A very warm welcome to everyone today for EROAD's interim results for the period ending 30 September 2023. I've got Margaret Warrington today with me today, our CFO, and it's my pleasure to take you through EROAD's interim results. If we turn to our agenda, there's a bit of housekeeping to talk about just at the start. I cannot see you, unfortunately, but you can ask questions of me. There's a chat bubble, I believe, on the top right-hand side of your screen. Please use it to ask questions of Margaret and me during the course of the presentation, and we'll take them at the end. We'll then go through now, shortly, our results for the half year. So we'll start off with our financial and operational results.
We'll then move to our results around our strategy and how we're performing against that, and then we'll touch on our guidance and our outlook. So now for the good news. If you look at our results for the first half of the year, we're incredibly proud of how we performed. It's been underpinned by relentless discipline on solid discipline around financial management and strategic execution. If you look at the top left-hand side of your screen, you'll see that our reported revenue went up by about 13% to NZD 88.9 million. In the center of the screen, you'll see that our normalized EBIT improved from a loss of NZD 3.4 million for the first half of last financial year, to a profit of NZD 1.9 million for this financial year.
When it comes to free cash flow, we're really proud about how we performed during the course of the last half of the year. In the first half of FY 2023, our free cash flow was negative NZD 27.1 million, and for this half year, it's down to only NZD 200 thousand. In addition to that, our cash burn has reduced from NZD 4.1 million per month, the first half of last financial year, to NZD 900 thousand a month for this financial year. We are largely through our cost out program as well. So as you recall, we've targeted NZD 10 million of annualized cost out this financial year, and that's on top of the cost out for last financial year.
We're already NZD 8.5 million through this, and we are targeting the next NZD 1.5 million over the next six months. First, I want to call out on this slide, is our performance in North America. I'm really proud to announce how we've passed 100,000 unit connection growth in North America for the first half of the year. That is a massive proof point in terms of EROAD's ability to scale and to provide services to marquee customers in North America, particularly when some of them are the leading Fortune 500 companies in that market. If you look at our normalized revenue growth, over the course of the last 12 months, it's increased by about 11.7% off the back of increases in...
So 13% off the back of 11% increase in connected units, as well as stable foreign exchange rates. For the half year, we have around almost 16,000 net new connections that we added to the business, over half of which were based in the North American market. If you look at EROAD and our positive momentum that we are currently building, there are four key factors I'd like to talk to today. Two of them are based on our strong foundation. The first one being the fact that we are in three complementary markets. If you look at New Zealand, New Zealand is a strong cash-generating market for our business. We've had to go wide in this market, and we have a leading platform servicing a range of customers from a range of industries.
We focus very much on health and safety and sustainability, and we see future opportunities growing in the future. We do not see a ceiling yet on our ability to grow. When we look at North America, we're investing in our future high-growth market here. North America is 15 times larger than the Aussie and New Zealand markets combined. We're focusing on our niches in this market, and as you've seen today, we are also winning customers there and progressing well. Finally, our Australian business. There are two approaches that we take into the Australian business. First is we try to capitalize off the back of our Trans-Tasman fleets. So typically, these fleets may have EROAD already in their business, and they're attracted to using us in Australia, and so we focus on them.
Secondly, we like to capitalize on our investment in North America and bringing new products and functionality down into the Australian market. As you'll see today, we've had successes off the back of our refrigeration and our construction products. The next strong foundation that we have is intelligence and sustainability. In the course of the last half year, we've been launching new products around sustainability, and we're committed to investing this into the future. We see a real growth with our customers and demand for these solutions, and we look forward to continuing to grow in this space. In addition to our strong foundations, we also are relentlessly focused on executing on our strategy, and there are two key limbs to this. First is about profitable growth at scale, and in this regard, Sysco is a clear proof point of that.
By bringing Sysco on, it helps build a scale-up in the North American market. It also means we're more agile as we bring them on to target other large enterprise accounts in North America. We've also, during this half year, have been able to win with eight key enterprise customers or renew them for almost 10,000 connections. And as I've talked about before, we are well on the journey towards having our NZD 20 million cost out on an annualized basis by the end of this financial year. We're also really focused on being free cash flow positive, and I'd like to confirm today that we believe that we'll be consistently free cash flow positive by the latter part of calendar year 2024. This is driven off the back of new customer wins, inflation indexation, and really strong cost control.
If it were not for our 4G upgrade program, EROAD would be free cash flow positive right here today. If we turn to our operational overview, EROAD is very much focused, as I talk about, on sustainable, profitable growth. To this end, in the course of half year, we did increase our pricing in the New Zealand market and also in Australia for a vast majority of our customers by around 6%. In North America, we uplifted our pricing by around 3%, and that was also looking at the value of our product and the strength that our customers get out of that, believe we've justified those price increases. Also, during the course of this half year, we had a capital raise, and in addition to that, we renegotiated and extended our banking facility. That gives our customers and also our shareholders certainty.
One, around the liquidity. We have close to $60 million that we can use to fund additional growth, particularly in North America. And two, we have certainty that we can reach our free cash flow positive stage without having to raise further capital from the market. We are winning, retaining, and expanding with our enterprise customers. We stand by this objective and we believe we're delivering on this. For example, during the course of the half year, we won Programmed, sort of a labor hire company in Australia for around 3,000 connections on a 5-year contract. In addition to that, we renewed our contract with NZ Bus's owner, Kinetic, for the 1,950 connections we already had. It also grew it by additional a 1,000 connections. And equally, we renewed our contract with Boral, the largest construction manufacturer in Australia.
Off the back of that, we've added 1,300 units on top of the 1,900 units we already have with them. Enterprise customers represent real value to EROAD, and it happens in four ways. First, when we win an enterprise customer, it then piques the interest of other competitors to that customer in the market, as they can see that EROAD can provide a strong solution to their competitor, and it begets conversations with them around opportunities to grow. Secondly, we do renew our enterprise customers more so than our other customer base, and that's off the back of our strong product offering that we provide them. As we renew, we typically increase our profitability over the long term. Three, when we do renew our customers, we typically upgrade them to new services and solutions and look to achieve a price lift - uplift off the back of that.
And finally, enterprise customers grow. They're large companies, and they typically acquire other companies or they increase the number of assets in their fleet, and we typically grow quite significantly off the back of that growth as well. Now, in terms of report card, this is one I'm particularly happy to talk to you about. As you may recall, in March of this year, with our results, with our Investor Day, we did set out our reporting card around the key metrics that you need to hold us accountable to. And there are two key metrics here I'd like to talk about. First is our annualized monthly recurring revenue.
That has grown over the course of the last six months by around 10% to NZD 169 million, and just shy of the 11%-13% growth we have targeted for this metric by FY 2026. In addition to that, as you can see, we're incredibly focused on our free cash flow margin, and six months ago that was -18%. It is now currently neutral. Now, we are still going through our 4G upgrade program in New Zealand, which will mean there'll be further investment into inventory over the course of this half year. So we'll not be free cash flow neutral for this financial year. However, I can confirm that at this point next year we will be free cash flow positive on a consistent basis.
Over these three slides, I'll talk about our performances in each of our regions, starting with New Zealand. Typically, we grow each year in New Zealand by between 9,000 and 10,000 connections, and we're bang on target for this half year at over 5,000 connections. Our asset retention rate is slightly lower than we've seen prior, and that's driven off the back of the 4G upgrade program that we're currently going through. As we switch out these units, some of our customers are testing other products out there in the market. However, I'd like to say we are significantly renewing a vast majority of our customers in that space. Those who we typically churn are looking for a lower priced product and more basic functionality than what EROAD offers in this market.
And finally, we grew our EBITDA by almost 15%, by NZD 28 million in this market for the year. If we look at North America, in this market, we've grown our net new units by about 8,000 during the first half of the year, and our gross units increased by around 13,000. Now, a large amount of that was driven off the Sysco win that we had and the rollout that we're having with them right now. In addition to those initial units that we contracted Sysco for, we've also supplied them with an additional 1,400 units, which aren't necessarily counted in these numbers, as they continue to grow and seek further solutions from us.
If you look at our asset retention rate, that's hovering around consistently at just around the 94% mark, and where we are churning, that's typically in the small to medium business customer base. These customers are more price sensitive and looking for more basic offerings to the type of solution that EROAD offers in this market. In the half year, we grew our EBITDA by about 25% to NZD 16 million. Turning to Australia. It's been a record organic growth year for our Australian market, with growth of over 2,000 connections in this market. As I touched on before, that's off the back of the two key strategies we run in North America. One is targeting Trans-Tasman fleets and the winnings we have there.
Another is sort of targeting construction and refrigeration customers using our technology that we bring down from the North American market. We have renewed confidence around our success in Australia, and we look forward to be able to capitalize on further enterprise wins going forward. We also have an incredibly high asset retention rate of over 97% in this market. I might now pass to Margaret to talk a bit about financials.
Thanks, Mark. All of our half year results are tracking in line with the full year guidance we provided earlier this year. As you can see from the first two graphs, good revenue growth, combined with tight control of our operating costs, has delivered an improved EBIT position. Our normalized EBIT is NZD 1.9 million profit for the six months, up from a loss in the same period of NZD 3.4 million last year. We expect this to continue, and we are confident we'll achieve our target guidance range of NZD 0-NZD 5 million. We've already implemented work programs that will realize the NZD 8.5 million Mark referenced earlier, and we're confident that we'll deliver the remaining NZD 1.5 million of our NZD 10 million savings target this year.
That's in addition to the $10 million cost out we took in the last fiscal year. As part of our cost review, we've been focused on obtaining efficiencies in our operational costs. You can see we're achieving that goal across two main categories: cost to acquire and cost to support our customers. Cost to acquire per unit, which is shown in the center graph, demonstrates the impact of the lag between incurring costs and revenue being realized. This is particularly evident for our enterprise customers. Cost to acquire for these customers is significantly higher, particularly where there are integrations required, and so we experience a lead with the cost up front and a lag as the matching revenue occurs once the units start to roll out.
Cost to support in our more mature ANZ market has reduced, while in North America we are investing in our teams to support customers such as Sysco and other customer growth in that developing region. This slide demonstrates that we're holding our costs flat while we're continuing to grow. On operating costs, it's almost all areas that have reduced as a percentage of revenue when comparing to the same time last year. That's demonstrated with the graph on the left. The graph on the right shows how operating costs have reduced NZD 1.3 million when compared to the same prior period. This reflects the benefits of the cost out program, which has enabled us to fund inflationary pressure, as well as support our growth and the 4G upgrade program. The largest change is our cost of sales, which has grown NZD 1.6 million.
This aligns to the increase in our unit base. As revenue grows, cost of sales moves with it. Our guidance for R&D in the current financial year was approximately NZD 30 million, or about 16%-17% of our revenue, our full year revenue. As you can see, we're right on track. Our current spend is NZD 14.7 million, and that equates to 17% of our revenue for half year. This graph shows R&D growing through FY 2022 and peaking into FY 2023. That reflects the period EROAD invested in integration following the merger with Coretex. A combination of the cost out program, completion of that integration, and a focus on return on investment sees our overall R&D spend reduce, along with a reduction in the proportion that is capitalized. Mark used the word relentlessly a couple of times in his upfront.
I'm about to use it again. We have been relentlessly focused on cash for the last 18 months, and that's not just Mark and I, that's everybody at EROAD. That's seen our free cash flow improve by more than NZD 30 million during that timeframe, from negative NZD 30.5 million to negative NZD 200,000. Compared to the same time last year, cash flows from operations have more than doubled from NZD 8.3 million to NZD 20.7 million. Our average monthly cash burn continues to reduce. At the AGM, we noted the average monthly cash burn was NZD 1 million per month for Q1. This is further reduced during Q2 and reduces the average for the half year to NZD 900,000 per month, in spite of increasing interest costs.
Importantly, based on our forecast and assumptions, as Mark mentioned, we expect to be free cash flow positive about this time next year. As noted on the slide, EROAD would be free cash flow positive today, but for the 4G hardware upgrade program across ANZ, which requires us to replace more than 80,000 units. That program has benefited from the previous inventory build we've talked about. Having exhausted most of that stock, we will see a larger cash investment and inventory required to support this accelerated program over the second half of this year. In October, we completed our capital raise and secured a new three-year, NZD 80 million bank facility.... These two initiatives have ensured we have a strong balance sheet, which in turn has safeguarded our strategic execution and has provided confidence and certainty in our roadmap.
It has achieved three key things: We de-levered our position, as amortization will reduce the limit of the loan to NZD 60 million at the end of the three-year term. We've safeguarded our debt position by adding another lender, additional duration, and greater flexibility with headrooms for covenants. And delivered the liquidity we need to grow under the right structure without the need for further capital in an ever-tightening credit market. With the shutdown of the 3G network in ANZ, EROAD has embarked on a hardware swap-out program to upgrade the hardware our customers use. In many instances, as Mark mentioned earlier, this enables us to re-sign our customers for additional contract terms and secure future contracted income. The program, internally labeled Sunrise, is progressing well and to plan, with almost half of our 3G units upgraded already.
We are confident in our ability to meet the project timeline, lines, and one of the reasons for that is the pipeline we have. It consists of a further 20% that represents units that are either with customers or installers awaiting installation, or in negotiation with customers regarding timing of their units. As we've noted previously, the majority of our hardware is 2G compatible, and in New Zealand, it will continue to work and fall back to the 2G network once the 3G network is switched off by One NZ in August next year. Our plan in New Zealand sees us upgrade the majority of our devices by the 3G sunset date and well before the sunset of 2G. In Australia, 3G shuts off in June next year, but we're confident in our plans to transition all customers before this time.
Since the expected investment remains within the levels we have previously signaled, although we are expecting to be at the bottom end of the range for the current financial year and the top end of the range for next financial year, we are seeing impacts of the weaker exchange rate with the US dollar. With that, I'll hand back to Mark to talk about our strategy.
Thanks, Margaret. So if you look at our strategy, this half year has all been about delivery. In addition to the cost out program that we have had, we've also been focusing on innovation and building scale. In the innovation side, we've released new products into the market. The first being our refrigerated trailer tracking product, Core Hub X treme, which we've now brought into the Australian market, and we're able to be successful at Woolworths off the back of that product launch. We've also launched our decarbonization tool, which I'll get into a bit more detail very shortly. We've also this half year been focused on building scale, particularly in our North American market, so we've got a strong foundation for growth going forward.
We've been building up our enterprise sales team and recruiting some incredibly experienced people who've worked for competitors and other telematics companies out there to help join our team, to sort of help us in our growth. That includes building our pipeline and helping to convert the pipeline that we have currently before us. If we turn to sustainability, core to our purpose is using intelligence to enable sustainability, and we see a number of customer pressures in this area. We know that in terms of total carbon emissions in New Zealand, 17% of it comes from the transportation sector, and in Australia, 19% of all carbon emissions come from transportation. It's absolutely critical that our customers get insight and guidance to help manage and reduce their carbon emissions, and we're incredibly focused on helping them do so.
It's all the way from helping them understand their fuel usage and idling, all the way through to helping to obtain insurance and managing food, to make sure it doesn't go off and keep that sustainable as part of their operations. I'm really proud to say that we launched, over this half year, two sustainability products. The first relates to our decarbonization tool in New Zealand. This is on the back of our partnership we had with the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, and there are two aspects to that product. First, there is a fleet emissions report that's available to all heavy vehicles in New Zealand, even if not our customers. What that enables them to see is what is their current carbon emission profile and get a better understanding around that.
We've also launched a sustainability module, which allows our customers who currently use our product better insight around their carbon emissions and how they can transition internal combustion engine vehicles into electric vehicles. In addition to that product, we've also been focusing on giving greater guidance to our customers around state of charge. And in both New Zealand and North America, we've released solutions to enable our customers to understand the current state of charge for the electric vehicles, to help manage range anxiety, and to obtain the right vehicle for the routes that they are using. As you may recall, in March of this year, at our Investor Day, we talked about our strategic search for a strategic partner in North America, and there are three key aspects to that search.
We're looking for customers and suppliers who can help us with go-to-market channels, technology partnerships, and also providing possible capital. But we're incredibly focused here on only those areas that we have a competitive advantage in, and that's the large enterprise customers, cold chain, and in construction. I'm really delighted that we've recently announced a couple of key collaborations with both Microsoft and Thermo King, which I'll get into now. ... If you look at this Microsoft collaboration, this is working with Microsoft to enable the use of generative AI to assist development of our cold chain product. Our cold chain product is a leading solution in the U.S. market that has predictive analytics. It understands the state of temperature of goods being carried in refrigerated trailers, and constantly monitors it to provide any alerts if the temperature goes out of range.
Our customers love it, but we want to focus more on it and grow it in North America. Working with Microsoft will help enable us to accelerate product development and broaden its reach into the US market, and it's particularly important given that there are over 400,000 refrigerated trailers in North America. This is just the start of other generative AI programs that we're doing with Microsoft. There's that pipeline of new generation AI products will not just benefit the US market, but also we're bringing it into Australia and also New Zealand. Today, we also announced our partnership with Thermo King. Now, Thermo King is one of the world's largest suppliers of cooling solutions, and our partnership enables us to be able to pull data directly from their vehicles without the need for EROAD to install our hardware in it.
This creates less friction and lower cost in terms of us being able to obtain access to data and visualize on our platform, and again, will help us grow in this vertical of transportation fleets in North America. Now, if I look at each of the three business units that we have in the markets, it's worthwhile going through them in a bit more detail. We have a clear growth plan in all three of our markets, and they all do have synergistic benefits to each other as well. However, each of them are in different phases of the current business cycle. If we look at Australia, we're focused here on our shared cost base in, from New Zealand and our ability to capitalize off the investment we have in products in North America, in both cold chain and also in construction.
As we can see, we are converting on enterprise opportunities there, and we expect to continue to grow there into the future. In New Zealand, we've had to go wide. We're the leading platform for logistics, supply chain, health and safety, sustainability, and compliance for transport fleets in the New Zealand market. We are truly a platform company that has strong economies of scale. Our customers benefit off the use of being on a platform, which enables them to share data with their contractors and their suppliers and other third parties to get the benefit more from EROAD. We have strong growth forecasts for our Australian and New Zealand markets, but ultimately they do have ceilings, although there's a long way to go before we cap out our market growth in both of those markets.
In North America, we're focusing on our future high growth engine, and as I mentioned before, the North American market is 15 times greater than Australian and New Zealand markets combined. Our approach here has to be going deep into the verticals of large enterprise customers, refrigeration, and cold chain, where we have a differentiated offering and competitive advantage. Our current focus is on building scale, and we've now crossed 100,000 unit connection in that market, which represents more than 40% of our business. Working with these large North American customers means that we're at the cutting edge of technology when it comes to telematics and compliance globally. And that means that our roadmap is future-proofed as we invest in new development, which our customers we know they want, both in the U.S. and also in New Zealand and Australia.
We generally believe that the North American expansion is pivotal for us to achieve long-term, enduring value for our shareholders.
With the information provided here, our intention is to provide a more granular view of where we spend our R&D and what we spend it on. The current mix of R&D is designed to support our current customers, target new customers, respond to regulatory changes, and address market needs. While this slide represents what we're currently doing, it does shift around over different period, over different time frames, depending on those needs. Driven by an allocation that primarily reflects the main market that we are building for, the geographical mix currently is 41% for New Zealand, 6% for Australia, and 53% for North America. Given North America is our growth market, we have a significant R&D investment in that area, particularly focused at enterprise customers. We will look to leverage products.
The benefit of our model is that not only once we build it for one market, but we can offer and leverage that and bring it back into one of the other markets as opportunities arise, or both of the other markets. Our R&D investment is not only about new customers, but it's also about retention and growth within our current customer base. That can happen through expansion, through penetration, or through adoption of new products. Historically, approximately 50%-70% of our net new growth has come from existing customers. This means it's important we continue to invest in maintaining our current platforms and addressing those customers' needs. There's a lot of detail on this slide, but it also answers lots of various questions that Mark and I have been answered, asked in our time in these roles.
When looking at the individual markets, it's worth noting the CAGR rates are post-merger, so there's already factored in the acquired unit base. While the Australian CAGR is the highest, it's off a much smaller base and is not really reproducible at scale. The key point is one Mark made earlier. The addressable market opportunity in North America is 15 times larger than our other two markets combined.
Just pause in here. Just a reminder, you can ask questions of Margaret and me for this presentation, so please go to the chat bubble. I think it's on the top right-hand side of your screen. Feel free to ask them, and we'll address them very shortly. So now we turn to our guidance and outlook. We remain on track to deliver sustainable and profitable growth. Our strong results in this half year mean we can reconfirm the guidance that we gave to the market at the beginning of our financial year. We still believe we'll have revenue growth of between 6% and 9% by the end of the financial year, and our cost out program to remove NZD 10 million in annualized costs. We have strong confidence we'll deliver on that before the end of the year.
We're also targeting on our EBITDA to between NZD 0 and NZD 5 million once we normalize it for the 4G switchout program. I'd also like to reconfirm our free cash flow guidance. We do believe we'll be neutral in FY 25 and positive in FY 26. And as we discussed today, we believe that by the latter half of the next year's calendar year, in 2024, we'll be consistently free cash flow positive. If you look at our outlook, in each of the markets, we have positive opportunities developing. First, in New Zealand, we see there'll be continued consistent growth in the New Zealand market. And also, with the new government coming into parliament now, we do believe there's going to be new opportunities around eRUC, particularly for light vehicles. We look forward to working on those opportunities with the government.
When it comes to Australia, we'll build on momentum gained in that market off the back of our enterprise customers. We will continue to launch new products to help target both the current ones and grow off the back of them. In North America, we are focused to grow off the back of our current customers in that market, and as we build our new enterprise and sales marketing team, we'll continue to start focusing on more new customers in the market going forward. I do have a note that when you do target enterprise customers, it can be lumpy at times. But what EROAD is committed to is making sure that we can continue to grow on a consistent basis across all our markets, and we're seeing strong momentum building in each of these.
So to conclude, as you can see, we're relentlessly focused on delivering and on the metrics that we've set for ourselves, and we believe that results will eventually be realized by the market when it comes to our share price. So just pausing there, we'll now turn to questions. I believe, Jason, people have been submitting questions, and I'll be grateful if you could read them out for us.
Thanks, Mark. The first question is, you're targeting free cash flow breakeven in fiscal year FY 2025, during which time you'll be bearing NZD 8 million-NZD 10 million of hardware replacement costs. Can I assume that I would be correct to assume that you would be NZD 8 million-NZD 10 million free cash flow positive in that year, excluding the hardware replacement cost?
Well, I'll just jump in there. The NZD 8 million-NZD 10 million reflects both program costs and hardware costs. So just to be clear on that, so some of it's around internal resources we needed to hire to support that program, along with these installation costs and hardware costs alongside it. Broadly, I would say fair assumption, possibly slightly lower than the total.
The second question is, EROAD is targeting a 9%+ free cash flow margin in FY 2026. Is this after bearing the NZD 5 million-NZD 7 million of hardware replacement cost? Would potentially the underlying free cash flow margin be even higher?
Yes. Yeah. So our forecasting incorporates everything we've indicated in here, and our targets are set off the back of that. So yes, that's included.
On the price uplifts, on slide 11-13, there was a 6% price uplift in July of 2023. Is that a clean 6% across the board for all ANZ units? And as a follow-up, was there any pushback or churn from customers in relation to that uplift?
No. That upsell uplift was applied to the units and customers that we were able to. We do have some customers that are on master services agreements, and we weren't able to adjust those, but the rest of the population, it was applied to. Was there any pushback? Generally, our customers understood in the inflationary times and the fact we hadn't put up prices previously. They got it. They understood why we were doing it. We had, I think, a couple come back to us and challenge it, and as a general principle, most of it went through.
We have also focused going forward, that we will be continuing to look at our pricing uplift to inflation as and when it's appropriate as well, under our contracts.
Thanks. Follow-up question on the segmented customer model. Has it worked as expected? Were there any issue encounters? And are there any cost savings worth noting?
As a part of our turn around the core, we're looking at how we segment our customer base. When you look at it, you know, if our bottom 700–7,600 customers in terms of size only represent around 13% of our revenue. What we're doing there is we're launching what we call our self-service portal. That helps enables them to be able to look at the units, raise questions, get their bills, and so forth... It's in an early adoption phase right now, but we see that it will continue to apply going forward. Customers are relatively used to using their self-service portals. It's pretty intuitive and helps them get the information they need quickly, as well as around training. It's really important for those customers, and we don't anticipate any issues off that back.
We're also focusing on our top end of our customers. So roughly our top 20 customers contribute about 26% of our revenue. So obviously, we work very closely with them to make sure that we provide them the support that they need and continue to grow off the back of it. In terms of reducing costs, at this stage, we haven't realized the full amount of cost savings from there, but what it does mean is we're not growing our cost profile as we continue to grow as a company.
A question on the guidance. Your full year guidance implies that revenue growth in the second half of the year will be flat versus the first half. Given contract wins and price rises in both regions, how do you explain that? Is it a level of conservatism, or is there something in the revenue projections that we should be aware of?
No. Look, our guidance remains NZD 175 million-NZD 180 million. You have a mix that happens within your revenue as you go through the course of the year, things such as one-off fees for professional services. We've got contracts with customers where revenue can grow. We've got other... Like, there's a variety of things that go into that mix. Clearly, we're gonna be targeting to do as well as we can, but the guidance remains at the NZD 175 million-NZD 180 million.
On the Microsoft collaboration, is there a cost to the Microsoft OpenAI platform? And what will be the cost to the business if there is one?
So we work really closely with Microsoft, and as part of that, we can access next generation generative AI technology under our current licensing suite that we have with them. So we don't anticipate increased costs with Microsoft. What the great thing we're doing with them is they're helping to provide resources and expertise into our business so we can build these applications really quickly. So it's all within our current relationship with Microsoft. It's not costing us additional money to help enable that collaboration.
On the partnership with Trane, could you provide some more detail on what that entails? Is that just an integration of hardware platforms, or is it being actively promoted with new customers? And are there other producers providing integrations with their product? And, finally, how should we think of the materiality of this?
Sure. So I'll try to work my way through each three of those points, and Jason, you might have to remind me if I miss one. So in relation to the first one, the way the integration works is we can pull data directly from their hardware that's already in the vehicle. That means we don't have to put our own hardware in there, and it just means we can use APIs in their technology suite to then visualize that data onto our platforms. So it does really reduce that friction and cost of putting hardware into the vehicle. In terms of other integrations, is the question, Jason, around in the cold chain area or just generally? So I wasn't quite certain.
The question is whether or not other suppliers integrate with their product, with the cold chain with the Trane product as well.
Not that we're aware of. We see us as one of the leading solutions here, and we're not aware of any other solutions that have integrated in with them. We've had actually had a very long-standing relationship with Thermo King, and they are very supportive of us. So as part of it, it's not just having this API integration. We're gonna work together to help target customers and potential customers going forward to grow off the back of that. As I mentioned before, there's over 400,000 refrigerated trailers in North America, and we currently, as a business, have around 35,000 of them. We know there's more room to grow, and a lot of those trailers don't even have a solution in them. So this helps us actually create new parts of the market that we wouldn't able to target before.
We're really excited by this partnership, and we do believe it will help us grow into the future in North America.
On the seasonality of revenue with relation to the Coretex product, what would be the typical expectation of the second half seasonality in certain vehicles that have lower utilizations in that part of the year?
Look, I think, we haven't seen any material movement in our own numbers around seasonality. What you'll find is different customers have different seasonality profiles. So, while you see a point in time where we talk about fleet resizes as we come out in September and March, it isn't a material shift around to move our numbers in any sort of material, significant way.
There's two questions here about the CoreTemp product. The first one is: How many CoreTemp customers do you currently have?
Yep, and what's the second one, or do you want me to answer that one first?
Yeah, the second one is that regarding the CoreTemp, the reefer trailers are expected to have a lower ARPU. What can you say about the CoreTemp ARPU? And the question is asking how much we're charging for the CoreTemp product per month.
Well, so in relation to the first questions, we've a handful of customers in North America that currently use CoreTemp. It is a solution that we want to keep pushing into the North American market, but it is very much in its early days. There's only really a handful who currently use it. And in terms of the second question, sorry, Jason, just ask that again. What was that second question?
... The second question is, how much we're charging? How much is the ARPU on the Core Temp product?
Sure. So obviously, it's a very new product, so we don't talk typically around our pricing. We sort of work with our customers in that lens. What I can say is, typically, refrigerated trailers generally have a lower ARPU versus in-cab. What this enables us to do is obtain further margin into the solution, so we can grow off the back of it. So it helps us bring that margin back to a greater level than what we'd have in just basic trailers as well. So it's still relatively early days as we look at pricing, but so far it has helped us build our margin in those markets.
On the 4G hardware upgrade, the hardware program costs that we've outlined, does that relate to the transfer of 100% of your customers? Would that be your expectation and/or what percentage of your customers do you expect to be retained and transferred to the new 4G products?
So in terms of... Obviously, we're targeting all of our customers to try to bring them over onto 4G technology. As you see, though, there's been a bit of an uplift in terms of churn. We anticipate the churn won't increase dramatically, so off the back of it, we are making sure we can minimize that as much as possible. So we still believe in the 90s that we'll keep our customer asset retention rate in that market.
Yeah, I'd just say that we've learned from the North American rollout, so don't forget, we've done this before, and we saw it, and it was across a customer base that tends to churn anyway. So we've lessons learned, and we're applying them back into ANZ to retain as many customers as we can. To Mark's point, we're targeting 100%.
On the same topic, if the 2G network switches off in 2025-2026, would there be any customers who remained on that network? And what would that imply for any expenditures for EROAD to retain those customers?
We have a really clear plan around switching customers out, which was managed across a bunch of customers in different segments. We're incredibly confident that we can roll out the 4G upgrade program across all of our customer base well before the December 2025 switch off. We have confidence there that there shouldn't be any customers still on there. Based on experience, as Margaret mentioned before, sometimes customers can be a bit slow in change of the hardware, but we are making every available opportunity to help them switch it out, including the way we build our hardware, the way we provision our software, to help them manage it themselves as well, to make it an incredibly frictionless process for them.
Thanks. This question is on Australia. The question wants to understand what is driving the uptake there, and what is our expectation for connections by the end of the year?
So in terms of what's driving uptake, as I talked about before, there are two aspects. One is those Trans-Tasman fleets. Typically, health and safety is a really important consideration for them. They know we're really good at managing health and safety in fleets, and so that end we see as a key driver, and that was one of the reasons that we won programs. The other key drivers is around renewing our current customers with our new technology. So Boral renewed on our Core Hub product in our construction vertical, and Woolworths in our refrigeration products, the Core Hub Xtreme. As we mentioned in our results for Australia, there's around another 4,000 connections to roll out, at least in relation to both programs, and also of Woolworths over the course of the year, which would mean there'd be about a 28% growth in Australia for the year.
We're obviously trying to get those units out as quickly as possible, and we look forward to, off the back of that, finding new opportunities to target as well.
A follow-up to that on the New Zealand market, what do we expect the growth to be in the future, and is that expected to slow, at any point?
So for New Zealand, consistently, we grow between 9,000 and 10,000 connections, and a bit of context is quite useful here. What we find as a company, given we help solve complex transportation problems for our customers, we see each wave of regulation creates a new market opportunity for us. Traditionally, it was around compliance and road user charges. In 2015, health and safety came to the fore, and we won some really large fleets, such as Downer, Fulton Hogan, and some corporate fleets off the back of that, who wanted to monitor the safety of their drivers, because driving is the most dangerous part of workplace activity. Sustainability has now come to the fore, and what we're seeing is, we've got a lot of customers coming to us now looking for sustainability solutions, which means two things for us.
One, it creates new targets of the market we can go after. And second, it means we can sell additional functionality to customers to increase our revenue there. The national government has announced they're looking at light vehicle RUC and the use of EVs. Clearly, EROAD has the expertise there to look at that and see how we can focus and grow off the back of that as well. So we're really confident of the growth profile there. There's over 600,000 light commercial vehicles in the New Zealand market, and currently we've got around 40,000-50,000 of them. So we look forward to continuing to grow off the back of that.
Thanks. And the final question. The New Zealand government that has just been elected is looking to charge road user charges for electric vehicles as well often is considering congestion charging. Have you had any discussions about how EROAD could assist in those areas?
So obviously, the government very recently came into effect, as from Monday, so no, we haven't spoken to the government directly yet. We have, in the past, worked with the NZTA, which is Waka Kotahi, the government agency around roading, to look at how EROAD technology can help both light commercial vehicles, as well as support congestion charging. I believe Auckland Transport's initial model was not to use our sort of technology, but rather to use license plate camera recognition. But when it comes to the EVs and charging, road user charge on them, we're absolutely positioned well to capitalize off the back of it. It'll be a clear focus of EROAD in the forthcoming months around how we can help support the government and customers with technology in that area. Any further questions, Jason, that have raised?
That's the queue. Thank you.
Thank you. Look, I just want to thank everyone for joining us today. As you can see, we have a very clear plan. The leadership is absolutely laser-focused on delivering on it, and we've delivered the metrics that we said we would. So thank you for supporting EROAD, and we look forward to following up with some conversations with you all very shortly.