Join shortly. Just a reminder that if you did want to ask a question, please submit it through the Q&A button down the bottom of your screen, or for our analysts, you can raise your hand and I'll allow you to talk. But Glenn is gonna run us through more so the financials as a part of the quarterly first, and then we expect Glenn to join shortly. Thanks very much, Paul.
Thanks, Simon, and good morning and good afternoon to everyone. Thank you for joining our Third Quarter performance update. We published our results earlier today, so hopefully you've had a chance to look at the document. We're not presenting slides today. I was actually gonna talk you through the handout that's been published on our website, and as well as the NZX and ASX. Overall, we've had a very strong third quarter, continuing on from the strength that you saw in the second quarter. At a very high level, our subscription revenues continue to grow at a 35% growth pace. You'll see that in some of the slides that we have.
We're also seeing continued improvement in gross margins, which creates operating leverage for us as a business, and we do that with a healthy balance sheet that we're you know, investing into new products, which are on track for release later in the calendar year. I'm gonna jump to the financial part of the presentation, and it's the section that's titled Performance Summary. I'm gonna start with what we call our exit run rate or annual recurring revenue trend. You can see that through the nine months year to date, we finished at NZD 21.1 million. That's an increase, 35%. It's actually 36% in constant currency. We had a little bit of an impact from the U.S. dollar/New Zealand exchange rate.
That represents about a 39% three-year annual compound annual growth rate. S ubscriptions is where the business is predominantly focused, and you can see that as we continue on that growth trend. One thing of note, we launched a product called IKE PoleForeman literally two years ago, and that product exceeded $10 million of that exit run rate ARR. R eally pleased to see the strength of PoleForeman and our numbers continue as we report today. If I go to the next chart, we look at subscription revenues. T his is our recognized subscription revenues, again, nine months year to date. We finished year to date at $14.1 million. That's a 38% growth rate over the year-to-date period from the prior year.
What's not on the slide is we actually did about $5.3 million in subscription revenue in the third quarter, which is actually a 43%, year-over-year growth rate. Y ou can see from those two slides, subscription revenues continue to grow, and the pace is picking up. In the third quarter, we added about $2 million of ARR. A lot of that comes from new logos. We continue to win engineering and utility new logos. We're also expanding significantly the portfolio into our existing customers. T hat trend and that business model continues for us. If I go to the third slide, which is the seat license trend, the majority of our sales are sold on an annual per seat basis, an annual per user basis. Seats grew at 30% year-over-year.
We're also seeing an increase in our average revenue per unit, and a lot of that has been helped by a recent release of our AI-based PolePilot. It sells as part of our IKE Office Pro product line. So seat growth continues well, the pricing continues well, underlying those seats, so continued growth there. If I go to the next slide, it's our transactional services business, and you can see that we had some weakness there in our services revenue. If you remember from prior calls, a lot of our services customers are broadband communication companies. The U.S. government had a reset on funding for some of those companies. A lot of the funding is there, but it's being delayed just through legislation changes, and we're seeing that in some of our service business.
You can see that, in a year-to-date numbers, we're down, year-over-year, both on the number of poles that we count in our transactions, as well as the services revenue. We have made moves to restructure the team that supports this business. We've offshored a lot of the work, so we are seeing improved gross margins and services, which adds to operating leverage across the company. I'll jump next to the segment revenue. Y ou can see the NZD 19.8 million of revenue that we're at year to date and how that is broken out. The recurring piece, which is our subscriptions, and the recurring piece, which is the transaction revenue, sits around 90% of our total revenue today.
You can see that, for the year to date, we grew revenues around 7%, and year-over-year for the quarter, revenues were up around 11%. C ontinued growth across the revenue, but clearly the mix is the subscription piece of the business. B efore we get into questions or if Glenn joins, I'll just finish with the metrics chart and just make some comments on it. This is the last table at the back. Gross margins continue to improve. You can see 79% versus 68%. The subscription mix helps that. The restructuring we've done in the transaction services business helps that. That creates leverage, leverage that we're using to invest in some new products, as well as on our path to EBITDA positive.
That table gives you a sense of not just the overall margin of the business, but how the margins of our product lines stack up. You can also get a sense of our customer counts, as well as, revenue and margin by segment. I'm gonna close there with just comments that it's a solid quarter. We see a similar, early signs in our fourth quarter, which started in January, and we continue to book business, and we're off to a relatively strong start as we embark on the fourth quarter and the final quarter of our FY 2026. W ith that, Simon.
Thanks, Paul
I'll hand it back to you.
Thanks, our first question is from James Lindsay at Forsyth Barr. James, please go ahead.
Simon, and congrats, Paul. Hey, I just wonder if I could just ask a few questions. Firstly, just with regard to, I suppose the more disappointing performance on that transactional side of things, if there's anything in there with regard to sort of when that could turn around?
That's a good question, James. From a macro standpoint, we are hearing that a lot of the companies that got funded had to reapply and are starting to see funding coming through. A lso from a sales pipeline perspective, we're starting to get line of sight to some large projects. Timing is unsure at this point. We're thinking March, April timeframe, but certainly we're seeing more deal activity in our pipeline, I would say, in the last couple of months than we've seen maybe in the earlier parts of this year. So,-
Yeah
-early signs that it could start to happen in first quarter.
Okay, thanks for that. T hen, obviously, the gross margin in that side, that transactional side of the business has actually been relatively volatile. But for this quarter, it looked to be up a reasonable amount. Is there, c an you give us any sort of headway about why it is so volatile?
Part of the volatility is, we took some one-time restructuring in the second quarter, so you would have seen, I would say, relatively low margins tied to, some restructuring that we did with the team. T hen, the third quarter was our first full quarter where the majority of the work in this business has been offshored. W e had an offshore model for some of the work that we do in services, but the third quarter was really the first quarter that we saw a full quarter of, work being done offshore. I t's not just lower cost, it's also more of a variable model in that we only incur costs when we incur the work. W e have less fixed costs in that model as well. So you're really seeing the effect of the offshore move that we've made.
Okay, and that's that, Mexican team, that you're talking about?
That's correct. Yep.
Yeah. Okay, great. J ust with regard, obviously, the balance sheet in really strong position post the capital raise. J ust with regard to the spend that's going on in R&D, can you talk about, sort of the mix of what's going on and spend and sort of full year? Yeah, will that start to accelerate in the next quarter or so?
It will definitely start to accelerate. We've started to onboard some new employees, tied to our PoleOS initiative. P art of what we're driving, is a fairly significant platform strategy, and we started to onboard some resource engineers, both here in the U.S. and in New Zealand, starting in January, and then we've got some additional hires coming in February. Y ou'll see the spend tick up, but it's not reflected yet in our third quarter because the headcount came in, is starting to come in this quarter.
Got it. Thanks for that. O bviously, well done. I think it looks, if I look at the numbers right, it might be your third best quarter ever as far as that 25 net customer growth. Just interested in the mix of that, and what do you think has driven it? Is that sort of more PoleForeman or is it just in core product? Yeah, where is that mostly come in?
Two areas that I've seen in the third quarter, James. One is, the ecosystem of companies that use PoleForeman continues to expand. T hink about a utility, not just rolling out PoleForeman in more departments, but also the engineering firms that support those, large utilities. W e're seeing, kind of a flywheel effect on that in terms of both, subsegments, the engineers and the utilities buying more PoleForeman. I would also say that we saw an uptick in Office Pro, IKE Office Pro in the third quarter. PolePilot has helped. We're starting to have customers, take the new version with the AI-enabled PolePilot, and we're also seeing. W e run a hardware trade-in program where customers could trade in old hardware and trade up to newer hardware with IKE Office Pro licenses, and so we're seeing a lot of the benefits from that on the IKE Office Pro side as well.
Right, and you mentioned just PolePilot, maybe just on, while you're on that, as far as sort of the customer feedback on that and, if there's been, any sort of, fight back on the increase in price that you, you're putting, into customers for that product?
So far, we've had about 30 customers license it with no pushback on the price, and overall, the feedback has been super positive in terms of, time savings they're seeing by being able to use that functionality.
Is there anything else in market that's sort of comparable to that?
Maybe a Glenn question, but certainly we haven't seen anything crop up just yet now that we've launched PolePilot in the market.
Right. Actually, just, the other thing I was gonna ask about the customer base, I know that there's always a, a very big mix of size potentially there, and maybe when you're saying about the network effect, if it's sort of associated companies to the utilities, it's possible that the, the size of this, the 25 net new customers is, is maybe smaller than the, the average that you've got to date. Would that be fair to say?
I would run an 80/20 on it, James, and say that, you know, 20% of those net new give us, I would say, material size of deal, meaning, high five-figure, high six-figure kind of ACV, annual contract value, deal size, and then the other 80% quantity is maybe, maybe smaller, more of the smaller engineering firms that maybe take a smaller amount of licenses and then expand over time.
Right. T hen last one from me, and it might be more of a Glenn question as well. Thanks, again, for the heads-up on that, sort of nine months for that module one. How long do you think that sort of pilot testing... Have you got any indication about how long pilot testing would take before sort of a market introduction?
I know that, based on what we did with PolePilot, and that module one is, I would say, , it's an adjacency to what PoleForeman does, but it's a different sub-segment. I would say that if I follow what we did with PolePilot, it's likely to be a 60-90-day beta. W e'll put it in customers' hands and get feedback on very quickly. T ypically, 2 months-3 months is what our beta period is, but we have more work, development work to do before we get to that.
Great stuff. Y ou mentioned, sorry to carry on, I'll pass it back to Simon shortly. I n the raising presentation, you talked about around about NZD 11 million, I think, if I recall, for the two modules. Is that still on track, or is there any sort of change in the view about what would need to be spent?
The only change that I would say that's material is we're, I would say, fast following in terms of our adoption of artificial intelligence, and I would say that that is improving the way that we develop and leading to a faster development cycle. We haven't quantified the impact yet, James, but certainly we're leaning into, I would say, faster AI adoption that could help accelerate the development, which ultimately would lead to lower cost, but I don't have a number that I can give you at the moment.
Great stuff. Thanks for that, and I'll pass you back. Cheers.
Thank you.
Thanks, James. Our next question is from James Bisinella at Unified Capital Partners. Go ahead, James.
Thanks, Simon. Hi, Paul. Congrats on the result. Lots of ground covered there. I might just ask a couple. Just on sort of the pipe, you mentioned some strength coming through there. Just keen to hear a bit more color, kind of in the potential makeup of that. Obviously, some large deals signed in the past. You do have 8 of the 10 largest IO Us at the moment, is this a makeup of sort of larger deals, a combination of smaller ones, or just any further color there would be helpful? Thank you.
Just to clarify, James, are you asking for, results to date or more of the pipeline that we're seeing as we move forward?
More so the go forward. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, we look at the pipeline constantly, and I would say that we have very good coverage of the bookings that we need to close to hit, you know, that 35% guidance. So we're laser focused in on the pipeline that we have, the deals that we have in that pipeline, and I would say we have between 8-10 material deals of significant size that make up, I would say, you know, maybe about half the pipeline. So, you know, we don't need to close all those deals to hit our 35% run rate. But my point is, the deal flow is still potential deal flow is still very healthy, and it's I would say it's a mix of large, you know, five-, six-figure deals, you know, in the 8-10 category, and then the rest is smaller deals.
Mm. That's great. That sounds very supportive. Then just another one from me, just last one. Just on kind of the ARPUs of the new product, the one that's nine months away, I think kind of blended ARPUs at the moment are around the NZD 2000 mark. I'm just keen for any color on ARPUs of this new product and what we could see out of that.
We haven't priced it yet, but you know, to give perspective, you know, our PoleForeman ARPU runs around, rounded up, $2,000 is our PoleForeman ARPU. O ur feeling is that the new product adds significantly more of a value proposition than PoleForeman. So we haven't priced it, but I would think that it would be well north of the $2,000 we have today for PoleForeman.
Excellent. That's it from me. Thanks, Paul.
Thank you.
Thanks, James. Next question: Congrats on Pole Foreman reaching $10 million ARR. How much approximately is the total achievable ARR for Pole Foreman just from your existing client base? Is the customer take-up of Pole Foreman still accelerating?
It's still accelerating through. You know, I would say that the revenue potential is still significantly higher. I know that in prior calls we've shared market penetration and penetration within our accounts, and so, you know, the short answer is, in the next, you know, 6 months- 12 months, I think the potential for PoleForeman is still there. We're not seeing a slowdown, and the pipeline that we have suggests there's still not a slowdown. So without throwing a number on it, Simon, I would say the potential and the upside is still significant for PoleForeman.
Great. Thanks, Glenn. Just a question, under what circumstances do you envisage that the company might raise more capital in the next few years?
I would say it's based on a strategic direction more than financial need, if that makes sense. So today, you know, we're tracking to get the business to EBITDA positive, and, you know, the increased gross margins give us more and more leverage. As we, you know, we grow that margin, we've got more to invest to, you know, further the strategy. But to me, it would be strategic reasons that would lead to potential capital raise, meaning, is there sub-segments we could get into through an acquisition, as an example. But today, you know, I would say we're heads down, executing on the strategy we have, and it would be something strategic that would lead to the need for a capital raise.
Thanks, Paul. That concludes the Q&A segment. Thanks so much for stepping in again, and if there's any further questions, details are at the bottom of the ASX and NZX announcement. But hope you all have a good day. Thanks, Paul.
Thank you. Bye.