Hi, everyone. I think we're on the air. They've given me a little script to read, so I'll do it. So I'm Gary Miles. Welcome to our HY25 half-year results presentation. Online attendees can submit a written question at any time by clicking the Ask a Question button on your screen during the presentation, and phone attendees can listen and ask questions during the meeting. Your questions will be answered at the end of our presentation. Welcome, everybody, and thank you for your interest and attendance. I'll jump right into it. We're here in Melbourne, actually, and happy to be in Australia, where we continue to have a great engagement with our customers, 22 customers in the country. I just came out of New Zealand, where we've got a lot of exciting things happening. I'll start with the financial headlines.
Revenue was up 9.8% to NZD 112 million in the half-year. I think you can see this here. We're most pleased that recurring revenue was up approximately 17%. As we put more emphasis on the recurring revenue elements of our business, I think this is a good achievement and an intentional one. I want to call out specifically that our Airports Division had another fantastic year. The growth was 24% for Veovo. I mentioned before that the airports are moving to Airports 4.0 and transition and digitizing and modernizing. I think we're setting not only a global pace there, but a vision for where airports are headed. They look to us to help them on that journey, which is fantastic. Once again, moving into the larger airports and the larger utilities as part of our results. I'll talk more about that.
EBITDA up 5.1% in the period. NPAT had an excellent result, up materially to almost 35%. I would like to just close on the cash element of the business. Once again, cash is a sign that the company is performing well, that we deliver value so we can invoice our customers. We know how to run projects well, so we do not get hung up on large unbilled. We can collect our cash because we have good customer engagement, relations, and value. A fantastic result on the cash side. Those are the headline numbers for the year. John will go into them in more detail. We will jump to the next slide, which is the outlook for the year. For FY2025, we expect revenue to be at or above NZD 230 million and our EBITDA margin to be above 12%.
As we've said very clearly in the past, this is a year of transition as we expand out of our core markets into Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, building on early wins in those new territories. Our pipeline is strengthening and maturing. With our global leadership ambitions, our proven track record, and the market potential as the industry transforms, we remain confident of our midterm guidance of growing revenue more than 15% CAGR and EBITDA margins of 15%-20% after expensing all development cost. That is the outlook, and we'll surely have questions and talk more about that. If you go to the next slide, we are a purpose-driven company. Our vision is to accelerate the world towards a net-zero future by leading the global modernization of energy and water retailers.
It is essential that these retailers modernize their IT stacks that support smart meters, time-use charging, battery assets, etc. They cannot meet green targets if they do not have systems that support these types of services. We are moving from an industry that was for about 30 years very static on the IT side and is now on the move to transform. As it transforms, we believe that three or four players will have a hyperscale stack and be able to have global reach and scale and delivery capabilities. They will capture this modernization event that is happening over the next 10-15 years and be able to amortize this software over 300-400 utilities each. Our ambition is to be one of those leaders and to help the energy and water industries transform, which they are in need of help.
If you go to the next slide, how are we going to do this? If you're one of our investors, you've seen this before. We have a modern stack from all the way from the meter to the call center to the agents and the automated agent interaction with customers, whether they're individuals with the EV in their garage powering maybe their house and getting powered from the grid to solar and battery on the side of the home, all the way to hyperscale major, major industry players like smelting plants and other things that require enormous amounts of energy. Same for water as the industry moves from kind of dumb meters to smart meters and better per capita consumption and better water leakage detection and usage and understanding the value of this precious asset and also to engage with communities better, they need a modern system.
G2 is resonating very well. We've got some questions about some of our deployments that have already come in around Genesis and others, which we will come to. I would like to say that it is designed as a global stack. We know how to deliver it. We've actually never failed a delivery. The industry, unfortunately, has some failed delivery programs, which are not healthy for the industry. We know how to do it. We like to do this with our strong partners of AWS and Salesforce and other key partners, SI and consulting partners that we lean on in the market. If we go to the next slide, in terms of customers, obviously, customers are at the heart of our business. We are fanatic about trying to service our customers well. I think that we are a very capable partner in this regard.
Some of the customer success, one of the things that's really important for our customers is they have a strong brand. It's a competitive marketplace in most of the places where we operate. The retailers have competition. Being at the top of the league tables for customer excellence is very important for our customers. If you have a bad system that runs their operations, that bills wrong or gets meter reads wrong or doesn't provide seamless transfer from one utility to another or bad experiences in the call center, it hurts the brand, it leads to churn. Our customers are growing, and they lead in the league tables in really all of our core markets. You can see the three countries here. Last year for Citizen Advice, Ecotricity for two of the quarters, which is a customer of ours, was number one.
The last two quarters is Utility Warehouse, which is a new customer of ours, which is number one. Red Energy continues to be number one for most trusted. They're actually, I think, the only utility brand in Australia that's in the leading 100 brands of Australia across all industries. Frank is a brand with Genesis. By the way, Frank is the first part of Genesis to go live this winter in the Southern Hemisphere, so this summer in the Northern Hemisphere. On regulatory compliance, the regulator is doing a lot of things. Let's talk about Australia specifically. The regulator is doing a lot of things to protect vulnerable customers. It's pretty active in this regard. Fines are significant. We've seen them.
If you take the top four suppliers in Australia, one of which is our customer, our fines are 17x-20x less than their fines. The others are 17x-20x higher than we're seeing. We're able to keep our customers in line with what the regulator is intending to do and to take care of the markets in which they operate, which is really important both to the financial well-being of the retailer as well as the brand of the retailer. On customer renewals and upsells, look, you saw our 17% growth in recurring revenue. A lot of it's about doing more, renewing with more value, and securing our customer base for multi-year projects. We have a lot of fantastic renewals, which you can see here. We have renewals every half-year period, but we've called out because we had quite a few this section.
We have some exciting new projects. We've now landed Amber and Ecotricity, which is the second now energy supplier in the U.K. There was E.ON in the U.K. and now Amber. Some new fun projects with NPower, which is a very stellar flagship large customer of ours. NPower represents about 17%-16% of the U.K.'s GDP with power solutions. Some other projects which we have here, which I'm not going to go into detail. London Gateway, by the way, is about integrated airport control and queuing and passenger flow and more things around the Airports 4.0. We put that up. Utility Warehouse is a new customer in the billing segment. Utility Warehouse was a customer of ours for our managed services. Now they're a customer for our mainstream billing stack.
This does not include the CRM component because they are the multiplayer leader probably worldwide, which means they sell mobile, insurance, broadband, energy. It's a really interesting business model, but they have a multi-vertical CRM on top of that. They are taking our stack to keep their energy business top of the league tables. That's pretty exciting. That's an approximately 2 million meter point installation in the heart of a very competitive landscape in the U.K. Obviously, they looked at all of our competitors, and we won that business based on our capabilities. Some really great customer momentum. If we go to the next slide, I know people are keen to get to the financials with John, but I do want to say that this slide is somewhat abstract, although a lot of people talk to us about the market size in which we operate.
You can see at the bottom on the right that we estimate the worldwide total addressable market estimated at about NZD 17 billion. We have triangulated that number from several sources. What is interesting is how it will transform. We took a very clear case study from the U.K., where in 2015, about 90% of the utilities were on legacy and now less than 10% are on legacy. If the rest of the world follows this journey, and we do think the legacy systems, although they are supplied by very capable, long-running vendor technology companies, they are multi-vertical stacks, meaning they support not only energy, water, but manufacturing, government, healthcare, health sciences, telecom, etc. We believe they are a sea anchor of change on the industry.
The industry needs to go to, because the industry is rather unique and some of its requirements need to go to special platforms like ours that are leading this transformation. You can see the number of utilities that we believe are the addressable ones. By the way, this is not all the utilities. There are a lot of water suppliers that are in municipalities and things that we did not include here. This is the addressable market that we are going after right now. Obviously, the world, as we see it, is the addressable market, and we plan to be a global leader, as we said in our purpose. One step at a time, and we really want to focus and get momentum in these markets, which looks strong, and we will talk more about that, I am sure, in the Q&A.
If I think that is if we go to the next slide, I think that kind of sums it up on the core Gentrack side. We did have a slide on Amber. It's important to we made an investment here. We like to make more investments. Generally, we prefer to do acquisitions than minority investments. Since Amber is a retailer in the U.K. also and a technology company, we were interested in working with them for their technology. Their technology is exceptional. They've now launched some EV products for vehicle-to-grid, which will be an amazing acceleration of uptake. The other thing that's happening is in Australia, in the core market, there are new subsidies coming on, the new government, etc., supporting battery type of assets. This will be very good for Amber and their Amber uptake of their own utility service.
From our perspective, how it helps us win more deals, influence the industry, drive sales. We see the Ecotricity win, which I spoke about, which is a great win. We are engaged with them on several of our pipeline and our upgrade opportunities. You can see they were Canstar Innovation of the Year award winner, really a good management team and a good vision and good, strong, capable product. We look forward to continuing to stay close to Amber and help them as they help us. I think that's the closure. I'm going to hand over to John to go into more details on our financials. Thanks, John.
Thanks, Gary. Looking at the group's profit and loss account first. The group's revenue is up by almost 10%. The call out there really is the strong growth in recurring revenue, up nearly 17%. Now, for our EBITDA, we've set out the margin both before and after our LTI costs. It's a similar style of presentation that we shared back in November for our full year last year. What we can see is that the margin before LTI costs, that's 17% versus 18% in the prior year. The reduction is really because we're investing a lot more in sales and actually in our product. I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation. In terms of those LTI costs, the accounting charge for share-based payments for LTIs, as we guided, that's lower than the prior period. The full year charge will be lower than last year's full year charge as we guided before. In terms of the payroll tax, in last year, we actually booked around NZD 7 million against these costs.
Now, all but a small amount, all but NZD 700,000 of that was booked in the second half of last year. It just means that when you compare this half against the first half of last year, you see an increase. Just to reaffirm, we expect the full year charge to be lower than last year's full year charge. We expect it to then drop as we roll into the following year in financial year 2026, but we still think it will be less than 1% of revenue. Our profit after tax, our NPAT, that's up almost 35%. I'll call out a few of the pieces here that fall below EBITDA. In terms of Amber, we account for that as an associate company because we have a 10% equity stake.
Our share of the loss at NZD 1.1 million in this half year, just to note that that is for the full six months, whereas it is comparing against only two months in half year 2024. Our investment was on, I think, the last day of January in 2024. You heard a little bit about Amber's momentum. They are investing in their strong growth. We would expect a similar charge in our books to what you see in the first half of the year and the second half. Gentrack's benefited from about NZD 2 million of Forex gains when you consolidate it into company balances. The overseas subsidiaries have back with the New Zealand parent. That is because of the depreciation of the New Zealand dollar across the period. I think a call out is also the income tax.
That's roughly a third lower than it was in the prior period, even though profit before tax is higher. Our effective tax rate, so the tax charge divided by profit before tax, is around 21% this half year. That's far lower than the statutory rates of the main countries we operate. U.K. is 25%, New Zealand 28%, Australia 30%. It's also a lot less than our effective rate in the prior year. The reason is we're getting a benefit from the vesting of shares under our LTI schemes. They're vesting at higher prices than the accounting values. In New Zealand and in the U.K., that's deductible for tax purposes at the price they vest at. That's given us a real tax benefit. We'll pay less tax as a result.
We should expect to see our effective tax rate be lower for the full year. If we move on to utilities, looking at the revenue in the utilities business, it is up around 7% in total over the prior period. That sort of splits between higher recurring revenues, showing the prior period wins, projects, upgrades, etc. They do flow through into our recurring revenue year after year, and that is what we have seen in the first half of this year. The overall impact of that is partially offset by lower non-recurring revenues. They are 12% lower, and that really reflects quite a high level of project work in the first half of last year and actually the variable nature of such revenues. However, we do expect strong levels of non-recurring revenues going forward, as you can see from our outlook, both from established and from new customers.
Moving on, we show a little more analysis on that revenue in the utilities business, similar style and consistent with the way we've shown this before. I think just looking at the regional revenue mix, you can see that the half year has seen continued growth in the U.K. and in Australia. In New Zealand, when you compare it to the first half of last year, it's relatively flat. The Genesis upgrade is an important project in that part of the world, and that upgrade spans last year, this year, and rolls into next year as well. The rest of the world includes Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the Pacific Islands. This year, it also now includes the Philippines, which is starting to give some revenue. It's relatively flat compared to the first half of last year, just the timing of projects overall, I think, between different halves.
This is an area that we do expect to see a lot of growth in as we go forward into the next year. Turning to Veovo, Veovo has had a very strong start to the year, so 24% growth over this time last year. That has been driven by wins in the U.K., such as Manchester and Stansted airports, and the Middle East, as well as upgrades in the APAC. We are seeing higher recurring revenue, 14% growth over the prior period. Again, we are starting to see those wins of prior periods flowing through into recurring revenues. That is a feature of our business in both utilities and in Veovo. In the Veovo business, we have also seen very strong non-recurring revenues. They are up actually 34% compared to the first half of last year.
Continued strong levels of project work, a large backlog of work that we've got from wins that sort of came across during the course of last year. I think what I've noticed is that in the first half of this year, there's a similar level of hardware embedded within that sales as in the prior period. We have hardware sales for, for example, our Passenger Predictability Software as part of the overall solution that we supply to our customers. The reason I call that out is just that that can be quite variable from half to half, 3.6, 3.8. They're relatively high levels.
Turning and looking at the cost base in our utilities business, where we show the walk between the operating costs in the first half of last year to the operating costs this half year, our direct costs, so engineering, hosting, those sorts of things, that's increased by NZD 3.5 million to support higher revenues. We've increased our investment in R&D, in our product. We're actually spending a higher percentage of our utilities revenue in this half year. It's closer to 16%. I think if we look at the first half of last year, it was closer to 14%. That's a NZD 2.5 million increase. We've also increased the amount that we're spending in sales and in marketing. That's gone up by NZD 1.3 million compared to the first half of last year.
Now, that's really, I mean, that's really a consequence of the very high levels of sales activity that we're seeing in this first half of the year in terms of our current pipeline. Moving across to the group's cash flow. Cash at the end of the half year, NZD 70.7 million, round about NZD 4 million higher than the start of the year. That actually compares to NZD 39 million this time last year. A big rise over that 12-month period. I wanted to try and sort of call out the half one, half two dynamics of our cash flow. We said something about this, I think, in the first half of last year as well. The first half, we expect to see a working capital cash outflow in our business. It's just the dynamics.
It's when we pay staff bonuses, commissions, the payroll taxes on incentive schemes. What that means is in the first half, we have a working capital outflow, but in the second half, we actually have a working capital inflow. We do not have those payments, but we're accruing those costs into our P&L. Outside of that, other working capital movements is pretty flat in the first half of FY2025. Capital movements on receivables, trade payables, etc. can sort of be a little variable, plus or minus a couple of million or so, but in the first half of this year, fairly flat. The other call out we have here is that holding cash in subsidiaries overseas in the U.K., etc., has given the group a Forex benefit of NZD 3.7 million when you convert that back to our reporting currency in New Zealand dollars.
What do we expect to see in the second half of the year for cash? We're likely to see a working capital inflow because of the half one, half two dynamics I've just described. We'll actually also see lower tax payments. Our tax payments are in financial year 2025 very much first half weighted. There'll probably be half as much as you've seen in the first half of the year in the second half. Whereas other items outside of Forex, other items are likely to be pretty similar to the first half of the year, maybe slightly favorable. That's running through the group's results.
Now, just before I hand back to Gary, we do also have, and I'm not going to go through them on this call, we do also have the standard slides that we share in our presentation in the appendix where we show what our revenue and EBITDA would have been had last year's foreign exchange rates been the same as this year's. We also show how the revenue and the way we describe it in this presentation in terms of recurring, non-recurring, etc., how that then maps back to the way that we describe revenue in our financial statements. With that, I'll hand back across to Gary for his closing remarks.
As we stated, a year of transition as we move also into the international markets where our pipeline continues to strengthen and mature. We have achieved growth in our base actually since I've been in the business and secured exciting new projects like Utility Warehouse. We target to announce new wins in the second half of this year as G2 gains momentum. I'll say here that the way we generally work is we are selected and we sign a scoping agreement and we start to work on trying to nail down the details of a project transformation. We use that to secure a long-term contract on the back of that scoping. We have some scoping projects in play now, which gives us confidence in G2 and our plans and our ambitions. At a time of increasing global uncertainty, the energy and water industry is a good place to be. I think we all see what's happening around the world and things are slowing down.
We do not see a slowdown really around our area for transformations because utilities need to keep transforming and the addressable market is very significant, as we showed on the prior slide. The Veovo Airports business continues to perform exceptionally well, delivering on its backlog and targeted new wins. We are investing more there. We have a strong balance sheet and we will assess M&A opportunities continually as they arise. We are in a position to be able to absorb companies into Gentrack and get that scale and capabilities. I would like to say that I think we have an exceptional investor register. We appreciate that the register is growing and continuing to have confidence in us, and we are glad that you are part of this exciting and purposeful journey. With that, I think we reiterate our midterm guidance and we will move to Q&A.
I think we'll start with calls on the line. Just to repeat, if you have a question, please see this.
I think the phone participants, if you press star one now, the operator will give you some instructions.
There we go.
Correct. If you have dialed in by phone and would like to ask a question, please do press star one on your telephone keypad. If you are called upon to ask your question and are listening via loudspeaker on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. Your first question comes from the line of Guy Hooper at Jarden. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning, team. Could you talk a little bit about some of the dynamics at play in the project work? I mean, I think you've talked previously about being able to plug sales gaps with upgrade work from the existing customer base. I mean, is there an element there some of the projects you had going maybe required greater resource and therefore limited the scope to carry out additional projects, or was it sort of some other dynamic at play around the upgrade opportunities?
Look, thanks, Guy. First of all, what we did say, and thanks for recalling that, is that over the next five to seven to eight years, we will upgrade our base to G2, and that will be a bit of a shock absorber for, let's say, as you win new projects, you have some lumpiness in your non-recurring revenues. We can plug some of those with upgrades that are smaller programs, and I think that'll be a really strong tool for us.
We also said we're not really pushing G2 hard through the whole base just now because we want to harden it and deploy it well. Genesis is our first deployment with the Philippines following shortly thereafter. In terms of added investment, we never really went out and raised capital to build G2. We've been building it on the P&L of the business. I think it's been a very good execution. As we're deploying Genesis, we are putting more resources and making sure that we land that successfully. That is part of landing any first hyperscale program in a good solid way where we stay close to our customer and they continue to recognize and provide references for us and have confidence that we will deliver. That has been an element in the first half of the year. We do not expect to see that continuing, obviously, as G2 gets more and more productionized and customers. Yeah. Thanks, Guy.
Great. Thanks for the color there. I guess that at least, actually, just I guess as you have hardened their product, and I have heard some commentary just earlier about scoping potentially with G2. I mean, what can you say around that? Is that with new existing customers or in or outside core markets? What additional color can you get there?
We will try to say a few things in this call, and then I think through the week, we will probably get questions from every possible angle around this point. I would like to try to address as much of it in this call as possible. We have some scoping in our core markets, and we have scoping outside of our, say, target growth markets. It would be anyway, we do not plan to talk about the specifics of those until we contract them. That is just the way we roll as a company. Yeah, we just want to be sure about things and then publish it.
Yeah. Fair enough. Maybe just one last one for me then. The Bulgaria example where you have been hiring resource. I mean, can you just talk a bit about, I mean, how you resource up a new market and at what point of the sales cycle you would look to hire in market?
Yeah. Let us leave Bulgaria aside. I think if we are doing anything outside of kind of New Zealand, Australia, or the U.K., then we will obviously need to have some local resources to deploy that project, maybe a small number to scope it. Language is language-dependent. Also, each deal is a little bit different. What is our partnering approach? Is somebody priming us that they're taking us in, that have a strong local team? Are we using a boutique, let's say, Salesforce shop that's local that's underneath us? They're all a little bit different. We have experience doing both or three or four permutations of that. It's kind of horses for course. You have to play to win with the partners and dynamics in a market and the price point and what the customer would like to do. Anyway, you would need a small number of people to implement scoping. Once you turn on the project, there's a bit of a surge for about a year to run the project. Thanks, Guy.
Great. Thanks. Thanks, of course, there. Thank you.
Your next question is from the line of Cameron Halkett from Wilsons. Your line is open.
Thanks, Albregt. Gary, John, can you hear me okay?
Yeah. Hi, Cameron.
Okay. Great. Thanks, guys. Good morning. First question, two parts to it. Can you talk, I suppose, on deal progression over the financial year to date, particularly like the Utility Warehouse renewals, potential opportunity in Bulgaria? Have things largely gone to your expectations back at November? The second part would be around the commentary on announcing deals in the short term. Should we take that as because you have to for materiality or exchange purposes or just to help us around color and the timing of things this year?
Okay. Maybe, John, I'll take the second half of that question. I think that's fine.
For those that may not have been with us, we did not provide guidance in November, as we said that it's a year of transition as our having gone out internationally 18 months or 12 months or so before, and then that pipeline matures. This year was really a question on whether deals would come in earlier on in the year so we could get revenue from them or later in the year. It's not always in our control, and things usually take a little bit longer than expected in these big decisions. We didn't really talk about that in November with our saying, "This is going to happen or that'll happen." We wanted to be really kind of clear with the market and not overextend ourselves from that perspective. I would say that things have happened.
First of all, the Utility Warehouse, it mentioned it is a renewal. It's a complete new billing system win. I mean, it's an important win in a really competitive market with a leader. Also in the B2C space in the U.K., it's a really important win. The managed service business that we had prior has helped us because we have relations, but it's a totally different thing over there in that shop. That's important to clarify. Look, once again, the competitive landscape of players that can transform this industry is relatively small. We are a capable company with great technology and outstanding results for our customers. We think as we get more and more G2 deployments, this will play out. We're bullish. We're doing more with Salesforce. Just to be kind of more applicable, Salesforce is doing more with us. They're showcasing us more and more around the world and particularly in our core markets and bringing us leads. That's why we are comfortable with the midterm guidance, and we just need to keep doing what we're doing and hope the industry just presses on. Yeah.
Cam, if I should answer just the second part of that question. In terms of disclosure, I mean, for every contract, we consider our sort of market disclosure obligations. I think you can see that where we think that's appropriate, we'll make a disclosure. If it isn't appropriate, we won't. Look, when it comes to Gary talked about scoping contracts or scoping sort of work that we might do in advance of securing a longer-term deal. They're not necessarily large in themselves, but they're a very important part of the process because it gives you increasing levels of confidence, and it's the way that you build up to larger, more material, announceable sales. I think that's really the way to look at whether we're able to come out at various points with announcements or not. Cam, does that answer both parts?
Yep, more or less. If I just turn to your medium-term guidance, I suppose your confidence in this revenue CAGR, if the guidance this financial year you're at as low as 8% growth year on year, and you think you can get to 15% CAGR over a midterm horizon, that would imply the 2026 and/or 2027 comes back strongly. Is this what you're comfortable implying, having that statement in the market?
Yeah. I mean, if you take the prior four years, it's been approximately 26% growth over the four years, despite some headwinds we had from the U.K., some insolvencies in the U.K. due to regulatory issues. We like the market in which we're operating for those macro dynamics we talked about. Once again, you come out with a new stack, you go to a new territory, this takes time. That's what we've been going through, and that's what we plan to execute against.
Okay. I'll just add to that. I think, so look, I think we're sort of on track to make the sort of progress in terms of closing the number and type, etc., of deals that we were hoping to. I think less of that we'll see in this financial year in terms of the revenue impact. It does not actually change or distract from the benefit that sets us up for in years to come. Whether we secure something at the start of the year or close to the end of the year, it has a big impact on this year financially, far less so when we roll forward. That is what it is that has given us the confidence.
The other thing,
just lastly,
just the other thing that I think is also important to say is, obviously, as a recurring capital type of business, just our starting point each year just gets higher and higher. Obviously, that is the nature of the beast. We are putting emphasis on that as well. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Yeah. I'll just add in lastly, I suppose, then with the EBITDA midterm guidance side of the equation, if the pipeline continues to remain full and buoyant and new opportunities replace those that either convert or do not go your way, would you walk back the 15%-20% as you've shown in the past? A keen interest to keep chasing the opportunity or that 15% we should really take to the growth?
We value growth and market share first and foremost at this moment. I think that as the industry transforms, momentum, scale, leadership, all of it is kind of compounding. We value that. If we decide to invest more in sales and marketing or new markets or technology, then we will be clear about our intention to do that and the impact it'll have.
What we've said several times is it's important for us to get some of these proof points internationally. Also, there's a cadence in which you make those investments or, let's say, a sequence that would make most sense. We do look at this with the board. We had some strategy sessions last week, for example. I think right now, we'd prefer you to just take the guidance as is. If we had higher revenue, we may look at that in light of the margin expansion that gives us more room headwind anyway to spend more money.
It is important just the fact that, again, our LTI costs come down as a percentage of our revenue. Our margin, the margin that you see in 2025 is, I guess, artificially suppressed by that. The dynamics as well leverage on the business as we scale are intact. I mean, that's why we think it's a really appropriate range.
Yeah. Good points. Thanks, guys. I'll jump back in there, too.
Thanks.
Your next question is from the line of Joshua Dale of Craigs Investment Partners. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Just the first one on Utility Warehouse as well. You called it out. On the timeframe for that, how much implementation falls into FY25? There's only four months left or so. And how much into later years? When does recurring revenue from that contract begin in earnest?
Yeah. Look, I think for an individual customer, I don't think we want to sort of just talk numbers, specific numbers of what our fees are to the customer. In more generic terms, look, we signed it right at the end of the first half of the year. We'll see implementation revenues in this second half. I'm sure we'll see implementation revenues in the following year. The recurring revenues, really, they start to become more significant in FY2026 and beyond. That's not something that we'll get a lot of benefit from here in the second half of this year. It's a great relationship. We hope it. We fully expect it to build on that and continue to grow.
Thanks. I mean, is there sort of a rough estimate you can give us as to when recurring revenue on the contract will hit in FY2026? Is it more at the beginning or more at the end or halfway through?
I think it's partway through that you start to see. I think you'll start to see often recurring revenue builds up over time in terms of when it reaches its fullest extent won't be early on in the next financial year. It's not untypical of a number of contracts we have, but it flows through to recurring revenue regardless.
Okay. Thank you. I appreciate you haven't landed this Bulgarian contract yet, but more just a broader question. Is there any detail you can provide us on country-specific variations in price per meter point? It looks as though it's fairly consistent across your core markets, but just in these sort of non-core markets, do you get much variation in sort of fees you charge or competitors might charge?
I'll take that. First of all, there's quite a bit of variation. It does depend on the market, like Asia, where you have very large national players, and the price points are different than they are in some of our core markets, for sure. That's not unique to energy or water software at all. It's pretty consistent with enterprise-grade software costing. Same thing, parts of Eastern Europe will be less than Western Europe. On the other hand, some things are easier in Eastern Europe than they are in Western Europe. If it's a B2C player with millions of meter points versus a B2B player with huge payloads of energy going through industrial systems, it's just so I understand that some software companies are able to translate this into some kind of forecasting metric. It's a little bit less, I don't know, standard in our space. Water is also a little bit different. We play to win at profitable levels and try to push more towards recurring. That's kind of how we price our software. I mean, obviously, we have price books and things.
Thanks, Josh.
Okay. Thank you. I mean, just one last clarifying question on that point. I mean, is there any sort of magnitude in the difference you might be able to point to? Are we looking at, I don't know, very rough numbers here, half the rate of your core markets or 20% of the rate? What are we sort of talking here?
I mean, if you're in Asia and it's a 10 million meter point, it could be per meter point. It could be less than half. But you make up for it with volume. It just kind of really would be hard to put that into a formula. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry not to give you, and the last thing we want to do is just.
No, that's fine.
Talk openly about pricing because our competitors also track these calls, and we have to just be careful about it.
Sure. No, I appreciate that. Thanks for the call, guys.
All right. Thanks.
Your next question is from the line of Jules Cooper of Shaw and Partners. Your line is open.
Thanks, Gary. John, can you hear me?
Yeah. Hey, Jules.
All right. Hey, well done on a good result and particularly Utility Warehouse, 2 million meter points in the U.K. A long time since we've seen a good material win in that market. So well done. Gary, you've talked there about the scoping studies that you have around the world and that you've got a target to announce new wins in the second half of this year. Without getting into specifics on names and regions, can I just ask, are they of a scale that would be similar in nature to what we've seen with Utility Warehouse? Are they the sort of scoping opportunities you're looking at? I'll just let you know. Yeah.
Jules, look, we've said it before. We have tier-one customers today. We are looking to win more tier-one customers like Utility Warehouse because our product is a good fit for that. We're also pretty good at deploying tier-two and tier-threes profitably and making money out of that. We also mentioned that we're more inclined to go towards those that are not just retail only. They have generation assets or things, so they have better profit pools. As you saw on John's slide, our customer concentration is not, we don't have super high concentration. We have a pretty mixed level of concentration across now, I think, 60-plus utilities in the utility space. We like all the sizes as long as they have money in or are serious about change because we can deliver it pretty well.
With G2, we'll be able to, I mean, our target, and this is aspirational. I do not take this into your model, but it is where we are headed. When we design G2, it is to be able to do a transformation in half the time and half the cost so we can charge more ARR. We can do twice as many installations with the same number of people. It is aspirational, but that is where we plan to take and mechanize our business more and more. We would like to do a lot of them. We would like to service tier-one, tier-two, and tier-three, and B2B, B2C, and multiply. We are pretty unique in that, and we plan to go after all those segments. Some of the scoping has a different range of suppliers in it.
Okay. Thank you for that insight. Look, Amber is going really well. We can see that at the E.ON deal more recently with Ecotricity. Are you able to give us any sort of perspective on the revenue growth there? Because I think, actually, the associate impact is not the best indicator of performance. It looks like it's going really well.
Look, their core business is performing well. As I mentioned, Jules, I think some of the battery subsidies that are coming in Australia will just really, really be a great accelerator for Amber Electric and their core business of retail. On the technology side, there's a lot of interest, but they also need to land that successfully in the U.K. in those two deployments and get a really strong reference. Both of those deployments see Amber as very strategic for their energy transition goals. It is not like a project that's kind of off on the side. It's a pivotal part of those companies' strategy. Our approach and their approach is to land those really well and then scale, not scale and then land. I think that's the right sequence of things. We're in that phase now, but there's a lot of discussions going with other retailers. We're pretty pleased with their contribution to this program. Fantastic.
Just last from me, I think you called out utility ARR growth of 17% was a key highlight. That's intentional. Should we really expect that the ARR within the business to continue to grow matched to the non-recurring revenues? Is there any reason not to think that won't be the case? I think you've got a fairly good model forming that investors can now sort of observe in the financials.
Look, we would like our non-recurring revenue to also grow really fast because it just means we've landed a lot of projects that will allow us to hunt today to eat tomorrow. That NRR translates into ARR. I think the main thing is we shouldn't try to track ARR against NRR. We should just try to track ARR against itself and make ARR grow and grow and grow. If NRR is performing really well, that'll translate. That is the way we should look at our business.
Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you, Jules.
In the interest of time, we will hand over to management for any written questions.
I think we have six minutes.
Okay. I'll try and sort of fill out some of the ones that I haven't really covered in great depth.
There's actually quite a few just asking us about Genesis and how the rollout is going there and how their migration is. Are they on track? Are they a good reference site for customers? There's a few that sort of talk about the same sort of.
Let me take Genesis. First of all, I met the executive team last week together with our executives that are leading that program. We have a lot of focus on Genesis, rightfully so. We are pleased with the way the project is progressing. As I mentioned, this summer, Southern Hemisphere, we should be going live with the Frank brand. Genesis is very supportive of our mutual cause. I think they see huge upside in the deployment of G2 for their cost-to-serve and their customer satisfaction and their innovation of product roadmap. They've been super helpful to us as customers call them. We're really glad that we have the kind of relationship that allows us to help each other. Yeah.
I've got a question here on Veovo from James Lindsay. Veovo had another strong period of non-recurring revenues. Can we expect this to continue in the second half? What does the new customer pipeline look like for them? Maybe I'll just take this one. Look, I think it's got a good backlog of work, and it's got a good pipeline of business. We expect Veovo to remain strong. When we look at the second half, the thing that I would just call out, and I said it in the presentation, is just it was strong hardware revenue in the first half, NZD 3.6 million. It should probably be lower, that component part, in the second half.
Overall, other aspects are growing. I mean, and it's another business going back to, I think, Jules's question on non-recurring revenue. It's another part of our business where you can see the direct link between the project activity of prior periods flowing through into recurring revenue growing across the business. That's the sort of dynamics we're seeing in Veovo in the second half.
The other thing that I'd like to call out for both our utilities and even probably more so for the airport business is the momentum in the Middle East. The Middle East is a growing part of the world. We're kind of over-indexing on that area also because we see a lot of potential there.
Question in from Wai. Why did utilities' EBITDA, so their margins, the percentage margin, go backwards? Again, I can take that. In the first half of this year, the margin was lower than the first half of last year. Actually, that really is the impact of investing a lot more in our product. It's a higher percentage of revenue that we invested in the first half of this year compared to the first half of last year. We're making sure that we can land G2 in its first implementation. We want to invest strongly in our product at this point in time. We're also spending a greater share of our revenue on sales and marketing in the first half of this year, particularly in the utilities business. That is really a reflection of those strong activity levels that we see across this year. That is really why the margin itself has dipped from last first half to this first half of the year.
I think that was definitely intentional. There is good reason for both of the increase in sales and marketing as well as R&D. Very good reasons. Also, we did not really touch on it, but as we have more of a global footprint from a currency perspective, the Australian and New Zealand currencies have had some softening. I think that this is a good component of our business that we definitely appreciate having.
Question from Owen Humphries. When you talk about near-term guidance, is the revenue growth ambitions expected in financial year 2026, financial year 2027? This is when we talk about our sort of 15% CAGR growth in the midterm. Are we expecting to see that sort of flowing through into financial year 2026 and 2027?
We are trying to get an earnings statement for next year now. Let us get closer to the end of the year, and Owen, it's a really good question. We'll be clear about that. We'll be clear about the timing of that.
Yeah. I think it's just the statement that we're winning business across the course of this year sets us up for next year and the year after. Yeah. I think we're almost at time.
I think we are at time. If we miss some people, we'll circle back.
Yeah, we'll circle back. All right.
Thank you all for the support. We look forward to continuing to engage. Thank you.