Hi, everyone. This is Gary Miles. I'm here for our HY 2026 outlook and results. Thank you for attending and participating. If we go to the first slide on our financial summary. Revenue's at NZD 110 million in the period, down 1.7%. Our recurring revenues were up 11.6% from NZD 76.4 million- NZD 85.3 million in the half. The non-recurring revenues that were down, were generally down to a couple sales that slipped to the right that we had not expected. These sales were due to broader business dependencies that were not lost to competitors. We'll talk about our pipeline shortly. The Veovo business performed strongly.
Revenue was up 3%, but if you strip out the hardware sales, it was up 20% versus prior period, and a 30% step up in recurring revenues, which was a fantastic result. EBITDA, as you can see in the numbers, at NZD 7.9 million versus NZD 13 million. Lower utilities project revenue dropped to the bottom line in this case. Cash at NZD 73.2. As those that follow us closely know that this half is a weaker half in terms of cash because we had some big cash outflows in the first half of the year, and it catches up in the second half. John will come to that in more detail. We expect FY 2026 to be cash generative before acquisitions and share buyback. We will come to the buyback in due course.
We will focus now on closing the acquisition of DTP and Factor, which we announced the Factor acquisition today or over the weekend. In the FY 2026 outlook, this remains unchanged from the 5th of May, so I'm not going to read out the entire outlook statement. I would like to say that it's too early to provide guidance for FY 2027, but we are reiterating our medium-term guidance, which is to grow the business at north of 15% CAGR with the medium-term target of 15%-20% EBITDA margins. Now, we're going to spend some time on a couple strategic drivers that are really kind of a focus area for our investments, one of which is part of the Factor acquisition.
I'm going to talk about two mega trends that are driving, particularly energy retail transformation, but also water transformation. The first one across both the water and energy sectors is the advent and the rise of AI. Use AI to automate operations. On the energy transition side, price volatility, which I think everybody's becoming pretty familiar with in the energy sector, is becoming much more prevalent and the complexity of the energy transition. Let's jump into these two mega trends and what they mean for our customers and our business. The first one is the first driver is AI automating operations and lowering cost to serve for retailers. We have some statistics here.
If you look at a AI enabled retailer, our expectation is that 30%-70% cost reductions are very realizable over the next two to three years. There's potential for enormous cost reduction here in the front office, back office, payment sections of the retailers. AI can also help with improved regulatory compliance, target marketing and segmentation capabilities, payments and collections improvements, and personalized offerings and renewals. This is a big, big investment area for us. We've got some super exciting technologies in this space. We're talking actively to many of our customers about it now. This is the space to watch. For sure, that's driving not only our engagement with retail customers, but the acceleration of our software development life cycle.
The second one is around the driver two, which is energy transition, which is creating price volatility and service complexity. This slide on the right, we created about three years ago about the changing environment of the energy marketplace. You start to move to decentralized energy resources and customers having batteries in the driveway and on their side of their house or big grid-scale batteries. Obviously global, kind of politics are driving also energy fluctuations. This energy transition is driving modern system upgrades. The main issues behind this is the advent of smart meters and hyper-scale data. Every consumption point on the grid starting to have a forecasting curve. The need to support Distributed Energy Resource Management.
There we've done an investment, excuse me, in Amber of, where we'll talk about. We have a slide specifically on service innovation and personalization, gross margin management, advanced trading and hedging, which we're not in the trading and hedging business, but this is a modernization area for retailers. Machine learning for forecasting and pricing. The machine learning for forecasting and pricing is where we have capabilities in g2, but we've modernized those with our Factor acquisition for that we had some specific things that we were looking for that we were able to find in Factor, we closed on that transaction. I'd like to talk more about how that rounds out some of our capabilities as we move into supporting the energy transition for our customers.
The deal rationale around the strategic rationale is, first of all, Factor's developed a gold standard for pricing and forecasting. It's an exceptional product. We scan the market well, and we actually have been looking on the market for a couple years. We're integrating that into g2, so it makes g2 more compelling. We can provide this as a upsell to all of our customers that we have today in the energy space, and it will help us win new business and push our pipeline forward. The other reason that we've, we're very attracted to Factor is as a standalone point of entry. Factor can be stood up. There's no need for market localization requirements. There's really no implementation project costs. It's the same-day deployment.
The retailers can stand up Factor outside of their standard billing and CRM system. It's an [assertion] point that we can, there's a light touch put all around the world, and then develop relations with those customers and come in behind them and upsell our billing customer care solution. This will be really helpful as we enter new geographies, and this is a really important part of our strategic rationale. The other thing, anytime you're buying technology, the technology has to be first class, if you're providing a bolt-on like this. The team should be fantastic. From the first time I met, Jess, the CEO, and other members of the team, this was clearly a group that I wanted to bring inside Gentrack.
A superstar set of people that know a lot about this domain and software development and had success pretty fully on with their technology. They are Wellington-based, the Factor team, here in New Zealand, but some of them will be coming to Europe to support our sales and our development there, so we look forward to welcoming all of them into the Gentrack family. If you look at the next slide, this is our capability model, which as you can see, is a very broad set of capabilities. I'm not gonna go into all the details. I would say that from a capability perspective, this stack supports B2B and B2C for energy and water. This is super capable stack. We've highlighted the areas on Distributed Energy Resource Management in the green area where we're working with Amber.
In the kind of pinkish area, this is the contract pricing and forecasting where we plug Factor in the g2 to make it even more compelling. If you look at the next slide, these are the transaction terms. I'm not gonna go through all the detail on this slide. I know that there'll be questions for John and the team about some of this, I assume in the Q&A section. I would like to say that the enterprise value of NZD 24 million was paid for with cash from our reserves. There is a potential for earn-out of additional NZD 10 million pegged against performance targets on the revenue over the next three years.
Once again, we're very excited to have them join our organization, and we'll come into this in more details in the financial section of our results today. I did want to touch for the first time on some more concrete updates from Amber. We spoke to Chris and Dan, the leaders of the Amber organization, and see if they were comfortable us providing an update to their market traction. I think if you live in Australia, you have a pretty good understanding of Amber. There's probably some Amber users here on the call even. The most interesting statistic from this slide is that from retail propositions that get a controlled battery, Amber is now taking north of 65% of new [adds] from the marketplace.
You know that there's battery subsidies, so battery uptake is come along. Amber is actually, through their distributed energy resources, is now deploying approximately 300 MW of power back into the grid. This is a fantastic success story for the energy transition. You can see the performance on the hockey stick. We're really pleased with the investment we've made. This, in my view, is undoubtedly the best tech in the world to solve this problem. We've helped them into Europe and expanding their technology and making our g2 stack more compelling.
We feel good about this investment and the direction it's headed and the value that it brings to Gentrack, our customer base. When we announced the DTP acquisition, we had a call on this subject. We did not have James with us on the call, James Williamson, who leads our Veovo business 'cause he was under the weather a bit with the virus. He's here actually across the table from me now. I'm gonna hand over to James to let him give everybody an update on Veovo as a whole, as it becomes a bigger and bigger organization inside the Gentrack family. James, let me hand over to you.
Thanks, Gary. It's been an incredibly busy first half of the year for the Veovo business. On the delivery side, we've delivered more projects than we've delivered ever before in a half. Particularly of note there is the incredible 15 airports in Saudi Arabia that we've now transitioned to go live state, but also significant Gen8 airport operations platform upgrades both in the northern and southern hemisphere. On the business winning front, we've added a number of real flagship customers as well. I'm particularly pleased with the first one noted on this slide here, the tier one airport we've won in the Asia-Pacific region. This is for our Total Airport Management platform. It not only underlines our position as the tech lead of Airport 4.0 technologies, but this opens up a whole new region for us.
Previously, obviously, we've been incredibly strong in Australia and New Zealand with our technology, but this now moves us wider into the Asia-Pacific region, and this is a real top-tier, top tier one airports. Slot management win over in North America for the Port of Seattle, so Seattle's International Airport. This is a new customer for us, just going in with an initial first product, but a great opportunity to grow that over time. We continue to expand our customer footprint with [Gen8] upgrades, as well as expanding our passenger predictability footprint at all our major airports. Previously, when I presented to you guys, I talked about our NAV CANADA win. This is our biggest revenue management win ever, and moves us into the air traffic navigation market.
That project's now well kicked off and in the design phase and due to go live in 2027. As Gary said, unfortunately I missed the chance to announce our intention to acquire DTP, so I just wanted to share my thoughts on that for a couple of minutes. We've been working with DTP for the last few years. They've been absolutely key to our wins in the Middle East, both with Dubai Airport for our billing platform, and then they took us into Saudi Arabia. We see significant growth opportunity in the Middle East, the biggest airport projects are happening there, and the most ambitious technology projects are also happening there. DTP have fantastic relationships with all the airports in that region, we really see this as being a growth driver for us going forward.
Not only have they got great relationships, but they actually bring a fantastic team of deep airport technology knowledge, and particularly in technologies that are key to the Veovo. We see this both enhancing our position in the Middle East, but actually for me, more importantly, we can use those 60 staff to deliver more projects globally. They also bring key capabilities around service management and cloud operations. Finally, they've invested heavily over the last few years in some critical technologies that fill gaps within the Veovo portfolio. Particularly, I'm excited to see their AirportView app. This is a community app which effectively will put our data and systems into the hands of thousands of users at each airport that we're in. This is a great cross-sell opportunity for us to take to our 160 airports globally.
They've got some very exciting bolt-on capabilities for our airport operations suite. That includes some Agentic AI capabilities as well as some extendable data models. And they've got a world-class integration platform that drives the whole of Dubai Airport's data integration, and we're looking to take that to our wider customer base as well. Really excited about our position. It's gonna take another couple of weeks, I think, until it completes, and then we're looking forward to welcoming them into the Veovo family. Gary?
Great. Thanks, James. On the closing remarks, before we hand over to John for the financials, Gentrack is well-positioned to lead across both airports and utility sectors as they modernize their operations and adopt AI. These are sizable markets in which Gentrack has grown 18% CAGR since I joined in FY 2020. We are confident in our target of greater than 15% CAGR in the medium term. The utilities pipeline across the next 12 months includes more than 10 new customer opportunities, and it spans circa 30 million meter points in Europe and APAC. We still target to win three to four deals from these 10 opportunities. We target to win these from now through March 2027. This number of wins would set us up for strong growth in FY 2027 and momentum for beyond. Veovo has had an exceptional first half.
It continues to win new customers and is delivering high growth and recurring revenue. We expect this success to continue. I would like to close on my section by saying this is a company with a strong balance sheet, no debt, track record of cash generation, providing an engine for bolt-on M&A. The acquisitions of DTP, in fact, demonstrate how we use this to support our growth. We remain very confident in our leadership abilities around the world and, the opportunity and the size of the opportunity that sits in front of us. With that, I would like to hand over to John. John, please.
Thanks, Gary. Looking first at the group P&L account, you can see there what Gary was referring to earlier, strong growth in recurring revenue. That's up 12%. That's been offset by lower non-recurring revenue. That's project revenues at utility, and lower hardware sales in Veovo. We cover operating costs a little later. I won't cover that here. Wanted to just talk a little bit about the LTI costs, which we again split out here you can see the impacts on half and half. We'd always guided that these would be lower in FY 2026 than they have been for the last couple of years. In addition to this half year we benefited from a NZD 2 million reversal of costs. That relates to the 2023 management LTI scheme, where we no longer expect to meet the last EPS hurdle on the last vesting date.
What happens under accounting rules when that happens, we reverse the cost that we booked prior periods against that tranche, against that scheme. That's what you see in this half year. Only affects this half year. On Amber, Gary talked about their growth a little earlier. They're investing to grow, we take our share of that cost through our P&L account. You can see that here, it's the NZD 1.6 million of cost. What it means is that the balance sheet number that we hold for Amber, which is around NZD 13 million, is actually less than the cost of our investment, which in turn is less than their valuation.
I think the last thing to highlight on the group profit and loss account is the tax credit you see there of NZD 3.9 million versus an almost NZD 2 million charge in the prior period. The reason we have a tax credit is because of the favorable treatment that we see on the LTI costs in the U.K. and in New Zealand, and that's because it's a tax deduction at the value they vet at, not the accounting value. And that tax deduction can be used to offset profits in the year and in future periods. And then we're starting to see the benefit of that flowing through as less cash tax paid this year, and I'm sure we will in future years too. Turning to utility revenue. Just a small point here.
I noted in the table below that annual fees and managed services in prior presentations, we refer to that as contracted monthly recurring revenue, CMRR, and support services we refer to as TRR, transaction recurring. The naming convention that we're showing here now matches that used in our accounts. Just turning back what the numbers tell us, recurring revenue is 9% higher, and we will see something similar to that for the full year. That's implied in the guidance that we've given for the full year. Strong growth in our support services compared to the first half of last year. That's actually spread quite widely across our customer base. What you see here is the lower non-recurring revenue. That follows the completion of several projects that were running last year.
Includes implementations at Utility Warehouse and Focus, the upgrade at Power and Water Corporation, the second phase of works we had at NEOM in Saudi Arabia. Those projects running off, haven't been replaced by new customer wins because of the delays that Gary referenced earlier. Moving across to our cost base for utilities. You'll see that our operating costs are higher than the prior period, but they're actually very similar to the operating costs of the second half of last year. Utilities delivered a much stronger revenue performance in the second half of last year in terms of project revenue. I think it shows that we had capacity to deliver more revenue in this first half than we did.
It really shows the impact the delays of in terms of new customer projects have had on EBITDA in the half. We continue to grow our investment in both sales and in product spend, that includes shifting some of our delivery resource to product investment in the first half. Thinking about the second half, we're expecting our costs, our operating costs to grow more slowly than revenue in the second half of the year. I guess just the other point to note, though, is that in terms of the LTI costs that you see here for utilities, they should be around about NZD 2 million higher in the second half of this year because the first half benefited from the reversals that I noted earlier. Looking at Veovo's financials, a really strong half. Excluding hardware sales, it's grown by 20%.
The prior period included quite a high level of those hardware sales. Just so I think people sort of feel what we're referring to here, but this is where we bundle hardware within our projects for upgrades or for new customer wins as an intrinsic part of that project delivery. That type of revenue is quite lumpy from half to half. It probably makes more sense to look at it on an annualized basis. But turning back to performance, the real call-out here is the big step up in recurring revenue, up 33%. And that's spread across quite a wide range of customers from prior period upgrades and new customer wins coming to fruition alongside this year's win at NAV CANADA.
A really strong performance from Veovo in the first half. The last thing to cover is our cash flow, where we ended the half at NZD 73 million. Our first half, in terms of our cash flow cycle, our first half is always typically the weaker of the two, and that's because it includes big payments we have across the year. That's the payments of the prior year staff bonuses, commissions or taxes, the LTI payroll taxes, for example. You can see that in the working capital outflow for employee costs of around about NZD 10 million. It was a large number in the last half. That's definitely drives the first half cash outflow of NZD 11.6 million. In the second half, we expected working capital inflow.
What that means is that overall, we expect full year to be cash generative before acquisitions and buyback. That brings us to an end of the slides that I wanted to cover in this presentation. There is more in the appendix that's a reconciliation. It really just shows how the revenue numbers that we disclose within this presentation map back to our interim accounts. That brings us to the end of the presentation and across onto Q&A. What we're going to do, we're going to be taking questions by phone first of all, and then we will move to those questions that have been submitted online.
Paulie, are you with us?
Yeah.
Just checking with the audio team. How are we progressing with the phone questions? We unfortunately do not have Mia in the room.
Apologies for the delay. If you are listening by phone and would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. To withdraw your question, simply press star one again. Your first question is from the line of Guy Hooper at Jarden. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning, team. Can I maybe just start asking, by asking two questions on the pipeline? Can you give us a little bit of, say, broad color around what actually caused the delays and, you know, just given that it was across two customers, you know, the delays similar manner, you know, how should we think about the risk to those projects under the second half?
Hey, Guy. That's great. Thanks for the question. You know, we talked about this on the May 5th call in some level of detail. Happy to reiterate it. We can't get into specifics on, you know, things that are with retailers that are not really ours to disclose. If you look at the types of things that could happen that are beyond our control, retailers can go into M&A situations. You know, they could have a trigger where the competitive landscape is going to change. For example, they could be deregulated and moving into a competition in the near future that was delayed by the regulators, so it took the trigger off trying to transform quickly.
There are things like that that can transpire that change the compelling event to move to a new [billing] CRM system. As I mentioned, that was what happened to us in this period. We were surprised by it. It's definitely not something that we had anticipated. Those kind of things can happen on the marketplace. I don't think they're normal course of business, so I wouldn't look at it as, you know, indicative of the market as a whole. It's also something that we can't fully predict.
Yeah. Thank you. I mean, just given we've had, I suppose, a couple of years where you had consistent upgrades in the guidance setting, and then in the scenario a downgrade, all of which predominantly driven by that project revenue. Like, how do you think about your guidance settings, you know, as you go and look for the year ahead, you know, and how should we think, I guess, about risk for those more generally?
Guy, I mean, in terms of the full year guidance, and I think we referenced this on the call following market update, what we try to do is to not be dependent on winning deals from our new customer pipeline to be able to fall within our guided revenue range for FY 2026. We try to remove the dependency on that for this year. Then for FY 2027, it's too early really for us to give guidance, 'cause again, you know, there's work there still to do. We're sort of clearly setting out here that we're not giving guidance for FY 2027.
Maybe I'll just add what we also discussed on the call on May 5th. Thank you for bringing in the beginning of that statement, meeting our earnings in prior periods. We've never missed our numbers until this point, so we surely don't plan to have that. It's just not in our DNA. Anyway, I just wanted to reiterate that's not, that's definitely not something we plan to do. Some more questions, Guy?
Yeah, great. Thanks. Maybe just one last one on Factor. Could you give us any indication of this current size of the business and what it needs to, you know, what growth would look like to hit the NZD 17 million ARR earn-out target?
Sorry, the last part of your question was a little bit muffled. Can you just repeat that, please?
Yeah. Just asking what type of growth Factor would have to deliver in order to hit the NZD 17 million ARR required for the earn-out.
Look, I mean, obviously, it's gonna have to deliver some strong growth to meet the full earn-out target. It's what you would typically expect for an earn-out target. It sets a good, strong high bar. I think the only thing I would call out is the statement we make in the deck in terms of being EPS accretive by FY 2028. I think that's clearly set at a lower level of growth than the earn-out. I mean, you know, we're still, you know, we're still going to go out and grow this business strongly, but we don't need to hit that kind of growth level to make EPS accretive.
That's all from me. Thank you.
Your next question is from the line of Joshua Dale at Craigs Investment Partners. Please go ahead.
Morning, team. First question. When you say you're targeting three to four deals before March 2027, and then say your pipeline in the next 12 months has 10 new prospects, it reads like six or seven of those fall between March and May next year, but that's probably not right. How should we interpret that?
Yeah, that's a misunderstanding. We do not, you know, propose a 100% win rate from our pipeline. This is a qualified pipeline in which we have 10 deals as we comment, in order 10 deals. As we said, we would target to win three or four of those. Some we may not win, some may get delayed, pretty typical pipeline activity. But that's the way you should look at. Then, you know, some will go out of the pipeline, different things will come in the pipeline. Does that make sense?
Just in terms of your question there, Josh.
Yeah. You're sort of saying your win rate out of 10 is targeting three to four.
We're saying our close rate. It's not really the same as a win rate because some things could shift, et cetera. Other things may come in, but, yeah, we don't really like to go too much into win rate. You know, we're trying to give some clarity on our, on our, on the size of the pipeline that's well qualified, and then, you know, what we would need to do to go into good growth in FY 2027 and beyond.
Got it. That, that's helpful, thanks. You know, I appreciate you don't give guidance for FY 2027, but you, and you obviously don't have full visibility over your revenue, but you probably do to some extent over costs. I just wanted to ask, there's an increase in costs implied by your guidance into the second half of 2026. Is it fair to annualize that into FY 2027?
I think on our cost base. You're right, there's a small, you know, there's a small uptick in the cost base implied with guidance, because there's an uptick in the revenue. Don't forget, you've got to think about both the utilities and the Veovo business when you're trying to work that through. I think in terms of FY 2027, I mean, it's kind of hard to really make comment when we're not giving guidance here. You know, I guess it will depend on where we think we're heading, the trajectory we think we're on in terms of how that cost base will grow into the following financial year.
Okay, thanks. I appreciate you didn't put it in the release, is there any sense you can give us of Factor's contribution to FY 2026? I mean, you know, if we look at the acquisition cost of NZD 24 million, excluding the earn-out, it's, you know, roughly in the ballpark of DTP's NZD 17 million. Is the revenue level sort of in the same ballpark as DTP too?
Well, DTP, we called out the contribution of DTP's revenue. For Factor, we're just saying that it's not gonna have a material impact on revenue in the, in the balance of FY 2026. They're businesses that are very different in their profile in that way. In terms of the cost that we take on, and the sales effort that we've put in to grow that business, what we have said is that that's actually included in the FY 2026 guidance that we gave back on the 5th of May. There's nothing that you need to sort of add in or sort of, you know, take account of in terms of the guidance that we've already provided.
Okay. That's helpful. Last one from me. Are there any sort of utilities globally that are currently using Factor that you are willing to call out? I guess some notable customers of these.
Yeah. We're not disclosing that at this point. We've talked about which countries they're in. We're not disclosing customer names at this point.
I mean, we completed on the deal on Friday. I think it probably good grace to sort of talk to customers and the like before we start sort of highlighting them on public calls.
Yeah. Okay. Understandable. Thanks very much, team.
Thank you.
Your next question is from the line of Philip Campbell of UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, guys. Just a couple from me. I suppose, Gary or John, the first one was just if we are gonna see in utilities a bit of a shift, more towards, you know, less upfront project implementation type revenue and more on recurring revenue, will there be a bit of a transition over the next two or three years for that? Will that dampen some of the revenue growth in the short term? Obviously with the higher recurring revenue medium term, you'll start to see that growth, be higher, or is it obviously gonna be more dependent on what customers you win?
Yeah. I, t here's no doubt that if we're, you know, if we're more aggressive and shorter sales, shorter delivery time for initial deployment, then, you know, the revenue will have some impact on growth on the short term. We have some other customers that are CapEx intensive. There's state organizations. They may push for CapEx, we'll, that'll balance that all some. This is definitely a transition that we're trying to make. We're intentionally moving towards, that'll affect our, you know, in a very positive way, that'll affect the dynamics of our revenue mix to debit on the bottom line. It's hard to predict exactly how that'll play out.
The other thing that's happening though with AI is you can actually, you know, these programs just when you have an out-of-the-box stack and then you can start to run migrations with AI and interoperability with tangential systems with AI and things like that, the cost to deploy these systems also goes down. That's also a driver and a dynamic. As the industry gets more and more, you know, success stories deploying things without such a long term and cost to deploy it, the more energy companies and water companies will transform. That's just part of a journey that the industry is on that we think will make a lot of sense for both the industry and for us.
Maybe any other thing, Phil, I'd add into context.
Okay. Awesome.
The only other add in context, Phil, so though is that, our non-recurring revenue in FY 2026, our guidance for it, you know, it's comparatively a lower level than you've seen the last couple of years. When you're talking about the impact it has on growth going forward, it's coming off the back of a lower starting base point, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Gotcha. Just the next one kind of a follow on. When I'm just looking at the composition of the utility revenues, obviously the B2B is now up to about 40%, which possibly could be due to the lower project revenues. Also with the Factor acquisition, is there kind of a subtle shift here more towards B2B away from B2C, or is that just a kind of a timing thing?
No, I don't think that's Most of our customers are actually multi-play, and I wouldn't read into it that way. We like the B2C business and we like B2B. I, you know, we're very strong in B2B. I think naturally that's a point that, you know, we have a lot of strength in sales process too. If you look at our pipeline, there's plenty of B2C work in there that's pretty sizable.
Thanks. Just the last one. You know, obviously with Anthropic, when they released the Mythos model to a select group of kind of customers globally, has energy companies had a trial of Mythos and trying to, you know, run it to find out where there's any bugs or problems with the software, including Gentrack software?
Yeah. Our customers have not that I'm aware of. I think that I would be aware, but I don't wanna just blanket statement it, you know, definitively. Yeah, the answer is no.
Okay. Great. Thanks.
Yep.
Your next question is from the line of Owen Humphries of Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Thanks, guys. I was just reaching back to the pipeline discussion. I know it's a qualified pipeline. I know there's movements in and out. There must be a base case to the three to four target over the next four months. Can you maybe just talk about on a risk-weighted basis what the three to four will translate to in terms of data points? Can you give us broad range?
Yeah. The tricky thing about talking about a pipeline in a such a public environment is, you know, it just, it's a really competitive aspect of our business. That seems to get, you know, repeated and sent around and used in all kinds of ways possible. It's just pretty difficult to try to go into more details. We're trying to provide some quantitative information for our investors, but we just need to be careful about how we peel that out.
Can we use a broad-based average then?
Yeah. No, I think, when we sort of target three to four deals, we would like to target that to be a sort of proportionate, you know, proportionate selection of the total aggregate in that extent. Clearly, if we won, you know, the largest and the most revenue-generative deals out of that. It'll probably be a little bit above that, and you can get something a bit below that. I would take it as proportionate.
Yeah. I think if you look at it , the scale of the numbers, I mean, NZD 30 million is a big number.
Yeah.
Some big suppliers in there. We've said pretty regularly that we support tier ones today at scale, and that we are targeting winning tier ones. That's an important also transition for us. I think we have done a really good job moving from the lower tiers end up really being a tier one, tier two player. That's exactly what this NZD 30 million represents for the utility business also.
Good one. Just given where the pipeline sits now and the expectations and timing, are you guys right sized in terms of headcounts to expect some more, some further moderation or 'cause just following from the question before around headcount appearing to increase in the second half costs?
Yeah. Thanks, Owen. Look, I think, you know, we've gotta create a careful balance here. To be able to progress on deals that are in play, we need to have the capability to be able to demonstrate we've got that capability to the opportunities that we can deliver on that. Clearly we have maybe sort of reduced the level a little bit since the first half. We need to maintain that, I guess a strong delivery capability to be able to capitalize on the deals in the pipeline. It's a little bit of a chicken and egg.
It becomes harder to win the deals without the capability behind and the resource behind to actually deliver on it. We'll be careful. We haven't launched a sort of huge sort of, you know, AI-linked retrenchment program, you know, or a large sort of, you know, scale reduction program. I think that would be shortsighted in terms of trying to grow the business.
Last one from me, just around Factor. Well done there. Just understand, what's its revenue model? Like, how do you charge customers, one? Two, what's required to hit their earn-out target there, or their revenue targets there, and how much do you expect to generate that from your existing customer base?
Look, we definitely are Owen, thanks for that. We're definitely not breaking that out. We have, you know, we built our model to be able to cross-sell and upsell this into our base. The majority of it will also quite frankly be new insertion points and new sales for g2. We really see this as a growth vector, particularly for the insertion point side. You know, it's a high ARR-related business. That's why it's, there's really almost no setup cost. This is something that people can spin up, trial for 60 days, purchase it. It's pretty slick insertion point type of technology.
They also have relations with AWS and Salesforce and the likes of those players that can that need a pricing engine inside their, you know, their own Configure, Price, Quote offerings that they're providing, at least Salesforce is providing to its customers. This is something that we plan to leverage up. We'll provide, you know, more details as that rolls out over the next year to two years.
Thanks, guys.
Yeah.
Your next question is from the line of Sinclair Currie of MA Moelis. Please go ahead.
Oh, hi. Can you hear me, guys?
Yeah.
Yeah. We can hear you, Sinclair.
Brilliant. Thanks, fine. I'm just interested in your managed services revenue and that composition of the recurring revenues. Presumably that just relates to between support and managed services, the sort of infrastructure, SaaS versus on-prem decisions of the clients. You'd expect managed services to remain pretty flat going forward? Is there any changes we should be thinking about within that composition going forward?
Sinclair, I think first of all was the, in terms of what managed services relate, actually the overwhelming majority relates to a sort of more of a data product we have that matches, you know, rather than it being sort of an infrastructure, the management of infrastructure in that sense. Yeah, slightly different dynamic.
I think in the past we've always guided that we saw us reaching the sorts of level we're at today, but we didn't see that, you know, we weren't guiding that people should expect that level to increase in the future. Currently it's focused on the U.K. market. We would like to take that into some other markets, but I think at this point in time, we sort of just guide, you know, we sort of guide not to build in growth into our managed services revenue stream.
Okay. Thanks for that. Another question just on your LTI costs and payroll tax. The implication, I guess, of where your share price is relative to where your last bunch of LTIs vested, would that imply that there won't be a repeat of the payroll tax impulse that you had, and which, you know, weighed on cash flow in the first half if the current share price sort of levels are maintained? Am I understanding that accounting and tax charge correctly?
Yeah. Okay. Let's just think. I mean, you won't see first of all, you wouldn't see any sort of cash flow or the like in the second half of the year. It's a first half dynamic. I think it also is generated around when shares vest. If you think what we've sort of talked about in this deck is how the very last tranche of the 2023 scheme, we're not expecting that to vest because the EPS hurdle won't be met. It means that you then won't have LTI taxes to pay against that in the first half of next year in the same way. It's always a little bit difficult to guide on how that runs.
Currently you'd expect in the first half of FY 2027 there to be a very low level of LTI payroll taxes. You still have commissions, you still have staff bonuses in your cash flow, but you'd see a smaller component. Sorry, does that sort of make sense?
Okay.
Is that what you were trying to ask?
I think that makes sense. I'll take it offline if I have anything else to come back with. Just one last question I think Owen asked, but just to understand. On the earn-out for Factor, I guess you highlighted the upsell as a pretty large opportunity for yourselves. If you were to look at the existing overlap of Factor customers with your existing customer base, are you able to give any sort of indication of what percentage of overlap there is there, and maybe, you know, yeah, just try to get a gauge for how much more of your customer base Factor could sell into relative to where they might be at the moment?
Yeah. At our current base, there's zero overlap. In our pipeline, there is overlap. It's one of the things that was attractive about Factor is that, you know, our potential customers were also talking about Factor, which was great. I'll just reiterate, the Factor transition is about growth, growth and growth. You know, getting in quickly with customers with really innovative essential technologies and building relationships to provide the opportunity to upsell g2 behind it. By the way, it doesn't always have to be upsold behind it, but, you know, and that's that was the logic behind a lot of this acquisition, that we think will help us quite a bit with our growth opportunities.
Brilliant. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thanks.
A reminder before we go to the next question to press star one if you'd like to join the queue. Your next question is from the line of Amit [Kanwatia] from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just a couple of questions from me. If I think about the fiscal 2027, and appreciate there is no quantitative guidance at this point, but if I look at the qualitative comments, I mean, you're still expecting a strong growth in fiscal 2027, which is similar to what you said back in November, December. This is despite, I mean, your pipeline has shifted by few months. Six months, you call out. I mean, how should I be thinking about those two things? Does it imply the pipeline or the conversion of customers is more imminent in the near term for you to be able to maintain that qualitative guidance comments for 2027?
No. I mean, maybe one way to think about it is that in our guidance statement, we're not providing guidance for FY 2027. Then we go on and talk about our medium-term guidance and our medium-term targets. I think we're just trying to draw, you know, a distinction between FY 2027 and our medium-term targets. Because at this time, I think it's just too early to sort of guide, but we can cover that in the next financial year. Yes, we've got lots of great opportunities and drivers for growth. We've got Veovo. We've got a strong pipeline. We've got full year impact of DTP acquisition. You know, there's a range of things out there that help support us. I think it's just too early to be more definitive in that at this point.
Sure. I mean, how should I be thinking about strong growth? Is that, I mean, is it fair to say by strong, you mean double-digit growth?
Yeah. Look, I think we wanna just be very careful what we set up as an expectation for FY 2027 at this point. I mean, again, I think.
All right. Okay.
I mean, I think just, you know, maybe just think through those different building blocks in turn. You can sort of see the range of outcomes that, you know, that make some sense there.
Sure. Just staying on 2027. If I look at your operating cost, I am looking at the utilities operating cost in first half, that is gone up. You have given the reasons why it has. Looks like your second half cost is a guide in terms of the first half. How should I be thinking I mean, you are holding the cost base? Would it be fair to say your FY 2027 operating cost be slower than the revenue growth as well, be more like a flat kind of outcome?
Yeah. A lot of that depends how fast the revenue actually growing at FY 2027. Look, I can sort of see where you're sort of heading on, onto that. I mean, one way to think about it is that we have, you know, we've held too much capacity in the first half, and we could have delivered more revenue. You see some of the benefit of that in FY 2026, as I sort of state in this deck.
I think there is some sense to that then going forward into FY 2027 in terms of the wider capability that we have to deliver on revenue. I think the only thing that we would then have to think about as we near the end of this financial year is what other investments are we going to make in terms of driving growth beyond FY 2027 still.
Sure. I mean, couple of questions on Factor. Just still trying to understand, I mean, a, what's the integration timeline, for this into your business? I mean, can you start upselling from day one? Secondly, are you able to provide, the Factor revenues and EBITDA, in the last 12 months?
What we're not, we're not disclosing their financials. In terms of the integration, we will be integrated with them within a matter of weeks. We've already sent some notes to our customers about the news and that we wanna get the technology in front of them. That's started already this morning.
Sure. If I look at the ARR, I mean, you've got NZD 217 million ARR related to the earn-out of NZD 10 million. Can you provide a bit more kind of color on the potential earn-out of NZD 10 in terms of the ARR of NZD [217]? Is that all driven by the Factor team or, I mean, you'd be growing the ARR as well over the next three years. How should I be thinking that?
It's just, it's driven by sales of Factor. You know, you can see the current part of any sale would relate to Factor. Sometimes it would be a standalone. It's purely the Factor product.
Yeah. I can say it's all hands on the pump.
Yeah.
Everybody in Gentrack's a salesperson, and we're all selling Factor and they're also selling g2. We're all pushing to get and exceed as much as possible any targets we've got.
Is that 217 number, is that for fiscal 2029 or fiscal 2028? Can you clarify that for me?
It's the [17] number we talked about, it's three years following transaction. I think that's what we sort of talked about. That's a target for the earn-out. Look, I mean, I think we've probably got time for one other question or so from phone lines, if that's everything from yourself.
Okay. I'll leave it there. Thanks.
Thank you.
Okay.
And then-
Sorry, Paulie. We've finished all the calls on the for questions on the phone. We've probably got time for one or two questions from those submitted online. Our first one from James Lindsay asking, "The combined consideration of two acquisitions is circa NZD 41 million before earn-outs, and you have also announced the buyback of up to NZD 20 million. This would be most of the cash balance without the second half 2026 cash flow. Should we expect M&A activity to be put on pause, or is it more likely that the buyback would be paused?
Look, I think the priority for us is growth. That's so. We You know, it's not the best time to go out and use equity to buy something. We'd prefer to use cash. The priority is definitely growth and that would lead towards M&A. We said we'd come back on the buyback and due course, and we will do that.
Probably our last question, for the call, from [Rohan Shankar]. Can you mention some of the key competitors to Factor? Does Kraken offer the same features?
The main use case for pricing is mostly on the B2B side of energy. It's not only on B2B, it can be used for broad B2C portfolios and things like that. We are obviously very strong there. I think Kraken has some ambitions in that space. I don't wanna comment on their stack itself, so I'm not going to. There are other competitors out there. We generally don't like to call out competitors on calls like this. Some retailers have their own pricing, but as you move to smart meters and things like that and hyperscale data, there's a very, very kind of growing trend to license this technology from the professionals that build it once. That, w e ran a pretty good funnel and decided on Factor for a number of reasons, and I think they make this really good fit for us and for our customers.
Well, all right. Thank you everybody on the call. That concludes the time we've got for this morning. I think we've addressed most questions between the phones and online. We look forward to seeing a number of you over the coming weeks. Thank you all.