All right, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Alex Sklar . I'm one of the application software analysts here at Raymond James. Very pleased to have Cartrack with us this year. We've got Chief Operating Officer Richard Schubert, Paul Bieber, Vice President of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance. They're going to start with a quick presentation, then I'm going to come join them up here. We're going to do a little fireside at this time. At the end, I'll open it to the audience for questions. Thanks.
Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the last presentation of the day. I know it's been a long day, so we appreciate you spending time with us. Quickly, on the safe harbor: we may make forward-looking statements. There are risks and uncertainties associated with forward-looking statements in our business. Please read the risk factors in our 20-F or most recent earnings, 6-K, for more details. Richard, you want to kick off?
Thank you very much, guys. I'm just going to give a short background of who we are. Karooooo is a SaaS platform. We're focusing on connecting fleet management and drivers and providing tools that they can increase their productivity, optimize their fleet, and increase the safety of their systems. We have a very compelling financial profile where we focus on a Rule of 60 with an unlevered balance sheet. We're also a founder-led company with a strong balance sheet and capital allocation policies. We currently support 2.2 million subscribers across 25 countries. This is done through a staff of approximately 5,300 people.
We've got a very strong customer retention rate of 95%. If we have a look at the segments we operate, we operate mostly within South Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. There are two verticals within the business. The first one is Cartrack. That's our operations management platform. The revenue of Cartrack is about $165 million at the end of Q3 financial year 2025. That's a 20% year-on-year revenue growth, resulting in a 30% profit margin as of Q3. The Karooooo Logistics side, which is our delivery-as-a-service platform, generated $17 million, which is a 45% year-on-year revenue growth. It has a 10% operating profit margin.
We have a relatively rare financial profile. We're one of the few small-cap SaaS companies that have exceeded the Rule of 50. What do we really do? We take data from our various IoT devices and integrations. We then enrich that data, use analytics and machine learning to improve the data. That contextualized data is then used by customers within their business space. That would be inside fieldworker applications, delivery management, safety, and operational visibility platforms. The benefits to the customer are quite clear.
It's about increasing your safety, increasing your productivity, making sure you're more compliant, as well as increasing your profitability and ability for the customers to scale. We're not just a telematics provider. We're providing a lot more rich services that have increased over the years. Typically, these days, AI-powered cameras are a core part of the business. They're really a growth segment, as well as the various segments, including the delivery management and fleet management platforms. However, there are still traditional areas of the business, for example, fuel theft management, where especially in the emerging markets is a big challenge for customers.
We really focus on providing solutions to all of these kinds of products. One of the benefits of Karooooo is that our software stack is not focused on one specific industry. We're supporting customers from logistics to mining to agriculture, every kind of segment. We are providing a lot of value benefits to customers in those regions. At the end of the day, no matter which segment of the software the customers are using, it's about increasing visibility and control, increasing profitability, increasing productivity, and making them have a safer operating or safer fleet. Here's an interesting case study about AI-powered cameras.
These cameras sit inside the cab. They alert drivers in real time with prompts. If a driver is caught smoking or a driver is caught texting, they will alert the driver in real time. That information is also pushed back to the management platforms so that you can do driver coaching with them. This is a great ROI. A customer in South Africa saw, within the first month, a decrease in fatigue events by 32% and mobile phone usage by 13%. They also increased their seatbelt usage dramatically.
These AI-type solutions, where traditionally it was more focused on the enterprise segment, within the last year, it has moved into the SME markets because even small businesses are getting better benefits and value out of this kind of technology. A more traditional customer spotlight is fuel theft. Fuel theft and fuel is still a big cost in most logistics businesses. Managing the fuel theft of a customer is very critical.
Monitoring exactly where the fuel theft happens, spot the trends with the machine learning technology to see where those fuel thefts could happen, gives us a big ROI benefit. This customer firmly believed that they had no issues with fuel. After implementing Cartrack, they were able to see a 78% reduction in fuel theft in the first month. These are the kind of benefits customers see for the platform. [Crosstalk]
I'm going to run through the growth slides and some of the finance slides. We are very excited about the opportunity in front of us. We think there is a very long runway for growth. Most of the markets in which we operate, the penetration rates are relatively low. Over the coming years, we plan to expand our customer base. We plan to increase subscription sales to existing customers. We plan to expand the scope of our operations, especially in newer geographies like Southeast Asia. We could get into that in Q&A. Finally, we really are focused on expanding the breadth and depth of our platform offering.
Focusing on the performance of the Cartrack business, which drives the vast majority of the company's financials. In Q3, we increased our subscribers by 17% to more than 2.2 million subscribers. Our subscription revenue increased by 14% to more than ZAR 1 billion. Our operating profit surpassed ZAR 300 million, which was a quarterly record for us. As you can see from the slope on the charts, we have a proven ability to scale and execute in varying macroeconomic conditions. We consistently beat the Rule of 60. In this case, the Rule of 60 is EBITDA margin plus revenue growth. Now, digging in a little bit in terms of subscriber growth by geography.
South Africa is our largest market. It comprises about 75% of the revenue. We increased our subscribers by 16% in South Africa. In Asia, we increased our subscribers by 20%. We believe Asia is the largest opportunity for the company over the medium to long term. Finally, in Europe, our growth rates were 19% in Q3. That actually was a 200 basis points acceleration. In South Africa, our largest market, we recently moved into a new building. We are very optimistic that moving to the new building gives us the ability to increase the cadence of our hiring. We are really leaning into hiring to position the company for faster growth.
Asia Pacific is the largest opportunity for the company over the medium term. We previously indicated that we intend to increase our headcount by 70% in Southeast Asia, which is a big growth number. It is off a smaller base than our other geographies. We are very excited about the opportunity in Southeast Asia and want to capitalize on that. We are leaning into the growth. We believe that we are well positioned for geographical expansion and growth in all the geographies that we operate in. We have a very strong track record of discipline. Excuse me. We have a very strong track record of disciplined capital allocation, earnings, and free cash flow.
Last quarter, we generated around $188 million in free cash flow. Solid free cash flow generation. It's notable that we have invested about ZAR 300 million. Did I say dollars before? If I did, I apologize. I meant rand. We invested ZAR 300 million in the construction of our new building. That investment cycle and that investment is now essentially complete. Strong free cash flow and high cash conversion. Moving on to our balance sheet, our growth at scale, our profitability, our cash generation really underpins the strong balance sheet. We ended the quarter with ZAR 856 million on the balance sheet. It's essentially unleveraged.
Historically, putting aside the investment in our new building, we have paid out the majority of our free cash flow in the form of a dividend. We do an annual dividend. Last August, we paid out a $33.4 million dividend. The growth rate was around 26%-27%. The prior year, I believe the growth rate was in the 40% range in terms of dividend growth. Our yield is around 2%-3%, depending on the stock price.
Really, when you think of the healthy balance sheet, it is really generated and underpinned by the strong growth and strong unit economics, very strong operating profit margins, unleveraged balance sheet, and then strong cash conversions, which we previously spoke about. Quickly on capital allocation, our paramount priority is investing in growth and product innovation. We have very healthy profit margins and unit economics. We like investing in our own business. Second, we like returning capital to shareholders. As I mentioned, we pay out the vast majority of our free cash flow currently in the form of a dividend.
We do have a share repurchase program in place. Our focus right now is increasing liquidity in our stock. Finally, on M&A, we have a very prudent approach to M&A. We are very profitable, have strong unit economics. To pursue M&A, it would really need to make sense from a strategic perspective, potentially geographic expansion, potentially enhanced product capabilities. To date, we look at things, but we have not really done anything. I am going through this pretty quickly so we get to Q&A. Just to summarize the key investment highlights, we are very well positioned to drive profitable growth given our efficient unit economics and expansive TAM.
We generate strong free cash flow. That provides us with a lot of capital allocation flexibility. Right now, our priority is growth. We have a very compelling and rare financial profile. Rule of 60 on essentially GAAP numbers. We report under IFRS, but the equivalent would be GAAP numbers. The financial profile is underpinned by the unleveraged balance sheet. We offer our customers a really differentiated enterprise-grade tech platform. It serves a diverse set of industries. We could maybe talk about that in Q&A. Last but not least, we're a founder-led business. It's very important to our culture.
Historically, we've always focused on profitable growth because of that. We're founder-led, operating in a very large TAM. That was quick, but we want to leave some time for Q&A.
Great overview. I think I'm going to focus a lot of my questions on growth because I think the growth opportunity really early stage is still here. Maybe before that, just to start, Richard, culture, founder-led company, I think it's a really interesting differentiator for the business. I'm curious if you could kind of just talk about kind of the culture that's been built by Zak and some of the founders and yourself there. How differentiated do you think that is? How important do you think that's been to your success?
I think the culture is one of the key success factors, and it is why we win. Over the time, we've realized that it's very important to have a right culture, especially as we have so many geographic operations that we operate in. We're very much about collaboration. We're very much about work from the office. Those kinds of things are very important for us to help us grow the business long term and make sure that we have the right people and the right staff. We've seen within the regions where we have people that are committed to the business and are part of that philosophy, the business grows very successfully and grows by itself very, very well.
This kind of goes hand in hand a little bit. One of the things that Zak and yourself have been really forward on is the idea of this vertical integration strategy. Why is being vertically integrated so important? What does that enable to you from a competitive differentiation standpoint? Vertical integration for us means that we own the entire value chain. The salespeople work for us, the customer care people, the installers work for us. We've seen over time that by owning this value chain, it means that we really can service the customer properly. Where other competitors might outsource certain business segments, they do not really have that control anymore.
They lose that touch with the customer, and they do not fully own the customer. Being fully vertically integrated has been a strategy for, I think, over 15 years now. It really has helped us grow because we take ownership of every part of the business, and we make sure that if something needs to happen, it gets done.
Got it. Maybe just taking a step back, when you think about the addressable opportunities, some of the most investment you're putting into right now is Southeast Asia. How do you think about what's greenfield out there in the market today? What's kind of your white space? How do you think about the broader opportunity as you would define the TAM?
If we have a look at the greenfields at this point in time, about 70% of the customers are greenfield. If we have a look specifically in Southeast Asia, it's very much an emerging market culture. In the past, a more advanced technology stack wasn't available to a lot of the customers in that region. We have really gone in there and provided them with a very high-end product that allows them to digitalize their workforce and their vehicles and improve the productivity of their business. These are the kind of things that have really helped and will help going forward growth in that area.
If you have a look at Southeast Asia as a region, it has a very large potential because there are a number of countries with large population growths. The reality is the larger the population, the more opportunity for logistics and for agriculture and for mining within the regions.
Just to continue a little bit on the answer, the TAM is very big. I think some sources cite it's $200 billion TAM. It is global. It is very big. I think a good way to think about it is there are hundreds of millions of installed, an installed base of hundreds of millions of vehicles and other assets like heavy machinery and generators and trailers.
We only have 2.2 million subscribers. There is a long runway. The penetration rates in the U.S. is probably 50% plus, give or take. We think South Africa is in the 35% range, give or take. Southeast Asia is maybe 15%. That seems high even. A lot of runway for those underpenetrated markets to get to 50% and higher. A lot of opportunity out there.
I think one of the gating factors on growth historically has been your ability to hire reps. I think not that it's been given some of the lockdowns you've had and some other factors. There are headquarters at capacity. You've exited now kind of the calendar 2024, I think, with a lot more capacity. Can you just talk about your plans for hiring here, what that can mean for the growth algorithm? When should investors think that those hires can start to inflect the overall growth of the business?
Our target has been to make sure that we double the business every four years. That means that we're targeting approximately 20%, 19.5%, 20% growth per year on the current basis. If you have a look at South Africa, we're currently at about 16%. South Africa has a very large customer base. Moving that up to a higher value is a challenge. We have expanded offices in multiple regions, including South Africa, to cater for these additional staff. Generally, if we have a look, the sales staff are a direct relation to your ability to onboard customers. More sales staff equals more customers.
The reality is sales staff are not an instant process. If you hire 10, you might only still have 5 after 6 months. It takes between three and six months to take a salesperson and get them well versed in the product that they can really effectively execute within the field.
Maybe just to help some of the targets you've laid out, what kind of magnitude are we talking about on the plans for the next couple of years for hiring in Southeast Asia and South Africa and Europe? What's the magnitude?
I mean, on the last call, Zak basically said that we intend to increase our sales and marketing headcounts in South Africa by 50%, 5-0, and our headcounts in Southeast Asia by 70%. The growth rate in South Africa, subscriber growth is 16%. Subscriber growth in Southeast Asia was 20%. There is obviously a lot of distance between those numbers. A lot of execution has to happen on the ground to build out the teams, train them. We aspire to accelerate our growth. If you contextualize that, we have 5,300 employees, just under 2,000, I think 1,800 at the moment are sales staff. That gives you the scale of what we have to increase the sales counts by.
I assume that you've kind of been looking at the pipeline. There have been incremental investments already in Southeast Asia and Europe. What have you seen in the green shoots or sales productivity for the existing staff that's helped you kind of say, hey, now's the time to really put some wood behind this growth opportunity?
With the sales staff, what we've seen is over time they get to sort of, let's call it a mature level. However, once they've reached that mature level, a sales staff can't double their sales over time. It's just too many customers to visit. A general sales staff will reach maturity, and then they'll continue to deliver those kind of numbers unless they get one or two large deals. The real growth factor is adding the sales staff to get multiple channels of sales going, multiple channels.
Okay. I think supplementing this, and one of the exciting things we have talked about recently is the idea of the video cameras. In cab, it is a big ARPU uplift for a customer to put that in. Maybe talk about that. Where are you in terms of penetration today? How excited are you for that opportunity as part of the growth algorithm?
I mean, it's a big part of the growth algorithm. At the moment, it's still early days for the video telematics. This really started about three years ago. Within the last year, we've seen very good growth in the segment. Typically before, the focus of the video telematics was really an enterprise play. Large customers used to do it. However, we've seen that move in the last year down into the smaller SME businesses that have 10 or 20 vehicles because they can also see the value. A typical customer who has 10 vehicles, for example, if they have video in their vehicle, they can tell when their driver is using the cell phone.
They can tell when the driver is smoking. If that were to lead to an accident, if they've only got 10 vehicles, 10% of their fleet is off the board. The effect to them to decrease their risk is very high. The benefit to them is also much larger because they have less management to manage their business. For them, it's more critical to make sure that every single cent they use counts.
Just to add to that, the uplift on video and camera could be as much as 2-4x in terms of A. Our attach rates are, excuse me, pretty healthy in the 25% range in terms of new commercial business. There is a lot of momentum in the video business, but it is still very small when you contrast it to 2.2 million subs. When you think about growth, we are focused on subscriber growth. The vast majority of the growth will come from subscriber growth. Over time, as video becomes a higher penetration, it is definitely possible that you get some the uplift from the increasing mix of video. [Crosstalk]
Richard or Paul, is that video opportunity, that cross-sell motion, is that coming from the same reps that kind of handle the full cycle, or is there a new kind of back-to-base set of reps that you're looking to stand up?
The general methodology is a sales rep will sell a product to a customer. At that point in time, after that sale is complete, that opportunity or that customer gets moved to an account manager. That account manager keeps that account, goes to the customer every three months, and looks after that account. The existing customers, it's the sales, the account managers that are going back to the customer and showing them the new benefits. It's part of the focus. As we add tech to the platform and as we add new features, those account managers and as well the salespeople are continually revisiting their existing customers and saying, we have this new XYZ.
This is how it can benefit your business, and trying to upsell those customers into that new technology. The video is one of the good areas where we see this ARPU increase that we really focused on using to upsell to both our existing customer base and new customers.
It is important to just note that our go-to-market strategy is a little bit different to a lot of SaaS companies. We do not embrace land and expand for the most part. We have different tiers of the product. When we have new features, we put that feature in the appropriate tier. The end customer ends up getting more value for essentially the same amount of ARPU, with the exception of video. Video has a higher cost. Ingesting and processing video is just higher cost.
That is one of the reasons why the ARPU is higher, even though at the end of the day, a video customer with high ARPU and a non-video customer, the operating profit margin at the end of the day that the customer drives should be relatively the same.
We have talked about the demonstrable kind of ROI case. One of the things I think has been most interesting in the story is you all kind of started a little bit later than the industry as a whole in South Africa, came from what had like 10 years probably head start to it, came in from behind, and now have a leading share there. Maybe if you could just elaborate a little bit on kind of where you've seen the most competitive differentiation of your platform. There's a lot of legacy track and trace still out there. What is it that you're providing that's provided a more comprehensive solution to allow you to gain so much share?
Specifically platform-focused, and I mean the differentiator is not just the platform, but starting with the platform, it's providing all of these AI-type vision technologies, being a leader in that and constantly evolving in it. For example, traditionally, it started with smoking detection. Then it became seatbelt detection. Now it's stop sign violation detection.
Our focus has always been on this technology to continuously upgrade it, whether it's the IoT devices or the platform, give our existing customers more value every single day, as well as integrations and specifically integration platforms within the last couple of years, integrating and pulling data and merging data to enable customers to contextualize it has really been beneficial to customers.
They're not just looking at our solution and one set of data. They're pulling in their fuel card transactions and their ERP software transactions and joining this all together to get a much better visibility of their operations. It's also about working out the costs of their operating costs because they now have a proper view of what everything in their organization costs.
I think with 2.2 million vehicles, there's a lot of data. It's helping drive your product roadmap, helping drive some differentiation there. I'll open up to the audience if there's any questions. Okay. One of the things that I think has been a trend in the industry is kind of there's been some M&A consolidation. You historically haven't been, you've bought logistics, but historically haven't been a big acquirer. How do you see yourselves participating in M&A for the landscape going forward?
I think we've always been open to M&A, but it's really finding that fit. We've always been a very much organic growth company. In all the regions, we're growing organically. To some degree, in M&A, we have to find the right fit because merging certain companies with ourselves would be, in a way, quite difficult to do. We really are interested in the M&A, but we have to really find the right partner or the right opportunity out there. As we grow into new regions, there's definitely M&A opportunities. However, I think it'll be less in the Cartrack space.
As you can see, the Karooooo Logistics section, it was an excellent idea how an M&A really was achieved and very successful, where we took a company that was very small and increased the profitability exponentially within the first couple of years of operation.
Just on the M&A front, just to add, our financial profile, the margin profile is very healthy. Unit economics are very healthy. Our preference is to invest in our own business, invest in growth, invest in product innovation. Having said that, we do look at things. We have a high bar when it comes to M&A. The most likely scenario could be geographic expansion, but it would have to make sense strategically and financially given our financial profile.
Maybe I'll just wrap up with one last one. You've talked with a lot of investors today since the last quarter. I'm curious from your seat, what do you think is still maybe the most underappreciated aspect of the Karooooo story?
I think from an investor point of view, the investors do not understand the business as much as they could. I mean, this is why we are out here to make people really understand the benefits and the scope and the breadth of the company and the value adds we are offering to customers on the ground every single day. We have got customers that have very high ROIs that are using our platform that really get the benefits out of there. That is really the message we have to push across to investors, the benefits we have along with that long track record of good capital allocation and good management of the business.
Just to supplement that, I think we're in the very early stages of educating investors. I think the vast majority of investors don't know us. There are also some liquidity headwinds that over time will be resolved. We're in the early stages, and we're focused on it. It will take some time, but we're very focused on increasing our profile so more investors know about us and our business.
Great. Richard, Paul, thank you for joining us today. Thanks, everyone in the audience. Thanks for having us.