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Freelancer Limited
2/26/2024
Hello and welcome to the Freelance Limited full year of 2023 financial results presentation. My name is Matt Barry and I'm the Chief Executive of the company. Today with me in the room, I have Neil Katz, the Chief Financial Officer. I have Andrew Bateman, who's the Head of Enterprise Products. Sean McMeekin, the VP of Sales. Adam Burns, who's the VP of Products and Growth. And Cohen Wisniewski, who is the Head of Operations for Low Shift and for Freelancer. As with all of our result presentations, you may address questions to any of the executives in the room at the end in the Q&A or to myself, and you may do so through the facilities within Zoom. So today we delivered gross marketplace volume of a bit over $1 billion, $1020.7 million, down 4.8% on PCP. Freelancer was up 2.9% to $132.1 million. Escrow was $888.6 million, down 5.8% on PCP. The group net revenue was $53.3 million, down 4.1% on PCP. Finance was down 2.8% on PCP to $44.2 million, and the escrow revenue was $9.1 million, down 9.9% on PCP. The big result in the full-year financial results was a momentous turnaround in the net profit before tax, which lasted with negative $7 million, and this year we egged out a small profit. And we continue to build on that profit in the following, in 2024. So the group, for those of you that are new investors, consists of three parts of the business. Freelancer.com, which is the world's largest cloud workforce in the world, about 72 million people. Escrow, which is the world's largest online escrow company, licensed in about 55 jurisdictions, all throughout the US, Canada, Australia, which facilitates and secures large value payments. and powers businesses such as eBay Motors, where it's the exclusive payment system, and LoadShift, which is Australia's largest online freight marketplace, primarily building in heavy haulage freight. All are market-leading, broad, horizontal service offerings to consumers through the businesses, and enterprises need it every day in the fields of labour payments freight. So we're trying to build a mini-Amazon here of services. And these are all very, very big industries. So going to the segment reporting. So in terms of freelancer, as I said before, the revenue is 44.2 million, down 2.8% on PCP. Freelancer GMB was up 2.9% to 132.1 million. And the segment was operating EBITDA positive in the year. The marketplace added 1.4 million new users and 201,000 new projects to the marketplace. The average project size was flat, effectively, at $259. Look it down. And that includes all the customers in our enterprise divisions and the load shift division, which balance out quite nicely if you look across the distribution of the loads. Liquidity in the marketplace remains very strong with the average bids per project at 42, which is flat on PTP. The liquidity in contests has gone through the roof. We now get an astounding 341 entries per contest. And with contests, it may start with something as very simple as a $10 contest to get some image or logo design. Right up to the largest contest we have running right now, which we've just awarded many prizes for, is $10 million Australian for the National Institute of Health and NASA for gene editing in the central nervous system of humans. And I'll show you a little bit later on the sort of stuff we're doing there, but you can really get anything done with Freelancer, no job is too small, too large to get done on our platform. Our big focus for the year in product engineering was really around four items. The first was to to drive the core marketplace conversion via AI. In the past, we really called it personalization, but it actually is AI. We didn't want to give too much away in terms of what we're doing here, but we think there's a very, very bright future for us in 2024 We'll talk about this a little bit later on. The second is collaborative features to really drive retention, engagement, and growth. Every unit of retention is worth more than a unit, far more than a unit of acquisition. So we're building a number of things to really make it easy to work in teams and larger groups on the platform and really bring back the clients and the freelancers to make it part of their everyday workflow to use our platform. Also to improve acquisition through organic channels. We believe that the world of Google and dominating Custom acquisition on the internet is rapidly drawing to a close with the advent of large language models and chat-based interfaces, and I believe that search engine marketing and businesses that rely upon it are going to have a challenging time in the future, so we're really focusing on organic channels, and it's great that we've also got our search engine marketing to its highest probability ever through quite a lot of work over the last number of quarters, and so we'll talk about that in a second as well. And also taking the UX design to the next level and consistency of life. So that was last year. And I think we achieved each of those four items, I think, in a pretty solid way. On the first, personalization of drive core marketplace conversion, throughout the year of last year, and we operate the calendar year, the product team had a big focus on really optimizing the funnel through the use of AI. And those of you who use the website quite frequently will see that, that when you post a project now, That flow is rapidly becoming a very, very delightful experience in terms of how you get jobs done. In fact, this morning and a couple of days ago, someone was posting stuff on Twitter that I've retweeted about how surprised and excited they were about how easy the site is to use and how much we assist now with AI. In the fourth quarter, we completely redesigned the job posting flow and we deployed some models. There's a lot to go here. We actually have a pretty amazing experience that we've got in our internal prototype. But the great thing is when we apply AI to our particular business, which is very much a text chat-based business, we get great conversions. I mean, LLMs are very, very much suited towards our business. And the other thing is that Freelancer traditionally has had a huge amount of content on the internet. So we've got 72 million users. Each of those users is a web page. We've done 22, 23 million projects. Each of those projects is a web page. And then we translate those pages into 30-something languages. We have it diced up into a whole different number of ways with the various project listings and other views that we show. As a result, we have a gigantic amount of content in the foundational models for AI. In fact, far more than our competitors in terms of just the breadth of information about freelancer versus our direct competitors. And so all that data that's going into those foundational models, coupled with the data we have internally around the world of work and how people communicate and get things done, means that we're getting pretty tremendous results when we apply this technology. And let me tell you, by the end of the year, the product is going to be absolutely wild. You've got some internal demos we've been showing off to people and it's almost voodoo magic in terms of kind of how the experience is going to change. We also provided more personalization around the ability to modify profile pages, bid with specific profiles and so forth, which has been taken up quite strongly by the freelancers. It's been about half a million bids created from these new multi-profile pages we've created. With collaboration, we've done quite a number of things in FY23. With the bulk of our efforts improving our groups' products, and this is really a bit like Facebook groups, where you can have a group on a particular topic. It may be freelancers from Pakistan, or it might be AI freelancers, or another special interest group, or it might be a workroom on a project. We allow lots of people to work together. That group's functionality now Some groups have in excess of eight, nine million people in them. So these groups scale quite well for a variety of different use cases, as well as for having a large number of freelancers. And there are a couple of freelancers that started producing some very high quality video content, which they can post directly into the groups to educate people on the platform, how to use it and so on. So that's going to double down and increase over the course of this year. We've also got a project update feature, which is currently in beta testing and will go fully live on the platform in the next week or two. We believe that's going to drive engagement. It really makes it easy for freelancers to check in and show off their work and have the clients be informed of that. And we also launch package services. So this is really your Fiverr-style model of click-to-purchase, although we're doing it in, I think, a fairly more sophisticated way. Quote functionality. And with a quote, you can quote, send a quotation out as a fixed price, an hourly engagement, or as a subscription, or as a combination of those three. And so we think we've got a more robust offering here in terms of services. And there's some pretty exciting things happening in the next month or two, building upon this to take it to the next level. But already there's thousands of these services that are being created, and for instance, they're sharing those links over the internet. We also have been focusing on improving our acquisition through organic channels, while at the same time lifting what's called our ROAS, which is a return on ad spend through our pay channels. And we've been investing in viral acquisition, which has resulted in distinct active referring users up about 70% year on year in the fourth quarter. And we continue to double down on that over the next couple of weeks. So our return on ad spend is actually the best it's ever been. In fact, I saw the numbers this morning and it's a huge step up. What this actually means is we've been able to cut $3 million out of our ad spend budget on an annual basis and still have an uplift in return and actual revenue from that program. So that's been phenomenal and helped somewhat with profitability. And we did that through a data science team basically launching a long-term predictor, which we reported on previous quarters. Because when you go through these paid ad programs, you have to make an estimation of the value of the customer through a small number of payments they make within the 30-day window of signing up. And so it requires a fair bit of sophistication to be able to extrapolate and figure out, you know, what the customer's going to do over a longer time horizon. So we put a fair bit of investment into that, and we launched that some time ago, and that's paying off now in space, and the team now is just continually optimizing that. In terms of the design, for those of you that use the platform, you will see this. The platform, for a long period of time, had a UX that was lagging, simply because when we took this business public, we did so very early in the life of the company. I only raised $1.5 million before going public. which is one of the smallest pre-raising probably in the history of the ASX. And as a result, we used that money, not for operating capital, we used that money to buy a platform. So when we took the business public, we didn't really have a platform that was robust enough for hundreds of millions of users and so forth. We've managed to rebuild all of that while being a public company, and we've taken a bit of punishment in terms of the share price by doing so, because companies don't usually do that. They usually kind of do that privately and before they go public. So we took a bit of a beating, but... For those that use the platform now, you will see it is absolutely, you know, I think we've probably nailed, you know, the consistent delight in FY23. And day by day by day, it keeps getting better. And let me tell you, by the end of this year, it's going to be winning awards. And that's one of our targets for this year is to start winning awards for the designers. It's really becoming a delightful and engaging platform to use. And we'll see that flow through in the stats. The other thing we did was we really, and this is a really major achievement that happens behind the scenes, we cleaned up the marketplace from a bad actor's perspective a tremendous amount. We pretty much broke the back of two forms of bad actors. One is people spamming projects on the platform, either to take them off site or to... cheat the freelancers by pretending like they've got work and getting them to pay a job application fee. In particular, in Nigeria, there are many, many, many thousands of people that on all the platforms, and it's not just the work platforms, you see it on Facebook, you see it on LinkedIn, you see it all over the internet, you see it on Dribbble, they're spamming to basically commit this sort of fraud. Our trust and safety team really destroyed Freelancer as a viable platform to do that in a big way in FY23. That required a lot of work. We've identified 180,000 proxy domains we've blocked. We've blocked thousands and thousands of SMS proxy phone numbers, which allow people to send SMSs without buying SIM cards. We have figured out, we've got some software running and some pretty statistically up analysis. That was a detective sort of fraud. to the point now that our team actually speaks to the topic at conferences internationally on forums on, you know, basically international fraud online. We will continue to fight these bad actors, but we've really reduced this to a trickle. And you can see week by week by week, those remaining are giving up. And so it's a minority on the site, and it was a tremendous achievement to happen in 2023 in terms of cleaning that all up. And I think it will also provide a bit of a competitive advantage because these fraudsters never really truly give up. They just go to a platform that's easier to go work on. And so they'll be going to our competitors now to give them a bit of pain. The four major items of product focus for this year for the freelancer platform is to turn freelancers from a painkiller into a narcotic. They always say, you don't want to sell vitamins, and it's not to sell vitamins, but people forget to take them. You want to sell a painkiller. Well, what's better than a painkiller is a narcotic, and that's a platform or an application that is so good to use, so engaging that the customer has withdrawals and they stop using the platform. So, for example, that would be Uber. Uber is so easy to use, getting cars and so forth, that if I had to stop using Uber and go back to, you know, traditional way of using taxis, it would be, you know, somewhat of a painful experience to go back to the old world. And that's what we plan to do with Freelancer. We're doing that with personalization. We're doing that with collaboration. We're doing that with the Delight platform, among other things. We also want to reinvent the world of work in the AI revolution. And I'll talk about this a little bit in two seconds when I get to the forward-looking statement. But we, I think, are phenomenally placed. And I know every company in the world is trying to attack AI somewhere into their presentations and on their homepage. But I'll explain in a second why we really are a phenomenal winner in this whole revolution. Our third thing is to rethink client acquisition in a world without Google. We are really on top of that in terms of the paid channels. We've really got that return on ad spend really during a great return for us. And we're spending a lot of time looking at, you know, viral channels organic channels and we've had some great success i've talked about this recently with the viral channels in the fourth quarter and then we want our designs to win awards and that's a that's a big one for me i think we're getting close to to that sort of level so i tend to forward looking for the year and let me tell you um you know i i've done a fair bit of speaking around the world on the topic of ai um last year in july uh jp morgan invited me to speak at their global chief investment investment officer summit um on the topic of AI, which was kind of a bit of a life achievement because in that room there were 100 people who managed $7.8 trillion. Jensen Huang was first up, Bill Browder, John McEnroe, Jamie Dimon and myself. So that was a pretty amazing forum. I did an opening keynote last week, again, on the topic of AI. The reason why is because Freelancer is probably the biggest user of AI in the world. You have 72 million people on the platform and all the freelancers using ChatGPT and MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and all the other solutions coming out Our marketplace is probably the biggest user as an online community globally. And what's happening there is all the skills in the marketplace are living dramatically. You can be an average designer, now you can be an exceptional designer with mid-journey. You can be an average copywriter, now you can be an exceptional copywriter with GPT. This year, something will come out in the software tooling space where you need to be an average programmer, you need to be an exceptional programmer. And already people are using GPT and and the like to kind of help write code. But this year, there will be a mid-journey moment happening in software development. So number one, all the skills in the marketplace now are lifting very rapidly to the elite level. And so if you compare, and who's going to lose here? Well, the Western world is going to lose because if you've got now a freelancer, say in the Philippines or in the middle of Pakistan or what have you with the AI tooling, they can in some circumstances and increasingly compete with the top elite Western freelancers because of the AI tooling. So it really does lift the skills for the largest low-cost workforce in the world. And it's low-cost because it's not just from emerging markets, but also it's on demand. The other thing is that every business in the world will want to transform to be AI-powered. For those who are old enough listening in the call, I mean, 1994 was the year that your geeks had email addresses. And 1995 was the year that your grandmother had an email address. And between 94 and 95, the world changed dramatically and led to the dot-com boom through the late 90s. Every single business in the world, small business, large business, wants to become an internet business. And what did that involve? It involved building websites. So you had this huge industry of website development. A lot of it was the cottage industry, one-man bands, small agencies, right up to the larger companies like your sausage software and so forth were doing web development. And today, web development is a very, very big category on freelancers, maybe 30% if you consider it at a gross level. And then we've had waves since then. We had a whole wave of mobile phone app development that happened when the iPhone came out and led to a revolution and sort of apps, the mobile experience. The next revolution, which I think is going to be 10 times bigger, will be the AI revolution. Every business in the world will want to apply AI to make their business better. And where are they going to go? They're going to go, it's just like web development. They'll go to small one-man bands, they'll go to agencies, and there'll be larger companies that will do the transformation. And all of those companies that are doing that transformation will be on freelancer on the platform. So we will be the place. I'm very confident where every business will want to figure out how to apply AI to grow their business. And it's a bit more complicated because it's not as discreet as, you know, I want a website, and so you kind of clearly know what the project is. It's going to cross all the functional areas. It'll be used to basically replace customer support functions or enhance customer support functions. It'll be used to enhance lead generation for sales. It'll be used in the B2B funnel for sales. It'll be used in marketing to overhaul all the content on people's websites for graphic design and for text. It'll be used for training videos. It'll be used for so many different things. It'll be used for enhancing all the operations side of things. And so we're getting ready and we're getting prepared in order to fulfill all of that and look forward this year to see a number of offerings come out from Freelancer. really making this easier to understand and really easy to adopt and really easy to get going and transform all these businesses. It's going to be a pretty crazy world in the next couple of years. Now, I've talked about the combination of low-cost freelancers leading to unprecedented levels of productivity with the AI tooling. Jensen Wang spoke before me at the JPMorgan conference and said, AI won't steal your job, but someone using the AI tools will. And our freelancers, equipped with AI, are the ultimate combination to drive business success. Our platform is not just a marketplace, it's a launchpad for businesses of all sizes to live into the future. I've talked about all the data we produce. It's not just the public data that's going into the foundational models, it's also the private data. We have all the private data, the 23 million projects of 72 million people working together on how jobs get done. That's extremely valuable for our fine-tuning of our own internal models. And a core marketplace also has numerous areas of opportunity to apply AI to solve real significant marketplace and customer problems which were intractable previously. For example, that was previously hard to customize the funnel and the project experience for the 10,000 or more different types of work we could do on our platform. With generative AI now, that's very straightforward. Before, it was very hard to have one of our agencies provide induction for all the freelancers because we get 28,000 or so signing up a day and it'll be an intractable problem to be able to welcome to the platform, guide them through using all the tooling on the platform, how to get going, how to get on jobs, fill their profile in, et cetera. We can now tell the journey of AI. In fact, I personally have written an agent to do that. So there are a lot of things that we can do and the very nature of the platform being very chat-based, very text-based, very visual, means that the affinity with AI here is phenomenal. We also believe that AI will drive an explosion in entrepreneurship because starting businesses will get easier and easier and also less expensive. And we also believe that there's going to be a fair bit of, in the macro environment, dislocation in full-time traditional jobs. And as we've seen in the past, where you do have that dislocation, like COVID or the GFC, you get a lot of people going online looking for work, you get a lot of business looking to cut costs online, and you get a lot of startup businesses being created. And I do think that there is going to be a fair bit of disruption from AI in traditional jobs, such as customer support, which I think is probably the first place it's going to happen, where the support team is going to be incredibly empowered with AI technology, but businesses will need less people in the jobs they were doing previously. So people need to move up the stack, become managers, or find new roles, or re-skill, or retrain. But I think in more of the traditional companies, like your banking and insurance and what have you, you will see quite a lot of dislocation, and that will lead to a lot of entrepreneurship. On the enterprise side for freelance, I don't know if I should do this, Sean, but we welcome back Sean McMeekin, leading the team. Do you want to have a look at this, or... No dramas, no dramas.
So last year, we deepened a number of our strategic engagements with our partners around the world. I returned during the fourth quarter. In that quarter, we delivered 55% revenue growth on PCP, resulting in overall growth for the year, double digits, 12%. In terms of some of the highlights in some of the sectors, so in oil and gas, We finalised negotiations with one of the world's largest oil and gas companies in direct partnership with their managed service provider in the United States. The scope of work has been defined and sets a rollout in the first half of this year, which we're excited about. In the FMCG space in November, we finalised the commercials and onboarded one of the leading beauty companies in the world out of Europe. They're an iconic brand and they selected us as they're looking for an alternative sourcing strategy and more flexibility in their hiring initiatives, which is a common theme that we're seeing for multinational companies. That company is going through their vendor onboarding at the moment and activating their first projects in the first quarter. In terms of in-flight proposals, we ended the quarter with a number of proposals in progress, not just for the core, marketplace but also across engineering services and project management, including a transformation opportunity with one of the biggest BPO leaders globally. In terms of new partners, we have a very positive outlook for the first half of this year as we're making future or more inroads into global talent management. We've got a number of agreements that are being discussed around the US, EMEA and through APAC. And there's a lot of companies around the world that are really looking to explore emerging markets for talent and they're looking to freelancer to provide that talent. We've also overhauled our activation program for new clients to really take them from, you know, posting their first projects to kind of really scaling up over time. And so we've got a number of clients that are going through that process at the moment. And the major goal there is to really take them from first-time users of the platform, as Matt was talking about earlier, really using our platform as a daily habit when it comes to hiring staff in their company. In terms of government engagements outside of NASA, there's also a lot of work going on with a lot of governments, particularly in EMEA. who are looking at how to best utilise their workforce and create a digital economy heading into 2030. There's a lot of strategic engagements around how they best utilise the workforce. And so there's a lot of governments who are talking to us about how best to utilise our global talent to fit those objectives. We also continue our engagement with Deloitte MyGigs, which has been going for over seven years now. In addition to the US, we've now got member firms in EMEA and APAC also asking about how they can deploy their own instance of MyGigs, and so discussions will continue with those member firms in the first half of this year. On the field services front, with our partnership with the technology company, globally we're We're now in 47 cities across five countries. Our project volumes increased by over 150% in 2023, and we're currently planning how to surge those volumes even further. We're going to concentrate our efforts particularly on the bigger cities in India, but also look to open up other countries such as the US. We're now approaching, in the last few years, we've now completed almost 50,000 work orders for our engineers who are being deployed in hard to reach areas on a very flexible and on demand basis.
Yeah, so that's a pretty big footprint we have now across India, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand. And we plan on getting live in the US. We were supposed to do it last year, but they've been pushing towards it this year. So I think we've now really proven ourselves that the freelance model for field services works extremely well. And the great thing about this particular program is we do everything here. So we do training, we do the QA, We do parts distribution and warehousing in a freelance model, which is really innovative and breakthrough and new. We also do the work. We then do the follow-ups of QA and happy calls and so forth. And we do all of this just with freelancers. We have one person in our company here in Sydney managing a network of hundreds of people. So it just shows you how easy and scalable the model is. And now we look forward to that kind of taking it to the next level. One thing I will mention about the government programs is the other thing we're doing with government, which we're developing a solution for. It's very early days, but all the major governments of the world have a problem with unemployment benefits. They pay billions of dollars a year in unemployment benefits to a range of workers with a range of skills and a range of environments and so forth, and All of them are looking for ways and trying to mobilize the unemployed, particularly the bottom 20% socioeconomically, to stand on their own two feet and generate income in the future for themselves. And we've got a bit of a plan of how we're going to do this, but this could be quite lucrative for us because all governments have this particular problem and begging for a solution because traditional ways of just providing handouts don't really encourage people to get into the world of work. Well, if you do microwork in the cloud, you can kind of edge your way into it. And it's great for people who can't work full-time for whatever reason, are in remote areas, disabled, or have other issues, elderly or what have you, which restrict them from working full-time. On to NASA, another good year for NASA and the US government team. We are continually showing the power of the platform in delivering highly complex and high-end projects with very, very high-end service providers performing on them. We also broadened, this team broadened outside of NASA to team up with the ELO2 consortium to do an innovation challenge for Australia for the first lunar rover arm design. Over the course of the year, we did challenges such as teaming up with Harvard around creating a sustainable future. We delivered to NIST a heads-up display to first responders for a million dollars going into emergency situations such as bombings or other disasters. For the Department of Reclamation, we designed a better precipitation measurement device, which is out in the field now being measured for the final awards. We delivered a 30 to 60 times speed-up in computational fluid dynamics modelling for river sedimentation, also for the Bureau of Reclamation, in basically optimising linear equations and sparse matrix solvers. As I mentioned before, we did some work with the Australian Space Agency, and we delivered some of the prizes for the Targeted Genome Editor Delivery Challenge, which is for editing genomes in the human central nervous system, both in vivo and ex vivo. And you look at some of the winners of these prizes, and it just shows you the extent of stuff you can get things done. You've got here the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. You've got PhDs, you've got the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, you've got Indiana School of Medicine, you've got a bunch of commercial companies, Columbia University, the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, you name it, right? So, I mean, you can get anything done on a freelancer. It scales up from very, very simple work right through to very, very sophisticated work. And as you increase the prize money in contests or the project size, the quality and the sophistication of the freelancers goes through. And you can see that This is only just the beginning of what is being delivered under this particular program. It's about $1.375 million of the $6 million, and you can see here there's an incredible amount of innovation that's been delivered under this particular program. So we will increasingly be prioritising innovation contests and applying them to governments and also to large enterprises around the world to deliver breakthrough innovation results. On my gigs, we've got 50,000 US consultants on the platform. This has gone on for a long period of time, but we look like we're about to get into Europe and into Australia. The big thing here is really activating the external side of the marketplace. At the moment, they've really been focusing on the internal side. It's just very, very slow going because there's a lot of stakeholders on their side now. ensuring success. So we're just inching forward slowly by slowly by slowly, but the great thing is that we've got a platform which has gone through extensive QA, extensive review by compliance, HR, legal, consulting this, that, the other, and that's a platform that's learned from all of that to be able to be provided to other companies around the world. On the escrow front, We had in the fourth quarter GPV of $217.9 million, which is up 15.1%. And US dollars was up 14.2%. It was down for the year, but we had a good fourth quarter turning it around. Escrow as a business was profitable for the year. The GPV was $897.7 million, down 5.9% in US dollars. And if you look at the overall GPV trajectory of the business, we had that silly period in 2021 where in the zero interest rate environment, you had some very large purchases being made, et cetera. But the trend is intact from pre-COVID. And the big thing we're really focused on now that we're throwing all our resources into is we're about to go live in one of the largest shopping cart platforms in the world. The shopping cart platform will be the first payment method ever to be able to do large value complex transactions. It's a household name, and the volumes here should be pretty decent, I would think. It really allows a new class of shop to go inside this shopping cart platform, and it has huge reach. So that's happening in the next month or two. It's going live, and it will be out there, and we'll see the volumes pick up, hopefully, from that. We've been spending a lot of time on automating and streamlining our operational process and preparation for that. In terms of partner activity, we signed partner agreements with the Fortune 500 e-commerce platform and another with a NASDAQ-listed e-commerce platform. We actually have quite a few of shopping carts now. Definitely a big focus to turn on one after the other, which is great. We've been doing pretty well with M&A marketplaces and brokers, growing that portfolio. And in automotive, we've been solidifying our relationship with eBay Motors and looking at expansion and getting into things like financing and so forth. And we also – we just had another show, which is the National Automotive Dealers Association show, and we've got a bunch of automotive things that we're doing there. And I do think that the next 24 months, you're going to see the entire automotive industry go to thinking about payments and putting up their roadmap concretely. Domain names ease slightly in the end of the year. Domain names really track venture capital financing, and that kind of dried up a fair bit, although I do expect a big rebound to happen with AI shortly. And when it does so, it will pick up the high-value domains, and the lumpiness will kind of come back into the GBV. On the LoadShift front, LoadShift had a great year, phenomenal year. We had to transition from a bought-and-bought model to a marketplace model. As of today, LoadShift just operates on the freelance enterprise code base. You post a job, you post a load, drivers bid on the load, advances bid on the job, you put a milestone payment in, you release the milestone payment, the commissions are the same, 3% on the shipper side, 10% on the driver side. We saw a big uplift in GMV for the year as we did that conversion. The number of loads posted eased a little bit, but it's a bit hard to look at those numbers because we actually, as more loads got awarded, the repost rate dropped and we also banned a bunch of people who were freight brokers who are not basically paying through the site and so forth. But the number of quotes went up 220%, liquidity went up massively, went from 1.5 quotes per job to 5.6. So it really is quite, and actually the number has been higher than that, actually closer to eight in the last week or so. The percentage of awarded jobs went from basically zero to about 22.8%. That number will continue to grow as we convert more and more of the loads to pay through the marketplace and the marketplace model, and we produce more products and features in the product to enable that to happen, particularly around things like the audio calling and so forth. And so there are about 17 million kilometers posted on the platform at about $4 per kilometer It's probably about $70 million in notionally close to volume. We're just trying to eat into it as much as we can, as fast as we can. Overall, the group level, we made significant progress in extracting about $8.8 million of cost efficiency out of the business. And, in fact, it surprised me that there's actually a fair bit to go in terms of what we can do in terms of cost optimisation. There's always places you look where you go, wow, there's actually – we can reduce the cost there. So, overall costs are 18% lower, and as a result, the group has evened out the positive in FY23. The group has now structurally a lot of cost base and well in a position to increase that net profit before tax in 2024, and we will be doing so. We also fixed a long-standing problem we have with our OTCQX listing, and this has been a – I don't know how this happened, but when we originally went OTCQX, it's quite a complicated process. This is best markets. It's a top-ranked listing on the exchanges. But we had to lodge a share of stock, and this is more of a ceremonial thing rather than an actual practical thing. And when we lodged our stock with OCCQX, we lodged one share of FLN CF, which is the OCCQX ticker. As it turns out, that was not the stock we should have lodged. We should have lodged FLN, and none of the service providers we're working with Picked up on that and the listing worked fine for a few months and then just broke and we were completely at a loss to figure out what was going on there until eventually we found out that without any notice, without anything being sent to us, without anyone being aware, it was because someone decided that the listing was not valid because the wrong stock was lodged. We finally fixed that, which involved going through a whole new listing again, but that was a bit of an egg on face and I don't know how that happened. But that should operate a lot better now, and we've got some market makers, market makers of stock in the US. Overall, the group had positive operating cash flows, $1.9 million for FY23, which is a big turnaround from negative $4.2 million the year before, and cash capital was $21.2 million, now 9.4% of FY22, and that should be back up this year. Now what I'll do is open up the Q&A to the audience. please state your name and your question, and Alex Dorey, who's driving the Zoom, will relay on the questions. As always, you can address it to myself or anyone in the room. We've got Neil Katz, the Chief Financial Officer. I've got Andrew Bateman, who's the Head of Enterprise Products. Sean McMeekin, who's the Head of Enterprise Sales and Escrow Sales. Adam Burns, who's the VP of Product and Growth. And Cohen Wisniewski, who runs managed service as well as load shifts. And then stepping to Drew today, he's a germ manager who's sick and also on the management side of Freelancer. So please ask the questions, and Alex will relay them to the team. Don't be shy.
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