5/25/2026

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Good morning, guys. My name's John Scott. I'm the executive chair of eRoad. Welcome you to the eRoad financial results for the financial year 2026. With me, I have Ciara, our CFO, and Ryan, our chief transformation officer. So, we'll get into it. So, today we've got about 30 minutes of us talking and hopefully 15 minutes of you guys asking questions, and we'll try and get you back to your day in about 45 minutes. In a slightly unusual term, we'll start a financial report with an overview of all of the strategy. The reason we're doing this is because of just how much of this has actually hit our financials and it's important for you to understand. So I took over or joined the company in March and I took over as executive chair in October. Over the eight months, I've got to meet a lot of our customers and realise what just a wonderful little business we have here. We have unbelievable product markets. This in New Zealand, a really, really easy to understand value proposition. But the thing I've learned most of all is you have to talk about our business by country because the dynamics are completely different. You'll see there across the top, the revenue's been stable. We've undertaken a whole bunch of initiatives to get back to basics and I'll talk to them. We're clearly focused on that Australia, New Zealand region. We have this Back to Basics or customer-focused program around just restoring our key metrics. And there is a headline which a lot of people joined during the year for eROAD, which is the eRAC opportunity. And we just wanted to sort of signal that it's a significant opportunity but represents less than 5% of our objects. This is a new slide for us. It'll be the first time many of you have seen that. And it's in line with the narrative that each country is different and has a completely different dynamic. And again, you can see the trends there. New Zealand is obviously the biggest bulk of our revenue and it's sort of flat to modest growth. You can obviously see the American situation where we've gone from growth to declining over the three years and it's reduced the proportion of our sales. And then you can see the Australian business which is obviously experiencing really good double digit growth. So I'll pass over to Ciara to give you some flavour for that detail.

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

Hi everyone. I'm Ciara McGuigan as John said CFO. I've been with the group nearly nine months now. Thanks for joining us today. The results reflect a year of review and reset. Consequently, non-cash accounting adjustments of $152.9 million were made to the financial statements in the year. They're defined in some detail on page 35 towards the end of the presentation. Turning to the headline numbers for FY26. Normalised free cash flow margin is 7.4%. The free cash flow that underpins that calculation is 14.4 million New Zealand dollars when normalised for the impact of the 4G upgrade programme in New Zealand, which has now closed. Reported revenue was 195.2 million. Growth was muted by softer conditions in North America and previously disclosed customer non-renewals. ARR closed at 174.3 million. While lower year-on-year, The reduction was concentrated in North America, with ANZ continuing to perform strongly and deliver growth across higher value products and enterprise customers. Normalised EBIT was 2.9 million New Zealand dollars, lower year on year owing to investment in resources to improve platform stability, increase service levels and deliver on product enhancements. While the top line numbers are below where we want them to be, The year also included decisive action to reposition the business to strengthen operating discipline and focus investment where we see the strongest long-term returns. I'll hand you now to Ryan.

speaker
Ryan Brosnahan
Chief Transformation Officer

Thanks, Ciara. I'm Ryan Brosnahan. I'm the Chief Transformation Officer and I started with eRoad in October to help establish this transformation program. This represents it on this slide here. and we've got a clear and focused plan that we're executing against. The slide shows the key themes that we are executing against along with the key measures that we're using to both measure our progress against this work and to also prioritise the work and ensure we're optimising our allocation of capital. The first three pillars are all about getting fit to play. The first one, operational excellence. Ensure we stabilise our platforms and redesign and automate scalable processes and ensure we have real time dashboards available to manage the company and make optimal decisions. The second pillar is all about product competency. So uplifting any gaps in our product suite to meet our target markets. The third is around customer intimacy. which as John has already mentioned, were reorientated to a regional model to ensure we are making decisions close to our customers and also recognising the fact that our three countries are each quite different businesses that are at different stages of maturity. This pillar also includes improving customer onboarding and customer support. The final two pillars are important options on our future. The AI capability we are embedding across the business both creates operating leverage and also mitigates disadvantages of scale. While ERAC, which we'll talk more about later in the presentation, is a growth option that we are well positioned to execute on, given our history. These pillars are underpinned by enterprise-wide uplifts in leadership and capability, platform modernization, and data. These uplifts are critical to successfully executing the plan. And we're in the thick of this execution. As you can see on this slide, we started in July last year and are achieving solid progress towards objectives across all of these pillars.

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Yeah, there's a bit going on on this slide, guys. So first of all, you'll see the Harvey Balls at various states of completion. I want to call out the ones that have got zero, we are underway, and if you had a look at the previous slide, something like platform simplification is one of our bedrocks, which we call platform modernisation. The big three call-outs which I get questions on all the time are the CEO timing. Our aim for that at the moment is to appoint a person straight after the AGM. The second thing is, and it's not quite clear in here, but we bought Cortex about five years ago. there is still significant integration to undertake on both process business systems and products. We have to do that. Every single year it gets harder and the systems and the products actually get older. So that's a key focus for us and it's built into this year's. The other thing that's probably not easy for you guys to pull out, but we're a company that actually sells digital transformation for our customers. And we need to do it for ourselves. And the dashboards and the live data for our team is actually critical for our decision-making. So I'll take a second now and just talk to you about what we're up to with AI. So one of the most pleasing things since I've been here is we ran a hackathon about four weeks ago. We had 27 teams in every single one of our countries. We were doing things from product enhancements to installation software all the way through to order-to-cash programs. I asked every single one of the 27 people how much OpEx or how much money it would make us and how big the productivity increase was. The smallest response we got from one of our teams was five times. And some of the call-outs we got five years of coding done over three days. It really is that remarkable. So the way we think about it is pretty straightforward, and we've got three leaders running each of these, but operational efficiency is the stuff that you could see that AI would help with in last year. It's stuff where you have large amounts of data and you want to access it, perfect for call centres, perfect for order advice, dispatch advice, fast triage, all that sort of good stuff. It actually only affects OpEx, so the savings you get there and your P&L are limited. The next one is platform modernisation. One of the challenges E-Road has, it has to compete against some pretty large American-based companies. And with our current revenue in the old world, we were probably subscaled to compete with them. But with the advent of AI, we actually have distinct advantages with our size. And that platform modernisation, again, it's a core undertaking we're doing this year, and it will affect both our OPEX and our cost of goods sold. The third pillar, in a lot of ways, is the most exciting, certainly for CEOs, because it affects the revenue line, and that's the data intelligence. We have Considerable amounts of data, especially in New Zealand, it's one of our largest moats. And we're moving very quickly to develop features and software to sit in our top tiers of functionality that will allow us to deliver real benefits for our customers, and we will see some of those in this financial year. So a real easy way to think about it is operational efficiency is sort of a one-time thing because it's OPEX. Platform modernisation is sort of a better five because you get both OPEX and cost of goods sold. And data intelligence, it's the sort of 10 times, because once you start to get revenue, you get acceleration. So, again, this will be a new slide. I haven't been here long enough to say that it feels like this is the inverse of the strategy that we previously had. So, obviously, New Zealand is the jewel in our crown, and it's non-negotiable. We will do everything to protect it. and we're going to drive both our net promoter score, our customer satisfaction and the way we handle that to a big world-class level. The next one is Australia. You can see with the double-digit growth, what we're doing there is resonating. It's a fragmented market and we care. And the combination of us caring and the fact that the Australians look to be following the same regulatory trends in New Zealand seems to be the key conditions for us winning. You can see we've got a dotted box around it. Clearly, if we can get Australia and New Zealand to work, it's going to be very, very hard for anybody to compete with us. A few of our customers are trans-Tasman, but certainly with the way they're regulatory the same and they're quite homogeneous markets, so there's a real sort of multiply effect if we can get Australia and New Zealand. The top two right are what I call optionalities. And I'll talk to the CROC opportunity in detail. We are known for our universal road user charges. We know the government of New Zealand is moving that way. We don't know the timing, but we are going to position ourselves to be the provider of choice and the partner for the New Zealand government. And in North America, our focus is to be free cash flow neutral. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to let Keira take you through the financials of the regions and details.

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, John. So starting with New Zealand, New Zealand remained stable throughout financial year 26, despite executing against the final phase of the 4G upgrade program, which has now closed. ARR increased 5% to 93.5 million. Overall revenue increased 1.1%, generating nearly 25 million in free cash flow to the firm, while ARPA improved 3% during the year. That RPWAP list is actually worth calling out as although asset retention was impacted by the 4G programme, the units churned were predominantly lower value, whereas our higher value customer relationships and workflows continue to deepen. Strategically, New Zealand is becoming increasingly important beyond its traditional role as a mature market, particularly with the government progressing towards universal work over time. We believe eRoad remains well positioned given our scale, operational capability and established position in the electronic RUC ecosystem today.

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

So, again, I've mentioned there's a lot of interest in the universal RUC. A bit of information on the slide for you guys. The things I would like people to take away is that we're funding it from our free cash flow. We're using the AI-assisted technologies that I spoke to on slide 11. and we'll keep it under 5% of optics at all times. If that ever changes, because the opportunity will obviously come back to the market, but at this point we're going to fund it from our existing cash flow. And again, the key aim here is for us to build optionality. I love what the team have done. You can see down there we've got three audiences. We're going to obviously put a product in the market for consumers. that will be good for our brand building and allow them to experience eRoad. We will then take that and we'll commercialise it with our existing fleets. We don't have 100% fleet penetration for any one of our customers because they have vans, electric vehicles and cars. And one of the nice things about this is we can take this product and introduce our customers to the benefits of telematics across the rest of their fleet. And then the third part is where it gets really exciting is we've got all sorts of other benefits from congestion, monitoring, tolling and insurance benefits. All early days, but we'll start to see those turn a mark at mid-27 of the calendar year. So I'll give you back to Kira for Australia.

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

Cheers, John. So Australia. Australia delivered another very strong year of growth and remains the group's key near-time growth market. ARR you see on the left increased 73% to 21.9 million and revenue increased more than 40% supported by enterprise customer expansion and increasing platform adoption. The Clean Away deployment continues to progress well and remains a significant proof point for eROAD's enterprise capability in the region. We also continue to see significant gains in ARPU performance as larger fleets adopt broader workflows and higher value platform functionality. We see substantial runway in Australia, given the fragmented market structure and increasing demand for integrated safety, compliance and operational fleet solutions. Moving on, North America. North America remained under pressure during the financial year, following previously disclosed customer non-renewal and ongoing softness across the US freight environment. You can see on the left that ARR declined 20% and revenue declined 7.1% as those impacts flowed through the installed base, while ARPU remained broadly stable during the period. We are not satisfied with these results and during the year we took deliberate actions to reset the regional operating model, including leadership changes, tighter investment prioritisation and broader operational restructuring. In the meantime, our focus remains on supporting customers, improving operational execution and ensuring investment remains aligned to the current market environment. Our target is to be free cash flow neutral. Now, on to an overview of the financials, so you've got me for a little bit now. Revenue and EBIT. As we touched on earlier, FY26 was a year of mixed regional performance and significant operational change across the business. Revenue for the year, you see on the left, 195.2 million, broadly stable on prior year, growth in New Zealand, strong momentum in Australia, largely offset the impact of the customer non-renewal in North America. Subscription revenue increased to 185.4 million, continues to represent the substantial minority of group revenue. Operating costs, which are also impacted by the accounting adjustments and one-off spend of 14.5 million. increased during the year as we invested in customer service capability, platform stability and operational transformation initiatives. I'll break down those movements in more detail shortly. The far right-hand side of that slide – thanks, John, bit trigger-happy there – reported EBIT was a loss of $155.9 million, impacted by 152.9 million non-cash accounting adjustments, as I mentioned earlier. the largest being the impairment of 134.7 million that was recognised at half year. In addition, there is a further 18.2 million of adjustments as we modernise our accounting practices to reflect our AI strategy and how we're moving forward in our transformation, so changes to useful economic life, minimum thresholds and things like that. In addition, we consider a further 5.9 million of off-ex to calculate normalised EBITs Normalised EBIT 2.9 million compared to 9.9 last year and the decline driven predominantly by investment in customer and product capabilities. Operating costs. So on the face of it, it looks like a material increase year on year. A reported spend of 156.2, you see on the right, includes 14.5 million of accounting adjustments, one-off items. These one-offs include net transformation costs of 1.1 million, some significant legal costs for a patent infringement claim in North America, that costs 1.7 million, along with some one-offs to do with the 4G upgrade program. We also revised the estimated useful life of certain capitalised software assets to better align with the pace of technology change. That reduced the amount of development expenditure capitalised during the year and increased costs recognised throughout the P&R. Excluding one-offs, recurring operating costs increased 5.1% year-on-year. And that increase, as it says on the chart, largely driven by deliberate investment in customer service capability and platform stability. While those investments impacted earnings in the financial year, they will drive improved customer execution and stronger retention outcomes and a more efficient operating model moving forward. Operational efficiency. So customer acquisition costs on the left remained relatively stable over the three-year period despite ongoing investment in enterprise sales capability and customer growth initiatives. On the right, support and servicing costs increased to 8.9%. of revenue during the year. The reason for this being our investment in customer facing resources and implementing a revised regional service model. We've made a deliberate decision to invest in customer execution as responsiveness and operational support capability is important during a period of organisational and regional change across the business. Research and development. The total R&D investment for FY26 was 34.6 million, the bar on the right of the chart, representing 18% of revenue, broadly consistent with prior year. But you can see that the blue shaded bit clearly shows a change in policies and changes in accounting adjustments in the year. The mix between capitalised and expense has shifted materially. And the shift was driven by increased investment in platform stability ultimately an operational capability, including those changes to accounting estimates. We continue to prioritise and improve disciplined investment approach to initiatives. Free cash flow. Despite the earnings impact from the higher operating costs and one-off items, the business continued to generate positive underlying cash flow during the financial year. So you see in the far right, reported free cash flow to the firm was just over break-even at 100k for the year. After normalising for the temporary impact of the 4G upgrade programme, underlying free cash flow is healthy at 14.4 million. Cash generation continues to be an important strength of the business as we prioritise ongoing disciplines around working capital and capital allocation.

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

So I'm going to chime in here. I like this slide. It'll be new to a lot of people. Hopefully actually it'll be new to everybody on the call. So again, what this really does is help you guys understand your model. You combine this with slide six and I think you have a new way to think about our company. So again, you can see the difference. You can see the gem and why we're so excited about the New Zealand business. You can see The Australian business, while growing at double-digit growth, is actually using a lot of hardware, which you can see why we've got negative cash flow. But it also sort of shows you when it gets to a reasonable size and if it could mirror the New Zealand, why we'd be so excited about the Australian and New Zealand business as one. And then you can also see the challenge that we have in front of us to get the North American business to cash flow neutral.

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, John. The group finished financial year 26 with total liquidity of 49 million, including cash in hand of 10.1 million and nearly 39 million of available facility headroom. During the year, the bank facilities were extended through to October 2027, providing additional certainty and flexibility to support execution of the group's strategic priorities without requiring additional capital. I'll now hand back to John for final remarks.

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

All right, guys. So this is the bit you've all been waiting for. So we think we're about six months into this transformation project, and we think the program's probably going to be 18 months. The reality is you never really finish these, but in terms of the cash and op-ex burn that is incremental to what we think our normal business is, we think we should be through it in the next financial year. There are a few call-outs here. We are one position short of having a full exec, which will be our CEO, which, again, we will introduce straight after the ATM. Our dashboards, we've seen our first versions of the live ones that are coming into play, which really will allow us to make our customers happy, and we will know stuff before they do when we can start to do preventative maintenance and all that good stuff. Again, we've got a really big program to start tracking net promoter score. We're talking to every single one of our customer quarterly about how we're doing. We're creating customer scorecards so we have the same view of the world. I feel like it'll take us about six months to get what I call table stakes or to a threshold level before we can start to put our foot down or accelerate. One of the things that I did over the last, nine months was i sat with our sales people in their cars as we were driving to customers and just listened to the phone calls that they were taking and really it's very very difficult to sell or to move forward when you're on the back foot and so i feel like midway through the next financial year we'll start to move on to the front foot where we can start to accelerate customer engagements drive new customers one of the key things to getting new customers is actually having reference customers who are wildly in your favour and I feel we're starting to see the green shirts with some of the customers that we've done early engagements with and yeah midway through next year I feel like we'll be in a place where we can really start to accelerate and that's especially in New Zealand and so I'll finish off here so the guidance one is new for us we are guaranteeing that we can be free cash flow We're just not sure of the scale of it, and we're not going to give revenue headlines. You can see what we will be is completely transparent with the revenue, which you can see on slide six, and the profitability of the regions, which you can see on slide 24. But given how early we are into this transformation program, it just doesn't feel prudent to give top-line guidance. Because if we do give you guys guidance, we want to be able to guarantee that we can deliver it all, things being equal, and it's just too early. So with that, I'm going to stop talking. Thanks for listening, and we'll move to any Q&A if you guys have any.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Thanks, John. I'm going to open with a few questions that have come in. If anybody wants to ask a question, there's a Q&A box at the top of your screen. You hit that and submit it, and I'll bring it to management. The first question is regarding the AI threat. How do you see that both competitively and in terms of AI being brought into vehicles to help with predictive data?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Okay, so top of the hour. I feel like you could actually see that in the Australia. We're not a straight SaaS company. As we're accelerating in Australia with Cleanway, you can see how big a piece hardware is of our implementation. So I feel like we've probably got unfairly caught in whatever I'd like to call the SaaS apocalypse. But in terms of what it means for us, I think it's only good things. I feel like we're a 500-, 600-person company, and we can do a lot AI-assisted. Previously, we were subscale, I would say, against some of the big guys, and they could do things with their balance sheet and their P&L that we couldn't. So at this point, I can't see anything but only goodness. Obviously, if you don't adopt and you don't move fast, then you're going to come into trouble, but... Crisis is the mother of all kind of focus and we are in there and we are deep in it. Again, if anyone came to our hackathon, I think, well, I know we had 10 of our providers partner with us. All of them said it's the best thing they've seen in New Zealand and some of them actually said it was better than their own one. So, yeah, I'm really confident that we're doing the right thing. We've got so many people who are enthusiastic. We've got three leaders across the operation, all the platform and the data. I think we're in good shape.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Second question is, given the guidance that you'll be cash flow positive and you're targeting to be cash flow neutral at some point in North America, where do you see, how do you reconcile the difference? Where do you see that money being spent?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

There's a lot going on. So the Cortex thing is a hangover and obviously we've got the ERUC and obviously then all the transformation costs. So the first thing is we've told you we're free cash flow neutral, so we are going to balance the revenue that comes in with the transformation costs. I don't believe we can eat the entire Cortex integration in the next year, so we'll be prudent about that. But the faster we transform and the more profitable we are, the quicker we will finish the Cortex integration. And my aim is hopefully by the end of the next financial year, we start the next one essentially on something like an integrated platform, integrated processes, integrated... When you say it all out loud it realises it's probably a pretty ambitious goal, but we're going to give it a go.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Third question is, how do you see the New Zealand market? Is it a mature market? Clearly you're moving your focus on that. Where do you see that moving?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Yeah, clearly it's mature. I think I mentioned in my opening, if I didn't I should have, I have not seen a customer who doesn't want more from us. So we're not fully penetrated with any of our customers. So if you think about 100% of our portfolio, I don't think one customer takes the lot. And some of our largest ones, again, we may only have 30 or 40% of their fleet because we don't have a light vehicle option which we're developing under the ERAT banner, or they don't use our cameras. Lots of the reasons or the friction to adopt the rest of our platform sort of goes to our customer satisfaction and meeting our SLAs and our platform stability and all the stuff that Ryan's fixing for us. So, you know, if you do any one of the Bain or the McKenzie courses, they tell you there's always the most upside in your core market and I probably tend to believe that. I don't think we fully understand the potential of what we've got. Again, when we come back to you guys in September or later in the year and talk about our business, I hope to see some of the upside. But, yeah, it's obviously a stable market and we're well penetrated. But you do a good job. I think there's quite a bit of upside here.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

The next question is on the Universal EROC, or light passenger EROC. When do you expect the light passenger EROC will start and what impact will the upcoming election have on that outcome?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Yeah, so that's a plug for you guys to come to the AGM. We've got a lady called Sabine who's our general manager for that and she'll introduce you to both what we call direct-to-consumer and direct-to-business models, but they'll be up over the winter.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Next question is, how much of the double-digit Australia revenue growth is pre-contracted. We get a sense of what positive delivery looks like in FY27.

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Most of the growth is pre-contracted, so the growth in FY27 will continue at strong mid-digit growth year-on-year.

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Yeah. I'll add a little favour. I can obviously see the pipelines of the opportunities, and this is not obviously the close rates, but of any pipeline that we have, the Australian one is the most robust.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

The follow-up question on that is, is it new clients or existing clients that make up that pipeline?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

I would say it's new for the vast majority. Obviously, clean away, we're only early days, but again, That market's so fragmented, and, you know, with our revenue, you can see we're actually a very small part of the market, so the vast majority is new. But, again, we've got our existing clients coming off contract, and, again, once our products work as defined and we delight our customers, there's probably upside in our existing base as well. I mean, we've got some pretty big names on that list.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Next question is, will there be a 5-grade upgrade 5G upgrade within the next five to seven years. How do you see technology obsolescence for this business?

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

Well, what I was going to say is no, there won't be in the next five to seven. I think 4G is expected to last another 10 years. So that would be the answer on that. What did you want to add, John?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

No, there's so much going on. I feel like there probably won't be. I'm talking like five, ten years in the future. I imagine the next upgrade will actually just be straight to satellites and that'll be the end of it. But now I'm just speculating on roadmap stuff.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Next question. You're looking at a consumer app that fits the current RUC system. Do you think an app would still be appropriate if a RUC system changes as I've been proposed?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Well, you're asking me to guess the government, so good luck with that. What I would say is, without giving away too much, that the consumer app is just a start. The direct business actually will require a hardware piece, and so, look, just roughly, hardware costs for a truck is like $1,000. We need to have a $100 solution to get into vans, and so... We do understand we'll have to have some hardware for compliance reasons, but it'll be a totally different cost base. Again, if you guys are interested in that, I can get Sabine to talk about the AGM.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Next question. You're targeting free cash or neutral for North America. Any specific timeline that you have in mind?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

As soon as possible.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

And can you elaborate on the initiatives you're taking to better match the North American cost base with the revenue as the non-renewal last year annualized into FY27?

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

We need to remember that the customer that churned was a low-margin customer, comparative to some of the other customer base, and that's the focus of the new Executive General Manager also. So that will help gradually improve the margin. There has been a significant improvement already in our higher margin customers.

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Yeah, I think Keira's getting something really important. Some of the loss of some of those customers actually increases our profitability. The cost to serve some of those big US elephants is a lot. I think that's what you're getting at.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Yeah. The free cash flow turned negative in the second half from $16.7 million in the first half. Other than what was spent on the 4G hardware upgrade, what were the contributors and how much of that increase in the cash outflow was went off?

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

So there's a number of timing issues, which I guess is just what happens with free cash flow. In the second half, that's when the transformation commenced in earnest. So we have the transformation net cost of 1.1 million that impacted the second half. We also had the patent infringement challenge of which 1.7 million costs to do the challenge from our side were paid in the second half, actually in the last quarter. We also have a timing difference with our Australian operation where a good timing of spend on hardware going out before we received cash coming in, so that's what made it go negative in H2, but a lot of them are one-off in timing nature.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

There's a question about the commercial model. The hardware leasing model that you run can create complexity during times of hardware upgrade, such as what you just recently went through. Would you consider switching to a hardware upfront model? so selling the hardware rather than leasing it?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Look, I'm banging the drum about customer first. If a customer wanted to do that, but I haven't had one customer talk to me about it. And if you look at America, the way some of our competitors are winning is obviously, you know, they don't try and break even until way later in the contract. They take longer contracts. But, look, if a customer came to me and said they would... want to borrow it all up front. I just haven't struck that customer yet.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Has the patent challenge been resolved now?

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

Yes, it has. It was resolved before year end and with a positive outcome.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Can you speak about the New Zealand economic conditions and how that has impacted your revenue in the last six months and 12 months?

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

Yeah, so one of the beautiful things about our business is I am not, I mean, every business is impacted by macroeconomic trends, but the value prop that we have, our customers can't operate without us. So we're actually pretty well insulated. Like the effects that you're seeing in New Zealand are more to do with, you know, how much our customers love us much more than the macroeconomic trends.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

And the final question, there seems to be a lot of moving parts in the business. Can you give us greater detail on what to expect for costs and free cash flow?

speaker
Ciara McGuigan
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, so overall, we are really strongly focused on financial discipline. We would like to exit FY27 with a lower run rate on OPEX. We are strongly focused on operational efficiency, which means making things easier and better for our customers and easier internally so it costs less. Our shift towards a manila workforce for some activities has reduced our average cost of employees in the right direction. So all I'm giving at this stage is our financial strategy towards reducing costs and focusing efforts towards go to market and customer and product.

speaker
Moderator
Investor Relations Moderator

Thanks. That's all the questions that we have. We're going to turn it back to you.

speaker
John Scott
Executive Chair

All right, guys. Thanks for your time. Everybody knows where to find us. I'm sure they do. Let's hope we get this transformation project on the same timing as this update, because we finished five minutes early. So we'll give you five minutes of your day back. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.

Disclaimer

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