Good morning, welcome to ikeGPS's full year financial year 2023 results presentation, released on the ASX and NZX last night. In the company, we have CEO, Glenn Milnes, who I'll hand it over to shortly. Before I do so, Glenn will somewhat speed through the presentation up on the screen before we get to Q and A, which you can submit through the Q and A panel down the bottom of the screen. Glenn, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Simon, and thanks everyone for taking the time for this update call. As Simon mentioned, I'll run through our slide material reasonably, quickly, and efficiently, and leave plenty of times for questions and discussion. My name is Glenn Milnes. I'm the CEO and Managing Director of IKE, based in Colorado, the United States, which is our center of gravity of operation. We're IKE, the PoleOS Company, so we build software products that speed up the deployment of electric utility networks and communication networks, and also help with digital transformation of those assets. I will work through these slides. Please take note of this important notice. At a glance, FY2023 was a very strong year for us. Again, coming off a previously strong growth year.
Revenue grew to just under $31 million, which was 93% up on the prior year, and quite significantly ahead of even the stretch targets we had in place at the beginning of the year. Importantly for investors, nearly 90% of our revenue is now derived from recurring subscription or reoccurring transaction revenue sources, which really helps with quality and predictability as we keep growing. About 380 enterprise customers in North America, it's less than 6% of the addressable market, so we're still early in terms of market penetration. Gross margin grew strongly. Gross margin percent was 53%, which is down from 62% the prior year. The reason for that was product mix, and real outperformance in terms of our IKE Analyze transaction revenue, which we can talk to further.
Our balance sheet remains very strong, with NZD 23 million of cash receivables on the balance sheet, and EBITDA losses shrank to around NZD 2 million for the year. These slides, there's some repetition here from our performance update at the beginning of May. This chart shows absolute revenue growth over the past three years. The key revenue components are the green and the blue bit, which is recurring transaction and subscription revenue, which is the blue. This is a consequence of the investment we've made into software products and capability. We expect this kind of relative mix to continue with growth across both of those categories. This chart details revenue, gross margin in orange, and EBITDA in green, and that's trended well.
We've continued to invest particularly substantially into product and technology development, but our EBITDA loss shrank to around NZD 2 million. Sort of showing that continued improvement trend. This is the table again, that we'd released in the performance update, but just going down, these are the really key metrics in terms of IKE's economic engine. We've had good solid growth across all the key things that drive our business in terms of number of transactions, associated revenue, number of customers. We're winning about one customer a week across the North American market at the moment. You see really healthy growth in terms of the subscription revenue piece also.
Snapshot here of our P&L, and to follow our balance sheet also, you see a loss for the year of NZD 6.6 million, once we've reflected in amortization in particular, and yeah, EBITDA of - NZD 2 million. You can sort of see the mix there. Our sales and marketing group is very efficient in terms of a spend to revenue, and particularly spend to revenue growth and momentum and, you know, high investment into research and engineering. There was one one-off non-cash item of NZD 3 million for an impairment assessment that sits in that research and engineering line, which distorts it a fraction. Our balance sheet's strong and is expected to stay strong as we keep growing, we're in a healthy position from a balance sheet perspective.
This is the liability and equity side of the balance sheet. I don't think there's anything too notable there in terms of working capital management, et cetera. We have no debt. Just changing gears, we're fortunate to be really in the right place at the right time in terms of market tailwinds, and, you know, that's a huge factor in any kind of growth organization, where we're helping communications companies deploy their fiber networks much faster. The photograph in the back here, you can see a power pole with 5G antennas attached to it. 5G networks are very dense in terms of those antennas, and they're all connected up with fiber.
We support the engineering practice to assess a pole and also to do the design and engineering work to install the network. It's a big market. There's still probably five to seven years of this macro tailwind to follow, with about 200 communications companies just in a race to get their fiber built as fast as they can, and we speed that up. Just some indication here of where North America is at in fiber and 5G, the investment super cycle, but it's just growing and growing, and we're really seeing that in terms of demand from customers. You can kind of see the level of CapEx spend that is being pushed into building these networks. The second market we serve are the electric utilities themselves, the people that own the assets.
There's about 3,000 electric utilities. They're dealing with the same challenges across the whole country, which is aging infrastructure, an aging workforce that has got a huge amount of work to do. Significant liability risks for network failures, and these folk really care about keeping the power on and not hurting anybody with their networks. We help with the quality of, and scalability of engineering design, and also the maintenance of these poles. That power pole in the back has failed, but you can get a sense of just how much infrastructure is attached to every power pole in terms of fiber, and cable TV, and all the power assets themselves.
What's really interesting about the North American market, this market trend has come faster than was anticipated, is a realization that the electrical grid needs to be able to run about 50% of the energy in the U.S. At the moment, only about 20% of energy currently sits on the electrical grid. What that means is, there's a requirement to build a lot more capacity, a lot more rigorous engineering, much higher stakes if the power network goes down for any reason. With global warming and more storms, the electric vehicle market, you know, these businesses now need to power a whole new asset class. It's not just homes and businesses, it's now the transportation market.
It's a, it's a really big tailwind for us, because utilities need faster, better, digital ways of doing this work. Just a graph here. These are billions of dollars being spent on distribution networks across the United States, across those 3,000 utilities. As most of you know, you know, we do target these really large Tier 1 infrastructure groups, we're winning quite a number of them. This list here covers the communication segment, so AT&T, Bell. Crown Castle is the biggest shared services network in the United States, have all standardized on IKE. We've got five of the 10, actually six of the 10 largest Investor-Owned Utilities in North America now. We just won another one recently.
The third segment are the engineering companies that do work on behalf of these infrastructure owners. They're an important cog in the chain. Again, we target the very biggest and have a number of them. We sell directly, and we're building the IKE brand directly through a customer experience initiative, and we deliver and grow accounts with a direct team. Just a snapshot here of some of the really brilliant, emerging people that we've got in the IKE business today. We've got a team of around 80 in Colorado, and we've got a team of about 25 in Wellington, New Zealand, mostly focused on software engineering. You know, we hire very specific people with specific skill sets that understand how to build and engineer these networks.
We've been very fortunate in terms of retention and the ability to attract talent through the past, 24 to 36 months. Virtually no attrition or not attrition that we would want to have. You know, we've been able to hire about 40 new roles over the last 12 to 18 months. Multiple ways that we see the potential to grow. Looking ahead, we continue to build out our sales and account management team, to win new customers and new logos. We've got a long way to run to penetrate the market. Most of our growth. Look at number two. Most of our growth from last year came from upselling into our existing customer footprint, just growing with these businesses, as we're more successful with them.
They tend to buy small to start, and then we build revenue over time by going across a wider part of their organization. Three, M&A. We've done two small technology M&A deals. Both have been, I think, quite successful. We should see our IKE Structural product, which we acquired back in 2019, I think this year there's an opportunity to have multiplied its revenue five or 10 times from when we acquired it. We continue to look at other M&A opportunities, and potentially, I think some well-priced deals that will come through, or deal opportunities over the next 12-24 months, just because of what's happening with the tightening of the private capital markets. Lastly, international market expansion.
We're 100% focused on North America today, but have opportunities in potentially in other international markets over time. I'll go fast through this. Our business, well, we've got three software products, and they all drive productivity for either assessing, designing, or engineering distribution power poles. Our business model is to every customer pays us a subscription to access any solution. There's a usage multiplier. We're either selling more subscription seats or we're charging our customers a transaction fee. The more assets they put through the software, we charge them, and different parts of the market operate on these two different business models. I mentioned we've invested substantially into product and technology development. We're really excited about the next generation IKE PoleForeman product or IKE Structural product that's coming to market this year.
We've built it with an amazing customer council. These are the standards group leaders within those businesses down there, that some of the names might not mean a lot, but these are some of the biggest utilities and communications groups in North America. We've got a real vested interest in terms of this next generation product. The early signs are really promising in terms of how the market has reviewed what we've built. Hopefully more on that to come in the second half of the year in terms of customer logos to update you on. Similarly, in terms of our automation product called IKE Insight, this is using AI to process power pole information at real scale. We've just announced a partnership with.
It's the biggest data collection company in the world, in terms of folk that are out either driving or flying, more than 90 countries to fill their, like, mapping software and things, we can't name them. Think of groups like Microsoft, Google, and Apple that are, you know, out collecting this data all the time. We've partnered up as their pole specific analysis partner, which we're excited about. Lastly, sort of, somewhat more boringly, perhaps, but a big focus for us through this last year in terms of investment, has been into systems efficiency, so that we can scale and drive revenue per employee outcomes. As we continue to grow revenue, we obviously don't want to be having linear growth in terms of headcount costs, et cetera.
We're focused very hard on systems that can support scale and growth, and there's some examples there of the different programs that we've implemented over the last 12-18 months. Similarly, with brand and customer experience, which translates to pricing power. Again, we work really hard on the IKE brand, and on the back end of that, we work very hard on pricing, and making sure we price maximize. A range of initiatives there, which support those objectives. Thanks. Simon, I'd be happy to take questions.
Perfect. Thanks, Glenn. First question, you've described how constraints to customers will impact Q1 transaction revenue. How concentrated is IKE's overall revenue? For example, what % of total revenue derives from its top five customers?
Yeah, that's a good question. We have some concentration risk. I think our top 10 customers represent around 45% of our revenue. You know, and the opportunity for us is just to build more larger customers, which we've had quite a lot of success doing over the last 12 to 18 months.
Thanks, Glenn. Noting that $3 million exceptional research and engineering expense in the second half, can you provide further detail on what caused this, and what level of R&E expenditure are you planning for FY2024?
FY2024, we're almost normalizing on the absolute costs that we had over this past year, we don't see that increasing too materially. The impairment cost that's in there, which is a non-cash item, just related to every audit, you're required to assess the carrying value of assets sitting on your balance sheet, and that requires a five year cash flow forecast. It's heavily impacted by things like discount rates and terminal values that you apply. We took a conservative view, and it resulted in a, you know, non-cash impairment.
Right. Thanks, Glenn. You're having good success in getting some new large enterprise customers. Can you talk to us about your sales staff numbers, more generally, about how you think customers are perceiving the company or brand in the market?
Well, some of the things that we're achieving now, we've got stronger and stronger brand recognition. We just don't deal with the same kind of objections in the sales process that we did perhaps three years ago, which was, you know, often was these companies wanting to understand what size you are, size of your balance sheet, et cetera. We don't have any of that anymore because we've got, you know, some of the biggest infrastructure groups that there are, and they're reference customers, and this market will talk. That's really helped. We've continued to grow the sales organization. We've got three sales teams that run their own playbook.
One focuses on electric utilities only, we start with the very biggest in the country, we're working our way down that list in terms of addressing that market. We've got a communication sales practice focused on 200 communication groups, we've got an engineering team that focuses on the engineering companies. We're selling them the same products, with, you know, it's nuanced messaging. The engineering companies focus on profitability and margin growth by using technology. The utilities are focused on safety and reliability and quality of data, which we provide. The communications group are just looking for speed. It's, you know, it's a different message, but same products.
Thanks, Glenn. Just touching again on the R&D expense. Can you provide further details as to why it was included as an R&D expense line versus below the line?
Well, it's per the standard, which escapes me. From a, from an accounting standards perspective, that's where it's applied.
Sure. Thanks. Operating expenses have gone through a period of quite strong growth. Are we likely to see a flattening or even a reduction in FY2024 operating expenses once the R&D impairment is taken into account?
Yes. That, you know, we touched on the investments we've made into systems, and that's really what underpins. You know, our goal is obviously to continue to grow from a top-line perspective and margin perspective, but not to have linear cost increases at the same time. Yeah, we wouldn't expect OpEx to decline far. I mean, keep in mind, we're about a 100-person business today. We're serving the largest infrastructure companies in the world, and we're just getting started in terms of growing accounts and growing our market presence. We, we do have to operate at, you know, at the right level of scale to support those customer opportunities. I think we're gonna do so in a sensible way in terms of cost management.
Thanks, Glenn. You've called out the first quarter, again, we've addressed this slightly, but being potentially below fourth quarter of 2023, can you talk in more detail about what drivers for this are and what gives you confidence of a rebound in the second quarter?
Yes. There's two parts. The context is, we've got two customers that we've got affected are both national communications groups building fiber across different markets in the country. Each of them, at the moment, are in a utility that has a very old-fashioned way of processing engineering data for their poles, and they have a set way that these two communications companies have got much bigger plans in a lot of other markets across the country, and we've got visibility into those funnels. It's just a case of when they move away from this particular electric utility in Kansas.
Right. Thanks, Glenn. That concludes the Q and A segment. I'll hand it back to you for closing remarks.
Thank you, Simon. Again, appreciate everyone taking time for a call. My email address is on our recent releases, so I'd be happy to follow up if folk have any further follow-on questions at any point.
Very good. Thanks, Glenn. Thanks, all, for attending. Cheers.