[Non-English content] , and good afternoon. My name is Alex Knowles, and I am the board Chair of ikeGPS. On behalf of the board, management, and staff of ike, thank you for attending our 2026 annual meeting. We welcome all our ASX and NZX shareholders on the virtual meeting platform provided by our share register, MUFG. Please note you can vote and ask questions online. We encourage you to do so. I will 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 at 0800 200 220. 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.
We are glad to host you, and I welcome you to the meeting on behalf of the ike board. We have an apology from Rod Snodgrass, who is currently traveling to Asia and unable to attend this meeting. Also present today are our representatives of our auditors, Grant Thornton. With the introduction out of the way, let us move to the formal part of the meeting notes. I will make some opening remarks, and then our Managing Director and CEO, Glenn Milnes, will present an online performance highlight of the year. After that, the resolutions that are before you today will be put forward. Just for good order's sake, the company constitution prescribes a quorum requirement of three shareholders. I can confirm that this requirement has been met.
Proxies have been appointed for the purposes of this meeting in respect of 91.5 million shares, representing over 47% of the total number of shares. I would like to thank shareholders for 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 through 3, as set out in the notice of meeting, subject to the voting restrictions that apply to Resolution 3. 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 it is regarding in the dropdown window, and type in your question, and then submit it.
I encourage shareholders who are attending online to send their questions through as soon as possible. The financial statements for the 12-month period through 31 March 2026, 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 the 26th of June 2026. I would just like to now make a few points before handing over to Glenn. Fundamentally, I am delighted to report that the last financial year was the strongest year in ike's history, setting the stage for more growth and strong predictability for the next couple of years. ike has moved from proving a model to scaling one. It is an exciting time. To give that some context, our recurring subscription revenue is up. Positive underlying EBITDA on a run rate basis has been delivered in Q4.
We have a strong balance sheet with no debt. We did what we said we were going to do. The team has delivered quality growth, a highly sticky customer base with financial strength that is funded to execute. Our strategy is clear. Ike's value compounds because it is embedded in our electric utilities workflow. It is written into the engineering standards. Our strategy of building a new system of record for distribution infrastructure using our decade-built Customer Council and standards level that are locked in has placed us in a very good position. It is very hard for others to replicate the position we are in. We are positioning AI at the performance strategic level. The board sees AI as ike's accelerant, underpinned by a proprietary data set of 20 million-plus human-engineered electrical assets. Our own moat, so to speak, carefully overseen at every level as it needs to be.
The capital you entrusted to us in 2025 is doing exactly what we said it would do, funding three new products coming to market soon. A disciplined allocation across the lanes, new product development, customer acquisition, and possibly selective M&A in time only where it clears our internal thresholds of likely return. A self-funding roadmap strong with a net cash position preserved. Our board continues to perform well. Firstly, I'd like to thank Fred Lax, who was a Non-Executive Director for over 12 years, providing outstanding guidance, Chair of Audit and Risk throughout, instrumental in shaping strategy and building the financial governance and risk foundations that supported the company's growth. His stewardship of audit and risk has been constant. We wish him all the very best in the future. I also note he remains a committed shareholder and is very interested in the continued growth of the company.
I would also like to welcome Rod Snodgrass, who is the former Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Product Officer of Spark New Zealand, and CEO of Spark Ventures. He is now Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee. He is a fellow chartered accountant. He brings strategy, product, and technology scaling expertise, and we're excited by his imports into ike's next phase. We will continue to seek out expertise and capability to ensure good governance, strong discipline that is refreshed as we scale. We would be remiss not to remember the most important part of our business. It is driven by our people, our culture. We have never been stronger. We had an NPS of 91, which is not a marking number. It's an output of what a great culture delivers. Our amazing team has delivered a 97% customer retention rate.
I cannot thank the people, the team at ike enough for their dedication and commitment that is growing this company daily. We are seeing with our education mission continuing that over 3,000 webinar attendees to our NESC sessions, over 1,000+ engineers certified, all part of our long-term market development and commitment to the growth of this business. The outlook is amazing. We have entered 2027 with our momentum strengthening. The macro market tailwinds behind us are getting stronger and stronger. With all that said, let me hand over to Glenn to take you through this in a lot more detail and substance.
Thank you, Alex. I hope I'm coming through. I, again, appreciate everyone taking the time to catch up. What I would like to do is cover some new territory and new outlook data because we've had, obviously, FY 2026 numbers in the market for a couple of quarters. I'm going to reiterate a lot of what Alex has headlined is that we're seeking to become part of the standard for how the distribution electricity networks in the United States are built. There's more than 3,000 electric utilities that we're addressing here in the U.S. So we call ourselves The PoleOS Company, but we're about to go underground as well, so that's exciting. I think from a FY 2026 scorecard perspective, we did everything we said we would in terms of growth and in terms of cash and balance sheet management and EBITDA, which has been very important.
In October, we're going to get into a lot more detail around the revenue bridge from an ARR perspective. How we added 86 new customers last year. We've already added close to 40 new customers this year. That matters because those customers start small, and they get bigger over time. We're increasing pricing. We're not reducing pricing. We're cross-selling, and we're bringing new products to market. We think that sets us up really well in terms of future growth. We've got lots of evidence of demand in the industry. I know in this whole SaaSpocalypse world, people are worried about the stickiness of customers and whether they'll build their own products and et cetera, et cetera, use agents to use your software. I feel that we're well protected on that front.
The two things I'd like to focus on in terms of this discussion, just so that we're not repeating the same data that we've talked to previously. One is around new product innovation. These are new additional ARR products that are going to drive recurring revenue and open us up to new markets. Also the AI conversation, because AI for us is an accelerant. We're sticking it inside of products. We're increasing pricing, and we're using it operationally to do things faster and better. I think that's an important conversation. So I'm going to pulse through these slides fast, and then leave hopefully as much time as we need for questions. Important notice here. Read this document in conjunction with our audited financial statements, and we've had a quarterly update in FY 2027 already. So that's important.
From a performance perspective, we delivered to our FY 2026 guidance in terms of growth. We're reiterating here FY 2027 subscription revenue growth targets at around 35%. It might be higher, it might be slightly less, just depending on revenue recognition. But we've got off to a really good start in terms of this financial year. In fact, August was an incredibly good performance year. I won't go through the FY 2026 numbers because they're in the market and you've already seen them. But we have continued to keep growing, and I think there's a bunch of things in terms of customer quality, in terms of retention that matter a lot. We don't lose virtually anyone once we get them on the platform. We do lose small engineering companies that come and go, and we lost one customer last year, Charter Communications.
We didn't lose them, but they're still a very active reference customer for us. But we helped them deliver a project in California for the regulator there. Other than that, we keep everyone. We released some AI-based products. PolePilot's the first one of them. We increased pricing 10%, and we lost no one on the way through because it delivers value. We're now operating in all 50 states across the United States, and we've only got 6% market share. So there's lots of growth opportunities in front of us. The thing I did want to focus on for this discussion today is last year we were very grateful to have support to go and build some new products.
It was a funding round that was oversubscribed by multiple times, and we're building new subscription products to bring to market, and we're on track in terms of all of these items. I wanted to provide just a fast overview here. So, what are we building and why does it matter? For IKE PoleForeman, we've grown that business 25 x since we acquired it. It's close to NZD 13 million of ARR today. The next thing that's coming for IKE PoleForeman is, we call it 2.0, which is not a very sexy title, but it means that we are now able to address the communications market. So these are all the fiber businesses.
There's 260 of them trying to deploy fiber across North America, and this product lets them solve for their planning process and their design process, and submit to electric utilities in a way faster and more visual way than what they can do today. So, we're excited to be bringing that to market. We've got another product that's coming. This is the one, as a shareholder that we should all be getting the most excited about. Based on our Customer Council, this is 18 of the biggest electric utilities in North America. The leaders in these groups have asked us to build something that helps them manage power quality. So this is, if you look at that image on the right-hand side, you can see up there those green boxes. They're not green in real life, but they're transformers.
So they take power from a very high voltage and deliver power into a home or a business. This is a huge cost item and quality item in terms of a power network. It also deals with, they call it DER, which is distributed energy resourcing. So that's when solar and batteries and those sorts of things are coming back into the network. So we're moving into the electrical management side of the grid, which we're very excited about and backed by the biggest utilities in the world. This is going into beta testing very soon, through this next quarter. I've just lost, James, I've just lost ability to move the slides forward. Can you help me? No, go next. I can't see. Apologies. James, can you go to slide 9?
And also for IKE Office Pro, this is coming to market within the next 30 days, again, in terms of our investment into new products. Moving to an automated Make-ready engineering software module. Why this matters is our customers use engineers in the back office to design the network, and this is a module that automates a lot of the standards-based engineering in terms of network development. Keep in mind, the distribution grid in the U.S. is going to double capacity over the next 20 years. So this is a very large problem that we're seeking to solve. James, next slide, please. PolePilot, we've talked about before. Next slide, James. We've developed this detection capability to be able to recognize power infrastructure. Next slide. And detect who's attached and where, and what the infrastructure is.
Again, this gives us an ability to work with some of the bulk data capture providers such as Google Street View and Tesla and other folk that are scanning things all the time, but are not focused on power infrastructure. Next slide. This is repetition from here, but we do see AI as an accelerant for our business, not as a disruptor or a threat. I think this does really matter in terms of how shareholders should view our business. I think, IKE, we have very proprietary data and that is what these large language models train on. We've got 20 million human engineered power assets as the data set to train on. That's what we've been leveraging. We've also put AI inside of our workflows and operations. That's the part that the whole world's got access to that side of things.
I think the key capability is having workflow integration inside of deep industries and in places where customers really need your direct delivery and support and customer experience, et cetera. So I feel that we're in a strong spot. We respect some of the threats, but we feel we're in a good spot from that perspective. Next slide. The rest of the slide information has been with you from last month, so I won't spend too much time talking about this. We're only 5%, 6% penetrated in terms of our position in the market. Next slide. I think importantly, we're positioning ourselves inside of industry workflows. We're not an app that is easily replaced.
We're tied into these really big industry problems around grid hardening is the biggest one in terms of dealing with the grid, in terms of storms and fires and floods and hurricanes, et cetera, and the digital twin requirement, joint use, et cetera. So we're focusing on these really specific applications. Next slide. The market just keeps getting larger and larger from our perspective. We're about to move into underground design as well as overground and underground distribution. So yeah, we feel that the market is going to get larger and larger, and at the moment, we're focused on North America versus other international markets. James, I'll probably pause there because the balance of the slides are items that this group has had a chance to review previously and open things up to questions.
Floor is now open for any questions of Glenn's presentation. James, are there any questions received?
There are no questions received about the CEO presentation at this time.
All right. Thank you for that. We now go on to the formal part of the meeting, matters requiring resolution, which are outlined in the notice of meeting. You may ask questions on each matter being put to the 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'll need to click Get Voting Card within the online meeting platform. You'll 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 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 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. Our Resolution 1 is auditors' remuneration. Firstly, we turn to the matters relating to the company's auditors.
The motion concerns the fixing of the auditors' remuneration, and the board seeks shareholder approval that the directors may be authorized to fix the remuneration. James, are there any questions for the board concerning this motion?
There are no questions on this matter from shareholders.
Thank you. Please now select either For, Against, or Abstain for Resolution 1 on the voting card. I will pause for a few moments before proceeding further. Resolution 2 concerns my own re-election as a director of the company. It would not be appropriate for me to preside over this item according to my position on the board. I, therefore, propose that Glenn takes over the meeting at this point to move Resolution 2 to vote.
Thanks, Alex. This resolution is to approve Alex to be reappointed or reappointed as a director of the board. He's had such considerable input into the business. The board all unanimously approves his re-election.
Glenn, there is a point there about the proxy position.
Yes. Sorry. That is correct. In terms of the proxy position, they have been received. There are 72 million votes for and 5,000 votes withheld, and there are 18 million discretionary votes held by the Chair, which have been voted for the board for this resolution. I would just ask attendees now to either vote For, Against, or Abstain for this Resolution 2.
Resolution 3 is the election of Rod Snodgrass. In accordance with the NZX Listing Rule 2.7.1, a director appointed by the board must hold office without re-election past the annual general meeting following director's appointment. Accordingly, Rod is required to retire, having been appointed by the board on November 2025. Being eligible, Rod has offered himself for re-election. The board consider that Rod will be an independent director for the purposes of the NZX Listing Rules if elected the board. The board unanimously support the election of Rod. James, are there any questions on this resolution?
We have one question from a Mr. Steven Maine, stating, It's unfortunate that Rod could not attend the meeting today. Could you please comment on the recruitment process that led to his original appointment to the board?
Glenn, would you like to run with that?
Yes. Look, we've really vigorously been dealing with succession planning. Rod is an executive leader at Telecom New Zealand, also at Spark, and he was a leader at Spark Ventures. He has subsequently been involved in other directorships at electric utilities. We're very lucky to have a very growth mindset person like Rod involved. He's picking up the chair of the audit and risks committee for IKE. I'd echo Alex's comments. We were very lucky to have Fred Lax on the board of IKE. But since he stepped down, Rod fills a really valuable gap, not just with governance, but also with a growth company mindset. We've been very deliberate. His appointment, Roz Buick, came on a year and a half ago. Roz ran all of Oracle Utilities product business.
We're lucky to have a very talented board, and obviously very pleased to have Rod join the team.
Any other further questions, James?
There are no further questions.
All right. We will pause for a moment. We have now reached the segment of the meeting, general business. Before we close, I would like the opportunity of any shareholders to raise any further questions. Are there any questions, James?
We have several questions. I will combine several just to make it easier to answer. We have a question from Alan Best of the NZSA, amongst others. Does older stock mean that will that delay the move towards net profit? What competitive position does IKE hold against local and international competition? I will add to that from another question. Can you also comment on competition in an AI world?
Well, I can go first and maybe you can follow up. We listed IKE as basically a pre-revenue software business. To build a company in the United States and win the electric utility market, we have been very fortunate to be funded by the supportive shareholders that are on this call today, and it is to grow the business. The thing we measure ourselves by today is subscription software revenue. We could be profitable tomorrow if we wanted to be, and we believe the highest value outcome for shareholders is to keep winning customers. Once we win these customers, we are going to keep them for decades and decades, right? These are such sticky customers. The quality of the revenue that we generate is very high. We think the opportunity is to go and win as much of the market as we can.
We have got a balance sheet that supports that. We have got investors that have invested behind that strategy. That is our headline objective at the moment. We are also sustaining our balance sheet really strongly. I think we have built our cash position over the last couple of years. We are in a really healthy spot, but this is about winning market share and then holding customers for 10, 20, 30 years, is what we are strategically going after.
I would only say the performance of the company and the cash resultant of it, I think echoes everything Glenn has said. It is happening, it is working, and it is delivering. James, further questions?
Thank you. We have another question/comment from Alan Best from the NZSA. The NZSA sent its voting intention previously and received replies and offers its thanks. They feel that the disclosure around directors' payments and a few other issues have not been adequate. The question is, Can you do something about this?
Certainly. We are open to all input and reflect on it, any input we receive, and take it seriously. Any omission on our part we will focus on and go back and talk to parties to ensure that we are not only complying, but we are giving all the transparency that anyone could ever ask for.
Thank you. The next question I have is again a conglomerate of questions. Approximately 12 months ago, the shareholders declined a takeover offer of NZD 1 per share. Can you please comment on the current environment?
I'll-
All right. You pick that up first, Glenn.
Yes. Well, I think the context there is it was one of the world's biggest private equity groups did come to us with a non-binding letter of interest at NZD 1 a share. The board actually did talk to some of the major shareholders. They had no interest. For efficiency, the board made the decision not to bring it to all shareholders, because if it's not going to get past the 75% threshold, then that's inefficient and it's costly. I think the board made the right decision at that time, given where we've traded up to. We've grown 70% software revenue since the time of that approach. Our valuation's now past that number. So yeah, there is a lot of M&A interest into the electrification space, the software space, in terms of distribution infrastructure, and we continue to see a lot of it.
But the board's obviously just interested in making the very best and highest value decisions for shareholders.
Thank you, Glenn. The next question I have is from Chris Mill around market penetration. In terms of current and new products, who or what is IKE displacing?
It's product dependent. If we're talking about pole loading analysis and structural design, we've got two key competitors. One is Bentley Systems. They've got a product called SPIDA. We've got their ex-CEO and their head of product management now in IKE. We compete with them. There's also O-Calc, which is a product that comes out of a company called Osmose. They're a multi-billion dollar services company. We actually recently hired their head of engineering into IKE. So we're trying to kick them in the shins as hard as we can in terms of competitors, and that's where we compete in terms of structural analysis. In terms of digitization and assessment of assets, which is that's our IKE Office Pro product, it's a broader competitive set. That's a harder one probably to talk through on this call.
We've been working really hard to work through how we get infrastructure data from different sources, big data sources. We've partnered with Google and their Street View team, who are taking photographs of everything all the time. Also working a bit with Tesla at the moment, who've got 3.5 million cars on the road taking photographs of things. We see big opportunity there. The goal on that side of things is to be the best at delivering an outcome to a customer. So stop thinking about technology, think about what a customer actually needs to achieve, in terms of their workflow, would be the best way to describe it. We don't see any really disruptive competitors turning up right at the moment, but we're keeping an eye on it all the time, obviously.
Thank you, Glenn. The next question I have is related to IKE culture. Can you just briefly comment on the internal, the team culture and health of such?
Yep, love to, and it's something we focus on a lot. James, you know this as well. Our culture, our key term is Manaakitanga, which means we rise by lifting others. It means we lift our customers, we lift our industry, but we also lift each other. We've got core values, which is tied to, we talk about simplicity and clarity. So that's simple language, clear language, but also simple products, clear products that are easy to use, and also how we engage with the market. We talk about, this is not meant to be crass, but we say, Open company, no bullshit. So there's no hierarchy. It's like we've got so many smart people doing smart stuff. We don't tie ourselves up with these other elements. We're lucky.
We have virtually zero negative churn of people inside of IKE, I think because of our culture and the fact that people live it every day. We've had one person leave in the last year that we didn't want to leave, which was a shame, but he got a much bigger job somewhere else. So yeah, our culture is very strong. We talk about being the partner that our customers cannot imagine living without. Just be great for the people that we serve. I think this matters more and more in an AI world, right, where people think they can develop technology fast and replicate stuff. But in our industry, it matters about being a great partner and a great support channel for the customers that we serve. Anyway, the thing I'm most proud of at IKE, by far, is our culture and how we serve customers.
Yeah, it's a real hot button. You can focus a lot more on this as a young, growing company. It's hard to change culture inside of a big business. But inside of a growth company like ours, it's something that we can keep a real focus on.
Thank you, Glenn. The remaining questions are focused on macro views of the environment and market in relation to the U.S. administration, et cetera. I think to be respectful of everyone's time, as that's a topic that could go for a long time. We can take those questions offline and reply directly to those asking the questions.
Thank you, James.
Great. Otherwise, there are no further questions.
Yeah. Okay. Well, we look forward to picking up the questions that James has highlighted and getting back to those parties, particularly in the sensitive political times we live. With that said, this brings the business of this meeting to a close. Thank you for your attendance and engagement today. We will be announcing results of the voting onto the NZX and ASX this afternoon. Thank you again, and any time you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. The board and management are very open to answer any of your questions and assist in making more clarity as to what IKE is achieving and where we're going. With that, thank you for your attendance and this brings the meeting to a close.