Good afternoon. On behalf of the Board, management, and the staff of ikeGPS, thank you for attending our 2023 Annual Meeting. My name is Alex Knowles, and I'm the Board Chair of ikeGPS. We welcome you as an online participant through our virtual meeting platform, provided by our share register, Link Market Services. A special welcome also to the many new shareholders who have joined ikeGPS since our last AGM. We note that you can vote and ask questions online and encourage you to do so. I'll provide you with further instructions as we progress through the meeting. If you encounter any issues, please refer to the Virtual Annual Meeting online portal guide, or you can phone the helpline on 0800 222 220. I would encourage you to send through your questions as soon as you can.
This will allow us to answer these questions at the appropriate time. In the meeting today, we have the following board members. Let me introduce them. Rick Christie, Fred Lax, Mark Ratcliffe, Glenn Milnes. Also present today is Brian Musfeldt, our CFO, and representatives of our financial year 2023 auditors, Grant Thornton. Ladies and gentlemen, with the introductions out of the way, let us move on to the formal part of the meeting. I will make some opening remarks, and then our Managing Director and CEO, Glenn Milnes, will present and outline some of the performance highlights of the last financial year. After that, the resolutions that are before you today will be put forward. Just to cover the formalities involved in that, the company's constitution prescribes a quorum requirement of 3 shareholders. I can confirm that this requirement has been met.
Proxies have been appointed for the purposes of this meeting in respect of 22 million shares, representing over 13.9% of the total number of shares. I'd like to thank shareholders on their level of participation in today's meeting. My fellow Directors and I intend to vote all discretionary proxies we have received in favor of Resolutions 1 and 2 , as set out in the notice of meeting. Voting on all resolutions in today's meeting will be conducted by way of poll. Those participating online through the virtual meeting website will have the opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you will need to click Ask a Question within the online meeting platform, select what item is regarding in the dropdown window, type in your question, and then submit. I encourage shareholders who are attending to send their questions through as soon as possible.
The financial statements for the 12-month period through 31 March 2023, together with the auditor's report, are set out in the company's annual report. The annual report was made available on the ikeGPS website on 30th June 2023. I would like to now just present my commentary moving forward. As you know, my name is Alex Knowles. I am the Chair of ikeGPS and based in Los Angeles, California. Through the financial year 2023 period, I was pleased to continue in the Chair, having been appointed in the financial year 2022. At this time, I'd like to again introduce my fellow board members, they being Fred Lax, Mark Ratcliffe, Rick Christie, and Glenn Milnes o nto our company.
The 2023 financial year marked another significant period for IKE, a year in which we deepened our foothold in the North American utility infrastructure market and made meaningful strides in financial and operational performance. We were very pleased to deliver a robust financial performance with revenue growth of 93%, reaching just under NZD 31 million, with 89% of this revenue coming from recurring subscriptions and recurring transaction sources. Gross margin was NZD 16.4 million, and EBITDA was a loss that narrowed to NZD 2.1 million. This performance significantly surpassed our internal targets. The uplift can largely be attributed to the continued demand for our productivity solutions in the North American electric utility and communication sector, along with our strategic investments into technology development.
Our market is comprised of approximately 3,000 electric utilities, 200 communications companies, and over 2,000 engineering service providers across the United States. Today, IKE serves approximately 400 enterprise accounts, constituting about 6% of this potential customer base. This underscores the vast untapped market and a long-term growth opportunity ahead of us. In financial year 2023, a significant part of our investment went towards advancing the next generation of our product suites, including the next generation PoleForeman and our AI-driven solutions. IKE Insight being one of the major areas of our AI focus. These advanced products, which are launching in this financial year, are designed to dramatically improve the way our customers operate. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and advanced engineering, we anticipate IKE Insight will enable faster, safer, and more precise network engineering outcomes.
The upgraded capabilities of our next generation PoleForeman solution will also allow us to further meet the unique needs of our customers, while enhancing our software's value proposition. A key part of our sales strategy is to land, embed, and expand the use of our software within these large enterprise infrastructure accounts. This could take some time. However, our software is sticky and directly supports network engineering activities, a necessity in the face of several macroeconomic tailwinds. This includes the anticipated investment of over NZD 350 billion into fiber and 5G infrastructure, an additional NZD 60 billion into rural broadband network developments. T he urgency to increase electrical network capacity to allow carbon zero targets to be met , and the pressure on electric utilities to harden and maintain their distribution networks.
Looking forward, we expect to see continued overall growth, noting that for Q1 and Q2 of this financial year, transaction revenue has been softer on a run rate level due to the traditional engineering practices of our two utilities, where our two larger customers are building their fiber networks. We extend our thanks to our shareholders for your support and the belief in our vision. As we continue to innovate and grow, we do so with the confidence that we are building something meaningful. Thank you. Glenn, now over to you for more detail on our performance for the financial year 2023 and performance as it pertains to this financial year.
Thank you, Alex. And Brendan, if you're okay to stream the slideshow, please, and I'll just prompt the page turn. And I'd like to first thank everyone for taking the time to meet today, and to hear an update on the business. So what I'll do is try to pulse through a number of slides. Brendan, I'm on slide four at the moment, so IKE at a glance. Just Alex has touched on this. It feels like a long time ago now, but we grew the business 90%+ last year to NZD 31 million of revenue.
I think importantly to understand is that 89% of that revenue is flowing from recurring and reoccurring sources, which is, you know, a very important part of our business model transition and a consequence of the product development that we've done, to move from a very early stage company back in 2015 to where we are today. This is 380 enterprise customers. Right now it's more than 400 North American enterprise customers that are building networks or supporting the build of networks. The other metrics are documented there. We closed our EBITDA loss position to NZD 2.1 million, maintained a strong balance sheet. Next slide, please.
Again, just a graphical representation of our revenue growth through these past few years. So we grew from NZD 9 million, that was sort of in the middle of the COVID mess, to NZD 16 million in FY 2022, and to NZD 31 million in FY 2023, and with gross margin, you know, growing in line with that kind of trajectory. Next slide, please. And again, for shareholders, I think it's really important to note the quality of the revenue, with close to 90% of our revenue mix now coming from either recurring subscriptions or recurring transaction sources. And this has been a really important transition for us based on investment into products and also into our business model. There's just a third bullet down there around efficiency.
So our revenue per employee has trended up. It's more than NZD 300,000/ employee, and that grew in the period from prior to being at about NZD 190,000/ employee. So that's a key metric for productivity and efficiency. Next slide, please. Every quarter, we publish the same table in terms of key metrics. And through FY 2023, we saw just strong growth across all of these things. We obviously talk about transactions, that shows usage of the platform. Clearly, subscriptions is really important. It's the number of people that are subscribing to use the software in-house themselves. And also hardware and other revenue. So our field devices and field software drives some of the IKE Office platform revenue.
So that's another critical thing for us to continue to track. And obviously, the other key thing for shareholders is to look at the number of customers and logos that we're winning. We're targeting the very biggest infrastructure companies in the U.S., and they start small, but they can grow to be large, and they can be very sticky. It's sort of a decades-long customer opportunity with our customer base. Next slide. So what I'd like to do in terms of this presentation is to focus a little bit more on the market opportunity that IKE is addressing and what we do within that market, and why customers are making purchasing decisions. Next slide, please, Brendan. So there's three segments of our addressable market. The first are the electric utilities themselves.
So these are the folks that keep the lights on and provide power to, you know, to power homes, businesses, and now the electric vehicle market. And they, they're all facing common challenges across North America. The first is around resiliency, so not having a network or part of the network fail to cause a fire or an outage. There's a big requirement for capacity. So, you know, how do you move from having 20% of the nation's energy sitting on the electrical grid to 50% by 2050 to meet carbon net zero targets and power electric vehicles? There's a lot of liability risk in North America for causing a fire or a death, or an outage. And the challenges are common across more than 3,000 electric utilities in the North American landscape.
It's pretty staggering in terms of just the number of electric utility customers that IKE potentially addresses. Next slide, please. This is just a map. Again, some of this might be really obvious for some. Apologies. Just trying to visually represent the scale of the network challenge in North America. Think of the U.S. as it's 50 countries, it's bigger than Europe. Everyone speaks English, but they're very different in terms of how they operate. The electric utility market's dominated by about 106 investor-owned utilities that serve about 75% of the population. They're the very biggest and most important electric utility companies in the country. Next slide, please.
In addition to this, there's more than 2,800 municipalities and cooperatives that also serve the more rural or smaller communities across the United States. So, yeah, market timing is just everything, and what we're dealing with here in the U.S. is aging infrastructure, a need for much greater capacity, and a need for much higher network resiliency. And IKE, we've built software that just helps to digitize the assessment process and also the design and maintenance process for power and electric utility companies. So we've got quite unique value-bringing technology into what's been quite a traditional market in terms of engineering practices, and I'll talk a bit more about our products in due course. Next slide, please, Brendan. This market trend is not going anywhere.
It's just going to grow and grow. It's. You know, if we look ahead for the next 20 years-30 years, and these numbers are in billions in terms of distribution network CapEx, the requirement is just to keep building more and more and more capability, and these companies just they're in need of productivity solutions. There's an aging workforce. They've got to go fast, way faster than they have gone before. And again, we play a small part, but we play an important part in terms of this network development process. Next slide, please, Brendan, to slide 13. And what we've been developing over these last number of years is a suite of solutions to support, very specifically, support distribution network assessment, design, and maintenance. So we've got three core software products.
One is called IKE Structural. It's now in seven of the 10 largest investor-owned utilities in the United States as their standard for designing and looking at structural analysis for their network. We've got a product called IKE Office Pro. This is all around digitizing the way that utilities capture and assess their network information. And then we've got a more recent product called IKE Insight, which is all around the ability to process, like, massive amounts of data. Think of drones, think of Google Street View, and being able to pull out power infrastructure information and give a utility customer some decision-making criteria. So those are our three core products. And then we've got a bolt-on solution called IKE Analyze. This is when we use technology-enabled...
This to process data on behalf of our customers and give them back an engineering output using technology rather than using a lot of people. So that's the core of our business, and we see opportunities just to continue to sort of build out capability around these key themes. Next slide, Brendan, please, on to 14. We go to market directly. This is a bit hard to read, I apologize, but we've got quite a deep team now of segment experts. We've got a group that focuses on the utility part of the market. We've got a team that focus on the engineering service providers that do a lot of the work, and we've got a team that focus on the communications company.
So these are the groups that are deploying a lot of the fiber networks and 5G networks, across the nation. Next slide, please. This is probably one to read at a later time, but we've now got a really well-defined sales motion that speeds our, our sales close, time frame. So, a go-to-market strategy that, that looks at the, obviously, the market opportunity, the, the go-to-market approach, and then these three verticals, and then sales playbooks that support, different messaging to different customers. They buy the same products, but they've got different, pain points that we, that we solve for, for these groups. Next slide to 16. Thanks. And just trying to provide a, again, a visual view of how. This is a look into IKE software. This is, Crown Castle.
They're the biggest deployer of fiber across North America. Looking down at the bottom of the state of Florida, and looking at projects, how they're using IKE to use our software to go faster, to get their fiber network deployed more quickly. Next slide, please, to 17. Again, just another map view. This is a dashboard for AT&T. These aren't projects, these are cities where AT&T, it's the biggest communications company in the world, where they're using IKE to again, help build their fiber network in a more efficient and faster, high quality manner. Next slide, please. So we've talked a bit about the electric utilities. The other big macro market driver for IKE ties back into what's happening with communications networks.
So across North America, fiber network deployments are still in their early stages, so most fiber goes overhead. So they attach to power poles because it's 3x-4x cheaper, and it's about 2x faster than having to put a network underground. So the IKE Solutions just dramatically speeds up this network assessment and deployment process, and I'll show you how in just a minute. Next slide. Thanks. And it's slightly counterintuitive in terms of where this investment super cycle is in North America, so it's different to how you might think about Japan or Australia or some of these other markets. There's probably another 5 years of just massive investment. There's 200 fiber companies racing to be first to pass homes and to pass businesses.
And again, we support them to go faster and get their networks stood up and lit quicker. Next slide, please. 20. And from a customer footprint perspective, it takes time with all of these huge infrastructure companies to A, get through the door, B, to run proof of concept, and then, C, to become standardized in the way that they use your technology across their networks. And that's the, I guess, the exciting part for where IKE sits at the moment, is we're now, you know, sitting inside groups like AT&T, Bell Canada, again, mentioning Crown Castle. These are all, you know, multi-billion dollar businesses with, you know, five-year or decades-long investment plans that are using IKE for aspects of their fiber deployments.
I think that's really important for our shareholders to understand. We get in, we land and expand, so we get in, and then we aim to develop accounts and grow over time. And there's obviously a big chance for us to expand into new logos, new customers. There's probably 200 communications companies deploying fiber here in North America. There's also about 2,000 engineering companies that are doing lots of this work for customers. Next slide, please. So overall, it's a really big market. Top down, it's just an enormous opportunity. You know, we assess approximately a $5.5 billion total addressable market, if anyone was to go and get the whole thing.
But this obviously isn't a winner take all. We see this market as a winner take best. You know, it's an opportunity to grab customers and to maintain them for decades and decades as a great technology partner, which is our objective. Next slide to 22. A lot of words here, but there's a good summary. Just in terms of some of these market tailwinds, and market tailwinds you know, matter a lot as you're growing a technology business, and we're just lucky to be in the right place at the right time, we think, in terms of this market. Next slide. Thanks, Brendan. And we've showed this same slide before.
If you look at the electric utility market, we're in six, actually now seven of the 10 largest investor-owned utilities in North America, have standardized on our IKE PoleForeman product to do their design and structural analysis programs. They, each of them sit on our customer council and are helping us build the next generation of products. So we feel like we're in a good place, but we've only really just got started in terms of the broader marketplace. So that was some context on the North American market landscape because, I know a lot of these logos and names, et cetera, just aren't familiar to a lot of folk.
But we truly are serving the very biggest infrastructure companies in North America, but just getting started. In terms of. Next slide, thanks, Brendan, to 25. Just trying to provide an update on the first half of FY 2024. That's the year to March, FY 2024. The first item is we have had some timing delays with engineering programs across three of our largest national infrastructure customers. These customers are not lost, and in fact, we expect. They're guiding us to be at very high levels of IKE product usage over the coming years that we're looking at. But as a consequence of unrelated slowdowns with some engineering practices, our transaction revenue in the first half of the period will be lower than perhaps analyst forecasts.
The flip side of that is we've continued to see very strong growth in our recurring subscription revenue in the prior calendar period, which is, has been very positive. So as we look ahead to the second half of the year, our sales opportunity pipeline and guidance from many of our core customers, we think the second half is gonna be extremely strong, which we're optimistic about. So we should see a return to strong growth through 2H of this year. Next slide, please, to 26. Thought I'd just try to highlight quickly some key customer win examples through the first half of the year.
We're winning about one new enterprise customer per week, and that velocity has continued to sort of step up as we deepen the sales team, but also our brand and the utility of our products in the market. There are three examples here. We made an announcement to the market around a Tier 1 communications company. This group operates across 35 of the 50 states in the U.S. We're supporting a project for them in California, initially. It should generate around $1.5 million in subscription revenue over the coming 18 months-24 months, and just some big opportunities to expand into their business in other parts of the country. The second one is a Tier 1 investor-owned utility.
This is one of the 10 largest groups in North America, up on the northeast coast of the U.S. They've adopted our next-generation IKE PoleForeman product and the business model. It's a multi-year subscription contract worth more than $400,000 initially, and again, opportunities to expand usage across that business. And then the third one is a Tier 1 engineering customer win. So the engineering companies are important to our market and our opportunity. They do lots of work for electric utilities and for communications companies, and they tend to have multi-year contracts in place to do the work. Initially, we're supporting this national group with a decade-long process in New Mexico, helping that utility harden their network or strengthen their network.
And again, opportunities to expand across a lot of different offices for this engineering company over time. Next slide, please, Brendan, to 27. We've invested significantly into product development and technology development over these last two or three years, and I think the exciting thing is we're at a point where this starts to pay back strongly. We're releasing, at the moment, the next generation of PoleForeman. So this is the structural analysis program. All of the logos at the bottom, that's seven of the 10 largest utilities in the country, are on our customer council and are customers, and we're just going into the process to launch into these groups with this next generation product.
But it's also a whole next generation business model, so moving to a pure SaaS model, you know, licenses per seat, per annum basis. So we just expect to see a, you know, a really significant click up in terms of annual recurring revenue from the next generation PoleForeman product. So it's gonna be great for customers in terms of productivity and quality. It's also gonna be very positive for the business in terms of revenue and predictability. Again, these customers are. They're acquiring our software on multi-year terms, so it provides us with a lot of certainty as we look forward. Next slide, please. 28. The other interesting item is we've built an automation engine called IKE Insight. This is the ability to process bulk data.
We're partnering with Google and using Google data to be able to crawl, like, a whole network, find the poles, find the wires, and be able to provide a customer with sort of a whole of network view of to drive some of their decision-making criteria. I'll just pulse through this pretty quickly, but before I go to the next slide, the example here is, imagine you're an infrastructure company. You're trying to deploy fiber. You wanna go overhead because it's faster, it's cheaper. But you wanna understand, where can I go that's gonna be easy from an engineering perspective? And where can I go where another fiber company hasn't already gone? And one underlying home or business in terms of their account base. So this is just an example. Brendan, on to 29.
This product's got the ability to look for power poles, find the wires, and augment over those, and try to categorize a power pole from one to four. One being, it's gonna be easy, it's gonna be fast to put your fiber up. Category four means it's gonna be really complicated and really hard. You're probably gonna have to go underground. So I'll just skip through these example images quickly, but you can see here an easy-to-attach-to pole. We're not interested in the power on the top; we're interested in what happens down below the power. How easy it is to get fiber down into the lower part of the asset. Next slide, please. 30. Here you can see a category two pole.
There's a bit going on below this asset in terms of two cable TV attachments, which you can see below the horizontal blue line. Next slide, please. 31. Here's a more complex pole. You can see here there's a streetlight, which has been identified, and you can see a fiber attachment as well as a cable TV attachment. This is gonna be more complicated for a network provider to go and put something else onto this asset. And then next slide. Thanks. Brendan, 32, and this is a really complicated pole. There's streetlights, there's transformers, and there's other attachers in terms of fiber, fiber competitors for this particular customer. And then next slide, on to 33.
Again, just to give a visual representation, if you're a customer, you're looking down at a map view of a city, and the green light means it's gonna be easy, and you've got fewer competitors. The red dots mean it's going to be harder, it's gonna be slower, and there's potentially another provider sitting on your network. So just trying to provide a visual representation of what the products do and the value they can add to a customer. Next slide to 34. And it just drives dramatic productivity improvement. So, you know, 10 x faster, 4 x cost reduction in terms of a communications company being able to deploy their network. Next slide, please, Brendan. Just other first half of the year updates.
We've been really pleased to add a significant capability into the IKE team. So, Brett Willitt has joined us as to lead our product management function. This is really important for IKE. Brett was the president of SPIDA Software, which is a structural analysis and structure management software business that was acquired by Bentley Systems a couple of years ago. We've known Brett for quite a long time. He's got a very extensive career in the distribution side of electric utilities, having worked for Osmose, FirstEnergy and Verizon. The SPIDA business was a is a direct competitor to our IKE PoleForeman product.
So we're, we're really pleased to have, Brett over to, to help us lead the charge across all of our products, but, but obviously, it's, it's timely in terms of our launch of next generation IKE PoleForeman. Secondarily, Brian Musfeldt joined us through the first half of the year. Brian's just got a huge amount of experience growing businesses, in the North American market and, and our industry and, and related, industries. So delighted to have Brian, here alongside our team in, in Colorado. Next slide, please, Brendan. We also acquired, a training and education business called Marne & Associates, and, you know, we're a, we're a software company and a technology company, but training and education is just the best way to, to reach our end customers.
So Marne specializes in writing a book around the National Electrical Safety Code and how it applies to an electric utility or a communications company. And they are the most respected group across North America for training on these. They're quite dry subjects, but bringing them to life and applying them to customers. And so for us, this gives us the ability to engage with our end users and also ultimately have a discussion around how you do this work in a technology-driven way. So it's a natural lead to talking ultimately about IKE products and technology. So we're really excited to have the Marne group join and add to our existing training team, which means we get in front of hundreds and hundreds of engineers.
Each year to talk about things that they care about. Next slide. Thank you. This is illustrative rather than exact, but we do have just multiple avenues in front of the business to grow potentially. So, you know, we're expanding logos and winning new customers. The biggest part of our growth is just growing existing customers. That's what you've seen over the last two to three years, is just customers that we've embedded in and then expanded in over time. We, you know, we've done three acquisitions now. The PoleForeman acquisition has been hugely successful, and we'll talk some metrics around what we've done with that business next time we provide an investor briefing. And then ultimately, there's an international expansion opportunity outside of the North American market.
Next slide. I think that's where we pause, and on to slide 39. Thanks, Brendan.
All right. Well, thank you, Glenn. The floor is now open for any questions after the CEO's presentation. Our CFO will aggregate the questions online so they can be advised of the meeting. We will also seek to address questions submitted online that were sent prior to the meeting. If we run short of any time and are unable to answer your question today, we will endeavor to respond to you after the meeting via email. Brian, do we have any questions?
Yes, we've received questions. The first question is for Glenn and comes from Michael Rutland. The question is: Does the company have any significant operations outside of the United States?
Thanks for the question, Michael. Yes. Well, we focus only on the North American customer opportunity because it's so vast, and we try to focus in terms of our go-to-market. But we have a really talented software development team in New Zealand, in Wellington. So we've got a center of excellence there, and some finance team members that help in terms of our listing in Australia and New Zealand.
Great. The next question is also for Glenn and comes from Karen Stewart. The question is: You made the statement, "Transaction revenue was softer on a run rate level due to the traditional engineering practices of one or two utilities, where two larger IKE customers are building their fiber networks." Can you elaborate on what you mean by traditional engineering practices?
Yes. Yeah, look, one of the utilities in question is in Kansas, and they have preferred data standards and vendors, and we've had to work with those preferred vendors to be able to access the utility on behalf of the communications company. The other is simply based on a utility's inability to process large amounts of fiber application requests, and it's slowed down the communications company that we're supporting. In both cases, these customers, they're not lost. They, they're slowed down for a period of time, and they're long-term customers that have standardized on IKE, and they're, you know, signaling they're coming back very strongly.
Great. The next question is for Glenn as well and comes from John Andrews. The question is: Cash has reduced from NZD 24 million at the end of fiscal year 2022 to NZD 18 million at the end of fiscal year 2023. What is the current cash holdings, approximately, and where do you see cash burn and spend?
Yeah, thanks for the question, John. So we'll release our, you know, half-year financials at the end of October. So that'll be the, you know, next disclosure in terms of our standard sort of quarterly update on cash. But you know, our, our operational goal is to maintain a strong, strong balance sheet. We've used the term fortress balance sheet historically, but we're, we're gonna maintain it strong. We can. We've got levers to control. We expect to can see long-term continued growth, and we can control OpEx accordingly.
Thank you. The last question is also for Glenn and comes from Ben Leybourne. Who are your greatest competitors, and what is IKE's competitive advantage over them?
Good question, Ben. So we've got three products, and so we compete with different parties, depending on which product it is we're selling to a utility or a comms company. On the IKE PoleForeman side, there's really two other competitors in the country, and one is called SPIDA Software that was acquired by Bentley. Yeah, and we just hired the CEO of SPIDA into IKE. And the other is called O-Calc, and that's a product by a company called Osmose. And there's really the three of us that are standards for distribution power poles. You know, there's a lot of green space in the market, as in, there's a lot of utilities that haven't made a decision yet.
So we're excited to be bringing this next generation product to market, right at the moment. IKE Office. I mean, we truly compete against historical work practices, quite manual work practices, utilities, et cetera. They're really good at what they do, so displacing manual work practices is much harder than it sounds. But there's one other technology company in our space called Katapult, who would be the closest technology competitor to IKE. And on the IKE Insight side, there's lots going on in AI, lots of hype and lots of nonsense. What we're doing specifically in terms of processing drone imagery and Google data, we're relatively unique at the moment, although that's an earlier stage product.
Great.
Brian, are there any further questions?
One additional question came in. This question is from Russell James' family: How many staff do you have, including R&D and on your sales team?
Well, in total, we have 104 employees, I think today. So, revenue per employee is about $300,000 or just over, and the sales organization. Actually, there's a chart in the slides, so I'll get that number precisely wrong, but our sales organization might be 24, 25 people. And R&D is the area where IKE has invested. You know, if you look at a mature technology company, our level of spend relative to revenue on product and technology is higher than you'd see in a like a normalized business. And we have about 30 people in engineering, building next-gen products.
Great. There are no further questions from shareholders at this time.
Thank you, Brian. All right. Now we come to the formal part of the meeting that are matters requiring resolution, which are outlined in the notice of meeting. You may ask questions on each matter being put to shareholders through the virtual meeting website. Please note, you will only be able to ask a question after you've registered as a shareholder. Now, moving to the resolutions, I propose to call a poll on each of these resolutions. As mentioned, shareholders will be able to cast their vote using the electronic voting card received when online registration is validated. To vote, you will need to click Get Voting Card within the online meeting platform. You will be asked to enter your shareholder or proxy number to validate. Please then mark your voting card in the way you wish to vote by clicking for, against, or abstain on the voting card.
Once you've made your selection, please click Submit Vote on the bottom of the card to lodge your vote. Please refer to the virtual meeting online portal guide, or use the helpline specified if you require any assistance. Voting will remain open until five minutes after the conclusion of the meeting. The results of the vote on each resolution will be announced on the NZX and ASX after the meeting. Each resolution set out in the notice of meeting is to be considered as an ordinary resolution, and as such, must be approved by a simple majority of the votes cast by shareholders entitled to vote and voting on the resolution. The first resolution is the auditor's remuneration. You will see we have placed up, that on a slide for you to view.
First, I'd like to acknowledge the work done by Grant Thornton in the financial year 2023. In their second year as the company's auditors, there has been a seamless transition, and we welcome their professionalism. Grant Thornton will continue as the company's auditors for the financial year 2024. This motion concerns the fixing of the auditor's remuneration, and the board seeks shareholders' approval that the directors be authorized to fix the remuneration. Are there any questions for the board concerning the motions?
There are no questions on this matter from shareholders.
Since there are no questions on this matter, you can now select for, against, or abstain for resolution one on the voting card. I'll just take a small pause while parties proceed. Brendan, can I vote for on both resolutions, please? Rick. All right. We come to the second resolution, which will be displayed on screen. The second resolution relates to my re-election. I will now ask Glenn to temporarily take over as chair of the meeting to introduce Resolution Two.
Thank you, Alex. I move as an ordinary resolution that Alex Knowles is re-elected as an Independent Director of ikeGPS Group Limited, in accordance with NZX Listing Rule 2.7.1, being that a Director must not hold office without re-election past the third Annual Meeting following that director's appointment or three years, whichever is longer. Alex has been a Director of ikeGPS since 2014. In this period, he's been a part of the growth of the company and its transition to a software and solutions business. The Board recommends Alex to you as an ikeGPS Independent Director and unanimously supports his re-election. Are there any questions for the Board or for Alex concerning the motion from shareholders?
There are no questions on this matter from shareholders.
There are no further questions on this matter, so thank you. Please now select either for, against, or abstain for Resolution 2 on the voting card. I'll just pause there for voting and, Alex, if you want to pick back up following this item.
Okay. Thanks, Glenn. We now come to the open section of general business, where there's an opportunity for any shareholders to raise any questions they may have that they have thought of about through this meeting. Brian, do we have any questions?
There are no further questions from the shareholders.
All right. Well, in the absence of any further questions, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance and your engagement today. We will be announcing results of the voting on the NZX and ASX later this afternoon, and based on no further questions or thoughts, thank you for your attendance and the meeting is now complete and closed.