Today we have Andrew Balgarnie, the company's Chief Strategy Officer, on the line. We do have the ability to take questions that have already been submitted or can be submitted through the Q&A panel that you'll see on your screen through the chat. With that, Andrew, I might hand it over to you to go through the presentation. Thanks.
Great. Thanks, Simon. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Simon mentioned, Andrew Balgarnie, Chief Strategy Officer at TradeWindow. The full context for today's results is set out in the written investor update that was published earlier today, and I'll be walking through the key metrics on the dashboard displayed on the screen. Before we get into the numbers, a couple of housekeeping points. This webinar is being hosted on our new TradeWindow Investor Hub, which is TradeWindow's dedicated platform for shareholder communications. You'll find today's investor update and all of our NZX and ASX announcements in one place. You can also submit questions through the Q&A function at any time, and I'll be working through those questions at the end. If I can't answer the question during the webinar, we will provide a written response on the TradeWindow Investor Hub.
Today, I'll be walking through the Q4 FY 2026 results. We'll cover revenue, ARR, customer metrics, gross margin, our Australian performance, then Freight.AI. Should take around 15 minutes. I'll aim to leave plenty of time at the end for questions. Let's get into it. Starting with the headline numbers, the dashboard shows the key metrics for the full year ended 31 March 2026. Please note all metrics presented are unaudited at this stage. Trading revenue came at NZD 9.6 million, up 20% on FY 2025. That's within our revised guidance range. We maintain an unbroken run of year-on-year revenue growth since we listed on the NZX in November 2021. The number I want to draw your attention to first is annual recurring revenue.
We ended the year at NZD 10.1 million in ARR, up 17% on FY 2025 and crossing the NZD 10 million threshold for the first time. ARR is the metric we track most closely because it reflects the predictability and durability of our revenue base. Reaching this milestone is significant. Customer count came in at 547, down 7 on FY 2025. I'll address that directly because I know it draws attention. This isn't customer attrition in the traditional sense. It's a deliberate outcome of our transition to new pricing plans, where we've rationalized the small number of lower value legacy accounts. The underlying retention rate actually improved. It was up 2 percentage points to 89%, which tells you the core customer base is holding and it's growing. On gross margin, Q4 came in at 63%, which was up 3 percentage points on Q3.
I'll cover the gross margin story shortly in more detail. The short version is that we're in the final stages of migrating our on-premise TradeWindow Freight customers to our cloud-hosted solution, and that transition is compressing our margin temporarily. We expect gross margins to further improve as we scale up revenues. Moving on to ARPC, which is average revenue per customer. This is where I think the FY 2026 story becomes particularly compelling. Shipper ARPC, for the, for the year was NZD 30,352 on an annualized basis, up 22% on FY 2025. To put that in context, only 2% of that uplift came from price increases. The remaining 20 percentage points of growth reflect customers using our solutions more.
That's higher transaction volumes, broader product adoption, and a deliberate shift in our sales focus towards larger shippers who tend to be heavy users of our solutions. What this tells us is that revenue growth is organic and usage driven, and that's it's more durable and compounding dynamic than price-led growth. That's the kind of ARPC trajectory we wanna see sustained into the next financial year. On net customer numbers in the shipper segment, we haven't grown the headcount significantly, but we've grown the value of the base materially. That's the model working as intended. The freight forwarder ARPC has also moved strongly at NZD 13,904 on an annualized basis, up 27% on FY 2025. The drivers here are a little different from shippers.
We've been actively recontracting existing freight forwarder customers onto our refreshed pricing plans, which incorporate cloud hosting and reflect the full value of the platform. Some churn has occurred as a by-product of that recontracting activity, and the current economic environment hasn't helped with retention at the margins. The customers who have recontracted are generating meaningfully higher revenue than before. New freight forwarder customers are also being onboarded at the new pricing structure, so the base is progressively shifting to a higher value profile. The 27% ARPC growth in this segment is the clearest evidence that the recontracting strategy is working. The broader point across both segments is that ARPC growth is a key value driver right now. We're not chasing customer numbers for its own sake. We're focused on the quality and revenue intensity of the customer base.
Both of these metrics validate that approach. On gross margin, the full year figure of 60% is down 1 percentage point on FY 2025, and I wanna give you proper context for that. Our cost structure in the current period reflects the tail end of a multi-month migration, moving our on-premise TradeWindow Freight customers to our cloud-hosted solution. During that migration, we're carrying both legacy infrastructure costs and the new cloud hosting costs simultaneously, and that creates a temporary drag on margin. The Q4 figure of 63%, up 3 percentage points on Q3, is an early signal that this dynamic is resolving. As the migration completes, the legacy cost base falls away and the margin recovers. We expect gross margin to recover and trend higher in FY 2027 as the migration completes and the revenue continues to grow over the fixed cost base.
This isn't a structural margin issue, it's a transitional one, and the Q4 number shows that we're on the right track. On the customer numbers and the geographical mix, total customer numbers came in at 547, which was down 7 on FY 2025. As I noted earlier, this reflects the rationalization of lower value legacy accounts through the pricing transition. Customer retention of 89%, up 2 percentage points, confirms the underlying base is stable, and that the accounts we are retaining are more valuable than those we've rationalized. The geographic story is important. Our revenue from Australia came in at NZD 4.1 million for the year, up 34% on FY 2025, and now representing 43% of total group revenue. That's a significant shift. Australia is the largest near-term opportunity in our addressable market, and FY 2026 demonstrates that we can grow there.
The Freight platform has been the primary driver of that growth. On the Pay as you Go segment, covering Origin and SpeEDI, revenue growth was driven primarily by Origin in Australia. This is a lighter touch, transactional revenue stream, and the Australian growth there reinforces the broader market opportunity. Entering FY 2027, continuing Australian growth is our top commercial priority. The FY 2026 result gives us a solid foundation to build from. Onto Freight.AI, development is progressing to plan. From this update, we've changed how we report on it. We've moved away from a percentage of expenses attributable to R&D, which was a relative measure, to an absolute capitalized R&D figure. We think this gives investors better visibility into the actual capital being deployed into this program.
Capitalized R&D expenditure for Freight.AI reached NZD 661,000 as at the 31st of March 2026, which was up 47% on Q3. It's a meaningful acceleration and investment, and it reflects the program entering into a more intensive development phase. The design principle behind Freight.AI is important to understand. We're not building AI as a standalone feature or bolt on. We're embedding AI directly into trade workflows, which include document ingestion, job creation, customs preparation, exception handling. The automation is native to how customers work. It's not something that they actively need to invoke. Commercially, this has three outcomes we're focused on. First, higher transaction volumes per customer without a proportional increase in their cost or effort.
Second, it opens a pathway to usage-based or transactional-based pricing, which allows us to monetize the platform activity rather than just system access. Third, deeper workflow automation increases switching costs. The more integrated Freight.AI becomes in a customer's operation, the harder the platform is to replace. The initial rollout of Freight.AI is targeted for September 2027, and we will provide updates on milestones as the development progresses. To summarize, FY 2026 saw TradeWindow cross the NZD 10 million ARR threshold for the first time, deliver a 20% uplift in trading revenue, and sustained strong ARPC growth across both customer segments, driven primarily by usage. Australia now accounts for 43% of group revenue from a lower base, and the Freight.AI investment is accelerating.
The gross margin movement is transitional and showing early signs of recovery, and the fundamentals of the business are moving in the right direction. Our annual results presentation and FY 2027 guidance will be delivered on the 30th of May. We'll cover audited financials, our balance sheet position, and a more detailed view of our FY 2027 priorities at that point. For those of you who want to stay close to the business between now and then, the Investor Hub is the best place to do that. We'll be adding content regularly, and you can submit questions directly through the platform at any time. Thank you for joining us today, and now let's open it up for questions.
Great. Thanks for that, Andrew. Just a few questions that have been submitted previously. The first one, when are you likely to be paying dividends?
Yeah, TradeWindow is currently focused on growth. Our dividend policy is not to pay dividends. The first milestone for us is taking the business through to EBITDA profitability, which we are aiming for in this financial year. By 31 March 2027, we would like the business to be at EBITDA breakeven, but we will be reinvesting the profits back into the business. We see that Freight.AI is a key driver for growth into the future.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. Where do you think gross margins could tend, or trend to over the medium term?
So-
Yeah
in the medium term, we expect to see incremental improvement as the revenue scales. The mid-60s% we seem to be on trend for with the current product suite. Notwithstanding the release of Freight.AI then provides us with a much more scalable platform. That's where we would expect to see margins akin to most SaaS businesses, so north of 70%.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. What's driving the decline in customer retention rate?
As I mentioned, it's the recontracting primarily around TradeWindow Freight customers, and so we've had some of the more marginal players drop out of the market. We're firmly focused on winning higher value mid-market to larger size enterprises, and that's a much more profitable customer segment for us.
Perfect. Just a question, in terms of conflict in the Middle East, is it having any adverse impact on TradeWindow?
The conflict in the Middle East doesn't impact us more or less than any other business out there. We don't have any direct exposure and nor do our customers. For us, it's really a case of the overall economic environment, and we're no more exposed than any other business.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. Impacting R&D and commercialization expenses as well as the conversation with customers.
Sorry, I missed part of that, Simon. It, you faded out there.
That's all right. Can you discuss how AI has been impacting on R&D and commercialization expenses, as well as the conversation with customers?
Great. Thanks, Simon. Yeah, we see AI as an enabler of our business, not a disruptor of it. TradeWindow operates in a space that in part is highly regulated. For instance, international trade documentation, customs compliance, border processes all require accountability and in many cases require a qualified human in the loop, such as a customs broker, and for example, they carry the legal and professional responsibility for the accuracy of a customs declaration. AI can help automate the preparation and reduce the manual effort involved. It doesn't remove the need for human oversight and sign-off. That's a regulatory reality, and it's a structural feature of the market, not a limitation. It means that the value of our platform isn't threatened by AI.
In fact, it's enhanced by it, and with Freight.AI, we see that's an expression of that view. Embedding AI across workflows to make our customers faster and more efficient while keeping people in the loop more accountable for being able to deliver against regulations.
Great. Just in terms of Freight.AI, September 2027 is still.
Sorry, Simon, you've faded out again.
I was just saying just in terms of Freight.AI September 2027 launch, what happens between now and then?
We've still got a great product suite out there. On the shippers side of things, we've got TradeWindow Prodoc and more features and functionality coming. Origin, which is used by both the shippers and the forwarders. Then we've got some significant upgrades coming to our existing TradeWindow Freight product, and so that will continue to extend the capability of that product and allow us to serve a wider range of customers, including more of these mid-market customers, and that feature and functionality will also be baked into the Freight.AI product eventually.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. Just a question. What was the ARPC for shippers and freight forwarders for the quarter?
Yeah. The ARPC for the shippers was, on an annualized basis, NZD 30,352, and that was up 22% on the prior year. For the freight forwarders, it was NZD 13,904 on an annualized basis, up 27%.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. How much investment have we budget for Freight.AI between now and September 2027?
I'll have to come back to you on the precise figure. I won't do it off the top of my head.
No. No worries.
We're going through a final budgeting exercise at the moment.
I suppose just specifically on Freight.AI, noting it's not in the market as yet, what are the sort of key specific outcomes that customers should expect or the company's aiming to achieve with the new launch?
Yeah. A much higher degree of automation inside of a freight forwarder's business. That's really important because freight forwarders are margin-constrained businesses. They generally scale up by the number of operators they have. Being able to enable the operators to do more is a key element that attracts freight forwarders to a product like Freight.AI. I think that's the key deliverable, is making our customers more productive, more efficient, and more profitable through a much, much higher degree of automation.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. Just a further clarification with regards to what was the ARPC for shippers and freight forwarders for the quarter, not on an annualized basis? For example, last quarter it was NZD [2,482] for shippers.
Let me have a quick look. I'll pull up the number in front of me. Yeah, we've gone to doing it on an annualized basis because it was confusing to people that that was a monthly number. I kept getting comments that the figure was low. All we've done is just extrapolated the monthly figure out by 12. Bear with me as I pull up the numbers in front of me. Yeah, the freight forwarder monthly ARPC figure was NZD 1,159, so it's still up the same percentage points at 27% on the prior year. ARPC per month was NZD 2,529, so 22% on the prior year.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. Just final question.
Yeah, we don't have, we don't have a quarter-on-quarter comparison.
Got it. Just final question. WiseTech have said they will easily copy and replicate anybody's efforts to compete with them using software or AI to dominate. Any comments on that?
We've been competing against WiseTech Global for a very long time. The roots of our freight business go back 15 years. Yeah, they're a familiar competitor to us, and we're ready to respond to any actions they or any other competitors make. We understand it's a dynamic market, but it's a huge market and there's plenty of room for growth for everyone.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. That concludes the Q&A segment. I might just hand it back to you.
Great. Thank you, Simon, and thank you everyone for your attendance today. If you have any further questions, please submit those through the Investor Hub. Appreciate your time. Thank you.