Good morning, and welcome to ikeGPS Financial Year 2024 Financial Performance Review presentation. From the company today, we have the company's CEO, Glenn Milnes, and the company's Chief Financial Officer, Brian Musfeldt. Before I hand it over to Brian and Glenn to go through the presentation up on your screen, I'll just remind you that you can submit questions through the Q&A panel at the bottom of your screen, and we'll endeavor to get to those close to the end of the presentation. Glenn, Brian, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks.
Thank you, Simon. Thanks, everyone, for taking the time to join in terms of the financial performance overview and our FY 2025 outlook. So as we start, please take note of this important notice. What we'd like to focus on today is the FY 2024 performance headlines that are now audited. I'd like to take some time to talk about the FY 2025 outlook and where we are going. And related to that is what's happening with product updates and product releases tied to our AI product platform and our new SaaS products that we're bringing to market. And then we'll pulse through the rest of it pretty quickly because the addressable market and the value proposition component is something I think most of you are quite familiar with.
Want to leave lots of time for Q&A. So I'd like to introduce Brian Musfeldt. Brian and I are both based here in our Colorado, USA headquarters. Brian's gonna take you through the first five financial slides.
Great. Thanks, Glenn. Yeah, so subscription revenue continued to show consistently strong growth, growing 21% to NZD 10.7 million in fiscal year 2024. You know, this growth was driven this year primarily by sales of our IKE Office and our IKE Office Pro products, and the company expects significant growth from this segment in 2025 as well. And that growth will be driven by not only continued growth from our IKE Office products, but from the successful launch of our Q3 and Q4 sell-through of the new IKE Office PoleForeman products. And we discussed this in previous meetings, but, you know, since the Q3 launch of our IKE PoleForeman product, you know, total contract value in closing has exceeded about $12 million. This is mostly from Tier 1 electric utilities in the U.S. market.
This represents about 47 customers who subscribe to the platform, and 28 of these were existing customers and 19 are new. One of those new customers is one of the 10 largest utilities in the U.S. So again, we're seeing great traction in this product as it, it goes to launch. You know, this product, as of year-end, had about 2,700 new license seats in place, and as of 4/30, we were up to 3,700 licenses. So again, we're seeing a great uptake of this product. We're seeing great multiples on the conversion. So, you know, the combination, the growth of that IKE Office and IKE Office products, combined with the launch of IKE PoleForeman, really do give us confidence that subscription revenue will grow 50% plus, going into fiscal year 2025.
Moving on to transaction revenue, you know, as we previously discussed, our platform transaction revenue was down, you know, 61% to $7.3 million in fiscal year 2024. You know, this reduction was on the back of a record year in transaction revenue in fiscal year 2023. You know, we had 3 customers in 2023 who had really large outsized growth, which really resulted in 191% revenue growth from fiscal year 2022- 2023, as you can see on the slide. And although that 2024 transaction revenue was down year- over- year, the long-term trend continues to show growth in this segment. If you look at the longer term, you know, this segment has grown 47% at a 47% CAGR since 2021.
When we look at the guidance from our long-term customers as well as the continued investment in broadband in the U.S., we do expect this segment to start growing again into fiscal year 2025. Great. So when you look at total revenue, you know, total revenue did decline about 31% to NZD 21 million, 21.1 million in fiscal year 2024, but, you know, the long-term trends remain positive. You know, the company has a three-year CAGR of about 31%, and recurring and reoccurring transaction revenue, which is the revenue we're really looking to build in this company, you know, continues to dominate the mix, you know, representing over 86% of the revenue for fiscal year 2024.
You know, in addition, the continued growth of our existing software offerings, along with this IKE PoleForeman offering, really do give us confidence and expectation to resume healthy growth into fiscal year 2025. So moving on to the P&L slide. You know, we've covered revenue, so I'll move quickly on to the gross margin, but, our gross margin did decline about 22% or $3.7 million in fiscal year 2024. You know, as we discussed, this is really primarily a result of the platform transaction revenue declines that we discussed previously. You know, conversely, the gross margin percentage increased from about 53% in fiscal year 2023 to 60% in fiscal year 2024. You know, and this increase is a result of the platform subscription revenue, which again, you know, that segment will generate over 86% gross margins.
So we do expect to see continued improvement in our gross margins going into 2025, as subscriptions revenue will continue to become a larger portion of the overall revenue mix. In addition to that, you know, remember, we had cost reductions executed in Q3 of fiscal year 2024, and those--t he benefits from those really only were reflected in the Q4 numbers for fiscal year 2024, but we'll see the benefit, though, of those for the entire year of fiscal year 2025. And lastly, you know, the company, we've discussed in the past, but the company has built out and trained contract resources in Mexico. You know, this group will allow the company to execute platform transaction revenue at a much lower cost, which again, will help improve margins as we go forward into 2025.
We move on to operating expenses, and sorry, Glenn, a little more on that last sheet. You know, discussing the mid-year update, the company reduced ikeGPS's cost base in Q3 of fiscal year 2024, and, and that really was to maintain the time towards both EBITDA and cash positive operations. You know, we regrettably had to redo that. It, you know, it was about 19% of the employee base, and most of those impacted roles were the U.S.-based back office and platform service positions. So again, that reduction will not only improve our gross margin, but will reduce our operating expenses into fiscal year 2025, and really will help accelerate the timeframe to reach EBITDA positive. The company did continue to make increased investments in sales and marketing in fiscal year 2024. You'll see that we increased spend by about NZD 2 million or 26%.
Just wanted to point out again that, you know, due to long sales cycles in the utility markets and the size of the customers we're trying to attack in the utility and the telecom markets, the company really expects to see the benefit from these increased investments in 2025, which again, will leads us into that confidence of where the growth will come from in 2025. The company did decrease R&D spending a little bit in 2024 by about NZD 1.1 million or 10%. You know, the reduction—this was really done through a reduction in outsourced engineering and really through transitioning our engineering base of the company to lower cost regions, which includes our own New Zealand location. So we do continue to make significant investments in product development.
We do see that as a key investment for continued growth of the company, and you will see continued investment in that in 2025 and beyond. So those combinations did, you know, led to our net loss. Net loss did increase by about NZD 7.2 million in fiscal year 2024, but as discussed, that was really three key factors. The NZD 3.7 million reduction in gross margin, driven by the transaction revenues. A reduction in non-cash items. Think about foreign exchange gains and losses and movements of fair value assets and liabilities, really did result in about a NZD 3.3 million of income in fiscal year 2023. That didn't repeat in 2024, and then the increase in our investment in sales and marketing.
I think that covers the P&L, Glenn, and we can get into the balance sheet. Yeah. So on the balance sheet, and I just wanna keep this quick, but, you know, management, we do continue to emphasize the importance of a strong balance sheet, and although we did utilize cash in 2024, you know, the balance sheet remains healthy, and we do continue to manage the business toward EBITDA break-even in the second half of 2025. You know, the company ended the year with about $15.4 million in receivables. That was a decrease from the year ended 2023. If you look at what drove that decrease, you know, it was primarily driven by three items. You know, $4.5 million was used in operating activities, which we talked about, you know, was significantly from the increased investment in sales and marketing.
One point seven million was from purchases of PP&E, which are primarily represent the addition of IKE rental pool assets that relate specifically to the sale of our platform subscription revenue. And lastly, about two point two million in spend related to development of our new product software offerings. So again, these are really intentional and focused investments in the company and what we think is necessary for the growth. But I'll turn it back over to Glenn here, just mentioning that again, strong balance sheet position, we believe will get us to, you know, no, no need to raise capital in the future. So over to you, Glenn.
Thanks, Brian. Brian will be available at the end of the presentation for Q&A as well. This is the same key metrics table that we published last month, so I won't go back through all of these key items, but as a company, this is, you know, how we think about our value and our growth over time. It's really around winning more subscription customers. It's putting more assets and engineering analysis through our software platform. So what I did want to do is spend a little bit of time talking about what we've been investing in, I think why it matters, and also why we feel extremely optimistic about FY 20 25 and FY 2026 and beyond.
To Brian's point, we, you know, we address the North American electric utility and communications market. These are the biggest infrastructure companies in the world. We target the largest ones, and we compete against some really big competitors. But I just want to explain how we're differentiating ourselves, and why we think the traction we're getting matters if we take a two-year, five-year, ten-year lens of the IKE business. So Brian mentioned this, we expect that subscription revenue in FY 2025 is gonna grow 50% or more. It's based on two things. We've got ongoing growth of our core IKE Office Pro subscription product.
I'll show you what that product is in a moment, but our retention rate's exceptional around IKE Office Pro, greater than 95% retention rate. The other major item has been the sell-through of our new next- generation IKE PoleForeman product. As Brian mentioned, now more than $12 million of total contract value closed since we launched it towards the end of last year, more than 3,700 new subscribers. And these aren't subscribers. It's not like subscribing to Netflix or LinkedIn. These are engineers who are basing their work on the standards of some of the biggest utilities in the country. And we think this is such a sticky, long-term customer footprint.
It's a really exciting item in terms of where we're getting to with IKE PoleForeman. We'll talk to that a bit more on the way through. We have these recurring transaction revenue profiles. That's the part that's caused us a bit of heartburn, you know, through. If we look at FY, you know, our growth rates through the last four years have been strong, but we came back on the transaction revenue piece from FY 2023- FY 2024. These tend to be communications companies or engineering groups that are just matching their variable cost to the use of our software. They go fast, and they go slow. I think we're going to have both upside and downside risk through this year and next year. But overall, we haven't lost any of these customers.
They pulse up and down, and we have to be prepared to, I think, as a business, to explain the profitability of this revenue stream, perhaps versus the headline revenue component. So I won't go down all these points verbatim. We closed $27 million of new contracts through the 2024 period against $21 million of recognized revenue. Gives us a lot of momentum into this year, and our sales pipeline is strong. You know, we keep winning about one new enterprise customer every week here in the North American market. We are winning. We're starting to displace some big competitors, and we're just lucky. The macro market tailwinds across this North American electric utility segment and comm segment is right behind us.
There's probably a two-decade tailwind in terms of, you know, network capacity, grid hardening, to electrify the future of North America. And we, you know, we play a small part, but an important part in that story. So we feel like we're in the right place at the right time. So I'll go pretty fast from here, because I know there's a bunch of questions to cover. So, you know, we position IKE as the Pole OS company, the pole operating system company, and we're looking to provide a suite of products that deal with the end-to-end engineering of the network, from network planning to assessment and digitization, to network design, to network maintenance and capacity and, you know, grid hardening.
So we're building these products that link these things together. We've got IKE Insight around planning. We've got IKE Office Pro. That's our core product for digitization, digital twin assessment. And then we've got IKE Structural, which is all around the design and structural analysis of what we do. And then the technology service we offer is called IKE Analyze. So that's where customers use all our technology in the field, but they use us to analyze their information, and that's what we're automating through AI, et cetera. And we intend to keep building out this portfolio of product offerings, including training and education, not because we want to be a training business, but because we want to educate our customers. Education's the, you know, modern way of selling.
So that's the suite of products, and we expect to expand it over time. I'll just talk a bit to what we've actually done in terms of investment into product. The most important thing, I think, for shareholders and investors, looking at IKE and kinda where we sit today, is what we've done with IKE PoleForeman. We acquired this legacy product in 2019. By the end of this year, you know, revenue will be more than 10x where it was when we acquired that business. We've launched a new version of the product with a pretty amazing customer council helping us to specify their requirements. As Brian mentioned, you know, now more than 3,700 engineering users added to the platform over this last period of time.
And this is super sticky. It's a super sticky sales model. If we deliver well to these customers, we'll keep these groups for, you know, decades. So we're really excited in terms of the customers that we're closing. We expect by the end of the year, we'll have eight of the 10 biggest electric utilities in all of North America standardized on IKE PoleForeman, and this is how they design their whole distribution infrastructure. This is engineers using this software every single day to design every part of their engineering network. So this really matters, and we think this is a super valuable asset. There's only two other standards in the country. We've already displaced one of our big competitors in the northeast of the U.S.
We intend to go after the whole market with this product. We think it's the best in the industry. The second exciting thing, we tend to be conservative in how we talk about AI, because there's been a lot of AI promises that haven't been delivered. But we've worked with Google and some other big data companies to figure out how we can do whole-of-network analysis, specific to power poles, and this is coming to market next quarter. It gives, in this case, a communications company, the ability to work out where they can go and attach a fiber network. You know, where's gonna be easy, where's gonna be hard, where's gonna be expensive, versus sending people out into the field to assess, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of assets.
We can do this with computers. And so this is coming to market. It's been a big investment for IKE, and that's, you know, you see it in the R&D line and our P&L, but we're excited about some of the lead customers that we're now working with around IKE Insight. And lastly, this is a minor item, but we've got a non-core asset called Spike, and we've launched a SaaS product for the signage industry called Spike SignPilot. So that's, we serve about 5,000 sign businesses in the United States through the Spike business, and we're bringing them a software offering, which can, you know, if we're successful, can make a big impact in terms of what that revenue model looks like over time.
I think probably the biggest item from my perspective, certainly, is how we keep strengthening our team. We're a North American-based business. We sell to the U.S. market exclusively. Been really lucky to bring on some great people through the last 12 months. So, Roz joined us as a Non-Executive Director. So Roz was one of the most senior leaders at Trimble here in the U.S., and also at Oracle and Oracle Utilities. She's a pretty amazing person in terms of market knowledge and particularly around product and go-to-market strategies. Brought on Ani as our Chief Marketing Officer, with lots of experience in our industry. Brett Willitt. Brett was the CEO and President of SPIDA Software, which is a direct competitor of IKE and IKE PoleForeman .
They were acquired by Bentley Systems some time ago. We brought Brett into the team to run our product management. He, he's an incredible guy, and you've met Brian, so we're delighted to have Brian onto the team as well, in terms of his experience, in terms of the industry itself, and also with a range of other things, such as M&A. So from here, I truly will go super fast because I think these slides speak for themselves, as I read through, but we're lucky to be in the right place at the right time. The U.S. market is just exploding. There's another 25 years of grid resiliency and grid capacity investment gonna happen. We help these projects happen faster, better. We digitize the process.
We're certainly part of the future in terms of productivity for the electric utility market. The spend on distribution infrastructure is just phenomenal. It's dominated by the investor-owned utilities, and there's 106 of them, and there's another 3,000 utilities that sit behind them. They're spending a lot of money on grid capacity, grid infrastructure, grid hardening, so they don't cause the next fire, the next outage, or fall over in the next storm. And again, we always post this slide for our Australian and New Zealand audience, just to get the scale of how big this North American market is. It is really so significant. We're in 26 of the 106 biggest utilities in the country today, but we haven't even scratched the surface in terms of the market opportunity.
This is a map of the investor-owned utilities that operate across the United States. They're generally, you know, publicly listed companies with a profit motive. And then sitting behind them, there's another close to 3,000 municipal or cooperative electric utility customers. They're all targets for IKE products. In terms of what we offer and what we deliver, it's the same proposition whether we're talking to the biggest utility or the smallest. And it's taken some time and a bit of a sense of humor, but we know we're winning. We're now in 8 of the 10 largest investor-owned utilities in the United States. We land, then expand. You know, we sell one product, and we sell more of our integrated products over time.
Yeah, a huge growth opportunity for us, and we're winning about one logo a week, at the moment. The second part of the market, again, I'll go through this really fast, is tied to the communication side of things. So, fiber companies are putting fiber onto power poles, power infrastructure. Most of it's going overhead. Huge amounts of investment over the next five to seven years, and again, we just help this process go much, much faster. We digitize the assessment process. We dramatically speed up the attachment process for a communications company. Same products, but different value proposition, and the investment's just growing, over the coming, five years or so. And again, we're lucky to be now in several of the, just the very biggest comms companies in the country.
Crown Castle is the biggest shared communications infrastructure group in the world, and AT&T is the biggest mobile operator in North America, and we serve those and a whole host of other tier one, tier two, tier three communications groups. But again we're still at 5%, 6% market penetration at this time. A big total addressable market. This is a top-down view of what's being spent on distribution network development. We play a part in productivity around this item. It's really important to be in the right market at the right time in terms of, you know, rising tide, et cetera. So again, we're grateful to be able to sort of play our part around the success of the people that are doing this work.
Some more data there on the market tailwinds over the coming decades. This isn't a short-term upswing. I think it's something that's just gonna become more intense over time. So again, yeah, we're looking to play our part and build software tools that really help customers go faster. We go to market directly. I think most of you know this, we're trying to build the best customer experience, the best brand in our whole industry, you know, bringing, like, a modern consumer brand to a very defensive, slow-moving industry. And it's really starting to work. We sometimes highlight some of the brilliant young people that work within IKE, who are industry experts. And that matters a lot to us in terms of how we remain super sticky with our customers.
Lastly, I'll finish up fast, Simon, so we can go to Q&A. Just wanted to provide a picture here of, you know, this is just a snapshot of how customers are using our software in practice. This is the breadth of how they're deploying networks using our tools and our software. So this is Crown Castle in Florida, all these different markets where they're putting poles on the ground. This is the whole of the United States and North America. This is AT&T in just seven states where they've got IKE Office deployed, and IKE PoleForeman deployed. But just trying to paint a picture of the scale with which we start to reach across these customers, and we hope why we can maintain a very long-term relationship with these groups.
So as we look forward, we're optimistic. I think having had a real mixed year, to be honest, in FY 2024, we had transaction revenue come down. That was tough because that wasn't what we had expected from customers that were running at a really fast rate at the start of the year. But generally speaking, we feel, you know, super confident about what's happening now with cross-sell, up-sell opportunities, the way that we're expanding across customers. We've got an international footprint opportunity over time and also M&A. We've had three really strong acquisitions to date. And I'll pause there, Simon, and open things up to questions.
Okay. Thanks, Glenn. Thanks, Brian. First question, expenses of NZD 28.7 million in financial year 2024 seems high versus revenue. Where do you expect expenses to rebase to in FY 2025?
Yeah, I can take that one. Remember, so we mentioned we did that cost- cutting kind of in late Q3, so the impacts of that cost cut really felt for the company kind of midway through Q4, as we got through all our severance and other payments. So, you know, that cost- cutting would save us about NZD 4 million annually, and we only recognize about a quarter of it. So I would say, you know, if you think of it that way, we'll reduce that cost- cutting. We will see some increases, mainly CPI. We're not gonna make a heavy increase in headcount or anything this year. We really made that investment last year.
I think if you factor in that cost cut and then kind of factor in a CPI to 3%-4% increase, that's probably where we're rebase for this year.
Perfect. Thanks, Brian. It's great to see the progress with IKE Insight. Are you able to quantify the level of revenue you expect from the Insight product over the next two to three years?
Yeah, it becomes an important part of everything that we do. So think about it a little bit like Microsoft Copilot. The biggest opportunity initially is to put automation and AI capability into the hands of customers that are already using software. That's what we intend to do. So we just make customers much more productive, and we intend to flow that through to price increases in terms of subscriptions. At the same time, we're launching, you know, some new planning tools, such as network viability. We think this matters a lot for any business that's trying to figure out how to go and put a network up in a new city, or a new province or new territory. So yeah, we're really excited about where we've got to.
You know, AI's been overhyped for a long time, but one of the great benefits you can have if you specialize in a problem or an application is the training dataset. And for IKE, you know, we've got tens and tens of millions of poles that have been engineered by human beings, human engineers, and that it's an incredible dataset to be able to do very specific things. So that's how we intend to introduce new subscription products.
Great. Thanks, Brian. Just a continuation of that question, will that be a subscription model or additive transaction revenue?
Oh, well, it depends on the customer, and I think, again, this is an important contextual point. Some of our customers operate on a transaction basis. So if you're, I just, you know, Crown Castle, they like to run their variable cost associated with the volume of the engineering they're doing, and so they want to buy on a transaction basis, you know, a per asset basis, because then they can match their variable costs with their variable revenue. Other customers, most of the utilities, they'd prefer to buy on a subscription basis. We'd prefer to sell on a subscription basis, also. So that's where they are happy to lock in a, you know, like an annual subs fee per user.
So it really depends on meeting the market requirements, and I think that's an important thing for our investors and shareholders to understand. You know, we're meeting market requirements. We're not completely able to dictate the revenue model.
Great. Thanks, Glenn. And can you discuss how the acquisition of Marne & Associates has contributed to the FY 2024 result, and what role that will play in the future?
Oh, it's been brilliant, and we're so lucky to have had the opportunity to partner with Marne, David Marne, and the Marne & Associates business. For those that don't know, this is a company that's been in practice for 30 years in the industry. David Marne sits on most of the, a whole bunch of the NESC committees, like the Regulatory Standards Boards. An amazing person, and he brings to life training around the National Electrical Safety Code and, you know, health and safety standards. If you're building power poles and power infrastructure, it's quite hard to do that, Simon, to make that really engaging. So we've been so fortunate to bring them into IKE. We've trained--
We're a long way ahead of plan in terms of the number of customers we've trained. And for us, it's around, you know, it's IKE being in front of hundreds of engineers at a utility, talking about a subject that they're really interested in, and then at the end of it, we get a chance to talk about technology and ways of doing things better and faster. So it's a pathway to market for us in the medium term. But it's a great way to get credibility and, you know, engage from top to bottom of these massive utilities that can be quite hard to access otherwise.
Great. Thanks, Glenn. And of these 8 of 10 largest utilities that use IKE, do they also use IKE competitor products or use IKE exclusively?
No, I mean, all utilities use, they use everything. But they standardize on particular products and programs over time. So of those 8 of 10 that we're talking about, that they're all standardizing on IKE PoleForeman for structural analysis and design, and that's really key because, you know, all of their engineering and decision-making flows from that platform. So that matters a lot. But, you know, utilities are always trying different things and different products and different licenses. It's a whole different story when they make a standardization decision, which is what they're doing with us at the moment.
Right. And just regarding the sales and marketing expense, we touched on this a little bit earlier, but the run rate of NZD 12.4, how much of the second half increase is tied to sales incentives and contract wins, and how much is fixed?
Yeah, so, I mean, if you look at our—I guess, looking at run rate, our last year's expenses were about $10.2. We did, we, you know, we're making a fairly heavy investment in marketing this year, so that sales and marketing is, is really our sales team, our marketing team, and our solutions engineering team. Those are the team who kind of saddles up with sales and gives that expertise when they go make the sales. When I look at that, I would say it's probably about 60% fixed and 40% variable. Our, normal reps, when you look at just a sales perspective, are about 50/50 between base and variable. And then, obviously, in the marketing realm, we have a lot of variable expense related to, you know, shows and programs and other things.
Great. Thanks for that. How did you go about deciding on recent headcount reduction? Were these within a particular department or more performance-based?
Yeah, it was both, right? I mean, obviously a big chunk came from the fact that we had the decline in our transactions, platform transaction business. Kind of forced us, not forced us, but we were already working toward moving some of that cost base into lower cost regions, like our contractors in Mexico. So that one was obviously built on the economics of the program and what we could do. So big chunk from them, and then the rest was really mainly performance-based, and again, where we wanted to make sure we kept our investment in the company.
Great, thanks. Just a couple final questions. Why are you so confident about subs growth in FY 2025?
Well, I think, it's based on the contracts we've closed now. Yeah, IKE Performance is just running so strong, and customer retention's super strong on the IKE Office Pro side. So yeah, we feel really good. You know, nothing's completely risk-free, but yeah, we feel very good about the year ahead.
Just one final question. I know you touched on it within the webinar, but does the company expect a need to raise capital for operations going forward?
No, you know, our--w e've got a strong balance sheet, and, you know, we intend to operate within our means. We're in a massive market at a exciting time. So we need to balance obviously the balance sheet component, but also the customer growth side of things, because as I mentioned, we win these customers, we probably keep them for decades, you know, if you're thinking about lifetime value.
Just one final question that's come through. With all the recent M&A activity in this space, do you think that ikeGPS might be a target?
There's lots going on around the market with some of the bigger private equity groups. I think looking at the distribution side of utilities, so who knows? Definitely nothing that we need to be disclosing at the moment.
Great. Thanks, Glenn. Thanks, Brian. I might just hand it back to you guys for closing remarks, and we'll finish up there.
Great. No, thanks, Simon, and thanks again, everyone, for joining the call. Brian and I are available anytime to pick up other questions if we haven't grabbed them on the way through, but we appreciate your support, so thank you.
Awesome. Thanks so much, you all, for joining.