Airtasker Limited (9B5.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Technical Difficulty] 2025 Annual General Meeting of Airtasker Limited. My name for those who don't know, is Cass O'Connor. I'm the Chair of the Board of Airtasker, and I'll be chairing today's meeting. It's now 11:00 a.m. We have a quorum present, and so I declare the meeting open, and I confirm that this meeting has been properly constituted. We begin today by acknowledging the traditional custodians of this land in which we meet, the Gadigal and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, who have been custodians of this land and its surrounding waterways for millennium. In accordance with this company's constitution, the meeting is being held as a hybrid meeting in-person here at Australia Square and virtually through the investor portal run by the company's share registry, Automic. The Automic investor poll will allow shareholders attending virtually to participate in the meeting by asking questions and by voting. With me here today are our Non-Executive Directors, Ellie Comerford, Pete Hammond and Fred Bai; our Founder and Managing Director, Tim Fung; our Company Secretary and CFO, Mahendra Tharmarajah; and finally, Joshua Tanchel, our audit partner from Deloitte. We'll proceed with the formal business of the meeting as outlined in the Notice of Meeting after my address and Tim's update on the company's performance and strategy. We'll then consider the resolutions set out in the Notice of Meeting, of which there are 7, and I'll outline the voting instructions ahead of that section. I will also invite relevant questions from shareholders after the CEO presentation and during the formal part of the meeting, including at each resolution being considered. For those online through the Automic Investor Portal, you can submit questions at any time. The Q&A questions are on the screen. And you can see on the screen now. To ask a question, click on the handily green highlighted ask a question drop-down box and then ask question. Choose text question or virtual question and then for text, type your question and select the relevant resolution and holding capacity and then click submit question. For a verbal question, you'll be called on to put forward your question. And please note that while you can submit questions on the items of business any time from now on, I won't be addressing them until the relevant time in the meeting. To assist our moderator, kindly include the resolution number to which your question relates. Please note that all questions may be moderated. And if we receive multiple questions on one topic, for example, we will amalgamate them together. Due to time constraints, we may run out of time to answer all your questions. And if this happens, we'll answer them in due course, either via posting responses on our Investor Hub or by e-mail. All questions should be addressed to me as the Chair. I will either deal with the question personally or ask somebody who is better placed to respond. We will do our best to answer any relevant question that's raised. And I do ask that you keep your questions short and to the point so that we may respond to as many questions as possible. When we reach the formal part of the meeting, voting on all resolutions will be conducted by a poll. Shareholders attending virtually through the Automic Investor Portal and wishing to vote can do so through that portal. The voting instructions are on screen. Once voting has opened, click on the voting drop-down and select pull or allocate and then your voting direction for each resolution. Follow the prompts and then submit your votes. If you've already lodged a proxy vote and do not wish to change it, please note that you do not need to vote again. Your votes will already be counted in the poll on each resolution as per your proxy instruction. If you wish to change your proxy instructions, please do so now, vote during the meeting. If you have any problem regarding your shareholding with Automic, please call the support number 1300-816-159 as shown on the screen. To allow shareholders time to vote, I now declare the poll open. Online voting is open, will remain open until I declare it closed at the end of the formal business. So, votes must be submitted prior to the portal being closed for them to be counted. Okay. Me again for the Chair address. It's my pleasure to welcome you to Airtasker's Annual General Meeting for the financial year ending 30th of June 2025. The Board and I particularly welcome the new investors who joined our share register as part of last week's placement. Earlier this year, we set out to improve our cap table and trading liquidity and the recent roadshows, last week's placement and the last few weeks' small unmarketable parcel activities are the first steps towards these ends. The 2025 financial year was one of material progress for Airtasker. My Board colleagues, the executive team and I are delighted to share with you the highlights and our views for the near future. With the financial performance, Airtasker delivered a second year of positive cash flow in FY '25, delivering $1.2 million in free cash flow and $4.4 million of operating cash flow. This was achieved despite significant cash and non-cash marketing investment in the Airtasker brand, which helps drive our total posted tasks to $2.3 million, which is more than 15% higher than FY '24. Our GMV went over $200 million for the very first time. Our marketplaces revenue grew almost 20% on FY '24, and our taskers earned over $160 million between them. We finished the year with just over $19 million in cash and term deposits, plus almost $28 million in prepaid advertising inventory on our balance sheet. Last week's placement increased our cash balance by almost $10 million, improving our capital management flexibility. Post balance date, Q1 FY '26 group revenue grew 14% on previous corresponding period, excellent Airtasker Marketplaces revenue growth of 20.5%, moderated by Oneflare, which has been experiencing declining revenues, and the team is addressing this underperformance by Oneflare. Operationally, with the Australian marketplace operations on sufficiently solid footing to continue to fund the international expansion, it is timely to look at what has changed since last year's AGM. The U.K. business seems to have developed enough momentum to reach close to self-sustainability. So with FY '25 GMV up 67% to the AUD equivalent of $15 million and GMV ARR of $21 million in 2025, we expect the current year will see an inflection point where we could scale back marketing in some cities we serve and continue to watch the GMV grow. Our U.K. plans include launching into more cities, of course, but this inflection point will be a milestone, whether we use it or not. The U.S. is at an earlier stage of development, with typically far higher growth rates. We've recently appointed a senior marketing executive in the U.S. who is already better focusing our efforts there. We plan on ramping up our contra media spend in key markets in the coming months. And some of that will be with iHeartMedia, the undisputed premier audio network across the U.S. iHeartMedia and Airtasker have recently strengthened our existing relationship with both the follow-on media deal and iHeartMedia's cornerstone investment in last week's placement. In closing, I expect my gratitude to my hard-working Board colleagues and the entire Airtasker team, whose dedication has been instrumental in achieving these results. And finally, thank you, all shareholders, for your continued support of Airtasker. At last AGM, we acknowledged ongoing macroeconomic challenges in many of our markets, and that has not changed. Despite this, our game plan is showing signs of success earlier than expected. I'll now hand over to Tim for his CEO address.

Thank you, Cass. Thanks to everyone who came today. Big thank you to my fellow Board Directors, huge shout out to the Airtasker team. We've got a few people here today, but a whole bunch more all around the world, all contributing to making all of those fantastic results that we just spoke about happen. And thanks to our 47,000-plus, our taskers out there in the community, who contributed to getting stuff done for people in their local community and sharing their skills. So, I'm really, really proud of that. If we just skip forward a slide, Airtasker is building the world's most trusted marketplace to buy and sell local services. And it's really heartening that we have a really, really simple thing that we do. We connect people who need work done, with people who want to work. On the next slide, I think that this is a vision that is really important in the context of what we're seeing with the changes in the labor markets and in the labor economy overall due to things in AI and autonomy and new technologies coming out. And that is that Airtasker's entire mission is anchored around empowering people to realize the full value of their skills. We believe that every single human being has unique skills that they have to offer other people in the community, and we provide a way for them to be able to share their skills, earn income and have a purpose in doing that. On the next page, what we're doing is a little bit different to what our folks have looked at before in terms of empowering the local services economy. We're doing it in a slightly different way. We are building an open community. We don't set the prices. We don't set the scope of the jobs. We enable customers to be able to ask for anything, and we enable and empower our taskers to be able to offer to complete those jobs in any way that they see fit. And I think that, that is not only a really empowering model that is great for users, it's also a great business model that comes with very light touch operations and really high margins. The second thing is that Airtasker is infinitely horizontal. And this is sort of our superpower, which is that the imagination of people is unlimited and the creativity of people is unlimited. And so Airtasker enables you to be able to ask for any of those jobs that you could imagine and to be able to fulfill things that you need done. And by doing that, we have a very unique value proposition, which allows us to get cut through into new markets and to scale brand and network effects. If we just look at the results in FY '25, I think Cass summarized them really well. We proved for the second year running that we could be group free cash flow positive and generated about $1.2 million of free cash flow at a group level. We did that by growing our Australian marketplace and our overall Airtasker marketplaces by about 18.3%. And our Australian business, which is really like the engine of generating cash and resources for our business, generated about $15.2 million after covering all of our head office and global head office costs. We're able to then invest that into scaling in the U.S. and the U.K., and we had a really phenomenal year. The U.K. grew to $21 million of GMV, was up about 111% and the U.S. hit $7.5 million of GMV, up 422%. That left us with about $19 million of cash on balance sheet and really well placed for the future. So, how are we going to move forward from here? Our growth strategy is really simple: to continue to invest into our core platform that powers that engine to generate profitable growth in our Australian business and then to invest that to scale in the U.S. and the U.K. We made some really great progress in FY '25. Firstly, our media partnership strategy started to show some real results in the Australian market. We saw that GMV started to reaccelerate. Revenue started to reaccelerate year-on-year, which is really exciting to see. And that was driven in a large part by some fantastic media partnerships that we have with ARN and oOh!media in Australia, which grew our unprompted brand awareness or our brand salience by about 15% during the year. We also continue to invest into improving trust in our marketplace. So, trust is something that connects our customers and our taskers together and brings the whole marketplace together. The more that we can enhance trust in our marketplace, the stronger our economy and the Airtasker marketplace platform grows. So last year, we saw that our monetization rate continued to increase as we invested into things like ID verification, making sure that we're compliant with all of the tax legislation in Australia and also rolling out simple tools, which enable our customers and taskers to be able to trust themselves and the Airtasker platform even more. Next, we think that there is a really, really massive opportunity to increase frequency in our platform. Airtasker has got a really high retention model. People want to keep coming back to use our platform, but we want them to come back more often. So, Airtasker is working on improving our platform frequency and purchase frequency, and also addressing our leakage in our marketplace through a new feature that we're building out called rebooking. That's enabling customers to come back and reuse or rebook the taskers that they've got a trusted relationship with. There's a huge opportunity here because 93% of our Airtasker customers have a 5-star experience, and 73% of those folks are saying that they need that job done again in the next 12 months. So, there's a massive, massive opportunity there. On to the next page. After investing and generating profitable growth in our Australian marketplace, we're going to continue to double-down on our strategic media partnership strategy. And as we mentioned last year, generated $19.4 million -- sorry, have $19.4 million on our balance sheet to invest into the U.S. and the U.K., and we're doing that alongside some incredible partners in the U.K., Channel 4 Ventures and in the U.S., Mercurius Media Capital, TelevisaUnivision, Sinclair Broadcast Group and iHeartMedia has been a really, really great customer -- a great partner for us. On to the next page, we're making some great progress in both of those markets. So, we set out to hit $25 million of GMV in any one major city. And at a national level, we're making great progress towards that and ahead of the curve in both the U.S. and the U.K. And if we go to the next slide, how are we delivering that kind of growth? We're doing it in 2 main ways. One is by using our on-the-ground playbook, nicknamed or code named SHPAB, which stands for the 5 different chapters of our playbook that we use to ignite a market and get it going. It's an intentionally awful acronym so that it's very, very memorable. So, that's intentional. If you hate the acronym, it's doing its job. And we're doing that alongside our media partnerships, which enable to build long-term brand. And the reason why we're doing that is that we know over the long run, you want to be free of paying the toll roads of the Internet for performance-based marketing. But in the short run, you have to ignite these marketplaces to get them up to that level of brand and network effect. So it's a two-pronged strategy, which we seem to be proven in the Australian market, and we believe that we can execute again to deliver this in even larger markets in the U.K. and the U.S. And on the last slide here, really proud to have said that since FY '26 started, we've recently raised $10 million in equity capital, which is going to really help us to scale in the U.S. and the U.K. This comes off the back of a strong start to FY '26, where our Airtasker marketplaces grew another 20% on PCP. The U.K. and the U.S. are moving in the right direction. And we brought on an incredible media partner at iHeartMedia, who are cornerstone to the cash investment into ART as well as backing us into the U.S. with a much larger strategic media partnership in the U.S. market. So, really excited about the results that we're going to deliver in FY '26 and beyond. So, thank you very much. And I'm passing it back now to Cass.

Thanks, Tim. Okay. So, we're going to welcome questions regarding either the Chair address or the CEO presentations from shareholders now who are eligible to vote. I'll pause to see if there are any questions from the room. No? And any questions coming through on the portal?

Nothing online, Cass.

Okay. Thank you. Having given sufficient time, I think we can now move on to the formal items of business. And here, we're going to revisit the voting instructions. As noted, voting on all resolutions are conducted by the poll. The results, which will be announced immediately after the vote on the resolution has been called. But once the poll votes on all -- sorry, not immediately, after the vote on the specific resolution, but once the poll votes on all resolutions have been collated by the returning officer. For the purposes of the poll, I appoint Adrienne Atkinson, Automic Group, who you can see through the glass doors there to act as Returning Officer and to conduct the poll. Adrienne was with us last year as well. Automic is online and able to answer any technical questions in relation to the voting process. I'll pause for any questions before I begin ordinary business of the meeting.

No questions, Cass.

Okay. Terrific. Thank you. So on to the ordinary business. As set out in the Notice of Meeting and its explanatory statement, there are 8 items of business today, which are displayed on the screen. The Notice of Meeting was posted and e-mailed to all registered members on or about the 27th of October 2025, and the Notice of Meeting is taken as read. Item 1, the financial report is for consideration only, no vote is required. All other items are ordinary resolutions, which require a shareholder vote. Proxies have been inspected and all of those validly lodged have been accepted and proxies have been received, representing about 113 million ordinary shares or 23% of the issued capital of the [ fund ]. All undirected proxies or open votes that have nominated the Chair of the meeting as their proxy will be cast where permitted in favor of each resolution of the Notice of Meeting. And as Chair, I have a total of 11,410 votes to vote accordingly. Okay. So the first item of the meeting is to receive the company's financial report for the year ended the 30th of June 2025. The financial report and the reports of the Directors and the Auditors are laid before the meeting. And as noted, there is no vote on this. The company's auditor for 2025, Josh Tanchel of Deloitte is present to take our questions relevant to the conduct of the audit and preparation and content of the independent auditor's report. And before I pause for questions, I should note that this is Josh's final year as our audit partner. Josh has served as our audit partner for the last 5 years since Airtasker's IPO. And on behalf of the Board and the company and our shareholders, we thank you for your service, Josh. My colleague, Ellie Comerford, Chairs the Audit and Risk Committee and is also available to answer questions if needed, as are Tim and Mahendra. So, now I'll pause for questions on the financial report or the reports of the Directors or Auditors. Okay. We'll now proceed to the resolutions set out in the Notice of Meeting. Resolution 1 is the remuneration report. And the resolution is that to consider and if thought fit, to pass the following non-binding resolution as an ordinary resolution that the rem report for the financial year 30th of June 2025, as disclosed in the company's annual report be adopted. This resolution is subject to voting exclusions, which knocks out every single Board Member and KMP. So, when you see the proxy numbers on screen, there's as well a small number of shares, okay, in relation to our market cap. If there are any questions on Resolution 1, please ask them now, either in the room or through the portal. No questions. So, you can see the proxy votes of 42 million have been submitted for 336,000 submitted against and discretionary votes adding up to a total of 42,640. And I will now vote as Chair for those for the undirected votes I'll be voting for. The next item of business is the reelection of Fred as a Non-Executive Director of the company. And you can read the resolution up there. Before we go to that resolution, I'd like Fred to say a few words about his involvement with Airtasker.

Thank you, Cass and shareholders. So, my involvement with Airtasker has been 12 years. It's a very long time. So, we were the very early-stage investors and it's been a pleasure to work with the team since then to build this company up. I think we've seen a lot of success. I'm super excited about the international expansion strategy that we are going to deploy over the next couple of years. So, I bring 3 lenses to Airtasker through my past professional experiences. First, operating and deal experience from Macquarie Investment Banking Group, where I learned disciplined capital allocation and risk control. Second, Board experience at a NASDAQ-listed company, which sharpened my governance, disclosure and compliance knowledge in the space of publicly traded companies and also in America. And third, as a partner at Morning Crest Capital and early investor in Airtasker and various other tech companies, I work with founders on go-to-market, international expansion, structuring growth capital. These are the tools that I use here to ask hard questions and to act management when conviction is warranted and to keep strategies tied to growth and units comps. Airtasker today is much stronger and more focused and better capitalized than 2 years ago. The strategy is working and the operating system is disciplined. If reelected, I will continue to apply my Board experience, venture investment perspective and capital markets' background to help Airtasker scale internationally with prudence. So, I respectfully ask for your support. Thank you. Cass?

Thanks, Fred. And I must say in my 2 years on this Board, I've really appreciated Fred's substantial contributions, particularly our discussions around product, our discussions around competitive trends and technology and what's emerging and always delivered in a collegiate manner. It's great to have you here, Fred.

Thank you.

If you wish to discuss or have any questions about this resolution, you know the drill. I'll pause for some questions. Any questions or comments?

No questions, Chair.

Okay. Proxies? Are there on screen with an overwhelming yes vote for Fred with 113 million shares voting yes and only managed to annoy 203,000 shares, which is pretty good going. As I'm allowed to vote my own shares in this as well as the undirected, I'll be voting for this resolution. So others, please vote now either via the portal or in-person on your yellow cards. Okay. I think we can move forward. So, we're moving to special business of this meeting. And as noted in the explanatory statement, special business relates to NED rights that are allocated to the Non-Executive Directors as partial or full-fee sacrifice. I'm a party to this resolution because some of the NED rights relate to me. And interestingly, all of my NED colleagues are parties to this resolution. So, we cannot vote on it and nor can I even introduce it because that's just the law. So, I'm now going to hand over the chair to Tim Fung. And you'll notice when the proxies come up that the share numbers have shrunk again because the NEDs and Fred and Pete between them hold 70-40 or something, 100-something million shares, the numbers are small, I think.

Thanks, Cass. So, Resolution 3 is as follows: to consider and if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that for the purposes of ASX Listing Rule 10.14 and all other purposes, the shareholders approve the issue of NED rights to Non-Executive Director, Ms. Catherine Ann O'Connor or her nominee, in lieu of payment of certain director fees payable to Ms. O'Connor under the NED equity plan and on the terms and conditions set out in the explanatory statement, with the number of NED rights to be calculated in accordance with the formula set out in the explanatory statement. Please note that this resolution is subject to voting exclusions, which are set out in the Notice of Meeting. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please follow the process previously outlined. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are on the screen. I now put the motion. Please vote as per previous instructions. Okay. Moving forward to Resolution 4. Resolution 4 is as follows: to consider and if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that for the purposes of ASX Listing Rules 10.14, all other purposes, the shareholders approve the issue of NED rights to Non-Executive Director, Ms. Ellen Frances Comerford or her nominee in lieu of payment of certain Director fees payable to Ms. Comerford under the NED equity plan and on the terms and conditions set out in the explanatory statement, with the number of NED rights to be calculated in accordance with the formula set out in the explanatory statement. And again, please note that this resolution is subject to voting exclusions, which is set out in the Notice of Meeting. If you wish to ask -- to discuss this resolution, please raise your hand in-person or submit your question via the ask a question dro-pdown in the Automic investor portal, choosing text question or verbal question as appropriate. [ Jo ], any Q&A?

No questions, Tim.