Airtasker Limited (ART) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

-- Airtasker's first-half financial results presentation for FY '26. So really pleased you could join us today because we've got some great results and updates to share. So if we move along to Slide 3. As a reminder of why we're all here, Airtasker's mission is to empower people to realize the full value of their skills. Creating jobs isn't a byproduct of the work that we do. It's our core reason for being. I'm really pleased to say that since inception, we've done over $1 billion in jobs completed with over 5 million tasks completed in Australia alone. We are seeing some really significant impacts from AI across every business in the world today. And I'm really pleased to say that Airtasker is well-positioned to thrive in the new AI era. We're seeing an operational uplift across the entire company where AI is already driving powerful operational improvements. We're able to use AI to do enhanced customer discovery to be able to find customers at the exact moment they need a task completed. We're able to use AI to drive enhanced content moderation to make sure that scams and leakage can be removed from our marketplace in real time. And we're seeing rapid product development through artificial intelligence and software development, which is seeing us shift changes to the Airtasker app faster than ever before. Secondly, Airtasker is all about real-world services. We focus on local services like movers, tradespeople, and furniture assembly. All of these skills require humans and human dexterity. And so they're not easily replaced by autonomous robots. Finally, we are driving -- we are sitting on a treasure trove for proprietary reputation data. Our reputation passport data sets combines over 9.6 million transaction-verified reviews, which gives us a truly unique inventory of local service providers that can't be bypassed by artificial intelligence agents. So some highlights before I pass it over to our CFO, Mahendra. We're seeing during the first half, 18.9% Airtasker revenue growth. Group revenue grew to a record $29.1 million. And what's really exciting is that we're seeing that reacceleration of GMV growth, which was up 11.3% for the half to a record $116.4 million. International grew 115% over PCP, and that was a big contributor to our revenue growth. The U.K. was up 85% on PCP. The U.S. was up about 380% on PCV. So we're seeing every sign that we need to see to be very confident these markets are taking off. Thirdly, we delivered our fifth straight half of positive operating cash flow, up $0.5 million, and that leaves us with $27.1 million of cash on balance sheet and sets us up to be in a really strong position moving forward. On the next slide, I want to share a couple of images about Airtasker's great brand work. On this slide, you can see our collaboration with the Australian Open. So you can see Airtasker brand, the Australian Open and our wonderful media partners, oOh!media, creating some of these great moments, which help to drive brand salience, of which I'm going to share an update later on in this presentation. But without further ado, I'm going to now pass it over to our esteemed CFO, Mahendra Tharmarajah, who's going to take us through the financial results for the half.

Great. Thanks, Tim. If you can jump forward another slide, please, Alex. Good morning, everyone. I might start by a bit of a recap on where we said we'd go through FY '26. So at the start of the fiscal, we provided some guidance of what we wanted to try and achieve over the course of FY '26. So at the halfway mark, it's a good opportunity to kind of recap and see where we're tracking. So the first one was we were going to deliver double-digit revenue growth in Airtasker Australia. We've done that, 12.9% for the half. And pleasingly, our Airtasker marketplace that includes not just Australia, the Australian Airtasker marketplace, but the U.S. and the U.K. as well, delivered 18.9%. And for those of you who have been following the story, you'll recall that at the full year, we were at 18.3% for the Airtasker marketplace. So the trajectory is definitely heading in the right direction. We talked about the fact that we would generate increasing cash flow out of the Australian marketplace. And we've done that at the half year, $7.7 million. We finished the full year at $15.2 million. So that's up 28% on the comparative period. In the U.S. and the U.K., our new markets, we're accelerating our growth trajectory. It is a seasonal business that we are in the low season or just come out of the low season for those 2 marketplaces, but we still delivered 85% growth in the U.K. and 380% revenue growth in the U.S., obviously, off a smaller basis, but still heading in the right direction. Cash and term deposits on balance sheet, $27 million. You will recall that we did a capital raise in November, about $9.5 million, and then net of cost of about $9 million. So that's obviously added to our balance sheet reserves. And we finished the half with just under $21 million of our prepaid media assets. So we have prepaid media assets with our media partners in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. still on balance sheet to use over the course of the balance of this year and going into FY '27. We also flagged we were looking at what we would do strategically with Oneflare -- and at the start of this month, in February, we implemented a number of initiatives to address the revenue and profitability of that business. We're focusing on our more profitable job categories in that marketplace, which has enabled us to really refine and focus our performance marketing spend and also optimize our lead pricing for the leads that we're generating for our customers. And that enabled us to also reduce our headcount as we were focused on a smaller portion of the business. Next slide, please, Alex. To step back, as Tim mentioned, group revenue was up 13.5% to $29 million for the half. And going back through the components of that, the Airtasker marketplace at just under $26 million, up 19%. Airtasker Australia, which is still the core of the business, 13% to $23 million. And then the Airtasker International marketplace is predominantly the U.S., and the U.K. marketplace is up 115% for the half. Next slide, Alex. We've had a lot of questions around the seasonality of the business and how that impacts our revenue and accounting expenses, and then the cash flow. So we thought we'd provide this slide as a bit of information to try and get everyone's heads around how the components of the business work. So at the top, you can see the Australian marketplace is generally -- it's a seasonal business. So we see stronger demand in the warmer months of the year, so spring and summer in the Southern Hemisphere in Australia, which is our fiscal Q2 and fiscal Q3. So we generally see stronger revenues and hence, stronger cash receipts. Our costs are largely stable through the course of the year. Marketing tends to move around a little bit, but most of the other costs are fixed, including the fact that we're covering all our global head office costs out of Australia in that Australian number. If we then look at the U.K. and the U.S., our new markets, their strong demand is in their spring and summer, which is basically the fourth quarter of our fiscal and the first quarter. And you can see there that revenue is stronger, but we also spend a lot of our marketing investment in those markets, whether it's cash or contra, certainly goes out in those high demand months. And the nature of the business is such that we are spending more in marketing dollars proportionate to revenue as we start to build our brand awareness and build out the network effects in these businesses. And so the U.K. and the U.S. are largely cash negative in the first quarter and the fourth quarter. And then as a group, you can see that the Australian business is really the cash generator, and it's supporting the investment into the new marketplaces. So we're generating positive cash flow out of the Australian marketplaces, and that enables us then to invest that money into scaling into the U.S. and the U.K. Next slide, Alex. Turning to Australia again. So as we mentioned, up 13% for the half, about $23 million. We also had a record GMV in the half year, just under $104 million, up 6.5%, and we continue to improve our monetization rate, sitting just above 22%. So we had a number of initiatives through the course of the year to improve that monetization rate. And we've expanded our marketing activities in some of our non-core markets like Perth and Canberra with our partnerships with ARN and oOh!media. And we've also seen pleasingly improvements in our brand salience. So one of our key metrics that we track in terms of the above-the-line brand marketing is brand salience, and that's up 32% on the prior period, and again, supported by the partnerships with oOh!media and ARN. Turning to the U.K. As I mentioned earlier, 85% growth in revenue for the half. GMV trending a little bit lower than that at 53% growth. The monetization rate just a touch below where we're sitting in Australia. And our GMV run rate is sitting about GBP 17 million for the year, obviously, at a low point in the year given it's a low season, but still up 43% on PCP. We've secured back in October, a follow-on investment from Channel Force, our partner in the U.K. has been with us now since June '23, bringing their total investment to about GBP 10 million over that time. We also launched a new partnership at the end of the half with Argos, one of the largest U.K. retailers, and that joins the long-standing partnership we've had with Dunelm, which is the U.K. homeware retailer. We're expecting pretty strong seasonal growth going into the Northern Hemisphere spring and summer season, so the fourth quarter of FY '26 and the first quarter of FY '27. Turning to the U.S. 380% growth, as I mentioned, coming off a very small base, but the GMV is moving similarly, up 310% to about $2.8 million and a strong monetization rate of 22.5%. We also secured a follow-on investment from iHeart in November that we announced, which has enabled us to launch some new cities, particularly in New York and Houston, and Phoenix. We've actually seen a lot of demand in the New York marketplace over the course of the half and the end of last year, which was a market we hadn't actually launched, but we were seeing a lot of spillover demand and so took the opportunity to implement some marketing activities. And again, Northern Hemisphere, so we're expecting strong growth in the fourth quarter of this fiscal and the first quarter of next fiscal. Turning to our cash flow and our cash position. So as we mentioned, positive operating cash flow of $0.5 million on the back of 13.5% sort of revenue growth at the group level. But that tracks pretty closely with our cash receipts, up about 13% for the year. So we don't have the debtors. Most of our customers pay us upfront. And so revenue and cash receipts generally track pretty closely. We finished the half, as I mentioned, positive net cash flow of $8.3 million, which includes the proceeds of the cap raise in November. We are planning on investing money into marketing in the U.S. and the U.K., and we did flag that as part of the capital raise process that we intended to use $5 million to increase our marketing activities over and above what we had already planned in the U.S. and the U.K. And so we're expecting the underlying group cash flow for the full year will be -- sorry, it was $1 million for the half. At the end of the half, we had $27 million of cash on balance sheet, and that gives us the optionality, as I mentioned, to invest in the U.K. and the U.S. marketing activities, but also settle the convertible notes we have that are expiring in June and July. So we have currently accounted for the convertible notes with oOh!media and ARN as being equity settled. We retain the optionality to either repay those notes in equity or repay them in cash. And we have the capability on the balance sheet, or capacity on the balance sheet to do that at the appropriate juncture. We haven't made -- the Board certainly hasn't made a decision on what they want to do, and we will decide that closer to the date. Next slide, please, Alex. So looking at the Australian -- sorry, back one, please, Alex. Just looking at the Australian business and how it generates cash to invest in the U.K. and the U.S. So our Australian marketplaces, as we mentioned, are cash generative. So you can see there in the table, the Australian market cash flow is about $18.6 million. So that's really the operations of the Airtasker marketplace and the Oneflare marketplace. That was up about 10%, 11% for the half. It tracks relatively closely to the revenue growth. You can see the 8% up half-on-half. We then are able to cover our global head office expenditure. So this is the cash expenditure incurred on running the platform, the engineering teams, the back-office teams running a listed business. And there was sort of -- that was relatively flat growth in that line, and we generated about $7.7 million after covering all our head office costs, which is up about 28% on PCP. We then use that money to invest into the U.K. and the U.S. So predominantly, our cash investment in the U.K. and U.S. markets is in marketing alongside the contra media we have from our media partners. And then obviously, we maintain sort of small teams in each of those markets, just a couple of people. Next slide, please, Alex. And I think I'm handing back to Tim now. Awesome.

Thanks, Mahendra, for articulating some great results based on some really solid performance during the half. So as a reminder of our growth strategy, we have a 3-point plan, which is to invest into our core platform to maintain our brand and market leadership position to use this platform to generate profitable growth in the Australian market to generate cash and then to take that cash and invest it into scaling in the U.S. and the U.K., leveraging that same platform investment that we have built into the Australian market and doing it alongside some great media partners like iHeartMedia in the U.S. and Channel 4 in the U.K. So going into the first part of our investment into the core platform. During the half, we invested into brand salience via our partnerships alongside oOh!media and ARN. And this generated us a really, really strong return on investment in terms of our brand salience. So what did we do? We engaged a marketing analytics firm called Mutinex to develop our Sahiraqibesian MMM. MMM stands for marketing mix model. And basically, it's a way for us to ingest thousands and thousands of data points around our marketing investments and to be able to create a predictive model of what the return on investment is. So really pleased to say that during the half year, alongside ARN and oOh!media, we're able to deliver a 32.1% increase in unprompted brand awareness. So that's really the measure of brand salience. That's when we ask people, hey, when you need a handyman, who do you think of, where 32.1% more people say immediately, I would choose Airtasker. In addition to that brand investment that we made, we've also been able to see through the MMM that in terms of direct incremental ROI during the period that every dollar we spent, we're able to generate about $4.85 of GMV or in direct robust terms, we're generating about $1.08 of revenue for every dollar that we spent during that period. In short, what we're seeing is that the marketing that we're doing is paying for itself in the very, very short term. But I think more importantly, is building a long-term brand asset, which continues to deliver us growth half-on-half. And during the half, we saw a record GMV, which grew to $103.5 million. And that was about 6.4% up on the prior year. What's really exciting about that is we're continuing to see that acceleration and momentum in the GMV growth happening from half to half to half, and we're continuing to see that into the first half of -- into the second half of FY '26. So really excited about that, too. On to the second real strategic goal that we have in our core platform investment is to address platform leakage to continue to drive purchase frequency. One of the ways that we're doing that is through our rebooking model. So rebooking is about when a customer is already connected with Airtasker through our platform, how are we making sure that they come back to Airtasker and put all their transactions through our marketplace again? We've made some great progress here. We launched AI-powered digital business cards, which sit on the customer's home screen and enable them to have one place that they go to for their cleaner, their plumber, their handyman. We launched a revised tasker rebooking interface, which more than doubled tasker responsiveness. And we revised fee pricing so that it's 1.9% service fee and a flat $5 connection fee, making a really great value for customers on our platform and to really drive rebooking volume. As a result of all that, we've seen rebooking volumes actually increase by about 40% on PCP. We also invested into AI-powered leakage and scan reductions. So during HY '26, we implemented a content moderation system powered by AI, which can basically find where there's photos, there's conversations, any of this leakage happening, and it can instantly delete that content. That resulted in both a direct GMV uplift, but I think more importantly, creates a really, really powerful brand equity or increased marketplace trust, which is long-term benefits. Thirdly, in terms of core platform investment, we're investing into generating recurring revenue. We launched during a few days ago, about 10 days ago, an Airtasker membership model. And the way that the membership works is that you pay an $89 annual upfront subscription fee, and that enables you to have unlimited tasks with no connection fees being charged. That saves customers up to $49 on each task that they do, and it renews automatically every 12 months. So we're creating this recurring stream of revenue. We're going to keep loading up Airtasker membership with more and more benefits for our customers, for our members. And we think this is a really, really exciting way to reward those high-frequency customers on our platform. It's worthwhile touching on the way that we recognize revenue in relation to our memberships, which is that although we bring in $89 of cash upfront for the membership payment, we recognize revenue across the term of the membership, which is 12 months. And that is about $6.74 every single month over 12 months. And at the end of that period, the subscription renews automatically again. It's also worthwhile saying that Airtasker earns fees from both customers and from taskers. So the service fees that are paid on the tasker side of the marketplace continue to be relevant on each task going forward. So looking forward to the remainder of FY '26. Airtasker Australia is going to deliver double-digit revenue growth. So really happy to be reaffirming that guidance. Importantly, we're going to see an increasing contribution from top-line GMV growth rather than pricing or yield-related growth. The second thing is that we're going to maximize the cash contribution from our Oneflare business. So as Mahendra mentioned, we made some changes to ensure that we could increase the efficiency of that business and increase the cash contribution that it delivers. We're going to see that through for the remainder of FY '26. We are going to see our Australian marketplace increase their cash generation. So in FY '25, we saw about $15.2 million come out of our Australian business. We're going to see that continue to grow into FY '26. Then we're going to see U.K. and U.S. really start to accelerate their growth trajectory. We're going to support that growth with $5 million invested into a disciplined program of marketing investments. And to make sure that we're really clear upfront, we're going to see that result in underlying group cash outflow of about $5 million to $6 million for the full year. Finally, we've got a really strong balance sheet. We've got over $27 million in cash, and that provides us with that capital to be able to support U.S. and U.K. marketing activity to really drive that marketplace into some serious growth, but it also gives us flexibility in the way that we handle our convertible notes issued to own media and ARN. So as a reminder of that in the first quarter of '27, we can choose to either settle those notes with cash, which would be about $5.6 million for each note, or we can choose to settle it in equity as well. So this gives us additional flexibility and optionality in what we choose to do in those arrangements. So we're going to pass through some cool imagery of the Visa Cash out racing bulls and the way that Airtasker is building our brand salience alongside a global and fast-growing brand, and skip to the thank you slide to say thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Obviously, really proud of the results and the whole Airtasker team. And pleased to open it up for questions. I also want to just call out that as part of the presentation, we've upped the transparency on cash flow seasonality, as Mahendra went through the typical cash flow seasonality. We've also upped the transparency around our media deals. So in the annexure to the presentation, which is on the ASX, you can also see a full outline of all of our media partnerships. And we've also got a worked example of how liquidity -- how the media partnerships may be settled over the full period. So worthwhile giving that a read, and of course, happy to answer questions about any of those parts right here. So handing it over to you, Alex, to help us through some of the questions.

Awesome. So we've got a couple of questions around share price. And I think that we can all agree that the share price has been really, really challenged. It's a challenging market. What can we say here? First of all, we're really focused on growing the revenue, growing the cash flow, and growing the performance of the business. That is where we are every single day. And I'm across product, marketing, every aspect of our business to grow our revenue and grow the fundamentals of our business. That said, it's also really important that we start to further engage with our investors. So we've brought on an Investor Relations lead, and we are investing heavily into our road shows and investor engagement across the 2 main cities in Australia, running things like investor lunches, investor education programs, also investing into the website investor hub, which you're watching the webinar through now to be able to do CRM, e-mails, newsletters, all of these things to be able to provide more information to investors to get a little bit more about what we're doing with Oneflare. As Mahendra mentioned, we've taken some really positive steps to increase the efficiency of that business. We've restructured the sales organization to make it more efficient in that way. We've also really focused in on the job categories, lead pricing, and marketing to make it have a more positive impact on Airtasker from a cash contribution perspective. We have not closed that business. We are continuing to make -- to operate that business and to make sure it has the best possible cash impact to Airtasker. Next question. How does the conversion rate of posted task in the book task compare across Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. So what we see is that Airtasker is built on network effects. And what that means is that as the liquidity builds, the experience in the marketplace improves as well. So in an early-stage marketplace, you tend to get when a task is posted, you'll have lesser people bidding on that task or willing to engage in that task. And then as the marketplace improves, you'll have more and more tasks happening. So as you get more customers, you get more task as you get higher assign rates. For that reason, we see that in Australia, it's a very, very high assign rate. In the U.K., we've got a growing assign rate. And in the U.S., we're still in that earlier stages, which is why our building network effects is so critical. And that's why not only does the posted tasks increase GMV, but also you're seeing the assignment rate grow over time, which is what really produces that exponential growth effect. We've got a question here about high-value trade jobs. So Airtasker seems to be focused less so on licensed and specialized trades versus other sort of lead generation or like quote advertising type businesses. So it's actually quite an interesting observation. Airtasker has about double the amount of jobs as any of these other platforms. So we're the clear leader in terms of posted jobs. And although we do have a healthy number of people doing furniture assembly or moving or other these sort of everyday jobs, we actually have a large number of people with specialized trades who are actually verified through our platform, whether it's gas fitting, whether it's plumbing, whether it's electrical. So we actually do have a strong position. But I think it is a great call out in relation to Airtasker's marketing and branding, which is, over time, moving more and more towards high-trust, high-quality trade jobs as well. Can you set up an ecosystem review content platform and specialized trades? It's hard to find reliable, quality tradespeople. So one of the things that we've been working on heavily is using artificial intelligence to be able to bring out the best version of people's profiles so that they're able to market themselves and to put their best foot forward when they're doing -- when they're positioning themselves for jobs. And in doing so, we've been able to help support people in more specialized trades, bringing to life all of these verifications like trade licenses, et cetera, on profiles. Yes, we've got a question from Stephen. In Australia, it looks like an above-inflation uptick in average pass price in the second quarter. Any call-outs on this at all?

Yes. So we are seeing some increase in the average task price. And a real positive of Airtasker's model is that as the average task price grows, we earn a percentage of that growth. So as our taskers win, we win too. That has been a contributor to some of the GMV growth, and we expect to see that those prices stay steady. I would say that Airtasker, in general, is a good indicator of like future inflation. We're seeing some of this data in real terms. So from our perspective, as a bellwether to the economy, yes, we have seen some inflation in the service price.

Next question is from Fola Tim, could you give us a bit more color around how the Argos relationship works and what your expectations are from it? Is it something you could replicate in the U.S. with firms like Home Depot?

Argos is an enormous retailer in the U.K. If you basically ask anyone who's from the U.K., it's a big part of their childhood, and it's an absolute stalwart of the retail industry. So it is a massive opportunity. The way that we have structured all of these partnerships is that we try to -- we use -- they focus on distribution rather than like high software integration. Argos is promoting us in their stores with physical collateral. They're also promoting us on their website and through CRM. So when you buy something on Argos that needs assembly or installation, they are contacting customers to let them know that Airtasker is a partner and they can get some -- they can get a small discount to try out Airtasker. We believe there's massive opportunity to continue to ramp up that partnership. So we're continuing to work alongside the Argos team to squeeze everything that we can out of that distribution. There's some exciting changes that are coming up shortly, which we'll be excited to share in our next update. But is it repeatable into the U.S.? Absolutely. What a lot of these firms realize is that providing installation and assembly is something that is -- installation assembly is something that's actually friction to customers buying the product. And so partnering with Airtasker enables them to improve their own revenue, but of course, gives us a great distribution angle, too.

Any more about the share price decline? And are you leveraging too much with the marketing costs?

So can you repeat the question, Alex?

In regards to the share price decline, do you think you are leveraging too much the marketing costs?

One of the great things that you'll notice, we've increased our transparency around how our media partnerships actually work. So I'd encourage anyone who's interested to have a read through the illustrative example of how the media works. But I think overarchingly, what's really important about these media partnerships is that they are tied to ultimate performance of those -- of the media itself. So for example, in the U.S. and the U.K., the more revenue that we generate, the more value that our media partnerships -- our media partners earn. If there's no revenue that's generated in those markets, the dilutive impact is basically -- is very, very small. If there is a huge improvement in revenue contribution from that, the cost of the media partnership scales with that. So I think in terms of leverage, we're not actually leveraging more because the media partnerships are very much performance-based.

Question from Barh. Is there any change to service fee percentage as well as the $89 subscription? When was this rolled out? Any initial numbers that you can share around memberships?

No, there's no change to the service fee structure that is being maintained. On the customer side, we launched memberships about 10 days ago. So if you do want to Google it, you can go and find an Airtasker membership, and I'd encourage you all to buy one. It's really, really great value. But no, the service fees remain the same. It's a customer-side membership.

Got some questions there on your chat over there.

Great. So this one is for you, Mahendra. On Slide 15, do the expenses that are there include the noncash spend on marketing contract?

No, it's cash only. So we have -- we backed out all noncash items in that presentation.

Awesome. Brent, we've got a question. While the international markets are growing reasonably from a revenue perspective, the investment continues to expand as well. Do you have a view on when those international markets will become self-sufficient? So one of the really, I think, notable things about how we expand overseas -- into international markets is we have -- we maintain a very lean fixed cost base. So as Mahendra mentioned, we have 4 employees in the U.S. and 3 employees in the U.K. So we've got a very small fixed cost base. And the variable is the marketing expenditure. And what that means is that we've really got the optionality to choose when to dial up more marketing investment or when to bring it back to cash flow generation. Where we are in the U.K., as we reported in June '25, with about a $21 million GMV ARR. We're expecting to see that GMV run rate improve in the second half as we go through the spring/summer high season in the U.K. And if you can sort of look at where a $21 million GMV ARR is at a 20% monetization rate, you're already generating about $4 million to reinvest back into the marketplace. Of course, if we can continue to scale that GMV, that number gets a bit -- that number gets considerably larger. And so we've really got the optionality, I would say, even from now to turn the U.K. market towards cash flow neutral or even cash generation. But we think the opportunity to keep expanding that marketplace before we pull it back to efficiency, there's still a good reason to be in investment phase right now.

There's a couple of questions here around the convertible notes. I might just sort of consolidate them. So there's a couple of threads asking us how we think about settling the media partnership notes, when we would choose equity over cash. And then I guess just a general point about the concept of convertible notes. So I think what we would say is the convertible notes, we see them as an efficient cost of capital, and largely decisions around whether we issue equity or issue pay with cash or settle the notes with cash will be a function of cost of capital at that particular point in time. So we retain the optionality, as we mentioned in the presentation, with the upcoming notes to either settle in equity or settle in cash. And the decision will be made depending on the cost of capital, or alternatively, what other options we might choose to do with the cash. So if we look at these notes, the notes that we issued in the U.S. are essentially at a coupon of 5% in Australia, 5.8%. That is a very low cost of capital for us in terms of borrowing money or raising equity capital. So we feel that it's quite a cost-effective means of pursuing our marketing activities and investment into overseas markets and the Australian market.

I think also it's worthwhile just building what Mahendra just mentioned, in looking at how the media partners are ultimately rewarded. And when you go through the illustrative analysis that we provided on 37 38 in the deck, you can see that it's very much tied to Airtasker's ultimate market capitalization. Basically, the 2 dials that make a great outcome for our media partners is revenue in the jurisdiction in which they are operating. So for our U.S. media partners, the U.S. revenue, for our U.K. media partners, the U.K. revenue multiplied by Airtasker's group revenue multiple. And I think what's so important about that is it aligns everyone to wanting the same thing, which is increase revenue in the jurisdiction you're in and get Airtasker's group revenue multiple into a good shape. And when those 2 things work out, our media partners win. But more importantly, we, by default, also win in an even bigger way through those media partnerships. So I think they are a very strong cost of capital, but also really, really great alignment of interests.

A question here from Varesh. How are the new cities where we've just launched behaving? Are there any new rollouts that we're planning?

Airtasker tends to be a very, very unintuitive and unexpected type of marketplace. As we mentioned throughout the deck, we started out really focused on Los Angeles, Austin, and Las Vegas. And what we started to see is like this massive overflow into other markets. As an example, New York as a market is experiencing snowstorms this week, and also about 3 weeks ago, had snowstorms. And we saw an absolutely massive influx of snow shoveling jobs coming to Airtasker. Why? Because if you look at how traditional local services work, it's generally like a fixed supply base. Like it's like, hey, if the snow shovel up the road from you is busy, too bad. You can't get your snow shovel. What Airtasker enables is to create more opportunities in the market. So when you post up your job on Airtasker, hey, maybe the guy who lives 2 miles down the road is actually willing to drive to your street to do your snow shoveling. You can create all of these opportunities. And as such, we've seen markets like Phoenix, Arizona, like New York, like Atlanta, Georgia, all starting to really have some positive traction. And this is one of the most powerful things about having an open marketplace or an open platform: a lot of good things happen, but you do have to create service area for things to go right. So in short, first 3 markets are going well, but I think this expansion into -- via overflow into other markets is really, really exciting as well.

A couple of questions there for you, Mahendra, from Wang. How did net swing to negative?

Yes. So this is largely to do with the accounting for the convertible notes in the media we received. So when we receive the media, we obviously have an asset that's on the balance sheet. And correspondingly, there's a liability to settle the notes or repurchase the equity if we issue an equity. And so as we use the marketing or the media that's on the balance sheet, that gets expensed through the P&L. So we're reducing the asset side of the balance sheet, while the liability side of the balance sheet largely stays the same. And so you end up going to reducing your -- I guess, your total assets relative to your total liabilities, and so we went into negative in the half.

Another question Andrew from Charlie. Group cash flow was negative for the half. Do you have any plans to seek further external funding for growth?

Not at this point. So underlying cash flow was negative. So we started the half year with about $19 million of cash on balance sheet. We raised net proceeds of $9 million out of the capital raise that we closed in November, and we still have another $0.5 million to come on that. And then we consumed about -- we invested about $1 million. We flagged that we are going to be ramping up our marketing activities through the peak season in the U.S. and the U.K. So we expect that number -- the underlying number to be about $5 million to $6 million at the full year. We do have $27 million of cash in the balance sheet. So we're quite comfortable that we have the capacity to dip into our cash reserves for -- to fund our growth in the U.S. and the U.K., while at the same time, having or retaining flexibility with respect to the upcoming note maturities in June and July.

Another question from Wang. Has the media partnership sold any shares, or have they obtained as part of the deal?

I assume that reference is to the investment by iHeartMedia in the capital raise. So when we did the last beneficial report a couple of weeks ago, they hadn't. I would say that they're entitled to sell their shares. It is a volatile equity market at the moment. So each investor will make their own decision around their portfolio and what shares they wish to retain or sell. And that's one of the reasons we also are seeing volatility in our share price. I think it's beyond the performance of the business itself. I think there are broader factors at play in the broader equity markets in both Australia and globally.

A question from Charlie Song. What were the initiatives that drove the improvement in your monetization rate? Do you have a long-term monetization rate target?

So monetization rate, just as a reminder, is our revenue divided by our gross marketplace volume. So one of the biggest drivers of improving the monetization rate is how many completed tasks or happy customers that we have going through the marketplace. Again, this aligns us really well with our customers. What's good for customers is good for Airtasker as a business model. By having AI do a lot of scam and leakage detection, we have seeing like a lot lesser volume of tasks going through to the taskers that don't behave well on the platform, and that is driving an improvement in the monetization rate. In terms of the long-term monetization rate, I think actually, we have a really great opportunity to provide even greater value to customers for things like rebooking and memberships at a lower monetization rate. And what that allows us to do is capture more marketplace volume. So as an example, Airtasker membership pay $89 per year as a customer. If you use us 100 times during the year, then you're still only going to pay $89. So you really didn't pay much of a connection fee. However, we're always generating yield on the other side of that marketplace. So what we'd rather have is much higher GMV volume and do that at a monetization rate, which is good value for our customers. So whilst we're not publishing a target for our monetization rate, flagging the pricing changes that we've made for rebooking and for membership, it's really to say that we believe that there's a huge value unlock by having some of those parts of our business at a lower monetization rate or a lower price rate.

A question from Steve. Can you talk to the rationale around the U.S. city launches, Houston, Phoenix, how much initial investment in New City from your experience is needed to start the flywheel spinning?

So it's really interesting. We're seeing so much volume come through organically that it's less of a strategic rationale to go, hey, we're going to launch into that specific city, and we're going to spend that much to go into that city. What we're seeing more typically is, hey, there's a few hundred jobs happening in that city by itself, snow shoveling in New York or in Boston. And so what can we do to just put a little bit of fuel on that fire and drive some incremental tasks through that marketplace? And so I think you actually have the -- we have the great privilege of not needing to say, oh, we need to invest $5 million into that marketplace in a minimum to get it going and much more of that flexibility to just be able to say, hey, if we want 10% more tasks, we can go and invest a little bit more in performance marketing into that. And what that means is we can keep our finger on the dial of cash generation versus all our marketplace growth without having to commit upfront to the sort of junky long-term commitments.

A question from Glen. What is the cost of the F1 play? And what has it returned to date?

So Formula 1 is under strict confidentiality as to the specifics of that transaction. So I can't share the value of the sponsorship. But I'd say that where we have talked to industry professionals, we have an incredibly economic deal. I think most people are surprised by how high value the partnership is for us. Why is that a unique scenario? Because Airtasker has actually been really smart about saying, hey, we don't actually want to the car or the drivers and have a little sticker on a car, which can cost millions and millions of dollars. We said, hey, you've got these great undermonetized assets. You've got all these people in the team that are on television being seen by 50 million people a week. And no one's actually looking at them because I guess, Microsoft and Google and all of these companies, they want to have a splashy thing on a car. And what we're doing is saying, hey, let's honor the people who are doing the jobs behind the scenes, the pit crew, the people in the garage, all these things who are seen on television, but are generally undermonetized assets. So in summary, we're getting an incredible deal on that. It's been super beneficial for us.

Next question from Brent. Do you have a view on when your international markets will become self-sufficient?

I think we actually already answered that question.

Okay. We're going to move to the other questions over here now. What's the plan -- we've also answered that. What's the plan in overseas business expansion for 2026? When we do experience material that one, excuse me. Has the company ever considered other methods of advertising, like movie advertising and magazines? Can you talk to me a little bit more about the marketing mix?

Yes. I would say, first of all, engaging marketing analytics firm Mutinex in all 3 markets across the world really gives us robust statistical analysis on what's working. And it's really great to see that we're already generating positive direct incremental ROI in our key market as well as long-term brand equity, which is often harder to measure. So I think that's the first starting point. Everything has got to be data-driven and has to be based on statistical analysis of what it's delivering. In terms of alternative methods, we are trying -- we have tried and had some great experience across a whole different range of mediums. In the United States, we've been doing some cinema advertising, which we're seeing have some great effects. We've also been seeing some great opportunities to do social marketing and social integrations. So you might have seen last week in an unpaid integration, Hamish from Hamish and Andy, posting up about using Airtasker to do jobs. You also -- if you check out Airtasker USA and Airtasker U.K., we're seeing some great collaborations with, for example, our L.A. DJ L&K, who's got sort of 400,000 local followers in the United States, and she's doing a daily giveaway of Airtasker vouchers for people who call in and dial into Talkback radio with their task needs. So in summary, we're trying a whole bunch of different marketing initiatives, and it's all underlined by marketing analytics, which gives us that robust framework of is it working or is it not working? If it's not working, we drop it. If it is working, we dial it up.

Next question from Varesh. Where do you see Airtasker in 5 years' time in terms of revenue and number of countries? Any vision for 5, 10 years?

So what we're really focused on at the moment is our next milestone of getting to 1 million customers using Airtasker 3 times a year with 3 countries at scale. And what's that to say is that our current dogged focus is on getting the U.S., the U.K., and Australia at massive scale and improving purchase frequency. If we can unlock that purchase frequency to dial up, you're going to see a profound impact on the business in terms of cash generation. And as that cost of capital and cash generation -- the cash generation goes up, cost of capital comes down, I think the opportunity to leverage our app and market it into new countries becomes very, very large. So I'd say the world is our oyster. There is huge upside. What's more important, make sure we execute to hit that next goal.

Next question from Varesh. Can you include a slide highlighting all future timelines for coupons and payments? When is the next payment due after June and July 2026, Mahendra?

Yes. There's an extra C in the slide deck. So I think it's Slide 36 or 35 has a summary of all the deals. And we -- as Tim mentioned earlier, we've included scenarios for the U.K. and the U.S. in the subsequent slides to give -- provide some education around how these -- how the settlement might play out.

Okay. That is I think most of the questions. Any last questions that anyone would like to submit?

Look, thank you so much for all of the questions and engagement. And this is really what we're trying to do as an organization, is get on the front foot, be there to chat with our investors. So are you going to be seeing that communication, that engagement, investor engagement continue to dial up? I really appreciate all of the questions that are here, and any of the feedback that you want to share with us, please do through Investor Hub. Thank you so much, everybody, and looking forward to sharing another update shortly. See you later.

Thanks, everyone.