AoFrio Limited (AOF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, guys. Kia ora and welcome to the Annual Shareholders' Meeting of AoFrio. I'm John Scott, and I'm the Chair of AoFrio Board. With me today, I've obviously got Greg Allen and John McMahon. There's 2 other Board members that I think are online. I can't see them, but I feel their presence. We've got Roz Buick and Keith Oliver. They're in America at the moment. And while I'm doing this, I want to just thank Melissa for her contribution over the last year. She's obviously not going with us for the next round, but she's made us better. I'd like to thank her. We also obviously have Greg here and Paul Seller. There we go. He's our accountant from Deloitte. We've got some process and ceremony stuff here, so I'm going to hand over to someone who's better at it.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to AoFrio's office. Just some health and safety things to start off with. If the fire alarm does go off, and hopefully, it won't, you do go back out the same way you came, which is down the stairs. And our meeting point is just out in the front of the building. The bathrooms, if you go through here and to the right is where the bathrooms are, should you need them today. Today's meeting is being held both in person and online via the Computershare online meetings platform. This allows shareholders, proxies and guests who are not able to travel and attend the meeting in person to attend the meeting virtually. All online attendees can watch a live webcast of the meeting and read the company documents associated with the meeting. For those who are attending online, we will now take you through the instructions for you to participate in the question-and-answer session and the voting. Firstly, the hybrid meeting for asking a question. If you would like to submit a question, the Q&A is always open. So please feel free to submit a question throughout the meeting. These will be addressed at the relevant time during the meeting. Questions may be moderated, or if there are similar questions on the same topic, they may be amalgamated together. We will answer all questions. And if we don't get time to do them in the meeting, we'll certainly respond to them via e-mail. In terms of how to participate in the voting, voting today will be conducted by way of poll on all items of business, and I will shortly open the online voting for all resolutions. If you are eligible to vote at this meeting, you'll be able to cast your vote under the Vote tab. Once the voting has opened, the resolutions will allow votes to be submitted. You can change your vote any time up until we close the voting, and we will announce that. To vote, simply select your voting direction from the options shown on the screen. You can vote for all relevant resolutions at once or each resolution individually. Your vote has been cast when a tick appears next to the resolution. John, it looks like we have a quorum, so we can declare the Annual Shareholders' Meeting open for AoFrio. The items of business for this meeting and the resolutions to be considered by the shareholders are contained in the notice of meeting, which has been sent to shareholders on April 29. I now declare voting open on all items of business, and I'll give you a warning before we close the voting. For our agenda today, we are going to comment on the full year performance for 2024. We'll give an update on how we went -- we'll comment on the first quarter for 2025. We'll give an update on our strategy, and we'll provide some commentary around the full year outlook. We will then take questions, and then we'll move on to the formal part of the -- formal business of the meeting. Please note the safe harbor statement on the screen. And I will now hand back to John Scott, who's going to take us through the 2024 results and the first quarter performance.

Thanks, Greg. Okay. So if you guys don't have a printed annual report, there are a few floating around, but I'm just sort of going to pull up the highlights of it. So in the very first page is -- page turning. We've got 6 KPIs that are there, and then we've added a seventh one. So it was a very good year by any standard. So we're up 20%, giving $80 million a nudge. You can see the gross margin was pretty stable, went down a small piece, but that was a combination of a little bit of strategic pricing and some of the cost movements with all of the supply chain stuff. But the big number there is the movement of our EBITDA. At $2.5 million, it's up obviously over 100%, but up $1.5 million. So all of our financials, any which way, that's a good result for us. And those are the back-looking ones. The ones that are probably more exciting to me are the bottom 3, the forward-looking ones. Net Promoter Score, if you don't know it, that's how our customers feel about us. And it's a relative score, but 54, again, I work in a couple of these spaces. It's a very solid number. The one -- because we're early on our move to SaaS or move on our early applications or engaged customers, the best one we can find or I can find at the moment is this app utilization, which is how our customers use our software. And you can see it's up 66% to 2.3 million logins in a year. So that is a giant number, like 900,000 additional sessions in a year. Our job is obviously to turn that into money, but it tells you what we're adding people value. And then I like staff engagement score. You guys won't know the detail behind it, but there's about 50 questions. Like some are strategic. Some are, are we operating well? Some are, are you happy to come to work? But if anyone is going to know if we're doing a good job, it's our staff. And that 79%, once you get into 80%, you're in rarefied air. We're probably top 25%. But once you start to get into the 80s, you guys can relax because the staff are taking care of it for us. So that's the one. And if we can move to the next one. So we call this slide our SaaS metrics. And again, it's very, very early days, and you guys can see that. You see that one that says 3.2% of our revenue is recurring. So it's a very small number. I think it's about $5.4 million, $5.3 million. And then when you look at SaaS metrics like this, there's these kind of industry standards. And one that they talk about is called the Rule of 40. And essentially, the Rule of 40 is that your growth plus your EBIT or EBITDA, depending on who's doing the math, needs to add to 40. And so when you apply that to our whole business, it's 22%, but you can't apply that metric to our whole business because we've got motors and some of the mechatronic-type products. But if you apply it to our IoT business, it gets to 35%. So without actually doing anything, you can see we're very, very close to the Rule of 40. And why we care about the Rule of 40 is it sort of puts you into the ratios and the metrics of software companies. So all of a sudden, you can start valuing the company on sales multiples versus EBIT multiples. And they start to go to double-digit metrics or values of revenue. But yes. So as a start point, you can see 3.5% of our revenue is recurring, but 35% of our IoT core business is actually pretty much close to where we want to get to. Now the other bits that are interesting for you guys here. I talked about the utilization. But we also have this massive, massive base of fridges. Like one of the reasons I joined here is we had about 2 million connected fridges. Now we've got 3.1 million connected fridges. If we can actually do something with that, that is a huge moat. It's a huge amount of information, and we need to monetize it. And again, the guys have done a great job of keeping our quality or our platform up, right? Like as soon as you start to see 99 point anything, it's probably better than our customers' need because of the way they draw it. Obviously, we'd like that last 8 to be a 9, Rami. So if you could just solve that for us, then we'll move on. But I just want to call out, sorry, mate, the 83%. Again, some of our more sophisticated or financial investors may confuse that with net dollar retention or gross dollar retention. It's actually customer retention. Our measure of that, again, early on our journey is how many of our existing customers ordered in the last 12 months. So it's not a churn. It's not an upsell or cross-sell. It's a loss. It's just a basic metric of 83% of our customers reordered in this space. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I was meant to say in this section. I think that one, we're now good. So the regions. So the standout region -- and we'll go through them from good to bad or good to not as good. You can see all of the regions grow. So tech. America was up 26% to $54 million. What's nice about that region is if you get it working, probably with Europe, it's the highest gross margin region. We had a bunch of stuff going on there, which I need to call out and remind myself. So we finally got the gateway into business. We got our IoT. We got our ECR 2 motors, and we also got a little bit of tailwinds in the heat pump market. So we make a really good motor, and some other people have recognized that. And all of a sudden, we're getting pulled into a vertical with a total addressable market of about $180 million. So it's amazing what happens when you put yourself in the market and start to call people and do a good job, what you can find. So good job, James. Moving to Europe. Again -- so I'll move to America. 19.1%. Obviously, that's our core market where we've been forever. We won volume off one of our competitors, and we're now starting to provide IoT data through to some of Coca-Cola's biggest bottlers. So again, it's doing a good job. EMEA was a tough one. We don't really have our IoT solution working there well, and that's actually why it went down. So it's actually just a motor business drop. And what we hope we'll see this year is as we come back in with our IoT solutions, it will go back up. And again, the APAC business has always been a slow burn for us, and now we're starting to get a better footprint closer to the customer. You can see there's a bit of interest coming through. I sort of talked about the ESG components. You can see in diversity, we're up at 88%. So again, that puts us in the top 80% of people they're surveying. You can see our engagement score, which I talked about at 79% is great. We got the bronze. We'll continue to get the bronze from EcoVadis, which again, I think that puts us in the top 35%. So when you look at the ESG stuff, why do we care about ESG? At the end of the day, you have to from a compliance stuff, but what's great about our business is we can make money off actually the environmental part. So we're a big E and the E, S and G are a bit smaller. So moving on to the last one, which is the outlook. So we had a great Q1. We did. We're up 43%, yes, 43.9%. Now by any measure, that's a good result. It was obviously better than we were budgeting. There are 2 components to it. There is a motor component and there is IoT. And actually, we're lucky we got an uplift on both. But obviously, the IoT increased 19%. So it's starting to happen for us. What I would say and the bit that is obviously out there is it's really hard to get a view on this kind of macroeconomic, whatever you want to call it, Trump world that we're all dealing with at the moment. And so what we've learned is we're certainly no worse off competitively, right? And I say that and something will change tomorrow. But if you look at Vietnam versus China, and we're a Vietnam manufacturer versus most of the rest of the market, we are in a more competitive situation. It looks like whatever we land on, China will have higher tariffs than Vietnam. And I'm probably jinxing myself there. But it's almost not that relevant because what we're learning is there's lots of ways around this. So if you want to get into Mexico -- sorry, into America, you can go into Mexico, and then they've got trade agreements. So the world is kind of working out how to get around this. But in terms of competitively, we're no worse off. The real big wildcard is what are the macroeconomic effects on the economy. And honestly, your guess is as good as mine. But if I was going to say, people like stability or markets like stability, and that's the one thing we don't have. And so we're all just dealing with it. What I would say, though, is we're not really seeing any change to the activity levels in our business or, in fact, the amount of inquiries. And so some of it, I think, is more just like emotional. Everyone -- every Twitter feed or whatever it is full, and we're sort of getting overcome with all this data, but if you look at our core underlying in terms of our sales funnel, our coverage, all of that stuff actually seems pretty good. So the facts point to we're okay. The doubt comes from the emotional. Now James is up there. Gentleman has his hand up. If anyone wants to have a coffee and talk to him about what's really going on, he's our Head of revenue. So with that, I think I'm going to pass back to Greg.

Thanks, John. What I'd like to do now is I'd just like to talk to you a little bit about our strategy going forward. What are the things that we are focused on from an organization perspective? From a shareholder perspective, what we're really focused on is this concept of quality growth. And what that means for us, it means we're trying to focus on things that will allow us to be -- have consistent growth but also protect us from the ups and downs that we see in the marketplace but also to increase the margin that we generate from the revenue that we achieve. And to do this, we're really focused on diversifying that portfolio. So you've heard us starting to talk about the food retail opportunity. We're focused on increasing the percentage of our revenue that's recurring because that helps protect you from the ups and downs of a capital market. And we're focused on higher-value solutions to our customers to try and increase margin. From a customer's perspective, we're focused on providing solutions that allow our customers to connect their whole fleet. So to get real value from an IoT solution, it's no use having part of your fleet connected. You want to have your whole fleet connected so you can make good decisions about how to utilize your fleet of coolers. And so we're really focused on, firstly, helping our customers connect their whole fleet. The second part of that is once you've got it connected, how do you get real value from the information that you're collecting? How do you change the way that you operate your business to increase your revenue, reduce your cost and deliver on your ESG commitments? And that's what our solution is designed to help our customers with. So from a strategy perspective, our first strategy we say is to protect and grow the core. And the core part of our business has 2 elements to it. One is our IoT business for Cold Drink Equipment. And the second part is our Motors and Fans business. So I'll just give you a little bit of an update on what we're doing for each of those 2 parts. Firstly, for the Cold Drink Equipment business or the IoT business, that's where we're focused on customers like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Heineken. And they are the ones that are -- that we are really focused on helping with that solution. The things that we're doing is we're focused, as John said, on launching new solutions for the U.S. market and the European market, where we have really low or no share in the IoT business. They have different solution requirements that we have from our existing solution, which has been hugely successful in the Latin American market, where we have really high share. So we are really confident that the new products that we are launching this year will really allow us to accelerate in both the U.S. and the European market in that Cold Drink Equipment space. The things that we're doing in June this year, we are launching 2 key things: a cellular-connected controller and our iQ platform, which is a true SaaS-based software solution. And those 2 things together will really allow us, we believe, to be really successful in the U.S. and European market. But those 2 things also allow some of those high-value workflow solutions to be implemented that I spoke to you about earlier. So we are now able to introduce things that allow our customers to manage their fleets without getting up from their desk. So we call it remote management of their fleet. So they're able to do things like disable a cooler. If they want to switch it off, they can switch it off from their desk as opposed to having to go out to their particular cooler. If they want to implement some of the maintenance actions like a remote defrost, they can do that from their desk. And so some of those things are allowing them to significantly change their operating model, improve their revenue and reduce their costs. And we think those types of solutions, which we're uniquely positioned to do because we have both the hardware and the software that interact. And so that's a real competitive advantage for us. And we see -- we're feeling really positive about the impact that those solutions can have. The second thing we're doing in -- for the IoT business is we're really -- we're starting to change our pricing model. And why is that -- why can we do that now? Because we're at a stage, again, because we're launching this solution both -- so more hardware but a unique software platform, and it allows us to reposition our pricing model to take advantage of the new solutions in the market. And so that we feel that's going to be really important, both to protect our existing business while changing the model -- and really what I'm talking about is the amount of revenue that we charge for the hardware and the software to optimize that from an organization's profitability perspective. For Motors and Fans business, we're really focused on 3 key things. One is extending the range of fan pack. So we've got really good motors in the marketplace, but to go with motors, you have a fan. And so having a complete range of fans that you can optimize for different applications is really important. The second thing we're doing is focus on taking cost out of the motor product, so to help us continue to be competitive in that market. And the third thing is -- we're really focused on is what we call application development. So John talked about the hot water heat pump application. That market is estimated to be about $180 million just for the motors and fans that go into that, not for the hot water heat pumps. So just the motors and fans. So it's a huge market. We have been successful with one of the biggest hot water heat pump manufacturers in the U.S., and we're working with their competitor today. And so we're really feeling optimistic about that application development type of thing. We're also working in Asia, again, on a different application for a mixing solution with our motors. And so this is just really application development. It's not developing new motors. It's just taking our existing motors and fans and applying them to the specialized applications where we can be really competitive and provide high-value solutions to our customers. So our second strategy is diversification or diversifying the market segments that we focus on. And you've heard me talk about the Food Retail segment in the past. And what do we mean for the -- when we talk about the food retail market? We're talking about some sub-areas. We talk about supermarket applications, quick-service restaurants, quick -- convenience stores, sorry, and then micro markets. So that's unattended cafes, if you like. And so we ran the 3 pilots last year, one in each of those different segments with the intent of trying to learn what type of solution those particular customers wanted. We were really fortunate that one of those has converted to revenue. So we're really pleased with that. Obviously, we were able to demonstrate the value of the solution. And the customer that we were doing the proof of concept with has implemented that solution across their full business. The -- one of the other customers that we're working with, we're still in commercial negotiations. And we're feeling optimistic that it will also -- that's the supermarket application, will also convert. And so we're -- I guess from those 3 proof of concepts, we feel that there's a real opportunity for us to take this solution forward. And we're working on a general market release for that product later in the year. In terms of what's happening from a customer perspective, we still are continuing to get customer inquiries ahead of our official launch. And obviously, we continue to respond to those on a case-by-case basis. Not all of them are great solution fits for the type of thing that we do, but those that are a fit for what we're able to do, we're continuing to take those opportunities and work them through. In fact, we've got some of our team up in Asia at the moment, working with a really large customer who's got thousands of convenience stores. And we're feeling really positive about these type of opportunities that we have. They don't happen overnight. They do have a time from the first inquiry through to actually getting them over the line. But we're really feeling positive about the food retail market. The other thing that -- in terms of diversification, we have also run a proof of concept in another adjacent segment, which is the ice cream segment. So we ran with Nestle in Chile a proof of concept. Again, why do we run these? We run these to see if our existing technology, our existing hardware and software will work for that particular customer and do we actually solve a problem that they have today. So that's why we run these in the first instance. And from that, we're able to think about what is the real solution, what is the technology that we actually need to help this customer be successful. And so we've run this proof of concept with Chile -- Nestle in Chile. And one of the problems that they had, not that we were able to solve today, was that they were losing up to 20% of their freezers, their chest freezers that you see in the corner dairy and so on. So they were losing 20%, and we were able to demonstrate in the pilot that we could reduce that to 0.5%. So that's -- so they have purchased some of our technology just to solve that one problem. But that's not really the complete set of problems that they would like to solve. But even today, we're able to solve that particular use case, if you like, for that customer. So we're not really investing in that at the moment because we can't do everything. But we see lots of opportunities, I guess, for this type of solution, these temperature management solutions for these different applications. And as we can, we're going to continue to invest in growing some of these other segments. Now the third aspect of our strategy is really about ensuring that we have -- we call it transforming our foundations. It's really about making sure we have the right people, the right systems and technology to support the growth aspirations that we have for the business. You've heard John talk about making sure our ESG strategy is supporting the organization. And we see that as really important to making sure that we're managing the risk in the organization. We're managing the customer requests. Customers ask us all the time, can you tell us that you're doing the right thing across the 3 aspects of ESG? And so we get requests and we have to provide reports and information to demonstrate that we are taking our ESG performance forward. But the third thing is about doing the right thing for our organization and our people. And so that's a really important part of ESG. Also under this transforming our foundations is making sure that our technology that we use to support our customers is modern and evolving and taking advantages of new technology like machine learning and AI. And that doesn't happen without conscious effort. And so we are investing to modernize our platform -- or continuing to modernize our platform. But that will be an ongoing thing that we always have to do as part of the organization. But you've got to be deliberate about it. Otherwise, at points in time, your technology will be outdated, and it's really important that we keep investing in that. The third part of this transforming our foundations is really around ensuring that we are developing the organization's capability. As you move -- as we've moved from being a hardware-only company to a hardware and software or hardware and SaaS company, you have to change the skills and the skill mix that you have in the organization. And so that, again, is something that you have to focus on and make sure you have the right people with the right capabilities to help you not only in that transition but help you get to that new business that you want to have, whether it's -- and Food Retail is different from the Cold Drink Equipment. It's different from the Motors and Fans business. And you need different people with different skill sets and subject matter expertise to allow you to make some of those transitions and operate in those businesses. So it's a constant thing, again, that we have to be mindful of. Are we developing our people, helping them make these transitions and ensuring that we've got the right bench strength to help the organization be successful not only today but tomorrow. So we are confident that we are on the right path with our strategy. But we continually review what we're doing. We listen to what the market is saying and doing. We talk to customers and so on. And so we're certainly not complacent about it, but we do think we're on the right path, and we're confident that the strategy that we have will deliver great results for our shareholders. So thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today about our strategy. And just really, I'm going to talk a little bit about our outlook for the remainder of the year. Obviously, you've seen our market guidance. At the moment, we're not changing that even though, as John's talked, there's some macroeconomic things that were making it hard to predict exactly what's going to happen in the second part of the year. But we're monitoring it like we do every year and making decisions based on what we're seeing, and the guidance is as it is there. Obviously, some of those things that are impacting us is the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and New Zealand dollar. And that's changed rapidly up and down just about every day. And so that has quite an impact on us. And some of those volatilities that we have to make sure we're taking into account as we talk about our guidance for the year. But as John said, we have a strong pipeline of new products and new opportunities, and we're certainly confident that we're doing the right things to deliver the results that we have indicated here. It's not in the script, but I see my executive team are actually in the room. I'm just going to say it's not one person that delivers the strategy of the organization. It is the -- I have a great team, who are hugely energized by the purpose and the mission of the organization. And so when you -- please take a few minutes to have a chat to them at the end of the meeting because they're the ones who really deliver the strategy of the organization. So thanks, team. The -- we're at the part of the meeting where we can take questions. So stand up here, John. So we'll take questions, obviously, from anyone in the room. But Howard is watching the on-screen questions and -- questions that people are putting us forward as well. So he will speak on their behalf or ask the questions on their behalf.

So if you have a question, there's people with microphones. And I do ask you to use the microphone because that's the way the people online hear your questions. So if you put up your hand, someone will give you a microphone.

Thank you for your talk. Most interesting. At a previous AGM, you commented that the sales of our engines for drink cores had collapsed because Mexico had instituted a sugar tax. From what we hear today, it looks like that drinks core market seems to have recovered somewhat.

No, I don't think I've commented on that. But certainly, I can comment on what's happening in the Mexico market. It's continuing to be a really strong part of our market. It's not growing rapidly, but it's certainly a big market that's stable, and we're continuing to be very successful, have really high market share in that market.

Grant Diggle, Shareholders' Association. I've got 2 comments. So maybe if I put the first one and then the second one. First of all, congratulations on your FY '24 results and metrics. They're really great. The first comment or thought we have is that you might think about putting a director skills matrix into your annual reported here just so that stakeholders can see your director skill sets. We like to see this so that it demonstrates how individuals contribute to the Board.

So speaking to Oliver during the weekend [indiscernible].

Yes. Oliver had a conversation with you.

We won't even wait. We'll just do one.

You'll do one.

Well, we've got one internally. We just didn't put it in. So...

Well, that's what we figured. You'd have one internally that you use for your own purposes. The second comment is around the environmental disclosures. I mean we recognize the size -- the relative size of the company. But we also think about the customers that you're dealing with, particularly the large customers and also your other stakeholders. And we wonder if you'd look to make some more environmental disclosures because you have got a great story to tell. And I think if you put some of it out there, it will just sort of give a sort of a good flavor about what it is you're doing and how you're managing your risks.

Sure. I think you're right. We're not a climate reporting entity from a size perspective. But we do see it as an important -- as I said during my presentation, this is a really important part of who we are and the business that we're in. And we did put in our annual report the work plan that we have around ensuring that we continue to develop our ESG framework and the way we work. And we're certainly committed to that. We're actually delivering on that road map that we have there. So you'll see more from us regardless of whether we're a climate reporting entity or not, just as we work through that process and start putting the different aspects in place. So you'll see more from us for sure.

So I spoke to Oliver, who's on the Shareholders' Association, for 3 hours on Saturday. And I think the flavor I want to get across is we're an $80 million business, right? And so we give the impression, when you look at these reports, that we are much bigger. And so the expectations are comparing us to big companies. And so we have this trade-off about what's important with our money. And if it's value to our customer, I'm good. But some of the other stuff, again, it's just compromises, right? We can do everything better, but it costs more money. And like on Investor Relations, we have our CEO and our CFO kind of writing. So it's kind of -- it's just appreciating or giving some understanding that we're a sub-$100 million business and we're making compromises. But take your point.

Some of the online questions, Greg and Chair. One shareholder has been very busy. AoFrio launched its connected controller several years ago at a German trade show. Why is it taking so long to get these groundbreaking and potential industry-disruptive technology to market? And how do you improve the development time line?

I think that the -- we would all like to do everything faster. That's -- but the reality is we have a certain fiscal framework that we work in. And so we have to manage the investment decisions that we can make. And we are -- as you've seen from the results, we delivered on what we said we were going to do. And then as part of that, you have to actually prioritize some of the things that you can do. So realistically, the reason it's taken us that amount of time is we've had an envelope to work in, and we've worked within it. But that does mean that we have to prioritize where we invest our money.

Yes. I was going to take some of that in my vote or introduce myself as a director section. But right. Like if we just say the world started again after COVID, what we picked up after COVID was a pretty tough situation, right? Like -- and not only was it tough like our balance sheet wasn't great and all that good stuff. Then there was these kind of spikes with supply chain. And then they over-ordered, and then they unwound. So there's a lot of turmoil for that first period of time. And so what Greg is saying is like we're managing both our P&L and balance sheet to get going. And so this is the first year that we've ever had any kind of optionality in what we do. So now we've actually got some -- well, we've got -- I mean the P&L is not that exciting other than that it gives us optionality. So this is the first year we have optionality to actually accelerate. So we're making decisions now whether we put money in the bank or we spend it, but we've never had that. And I don't know if that's fully appreciated.

There's 2 follow-on questions. With the impending launch of AoFrio iQ, which is the software solution, does it meet market expectations for AI capability? And what is the time frame for an enriched AI feature set?

I think what I would say to that, does it meet everything from an AI perspective today? And the answer is that no one does that today. But certainly, we have invested in the underlying technology that is positioning us to be machine learning and AI ready. So we've -- like I say, we have invested in the technology. We've had some external review of our way that we manage data and the way we store and the way we process and all those good things that you need to be able to take advantage of the productivity enhancements that AI and machine learning will not only allow for our organization but change the way our customers behave and work. So certainly, it won't -- it's not going to be in v1, but you'll see it coming in next iterations of our iQ platform because it's going to be essential that we do that.

So the pickup on the iQ and the significance is the right one. Like if I was looking at anything we're doing next year, that is really the game changer because if you look at our stack across our motors, our controllers, our comms, it doesn't mean anything until we get the application. So now that's here, we can actually start to talk about solution selling. So that's the right pope. But when you think about AI, like anyone who says they understand it doesn't. What you actually want to hear people talking about is organized data, data lakes, data at the edge and that I know we've got it right. So data iQ or what we were launching is actually just a visualization. I don't think that's a long-term play. Obviously, people will be pulling it and using it with their own agents or plugging into MCPs or MCLs. So there's a bunch to go on in that space, but you got to start somewhere. So I think it's the right place, and it would be different. I think we have a full AoFrio solution set, right? And then is the iQ the interesting bit? It's what the customer says, but the fan, controller and comm stack is actually where a lot of the money will land. So yes, that points to the right thing, but I don't know if the AI is the answer this year.

The next question is camera vision systems and drinks coolers and ice cream freezers have been proven to measurably shift the revenue returns from these cabinets. AoFrio seems to be best placed to capitalize on the developing trend. And what is holding AoFrio back from also being the leader in AI-driven vision systems?

You want to answer that one?

Well, thank you, John, for putting that question in there. Look, we do see that vision systems or camera solutions is an important part of the portfolio. At the moment today, no one is really buying those solutions, but that doesn't mean they won't tomorrow. And so we are -- we have a team focused on developing a solution that works with the rest of our portfolio. And so we see our advantage in being able to deliver a vision solution, the fact that we can integrate it with the communications technology and the fleet asset management solution that we already provide, whereas at the moment, most of the others are doing it as a stand-alone piece of technology. And we don't think that's going to be a winning strategy for them. So we feel we have a competitive edge, and we're investing in our approach to a vision solution for the CDE market. In terms of the ice cream market, as I said earlier, at the moment, we're not investing in the ice cream market at the moment.

Yes. This might go a bit long, but we're having fun here, right? So I used to work for a little company called Invenco. We've pumped somewhere or transacted somewhere around 20% or 30% of America's petrol transaction. So what we found is -- not unlike AoFrio, we had a comms line, and we were doing something that the customer wanted, which was transacting payments. But we found with that we could also deliver advertising. And I think we delivered 10 billion media impressions last year. The camera thing is exactly the same for here, right? We're providing a service monitoring fridges. They call this an adjacent. It's very, very hard to get into adjacents because they're not existing business models. But we have, as Greg said, every right to win, and we're definitely going to investigate it. But you've got to kind of have a solution. You got to have a vision. You got to find a customer. So I wouldn't take that to the bank. But as Greg says, we've got every single right to win and if we can start to move into some of those adjacents, there will be some nicer cars in the car park. So yes.

Another question, different shareholder this time. High-efficiency motors have a huge inherent dollar value that you hope customers realize from efficiency gains. But obviously, there may be some reluctance to make this upfront revenue on part of customers to pay for it, I guess. Is the IoT story helping recover more actual dollars reflecting that value in terms of what you can get customers to actually pay for? Is unlocking the efficiency savings value a metric that could be tracked? Big question.

Yes. Well, I'll take the end part first. Can we actually track the efficiency? And yes is the answer to that. And certainly, in our iQ dashboards, where we are launching in June, we have that demonstrated, the efficiency of a customer's fleet as part of that. Can -- will customers change their behavior as a consequence of that and purchase more energy efficiency -- energy-efficient motors? I think that's an overtime question, but I think it helps. When you're trying to sell a solution overall, having different parts of the solution to demonstrate value is important. So just like the camera solution, part of that is about having it available so that you can sell the rest of your solution. And so that is the concept of a solution sale. You got to be able to address most of the parts of the solution that people want to get them to come to the table to talk to you. And so some of these things, while they may not individually help you sell those individual components, that helps you from a solution sales perspective.

Yes. I don't know if this tag teaming helps, but like when I think about that, like what's exciting or what you got to understand is today, we sell to people making fridges. And their motivation is different to the people running them. And so we don't actually get a whole heap of revenue or engagement out of the people running them because our interaction is with the people building them. The software, all of a sudden, will start to allow -- again, it's another vertical. You might even call it a horizontal, but it will allow another bunch of people to get value from what we do, and again, for us to get more revenue. So that's sort of my view on it.

A question, what is so hard about the ice cream market?

I don't know. What is so hard? I think -- I'm not sure that the ice cream market is any harder to do something with as opposed to Cold Drink Equipment. But as I said, we have an organization, and we're pointing it at the things we think will deliver the best results for the organization at the moment. If we had unlimited everything, would we focus on the ice cream market? Yes, we would. But at the moment, we are focused on things where we're seeing the most opportunity to both protect what we already have but also to grow. And that is, at the moment, the cold drink equipment market and the food retail market are the things that we're investing in.

Yes. So again, just to pick up. So getting into any market that you're not in is hard, right? Like your 101 is all of your growth comes from your core. They call it the hedgehog. Like it's all understood. You grow faster in your core than you think. Going into verticals is expensive. But I think what people are missing is P&Ls aren't that exciting in themselves, but the money or what they throw off is. And I think people are missing we didn't have that much optionality for the last 3 years, right? Like we were building up our core. We were trying to get good at it. Like it's amazing how well a business runs when your staff care and your customers value it. And that's where we've got to since COVID. Like you can see that's why I care about the engagement score and the Net Promoter Score. So we've got staff who care, customers who value it, and now you can start delivering in the P&L. And now we have money, we actually have optionality. But to say is the ice cream market hard, I don't really know. I hope the ice cream is firm. But like we haven't really gone after it, I mean, not in a meaningful way because we kind of didn't have the optionality in our balance sheet or P&L, but we do now.

I think from a structure of the market, the ice cream segment is -- are very similar to our Cold Drink Equipment business. And so I guess that's why we feel it is a good segment that's adjacent. It's big brands. We -- today, we deal with people like Coke, Pepsi, Heineken. But the ice cream market has also big brands, Nestle, et cetera. And so it's a similar kind of channel, if you like, to market. It's something that we understand. The technology is not too far away from what we do and understand. And we have worked with Nestle Chile, in particular, quite closely. So we do feel it's -- we don't think it's actually hard. It's just -- truly, it's a prioritization decision, and I hope you appreciate that that's what we should be doing.

There's a question here, which I think you've answered, Greg, which was on Nestle retrofit. There's a question here, which I think is for me, which is more information on the taxation credit that's on the books, which I guess I could answer that. We're required under accounting rules to recognize a value for the tax losses that we have. We have something like $80-odd million of tax losses in New Zealand plus losses in Singapore and the U.S.A. We do a calculation that works out what value -- what amount of those losses we expect to utilize in the next 5 years and put a value on it. It's an accounting requirement to do so, and that's the value. I think it's close to $10 million sitting on our balance sheet for the value of those losses, which will be consumed over the next 5 years.

Look, in the interest of time, I'm going to call it because we've got to get through. What I'd do is we'll stick around. It seems like a good point for me to introduce. So that good-looking man over there is Howard. He's our CFO. We've got Dani here, who looks after our environment and people. We've got James here, who looks after our revenue around money. We've got Rami, who looks after R&D; and Genevieve, who looks after our product. We're just the front people, the people who know what's really going on with them. So if you want to talk to them afterwards, we can kind of have a coffee and chat about it. But then we can get on to this. Is there anything in there, Howard, that we can't or you want to tick off. Otherwise, we'll just get to the kind of...

There's one more question.

Is it a good one?

It's a good summarization at the end. Could you elaborate on the specific levers the Board and management are pulling to translate top line growth and promising pipeline into sustainable profit and crucially positive shareholder returns in the near to medium term?

Well, that's the aim. So the punch line is revenue growth, yes. It depends how you measure profitability, right? Like gross margin, yes. I don't know, EBIT -- I mean, obviously, you don't want to take more money off people. And there's no need to. But like I think that's a trade-off. Like do we want to grow? Yes. If we start to grow as a SaaS company, we're going to get rewarded for growth more than profit. And so these are some of the trade-offs. So yes, like our aspiration is to grow more than 20% every year. Our aspiration is to have 50% of our revenue recurring. If you have those 2, no one is going to be focused on EBIT or earnings. They're going to be focused on revenue growth and margin growth. So depending on how they're interpreting it, but my answer is we absolutely want to grow. And if not growing at 20%, I think we should be disappointed. And I want our margin growth to go, and that should go with the IoT. I hope that's an okay answer. Okay. For the people here, can we just do it afterwards in the coffee because I'm getting -- okay. You need the mic, ma'am.

It's not a question. Yes. John, the U.S.A. market is earning most revenue. And I suggest because the Republican party, they do not care about energy saving, that sort of thing, but the Democratic party will like this, so I suggest we will like to expand into the U.S.A. market, choose those states that have -- governed by the Democratic party governor. And I think that will be earning more business, isn't it?

Okay. So we'll do that. Yes, yes. What I would say is everyone cares about money and what we do is help people make more money or save money. So we're good either party.

All right. This is a bit I'm really uncomfortable with. I have to read from this. So excuse me if I put my head down. We will now move to the formal business of the meeting, voting by way of poll and through proxy submission. Once all the votes have been cast, they will be counted by the company's share register. The votes of today's meeting will be released on the NZX on the completion of verification of the voting. As a reminder, if you're attending online, you have been able to vote since the meeting opened. To vote, simply select your voting direction from the options shown on the screen. You can vote for all the resolutions at once or by each resolution. Your vote has been cast when the tick appears. To change your votes, simply select change your vote. You can change your vote up until the time I declare voting closed. I would also ask you to start asking your questions on these resolutions now, and I will address these questions as we discuss each resolution. All the resolutions are ordinary resolutions and are required to be passed by a simple majority of votes. Once all the votes have been cast, they will be counted by the company's share register, Computershare. I will now hand over to John, who will introduce me back to you guys.

Thanks, John. I'm just temporarily chairing because the next resolution is to reelect John Scott as a director of the company. The NZX listing rules require that the company's directors may not hold office without reelection past the third Annual Meeting of Shareholders following their appointment or 3 years, whichever is longer. And John was last elected in 2022. So he retires from office at this year's annual meeting. And being eligible, he offers himself for reelection as a director of the company. And the Board has determined that John is an independent director as defined by the NZX listing rules. And I will ask John Scott to speak to his reappointment.

You guys are going to get sick of me by the end of this. All right. So I'm John. I was the CEO at Invenco up until February. So I've kind of been moving from, I guess, 80-hour week to what they call fractional work. I'm involved with 6 or 7 companies. Some are start-ups. Some are bigger companies like EROAD. Just trying to help them. Like New Zealand tech has been real good to me. So any tech company in New Zealand that's trying to do something that I can help with, I'm trying to. So again, I don't know if it's interesting, but we've got Vessev, EROAD, Digital Matter, asBuilt. And there's a couple of just like super green start-ups. What I would say is I've been here 6 years now, so I'm becoming part of the furniture. I think 2 years to learn the business, 2 years to make a difference and then 2 years to really do something. But we had COVID in the middle of that. I feel like we've only been going since about 2021. Greg joined in 2021. He spent the first 9 months at home. So like if you think about that, Greg joined in 2021, and he's built up the management team that you see now. I think -- yes, Howard was the only person when he joined. So we've kind of reformed the entire exec. Certainly, we're in a good place now. The guys have done a great job in giving us a balance sheet -- at least there is a balance sheet now and the P&L that we have optionality. So I think measure us on the next 2 years, I think -- as far as I can see, we're doing everything right. Like I think if we have customers that care and people that care about those customers, you're pretty much 90% the way there, which we are. So yes, that's me. I'm pretty bullish on this one. Like I'm like you guys have got a few shares in the place, and I'm much more interested in my share growth than I am the salary. So yes, I'm in there with you.

Okay. Thanks, John. Are there any questions? Anything online, Howard? No? No one. All right. All good. So I now move as an ordinary resolution to reelect John Scott as a director of the company. If you haven't registered your vote online or completed the voting form here today, please do so now. Given that resolution 1 is now complete, I will now hand back to John Scott to retake up the chair of the meeting.

Okay. So this is the next one, to reelect Keith as a company director. As per the NZ listing rules, we require that the company's directors must not hold office without reelection past the third Annual General Meeting of shareholders following their appointment or whichever longer. Having been elected in '22, Keith will retire from his office, and being eligible, he offers himself for reelection. And if he's listening/present, he can say something. There he is. Can you hear us, Keith?

Yes, I can. Thank you. It's a privilege to have been a director with AoFrio for the last 6 years or so. And after 6 years, it's an opportunity to take a step back and see where we've been in. Someone once said, if you want to work out where you're going, first, turn around and look back and see where you've been. And I think the background to something that Joseph Campbell called a Hero's Journey. And in 1949, he wrote a book called just that. In fact, many, many famous directors have followed The Hero's Journey as they wrote their themes for their movies: Lord of the Rings with Frodo, Star Wars with Luke, Katniss in the Hunger Games and Jake in Avatar. And these great directors described it in 3 acts. The hero's journey starts with a departure or a call for adventure, a denial in some form of major event that triggers act 2, which is typically a journey that starts with initiation and battles. In these ordeals [indiscernible] truth our Board from the [indiscernible] slaying a metaphorical dragon. And act 3 is the road back or what Joseph Campbell called the road back, where there's a redemption, a resurrection. And the hero returns with an Alexa, brings the Alexa home to the family and celebrates success. Well, when I look at AoFrio and the 6 years I've been here, to me, it starts -- we were in the middle of act 1 when I arrived. It accumulated $14 million, I believe. Our high energy -- sorry, our low energy, high-performance motors were under pressure from low-cost spenders. Frustrated with the lack of shareholder returns. And we believed that the transition would come to success from connected coolers, IoT and analytics. So in 2018, when I joined, I think we started act 2. And we're certainly seeing a lot of tests. We've seen a lot of ordeals, and we have come closer to spare, but all is not lost. We did see the commoditization of our motors. We did see working from home under COVID. We did see customers closing their wallets. We did see shipping close down, and our supply chain folks did have to redesign some of our components because of the lack of component supply. However, it's not lost and we believed in the truth. So after 6 years, the question in my mind is, are we still in act 2? Or are we starting to come into act 3? Are we on the road back to see that we are close to bringing the Alexa home? And I wonder if we might be. Our business performance in the last 6 years, we've lifted our revenue 35% to $80 million. Our gross profit has grown 62% to $23 million on revenue growth of 35%. Our GP has lifted 5 points from 24% to 29%. IoT products, which were [indiscernible], have got 152% growth to $43 million from $12 million in 6 years, now comprises 54% of our revenue, up from 29% back then. And our connected coolers have grown from 500,000 to 3.1 million, which is a 520% increase. And our data revenue has grown 152% to $5.3 million. And despite the challenges of supply and commoditization in the motor industry, we delivered over 1.6 million pieces this year from motors and IoT devices combined, and despite regulation this year [indiscernible] what it was in 2018 when John and I arrived, and our net assets have increased 170% from $17 million to $6.3 million. So are we in act 3? Or are we not? Sadly, I don't think we are yet. Despite slowing the dragon and moving our product mix and scaling our IoT business and hitting the numbers for the last 9 quarters, the market doesn't see us in act 3 yet. So despite growing revenue 35% to $85 million, at the same time as the NZX index has gone up 20% from 1,500 to 1,800, so all index has grown at 3.1% CAGR. Meantime, despite what we've done, our market cap has dropped from $69 million to $43 million. That's a 38% decrease on a revenue increase of 35% when the index has grown at 3.1% CAGR. So at a personal level, I'm keen to remain on this journey. I'm keen to move from act 2 to act 3. My aspiration is to support the delivery of act 3. Our team have proven they know how to design and deploy and deliver high-margin SaaS and IoT services. By margin, I mean, 41% GP compared to motors at 15%. And we know that AI is voraciously demanding access to data of all forms in all countries 24/7. So I think we're riding the wave. However, to complete act 3, the market must first recognize our business performance. And once the market realizes we are in act 3, I believe our share price will lift. And that will be the Alexa for AoFrio's hero's return home. And the hero is not the Board. It's not me. The hero is customers. The customers will get a better product that will get delivered fast as a result of having access to more resources. Our team, our people, means they get enhanced careers. I think share price will stimulate their working environment, and they'll feel valued and be recognized through their ESOP participation, something we launched in the last 12 months. And for you, our loyal shareholders, it means receiving fair value for your patience and support. So in closing, I thank you for supporting our 3 heroes over the last 6 years. [indiscernible] moving to act 3 with you as you vote for supporting my reelection. Thank you.

All right. Are there any questions? So I don't know if you guys picked that, but one of the great things -- or one of the things you guys want on your Board is diversity. If you see what Keith and I said, I think we actually said the same thing. I wish I said it like him, but like it's real good. And I just want to call out we both got Greg and John here. I think -- I'm very, very happy with the shape of our Board with Roz onboard, if she's in the virtual cloud somewhere looking down on us. But I think we've got good shape to look after you guys and support Greg and the team. So with that, I move as an ordinary resolution to reelect Keith as company director. If you haven't cast your vote yet, you need to vote now. [Voting]

Okay. So if you guys bring up the next resolution for us, it's to approve our remuneration for the auditors. All right. Here we go. So I'll just read this verbiage. Deloitte is the existing auditor of the company and is automatically reappointed by virtue of section 207T of the New Zealand Companies Act 1993. The proposed ordinary resolution is required to authorize the directors of the company to fix the auditor's remuneration for the purposes of section 207S of the New Zealand Companies Act. I move as an ordinary resolution to authorize the directors of the company to fix the remuneration of the auditor for the purposes of section 207 of the New Zealand Companies Act. I'm sure there must be a way we can do that easier, but there you go. If you haven't registered your vote online or completed the voting from here today, please do so now. [Voting]

John, are you taking questions on that?

Am I taking questions on that? As long as they're nice ones, yes. Yes.

Could you describe how the Board has gone about choosing the auditors and what they've done to ensure that we're getting value for money?

Talk to the man who runs the committee. Do you want to take that one, John?

Yes. So just to be clear, the process for auditors is there's an audit required -- audit partner rotation every 5 years. And while there's no legal requirement to rotate the audit firm, the corporate governance institute and corporate governance rules that most NZX companies comply with do suggest and recommend that we rotate the audit firm every 10 years. And I would expect that, that as a policy that AoFrio will comply with. And I think from memory, I'm going to say we have 5 years, 5 years into Deloitte. And the process around Deloitte was we ran a competitive tender. We've got a variety of audit firms, some top-tier firms, some second-tier firms. And we looked at their capabilities, and we ran a proper assessment and a proper RFP process. And we will do the same, but probably not until we reach the end of that 10-year period.

I don't know if you guys know John, but it's fair to say he's an old dog, and he's been around a while. Greatest respect. But he's -- he looks after us. He knows what he's doing. And so you guys should feel in real good hands, and I know you know that, Grant. So okay. If we just close here, I think. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our discussions, unless anyone wants to show another wildcard out there. And I will close the voting shortly. I request Computershare to please collect the voting papers from the shareholders in the room, if there's not any done. And with that, I will thank you. Online voting is now closed. Thanks for coming. There's a few familiar faces and a few new ones. So I guess we'll be sitting around here. Again, I would say talk to the staff versus talking to the directors. I won't let them run off. But yes, it'd be good to talk to you. And with that, thanks for attending, and talk to you guys next year.