was optional. Certainly back in August, it was an optional, I don't know what you call it, customers didn't have to mandatorily move across. It sounds like that's absolutely changed that for 95% of customers, it is now mandatory. Just trying to figure out the shift, why that's changed. Certainly, that's not what you had previously done and certainly what you'd previously said.
I would challenge that slightly, Gary. I'd say that for every commercial model change that we've made in the past, it is a mandatory move across. We don't allow people to flick back to an old model or stay indefinitely on an old model. We are transitioning our commercial model. The same thing has happened here. There was never a point in August or prior where we said customers had a choice that they could choose to move across or stay on the old STL model. We have realized that because of the increase in power and ability of AI, this was something we had to deal with urgently, and we have accelerated that rollout, but because we see the value to industry, we see that the AI capability and the 200 features and the cost recovery option, that that's an option, is an important thing to get to industry.
So it was never an option. It might have been that in August we said we would roll out at a different pace or a different plan, but we always had an intent to roll out to the level that we have rolled out to.
Zubin?
I can just give you a bit more of what the option is. There are options in the accounting treatment for how you deal with the charge. That is an option. There's an option, if the customer wishes, that they can manually remove the charge from the invoice. We strongly discourage that. So it's their option in both the accounting treatment point of view and in whether they want the charge to roll forward to their customers. But we're talking about something which is very largely to their benefit to accept it in the default configuration that we've given it to them. That doesn't mean they have to do that. It doesn't mean they have to account for it that way. I've seen some quite strange comments about revenue recognition, GAAP accounting, and so forth, none of which are correct. But there is this understanding being developed.
We're starting to get through it now. We're starting to see customers rereading the document or reading it for the first time and realizing that this, yes, it's optional, but why would you do that?
Yeah. So I think that's exactly the summary. The commercial model is not an option. How they choose to recover or not recover is an option.
And sorry, the other question is about AI. I think I noticed in the customer letters that have gone out, not quite clear exactly what functionality or features is currently available, and it says it'll be released over time. Maybe just in terms of the product roadmap for AI, what is currently available right now, what's going to be released over time?
Sure. Sure. So AI classification assistant, which is what Mirta took us through, which is, as I said before, one of the most complex processes in the supply chain, import classification. What Andrew took us through, which is ComplianceWise. And of course, also what Mirta took us through, which is the ACE chatbot, which is really more than just a customer service chatbot. It's a way of talking to CargoWise in English and instructing CargoWise in English. Those three modules are available today. And the first two, ComplianceWise and classification assistant, are built using agentic AI. ComplianceWise, particularly, uses the workflow model of delivering that. So those are available as of two days ago to customers. And they were available to some customers prior to that on a trial or early access agreement basis.
Now, the roadmap going forward is very much about accelerating the rollout of more agents to do more types of logistics work. Things like dangerous goods classifications, filling in an airway bill, invoicing a customer, communicating with an importer or exporter because the documentation that they received didn't have a signature or was missing a piece of data or was scrambled, asking for further details about the type of the metal rod, for example. Those sorts of agents are being worked on now, and they'll be rolled out progressively over the next few years. Maybe let's go to this side of the room. Oh. Sorry, I'm not sure who's directing traffic.
Hi, it's Bob from J Morgan. Just a couple of questions. One, just on the value pack. I guess, how did you guys actually construct the pricing for the value pack, especially given the rollout of all these new modules and tools that your customers didn't have before? Are you sort of giving them introductory pricing, and then as your customers reduce their workforce by 50%, do you have an opportunity to recover more of that sort of value that you're delivering?
Look, I'll ask Richard to talk to the actual current pricing. But just to the second part of your question, I'll say that the pricing we put up on the website is the CargoWise Value Pack pricing. There's no intention to change that tomorrow or next month or in six months' time. Naturally, as we deliver more value in the Value Pack, and that means as we invest more in R&D, which we're constantly doing, and there's more value to importers and exporters, and there's more value to logistics service providers, it would be reasonable for us in the long term to capture some of that value and some of that investment. So yes, there is an opportunity in the future. Right now, the CargoWise Value Pack pricing we put out is the pricing that we will stick with for some time. To the current pricing, Richard.
The first thing I think, if you've ever bought sausages or a pie, you should never ask a butcher how they made them. You might be shocked. The ingredients we started with, obviously, there's a financial model behind everything we do. There are multiple inputs to that, and we do a lot of modeling. We try to find a balance between the expectation of that part of the market, what the value creation is in the software, and who benefits from that. That's why we're very clearly of the view that this belongs to the importers and exporters and not to the forwarders. As Zubin sort of pointed out, I think it's very clear that if you're a high-volume forwarder and you pass the charge like you pass so many charges to the importers and exporters, you end up with completely free software, completely without charge.
Now, it depends on volume, and it depends on the number of jobs per person you have in the business, but ultimately, that is a very, very strong outcome. So yes, pricing is somewhat of a magic thing. There's no one way of doing it. We don't really look at competitors or compare prices of other equivalent products. There's very little in this space to really compare to. So what we look to is what is the supply chain cost for many other things. And I have talked about this many times to investors over the last year. I've said, "We expect that the price of the value pack is something the same as or less than the cost of putting a little plastic seal on a container at the export point where the container's closed." It's something either that price or a lot lower than that price.
And every other part of the supply chain and every other charge is more than that. We are by far and away such a tiny part of the landed cost of a good or even a tiny part of just the full set of logistics charges, and yet we remove most of the complex labor in doing those services.
Zubin, we've got a question online from Michael Hollowand. On CTO, are you able to indicate timeframes for some milestones? Milestone one, ACFS initial pilot into routine operation. Milestone two, first launch with a West Coast customer. You've made clear the magnitude of the opportunity. However, would like some more around timeframe. Is less than clear.
Thanks, Mariana, for sharing that one. Look, we have been quite clear on this. Our focus is implementing with ACFS in Australia. That is our focus, and that is where we are spending all of our time. And that's what we're in the throes of right now, as you could see from the presentation. The US opportunity is massive, as is the global opportunity, but those are not things that we're spending time on right now. Our focus is primarily on ACFS. In terms of actual milestones, we've guided that there'll be some revenue from CTO and FY26, and we confirm that that's our intent.
Hello. Hi, sorry. It's Eric Choi from Barrenjoey. So sorry, could I go back to the CVP? And I had one numbers one, maybe for Caroline, and maybe a higher-level qualitative one. Just to help everyone, I guess with guidance, if you look at your first half, you're guiding to 10% CargoWise revenue growth. Second half is sort of 24%, so there's kind of like a 14% difference in there.
If you assume the CVP makes up the majority of the difference, and I know there's some effects in the second half, and I know there's only an extra five months, but if 14 percentage points or 10-15% points of delta is majority driven by CVP and you're only moving some of your customers across because by revenue, I reckon it'd still be less than 50%, it sort of implies the average revenue per user has to be much bigger than that 10-15%, probably like 30% plus . Just wondering if I could check that with Caroline.
So the answer to the question is that there is variability in terms of the price increase our customers will see when they come across. So as we mentioned earlier, it really is a function of how much they're using CargoWise today under STL and how much they'll be using under the new model. So I think what we can say is that moving 95% of our customers based on count is what supports guidance, which we reaffirmed last week, and that any sort of large customers that come onto the system after that is obviously something that will help drive that long-term growth. So I think in terms of the average, I think we don't want to say what that number is because it really does vary.
And part of it is due to size, but a large piece of it is really just due to how much they use the system. But I think definitely what we've said for FY26 is that there are two major initiatives that are going to contribute to revenue growth. It's the CargoWise Value Packs and it's CTO, and that still remains the case.
Quick follow-up is you've got thousands of customers, don't you? And the top 20 make up about 35% of revenues. So if 5% even represents 100 customers, you could infer a large portion of revenues hasn't moved across yet. So that benefit is still to come beyond.
I think it's definitely fair to say that our largest customers obviously contribute the most revenue, and we give that split, as you said. So yes, I think for us, it is obviously just upside if they come across because they are going to deliver that incremental revenue. So that's true.
Sorry, Caroline. Just qualitatively, Zubin, if you think about another company that's got a lot of pricing power, REA, and the reason why they've been able to be successful is they create FOMO for the real estate agents, create FOMO for the end customers. So my question is, you've got a lot of your LGFFs on early access arrangements. You're giving them a lot of features that only they have access to now. Are they seeing FOMO? So are they going to move across because they are going to be at a disadvantage if they don't take it?
It's a great question, so the early access agreement was a process we had in place for some customers to use certain features as we were building them out and experimenting, and we always had a clause that said once we commercialize those products, the early access agreement would terminate, which it now has, so the customers that were using those features, including some of the larger customers, you would expect that they would be incentivized to come across. They want those features. They've built their business processes now around those features. Again, we're talking about some of the most appreciated features in our product, like electronic bills of lading, parts of CargoWise Neo, certificates of origin, so there is a drive for those customers who are using those features to continue to use them and to move to the CVP.
To the more general FOMO comment, I think that really applies well for some of our largest customers. You can imagine with all the work we're doing with AI, particularly around reducing labor and removing large parts of labor, you get one of those top 10 that come across, and there will be a first mover, and it will just incentivize the rest. There will be strong competitive pressures because of the results that that one sees. So we are convinced that this is the right thing for all forwarders and particularly for those top 10.
There's been a bit of noise in the industry. Without mentioning names, I think we all know who that is. And my view is that there is an unfortunate focus on a pure cost and not on the value of the thing. We are someone who constantly has to try to explain to customers value, not price. The industry has a problem because everything is standardized. You can get the same container on the same trade lane from 10 different shipping lines or 20 different airlines for the same kilo freight or from the same transport carrier. They're almost all standardized within a few percentage points of each other in terms of time, service, and cost. Software is completely different. It has a completely different outcome, and it has a massive impact on labor.
If you are a forwarder that has spent all of your time generating value because you do more jobs per user in your system than any other forwarder, and there is a forwarder like that that makes those claims and is true to those claims, and WiseTech is able to take other forwarders of similar size and halve the labor cost or more, what does it do to that model?
Afternoon. So my question is on competitive advantage. I think there's been a number of breadcrumbs dropped throughout the presentation about what some of those things are, but I won't name them all, but let's say data assets, global Optima, et cetera, and obviously your product, Prowess, the ability to deliver agentic AI, for example. How should we think about that competitive advantage translating into revenue and earnings growth momentum sort of on a one to three-year view?
Thanks, Nick. Look, the way I would talk about that is, and we've mentioned this a few times today, the world of global trade is becoming incredibly complicated. You look at what's happening in the U.S., and Anthony talked briefly to this, the tariff wars, tariff refunds that are being talked about, sanctions, embargoes, denied parties, restricted parties, the real impact of fines on these freight forwarders, but also the impact of breaches on border security and on countries. It is only products like CargoWise and really CargoWise that solves those problems very well. If you look in the top 25, the biggest competitor in those top 25 for us is legacy in-house software.
And legacy in-house software built by freight forwarders is simply not going to keep up with the increasing complexity of global trade, the increasing threat of cybersecurity, the ability to drive agentic AI benefits into the product. So from a one to three-year revenue point of view, it is very fair to say that we think the innovations that we're building, the culture we have, the data we have, the people we have mean that we are in the prime position for those 11 to come knocking on our door.
Maybe just sneaking in a quick follow-up. To what extent is your greatest competition in your core product now coming from your own customers? Some of the feedback we've had recently is that they're trialing both third-party software, which could potentially be your own products, as well as trying to build themselves. So how do you counter that? What has the feedback been on the Agentic AI products?
Yep. So the first, let me answer it this way. And I didn't say this in the AI session, but I should have. A lot of companies talk about bolting on their AI products on top of your own product, on top of CargoWise, on top of Microsoft, on top of something else. And they can have some benefit. They can automate data entry, and maybe they can automate a few clicks on screens. What we are doing by building it into the workflow engine that I referred to earlier is building it into a very fundamental low-level piece of architecture or of infrastructure. No one else can do that. We own CargoWise. We have access to the source code. We can do that. A third party simply cannot do that.
And if you think about large global freight forwarders or any freight forwarder or any business, really, there is real benefit in having one piece of product that runs their business operations. Not a product here that does customs, a product here that does freight, plugs Xero in to do finance, plugs something else in to do something else. That's not how deep domain systems work. Deep domain systems solve all of the problems that these customers face across the supply chain. And that's why I keep coming back to the fact that we are not just a software vendor that can plug and play. We are the operating system that makes these businesses successful.
And I think any customer of ours that you talk to would talk about how there's benefit in having straight-through processing, having connectivity between these systems, and not having master data and other data that has to be re-keyed into three or four or 10 systems. And sorry, the last part of that question, Nick, the build their own, it goes to my earlier comment. These companies are fantastic at what they do in terms of facilitating logistics execution. They might play their hand at trying some software development, but again, we've been doing this for 30 years. And without trying to sort of sound arrogant, that 30 years of experience has allowed us to build the product to the depth that we have today.
Paul Mason from Evans and Partners. I've got two. I'll just ask them together. The first one was just with all the AI tools that you're launching, could you give us a bit of an overview of the underlying infrastructure that's supporting that and how well built out that is and maybe a bit on how much per agent work action it costs you to deliver that? And then the second one was just I've doxxed myself on the guy that was getting all this weird feedback about North American use of CTO, which I still haven't figured out what the explanation is, but maybe to help me. With the three products that you've mentioned, are any of them actually surfaceable within CargoWise? Because I'm trying to figure out why I'm getting this feedback when you're being very clear about the circumstances, right, that it's not available yet.
Sure. Let me answer the first part, and I'll throw it to Richard potentially for the second part. The first part in AI. So our infrastructure, we haven't gone and built our own large language model or our own small language model. We are leveraging the billions of dollars of investment that OpenAI, Microsoft, Claude, Anthropic, Google are investing in this space. And as you would have seen yourself, these models and platforms are leapfrogging each other every single day. So we haven't picked one. We have built what we call an LLM proxy, a large language model proxy, a layer that buffers us from each individual platform. And it allows us to experiment, to do some A/B testing, and to try different models and see which models are suited for different types of work. There are certain models that are great for a chatbot.
There are different models that are great for interpreting deeply sort of scientific documentation, a bit like the HTS Tariff, the 99 chapters that Mirta referred to. So we are able to leverage all of those models. In terms of cost, it's fair to say it's four cents on the dollar. And we have that capability of scaling them up and scaling them down as demand rises and falls from our customers. Second part of your question, yeah, we had a bit of a communication about this. I don't know the exact answer, but I can say that there possibly is some integration between Matchbox and CargoWise because I think there was some reference to a Matchbox menu that you or someone else made.
No.
No, there's no integration.
There's integration between CTO and Matchbox. Matchbox and Aventida, in fact, which we own through E2open, have connections to shipping lines the world over that let us do container exchanges, container reuse. But there was never a need to have a Matchbox integration with CargoWise.
I might just throw it to Michael Toolan for a second if his mic can be turned on. He might be able to add some value here.
Okay. So from a technical aspect, we do have Blume integrated into CargoWise. So it has an integration to our transport bookings module. That's one possible answer for that in terms of integration. But yeah, in terms of Matchbox, Aventida, it is very disconnected products.
Paul, the best thing to do is to get some screenshots to us, and we can understand what's going on.
What most people believe is CTO is, in fact, what Americans call street turns or what we call triangulation, where a container is released from the importer as an empty and immediately picked up by the exporter as an empty and repacked, and instead of going to the container park or returning to the terminal, it just transfers in a triangle, effectively. Import across to the exporter, exporter to the terminal. Now, that can only really happen in about 5% of cases because of the way that model works. Whereas in the case of CTO, the reuse is part of it. It's not the only part because of all the leg compressions and other things we're doing, so when people say, "I'm using CTO," what they really mean is, "I'm doing street turns," which is what Matchbox does, what Aventida does, what Blume does. It is a value.
It does create value, but you just can't do it for very much of the transport chain. It can only be done in small. Whereas CTO is meant to be done in the very large and at massive scale.
Siraj.
Can you hear me? Yep. Siraj from Citi. Two questions. One on CTO, second one on E2open. On CTO, I think last year you had said there's 10 optimizations that you could do with CTO. It seems like the focus in the 12 months has just been on the one optimization. Anything stopping from the other? Is there some hindrance or roadblock for the other nine optimizations? And secondly, you talk about maturation of CTO into FY27. Is that about ACFS into 10 optimizations? Because it sounds like the U.S. has now been pushed out further. So what do you mean by maturation? Is it global rollout, or is it just ACFS, or is it other customers in Australia? And I'll ask E2open after this.
I'll throw to Michael for the first part, but just on the second part, Siraj, we're not going to guide beyond FY26, of course. But what we can say is there are two parallel streams beyond FY26. The global expansion, obviously, and as Michael and Richard talked to in the session, there are more optimizations and more opportunities for us to build out. And there's no reason we pick one or the other. It's really that both of these things can happen at the same time. Michael?
There we go. On the CTO front, I think I mentioned this in the answer to my technical progress question. The product has continued to evolve, and there are a number of optimizations that we need to do to reach our goals. As I answered earlier, triangulation or container reuse was definitely the first milestone that we hit, and we hit that around this time last year. The mobile platform that we have built is a technology enabler to enable us to do the next round of optimizations. On the screens that we looked at before, we spoke about dead leg removal, clustering of jobs together to decrease the distances that trucks are traveling. These are some of those optimizations that we listed last year, and there were more than 10.
Some of that's our secret sauce, but they are the optimizations that we're working through this product evolution.
Thanks, Michael.
Let me just add a bit to that. Just because you said 10, what we actually said back then was more than 10, and we didn't give you an exact number because we're still building them out, and I don't think we should go around claiming this is how many optimizations we've thought of. There are a lot. We've probably got three, four, five of those in the current model, and some of the optimizations require volume to exist in the first place before you can really get to the rest of the optimizations. Because of those very large structural localized optimizations in the terminals and with the shipping lines, they're not going to participate until they see that this is really important and a big advantage to them. At that time, those negotiations will occur, and those optimizations will kick in.
But as we showed on that map before, there is so much already optimized, and the cost base is so much lower once it's an optimized container. I don't think the other optimizations are going to make a material difference to take up now, but they will allow us to continue to grow the model and make it more powerful over time. Not necessary today. Good to have in the long term.
Sure. Just on E2open, Zubin, you had mentioned in August that there was revenue optionality with E2open, even for FY26, right, that you could move on. Have you moved on any of those revenue optionalities, thinking price increases potentially? And secondly, Mark, you sort of mentioned the churn in E2open is still a bit too high. Is that picked up from the 5% that I think E2open had historically for the last couple of years, or is it just 5% is too high? Thanks.
Both questions to you.
Yeah, sure. So I mean, from a churn perspective, there's been no major change in churn. I guess what we're referring to there is the higher level of churn relative to the very, very low level of churn that we experience on CargoWise. And that's what we're aiming to get to. And that's why we're focusing on the root cause of some of that churn, which is really about making the products better, more robust, and add more value to customers. So that's from a churn perspective. In terms of the revenue opportunities, there are revenue opportunities for us short term. We are working on some of those. The biggest opportunities for us are some of the things we talked about earlier on. Those are obviously much later horizon opportunities.
But there's a combination of things that we're working on, some that have the potential to have some upside, some that have some risk to them. So yes, we're working on those opportunities, but from a net perspective, we're not anticipating any major change to our guidance or outcome for FY26, if that was the underlying part of the question.
Thanks. It's Lucy from UBS. I just have two questions. So one on CTO as well. I know the focus at the moment is on ACFS and in Australia, but I think you mentioned we're going to go into the U.S. once ACFS is fully implemented. Are we starting those conversations now already with some of the U.S., I guess, container transport companies? And in terms of the product as well, are we starting to customize what is needed for that market now, or is that going to be in the roadmap once ACFS is embedded?
Great question. Thank you. So we already have connections with a lot of different U.S. customers. So we already know how to do this in the U.S. It's really our optionality in terms of timing as to when we do that. And as Richard said, through Trinium, we have companies there and customers there that we can tap on their shoulder when we're ready. In terms of customization, there are slight changes, slight differences in how different regions deal with containers and trailers and trucks. But the underlying premise of CTO that we're building here for ACFS is pick up and move to the U.S. with some minor changes. It's not really customizations. It's just additional algorithms or modified algorithms and optimizations that we could do in different markets. But the product we are building today is the product that we can take to the world.
And then just one question on the commercial model as well. I think one comment you mentioned was small freight forwarders can now compete with the large ones because it's now standard pricing. I guess one of the big benefits WiseTech has had is your big customers consolidating because the smaller guys have been inefficient. How are you thinking about potential fragmentation across your customer base and whether this is a risk or opportunity?
I'll answer that briefly, and then I might ask Caroline to comment on that. But for small and medium enterprises, you're right. It sort of levels the playing field a little bit, or it allows freight forwarders and customs brokers to differentiate based on the service they offer rather than the technology automation. But the other really important thing that the value pack does for SMEs is by removing those overheads, removing the seat fees, removing the standard cloud hosting fees, the barrier to entry is just knocked away. So the barrier to entry for these smaller players who are even more profit-sensitive and even more margin-sensitive and cost-sensitive, I should say, is significantly reduced. Caroline?
Sure. And welcome back, Lucy, by the way. So I think on the large customers, I think there is still the ability for them to gain on consolidation of smaller companies. I think the other area that they, and actually even the other small to medium-sized customers can gain, is actually by leaning in deeper to the different layers of productivity that we have in CargoWise that are now more accessible than ever before through the Value Packs, right? So I think that's always been a way for customers to differentiate themselves. And we have many examples, actually, where customers are getting great benefits from CargoWise from using simply the forwarding module. But there are customers that really take on board all of the content. They have as many users as possible that are certified.
And so they really go into forwarding and all the other ancillary features that we offer that really kind of boost their productivity. And so I think that opportunity is still there, right? And when we look across our customer base, there's not that many that have leaned in that deep into the software. So there's a huge opportunity for large customers still to differentiate themselves in addition to the consolidation opportunity.
Richard?
There is one thing we haven't talked about much, and it's an interesting thing. We get a lot of noise from some customers who are concerned about the new commercial model. Where we're not getting any noise is when new customers come to us, we say, "We've got this model. You can actually put this in, and effectively, your software can be free, and you'll be doing what effectively all your other customers are doing, but now you're doing it with completely new and very powerful software." Actually, potential customers are very interested in the model and are not reacting negatively at all to the presentation of the model. I think it's really more about change than it is about opportunity.
The opportunity is great, and it's shown by the fact that it is relatively easy to explain it to a new customer and say, "This is how it's going to work, and this is what it's going to mean to you," whereas you're going to a customer that's been used to the same thing for 10 years, and they go, "Oh my God, this is a big change.
I have two more questions. Yes, over here.
Rob Yocha from Fisher Funds. Zubin, I understand the logic about passing on the cost to the end customer under the CVP. Following the same logic, though, if we think of STL, the transaction component in STL, have forwarders been passing that cost on to the end customer? And if not, what has been the impediment and why the difference?
Look, it's a great question. Some have been, but it's complex. It wasn't a straightforward process. So some forwarders were treated as an overhead. Some would take their average WiseTech invoice or their CargoWise invoice every month, divide it by the number of shipments, and for the next month, add a different charge on. Some would add a margin and pass it through, but it was a very complex process. In fact, we had one large customer saying they liked this model, and they currently have a team of five people in finance that sit there every month and try and figure out how to pass that through. So it's very complex, and in the new process in CargoWise Value Pack, it's a simple, straightforward, automatic process.
The second part is in all of those earlier iterations, or in most of those earlier iterations, the charge would still hit the customer's P&L, most likely. In the new model, and we're not telling freight forwarders how to do their accounting, but our thinking is that in the new model, this would pass through a bit of a clearing account and bypass the P&L. So it has an immediate margin impact if the customer chooses to treat it that way and if the customer chooses to recover it from their importer or exporter. Yep, Siraj?
Follow up on the CVP. Because Caroline sort of mentioned this upside if one of the top 10 Omega customers breaks their existing pricing and moves to the new model. I mean, you sort of mentioned this in August as well. Are you more confident, or is there been some progress with Omega customers that you can talk to? Because I think you did say there could be AI partnerships and stuff. So can you just touch on that? Thanks.
Yeah, sure, Siraj. The focus really has been to get the 95% moved across. And similar to the CTO ACFS model, we need to get the industry to adopt this change. We need to have these charges seen in the importer-exporter community, and then we're in a position where we can talk about this with more of our larger customers. Having said that, we have, over the past three months or so, had multiple conversations with some very large global freight forwarders about AI, about simplified billing, about cost recovery. And in all cases, different variations of customers have liked different variations of those benefits, especially AI. And you're right. We talked about an AI partnership. That is still something we're talking about. We want to work with large industry partners to test our models, to test our personas, and to really give them first-mover advantage.
I said two more, but if there's a few more, there's no more questions? One more in the front. Let's do this one, and then we'll stop.
Hey, it's Eric again. Sorry. From Barrenjoey. Just wanted to ask it in this forum just because we won't get a chance to chat with you again. But there's been some sort of chatter around IFCBAA and FTA sort of sending correspondence and asking you to delay CVP implementation. Can I just confirm you said all the feedback's in line with what you expect, revenue guidance, so there's going to be no delay?
In fact, to be fair, Eric, on Monday, actually, when we launched this, I emailed the CEO of FTA, IFCBAA, and CBAF, and I've had really positive conversations with all three of them. Sure, they're hearing noise from their members, just like we're hearing noise from their members, i.e., our customers. But the noise is more about how does this work? I haven't read the documentation. What's the new charge? What does it mean for me? What's the benefit to the importer or exporter? There has been no request from any of those associations, to me at least, that we should roll this back or we should delay it. In fact, as I said, all those conversations have been very, very positive. Maybe we'll just do this one, since we cut you off the first time.
Thanks, Zubin. I suppose just coming back to passing it on to the customers. As you were saying, Richard, there's 20 different containers out there at the same rate. It's a very commoditized industry. The large forwarders aren't going to be passing it on yet. They make up a big chunk of industry revenues. If you are that small, midsize forwarder out there trying to pass this on to your customer, why don't you think there'll be a lot more pushback given those industry dynamics?
Why don't we think there'll be more pushback?
Yeah, like I appreciate that.
Why are we so confident, is what you're asking?
Yeah, I mean, I would have thought you'd see some pushback given the.
Look, there is pushback. As we said, there's been noise. I mean, you've seen the Reddit post and the other stuff. There has been noise about, "I don't want to recover this. It's not how we operate. We already have a charge for this. We're already charging the customer for this." There's obviously going to be noise and a change management process. But what gives us confidence is, A, this is such a small charge, as I said, the smallest charge. B, there's a very clear explanation here about why the importer or exporter should pay it, because they are the entire beneficiary of the benefits that we actually build. And C, I forgot to see. Oh, C, this is how the industry works. Disbursements are everywhere in this industry, and much larger disbursements. Richard talked about the $8-$230 in five years, and that just got dealt with.
Those three factors give us confidence. The noise doesn't give us pause. It just means we have to continue to communicate. We have to continue to explain to customers and listen to customers and make sure that we're explaining our proposition really well.
There is one way of looking at this too. We've talked for probably more than half a decade, maybe more, about community pricing. And all of our customers are on the same price list, more or less, depending on timing and contracts. They have different discounts because their scales are different, right? But we've always had community pricing. What we now have is a community price that we've published. That has never happened before. It's literally there for everybody to see. And on the invoice itself, you can produce a pro forma from us showing the price that we bill the customer. So this is incredibly transparent.
And the industry has a long-term habit of acquiring a service on behalf of the importer and saying, "This is necessary to effect the import or the export, and here's the invoice from my supplier, and here's the charge in your invoice," and we move on. And that's what we expect people to do. Now, we're going to have to have tough conversations with people. Some people are already there. Some people are mostly there, and some people are definitely not there. But we have been very transparent. We've been very detailed. Unfortunately, some people just don't read the documentation, and some people do. And it's okay. We'll work through it. It won't be the end of the world. The sky is not falling. But this is a fantastic process that is by the way. I actually do speak about the associations and another component.
This is a brilliant idea, is what they've said. We love the idea. It's very noisy. Why did you make it so quick? Well, we have to make it quick because this is an existential crisis if you don't. The AI is coming, and it's coming very fast, and we've got to be there first. Some people have told us we're not going fast enough with AI, particularly some of the newspapers. I think we're going very fast with AI, frankly, and we're going faster than most anybody else. All right, with that, we are going to wrap up. We have a 10-minute break. Is that right? I'm getting sign language from the back. We have a 10-minute break.
Thanks, Mike.
Then we have a session with our independent directors. Thank you for the questions.
When we decided to switch to CargoWise, we understood that we couldn't keep different software to communicate operations with the warehouse. The need for a change in the software was more in the operational level than in the warehouse level.
We decided to go ahead and move forward with Transit Warehouse to meet the needs of the growth that we have. It's a matter of having the technology at hand and being able to see everything that you need in a matter of minutes. The ability to be able to visualize the cargo the moment that it touches our dock, being able to see documentation, to see pictures, to be able to not to wait for us to provide you the details of knowing how much cargo you have in our warehouse, the ability to communicate with the forwarding system. The customer can visualize the house bill of lading in that particular shipment departed with. It can also go back into the system and see how it was packed because we take pictures once the container departs, and those pictures get uploaded immediately.
CargoWise did expand our capabilities to work in the warehouse and to combine that tool with other software that helps us process more workload in less time.
We have an AI system read the actual box or the crate. It picks up the information when we scan it. It sends it to Transit Warehouse and goes into the system.
By the time that the cargo arrives here in the warehouse, we had already the information in our system, and we only need to cross-check the information with our dimensioner and with CargoWise, and for some specific customers, we have been able to increase our productivity by 300% at the warehouse, and we can expand that solution to other customers as well.
In a matter of less than two minutes, you have a full warehouse receipt with pictures, data, DINs, weight, and documents because the system already uploads it. And once it goes into the system, that's it. All we have to do is for someone to come and put it away. It is amazing to see how fast something can get processed. So when you bring someone and you show them how quick a shipment works, how quickly you will be able to resolve a problem in the warehouse, for them, it's like, wow, this is a company that is invested in the future. Hey, and I am the future, so I want to be part of it.
Here at Alliance Shippers, we started with what we call a perfect shipment. We're picking up a shipment on time. We're delivering it on time, getting an accurate freight bill and damage-free. In the automotive business, the customer demands for timely information continues to grow. People want to know where their shipments are. They want to know if there's a problem with them and what to do. Technology has changed a lot of that. There's a lot of moving pieces in our business. So Blume really helps us with information as we move equipment across the rails. It helps us get data to manage our business on a day-to-day basis and also to our customers.
Every load I have, my equipment comes from Blume. We rely so heavily on that system. There's really no other way to get that information without having access to it and that website.
Before Blume, there were a lot of inaccuracies with the billing cycle. I'd have to go load by load by load, compare the billing with our system. When it became Blume, it's now more easy to reconcile. If there's a discrepancy, it's easier to find the information I'm needing.
Every five minutes, 10 minutes of my day, I'm in there, whether it's looking up a policy, just checking on containers, making sure they're terminated. I have to keep track of my truckers, and to have it all streamlined in one place makes our job so much easier.
We can run any report we want. It comes right to our desktop, and we're able to go ahead and supply that information to our customer. It's also become a tool now with some added features that we are able to go ahead and either geofence or track and trace or map their containers. Prior to these new tools that we have, we would lose visibility 100% to where the container actually was. The GPS on the containers is a major project with railroads. Us being able to get data from Blume on that, where a box has been sitting, where it's been, that type of stuff is very helpful. And I think we're just in the infant stages of that, that we're going to be able to do things for real time. We would be able to give our customers better visibility of where their shipments are.
We just use the portal, click on a button, and then we have visibility, and we can send that to our customers directly, and they have full visibility at any moment, 24/7, of where their freight's at. Helps the customer manage the cost of the container or the per diem all the way from the origin point to the destination. It allows them to see how long something's on the street, how long something's on the rail, how long something's at destination. So it can point out any issues or any outliers that maybe need to be addressed.
Every little bit of information is helpful to the customer. So that's a huge bonus to have that available to us.
If the Blume website suddenly went away, there would be no way of pulling up information that would be needed.
As we continue to grow, we're looking towards the future. We continue to invest in the new technology that comes with that. I think that's going to continue to help us bring a lot of value and really concentrate on, again, concentrating on that customer and what their expectations are. Customer service is number one. At the end of the day, we're here to satisfy the needs of the customer.
The seed that started this program, I have to say, takes us back to our European roots. So in Europe, apprenticeship programs are really popular, and our CEO is German and actually was an apprentice himself. And when the opportunity came up with HCC to create an apprenticeship for freight forwarding, it was very interesting to him and to the executive team. Also, when we learned of their partnership with CargoWise, that immediately spiked our interest because CargoWise has been a huge investment to our operations. It's been a wonderful partnership and has really propelled us from where we were six, seven years ago to who we are today.
When a company like Fracht wants to embark on an apprenticeship, we sit down, we have a discussion. We ask, "What kind of education do you want your folks to learn? What kind of industry certifications do you want them to have?" And then we demonstrated what we have in class inventory and the current two-year degree. And then they developed and helped us build the International Freight Forwarding two-year degree.
This is very new for us. It's new for the U.S. to create the first apprenticeship freight forwarding program registered by the Department of Labor at the U.S. government. So the first six months have really been foundational, learning the basics of what we do, starting in CargoWise at an operational level.
The apprentices use CargoWise every single day. We send them stuff we need to update in the system or things for them to go track in the system. They know how to use all of the filters and the customized columns, and we kind of taught them all the ins and outs, at least of the part of CargoWise we use when it comes to the shipments and the consolidations.
This program is a combination of the classroom learning and hands-on training here at Fracht.
Working in a workplace is completely different than reading a book or having a teacher kind of tell you how it works. Doing it yourself and actually getting hands-on with the work, it's a million times more beneficial.
First of all, it was a little bit challenging how to use the CargoWise, but now I feel more comfortable, and I'm holding a CargoWise specialist certificate.
Having the CargoWise certifications gives me a leg up ahead of anybody else just because I'm familiar with the application.
They completely are enthralled that they got a certification out of an academic class, that they can actually go now and apply for those jobs in the workplace.
By the time an apprentice finishes our program, they will have learned ocean, air, import, export, project forwarding. They will have sat with our marketing team, our IT team, our finance team, our customer service team. They are getting a very well-rounded experience to what it means to work at a freight forwarder.
This journey has been life-changing for me. It's been incredible. I've met great people here. All this helped us to get all this knowledge and the skills we need for the industry. I do feel more confident about my career.
What's been really interesting is to see how the apprenticeship program has given back to Fracht. I find that the leaders are really inspired to teach and give back to a new generation to show these apprentices how interesting a career in logistics could be. The apprenticeship really gives them the opportunity to discover what their passion is. And once they discover what their passion is, we are happy to fuel that passion and opens up the opportunity to build an employee and collaborate with an employee on their future for decades to come, hopefully.
My name is Nicolette Genis. I am the Corporate Support Manager at SEKO. I am kind of the front line of any questions, training, problems, issues, the go-to. Getting everyone certified into CargoWise was one of our big goals. We were pushing for every branch that has five or more loggable users to have at least one person at second-level CCS certification. Everybody else achieves CCO.
Part of the driver for incentivizing people to get CargoWise certified was to really have a lot more expertise at the local level. Having them have that knowledge would help them support themselves or respond quicker to support their clients, standardize our processes, improve productivity. So that was one of the drivers, but also, and we do get top-tiered service with the CCLP, so a lot of those things really helped us incentivize people to do that. I think a lot of people were able to find the time within their regular workday to get it done.
The neatest thing was the aha moments. It was like, "Oh, I didn't know I could just click this box and preview an EDOC without having to double-click and open the EDOC." And it's nice to get that feedback. There were a few that did reach out and say, "I'm glad you guys made me do this because this is so much easier, and now I know why you're asking me about that in order to accomplish building a good organization.
The reaction from the staff was they were excited to have that CargoWise certification. We have a lot of people that actually put that in their email signature. It's something that we also told people, "Hey, you know, if you leave CECO, we don't want you to, but if you do, you have that as a certification on your resume that you can take anywhere." So I think people were very proud of that once they did have that certification.
After more of the certifications were coming in and coming in, the questions change in our ticket system or somebody sending you a Teams message. So they get more detailed, and there's more comparison. "Oh, hey, yesterday I could do this, and now today I can't. Did something change within the system?
People think a little more clearer before they came to us and asked for support, where they were able to kind of check a couple different boxes off. "Well, hey, I looked at this. I looked at this. I'm still stuck. I'm going to contact corporate for support." But it did open their thought process before they came to us for support.
Knowledge is power. Just knowing that you're a little bit more well-versed in the different aspects and the different modules within CargoWise, I think helps you to understand how the system works and then how you can kind of blend that all together. So when we bring on another module and say, "Hey, we're going to start using transport bookings," you've got an idea because you've seen it in the training, and you see how that organization affects this module differently than that module, and those relationships and building that really good organization really plays a huge role in either being successful or not so successful.
Pushing our team to get CargoWise certified, improving our workflow, standardizing our operations from a global perspective, is only going to help us be more productive, be able to take on more volume, more clients, and be able to continue to grow as a company.
In my opinion, LaserShip is different from the other competitors. It's always growing, and we have a lot of volume. We are trying to be more flexible. We keep focus on the client and keep focus.
Are we good? All right. Good afternoon, everybody. We're going to get started on our next session for the afternoon. If you don't mind taking your seats, and we'll get started in about 30 seconds. Thank you. Great.
Thank you, everybody. My name is Katrina Johnson. I am the Group Company Secretary and Head of Regulatory Affairs here at WiseTech. In my role, I get to work very closely with our board and in particular with our independent directors. So it's a real pleasure for me to be able to introduce them for our next session today. We have Andrew Harrison, our Lead Independent Director, also Chair of our Audit and Risk Committee and Chair of our Nominations Committee. We have Rob Castaneda, an Independent Non-Executive Director.
We have Sandra Hook, who is the Chair of our People and Remuneration Committee, as well as being an independent non-executive director, and of course, Chris Charlton as well. And we had Rob and Sandra and Chris join us this year. Andrew rejoining the board earlier this year. Before I joined WiseTech almost six years ago, I spent close to 20 years working in some pretty disruptive, innovative, high-growth tech companies, places such as Uber, PayPal, eBay, and StubHub. And I also had the opportunity to serve as a non-executive director myself on a couple of ASX-listed technology company boards. And those experiences, both on the executive side as well as being a board member myself, have given me some direct perspectives and insights on the unique responsibilities and roles that non-executive directors have in these sorts of environments of high-growth, transformative, disruptive companies.
And the particular skill sets and depth of experience you have in these environments and the challenges you're solving, the problems we're trying to address, the scale and the pace at which these companies work is often quite different, of course, to, say, more legacy-type business models or traditional, more established businesses where you have a well-worn path to follow. These are companies really doing big, different things at scale and speed. And so for the boards, I think it's even more important that those directors have a really good diversity of skills and experience to bring to the table just to make sure that the board is agile enough and responsive enough to be able to address rapid developments in the environment we operate in, to take advantage of the various opportunities and peer around corners and be swift to move on those.
And when it comes to our particular board members, I think we've got a great range of that diversity of experience and skills and depth from executive experience that our directors have had and also from other board roles that they have as well that they bring to our WiseTech board. So I'm looking forward to hearing a little bit more about that in this session. We're going to start with you, Andrew. Obviously, you had a very extensive executive career before becoming a director and very deep financial experience being CFO at Seven Group, for example. You obviously have some very strong corporate governance experience as well from your various board roles you've had. But in addition to that, on our board, you bring that really deep understanding of WiseTech. You've served now for almost 10 years in total as a board member.
You know where WiseTech's come from, where it's going to, its people and products. You had retired from the board last year in March as our board chair, but did return. What were your reasons for coming back to the board this year?
Well, thanks, Katrina, and it's great to see so many of you here today, a number of whom I've met with some of the engagement I've had recently, but well, coming back to WiseTech was a relatively straightforward decision for me. I joined the business as a director pre-IPO and went through the IPO and had many years of success with the business, and obviously, with the events of late last year and early this year, there's a period of considerable change and disruption.
And I thought on being asked by Richard and Charles Gibbon, who's here today, it's great to see Charles, if I would consider returning, I didn't hesitate. I've got a huge regard for the company and felt I could add something perhaps in rebuilding the board and also bringing some of my experience that I've had over the past 10 years to bear. So that's what I've been trying to do.
Thanks, Andrew. And I know one of your key priorities in rejoining has also been to assist on the board renewal program that WiseTech's been undertaking this year. And to that end, the board has just announced an additional appointment of Raelene Murphy, who'll be joining the board as an additional independent non-executive director from the 1st of January. Andrew, could you tell us a little bit more about Raelene and what you think she's going to be bringing to the board when she joins, and particularly as the board continues its evolution and the reforming that you're conducting, and maybe touching a little bit on her particular governance expertise as an experienced ASX company director?
No, we're very pleased that Raelene's agreed to join the board. She was sort of the last of the specific profiles we were looking for, which is someone with a financial and accounting background and capable of contributing and potentially further on down the track leading an audit committee. So a number of you in the room would know her from her other directorships. Probably most relevant to us was she was on the Altium board for many years where she led the audit committee. She's led the audit committee on a number of other listed businesses as well. She's a very strong character. She's highly experienced, and I think she's going to make a strong contribution.
Great. Thank you, Andrew. Now, Chris, you bring some very rich experience from industry to the board table at WiseTech. You've got over 35 years of global logistics expertise across international trade and customs. You also spent over 25 years of those at UPS in senior executive roles, and that's obviously one of our very valued customers at WiseTech. In addition, you've got a lot of industry governance expertise from that experience. You've served in a number of different capacities. You're a licensed Australian customs broker. You've served the World Customs Organization. You've been on the National Consultative Committee for Australian Border Force, the Advisory Board for Singapore Customs, and serving on the Executive Committee and Secretariat for the Conference of Asia-Pacific Express Carriers. So a lot of regulatory and governance expertise there.
What made you decide to join the board, and what do you think you can bring uniquely to the board environment, drawing on your experience in those spaces?
Yeah, thanks, Katrina, and good afternoon, everyone. I had a uniquely different experience as I came from industry. So I understood what WiseTech could bring, and also as a customer at UPS, as you talked about. I think that I truly understand the unique value that WiseTech and also CargoWise brings to the industry, as well as the head of customer experience and getting ahead of the curves. You've heard Richard and Zubin talk about today in relation to what customers need, and sometimes don't even know they need, is what they can bring to the table. Joining the board, I was really, really, really excited, as I believe that I could support the board and the company in relation to bringing the customer's lens, understanding what the industry's looking for, and obviously also bring my depth of experience from overseas as well.
Coupled with that, I think that my 11 years that I spent living in Singapore and working across Asia brings not only a different perspective but also helps the board from a global perspective in relation to different aspects. I think that, coupled with my industry experiences on industry bodies, brings regulatory compliance as well as some other areas of customs affairs and that sort of areas that can actually support the board as we look for diversification of different perspectives.
Thanks, Chris. And on regulatory compliance, I think if anyone understands the complexity involved in international trade and logistics, it's you. You've obviously seen a lot of change in this space and some of the increased burdens that logistics service providers are facing. What do you think are some of the really key developments you've seen in more recent years, perhaps, and how do you think those could impact on WiseTech and our ability to serve our customers?
Yeah, absolutely. You've heard today of all the different complexities that are in logistics. It's not just one area. It's across the entire supply chain. And that complexity is getting deeper. It's also getting faster, and it's getting definitely much more and more complex. From that, I think it's the ability of the system as well as the company to deliver it. There are not many companies, if any, that are out there that have the depth and breadth to be able to execute the changes that governments are making fast and accurate and deliver that confidence to their customers and also their customer's customer. And I brought this paper up here so I got this right, okay?
When you talk about, if we talk about what Adam and Anthony were talking about from E2open before, he used a number that I don't know if you recall, but it was 73.8 million updates per annum. 73.8 million updates. Now, if you're in the logistics system and you're lucky enough to get six hours' sleep, from the time you went to bed to the time you woke up, that's 50,000 changes that would have occurred overnight. So the complexity, and that's what CargoWise brings into this space, is it brings all that complexity and makes it easier for the customers to be more compliant.
Very well said, Chris.
Thank you.
Sandra, turning to you now, you obviously have a real wealth of experience in your executive career as well, in addition to your board roles that you have in other companies. But in your executive career, you served in some very senior roles, including CEO, COO, GM, and marketing director in divisions of leading media organizations like Foxtel, Fairfax, and News Limited. You've worked across very dynamic fields of media, technology, services, communications. And I think the time that you spent in some of these organizations were marked by profound disruption. A lot of change management was required. And I'm keen to hear a little bit more about how your direct experience in leading through change and leading through digital disruption in particular helped inform the way you think about WiseTech and some of the opportunities that lie ahead for us as well.
Thank you, Katrina. I don't know whether it's one of the features of my career that I keep working in industries that are deeply disrupted, but it seems to be something that I'm terribly attracted to. But my very first, very first industry I worked in was the music industry, which we haven't even mentioned. And of all the industries that were deeply disrupted, that was a definite early in. And I think it really, all of these industries, including print, magazines, television, and finally working in digital businesses myself, the fact that they were so heavily disrupted embedded a really deep mark on the way I approach business and what I like to bring to business.
When I had the opportunity to run a business as a CEO and a managing director, I was all in on innovation and change and ensuring that we had an agile organization that could stay abreast of the times. I did a lot of transformation work when I was at News Limited, and I've subsequently made sure that that translates into my professional career as a director. One of the things that I'm really delighted, one of the reasons why I'm absolutely delighted to be working with WiseTech, is that this is a company where innovation is deeply embedded in the very soul of the organization. Having worked in organizations where you have to work very hard through the change management piece, we've spoken a lot about the change management piece this afternoon and how difficult that can be.
The fact is it is difficult, but it is so essentially necessary in order to move businesses forward for the new commercial models that all businesses are pursuing currently. So I'm finding this deeply satisfying. WiseTech is, as we all know, an Australian organization of great global scale. It has a big tech moat. It is focused on executional excellence, and it's got innovation embedded in its very heart. And this very much aligns with where I like to work and what I like to bring to organizations.
That's great, and marrying that executive experience with some of the things WiseTech's working on is fantastic, and it's also wonderful to see you bring your corporate governance expertise as well, Sandra, in addition to that executive insight that you bring. I think serving on other boards, you've served as a PRC chair in other organizations. How do you like to bring your corporate governance skill set and depth to the WiseTech board?
Yeah. I mean, I've served as PRC Chair for practically all the boards that I've sat on over the last 12 or 13 years, and I think that's because I'm a deeply people-focused person. I've always worked in businesses that have been driven by people. Great companies are driven by great strategies that employ great people to do wonderful things, and I think this is, again, very, very true of WiseTech, so for me, I like to think that my style is very supportive of management, but also constructively questioning and curious and critical where it needs to be. What I have found is that I've spent quite a bit of time with senior leaders in the organization.
And not only is there a wealth of talent in this business and people who genuinely and deeply know their stuff, but they also care about the organization, and they're very transparent and frank about the organization. So as well, I might add, as being quite collaborative. There's a lot to do at WiseTech, and everyone's on that journey and very aligned. I have to throw to Zubin and say one of the things I've also really enjoyed is the fact that getting clarity around strategy is really important. And that's one of the things we talk about at board level often. And Zubin has spent a lot of time making sure and ensuring that those big rocks are implanted in the business and that the message is carried frequently and with clarity.
That really aligns with where the Board's thinking about strategy and embedding, just making sure that we're delivering. I guess that's a little bit about how I think about my contribution at Board level.
Great. Thank you, Sandra, and as the Chair of the PRC, you touched on some of that collaboration with management. How do you ensure that you're getting the right level of information and accessibility to management in order to get the information you need as a director?
Look, from a PRC point of view and also on behalf of the whole board, we work closely with management to make sure that we get all of what you would expect to see in terms of the typical information that's thrown up and through the organization. So we're looking at detail about everything from our EAPs through to our diversity metrics through to the organizational churn and how well we're managing that. I have to say it's a pretty sticky organization. People seem to love working at WiseTech and stay here for a long time. As well, from a director's point of view, we have access to some of the best advisors and consultants. We make sure that there's regular director education.
so we're very well apprised, and across our directors' duties, we have detailed conversations about all of the things that you would expect us to be having conversations about: workplace safety, psychosocial health of our staff, and just regular check-ins on the culture that we get through the various mechanisms and surveys within the organization.
Great. Thank you, Sandra. Now, Rob, you are a successful tech founder yourself. You're living in the heart of Silicon Valley, a very exciting place to be for anyone in technology. You get to work closely with co-founders of other large, successful companies like Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar at Atlassian, of course, our own Richard and Marie, our co-founders as well. As an entrepreneur and as an innovator living and breathing tech, what do you think WiseTech needs to be focused on in the near term, and how do you think we're tracking against that?
Well, so thanks for having me. I think if you look at WiseTech, this is a 100-year-plus business. The opportunity that's in front of us isn't ASX. It's the world and not just Australia. We are number one. And the opportunity, if you look forward for the role that the business can play in life, in not just saying we're going to be good for the world, but CTO and what it reduces in terms of just human waste and so forth. So what I love about this company is that it's product-driven at its core. Zubin's depth of knowledge, detail, both of the business side and technical side, is really good. For me, I love working in technology, but the core thing of that is just doing it properly and not just rushing something out the door. In the Valley, so I'm Australian. I live in Palo Alto.
are kinds of categories of companies that are trying to. Some companies are just trying to catch a wave and be a venture, and others are building something to last, building something that's going to last a century or more. WiseTech is one of those businesses. With that, there's a unique balance of creativity, tenacity to solve a problem that hasn't been solved before. Also, for me, it's also looking at what does long-term succession look like, again, building that properly and making sure that we're putting all of the energy in the right place behind it, so.
Rob, you are our first director on the board who is based outside of Australia. I think that gives a really great international perspective that you bring to the boardroom discussions as well. How does your experience as being outside of Australia sort of shape how you think about WiseTech's place in the global landscape, the global tech community?
Yeah. I think in general, I think there are 1,400 WiseTech employees in the U.S. now. So it's quite sizable. The size of the market there is gigantic. And for us, it's thinking about growth at a global level and bringing that thinking. And I think Silicon Valley, as well as being a place, it's more of a mindset and keeping that product-first drive. And we have the core of that here, supporting our people. I work day in, day out. I fly tomorrow for a weekend migration with one of the largest companies in the world doing some hands-on stuff.
That's huge.
And that energy of just getting in there and doing stuff like that, that is here. And it's keeping our thinking not limited by maybe some of the local pressures that are there, so. But it's an exciting business to be part of. There is a lot to learn, and I'm excited for the journey, so.
Fabulous. Fabulous. Thank you, Rob. And then coming back to you, Andrew, just a final couple of questions for you. You're obviously the Lead Independent Director. This is a role that the board has deliberately created. That's a function of having an Executive Chair in Richard. Could you just maybe talk briefly about the role itself? How is that different from Richard's role as Executive Chair? And what sort of things are you responsible for as the Lead Independent?
Yeah. Thanks. It actually divides up fairly neatly. We have amended the board charter for those that are interested in documents. That is on the website, and you'll see the role and its formal duties sort of set out there. But I think in a nutshell, I focus on more what could generally be called governance-type issues. So there are many, many compliance things that we need to make sure we turn our mind to appropriately. So that is very much in my domain, as is a lot of the meat and potatoes about organizing the way the board goes about its business, its agenda, liaising with your good self, Katrina, and my fellow independents here. So it's working well. Richard and I work very constructively together.
It feels, I've said to many I've met before, it doesn't feel a long way from when I was an independent chair a few years ago, and I think that balance seems to be working quite well for us.
Great. And then finally, looking ahead over the next 12 months, what do you think are some of the key priorities for the board?
For a board, we've got a few things. The first is we want to continue along this board renewal process. Raelene will be joining us in January. We'll have, I expect, hopefully shortly thereafter or in the near future, at least one more new appointment, another independent director from there. The second is the succession planning more generally in the business, which Rob touched on. Obviously, Zubin's doing a great job. There are a number of other senior positions which we're in the process of filling at the moment. The board will take a close interest in that. The E2open integration, which Mark and the team spoke about earlier, obviously is a major focus for us as a board. We're very mindful of delivering forecasts for this year after last year's experience.
So the board and the whole team and the company are very mindful of delivering on that forecast. And then finally, we'll be doing our regular stuff as a board. So we've come down, I think as a team, we're working well together. The guys have come on very, very quickly, and we've got all the normal things one would expect to do as a board rolling forward. So that will keep us busy, I suspect.
Indeed. Indeed. And I certainly appreciate the opportunity to work with each of you. It's been a wonderful experience from the management side as well. With that, please join me in thanking Andrew, Rob, Sandra, and Chris for sharing their insights today.
Thank you.
And if anybody would like to stick around afterwards, they will be generously sticking around if you'd like to introduce yourself and ask them any questions. But now I'd like to invite Richard up to the stage to give some closing remarks. Thanks.
Okay. Well, thank you all so much for joining us today. I'd like to take a moment to reflect on the journey that brought us here, a journey that began more than 30 years ago in a small basement in Newtown, 41 Well Street, Newtown, in fact, with my co-founder, Maree, in a basement that I dug myself and a credit card with AUD 5,000 on it and a very simple idea to build a better software solution for Australian freight forwarders, probably for Sydney-based freight forwarders really at the beginning because that's all I had as customers. Back then, our focus was narrow, but the ambition was pretty big. We were solving real problems for real people. I had a very good relationship with a number of very generous Australian freight forwarders that wanted to do something, wanted to help me, help them.
Helping freight forwarders operate more efficiently in a tough and rapidly changing industry is a big thing, and as the value that we were providing expanded, our penetration across Australia and New Zealand grew. It grew very powerfully. It became clear that the challenges we were solving weren't just local ones. They were really global. If we wanted to truly move the industry, we needed to think bigger, much bigger, and frankly, we kind of ran out of customers in Australia because it's a small country relative to the world. It took a few years and a lot of conversations with customers and a lot of research and a lot of thinking, and with our partners and with our customers, the vision became clear. We wanted to build the operating system for global logistics. I didn't really have those words in my mind, but they crystallized shortly after that.
This is not a tool, not a piece of software, not a module. It's a global platform that addresses the root causes of inefficiency, fragmentation, and complexity across the global logistics chain. The principle of finding the root cause or the deep core conflict and solving for that has always been the driving force behind WiseTech and what we build in software products. It shapes every decision, every innovation, and every move we've made, and as we've expanded beyond freight forwarding and into customs, we saw how much value could come from bringing in the business with deep experience, deep knowledge, and incredible talent. Acquisitions weren't just about scale, in fact. They were about accelerating our ability to solve complex problems across the world in multiple languages, in multiple countries, in multiple jurisdictions, with people who'd lived and breathed those problems and those solutions for decades.
That blend of organic innovation and strategic acquisitions has made us stronger and more capable and certainly more global. From those early days, as a team of five people in the basement in Newtown, we are now over 7,000 deeply talented, passionate problem solvers around the world, everyone contributing to something significantly bigger than any of us could have built alone. And I can honestly say that the scale that we've become is far beyond anything that I imagined when we started. Today, with the addition of E2open and the incredibly complex challenges that exist across the global supply chain, there is no team better equipped, no business with more depth than to take on or deliver our expanded vision to be the operating system for global trade and logistics. That journey hasn't been without friction. It is certainly not today or any other day we haven't had friction.
Innovation moves fast. Industries don't always keep the same pace, especially one as old as international trade, arguably one of the foundations of civilization. Change can be uncomfortable, as we all know. But our role, indeed, our obligation has always been to push forward, to solve industry-wide challenges, to drive transformation, and to create genuine, lasting value across the global supply chain and the logistics chain. We're not selling software. We're enabling productivity, scalability, and risk reduction, leading to better business outcomes. We're actually selling business success. What you've seen today from the team is the continuation of that commitment. And it's exactly what you will continue to see from us in the months and years ahead. I'm incredibly proud of what WiseTech has achieved.
I'm proud of our innovations and of the people who drive the great global business they are at the heart of and the brilliance behind everything we do. I feel truly privileged to be part of a global business and an industry that plays such an essential and positive role in the world, an industry that keeps economies moving, keeps product flowing, and connects peoples, communities, and businesses everywhere in the world. Judah mentioned the invisible hand of economics. It's there every day. Thank you. Thank you for listening to us today. Thank you for being here today. Thank you for the belief in your partnership and for joining us today. The journey continues. And whilst we have some big wins, there is still much to do. And the best is still to come. Thank you.
Thanks, Richard. Thank you, everyone. What a fantastic day.
I want to offer you a genuine and heartfelt thank you to all our presenters, our board, our leaders, and the incredible teams behind the scenes who made today really possible. Their preparation, their commitment, and their passion for what we're building is extraordinary. And I'm deeply grateful for the work that they all do every single day. And to all of you, whether you joined us here in Sydney or tuned in online, thank you. Your engagement, your questions, your continued support mean a great deal to us. And we don't take it for granted. Today was about giving you a clear, honest view of the work that we are doing, how we're integrating E2open, how we're evolving our product strategy, how AI and optimization are accelerating our progress, and how our people are driving real outcomes across this business.
I hope you leave with a strong sense of the scale of our ambition, the discipline behind our execution, and the meaningful opportunity ahead for WiseTech. As I said at the start, this is a company built on product, powered by people, and positioned for growth across the entire supply chain. Everything you heard today reinforces the momentum we're building and the confidence we have in the path ahead. We are in the business of selling success. We sell productivity. We sell innovation. And we give our customers the capability to become truly remarkable businesses. We are not just a software vendor. We are a catalyst for value creation and growth. So let me close with the three key messages I mentioned I hoped you'd walk away with today. We innovate deeply. We execute relentlessly. And we hold the strongest trade data asset in the industry.
That combination is rare, powerful, and positions us for everything that comes next. For those here with us in Sydney, please stay, meet our teams, and spend time with the people who make this company what it is. For those online, thank you again for being part of today. On behalf of all of us at WiseTech, thank you for your time, your trust, and your partnership. We're very excited for what comes next. Thank you.