Good day. Welcome to the Gentrack Results Announcement 2022 conference call. This call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Gary Miles, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir.
Great. Thanks very much. Welcome all to our FY 2022 results. Ja mes and I are here in Melbourne. I came in from London via Singapore, where we were able to meet some of our new and existing customers as we expand into that region. We'll talk more about that today. Here in Australia, I think I'm meeting 11 of our 25 customers, chief executives and business owners. It's pretty exciting times. I look forward to meeting many of our shareholders, current and potential, over the coming days. Let's get started. Let's jump into the financial highlights. First of all, we had a good year. Revenues were up approximately 20%. This was underpinned by strong growth in the utilities business of approximately 22% to NZD 108 million from NZD 89 million.
The Veovo business posted an 8% growth. I would like to remind everyone that pre-pandemic, this was a Rule of 40 business, our airports business, and we're very bullish about that, and we will highlight some of that further on today. Our AR continues to rise. Our EBITDA, we posted NZD 8.1 million of EBITDA. This is consistent with our forecast that we would continue to invest in our technology. We successfully did this. We launched our g2 platform, which is a modernization of our technology stack, in September of this year, which we funded out of operating business. Finally, the business is, I think, really in a strong position to prove that we can deliver well. When we deliver well, that means we can invoice well and we collect cash. We have a cash-generating business.
Cash is up to NZD 27.4 million. I think overall, the performance was very strong, and we're moving from strength to strength. I'm gonna ask James Williamson, our general manager of our airports business, to join us. We're actually putting airports in front of the utilities business update today because we're highlighting the airports business as the airport industry turns back on and kind of unleashes pent-up IT demand. I also think that it is the airport business could be better understood by our shareholder base because we see real value there, and we're not sure that it's fully recognized. With that in mind, let me hand over to James to give us an update. Please, James.
Thanks, Gary. Good morning, everyone. For the next few slides, I'll be giving that market update on the Veovo business. As you can see from this slide, Veovo has an enviable global customer base. Our technology supports more than 120 airports with customers in 28 countries across five continents. For our airport customers, our products are often mission or business-critical, and that means providing capabilities such as flight management, how they manage their resources, such as gates and check-in desks, how they build their airline customers, and how they effectively use their resources to manage and optimize passenger flow. We do have some customers outside of the airport space, where our passenger flow solutions are also used to support ski resorts, theme parks, rail and metro customers, as well as roads. The majority of our revenues do come from airports. Next slide, please.
Now, as Gary already mentioned, COVID hit our industries particularly hard. As you can see from this chart, I'm really pleased to say that the recovery has exceeded our expectations. I'm sure many of you will have either flown or tried to fly in the last few months, and you'll have seen that travel is really back with a vengeance. In many places, we've actually seen passenger demand has outstripped the ability of airports and airlines to meet that demand and turn back on the capacity that they switched off during the pandemic. This has generally driven higher load factors for airlines and higher ticket prices, and that, in turn, is going to drive aviation back to profitability.
Most importantly for us, it's also driving back airports to investment as they look for the technology that is gonna deliver the capacity that allows them to operate, but at a lower cost than pre-pandemic. They've also lost a lot of experience during the pandemic, the industry is looking to accelerate next-generation capabilities that really replace human experience with greater automation, better decision support tools, and better optimization tools. Next slide. What's Veovo's runway to growth? We entered the pandemic in a strong position. As Gary said, we were a Rule of 40 company in 2019. Our technology is largely business-critical, and this means we've had very low customer attrition and strong ARR retention. During the pandemic, we really doubled down on our customer relationships, and we've also accelerated our tech investment.
We knew that the capabilities that support greater efficiency and reduced costs for airports in the recovery were gonna be absolutely key. This also includes the move to technologies that support the cloud and SaaS. The strategies already started to be reflected in our results during 2022. We won our first major contract driven by AI machine learning for Avinor, who operate nearly all Norway's airports. We've completed the transition to SaaS for all our passenger movement customers. We also signed our first major Managed Services deal for a Tier 1 airport. Finally, another highlight was delivering a world-leading sustainability initiative for Swedavia, who operate the 10 largest airports in Sweden. This leaves us, I think, in a really strong position to capitalize on what is clearly pent-up demand.
We've got upgrades planned and expansions planned with all Tier 1 and Tier 2 customers during 2023, and we're also seeing our pipeline of new potential customers strengthen. In fact, over the last few months, we've seen a significant number of new tenders come in and more than we've seen in the previous last two years. In short, I think we enter 2023, not just full of optimism, but actually with real confidence for the coming year and beyond. Back to you, Gary.
Thanks, James. Let's move to the utilities. We will come back and as we're separating out the utilities and Veovo business targets and we'll come to that later so that it's clear for all. On the utilities side and the business as a whole. I joined two years ago, the to October of this past month. We set out in June, in our strategy days of 2021, a three-year strategy where we were going to focus on our core technology, on our core geographies, and getting back to growth. I'm pleased to say we've achieved it. We did what we said we were gonna do. I think we've really built a very, very strong base, and I'm confident. I'm just gonna run through a few of the things.
We created a customer-centric organization. We reset contracts that needed to be reset. I've been able to assemble a really world-class management team that we know how to operate. We work well together. We manage the time zones super effectively, which is not trivial. The company has always had a strong delivery DNA. We've strengthened it. In 2021, we established our idea of a trilogy stack, which is Salesforce, AWS, and Gentrack hand in hand. We began building that, accelerating the build of that stack. In FY 2022, we released it. We call it g2. We released in September, as I mentioned before. I think besides the growth and strengthen our customer relationships, the number one thing we achieved in FY 2022 is that we have an enormous amount of confidence in the business.
We put forward our 50 and 15 plan, which is to grow to 50 million meter points in 15 countries as the next step in our global positioning. We invested a lot in our people. We're scaling up India, staffing it up, strengthening it, and all of our systems so that we have a well-oiled machine, and we can scale it globally. If you go to the next slide, I think some of the market feedback and response to our strategy has come through in the last year. These are some of the announcements. I'll highlight a couple of them. Mercury bought Trustpower's business in New Zealand, where we're headquartered. It's now the largest retailer in the country. They had our technology stack and one of the older, more traditional stacks.
They have chosen to modernize on Gentrack's technology and transform their business and integrate it and meet their KPIs as they've committed to the market. We're a strong partner to help them do that. We closed some new business in Singapore. Singapore is a launchpad for us in Asia. If you have strong references in Singapore and Australia, they go a long way across Asia. We've proven that we can win business there. In general, we're winning more deals, and we're delivering more with our customers. Our customers are leaning into us to bring the innovation they need. As an example, we moved 95% of our customers in the U.K. into the cloud this past year. I think from this perspective, we're going from strength to strength.
On the partner front, we took the year to further solidify our partner relations because going global requires a strong and effective partner strategy. Today, we announced a relationship with Merkle, which is a 15,000 person strong Salesforce organization to go help modernize the energy and water industry. We have strong customers together. We recently announced an agreement with Tata, TCS, to build a go-to-market solution and center of excellence to modernize globally the energy and water utilities. This is a major program with a 600,000 strong partner that we can grow our business together. The relationship with Salesforce is absolutely critical. The trust, the co-working, the co-selling, building demos together, seeing customers together. Salesforce is a sales machine.
They know how to sell, they know how to articulate value, and I think that what's important for them is they have a billing partner that can deliver and that they can trust that will help them continue to build their brand in the utility space. They're increasingly realizing that Gentrack is the partner to do this globally with. We're pretty excited about what we've achieved. Let's move to the next slide and talk about what we have planned. I'd like to take this as a moment, and you'll see it in the numbers, is we did come out with our three-year targets in FY 2021 to grow our business in the core.
I believe that regional players are not going to be able to capitalize on the global opportunity that this industry brings, which there'll probably be three or four players in our space globally that will dominate and modernize the utilities, energy and water customers. We're planning to go global, and we wanna accelerate this. We're doing it this year, so we're resetting from our three-year strategy that was only in our core markets to go global. First of all, we need to make our numbers in our core and continue to grow it. I'll talk about that in the left column. We have a lot of new wins. We need to implement them and bring that revenue across the line, across Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and our other countries in which we operate.
We have a great opportunity to modernize our entire base from Velocity version 3 and 4 and Junifer onto g2, to sell cloud services and put them on our highway of innovation, and all the upsells associated with it. We are going after Tier 1s and Tier 2s. We Tier 1 and Tier 2 customers today. We are in play with all the Tier 1s and Tier 2s that have deals in play in our core markets. We're talking to the decision-makers, and we're in there to win. Lastly, I'd like to say that we're bullish on water. We think the water opportunity in the U.K. for regulated B2C water is material. We work with six of the water, top 12 water companies in Australia.
We'd like to win more of that. We see the water opportunities globally, as exciting. About our global expansion. We did tell our shareholders and potential shareholders that before we went global, we would come with a plan. We have a plan. It represents spending about NZD 3 million of incremental money annually on sales and marketing, at least in the next two years. We're not going out and opening offices in 10 countries. It doesn't make sense. We've done this before. We know how to do this. I've done it in prior businesses and so have a number of the management team members. We're gonna use Singapore as a base for Asia and the U.K. as a base for EMEA. We've already reassigned experienced leaders.
For example, the person that led our European business, which was our largest growth, largest revenue business, has relocated to Singapore to open up Asia. We've got a new general manager in Europe that's super strong that we've elevated internally. We're repositioning people towards, and leaders towards our growth objectives. This is just one example. Our partnerships are viable alternatives for SAP and Oracle, I think very, very attractive ones. Then we're amplifying our global brand awareness. To go global, once again, I think this is a huge prize to go after. My closing slide, the last slide, is a little bit busy, but I'm gonna talk through it. On the left is the size of the prize.
Gartner has come out and said that the legacy providers will shed 25% of their meter points to be recontracted to new age suppliers. That's the first step. That's about 400 million meter points. It's probably more than $1 billion of annual ARR that it represents. The question is, which challenger new age companies can go deliver this? It's not a trivial thing to go modernize this many. That represents probably about 200 utility companies. We think we have a good hand that can do this. If you look at the right side, first of all, our technology supports energy and water, B2C and B2B. Many of our competitors only do B2C energy. We're well positioned there.
Secondly, we have proven that we can work in 15 regulatory environments in six countries. It's easier to go from six countries to 15 countries than to go from two to four because we know how to do it, we've done it before. We know how to stand up teams and deliver. Our delivery capability is by far the best in the market. I can say it without any hesitation. This is a very dangerous game for utilities to migrate to a new stack. They need to have a strong partner that they can depend on, and they can depend on us. Lastly, I think from the brand, our brand is rising. We're getting more and more visibility. We're of deals. Our deal flow is improving. I feel very, very bullish when I look at it vis-à-vis our competitors.
Just as a reference, there were a couple competitors that were on a couple years ago or a year ago when I started that have really kind of fallen off the radar screen. I think our position is getting stronger and stronger here, and I'm very confident and bullish about the future. With that in mind, let me turn over to John, who's gonna take us through more details on the financial results. Thank you.
Looking at the group results for the year, a very strong revenue result with revenue up 19.5% over the prior year. That's being driven by strong growth at both our utilities business and our Veovo business. Our cost base includes a one-off step up in our strategic R&D spend and higher sales and marketing. As a result, EBITDA was NZD 8.1 million for the year. Our planned investment was funded by our earnings in the year. If I look then at our utilities business and what's happened there with revenue. For utilities, revenue is up by almost 22%. Now, in the presentation, I've split out the revenue from Bulb and other U.K. insolvencies, and this shows the strong growth in the rest of the customer base.
In fact, our underlying growth of that customer base is 24%. Uncertainty over those exits remains, but we're expecting the Bulb and other U.K. insolvencies revenue to drop off over two years evenly, over financial year 2023 and financial year 2024. That means a GBP 13 million reduction, a loss in financial year 2023. Going the other way from booked customer wins and transformations that grow our existing customers, we're expecting an increase in financial year 2023 recurring revenues by NZD 16 million. Putting those together and combining that with our remaining pipeline, it gives us a lot of confidence in meeting our financial year 2023 guidance. That's to increase our financial year 2022 number of NZD 108 million by NZD high single-digit millions for the utilities business. Looking a little further at utilities revenue, we can see that revenue grew in all of our regions.
They grew in the U.K., in Australia, and in New Zealand and Singapore. In the U.K., we're expecting to see continued growth and future opportunities, in particular in B2B energy and in B2C water. The Australian business actually grew by 28% in financial year 2022 over the prior year, and we're targeting to continue in Australia with double-digit growth. Whilst in New Zealand, we expect that the booked wins to date will actually make that the fastest-growing region in financial year 2023. As in prior presentations, we also disclose our revenue by customer, our top 10 customers, and we also show how our revenue splits by the segments that we operate in. Turning now to Veovo. Revenue at Veovo is up by 8% total revenue. The Veovo business has returned to growth. Our recurring revenues are actually up by 9.2%.
In fact, our recurring revenues have grown consistently throughout the aviation downturn. That illustrates the strength of the underlying business here. In terms of our cost base, that's grown alongside business growth. There's also been a one-off step up in our strategic R&D spend, and that's ring-fence spend in developing our next generation platform, g2, which we launched in September. In financial year 2022, that spend hasn't contributed to revenue in the year. It will contribute to revenue in years to come. I think I'd also like to highlight here that we've got good customer contracts in place with indexation in them, and that will allow us to withstand margin pressure that we might see from inflation.
In terms of our cash flow, the strong business growth has allowed us to invest in our people and our products and remain a cash generative business across the year. Our cash flow is up NZD 1.4 million in the year, and we ended up September with NZD 27.4 million of cash on the balance sheet, which we believe is a really strong result. What does that mean in terms of our outlook? For the group as a whole, we now expect to achieve our previous financial year 2024 revenue target of NZD 130 million in financial year 2023, so that's a year early. Our financial year 2024 revenue guidance is upgraded to NZD 150 million.
In financial year 2023, we expect that the growth in our utilities business will be in the high single-digit NZD millions over the outturn in financial year 2022. As a result, the total group revenue, including Veovo, is expected to be in excess of NZD 130 million. Looking at the two parts of the business separately. In utilities, from financial year 2025, we're expecting that the full impact of those customer insolvencies will be behind us. That year-on-year drop that we have seen will be behind us. The underlying growth in our core markets, as well as expanding into new markets, means that we're targeting our utilities revenue CAGR to be in the high teens percentage from financial year 2025 onwards.
Our planned investment in global expansion means that we're now targeting our utilities EBITDA to reach 12%-17% in financial year 2024, and then it will grow to be within the 15%-20% range from financial year 2025 onwards. At Veovo, we're targeting this business to grow on average by 15% CAGR across the next five years. We're expecting our Veovo EBITDA to be within a 15%-20% range across that. Looking further at those new targets and how they compare to the old. In utilities, our new targets are including both stronger growth in our core markets because of the momentum that we've got and the pipeline we're seeing, as well as expansion into new markets. Actually, our old targets have not factored in growth outside of our core.
We're planning to invest around about 3% of our utilities revenue to expand into Asia and into EMEA. Our financial year 2024 EBITDA target is now in that 12%-17% range. The stronger growth we expect will come with a higher proportion of implementation revenues. It means our recurring revenues are targeted to be 70%-75% of the target. At Veovo, our old targets assumed very limited growth in that business. The recovery that we're seeing in the aviation market and our and our position to benefit from that really increases our confidence here, and hence, we've increased our targets. For the group as a whole, it means we've updated our financial year 2024 guidance revenue to NZD 150 million. That takes us to the Q&A part of the call.
We're going to take questions from the audio conference first, and then we're going to move across to the webcast questions. Operator, can you please open the line and thanks all.
Yes, thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press star one to ask a question. One moment, please, and we'll take our first question. The first question comes from Joshua Bell with Craigs Investment Partners.
Hi, Gary and John. First of all, I just want to say well done on positioning the business with a very strong outlook. It's great to see. Just the first question I have, you didn't provide EBITDA guidance for FY 2023. I'm conscious, you know, you expect revenue of, above NZD 130 million, and your cost base at the second half run rate is about NZD 125 million annualized. It looks like EBITDA might land at perhaps mid to high single digits or even low teens for FY 2023. Is that how we should be thinking about it?
Sorry. I mean, you're right. We haven't provided EBITDA guidance for financial year 2023. We're clearly expecting to increase our revenue and increase our cost at a slower rate to get to that margin improvement for financial year 2024, but we're not going to break it down at this stage into financial year 2023 guidance.
Okay, sure. That's okay. Just second question. In a Supplier of Last Resort process, and, you know, with Bulb on top of that, can you run through why it takes so long for revenues to roll off? Just conscious you're still expecting revenues from insolvent customers in FY 2024. I'm also conscious that Octopus appears to be the last bidder for Bulb and, you know, surely they'll be interested in rolling off Gentrack as fast as possible. Can you just provide a bit more detail around that?
Sure, Josh, I can take that. This is Gary. Look, there's a few administrators in the U.K. that unfortunately we've gotten to be we know them pretty well because of, I think, this government problem with the price cap. We were able to manage down with the administrator a smooth transition for the U.K. customer base on the B2C side, whenever there's need to be a supplier of last resort. We're able to get revenues in that transition. This takes time. Bulb is in special administration, as you know. It's actually going to courts today. There's been a complaint lodged by some of the other retailers. We just don't know how long it's gonna take. We're pretty good at working these projects to help them and also get money along the way.
That's been helpful for us. In terms of Octopus, they would like to, you know, get off as quick as they can. It's a big book, and we had very, very good metrics. I actually think the operating metrics in Bulb were the best in B2C in the U.K. They're gonna need to figure that out as part of the transformation if they get it. We'll see how long it takes them. Yeah, we'll see.
Thanks. Just trying to get a sense of your confidence around hitting your FY 2024 targets and how much visibility you have on revenue in that year, and how much do you hope to win that's not quite locked in yet?
Look, we're, we remain pretty confident about our financial year 2024 targets. We've got all the momentum. I mean, you can sort of see that the growth that we've achieved in financial year 2022 and the growth that is, you know, that we've already locked in for financial year 2023 and the growth we expect to get to financial year 2023 takes us across and positions us really well for our NZD 150 million target. We're very confident on that. We've got a very strong pipeline. You know, it's the right size and the right position at the right stages to take us across that journey and compensate us for old revenues such as Bulb falling away over time.
Okay. Thank you. Just one last question from me. You know, you're looking to allocate NZD 3 million, give or take, into your global expansion into Asia and Europe. Can you sort of talk to exactly what that NZD 3 million will be allocated toward? I'm just conscious that Gentrack hasn't traditionally had a huge sort of sales and marketing force. You know, I think historically it's sort of been responsive to RFPs as opposed to trying to, you know, pursue business, so to speak.
Yeah, certainly. It, you know, it's for example, I think, Gary gave a good example where we're relocating our former U.K. general manager, the general manager of the European business. He's relocating down across into Singapore. We open up a small office there, have support from a sales and pre-sales team. That's how we're growing our sort of sales and marketing cost base. It's very much using experienced leaders in the business that have got a good knowledge of Gentrack and its products already and know how the business operates. It's, you know, it will be a small number of sales and marketing people.
I think we need Josh, I think you hit on a point that I'd like to just take a moment to reflect upon. I, your description of Gentrack as being somewhat reactionary to change and requests and opportunities might have been true in the past. It's not true anymore. We are the sales-led organization. We've probably increased by 5 x the amount of marketing experts we have in the company and 4 x the amount of sales experts. We're out to get deals and win deals, period. The real interesting question is what's gonna happen with, you know, TCS, Salesforce, and others, as we start, you know, selling more and more together. They've got a lot of reach. That makes it hard to predict out way out.
We're pretty cautious about forecasting that at this moment. I would say that with, together with our partners, we have a very strong sales mentality.
All right. That's really helpful. Thanks, guys.
Sure.
Our next question comes from the line of Phil Campbell with UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, guys. Just a couple of questions from me. The first one was just to get a bit of a feel for next year, particularly in the U.K. when the price cap steps up again, just, you know, the provisioning for bad debts. You obviously, you know, potentially have bad debts from a customer perspective, and B2C that they could influence for you guys. Just be interested in kind of what your views on that are. Yeah, just following on from the international expansion question. Just be quite interested to see some of the assumptions behind the greater than 15% revenue CAGR. Obviously, I'm assuming if you're going into different geographies, there will be some time in terms of developing product because there's obviously different regulations and different markets in terms of billing and so forth.
Just interested kind of how you've come up with the, you know, quite high revenue growth there.
Okay. Look, just going back to the U.K. bad debt question. I mean, I think the way we see it is a lot of that's behind us. I mean, we carry a large provision. The B2C customers, a lot of them are quite smaller customers. They're already in administration. We've got a much stronger customer pace that's continuing. It's not really an area that we see as, you know, as a major risk for financial 2023 or 2024. I mean, you know, we always look to see what's gonna happen in the, you know, in the markets with U.K. government subsidizing our customer base rather than putting a price cap on. I think that's a very positive development.
We see a lot of that risk as something that we've already suffered and isn't the large risk it was going forward. Does that answer the better risk question?
Yeah. I suppose I'm kind of interested even in... Yeah. No, I think that does. Yeah. I think it does. Thanks.
Look, we're just in a, we are really in just a very different space to where we would have been 18 months ago. The U.K. government's been supportive rather than, you know, than having very strange policies. We just have a very different quality of customer base that's left standing, you know, and it's growing. The larger tier customers. It's a very different space to where we were before.
Right. That's good.
Sorry. Do you wanna just ask your question on international expansion again?
I am so sorry. I cleared his question.
I think the question was in terms of EBITDA and. Look, there are certain regulatory requirements in new countries that you need to try to develop towards and meet. As I mentioned, we're in 15 regulatory environments today with our technology. We know how to do it. We baked it into our price book and our cost, and we actually think it's a differentiator that we have a layer of localization that we can configure pretty readily and enter new markets with confidence. You know, some markets are trickier than others, and we'll navigate that. There's a precedent here. I mean, Oracle and SAP system works all around the world with the same technology stack. We plan to do the same thing. I hope that answered the question.
If we could move to the next one.
The next question comes from the line of Jules Cooper with Shaw and Partners. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question this morning. One number that sticks out to me is the $16 million of booked customer wins and transformations, and resets that you know, talk to as impacting FY 2023 recurring revenues. If I remember at the half, you were sort of talking to $7.3 million benefit to IRR being spread over 2022 and 2023. That seems like a pretty solid jump from the half year to now in terms of benefiting the FY 2023 numbers. I wonder if you could just sort of elaborate on what particularly is driving that increase in underlying organic recurring revenue growth, please?
Yeah, I mean, it really is the sort of cumulative impact of bringing on the new customers and substantial customers. Also, the transformation of some very large existing customers. I mean, you know, examples such as the transformation of Empower and E.ON. I mean, that's really increasing the size of our customer base. Bringing on, and sort of closing at the end of the year, Mercury, transferring their customers from SAP across to our platform. You've got some very major changes, very major wins that are gonna benefit the business in financial year 2023. You know, the win in Singapore, which I think we actually came into play just after the half year.
Again, these are all big step-ups in our, you know, in our run rate business. It gives us a lot of confidence going forward.
Yeah. Okay. All right. No, that's clear. Well done on the result.
It appears there are no further questions at this time. Audio questions, that is. Would you like to take questions from the web now?
If there are no further audio questions, yes, we'll take questions from the web. We're just waiting for the webcast questions.
I think that may be it.
Yeah.
Um-
John, you can see the webcast questions on the screen now.
James, Here we go.
Okay. We've got a question that's asking us why there is no financial year 2023 EBITDA guidance. Is that due to uncertainty around the Bulb exit? In part, it will be. I think we've got to make sure that we manage that exit in the right way. We can see very clearly our growth path in our revenue base. We're also very confident that our revenue growth will outstrip our cost base, which is why we're very comfortable to provide EBIT, EBITDA guidance for financial year 2024 and onwards, but not for next year. We have another question that's just asking to clarify if the loss of Bulb and other U.K. insolvencies GBP 13 million in 2023 and GBP 13 million in 2024? The answer is yes.
What we're going to see is effectively the year-on-year impact of that would be a NZD 13 million drop-off from financial year 2023 to financial year 2022 of NZD 13 million. The balance of the drop-off from financial year 2024 to financial year 2023 is NZD 13 million. It's spread across the two years like that.
That's our understanding as of today. If the court system delays.
Yeah.
this will just be pushed out, and we'll continue to make the revenue in the meantime.
Yeah. That's what we based our targets off of.
Yeah.
We've got a question on, is there any dividend guidance, or are we reinvesting in 15 15? I think at this point in time, we made an input loss in the year, which is why we are not recommending a dividend payment for financial year 2022. We don't have dividend guidance at this point in time. It's something that we're continually keeping under review, and we'll look at that question again as the year runs through. I think you can see that in terms of reinvesting in 15 15 and reinvesting generally in our strategic R&D, we've been very successful to date in doing that out of earnings. We've got a question that's asking.
I think we addressed this.
About, yeah, we addressed that question.
There's a question that says, "Utilities CAGR of high teens beyond FY 2025. What is beyond FY 2025? How sustainable is that growth rate? What type of meter point wins will be required?" First of all, because we support B2B and B2C, it's hard to pin it down specifically to meter point wins. I think it's more relevant to see how Tier 1 and Tier 2 utility customers we transform across. Is probably, you know, the right metric to look at. Look, we think that the 50 million meter points in 15 countries is the first step as the whole industry transforms. It will take time. We wanna be in those countries of, you know, high populations and high income, either one.
When they make a decision to transform, we'll have the proof points to help them navigate that transformation. This will happen faster in some countries than others, but somebody, some companies, three or four, are gonna win this game over the next five to 10 years, and will end up controlling the market for the next 15 to 20. That is our target. Then I think with that, high teens, CAGRs, long-term sustainable or over achievable. I hope that answered the question.
We've got a question that's asking for the uplift that we've seen in financial year 2022 for R&D, for sales and marketing, how much of it is one-off in nature? I think the thing I want to sort of just emphasize here about that step up in R&D, that's really been ring-fenced in financial year 2022. This has created a separate R&D team, a division, a lot of engineering resource there, focused on delivering our next-generation technology stack. It hasn't contributed to our revenue in the year. That is a one-off step up in our spend. In future years, we're expecting that to contribute to in-year revenue in a greater way. We have a question. What is a reasonable margin range in the guidance on a specific revenue number?
Can you please provide some color as to where some of those cost sensitivities are?
This is from Guy. I'm not sure about the question.
No.
Guy Hooper from Jarden. Guy, if you could reissue it. Sorry. We didn't really get it.
I mean, we don't provide gross margin information on our different products from our different customers. But maybe we pick that up when we speak separately, Guy, in terms of what you're trying to drive at there. We've got a question on how much in terms of the resetting of customer relationships, how much of the growth in financial year 2022 is attributable to those resets? I mean, again, I don't think we want to give out an actual number here or be too specific about how we've changed the pricing on individual customer contracts. I mean, it contributes some. The lion's share of our growth in financial year 2022 is just straightforward winning new business.
It is us selling more to our existing customers, which may be part of a reset. When we reset a contract, we may not reset the prices. We may go in and offer to do more things like Managed Services, and then we bundle something that was maybe making a loss into making a win and growth. That's just one of the levers we have for a growth engine. We, we don't separate out specifically. I think there's more room for us to get both EBITDA and revenue growth from our existing customers for sure.
We have a question that's asking us to talk through size of the contracts that we're pushing, that we're pursuing in Asia, and whether they're software only or managed service style.
I can take that. First of all, we are not breaking that out. I also don't know that we know. I mean, there's some very big players over there, you know. Some utilities with 10 million-plus meter points. Super exciting. The way to enter them may not be with the full bang transformation on day one. We may enter in a different path. I think we need to get out there and learn. We have a pretty good view based on our early conversations and our experience. I don't wanna try to forecast something at this point about the size of those contracts. Look forward to providing more detail as we know more. Is the utilities product commercially ready in other Asian and European markets from a regulatory perspective?
This is from Shui Yang. Thank you for the question. As I mentioned before, I think we covered this. We're in 15 regulatory markets today. Each environment has some unique regulatory requirements. We have a layer that helps us customize and configure this. We're pretty confident that we can tackle it from region to region. There is a precedent here of this being installed, you know, Oracle and SAP doing this all around the world in the last phase. We're confident we can do that, and we'll navigate it on a case-by-case basis. Are there more questions? How much of your deal pipeline would be direct versus channel partner sourced? From Shui Yang. Thank you for the question. Our partners. We work with partners today in our core markets also.
We will always deliver some things directly because we're capable to do it. Then with some of our partners, we'll be a sizable subcontractor for that. I don't know the answer at this point in time, as it unfolds. I can say that with Salesforce, it's interesting, we really co-sell, and they sell their own software, then we may take the prime or integrator takes the prime. That would be a side by side as opposed to a direct sale.
I have a question asking, are there any duplicate costs that can be pulled out of the cost base? I think really the thing to look at here is the very large ring-fenced R&D spend in financial year 2022. There's a lot of potential for some of that to be repositioned into customer-funded development work. Using that engineering talent that we built up to generating new revenue.
Yeah, there's another very obvious one that we historically have had two technology stacks, Junifer in the U.K. and Velocity in, the rest of the world. As we integrate onto g2, we'll need to support one stack instead of two. Over time, there's a sizable opportunity there.
Asking, do we still view the Veovo business through the Rule of 40 lens?
I think we put out numbers that are.
Yeah.
You know.
I mean, you know, 15% CAGR growth and an EBITDA margin of 15%-20%. That's the lens that we're viewing Veovo through at this point in time.
That's the lens we would like our shareholder base to kind of look and, value at, quite frankly.
Is M&A being considered if it would assist in the global expansion strategy?
I would say that our balance sheet at this moment is not really in a position to do a major M&A without us needing to go raise some money. We may do that if the right opportunity presents itself. It's definitely a lever that makes sense and in a growing global dominant objective. We haven't baked that into any of our numbers. We're always looking at it.
We've got a question about our cash balance. It's high, how are we thinking about the cash? I think at this point in time, we are, you know, very comfortable with the position that we're at. I mean, we can see we're a cash generative business. You know, going back to the last question about potential M&A, it's a, you know, a position that we sort of keep under review and consideration, but we don't have anything further to say on this at this point. We're asking how much of our utility MRR is coming from Managed Services.
We don't disclose this within the investor deck, but you'll see in the financial statements that we disclose the level of our revenues that are coming from Managed Services, and a large part of that is recurring. I mean, there'll be bits that aren't, but you can see that in the notes for the accounts. We're also being asked, is Veovo still core? Could value be created by spinning it off or by selling the business?
We're always looking at our value creation opportunities. Veovo is set up as an independent operating and governance arm, from a corporate perspective. If that makes sense for the creating value, that's something that we're in a position to execute on.
Again, coming back and retaining on the M&A scene, we're being asked if there are any bolt-on technology acquisitions in either utilities or airports that could add significantly to our value.
I'll take that. We are definitely looking into this. We're strengthening our M&A pipeline management arm to scour the market. It's not something that we focused on much in the first 20 months of my tenure just because, you know, I think you need to get your house in order before you start consuming new houses inside to bring them in. We're in a position to do that now, we're definitely looking at the market.
I think the last question that we have is again, asking about our strategic R&D and whether that eventually disappears, that uplift, whether that eventually disappears given that it's ring-fenced. It's not so much that it disappears. It's just that we're able to use it in other ways. We've launched the g2 stack, so there's less call for all of that to be ring-fenced. I mean, we've built up a very valuable source of expertise here in engineering. You know, there's a lot of capability that can be used on growing the revenue base.
I would like to say that the market's very dynamic. There are super exciting things happening with clean technologies, batteries, solar, bundles, new age energy, consumers, prosumers, flex contracts. It's a very dynamic and interesting area where retailers are spending money. Also, you know, debt was talked about on the call. The whole debt area is interesting to help them navigate that with technology. We do see room for investment, and we look at it from an ROI perspective pretty carefully. I think that's it. There was a lot of active call questions. Thank you very much for the continued support and for those that are watching, we hope that you'll join us on this journey. Thank you.
This concludes today's call. Thank You for your participation. You may now disconnect.