Morning again. I'm Matt Thompson, CFO of Vista Group, and I'm joined this morning by our CEO, Stuart Dickinson. Thank you for your time today as we take you through our performance for the first half of 2026 and our outlook for the remainder of the year. Before we begin, please note our standard disclaimer. We'll be taking questions at the end of the presentation. If you'd like to ask a question, please use the raise hand feature on your screen. When it's your turn, we'll call your name and your line for you to ask a question. Turning to today's agenda, Stuart will start with the highlights of the first half and the strategic progress we've made against the goals that we set out in February. I'll take you through the financial results in detail.
Stuart will return to cover our industry outlook and our updated guidance for 2026 before we open the floor to your questions. This is an interim result, we'll keep the formal presentation tight and leave plenty of time for Q&A. With that, I'll hand you over to Stu to get us started.
Thanks, Matt, good morning, everybody. Hope everybody is well this morning. Just as we get into it, I wanted to go slightly off script a little bit and just comment on the weekend that's still going on in the U.S. For those of you who have been out and about this weekend, "Spider-Man: Brand New Day," and also The Odyssey have played incredibly well. It looks like over the weekend, Spider-Man will probably end up around $355 million for the domestic box office. When we put all of these things together, it will probably be the largest domestic box office weekend that's ever been recorded. Pretty exciting from a domestic perspective, but also a global perspective as well to see the power of theatrical release and to see people out having a great time at the movies. Let's get into our conversation.
Before we get underway with the numbers that underpin the result, I just want to highlight the four key themes for us in what has been a really exciting first half. Six months ago, we noted that 2026 would be a year where we would start growing market share. I'm delighted to advise that we've done this in the first half, growing our contracted market share from 46%-48% globally. We also said that we were seeing substantial demand from our marquee clients. You will see this in the half, where several signings have not only de-risked our full-year site count targets, but they're also filling our pipeline for 2027 and beyond. The third theme is that we've delivered another strong result, with key metrics expanding and cash deployed to accelerate our cloud transition growth strategy.
The progress we're making on a day-to-day basis is enhancing the visibility towards our 2030 exit rate aspirations and reducing our execution risk. Finally, on the back of that strong first half and a favorable industry backdrop, we've upgraded our 2026 revenue guidance to between NZD 179 million and NZD 184 million. These are four fantastic achievements, and they demonstrate how well the Vista Group team are working together and executing our strategy. Let me turn now to our key financial metrics. Matt will take you through all the details shortly, but overall, from my perspective, this was a really high-quality first half. While there were positives across the board, what really stood out to me were two things. The 38% increase in SaaS revenue to over NZD 43 million, which is now more than half of Vista Group's total revenue.
Of course, it is this ramp-up in SaaS revenue which is driving the increase in total revenue, which was up 12%. The second thing I want to point out is that we grew EBITDA by 24%, which is a preview of the kind of operating leverage investors can look forward to over the coming years. For me, though, operationally, this is the slide I'm most proud of in the last six months. These four wins are the strongest evidence yet that our strategy is working. They demonstrate both the strength of demand we're seeing and the increasing momentum behind our platform. To start with, I want to celebrate an important milestone for us, the re-signing of Cinemex from a competing solution. Under the agreement, 312 sites across Mexico and the U.S. will transition to a combination of Vista Classic and Data Empowerment through 2026.
On its own, this win increases our contracted enterprise market share by two percentage points. More importantly, though, it demonstrates our ability to attract new clients. The project is already well underway, with Cinemex's U.S. operations now live. We're also hugely pleased to secure a major operational excellence commitment from Cinépolis in Mexico. At 504 sites, this represents Vista Group's largest single-country deployment and accounts for approximately 10% of our contracted enterprise client sites moving to the full platform. Importantly, though, this demonstrates the success of our pilot and then expand strategy. Following the successful deployment of operational excellence across Cinépolis' 51-site Cine Yelmo circuit in Spain, the group has now committed to a significantly broader rollout in its home market. Another way to think about the significance of these two wins is that when combined with our other clients in Mexico, Vista has more than 90% enterprise market share.
This accounts for more than 95% of the Mexican box office, which is the third-largest enterprise cinema market in the world. To continue the momentum, Cineworld has contracted 88 sites in the U.K. to digital enablement. Importantly, Cineworld is part of the wider Regal Entertainment Group, which operates around 500 sites, including 400 sites in the U.S. through Vista Classic. This win follows the successful deployment of digital enablement across Regal's 25-site Picturehouse Cinemas circuit in the U.K. and creates a pathway to a much larger opportunity across the broader Regal estate. Cineplexx, a leading European circuit, has signed a multi-year agreement covering 59 sites to operational excellence. Taken together, these are exactly the marquee wins we told you to expect in February, and they give us real confidence. Beyond the individual wins though, let's now look at how conversion progressed during the half.
I'll start with a small table in the bottom right. Over the past six months, the number of sites live on Vista Cloud platform increased from 1,557 to 1,646. Our goal remains to reach 2,000 live cloud sites by the end of 2026, and I'm pleased to confirm that we remain on track to achieve that target. However, the more important 2026 metric is operational excellence adoption, where we expect operational excellence sites to increase from 724 at the end of 2025 to approximately 1,300 by the end of 2026. The step change is largely driven by the Cinépolis Mexico agreement, which accounts for 504 sites. Let's look at the most important number on the slide, our contracted operational excellence backlog, shown in the table on the left.
Of the 1,808 sites now contracted for operational excellence, 750 are live, leaving more than 1,000 sites contracted but still to be deployed. Put it another way, 37% of our client sites are now contracted to transition to the full operational excellence platform, compared with just 17% currently live. This contracted backlog gives us significant confidence as we move into the second half. It materially strengthens revenue visibility, not only through the remainder of 2026, but increasingly into 2027 as well. Importantly, these figures reflect only contracts already secured today. We expect to continue to add further wins over the next 12 months. Finally, as you can see in the top right-hand corner, our contracted enterprise market share has increased to 48%. At our full-year result, we outlined why we believe that Vista Group is best placed to be an AI winner.
Central to that is our competitive moat and the proprietary industry-specific data that generic AI simply cannot access or replicate. I won't repeat all of that today, but I do want to show you the progress we've made this year and what we're continuing to focus on. The key point in this slide is that AI at Vista is not a set of bolt-on features. Our intelligence layer is being woven throughout the platform, underpinned by decades of cinema operations, ticketing, loyalty, payments, marketing, film distribution, and guest behavior data flowing through our ecosystem. That intelligence layer is enhancing decision support for our clients across pricing, scheduling, operations, and guest engagement. It also delivers automation, optimization, and real-time insight at scale and extends the platform's role in our clients' day-to-day operations. If you're following our product development process along, remember to visit our website where the roadmap is published.
AI doesn't just make our offerings better, though. It strengthens the economics and defensibility of the whole business. It raises switching costs through deeper workflow integration and data dependency. It supports margin expansion through productivity and operational leverage. It increases our revenue opportunity through wider value solutions and optimizations. It amplifies our data advantage across the platform, and it reinforces our position as mission-critical infrastructure rather than commoditized SaaS. In short, we are best positioned to benefit from AI adoption, not to be disrupted by it. A tangible example of this for us internally is Avo, our third-generation engineering AI agent. Built on a Vista proprietary model harness, Avo consolidates knowledge across more than 45 of our product repositories. Avo is already helping our teams resolve issues faster, scale expertise across the organization, and accelerate software development through engineering, support, and automation.
This is exactly the kind of operational leverage that, over time, supports both faster delivery and margin expansion. The final highlight I would like to cover is Vista Payments. You will remember that this is a growth initiative we launched last year. By embedding a white label payment solution directly into our software, we are now able to offer clients a single vendor relationship, automated reconciliation, guaranteed day settlement, and competitive transaction rates. Basically, I can share with you it is off to a great start. By 30 June, the platform was live and transacting with 11 Vista and Veezi clients. So far, we estimate that Vista Payments has contracted more than NZD 2 million of ARR, which is more than 10% of our 2030 aspiration of NZD 15 million. I will remind everybody, we have really only been going here for five months.
Based on the momentum we are seeing, we believe the target is increasingly achievable. Overall, we see this as a highly attractive revenue stream. Revenue is reported net of transaction costs and is expected to carry strong incremental margins. For example, at scale, we anticipate only needing a payment team of around 20 people. At our 2030 exit rate aspiration of NZD 15 million ARR, Vista Payments is expected to contribute approximately three percentage points towards our 33%-37% EBITDA margin aspiration. Importantly though, Payments also provides an additional growth lever for us alongside our cloud transition, further diversifying and de-risking our path to our long-term ARR objectives. With that, I am going to hand over to Matt to take you through the financials.
Thank you, Stuart, good morning again, everyone. As Stuart said, this was a strong first half, that comes through clearly in the financials. Revenue has increased 12% to NZD 86 million. Most importantly for me, we are starting to see operating leverage, with EBITDA growing 24% to NZD 12 million. Continuing down the page, EBITDA margin, adjusted for foreign exchange, increased by 190 basis points. I would encourage you to remember that this has been achieved despite the acceleration we set out to do this year. I am delighted with these results, most of all because I see them as a validation of our internal modeling and longer-term financial objectives. I will now take you through a more detailed view of the P&L, as there are three aspects of this result I would like to highlight. Firstly, our revenue growth has accelerated for the second consecutive year.
What I find interesting with that is that revenue growth has continued to accelerate despite us cycling larger and larger numbers. Secondly, EBITDA margins have also expanded for the second consecutive year. This operating leverage is driven by the scaling of our top-line revenue, where we are seeing profit expansion on our fixed cost base. It is also been achieved through our disciplined cost management, which can immediately be seen in our general and administration cost line. The third thing I want to point out on this slide is our well-established second half seasonality for both revenue and EBITDA based on the charts on the right-hand side of the slide. Looking first at revenue. Over the past two years, the first half has represented between 46% and 47% of the full year outcome.
At the midpoint of our upgraded full-year guidance range, the first half revenue represents 48% of projected full-year revenue. The same is true for EBITDA. Over the past two years, first-half EBITDA has represented between 33% and 34% of the full-year result. At the midpoint of our upgraded guidance range, first-half EBITDA represents approximately 34% of projected FY 2026 EBITDA. While we have increased guidance, the implied second-half performance remains consistent with the seasonal patterns we have delivered historically, which gives us confidence in achieving our full-year outlook. There are three key reasons for the seasonality that we've mentioned. The first is ARR grows through cloud conversions. A greater proportion of revenue is naturally recognized in the second half of the year. The second reason is the box office activity, which is weighted towards the Northern Hemisphere summer, Thanksgiving, and Christmas periods, all of which occur in the second half.
Finally, from a profitability perspective, annual remuneration reviews take effect in January each year, which creates a natural first-half cost weighting. Now to our segmental breakdown, where both cinema and film have continued to grow. In our growth engine, cinema, SaaS revenue was up 45% on the first half of last year and driven by 37% of client sites now being on the Vista Cloud platform. Overall, total cinema revenue was up 15% on the prior period. In film, SaaS revenue grew 9% and recurring revenue grew 3%. Please note that the components of the Powster revenue this year are weighted to the second half, the film result will be best read on a full-year basis. Now to the balance sheet, where earlier in the year we advised that we expected to use a portion of our debt facilities to support us to accelerate to meet client demand.
Given the amount of client signings we announced during the half, I'm confident that demand has now been confirmed. As a result, we closed the half in a net debt position of NZD 5.8 million, which we consider to be working capital level debt. We continue to enjoy strong support from our banking partners. We have a NZD 62 million facility in place through to 2029. Including that facility, we have approximately NZD 56 million of available funding capacity, providing more than sufficient liquidity to support the business and our growth ambitions. Looking at the bottom right of the slide, reassuringly, our cash profile is tracking exactly as outlined in February. We used a modest amount of free cash flow during the half, which I will discuss on the next slide.
Most importantly, looking ahead, we remain on track for second half of 2026 and full year 2027 to be broadly free cash flow neutral, before returning to both free cash flow positive and net cash positive positions during 2028. Now to looking at the cash flow in more detail. You'll notice that we drew NZD 30 million from our debt facility during the half. During the macroeconomic uncertainty we've experienced since February, we took a prudent approach to liquidity management by drawing the facility and holding these funds on deposit to preserve our financial flexibility. This was an extremely conservative move, I want to be clear, the debt was not drawn to fund our cloud transition strategy, we expect to repay it once macroeconomic conditions become more stable.
Just so you know, the net cost of maintaining this additional liquidity is less than 2% per annum on the amount we have drawn. Meanwhile, client collections remain strong at 98% of revenue, albeit a touch lighter than prior periods. Operating cash flow of NZD 9.2 million was lower than the reported result in the first half of 2025, but the prior period benefited from a one-off working capital tailwind of NZD 6.8 million. Adjusting for that effect, underlying operating cash flow increased by approximately 25%. Finally, we used NZD 6.8 million of free cash flow in this half. This was a deliberate investment to support our acceleration strategy, designed to meet the significant client demand we are experiencing, is consistent with the investment profile that we outlined earlier in the year.
For those who wish to delve into the free cash flow calculations in more detail, full reconciliations are available in the appendix. On this slide, I provided a bridge to show you how we've used our cash during the first half. Moving first to the table at the top of the slide. As I mentioned earlier, the first half of 2025 benefited from a one-off NZD 6.8 million working capital tailwind, which you'll see in the second row. Adjusting for that, the like-for-like free cash flow was similar to last year, being a NZD 6.9 million outflow compared to NZD 5.8 million in 2025. Now draw your attention to the chart at the bottom of the slide, which shows the changes in free cash flow against the prior period. On the left side of the waterfall chart in dark purple, you can see the cash changes in the underlying business.
Together, this box accounts for approximately NZD 3.3 million of incremental cash inflows relating to the underlying business. Revenue net of variable costs was NZD 5.6 million higher than the same period last year. Meanwhile, we had our remuneration review in the first half and our VistaCon client conference, which occurs every other year. Overall, the left side shows that as more clients transition to Vista Cloud, the additional recurring revenue increasingly drops to the bottom line and translates into cash generation. On the right side, which has a lighter purple, we invested NZD 4.4 million directly into accelerating our cloud transition strategy through capitalized development and implementation costs. I view these investments as the seeds of tomorrow's ARR. We incur those one-off costs today before the associated recurring revenue and cash flows are realized in future periods. It's a classic timing delta between our cash flows and P&L.
Put simply, the incremental cash invested during the half was substantially directed towards accelerating future growth. Meanwhile, the underlying business continued to generate increasing cash returns from investments already made. To better illustrate the underlying cash generating capability of the business, we use an underlying free cash flow measure. This excludes the one-off incremental capitalized development and deferred implementation costs associated with the upfront cloud transition. A full reconciliation of that is also included in the appendix. You should expect to hear us talk increasingly about this metric because it demonstrates the underlying cash generating power of the business. If we start with the chart on the left, in the first half of 2026, underlying free cash flow was NZD 5.6 million.
While this is lower than the NZD 9 million generated in the first half of 2025, it's important to remember that the prior period benefited from a one-off NZD 6.8 million working capital tailwind. Looking ahead, we've advised today that we remain on track to be free cash flow neutral in the second half of 2026. Assuming a similar level of cloud transition investment in the second half, underlying free cash flow is expected to increase to NZD 12.4 million, which is a NZD 2.6 million improvement. Turning to the chart on the right. In 2025, we generated NZD 18.8 million of underlying free cash flow. In 2026, that figure is expected to be only modestly lower, showing that our acceleration has only had a minimal impact on short-term underlying free cash flow. Again, we've already reached an inflection point with the improvement we expect in the second half.
The key point I want you to take away from this slide is that every NZD we invest today increases the pace of cloud adoption. This matters because it further de-risks our 2030 aspirations and supports a pathway towards NZD 75 million of free cash flows, which is approximately quadruple where underlying free cash flow is today. For my final slide today, I want to reiterate our 2030 exit rate aspirations. Over the next five years, we continue to expect to approximately double ARR to NZD 315 million. In addition, we estimate that EBITDA margins can double to between 33% and 37%, while underlying free cash flow quadruples to around NZD 75 million. These are the same aspirations we shared with you in February. What has changed since then is that we now have more evidence to support the path to achieving them.
We've added more cloud sites, signed more enterprise customers, increased our contract market share, and further demonstrated the potential of Vista Payments as an additional growth and margin lever. While the opportunity remains compelling, the more important point is that the path to achieving it carries less execution risk than it did six months ago. Before I wrap up, I want to thank the entire Vista Group team. Together, they have already delivered many of our 2026 objectives, including the marquee client signings, a meaningful increase in contracted market share, and the continued development of Vista Payments. With that, I'll hand you back to Stuart to discuss the outlook.
Thanks, Matt. Let me finish with a few words on the industry backdrop and our updated guidance. You'll see from the slide that the industry backdrop remains encouraging, and as I started the call, some of the things going on are just truly exciting. Domestic box office grew 15% in the first half and is now within 17% of pre-COVID levels. Importantly, this growth has been driven by admissions, which increased approximately 12% year-on-year, rather than ticket pricing alone. We're also seeing meaningful investment and capital reinvested into the exhibition industry, providing a strong signal of confidence that our clients and the investment community. For example, AMC has completed two capital raisings for approximately NZD 350 million, and they've committed up to NZD 225 million into theater investment during 2026. On top of this, they've just reported their strongest revenue and EBITDA quarter in their 106-year history.
Another example of this investment in the industry is Cineworld, who has continued to expand through acquisition, adding 27 U.S. sites across Imagine Showcase Cinema transactions. Finally, IMAX have signed agreements for 42 new systems across 10 countries, including in Australia and New Zealand, reflecting continued investment in premium cinema experiences. All of that content pipeline drives and continues to drive strong, exciting new things. The second half of 2026 is genuinely blockbuster-heavy, with six of the nine wide releases on the slide being franchise tentpoles whose previous installments collectively generated greater than $3 billion at the domestic box office. It's also encouraging to see content creating genuine audience excitement. "The Odyssey" is a great example, where demand for those 70-millimeter IMAX screenings has been so strong that premium format screenings have sold out weeks in advance across major markets worldwide. That brings me to guidance.
On the back of a strong first half, continued Vista Cloud transition progress, and a favorable currency backdrop, we are upgrading our 2026 revenue guidance to between NZD 179 million and NZD 184 million. This is up from the NZD 176 million to NZD 182 million that we'd set six months ago. We continue to expect EBITDA margin of 18%-20%, and we expect free cash flows to be neutral in the second half. A few notes on the assumptions that underpin the guidance. The domestic box office assumption is unchanged at $9.75 billion, and is roughly in line with U.S.-based industry analyst consensus. The currency assumption has moved down slightly to $0.59, back from the $0.60 previously assumed, and our Vista Cloud transition remains on track for the 1,300 operational excellence and 2,000 digital solution site targets we set for year-end.
Finally, as Matt mentioned before, our 2030 exit rate aspirations are entirely unchanged. Let me return to the four key messages we opened with, which I believe really highlight the strength of the first half performance. We've grown market share, we've secured several marquee client wins, we've materially strengthened growth visibility and reduced execution risk, and we have upgraded our FY 2026 revenue guidance. Before we take your questions, I'd like to thank our shareholders for your continued support, our clients for the trust they place in us, and our people across Vista Group for their hard work, dedication, and commitment. The progress we've delivered in the first half is a direct reflection of their efforts, and it positions us really well for the opportunities ahead. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, Stuart. That concludes our formal presentation. We'll now move to the Q&A session. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please click the raise hand icon at the bottom of your screen. When we call on you'll be prompted to unmute your line to ask your question. The first question comes from Phil Campbell at UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, guys. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can. Good morning, Phil.
Yeah, morning. Just in terms of the total site numbers, because I think in the past you had this aspiration of 6,000 sites. Obviously making some pretty good progress in increasing market share. Is there any risk that we could see that number being higher, or are you still pretty happy with the 6,000?
Look, I'm still pretty happy with the 6,000. We set that goal a little while ago. We're continuing to track to it. It's something that we talk about very regularly internally. Yeah, comfortable with where it's at. Obviously, we want to continue to work towards that as quickly as possible.
Just my second question was on AI. I suppose there's two parts to this question. One is, I suppose if we looked at the benefits of AI, is there any productivity benefits from the developer point of view where the kind of CapEx envelope you outlined for the migration could be potentially lower than what was guided for? Are you seeing any examples at the moment of disruption from AI from a customer perspective?
Yeah. Just addressing the first one. I think there is definitely AI and productivity, what we can do. We're learning every day, as is everybody. We're going faster with tools every day, and there's some really exciting enhancements there. I think we're too early yet to see really what the total impact will be of that on our CapEx envelope. What we are very conscious of is that obviously AI tokens come with costs.
We're making sure that we're being very thoughtful around how we deploy it to get the most benefit from it in the organization across our development and also our whole business. Very focused on it. Probably still early to tell in terms of what the overall impact will be. I just see us being able to continue to go faster and build more quality software there as well. I see it as a real tailwind for the business.
Just in terms of the customers, and seeing anything, short answer is no. A number of our customers are continuing to experiment with AI internally, mainly around crew training, health and safety, et cetera. We're working closely with them on those opportunities, a little bit outside the core Vista platform. It's encouraging to see the clients starting to adopt AI as well. In terms of people vibe coding versions of Vista, et cetera, we're not seeing any of that, Phil.
Okay, great. Just the last one for me was just I think in the past you have provided like a GTV estimate on the platform. This result you haven't, but I'm just wondering what the reason for that is, or are you going to provide it later on?
Yeah. If I'm being honest, it wasn't for any particular reason. Yeah, it was more that we had a lot of metrics that we wanted to get out this half, that was one that we perhaps just didn't have the data just readily available-
Yeah.
to be able to release that this time. It's something-
Okay.
We can definitely go through and calculate for the full year, though.
Okay. Yeah, that'd be great.
I think, traditionally we've released our metric in the construct of particularly of Vista Payments and the opportunity there. For me, it was really important to just draw everybody's attention to what I think is a super key metric in Vista Payments, which is around NZD 2 million of ARR. I said before, we're five months in. It's incredibly exciting, this opportunity. That was the key metric. For us, as Matt said, we'll continue to calculate GTV. We'll look to do that as we go through the fall. Yeah, there's a lot of momentum in that space.
Yeah, great. Awesome. Thanks.
Thank you.
Great. The next question from James Lindsay at Forsyth Barr. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gents, and congratulations on a good result and good to see Stuart. You are getting the help of Superman as you mentioned.
Yep, I know what you mean.
Spider-Man. Sorry. Yeah.
Yeah. It was a very exciting weekend. I don't know if you were out and about, but there were Spider-Men everywhere.
Yeah. Well, I've certainly seen lots of full cinemas, which is good to see. Yep. Hey, a quick one just on the site guidance with just with regard to the 504+ implementation. Just with the AI question as well, are the risks around bringing implementations like that on board, the timing risk of that sort of lowering now?
I think AI, I guess we're working towards leverage AI across all of our business. As I talked about the Avo example, which is helping us in support and engineering, et cetera. AI is definitely helping us build more processes across the business, create more automation, et cetera. The other thing I'd say specifically about that is we're starting to build now a really good track record of bringing large clients live. Yes, this will be our largest one, but it's the same sort of process that we move through now with all of our clients. I wouldn't say AI is specifically helping us here, but again, as I said before, it just helps reinforce the motions that we're going through across the business and everything we're doing.
Yeah, thanks. Just interested in the capacity as well. Obviously, the teams have got a lot on for the next six months as they have on the last six months. Just interested around what's the hold-up now? Is it customers wanting to sign on or just the implementations team, that you could have more, but it's just slow to get them on and up to speed, et cetera? Just interested in that sort of dynamic.
Yeah. As we said last August when we announced acceleration, that we would onboard a number of field engineers or forward-deployed team members, plus also core sort of project team members. That's largely done now. Obviously, it does take some time to bring everybody up to speed. In terms of the profile of the business and the demand, we've still got, and I drew it just to reinforce the backlog slide. There's about 1,000 Operational Excellence sites now backlogged, which it's the first time we've given you that metric. For me, it's just a really good demonstration of we're signing and we're continuing to build project deployment roadmaps. These projects do take some time, so you naturally end up with a backlog from signing through to delivery as well. I feel like we're in a pretty good place now. We're going to continue.
We've obviously got our 2030 aspirations out there and the number of sites, that implies that we have to continue to accelerate, we'll keep working on that. Just in terms of the actual people, we're comfortable with what we've done over the first half.
Yeah. We'll keep building on those delivery teams as well. If you look at that cost, we deferred NZD 4.2 million in this half, and if you're looking at about NZD 8.5 million for the full year, if you just double it. We've said that we intend to increase that to around NZD 15 million over the coming years. Yeah, we're still going to bring on more, but we're pretty happy with what we've done for this year.
Yeah. Not that anyone could complain with regard to that, more recent signings, et cetera. Just note, there's obviously a sales and marketing line has increased. Just interested in your thoughts about needing to do more of that marketing versus customers sort of ringing you and saying, "When can we convert?
Yeah. That line includes 600,000 from VistaCon. That's our biannual, or every other year, we run that client conference where we bring everybody to Auckland and explain everything through. That one's a little bit not quite like for like comparing that in this period. Yeah, I think you'll see leverage start to come through in that line as we go forward. It's an obvious area that we don't need to exactly double down when we've got the strong interest from clients.
Yeah. When there is interest now, are you having to talk about 2028 delivery, or are there still reasonable slots for I'd imagine your 1,000 sites is a great number to have out there, and we appreciate it. Just obviously, we don't have a timeframe for when they are.
Yeah.
Just interested, like the slot, are you full for 2027 implementations?
Look, we're certainly not fully contracted for 2027 yet. We do balance this around the world as well. Remember, we've got the project teams in each of the regions, plus also the core engineering team. A little bit more work to do in terms of contracting 2027, and just finalizing the delivery schedule there. We're talking to each client in a very deliberate way around what are their drivers, when do they need to come, and when can we put them in the process as well.
Great, thanks. Then a couple just on payments, to end me up. Just with regard to, obviously, 11 customers coming on, that's great progress. If you could just give us an idea about how hard that is to do the transfer over and obviously, your full implementation at the moment, probably as teams-wise, and just how hard is it to transfer over those customers, and could we see quite rapid progression if that is a reasonably easier process relative to the full sort of system switchover?
Yeah. It's definitely an easier process. We can onboard a client to Vista Payments. They could be using Veezi or Vista Classic or also Vista Cloud. We made the decision to create a separate implementation capability for Vista Payments, that's stood up and working as well. We have the ability to bring a client to Vista Payments, and sort of not interrupt that core cloud delivery pipeline as well. I think you can see from the metrics and the number of clients we've been able to onboard, we definitely can do it faster than the Vista Cloud transition. We'll continue to accelerate that.
Could that be, for people that are interested in it, could that be a lot faster, i.e. like in the next 12, 18 months of getting all clients that want to do that? Is it as quick as that?
It could theoretically be. I'm not sure. We obviously want all clients who are interested to continue to grow, and so we want to continue to do that. It's also, to a degree, it's a little bit dependent on where the client is, in terms of where their payment contractors, if they've got an existing payments provider contract that's coming to term or that is out for a number of years. We have to balance that as part of this as well. I'm not going to put a timeframe on it, but I'm really excited about the start.
Yeah. It seems to be potentially more of the larger clients interested as well. Is that sort of theme developing as well?
Yeah. Look, we've definitely seen interest across the client base, and we've seen it up into larger clients or larger circuits than we originally thought. That's really Yeah, it's exciting.
Yeah. We still project this to be more relevant to those clients that are 50 sites or less. Yeah. Don't wanna get too far away from that.
No, exactly. Then just last one, just with regard to that 11, is that what has approached you to date? Or have you got a backlog with implementation there as well?
That's the number of clients that were live and transacting at 30 June, yeah, it's gone beyond that.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Again, well done. Good result.
Thanks, James.
Great. The next question's from Owen Humphries of Canaccord.
G'day, guys. Can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear, Owen. Good morning.
I can confirm that cinema is alive and well. I was actually knocked back from the cinema because it was full on the weekend. Didn't think I'd see that day come.
I'd encourage you to have pre-bought your ticket, Owen.
Yeah, a bit more money to you guys. With the resurgence in demand, can you just kind of flag to us again the sensitivity to the strength in the box office? If it holds a kind of 15% versus your expectation a bit over nine and a bit, what does that translate to revenue for you guys?
Yeah. There's a couple of metrics here. If you're just doing it directly through to the box office, we say that every $100 million of U.S. domestic box office equates to around NZD 200,000-NZD 300,000 worth of revenue for us. If you're looking at the various different variable streams, such as number of titles or the various studios that released such movies, it gets to between NZD 300,000-NZD 400,000 on a variable basis. It's a bit nuanced looking at those variable streams, but if you're just doing the domestic box office, every 0.1 is between NZD 200,000-NZD 300,000 of revenue.
I imagine that's pretty high margins, right?
Correct.
Yeah. You guys are running what sounds like full velocity on operational excellence. Just a quick one. Converted 26.5 . The backlog's 1,000, guidance is 550 in this second half. Just in that first half, was that all to plan? Were you just getting everyone ready? Was it to do with the market activity? Just a little bit more around that transition.
Yeah. It was to plan. One of the weird things that happens in our business and with our clients is that we tend to be back-loaded. Yeah, that was definitely to plan. If you look back at last year, it was very lumpy as well. We haven't been able to smooth that out. We continue to think that we're going to be lumpy through the period. Obviously, we've got a big lump coming in the second half that we're focused on at the moment.
Yeah
And so that's a really core driver.
We had initially said that when we gave that 1,300 number, that implied just less than 600 additional sites going to operational excellence, 504 of those are Cinépolis Mexico. We signed that in, I believe it was April or May this year.
I thought you guys are giving guidance for the second half to be free cash flow positive and also into FY 2027. Just to understand, if you're uploading 500 odd sites into the cloud, I thought there was a working capital drag through that process. Am I saying that the performance of the core business would be strong enough to facilitate this expansion?
That's right. What we're saying here is it's going to be free cash flow neutral for the second half and next year, that supports the objectives that we've given. That's the 2,000 sites that we're going to have. It also supports what we have planned for next year.
Good one. Well done, guys. Good result.
Thanks, Owen.
The next question is from Jules Cooper, Shaw and Partners.
Thanks, guys. Just a question, Stuart. You've talked to the success for some of the marquee deals in the first half. Can you maybe just give us a perspective on the momentum that you're seeing within the clients to those announcements, and you've had like VistaCon as well. Is there an expectation on your part that that success will lead to further signings and momentum amongst the client base sort of in the near term? I know you did say over the next 12 months on the call, but just is that something you'd expect to continue? Or do we maybe think about major new signings coming towards the back end of that 12-month period? Just given your capacity, et cetera.
I think there's a couple of things going on, Jules, that I'd just sort of reiterate. The first one is we definitely have a proven pathway of pilot to larger. We saw that play out or we've seen that play out now with Cinépolis. We've seen that play out with other circuits as well, and we're seeing that go on at Regal Entertainment Group as well with Picturehouse and then now Cineworld, et cetera, as we go. What we're excited about there is that those big clients are in the process. They're either piloting or they're either live with components of the solution and territories, and we're seeing that continue to move forward. I expect that to keep going. We're obviously in pretty deep conversations with all of those clients. As we get more news there, we'll obviously announce that.
The other thing we're starting to see is that if you step back here probably two years, there was still from some clients a question around, well, could this work? Could you take this critical technology to the cloud? Could you operate at scale? Could you really deliver the results that they needed? We've proved that. We've just, for example, been through or are going through the largest box office weekend in almost forever with "Spider-Man," and our technology is working well and doing what we wanted it to do. From a client perspective now, that whole question around cloud has disappeared. It becomes a question of when. Are they ready? Where are they at in terms of their CapEx cycle, particularly for operational excellence, and some of their other projects as well?
The other thing that I'd also encourage you to think about is that for a number of our larger clients who have got larger states, they could have 30, 50, 100, 200 cinemas operating. That's 200 servers. If you think about what's happening in terms of memory and infrastructure costs at the moment, the capital for them to buy that new infrastructure if they need to refresh it just creates another tailwind for Vista as well, because moving that to the cloud rather than having to replace that infrastructure becomes a pretty compelling proposition or even more compelling proposition as well. It's a long answer to the question, but I would see us continuing to go. It'll depend a little bit on the timing for each client as to when we're there and when we're ready to announce.
We've obviously got a pretty good handle across the whole base, and where each of them are at.
Excellent. Thank you. Just on the payments side, really encouraging start. You talked to 11 clients. I just wondered if you could maybe provide a perspective on the sites. I guess the question here is it 11 clients with just a toe in the water in terms of piloting payment use across certain sites? Is it they've just dove in and adopted it across their business? Maybe just that site count will give us a perspective on the average size of the customers that are engaging early too.
Yeah. Good question. We haven't provided and won't provide a number of sites on there. We're really focused on the annualized recurring revenue here. What I would say for each client in terms of how they adopt, a client typically goes through two steps to adopt Vista Payments. Because you adopt it across your digital channel, so your web app, et cetera, and you then for cardless transactions, or card-not-present transactions, and then you also adopt it in your physical point-of-sale kiosks, et cetera, for card-present transactions. For most clients, we will pilot it, either at one site or across one payment channel, and then can continue to roll out. On the 11 clients, as we said, all of them are transacting.
It's a mixture of clients that are fully deployed across all channels and all sites, there are some in there that are still working their way through the process as well.
Yeah. It's also about half would be Veezi clients and half would be Vista. That's the encouraging thing is that this is going across all levels. This is not just coming into one specific sector of our client base. From the additional that we've got contracted outside of those 11 clients that are live, that is playing out as well.
Excellent. Well done.
Great. Thanks, Jules.
We have another question here from Adam Bullivant of Ord Minnett.
Hi, guys. It's actually Amelia Hamer here from Ords. I'm just using Adam's account.
Oh.
Sorry. Hi, guys.
You're masquerading, Amelia.
I am. Congratulations. A great result and great to see the guidance upgrade as well. I just want to understand on the cloud transition piece and just that bottleneck that we always talk about in terms of having to get the implementation teams running and trying to get as many customers transitioned to meet the demand. Is that more on the contracting stage or the implementation stage? Because it sounds from having a look at some of the numbers today, it looks like it's actually a bit more on the kind of nitty-gritty of getting those contracts across the line and all the customizations and hand-holding the customer than it is the actual implementation.
Look, I would put it strongly on the implementation side, that the actual contracting tends to be a little bit of a chicken and egg. Until we can work with the client and really agree a timeline and a process, they're unlikely to want to put pen to paper as well. For us, it's about working with the client around the schedule, when we can go together, when they're ready, when we're ready, then we tend to contract once we've gone through that process. I'm really comfortable with the overall pipeline, what we're seeing in it, how we're moving the client base through it. The contracting, for me, is just a moment in time on a much larger journey that we go on with each client.
Right. Okay. That makes sense. Can you break out the EBITDA margin that you've reported by underlying versus implementation costs?
Probably. Haven't actually thought to do it. Yeah, it could be something we look at.
Awesome. I think that would be super helpful in terms of just trying to understand that transition and getting towards that 33%-37% guidance. Just my final question is just on the cloud uplift in revenue that you see. Obviously, you've guided to sort of 2x for the digital solutions piece, then 3x for full cloud. In terms of what you've sort of signed in the last half, are you seeing that trend continuing in line with those sort of numbers?
Yeah. We're comfortable that each of our client contracts is in the model that we've set. We haven't changed the model, and so yeah, we're comfortable.
Awesome. Thank you guys, and well done again.
Thanks, Amelia. I think we've now got [Tama], who's got a question.
G'day, Stuart. How you going?
Good.
Yeah, good.
Good morning.
Morning. Yeah, good results. Thanks for that. I suppose the interesting comment you made around the server and memory, and chips and different things, and I suppose that's always been one of the arguments around the rising sort of IT costs that a on-premise provider would have to cover. I suppose when you're talking about chicken and egg, I suppose you're talking to some of your biggest clients is about converting. I suppose the other side of it is there's 52% of the rest of the industry who are sitting with other small providers or on-premise themselves.
Yeah.
Is that one of the pressure points that, or I suppose, with your existing clients is you could bring new clients in to fill that gap. Also, what sort of capacity do you have to, as these costs are also impacting these non-clients, to actually take them on board in the next 18 months as well?
Yeah. So we—f or each client, we look at it and say, who approaches us Sorry. Actually, let me start that again. We understand the market really well across the total market that we've got contracted and know well, and also the rest of the market. We have a good feel for where the other market share is at and when they might be able to move or when they might be looking to move, that's something that we work on and continually talk about internally. For each of them, we've got conversations going on.
Okay.
We have been really focused on our existing clients. As we've said previously, we wanted to make sure that we looked after them. We also said this year we would start to expand market share. We've done that with Cinemex, we'll continue to look at opportunities, but we'll be balancing that against the overall capacity we've got in the business.
We also have set aside some funds, right? In that implementation where if we're seeing that demand, especially from new clients coming, we will be ramping up to meet that as well.
Right. Okay, you can bring on more implementation teams if you want another Cinemex.
Yeah.
You could find a way to bring them on concurrently with Regal's expanded Regal implementation or something like that.
That's right. I just alluded to before, we're annualized at around about NZD 8.5 million of delivery cost, and we've set aside around about NZD 15 million at full velocity. Yeah, we definitely have the ability to go out there and meet that.
Great. No, thanks very much.
No problem. All right, everybody. I think that's the end of all of the questions we've got. Thanks for joining the call this morning. Thanks also heaps for your interest in our business. We've got lots going on, and I'm sure you all have as well, so I really appreciate your time and listening to us. Enjoy the rest of your day, and we'll talk soon. Thanks everybody.