Atturra Limited (ATA.AX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. My name is Shan Kanji, I'm the Chairman of Atturra. Welcome to the 2025 Annual General Meeting of Atturra Limited. On behalf of the Board, I would like to welcome each of our shareholders who are attending. I begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we work, live and gather, and I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. It's now 10:00 a.m. and there being a quorum present, I declare the meeting and poll open. I confirm that the meeting has been properly constituted. In opening the 2025 AGM, I would like to introduce the Atturra Board and management team who are in attendance. Alongside me, Atturra has a very capable and committed Board of Directors, including Nicole Bowman, Stephen Kowal and Jonathan Rubinsztein. Jonathan is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Nuix Limited, an ASX-listed leading global provider of investigative analytics and intelligence software. Previously, Jonathan was Managing Director and CEO of ASX-listed SaaS company, Infomedia Limited. Prior to his role at Infomedia, Jonathan was CEO and Founding Shareholder at UXC Red Rock Consulting, where he was instrumental in growing the business from a start-up to over 700 people across 13 offices. The Board and I wholeheartedly recommend you support his reelection. Also in attendance today are Ash Pather, Atturra's independent auditor; Herbert To, Atturra's CFO, David Decker, Atturra's COO; Kunal Shah, Atturra's Company Secretary; and Danny Younis from Automic. Being a virtual meeting, we are unable to meet with you in person today, but I would like to thank those shareholders who are joining us via the Computershare meeting platform. The agenda for today's meeting will be as follows: the Chairman and CEO addresses. We will then proceed with the formal matters to be considered at today's AGM. And finally, there will be an opportunity for questions or comments. Fellow shareholders, through what has been a relatively difficult year in terms of the Canberra market, I'm proud of what Atturra has been able to achieve. It is with some regret that as a result of these challenges, we conducted a Canberra-centric rate structure impacting around 50 staff with a one-off extraordinary costs of approximately $2 million. Atturra ended the 2025 financial year with revenue of $300.6 million, statutory EBIT of $14.9 million and underlying EBITDA of $30.5 million. This growth exceeded our long-term growth target of revenue growth of more than 20%. Our underlying EBITDA falls within the range and LICAT revenue has grown 24% on the prior comparable period. This continued growth reflects the successful integration of acquisitions and is a testament to Atturra's ability to continue to execute against the strategy. We ended the year with cash of more than $91 million, undrawn facilities of $35.1 million and net cash of $72.9 million with substantial capacity for additional debt beyond the existing committed facilities. As part of our ongoing capital management, Atturra initiated a share buyback program in April 2025. It is an on-market share buyback program for up to 10% of Atturra's issued capital and will run for a maximum of 12 months. Even after the planned buyback and acquisition of Blue Connections, with the upfront cash consideration of $18 million, which completed in September '25, Atturra has significant financial capacity to pursue its core growth initiatives, including the M&A strategy without need for any external capital. No dividend was declared in FY '25. And consistent with Atturra's strategy to invest in continued business growth, IP and acquisitions, there is no current plan to change this position. Looking ahead, we expect FY '26 to be another year with a growth rate at or above our target of 20%, both for revenue and underlying EBITDA. As always, Atturra targets at least half of that growth by organic means, and half by acquisitions. We have provided guidance for FY '26 for revenue to be in excess of $380 million and underlying EBITDA above $40 million. We continue to deliver against our above-market growth through a combination of organic and acquisitive growth with a stronger focus on organic growth in FY '26. Though I believe a significant loss for Australian sovereign capability, we have now pivoted away from the government and defense markets and are deploying that capability into other markets in Australia. Our philosophy remains consistent. We target underlying EBITDA of 10.5% so that we can continue to invest in growth, acquisitions and IP. We have increased the share of predictable revenue being recurring and long-term client revenue to 78%. This highlights the Atturra is delivering quality solutions as clients continue to engage with Atturra on a long-term and repeat basis. The technologies we support have made significant improvements in their AI capabilities and we work closely with our technology partners to integrate and optimize AI models, data and infrastructure, delivering solutions to our clients to accelerate time to value. Atturra continues to experience strong demand for AI solutions from clients and is well positioned to meet this demand. ESG is important to what we do at Atturra and is formalized in our ESG framework, which is outlined in Atturra's Sustainability Report. Our ESG behaviors are aligned with the following 5 pillars. Ethics and governance. We embed our corporate values across all areas of the business through a strong governance structure. Staff have access to tools to share ideas or raise concerns that they may have, and our modern slavery policy is supported by supply chain mapping and risk assessments. Atturra continues to be ISO certified in quality, environmental, safety and information security. People and culture. Our people are a core differentiator. We invest in talent through learning and development programs, leadership training and a comprehensive onboarding experience called Atturra base camp. Employee engagement is measured through monthly anonymous engagement surveys with results driving management action. Protecting our workplace and clients. Data security is foundational at Atturra. We operate a cloud-based environment with industry-leading security, validated by a Microsoft Secure score above industry standards and compliance with ACSC Essential Eight controls. Community support. Community engagement is a passion both of mine and of Atturra, with initiatives supporting both local and national charities. Over the past year, for example, Atturra staff have raised funds for local and national charities including Dress for Success, Cancer Council, Telethon and Legacy Australia. Environmental accountability. Atturra aims to have a low impact footprint, and we offset our carbon footprint for office use and work-related air travel. Through our partnership with Pony Up for Good, we diverted 4 tonnes of e-waste from landfill in 2025. And over 16,700 fresh meals donated to SecondBite. But above all, it is our people who are the key to Atturra's success. Following the acquisition of Blue Connections, we now have over 1,200 staff predominantly in Australia and New Zealand, a great majority of whom are consultants delivering Atturra's services. I'll now hand to our Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Kowal, to expand on our philosophy, industry and technology strategies and our acquisition strategies.

Thank you, Shan. I'm excited to join you here today for our fifth AGM and I'd like to give a special thanks to the Board for being instrumental in helping guide Atturra. To continue from what Shan was talking about, we execute on our business philosophy in several ways. Firstly, by continuing to grow our existing practice areas where we enjoy competitive advantages; secondly, by investing in new practice areas, third, by acquiring new practices to supplement our existing businesses and finally, by acquiring capabilities to add to our existing practices. For those long-term investors, you will note that our overall vision and strategy has remained unchanged, and our messaging is consistent since our IPO in December 2021. Our vision is simple and it remains unchanged. It is to be Australia's leading advisory and IT solutions provider. Our vision is enabled through both an industry and technology strategy. At a high level, the industry strategy is about having strong industry specializations allowing the development of industry solutions and clear sales differentiation, which leads to a low client churn and more predictable revenue streams. Our technology strategy at a summary level is about choosing technologies and specializations in which we can be market leaders. In FY '25, we entered the enterprise software market through the acquisition of DalRae, a specialist SAP provider. The other core nuance of our vision is to focus on being the leading IT solutions provider which is slightly differentiated from IT service provider. The important difference is that solutions is more than services. It's about building Atturra-specific solutions aligned to our selected technologies and industries. This provides Atturra with secure long-term revenue streams and the ability to achieve higher overall margins. FY '25 saw that solution vision starting to come to fruition with the launch of several Atturra offerings, including Boomi on ACP, Scholarion, our student information management system and several ERP accelerators primarily focused on our manufacturing clients. Whilst we aim for an even split between organic and inorganic growth, FY '25 was skewed towards inorganic growth, which is heavily influenced by the 6 acquisitions we made during the year. We acquired Exent in August 2024, Chrome Consulting in November '24, Plan B in December '24, ComActivity in January '25 and Kitepipe in March 2025 and then DalRae Solutions in June. These acquisitions have strengthened the foundation of which our industry and technology strategies are built with Plan B and Kitepipe broadening Atturra's reach to New Zealand and to the U.S. Whilst Chrome Consulting and DalRae Solutions have enabled our expansion into enterprise solutions. With the recent addition of Blue Connections, Atturra now has a broad range of capabilities and the required scale to be competitive in the managed services space. It also contributes to a healthy revenue mix with the share of predictable revenue increasing. I'm also pleased to announce that the integration of these acquisitions are on track and that Exent, Chrome, Plan B and ComActivity have already been fully integrated. I do want to spend a minute highlighting Atturra's key IP offerings. Atturra's first major IP offering is Scholarion, a cutting-edge student information system built on Microsoft D365. Scholarion features a total of 12 modules that can be licensed and tailored for other schools, making it a key enabler for digital transformation in the K-12 sector. Scholarion addresses a market that has been underserved for years, offering a significant upside potential as more schools seek modern integrated solutions. I see a lot of demand for this in the market. To date, a total of 5 schools have already signed up, and I see no sign of this slowing down. The second flagship IP offering is the Atturra Cloud platform, ACP, which provides an end-to-end cloud-hosted environment optimized for integration and ERP solutions. ACP is scalable, flexible and designed to suit organizations of all sizes. This is another solution where I see strong demand. As of today, we have over 40 clients using Atturra cloud platform. The platform delivers various financial and strategic benefits, including higher gross margins and drives primarily recurring revenue streams. Notably, about half of the new clients were new clients to Atturra, highlighting ACP's appeal and growth potential in both domestic and global markets. To wrap up, I will now look ahead at what this means for FY '26. Shan covered our forecast for FY '26 earlier with the forecasted revenue above $380 million and underlying EBITDA of above $40 million, $40.3 million to be precise. It is important to highlight that this forecast includes Blue Connections and we will review this forecast if we conduct any other material acquisitions. We thank you for your attendance at our AGM, your support for joining us in what has been a very positive and productive few years for Atturra. It provides continued validation of our strategy to be Australia's leading advisory and IT solutions provider. We look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. And with that, I'd like to hand back to Shan.

Thank you, Stephen. We now move to the formal business as set out in the Notice of Meeting. The Notice of Annual General Meeting was sent to all registered members on 12 September 2025, and is to be taken as read. Today's meeting is being held online by the Computershare meeting platform. This allows shareholders, proxies and guests to attend the meeting virtually. All attendees can watch a live webcast of the meeting. In addition, shareholders and proxies have the ability to ask questions and submit votes. Shareholders and proxy holders can submit questions at any time. To ask a question, select the Q&A icon. You may enter a selected topic from the drop-down menu to which your question relates and type your question into the box. Once you are finished typing, please press the send button. Please note that whilst you can submit questions from now on, they will not be addressed until the relevant time in the meeting. Please also note that your questions may be moderated or if we receive multiple questions on one topic, amalgamated. To ask a question verbally as a shareholder or proxyholder, please follow the instructions written at the bottom of the Q&A icon. Voting today will be conducted by way of poll on all items of business. For the purposes of the poll, I appoint Glenn Rogers of Computershare, the company's share registry, who have examined and prepared summaries of the proxy forms received to act as returning officer and to conduct the poll. If you're eligible to vote, once voting opens, press the vote icon and all resolutions will be activated with voting options. To cast your vote, simply select one of the options. There is no need to hit submit or enter button as the vote is automatically recorded. You will receive a vote confirmation notification on your screen. Shareholders in attendance via Computershare's meeting platform that have already submitted a proxy -- a vote by proxy should note that your votes will already be counted towards the poll. You do not need to lodge another vote unless you wish to change your proxy instruction. You can change your vote until I declare the voting closed. All undirected proxies or open votes that have nominated the Chairman of the meeting as their proxy will be cast in favor of each resolution in the Notice of Annual General Meeting. Please note that online voting portal is open and will remain open until the poll is declared closed. Your votes must have been submitted prior to the poll being closed for them to count. Are there any questions relating to the voting process?

There are no questions, Mr. Chairman.

Proxies have been inspected, and all those validly lodged have been accepted. Proxies have been received representing 288,493,867 shares or 77.57% of the issued capital of the company. We will now proceed to the resolutions set out in the Notice of Annual General Meeting. The first item of business is to receive the company's Annual Financial Report for the year ended 30 June 2025. The financial report and the reports of the directors and the auditors are now laid for the meeting. There will be no vote on this item, which is an item for discussion only. The company's auditor for 2025 financial year, Ash Pather, partner of Crowe Australasia is present to take questions relevant to the conduct of the audit and the preparation and content of the independent auditor's report. Are there any questions or comments on the financial report or the reports of the directors and auditors, the management of the company or are there any questions relevant to the conduct of the audit and the preparation and content of the auditor's report to be put to the auditor?

There are no questions, Mr. Chairman.

We will now proceed to the resolutions set out in the Notice of Annual General Meeting. Resolution 1 is as follows: to consider and if thought fit to pass, with or without amendment, resolution 1, adoption of the remuneration report as an ordinary resolution. The resolution wording is on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please submit your questions via the Q&A.

There are no questions, Mr. Chairman.

The proxies received in relation to this resolution are now on the screen. I now put the motion. Shareholders and proxyholders can vote at any time by selecting either for, against or abstain. Once you submit your vote, you should see a green tick confirming that your vote has been received. Resolution 2 is as follows: to consider and, if thought fit, to pass with or without amendment resolution 2, reelection of Jonathan Rubinsztein as a Director, as an ordinary resolution. The resolution wording is on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please submit your questions via the Q&A.

There are no questions for Mr. Chairman.

Proxies received in relation to this resolution are now on the screen. I now put the motion. Shareholders and proxyholders can vote at any time by selecting either for, against or abstain on the resolution. Once you submit your vote, you should see a green tick confirming that the vote has been received. Resolution 3 is as follows: to consider, and if thought fit, to pass with or without amendment Resolution 3, approval to issue of performance rights to Stephen Kowal as an ordinary resolution. The resolution wording is on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please submit your questions via the Q&A.

There are no questions, Mr. Chairman.

Proxies received in relation to this resolution are now on the screen. I now put the motion. Shareholders and proxyholders can vote at any time by selecting either for, against or abstain on the resolution. Once you submit your vote, you should see a green tick confirming that the vote has been received. Resolution 4 is as follows: to consider, and if thought fit to pass, with or without amendment, resolution 4, ratification of prior issue of placement shares as an ordinary resolution. The resolution wording is on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please submit your questions via the Q&A.

There are no questions, Mr. Chairman.

The proxies received in relation to this resolution are now on the screen. I now put the motion. Shareholders and proxyholders can vote at any time by selecting either for, against or abstain on the resolution. Once you submit your vote, you should see a green tick confirming that your vote has been received. Resolution 5 is as follows: to consider, and if thought fit, to pass with or without amendment resolution 5, renewal of proportional takeover provisions as a special resolution. The resolution wording is on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please submit your questions via the Q&A.

There are no questions, Mr. Chairman.

Proxies received in relation to this resolution are on the screen. I now put the motion. Shareholders and proxyholders can vote at any time by selecting either for, against or abstain on the resolution. Once you've submitted your vote, you should see a green tick confirming that your vote has been received. Resolution 6 is as follows: to consider, and if thought fit, to pass with or without amendment resolution 6, approval of financial assistance of named subsidiary as a special resolution. The resolution wording is on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please submit your questions via the Q&A.

There are no questions, Mr. Chairman.

Proxies received in relation to this resolution are on the screen. I now put the motion. Shareholders and proxyholders can vote at any time by selecting either for, against or abstain on the resolution. Once you've submitted your vote, you should see a green tick confirming that your vote has been received. That concludes the resolutions to be voted on today. As noted, we are conducting a poll on all resolutions. Please remember that to record your vote, you should be able to see a green tick confirming that your vote has been received. I would like to advise that voting on all resolutions will close shortly. I'll provide you all with a few moments now to finish voting. Please complete your voting now. [Voting]

There are no questions, Mr. Chairman.

I now declare the poll closed. The staff of Computershare will now process the polls, and the results of the poll will be announced to the ASX once they are available. We will be holding a general Q&A session shortly. If you have any questions in relation to the Chairman's address, CEO address or general questions, please submit your questions in the Q&A box now. Is there any other business that can be lawfully brought forward? There being no further questions, I'd like to thank all shareholders for their attendance and we'll now end the formal part of today's meeting. I declare the meeting closed. As advised earlier, the results of the poll will be announced to the ASX once they are available. We will now open the floor to any general questions. Are there any questions on the Chairman's address, CEO address or general questions?

Mr. Chairman, we do have a question. The question is from shareholder, Stuart Altas. Good morning. There has been no dividends issued to date. Could some indication be given as to when dividends will be forthcoming? Thank you.

As previously alluded to, Atturra's current policy is not to declare any dividends being focused on growth. We will advise the market once that position changes.

There are no further questions, Mr. Chairman.

There appear to be no further questions. Thank you for your continued support of Atturra and for your attendance today. We will now close the webinar.