Aussie Broadband Limited (ABB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everyone. We'll start to kick off then. Obviously, I'd like to welcome you all today to our first Aussie Broadband Investor Day. It's an test kind of see obviously, so many people here in person in Sydney, but obviously people online. So my name is Kusi, I'm the Chief Operating Officer here Aussie Broadband. I've been with the company about 6 years now. So when I started, it was still a pretty small operation back in more, about 20,000 customers, about 65 staff. And so very, very exciting to be kind of here today. I'm going to hear a little bit about the strategy and kind of the growth to date. Before I actually moved down to Melbourne and obviously started working in Aussie was actually Wollongong myself. So grow up here, went to uni here at the University of Wollongong actually worked at the University on for 6 years before I came to Aussie to effectively start the marketing and strategy team and then kind of moving to the Chief Operating Officer role earlier this year. So turn on the quicker great start. Here we go. The disclaimer slide is there for anyone who can read size 8 fonts in electric theaters, so feel free to read that in 2.5 seconds because now we're going to move on. We'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting on today. It's the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. There's very, very strong connections with this news. This actual location sell very, very strong connections to our indigenous community. But not only obviously here, we've got everyone meeting online, so to everyone wherever you are and all of the lands in which you're meeting on, and we pay our respects and acknowledge our others past, present and emerging. And just a little bit of housekeeping before we begin. So toilets for anyone who hasn't been to this venue before, just outside, down the stairs and then kind of to your left. So it's actually kind of underneath the area where we're standing today. If you need to use them at any point in time, an emergency exit or literally straight down the stairs and then out through the glass doors probably screaming the same -- exactly the same way that you came in. For anyone who's online, we've got a lot we are kind of covered today. The packs been uploaded. We ask it. If you are online, please don't record the session. We've got a couple of our partners that are presenting today, and they have asked for no recording, please. So we'd ask in respect that -- request from them, if that's all right. And then we are going to have the Q&A session. So you'll hear from effectively all of us today, pretty much all of the leadership team will speak. I'll run through the agenda in a second. What we're going to do is we're going to do a Q&A at the end. So the agenda will look a little bit like this. Essentially, I'm going to talk a little bit about Aussie, who we are, where we've come from, where we're kind of going and what we mean when we kind of talk about Aussie 2.0, our new organization that we're kind of transforming our session. John [indiscernible] who's our Chief Strategy Officer, is going to talk about the residential marketing strategy and talk about really how we see continued growth and opportunity in that area. Aaron, who's our Chief Growth Officer, is actually going to then talk about business and how we see what opportunities we see in that business segment and then moving on to enterprise and government, which obviously those are larger businesses and customers, and really about how we can kind of leverage all of the assets that we've kind of -- and infrastructure that we've got in those kind of 2 growth segments that are kind of a real focus for ours. We'll then talk about our wholesale and white label segment. And then at the end, Brian's actually our CFO is going to wrap up around delivering value. So we've got quite a full agenda, I suppose, planned to kind of cover. And the way we're going to run it is we're going to run a Q&A session at the end. So at the end, you'll be able to actually ask all of any of our leadership team members effectively any questions that you may have. If you are online, feel free to put questions in the chat, and you can put questions in the chat as we basically move through the presentation today. And then at the end, when we do our Q&A session, we'll actually have those read out, and we'll be able to answer those you basically be able to hear from all the members of the leadership team. We will have a short morning tea break and you're obviously more than welcome to join us for lunch. And at that point in time, obviously, we'll all be around taking kind of chat to all of us then as well. So we are very, very lucky to have the company steered and governed by a fantastic Board that has a wealth of experience, not only in terms of years, but across a number of different segments and industries, everything from kind of really start-up companies right through to our ASX in companies. Adrian Fitzpatrick is our chair, who's just here over to my right, your left. And so Adrian, obviously kind of -- yes, as a Chair of the Board, obviously, the operation of the Board, Richard Dammery is also here today. He's the Chair of our People and Community Committee. Also the board are Vicky Papachristos. She's basically from Melbourne. I would have come up today. Patrick Greene, who is actually one of the founders of Westvic Broadband, that was 1 of the 2 companies to merge with Wideband Networks to the form Aussie Broadband. And then Phil Britt, obviously, our Managing Director; and Michael Omeros, who's an Executive Director. Michael was the effectively founder of -- one of the founders of and was the CEO of Over the Wire when we acquired the company back in March 2022. Unfortunately, he's not able to make it today. He's actually recovering from some surgery, but he's doing really, really well. He's up in horizon at the moment. As I said, the Board will be -- and a couple of members of the board we around today. We also have our entire management team here today. So they'll actually introduce all of themselves when they come up and most of you'll hear from most of them or obviously, we'll be doing the Q&A and that's where you like to hear from all of us. And hopefully, as we go through, we'll be able to talk about the strategy and about who we are and what we do. And then you've got to get a bit of a better sense, I suppose, for the broader leadership team. I know many of you guys have hold probably on investor calls before with Phil and Brian, so you're probably more well acquainted with those guys, but you've got the full breadth and strength of the leadership team here today from Aussie Broadband. Good. So I want to talk about -- a little bit about our journey so far. We know a lot of you guys have been probably covering us for quite some time, but for the probably new or probably more interested, I guess. So we actually started, so back in effectively -- more world, which is a small town in regional Victoria, that probably not many people have heard of, or I certainly haven't heard of it, until I moved there myself. But Phil and John started effectively wideband networks back in 2003. The whole purpose and [ remi ] was they were basically trying to deliver Internet to people in regional Victoria that basically couldn't get any other internet any other way. And they started right back in the day, effectively doing wireless and satellite services and that kind of evolved into then DSL dial up and things like that DSL services as time went on. Basically, at the same time -- so literally the same year 2003, Pat Greene, who's one of our Board members and other a couple of group of founders actually founded a company called Westvic Broadband in Western Victoria. And so for a couple of years, actively, both companies has started the same year we 2003. Both companies operating individually, 1 kind of doing, obviously, the western side of regional Victoria, one doing the eastern side of regional Victoria, but both effectively with that same mission, trying to connect people who couldn't really get access to good quality Internet otherwise. And then in 2008, they kind of said, "Yes, look, we're already starting to both push into the city this makes sense to kind of merge and become a combined operation. So that's actually when Aussie Broadband was created. 2008, we then started to grow, offering still mainly those satellite, wireless and those DSL services. And then we moved into the NBN. So when the NBN started to roll out in the beginning of 2009, 2010. We then started to kind of move. And so in 2014, we started to establish our own connection to some of the NBN points of Interconnect. So we'll use the term POI a little bit throughout the presentation POI stands for points of interconnect. There's 121 NBN employees kind of spread out around the country. So back in 2014, we started to connect basically directly to these NBN employees. And then that was kind of the start of obviously our NBN journey. In areas where we weren't directly connected to the NBN employees are actually selling third-party services. So it was actually an Optus wholesale broadband service that we're buying, and that was what we were using the service areas like Queensland, Western Australia, Sydney, where we didn't have our own direct POI connection, that had a number of challenges with that service. And it was at that time, the wholesale offering, the wholesale broadband offering by Optus, wasn't that great. And so we had a real kind of contrast. We had customers that are having a fantastic experience where they were directly connected to the Aussie broadband infrastructure, then a whole group of customers that weren't having a really great experience at all. And that's why in 2016, we decided to commence our POI build out so we started to build out nationally to all 121 plays across the country, which was a very, very big undertaking for a company that was still relatively small. As I said, around that time, we had about 20,000 customers. So it was a large undertaking. But we saw it as our way, that investment in our infrastructure was going to help us deliver a better customer experience. So that's exactly what we did. And then we in line with building out our national network, we then started to build out our national marketing sales strategy really starts to ramp up our operations. And then from there, we've kind of started to grow. So we hit 100,000 customers at the beginning of 2019. And from there kind of have gone to 200,000, 300,000 to basically where we are today, which is kind of basically approaching now 600,000 customers. We're very, very obviously lucky that once we kind of got this momentum, people really, really value what we were doing. We will continue to grow. We listed on the ASX in 2020 as a way of basically being able to bring more funding into the business so we can continue doing what we were doing. And then obviously, we had the -- sorry, the acquisition of Over the Wire, which we completed in March of this year, and that's kind of then helped us really round out ourselves now into a full-scale telco with infrastructure assets in not only data, but voice and cloud, which we'll talk about today as well as our 4 segments. So where we stand today, we have as a combined entity over 800,000 services that we offer our customers. About -- yes, sorry, 530,000 customers -- unique customers. I always forget in my mind because I've got a customer graph that says 585,000 customers. but Origin, which is our white label provider actually is one unique customer with a whole bunch of different accounts. We always have to get to make that adjustment in my mind. So 530,000 unique customers across our 4 segments. About 1,100 staff across 8 locations. So truly a national footprint now. And you see a couple other things about our network and our infrastructure starts down there. We were very, very proud only a couple of months ago to be named as the most trusted telco brand in Australia. And that was obviously a great recognition of the brand awareness that we now have in the market, but also the value that customers see from the services that we provide. And we're actually 1 of the top 50 trusted brands in Australia. So not too bad for a little company that was operating out of a couple of hats in more well kind of as little as 5 or 6 years ago. We're very, very proud of the awards and they really kind of do speak for themselves. The fact that we've been able to continue growing from a very small operation to quite a large national operation, but still, as you see, continue to receive awards continue to receive awards over multiple years. And it's a real testament to the team, the team that Phil and John have built over time. And the fact that we continue to be so focused on our industry-leading technology and that award-winning kind of customer experience today. And the customer reviews that we get online kind of really they just speak for themselves. We're very, very humbled to be. Our ratings online are kind of in that 4 to 4.5 kind of star rating. Most of our competitors are really in the 1 to 2 kind of realm. So very, very proud, as I said, to be able to continue that and that has been through the work of the broader team, the whole organization of 1,100 people that we've got today. So just update everyone on the Over the Wire acquisition that I mentioned beforehand. Over the Wire, obviously, was a very business-focused technology company. We saw an opportunity there to really build out effectively that strategy into far more of a broader full-scale telco. So not only offering residential, but business ANG wholesale. Over the Wire had customers in that space. They had already products and people capability in that space as well as the systems and infrastructure to effectively underpin all of that. With the growth of effectively green by bringing Over the Wire in, we've actually really accelerated our integration of the company because we've seen some really great opportunities already we've been working hard to actually now be 1 team. We've now actually embedded our full -- our kind of 1 structure, and we're already seeing cost efficiencies. So we've got $5.2 million worth of synergies already action from that acquisition. We're on track to meet our investment case of $8 million to $11 million worth of synergies. And we see huge upside in being 1 combined entity with the kind of unique products and the infrastructure that they bring -- they bought to our group, particularly in that voice and cloud space. We see huge opportunity for us to continue to grow. And that's kind of really what this -- obviously, what today is all about, how our plans for growth. And what we kind of see over the next kind of couple of years out to 2025 and beyond. It was an interesting kind of premise when we did do the Over the Wire, acquisition because it was really a bit of an opportunity for us to really look at ourselves. Aussie was obviously a fantastic company as well as Over the Wire. But any company that's growing as quickly as we have, particularly over the last kind of 5 or 6 years. You're going to have scaling problems. We had systems, we had processes, all those kind of things that really weren't designed to have the hundreds of thousands of customers that all of a sudden, quite quickly, we found ourselves with. So it was an opportunity to kind of really relook at what we were doing and what we kind of set upon was we said, okay, well, let's not just kind of match these 2 organizations together, let's actually be very deliberate in our strategy. So we embarked upon a transformation journey, that transformation journey is internally, that's what we've been calling Aussie 2.0. That's really been about bringing the very best of both organizations, the very best of their infrastructure, their customer service, their people, their product, their capability, together into our new organization that is then equipped for where we see ourselves moving, as I said, through '23 and then into FY '25. So there's a huge opportunity that we see to grow and we see that that's going to deliver huge returns for our investment community as well. And we're going to be far more -- we're already right now far more than just a residential business. And as we continue to consolidate, I suppose, and evolve into 2.0. We really will be that full-scale telco. Our why our values are super important to us. It's the reason that we get out of bed every day and the reason we kind of come to work. We're here to change the game as a company, but also as individuals. We're here to change a game. And that game obviously started from our routes is providing Internet of people that basically couldn't get any other Internet and that was kind of game changing. It continues to be the way that we operate now and has continued to be how we've grown. We've owned so quickly because we were a game changer. We came and we said, you know what, you can provide a great quality products and amazing customer service and they can be based in Austria and all those other things but we're game-changing in the technology and communication industry at the time. But it's not just that industry that we're looking to change our game in, we're looking at games that we play for staff our community. They are all the kind of ways we see it as a broad statement for all of the a lot of different names that we play, and we want to be able to be game-changing in all of them. How we change our games through our 5 values. And again, they're very, very important to us. They are absolutely what we live by, and we use those values every day in our business to make sure that we're making the right decisions. Is this bull s***? Is this being good to people? Are we thinking big here? Those are -- those -- our 5 values really drive the decisions that we make, the way that we think and ultimately, the outcomes that we've been generating over the last kind of 5 years. Our goal -- our stated objective for '25 is that we want to be Australia's fourth largest provider of communications and technology services. So we see the fact that we're the fourth largest provider and obviously, probably no surprise, Telstra, Optus, TPG and then we want to be the clear #4. And we see that not as important because we hit the number #4, but it's important because of what it represents. What it represents to us is that we're doing something that is really game changing and people value it. We've got customers that are involved, employees are involved, investors that are involved in that game that we're playing. So we see it as really compelling, and it's not just to say that we are the fourth biggest because of all those other things, that being the fourth largest provider of communications and technology services actually represents, I suppose, for the company that we are at that point in time. These are some of the things that we think we've got 6 -- what we call internally areas of fundamental importance. And this kind of is the world that we see in 2025 that we see as possible if we are the fourth largest provider. You'll see a couple of the metrics on there. We're providing millions of services, voice numbers in minutes, mobile services, all those kind of things. But they're balanced with our broader effectively outlook, I guess, thriving people and culture, building better communities. They are fundamentally important to who we are as well. You'll hear some of that stuff being spoken about throughout the presentation. And certainly, Brian will touch on it at the end in his financial outlook pace. But really, what we're looking at is what does that world look like in 2025, and we think that there's a really, really compelling world that Aussie has a genuine place in, and we've got a real opportunity to basically get there. We've really kind of built the game that we're playing around our 4 key segments, and you'll hear more on each of those key segments as we run through, there will be a session effectively on each of them. For residential, we want to continue to be able to show people what a great telco looks like. And as I said, John will speak to that and how we see that there's continued opportunities to elevate our marketing and our awareness and therefore, gain effectively more market share in this space. We want to really expand into those business and government segments and really use them now to help drive leverage the existing assets that we have and the infrastructure but to help really drive additional profitability and margin. And then our wholesale, our while wholesale and white-label segment, which again is really about sale from the existing infrastructure that we've built. It's all based on a foundation of our exceptional customer service and our industry-leading infrastructure and technology, and that continues to be the core of everything that we do. For those of you who would have seen in the AGM presentation, we've got a number of areas that we're focusing on for this year in particular. It is a big year for us as we move through this transformation. We do have a lot on our plate. But we've got a really, really passionate, committed team that are really, really excited. We've worked with everyone across the organization to kind of co-create this Aussie 2.0 vision, that we're going to talk to you about that today. And we're really, really excited to get in and get cracking on some of this stuff. So I'm now going to hand over to Phil and John, who are going to talk a little bit more about our technology and infrastructure.

Thanks, Kusi. So I'm John. I'm the CTO for Aussie Broadband. I'm also as Kusi mentioned, one of the founders, I've been in charge of the technology side of the business for since we started almost 20 years now. In that time, we've gone from providing wireless services to a few regional areas and having a network backbone that ran on 100 megabit leads to having an NBN presence that spans the entire country and a network backbone that has 400,000 megabit leads. So that's a bit of a journey. Our technology strategy, it's underpinned by our game and our values, such as [ think B ] and be good to people. So this has led to us investing heavily in infrastructure in order to provide a great network experience to customers. So we've done that through building our own fiber to 83 of the NBM employees and direct links to the other ones through our Tier 1 voice network and through our cloud infrastructure, among other things. So smarter network management. We're providing the right amount of bandwidth to our customers has always been at the heart of Aussie customer experience. It's been something that we've really worked on throughout the years. Whilst customers purchase unlimited plans, the way you can use as much data as you want, NBN charges providers like Aussie volume-based charge called CVC, where it is somewhat restricted. So effective management of CVC is essential to make sure that our margins are maintained and customers get that great experience. CVCs are highly leveraged. So a 10% increase in usage can lead to a 100% increase in cost. We've put in several technology solutions to ensure we maintain the right balance between the customer experience and the CVC cost. These include our one-of-a-kind in-house developed CVC bot, which actively monitor network usage on upgrades or downgrades to CVC in near real time. So it looks at what customers are using and purchases CVC at a time for what they need at that time rather than having to have a person do it. In October this year, we've also introduced a customer experience platform across our network, which actively monitors usage and time shift some types of traffic to reduce peak time CVC load, which means we don't have to buy as much CVC. And we believe this will lower our expected CVC expense in FY '23. So we've used these technologies as well as our 24/7 [indiscernible] network security and operations center to improve the customer experience without the cost flowing out due to CVC. Along outside that, we're also upgrading our data network so we can support additional customers and integrate Over the Wire customers into our network. So we're moving from 100 gig capable network core to a 400 gigabit capable network for. We're re-architecting our core to be more flexible. We're putting in strategic fiber hubs and fiber monitoring equipment. That's all a bit technical. So the benefits are we can do things such as this allows us to scale our network to 1 million customers and beyond. It provides a framework so we can put business services in without having to use anyone else's infrastructure and do it all ourselves. And it also provides more redundancy so that we get a better experience for customers as well as when something does break. We can actually find out what's broken quicker and get it resolved in a quicker time frame. And we've also been able to do this while maintaining our investment in existing hardware throughout these upgrades. So a lot of the time when there's a network upgrade, they'll do what they call a forklift upgrade. They'll forklift everything out and forklift a new set of equipment. We've actually taken our existing equipment, and we've put that in parts of the network as well as the new equipment, so we can make use of the existing CapEx investment that we've had. So I'm going to pass over to Phil for some stuff about [indiscernible]

No worries. Thanks, John, and thanks, everyone, for coming today. I've met a lot of you before online. It's nice to meet a lot of you in person now, which is awesome. Like John was one of the cofounders of Aussie started about 19 years ago today. And this is actually my second rodeo in terms of telco, I be able to dial-up ISP back in 1996 as well. So I've been in the game close to 25 years now and have sort of seen all the different technology waves and rides as we've sort of gone. One of the things that I'm super proud that Aussie done over the last couple of years is Over the Wire network. And this was a piece of infrastructure that we started to look at when our first stage, as John talked about, was we used other carriers to get out to the NBN employees. And as we started to scale through that was going to keep costing us more and more as our customer base continues to grow. And so we decided at that point that the next logical step was to own the highway from the key data centers to the NBN employees. And so we sat down and we designed a network and basically have spent the last 20 months building that network. And this is now 1 of the most modern networks in Australia and is unique in a number of ways. When the NBN was conceived, the fiber that was rolling out through the areas was largely in the ground, the encumbered Big 4 carriers. They've built their networks long before the NBN was even conceived. And so Aussie's fiber network has been designed around the NBN employees. So the way it's been built obviously factors that in the design and redundancy that we've built in factors that in. but also the number of cores we've put into that network significantly larger. Most of these carriers might have had [ 2472 ] cores running out to a lot of these locations, if that. The minimum we have in our network is 360 cores and a lot of it is actually 720 cores. And so this basically providing a really fast highway out through the regions. Now we've connected directly to 83 of the 121 NBN employees with our own fiber and the rest of the employees we use Telstra wavelengths to connect to. So we have a minimum of 100 gig to every core and that includes the regional poised with Telstra, and they've built in a similar redundant mechanism. The other part to it as well is we're also connecting customers directly to this fiber network. So business enterprise-type customers, not resi. And that's enabling us to connect to a number of different buildings. And so we have over 100 buildings now connected to the Aussie fiber network. And why that's important is there's an investment to build into a building initially. And that's sort of the first customer makes sense or barely makes sense. The second customer, though, the returns on that are significant. And so we'll start to unpack a bit more of that. In terms of the reach, our network is wide. A lot of fiber providers and smaller operators tend to focus on the CBD areas because that's where the bulk of the multistory buildings are. Our network is different because it was built to handle the POIs. And so essentially, we've built these super highways that are running out through all the suburban areas through the 5 major capital cities. And if you look at the Sydney layout in particular, that goes very deep out and covers the vast majority of the urban sprawl. And so not only do you have the Sydney CBD as a core business area but there's a number of other key business areas that have picked up, by the way, this network has been designed. And as we connect more and more customers, the spurs and the tails that start to come off the super highway. Think of it like the way the road network rolls out. When we looked at the Over the Wire opportunity, we started to look at the types of customers and connections that they had. And what we found was they had a lot of enterprise-type customers sitting on other carriers like TPG, Telstra, Vocus those sorts of things. And we did a part of the due diligence process, we did a detailed analysis looking at mapping every one of their connections and looking at how far it was from the Aussie fiber backbone. And what we do as there was well over 1,000 services that were within 1 kilometer of the Aussie fiber network. We then overlaid that data with Aussie's data where we had customers on other carriers as well, enterprise. And once you started to cluster all that together, we found another 400 services on Aussie. And once you start to build this out, you then find the next lot of customers within reach because you've then sort of built to it. And so what we started to do is basically look at the customers look at the -- what we're calling clusters, basically grouping them into 5 or 10 buildings at a time, looking at what those customers are paying us in terms of revenue. Looking at what we're paying other carriers in terms of cost. Looking at what the build cost is and basically making a cluster-by-cluster assessment on whether it makes sense to build that particular zone or not. And so essentially, we're doing a very granular analysis on where we should roll out of fiber next based on where our existing customer base is and also taking into account new customer demand as we go. So if we look at a new customer profile, this is a real-world example based in Sydney here. We had, at the very top of the diagram, our core network runs through there and they happen to be joined near that building that we come off. And we had an opportunity to come down towards the middle of the building there and build it through. And we looked at that, that first customer cost us about $45,000 build out, which on its own doesn't make sense. Very soon after we sold that first connection, the second building that you've seen that came online. The cost us about $4,000 to add that second building to the service that was next door. And so that was the start of our little particular hub here in Sydney. What we then did was identified the other buildings that could be built basically off that new joint that we had put in. And we feed this data into our sales team and our sales system so that they know that if they go and tap a customer in that particular building, that they'll be -- we'll be able to build it for probably $3,000 to $5,000. It will be built very quickly because the existing leading parts have already been looked at and tested, and our design team don't have to redesign it again because it was actually designed at the very first point. And this is something, again, a bit unique in what we do. We're planning down the track and making sure that the data is done because when you're designing the first couple of buildings, it only takes a few minutes longer to design rest of the buildings. Whereas other providers, they'll just do the work required to service that first customer, and then you come back and redo the work again. And so when we look at it all, as I said, the first stage didn't really make sense in terms of the return, but we knew from the types of buildings in there that we felt there was other services, and we took the calculated risk to enter that. As we got the second building, it basically made financial sense at that point. And then if we sign up 1 of the -- just one of those other orange buildings, then you start to get really, really good returns from it. So that's a new customer example. If we then look at the migration of the Over the Wire services and how that plays through with this, we take our same original cluster that we looked at before. And then we add the green segment to it. So those 3 buildings there were buildings where Over the Wire had enterprise services in. Now there was 3 buildings, but there was actually 5 services in those buildings. So there was already multiple customers and actually a mixture of carriers that we're buying from within that. And so that cluster there made sense to build, and so we're proceeding with that. And like we did in the first thing, we've then identified all the other buildings that can come off those 2 new joints that we've built. And so they're the pink buildings that are represented there. And we feed that again into the sales process so that we start to take over. And once you start to get to that stage, again, really, really strong returns in terms of what's done. So that's sort of the -- I guess, the sort of fiber network. And the initial phase was build out to the NBN employees and save the backhaul costs that we're paying. And that paid for the network in itself and as we've talked before, $13.5 million a year savings moving forward and about a 4-year payback. This is the next phase of basically supercharging that network that we've built. Now I'll hand back to John.

Thanks, Phil. As part of the overaction we have acquired a unique asset, which is the Tier 1 voice network. Voice, it's not s*** like many other products, but it is high margin, and it is growing. So the Net platform is a bit unique. It's been developed in-house and it uses a range of open source technologies and a lot of custom software written by our team themselves. There's actually only 6 Tier 1 voice providers in Australia, which includes Aussie, and there's a number of benefits we get out of being a Tier 1 provider. So there are regulated rates between carriers who are Tier 1s, which lowers our costs compared to the previous providers we were using. We no longer have to pay a number of hosting fees to actually have a phone number on our network for customers. And we could also receive revenue from other carriers calls that are made to Aussie So as an example, with our call center, previously, we wouldn't get anything if someone called now if someone calls who's on another network such as Telstra, they will actually pay us to call -- for our customers to call in to us. It also allows us to scale up capacity quickly because it's all done in-house. The more solution is also going to range of other benefits. We've got multiple protected parts to the other Tier 1 carriers. So that means we get the best uptime that we possibly can. When numbers reported, we test them to make sure the number is reachable for all carriers. So when someone comes on to our network, it will actually test it from mobiles from various other carriers to make sure that everything has gone right. And while that seems an obvious thing that you would do, we're one of the only carriers that does this. Not many others do. We got a range monitoring tools which automatically test the call quality and report back into our team when something isn't quite going as a sure so they can have a look at it and work out what's going wrong. We have a great portal. It makes it easy to manage the services -- and number porting, which is usually a pain point, it's certainly been a pain point for us at times in the past, makes it simple. And our own staff say that when they've gone to use that. And it also has an extensive API library so that other carriers and over-the-top players can integrate into us and connect in an automated fashion. Maybe voice, we've got a cloud opportunity. Cloud is just massive. Based on some research from Telstra, the Australian organization spent over $1.3 billion on Infrastructure as a Service platform or cloud in 2020, and that's up 38% from 2019. And it's on track to exceed $3 billion by 2025. At the moment, the market is dominated by hyperscale public providers. So that's your Amazon's AWS, Microsoft, Google, Azure, that sort of thing. There are a number of applications where that sort of public hyperscale cloud isn't the best solution. One of the big ones is legacy applications, which may not run in a hyperscale cloud, but it can be done in private cloud. always on applications, which use significant resources, latency-sensitive applications. So the hyperscales are only in certain states. So if you're in another state, it's easier private cloud to be more local and give you a better response. Security and sovereignty of data and also the requirement that you -- with the hyperscalers you need fairly specialist staff who know how AWS or Google Cloud or that works in order or alternatively contractors in order to make that look for you -- so as part of the overlay acquisition, we acquired their cloud platform. So that allows us to provide a wide range of sliver services to customers. So hybrid cloud, definition. Hybrid cloud is were basically method of using cloud where -- rather than just saying, "I'm just going to use private cloud, I'm just getting to hyperscalers, you choose what you want to use based on what the workload is. So some applications work better in the hyperscalers cloud, somewhat better in primary cloud, some may even work better on site still. And that gets you cost effective and the overall best results from using the cloud ecosystem. Hybrid -- as addressed radically. So over 65% of organizations are using cloud technology and hybrid cloud solutions, and hybrid cloud is a product that we offer in Aussie. We also offer consulting services needed to seamless platforms together. So to workloads can move from one to the other as needed. Many organizations also require backup solutions for the public cloud. So generally public cloud won't involve they include backup. So our data protection solution is used by a range of organizations to protect that data. And also then when we combine it with our healthy fiber solutions, we can provide an overall offering that provides the fastest, lowest latency and most secure environment for the workloads and for their backups. A quick example here of a basic cloud solution to show some of the benefits of using hybrid cloud. So as you can see, there's plenty of savings when you move from a self-hosted model into the private cloud and a lot of benefits. So self-hosted is where you've got a set of servers in your building or in a data center and you look after yourself with your own staff. There's while there are less savings between the public and private cloud. There are a number of benefits to the private cloud such as to support the lower latency, some of the other ones I've gone over. So with hybrid car companies can have it all with most of the infrastructure on the private cloud are making use of public cloud and self-hosted infrastructure where it makes sense, and that's something that we can offer. Lastly, for my section, security. So data breaches and security is certainly a hot topic at the moment. as we're an operator of critical infrastructure in Australia. So security has always been at the forefront of what we do. Phil and myself, we're deeply technical leaders. It's probably unusual to have in a C suite, but it does allow us to be across the detail and make sure our teams are untaken the right steps to protect our data and provide secure solutions to our customers. listed some of our general security activities we do. However, due to the nature of our infrastructure, we are required by the government to keep the specifics confidential. We regularly meet with a range of government agencies regarding our infrastructure and security, and we're required to report any technology or vendor changes we make, so they can evaluate our security as well as us. This has been in place long before the recent data breaches. The reality is companies need to get around 100% of the time. The hackers only need to get it right once. So we do utmost to ensure something like what happened in the media doesn't happen to us. Now I'll pass over to Jono for residential.

Hello. So I am Jono, otherwise known as Jonathan Prosser. I am our Chief Strategy Officer here at Aussie. I've been in telco for 7 years. The previous fall before John use was leading a she's largest research programs for product marketing, customer and pricing. I spent the previous decade before that, doing a consulting stuff around the world, which is good firm . In this residential section, there are 4 things that I want to cover off. The first is, well, what is our strategy for growth in residential, in particular, when we look at the different points of maturity for our fixed line and our mobile portfolios. The second is what do we need to do differently in marketing and market positioning to really grow through FY '23 into FY '25. The third is what are the reasons that you can believe or growth ambitions? And do we actually have the fundamentals in place to achieve this growth? And the last is some key highlights from our FY '23 product road map. We have 2 different but complementary product strategies to grow share and value in FY '23 and beyond. In fixed, our focus is profitable growth. In mobile, we are relaunching our sales as a true M&A alternative. We are clear where we want to play in the market and we have the brand permission to do so. We are targeting the 57% of the consumer market that [indiscernible] value maximize, not cost minimize. We have been recognized as the most premium telco in Australia by Roy Morgan. This is important as it suggests that Aussies are willing to pay more to be with us. We know why this is so and as you'll see in Part 2 marketing is our core to our why Aussie value proposition. The last point on this slide is critical. We know that in order to grow, we need to increase our brand awareness. Continued profitable growth requires us to target and to win more of the mass population, whilst maintaining our SKU of services toward higher speed tiers. Given the different points of maturity of our core residential product portfolios, we have 2 different strategies. For fixed line, we will evolve our current approach and continue to position ourselves as the high-speed kings as NBN refers to us as. In doing this, we are actively taking advantage of the current and ongoing investment by NBN in these tiers. By the end of 2023, there will be 8 million premises eligible to access speeds of 500 megabits and above. We are well positioned compared to the rest of the industry to capitalize on this investment, as you'll see in Section 3 fundamentals for growth. However, to take advantage of this positioning, we know we need to do more to signal strong value to customers. Doing so will require us to evolve our VAS, our value-added services portfolio. And VAS is evolving in FY '23 and beyond to focus on 2 types: First, VAS as is related to our core offerings of network experience and customer experience. This will include enhanced modem, security offerings, home ecosystem controls and parental controls. The second is VAS that is related to the needs of the household, including entertainment and mobility, again, more on these in Section 3. For mobile, we are launching or relaunching as a true alternative to the MNOs. And although we are an MVNO and Optus is a wholesaler, that is not the area that we want to play in. we are positioning as a full-service telco alongside the MNOs. Our pricing architecture and our propositions support this positioning with results from our June launch showing that this approach is working, again, more on this in Section 3. Simply put to succeed in mobiles, we are focusing on 4 things: Price points and inclusions that talk to a typical MNO customer, clear messaging on not paying for data you don't need. Third, VAS and bundling options that enable affordability; and finally, outstanding customer experience from a telco you can trust. We also know that we need to be deliberate in where we focus on mobile attention. And we need to understand if we have the brand permission to play and win in this segment. We'll be focused on the BYO market. We'll be focused on those customers that skew to being technology savvy, metro dwelling and customers that value network performance. We'll also be skewing toward customers who have a positive previous predispositions to the Optus and Vodafone networks. Importantly, we have done and we continue to do research to understand how to position ourselves and how to win. Key to this was to first understand if our Aussie Broadband brand is an inhibitor to growth in mobile. It does say broadband after all. The answer to this question is a resounding no. It is clear that we have the permission and indeed an expectation to compete and to win in the mobile category. The wrapper that brings our 2 portfolio strategies together is bundling. We have now launched our first bundle in market, and we'll continue to evolve this over FY '23. Importantly, our approach to bundling is guided by 3 principles that are designed to grow and to protect margin. Sitting behind these, we have a commercial construct that provides us to guard rails within which we can iterate and evolve our bundles whilst maintaining the margins we require at a total portfolio level. Our principles are relatively simple. First, fixed as hero. In a scenario of a mobile plus 6 bundle, the demonstration of great value will be achieved by manipulating mobile, not fixed, fixed is the reason why ABB is famous. We do not discount our fame. Secondly, value through inclusions. All those often discussed, we know that the existence of a discount drives less than 1% of a consumer's choice and provider. We also know that VAS serves a key role in signaling value. VAS, such as entertainment and security will play an upweighted role for us moving forward. And then finally, dollar hurdle -- dollar set behind a hurdle. Where discounting is used, such as in a family mobile plan, customers will need at least 1 premium offering to protect our margin. Now as well as driving sales volume, bundling will increase our ratio of customers with multiproduct holdings. We know that multiproduct holdings also increase our customer stickiness. Using data from June '21 through to September '22, we see a significant difference between NBN stand-alone customers and NBN plus mobile customers when it comes to churn. Over this period, NBN only customers had a churn rate of 1.2% compared to 0.66% for NBN plus mobile. Now just to be cheeky, that creates a theoretical opportunity of $260,000 incremental revenue. Part 2, marketing. Marketing drives the sales engine of our residential business and has a critical job to do in FY '23 and beyond. Through our research, we know that we need a tweak to our brand to appeal to more Australians. We will be doing this whilst remaining true to our DNA. Our evolution will see us grow up just a little. Our personality will be less about the Aussie Larrikin and more so about the things that Australian consumers desire from businesses. Importantly, we already inhabit these spaces with our existing brand, and we have the permission to evolve. Our personality will be grounded in fast free approachable, helps out on met culturally relevant Australian supportive feel good, and we know you. We'll also improve the consistency within -- with which our brand and marketing shows up across our customer engagement and touch points. This consistency, coupled with our strategy to become more targeted in the channels and the regions that we show up in will drive greater spend efficiency, but more importantly, how to achieve increased awareness. Core to our current brand DNA and keep it going is the unique position we hold in the industry when it comes to customer experience. the independent research that we've done shows us that there are 4 elements to our CX that serve as a true point of difference in the market. First, our approachability and our availability. Second, our willingness to spend the time to listen and to properly engage. We don't use scripts here at Aussie. We want to talk to everyone using a real conversation. We want to get to know you. Third, we are committed to finding a way to help out. Our customers come first. We don't stress about average call duration. And finally, we bring a truly Aussie attitude. We make you feel welcomed. We know that we are better together and nothing is too much of a problem. These elements will continue to differentiate us in the market and support the perceptions of both premium and trust. Part three, our fundamentals for growth. To deliver this growth, our business fundamentals, the economics need to be solid, which they are. We have a deliberate shape of share strategy for the NBN portfolio that has historically delivered rapid SIO and margin growth when compared to the rest of the industry. Key to this is the margin gains we achieved in our home fast -- Super and Ultra Fast portfolios. Super and Ultra, of which, we have a 29% market share, deliver margin improvements of 20% compared to our 12/25/50 mix. For Home, our share is 13%, delivering margin gains of 6%. This shape of share strategy has continued into the next evolution of the NBN being fiber. Aussie currently holds 50% of the connection order share for the Fiber Connect program, and we continue to skew towards the high-speed tiers versus the rest of market. Using September as the example, 32% of our Fiber Connect plans for the FTTN technology, we're on the 250- and 100- megabit tiers versus only 14% for the rest of the market. The FTTC portfolio had a similar SKU. 41% of our customers are on 1,000 megabits versus only 10% for the rest of the market. This is critically important as we look forward to the continued rollout of NBN for the 8 million premises towards the end of 2023. Alongside the economics of margin growth and margin protection is the criticality of services growth. In FY '22, ABB was a standout performer amongst the top providers by share with our market share growth, standing a stark contrast to the declines experienced across this group. This strong and continued growth is clearly demonstrated in our June '21 through June '22, share of NBN SIO growth. In June '22, Aussie delivered 73% of the total SIO growth achieved by NBN. Our strong economics and our continued growth in SIO momentum provide us the fundamentals to achieve further breakthrough growth. On the other side of the ledger is our ability to retain customers, which remain strong. Our FY '22 customer churn rate remained in line with our historic performance at 1.2%. Importantly, this was despite the heavy promotional and price discounting activity that we saw in the market. Importantly as well, where we have experienced spikes in churn, we now understand why, and we have implemented clear programs to address these 3 of note. The first our programs to improve our quality of received network experience. The second is to do more to nurture our customers toward the end of life of any promotional activity. And the third is doing even more to support our customers in moving home. The immediate test of the fundamentals of our mobile portfolio was the launch of our new pricing architecture and planned tables in June. This launch sort of simplified a number of our plans to focus on the sweet spots of current usage and spend behavior. We now have a 7-plan architecture reduced from 13. The impact of these changes was immediate. In June through Q1, we have seen a rapid rise in mobile acquisition, and importantly, a positive inflection in our ability to attract new stand-alone mobile-only customers. This proves the validity of both the research and our strategy. Aussie broadband has the right to play in mobile. We're not wasting time to build from our fundamentals. Our product road map for FY '23, which is kind of vague on this slide, is refined and is targeted to deliver those use cases most likely to drive growth. Bundling serves as the hero activity to drive increased awareness and to support our economics via multiproduct holdings. There are 3 flavors of bundles in FY '23. And this will culminate in the launch of bundle customizer empowering our customers to configure their optimal bundle. In Fixed, we will deliver the expected 4G failover as well as mechanisms to reduce our modem cost barrier. In Q2, we are launching a hardware repayment option to reduce the price hurdle faced by consumers in adding a modem to their order. In-home WiFi experience is a key point of differentiation in the Australian market. Netcomm provide our hero modems. In the coming months, there will be independent research release, which compares our Netcomm hero range against the Telstra Gen3 smart modem. Importantly, the results are very favorable towards Netcomm. In mobile, we will continue to simplify the portfolio and deliver use cases that support the message of affordability. In Q2, we have made it clear where we are playing in mobile by becoming a destination for your device, not a destination to buy a device. We have now stopped ranging Samsung devices. This decision was driven primarily by our strategy to play to win in the BYO not MRO segment of the market. Later this year, in Q3, we will launch enhance data pooling. This evolution is something that we're building from our current offering and will give us the ability to deliver compelling family bundles but also provide the foundations for more aggressive fleet base plays in the business and enterprise segments. That is the end of the residential section. We now have a 15-minute break for tea and refreshments. Thank you.

We'll be back at, let's call, it 11:05. [Break]

Hello, good morning. I hope everybody enjoyed their morning tea. I've just got a quick reminder for everyone online. You can type questions in as you go so that we can answer them during the Q&A time. I'm Aaron O'Keeffe, Chief Growth Officer. I've been at Aussie Broadband for nearly 15 years. I came on back in 2008 when Wideband Networks and Westvic Broadband merged. I come on as a Business Development Manager originally, and I come from an IT background. So firstly, I'm going to talk a bit about our business sector to begin with, and then I'm going to move into the enterprise and government side things. So there are 2.5 million small to medium businesses actively trading in Australia, and this number is growing year-on-year. We currently service 66,000 of these customers. There's a massive opportunity here, not for the size of the market, but the fact that we can serve this sector in the way that it needs to be served. The sector hasn't been serviced that well historically by the encumbered providers mainly due to the either overcomplicating the services or under complicating the services and making the services too simple and basically making residential services for this sector. We do this by bringing on easy informative processes from sales through to provisioning and supporting these customers. Our products are of a build once, sell many nature, but they're configurable by a preset set of dials. They're not customizable. We don't want to go down the customizable path in this sector. We go down a customizable path, price goes up, and we can't service the biggest part of this market. These customers have a much higher lifetime value than that of a residential customer, and there's a big willingness to bundle in the small business sector. The bundles like house to phone system and our security services and mobile services and things like that. Businesses want 1 place to get everything to make their lives as simple as possible. And there's a little CVC bonus from NBN that we get with business services because business services are used generally between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., it's not the busy period on our network. A busy period is in the evening. But the CVC that we get with each NBN service is available 24/7. So that means it actually lowers the cost of the overage we need to pay nightly to NBN. Our target market. SMB is looking for simple, straightforward solutions to let them get on with running their business. We build everything into our automated provisioning platform so that little to no human touch is required to get these customers online for the different services we offer. We proactively market to this segment. It's such a big segment, and it's not served that well, we have to proactively market out to this segment. SMBs, as I said, want to get on with their business. They don't want to had their telco and their technology services get in the way of them doing business. And certainly, they don't want to wait on hold for too long if there is a problem, which is why we're implementing a 60-second to answer target time for our small business support department. There are 4 direct sales channels. Our call center, which does inbound and outbound calling with very highly trained staff. Online, it's designed to be simple and flexible and really easy for customers to order a service. We have a team of business development managers. These BDMs are out there targeting the larger part of this sector. The customers that need that extra care. They need that face-to-face relationship and they're bigger. And of course, our award winning MyAussie app where customers can very easily order new services, but more importantly, get the information and manage their existing services they have with us. We've grown massively in this business segment over the last couple of few years. Last year being our biggest year, putting out 18,093 new customers. Our growth began when we started to put focus on this segment. And I sat down with a bunch of our SMBs a few years ago and said, what does the best look like to you? What can you tell us? Tell us about what you want to see. With the feedback that they gave us and the experience from when we were a small business, we put the plan together for great products, great solutions, a fantastic support structure, and these are the things that our customers said they needed. We offer more than just glorified residential services. As I said earlier, some of the providers tend to just under complicate things. They're just basic residential. So we went, well, our customers said they need more advanced services. So we do things like symmetrical broadband services up to gigabit, business-grade networking and WiFi solutions, special phone numbers, including things like area code routing and call routing, security solutions are very important to small business, hosted firewall web and e-mail filtering. Our host of phone systems with the ability to softphones on a desktop or a mobile, competitive mobile plans for both voice and data and our enhanced service level agreements. All of this is great, having these -- all of these products available. What we needed to invest in is training our staff to be able to ask the right questions of the customer to figure out really, what do they need? What's going to solve their problems? What's going to allow them to continue doing the business, which is what we've done. And all of these products are built automated so that we can deliver these products at scale. Now there's a few things listed on here. And each of them, every single 1 of them, in my opinion, is different to the way other providers are doing it. Keeping our sales process straightforward, making sure that whatever channel our customers want to do business through, they get the same straightforward process. Keeping our products as simple as possible but making sure that they tick the boxes of our customers' needs. Competitive pricing so that we can appeal to the mass market and not hitting our customers with higher pricing just because they've a business. This is the basic business broadband services. We do this because our network capacity is provisioned for peak periods, meaning that during the day, it doesn't cost any more. Building our products so that everything can be automated so that we can deliver and support at scale whilst also delivering a superior customer experience. Our business technical support staff are trained to be able to fix the vast majority of customer issues while the customer is on the phone. So one of the targets in the business sales area is total solution selling. It's 1 of our biggest targets. And this raises ARPU and profit and lifetime value. We do this now with our existing product set. But what we can do is add further products to this for the total solution selling. Things like cloud backup, mobility services for IoT, 4G, 5G failover as a standard offering, virtual office phone system so that our customer staff can work from anywhere in the world. Flexible value for money product bundles designed specifically for business. We can add these products with very little investment because we already have all of these platforms in place, we already have all of the agreements in place to launch these products. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about the enterprise and government side of things. So our enterprise and government strategy, around products, especially is somewhat the opposite to our business strategy. Our target market is mid- to large enterprises and government customers seeking a partner to deliver tailored and fairly customized communications and technology services. Once again, we want to focus on best customer experience in more of a business partner capacity than its provider of services capacity. We need to deeply understand our customers, and we need to deeply understand our customers' customers to be able to work in a true business partner capacity. We want to focus on multisite customers so we can leverage the largest part of our infrastructure and our solutions. And also, we want to focus on our self-service tools, carbon -- the Carbon portal, NetSIP portal and consumption-based cloud portals. Our customers have given us feedback. They love these portals. At a click of a button, they can see what their services are doing, at a click of a button, they can order a service at the click of a button, they can reconfigure a service. They love it. And proactive support. So the proactive support real-time service monitoring so that our -- so that if there is an issue, we'll know about it and we'll often have it fixed before our customers even know about it. As I was talking about the diverse product offering, with the combined strength of the Aussie Broadband nationwide data network and the Tier 1 voice network and cloud platform that the [ ABB ] Group brought into an organization, we can now do complete end-to-end solutions on our own infrastructure. Things like public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, data center colocation, private IP, SD-WAN, mobile fleets, phone systems, SIP trunks, et cetera or with the management security and portal APIs that we have built into our systems, giving our customers a single pane of glass to be able to see everything that their services are doing. Leveraging our diverse product offering and strong customer focus to deliver solutions and provide the right outcome, we do this by spending time to understand our customers and our customers' customers to work in a true partner capacity. We need to drive multiple stakeholder engagement. We do this by facilitating workshops bring vendors into these workshops to build credibility and confidence. And we already have a reputation for delivering on our promises. This is why our largest customers trust us to be their technology and telco partner right now. In anticipation of putting more focus on the government side of things, a few years ago, we decided to start applying to become certified on state government panels. This is extremely important because government organizations, it's very difficult to purchase outside of these arrangements. And these arrangements are generally 5-year deals. If we didn't get on the with anticipation, we're going to put more focus on them, then we're waiting several years and we can't do that. We're on many of these panels now and we're continuing as the panels come up, to continue applying to be on these certified panels. And we've won quite a few local government, water and state health type deals already from being on these panels. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about Westpac. So if people don't know the story, we were invited to tender for Westpac services Australia-wide and [indiscernible] that we want to provide Westpac services across Australia. At the time, our Carbon portal was in its infancy. We just started the design work on our Carbon portal And we thought, well, why not get some of the Westpac, a big enterprise to have some input on this, and they were very willing to, which was absolutely fantastic. And a lot of the features that were built into Carbon come from ideas of workshops that we've done with Westpac. Westpac use these features on a daily basis now and thousands of other customers use these features also. So I'd like to also introduce Wayne from Westpac, Director of Secure Network Service to talk a little bit about the relationship and the services we provide. Thanks, Wayne.

Thanks, Aaron. Good morning, everyone. I'm Wayne Bonett. I lead the team at the design and operate all network connectivity for Westpac Bank. We've been working with Aussie Broadband for about 2 years. And in that time, we've become strong advocates for the service they provide. They're a company that are really reliable to us. They're very transparent in their operation, and that makes our job much easier. Running large enterprise networks comes with some different considerations to what you would see on your home Internet connection over NBN. So I'd like to share with you my experience with ABB and how we've built the relationship we have today. So it started about 3 years ago when we were running an RFP for Internet carriage, as Aaron mentioned. We were -- the RFP had about 900 circuits in it. We had just insourced management of our wide area network. And we were upgrading the environment to a software-defined WAN technology. We were the first bank in Australia to use the technology at scale, and there were high stakes on it being successful. We included 4 ISP in the RFP, all put forward their proposals, as I referred to them at the time, power points of hollow promises. On the final day of the presentation of the presentations after sitting through the first 3, Phil and the team walked in. Phil sat down and he said, we run the company with 1 primary value, no b*** and I said that this is quite different to the other 3 that I just sat through the day. He continued to say, if we make a mistake, we will own it. We will be transparent about it and we will tell you what we're doing to prevent it reoccurring. And he's someone about -- put their job in the line for a $25 million, $30 million project. This was something that was really well received. So I then went on to ask the team what SLA they could provide on provisioning a link. This is really important because we're ramping up a project with a burn rate of about $1 million a month. If we had a delay, it was going to cost us a lot. When I asked that question; what the Aussie Broadband team didn't know. I had asked the question of the 3 service providers before them. The first service provider came back and said, give us 25 days' notice, and we will provision a link. Second 1 was 20 days, and the third 1 was 15. So then the team responded with we'll provision a link in a couple of minutes. Okay. And then I said, in fact, we'll do better than that. We'll get you -- we'll give you access to provision your own link on demand. And what this did, it shored up an area of the project but always very concerned about the NBN provisioning. It was a big logistics exercise across over 900 sites and 5,000 devices we were deploying. So we had lots of other considerations to keep in the back of our mind. So this was a game changer, game changer for me in our project. The next few questions we asked were around rates of contention on the links. And we said to them, how will I know if I'm paying for 100 meg link across 900 sites, I'm getting 100 meg. And they said, look at our website, and you'll see we publish the rate of CVC subscription against what we purchase. So anyway, after that, I ask my team for the next 2 weeks, pull down off the website. Every point of interconnect and tell me that they're not oversubscribing our links if we were going to go here. So we did that exercise and true to their word, they weren't. So I should also say I gave all other ISPs the same opportunity to expose the rates of contention that they were providing on the links that we were buying. And none of them would give us that access. So that was another big tick for us. So last forward to the end of the project, we completed the rollout of our 900 sites. We did it in 9 months. We finished the project 3 months ahead of schedule. We came in $3 million under budget. Shortly after that, we won an award for Best Telco Project in Australia. And next week, 1 of my team members is flying to Amsterdam to hopefully pick up the global award for the Best Telco Project from the Institute of Project Management. So -- and we're very hopeful that he'll bring home the award. So yes, there were lots of things that came together for that to be a success, but Aussie Broadband were front and center for us. Day-to-day operations, we run a pretty healthy level of resilience across our network. And we -- across the WAN, at least, we're running 100% since the thing has gone live, 100% uptime that is, with the exception of fires, floods, power outages, as you would expect. We've recently started a similar project on the -- rolling out the same technology to the international. Our international sites, and we're using global players. So I have very good visibility in terms of the capability of global ISPs. And I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt that Aussie Broadband service is world-class. So in closing, I currently sign off about 2,000 Internet links or invoices for about 2,000 lengths a month. So people, friends, family, et cetera, often come and ask me what Internet provider should I get at home. And sometimes I share the story that I've shared with you today and other times, I'll just say Aussie Broadband. Thank you.

Thanks, Wayne. So you just heard of an example of an enterprise solution for Westpac that we provide. I'm going to now share an example of a cloud solution that we provide for government. We shouldn't forget to flip the fly. Here we go. Queensland Treasury, a case study and a cloud solution. So Queensland Treasury is the government body responsible for managing the state's balance sheet in support of government's priorities, employing over 1,200 people. They had a pretty big problem, and it was. Queensland Treasury had their main compute and storage on aging infrastructure housed in their own aging data center facilities that needed a lot of work completed on both the infrastructure and the facilities to bring them up to current standards. They had an internal target to reduce large CapEx expenditure. They wanted to improve the flexibility to be able to flex their ICT workloads for seasonality. They needed a solution that scale with their business growth and reduce the time to deliver new services to their workforce and customers. Needing these features exposed a pretty big limitation within the skills that Queensland Treasury had. What we provided initially was just in consulting on how they could achieve these needs and wants using our online cloud platform. What we proposed was a customized managed cloud solution, provisioned on our infrastructure, housed in the latest data center facilities located in Queensland. We initially created a test environment where we could bring on IT workloads and test multiple variables. Once this testing was complete, we planned and completed the migration adhering to our contract SLAs. We delivered a measurable IT benefit allowing Queensland Treasury to roll out new services to their workforce and customers in shorter time frames. We reduced the total cost of ownership on their IT infrastructure and enable greater flexibility and agility. And I'm very proud to announce that we have just re-signed the Queensland Treasury for another 3 years, taking the partnership between our organizations to over 8 years. Now I would like to introduce David, Chief Customer Officer and Chief Commercial Officer at NEXTDC, to talk a little bit about the relationship and the services we provide to NEXTDC. Thanks, David.

Thank you. My name is David Dzienciol, I'm the Chief Customer and Commercial Officer with NEXTDC. Some of you I know in the room cover us as well or have covered us. So today I am here as a supplier, customer and partner, not here in the context of talking about NEXTDC at the investor relations level. So a small disclaimer. What I wanted to do was spend just 2 minutes on NEXTDC for those in the room that don't know what we do. As I was listening to the first presentation this morning, I was reflecting another great Australian homegrown story. Obviously, Aussie Broadband but NEXTDC is also a great Aussie story. We provide what we call data center as a service. I won't go through all the key facts here. But essentially, over the last 12 years, we've built what we see as a pretty powerful platform that helps fuel the digital economy. That's what a couple of billion dollars looks like of capital investment over 12 years. We recently had the opportunity to launch or open our S3 and M3 facilities. And today, we service all types of customers from the largest providers of cloud services in the world through to small, medium businesses through our very complex and large partner network. That's enough about us. This is really what we do just for some backdrop. We provide power, security and connectivity, not the same connectivity that Aussie Broadband do but we talk more about what happens inside the data center in between our data centers. Those 3 pillars: security, power and connectivity is what we live and breathe every day. I wanted to give you 30 seconds on how the market works when it comes to data centers because it gives you some context and then I'm going to spend the last couple of minutes on why I'm here talking today. On the left-hand side, you see what is traditionally known as on-premises data centers and those that understand that statement will know that there's literally hundreds of data centers around the country, either in expensive city real estate or expensive out of city real estate. And over time, as we heard about the cloud growth, those are being repurposed for a whole bunch of reasons. I'm not here to sell you on that today. Essentially, that infrastructure is either going to the cloud or it's going into colocation facilities. I haven't met a customer yet that is building their own data center for their own consumption because the economies of scale don't work probably similar to why wouldn't build my own network to service my requirements. And essentially, that's the business that we're in today, providing those very secure and reliable facilities. So what has that got to do with NEXTDC in Aussie Broadband. So this is the map of our sites and what we tend to do is connect our data centers and then connect our data centers to other customers through our partner network. Now underlying all of the investment that we do, there's 1 sort of secret ingredient that actually makes all this investment work and that's what we call interconnection or connectivity. Empowering that is an enormous amount of investment and complex design and managed service to enable that network to flow so we can actually do business inside the data center, inside what we call the ecosystem. From the beginning of time at NEXTDC, we formed a relationship with a local Brisbane company called Commex, that was 12 years ago. over time, Commex was our preferred and only supplier of network services, design, build and manage. And over time, that became over the wire. And then over the last couple of years, that is now under the Aussie Broadband brand. And so we work closely with Aussie to help design, as I say, manage and build and support all of the network infrastructure that sits inside our data centers. It may sound like a simple statement, but when you think about that for the large and complex customers that we have, it's a pretty significant piece of the puzzle for us. Those that may have seen on the first slide, about 8% of our revenue is what we call interconnection, all of that interconnection. all of that connectivity, pardon the use of the word again, is fueled and powered by network equipment and network services that we work very closely with Aussie on procuring, managing and supporting. And so I don't want to underestimate how important the interconnection and connectivity parties to our end value proposition to our customers and how we deliver that is through the partnership. So a couple of thoughts just in summary in the context of how we tend to work with Aussie Broadband. As I said, one, we are a partner with Aussie Broadband. They help sell or use our data centers to enable more services for their customers. I think Phillip had a slide in his second slide that says they are interconnecting data centers, they're in all NEXTDC data centers and Equinix, that's the ecosystem that we live in. Then we have a strategic supply relationship with them. They provide us with those strategic products and services that enable the service levels that we can deliver to our customers. Why do we partner with them and why have we partnered with them from the beginning? For me, there are 3 key things that stand out. The first one is, believe it or not, it's cultural alignment. So Phil has been to our data center team the signs on the walls. Our values are almost identical, a different wording, and we also use the b*** word. So that's good. But very strong cultural alignment then leads to the trust that we need. The second reason is because we are relevant to them. We've been relevant from the beginning. we sit around the board. We don't want to be a supplier 84 -- sorry, customer #84 and maybe get a call responded to when we need to. We need to know that we're important to them. And that's not necessarily because we may spend a lot. We were important to them from the beginning. But we've continued to be important throughout the journey of those companies that have come together. That's really important to us. We know there is choice that for us, it's about the trust and the importance. And the third one is they know what they're doing. And so as you were saying earlier, with your deployment, we want to focus on what we do well. If we wanted to be in the business of doing what they do, we go out and do that, but we're not interested in doing that. We want to partner and acquire those services that enable us to be successful to focus on being Australia's leading data center as a service provider and together by leveraging that partnership, we're able to deliver on that promise. Thank you very much.

Cool. Thanks, gents. Obviously, so fantastic to have both of you guys come and speak, I guess, give a little bit of context and a little bit of light to some of the services that we provide, and we sort of value the partnership that we have both with NEXTDC and obviously, with [ Westpac ]. So Hopefully, that gave you guys some of the, I suppose, a little bit of a flavor, I guess, in particular, that enterprise and government space, as some of the solutions that I guess we provide to customers. I'm going to talk a little bit about wholesale and part of white label this segment, I suppose, that we are already in and continuing to grow. It really is all about leveraging, as I kind of said at the introduction, leveraging the existing assets that we have, the infrastructure that we already have, the systems, the technology, but also the people capability that we've built through residential business [ANZ] and then leveraging that to drive effectively further growth through wholesale. And pretty much a lot of the infrastructure that we've built, effectively, it's fixed cost. So the more scale that we can get by using that fixed cost asset base better, we are actually really able to kind of further increase margins and that kind of thing, even though it depends who we provide wholesale services white label kind of variation right through to kind of that business in [ANZ] market. It very much is the case where the market is very -- the wholesale telco market isn't huge necessarily in Australia. We are very lucky that we've got quite deep capability in data, voice, cloud, and obviously, a couple of those other supporting products that you've heard about in business in [ANZ] presentations today. But not only that, we've actually got the combined partner network. So by bringing Aussie and Over the Wire together, we've got effectively a partner network of over 900 different partners that we can now start to bring voice, data, cloud and all those services to get through that network to be able to reach out further into the MSP community, and therefore, reach out further into those more profitable segments that we're targeting as part of our overall strategy. So we've spoken about carbon and Wayne obviously, did a fantastic job talking about some of the power and the benefits of carbon. It is a unique platform. And even though it's been around for a couple of years, it is still to the best of our knowledge, a unique platform. There's no other platform that does allow MSP partners, [ANZ] partners, to be able to go in, boom, order our service and have it delivered in a couple of minutes and then the full end-to-end configuration and management of that service. So I won't bore you with all the technical nitty-gritties, but some of it's pretty cool. And it's often stuff that effectively -- previously, you needed a phone call for -- someone needs to pick up the phone, [wait on hold] blah, blah, blah, how can we arrange this for thing or that kind of stuff. None of that needs to happen with carbon. It is a full end-to-end order configuration and management portal. And the thing about it is that it really allows us to get that scale, right? Very, very little outlay, very, very little support cost support over there because it's fully self-service. And then helps us to drive that additional scale from our -- obviously, particularly our data infrastructure, our NBN kind of product offering was the first product offering in carbon. But we've been expanding it. And so there's mobiles now available in carbon, there's Aussie Fibre now available in carbon. And as we continue to grow and develop that product portfolio, we continue to build out new features and functionality within carbon to help, obviously, service effectively our wholesale customers and our wholesale market. And it really does allow us, as I said, to be able to generate effectively higher margins and higher returns as we move forward. So it's a very cool, unique portal and as I said, not yet replicated by any of the major telcos in the industry, although they might probably try. You've heard a fair bit about our Tier 1 voice service -- Tier 1 voice platform, which is NetSIP. NetSIP was kind of built kind of similar origins to carbon. We were -- in carbon when we built carbon, we're very frustrated with the way to deal with wholesale services in the data space. NetSIP had the same kind of origin, I suppose, it was very people, particularly Over the Wire had to build that platform, very frustrated with the way that legacy Tier 1 carriers worked. And so we've built that NetSIP platform. It is one of the most modern networks -- Tier 1 voice networks in Australia. You heard about it a little bit previously. And again, it allows us to really start to increase our share of the wholesale voice market. Now wholesale voice in the traditional sense is declining. People are ditching their landlines and their traditional VoIP services and actually moving a lot more to over-the-top providers. So people like your Microsoft Teams, your Cisco Webex, Zoom, all that kind of stuff. That is where really a lot more of our business customers, effectively and wholesale customers are starting to shift their voice traffic through. The thing about it is that those over-the-top providers still need effectively a carrier within the country in order to land those calls into, they still need to make it into the public telephone network somehow. So with having NetSIP as our Tier 1 voice provider, not only are we able to now help provide wholesale services to other customers, like other telco and then non-telco customers. we can actually then start to partner. We already have built integrations between NetSIP and teams, which is the biggest over-the-top provider in the market. They've got about 40% market share. We can help basically build those integrations and therefore, drive additional traffic onto our Tier 1 voice network. And again, like with the data -- with carbon and the data example, we can scale this network up quite easily to generate additional revenue, but obviously, the voice hold -- the entire voice business is quite high margin. So we can again expand quite quickly with relatively low costs and, therefore, drive further returns. And we've seen already great growth in effectively our Tier 1 platform over the last 18 months to date. So I'll talk about white label and our partnership with Origin because otherwise, I know people are going to smash with questions in the Q&A about it. So we'll talk about it now. Origin actually approached us back in probably the end of 2020 or end of 2020 fills about that. So they actually approached us. And they basically came to us with a problem. And they came to us and they said, Hey, we love what you do with your -- the infrastructure that you have, the technology that you have. We love what you do with your customer service experience and your focus on providing that game-changing service in the industry, can you do that for us? So they actually approached us with kind of effectively what has now become the white label agreement that we have with them, the partnership that we have. And it was really about that. They wanted to be able to provide that really premium, not only technology experience, but also customer service experience, to their customers, and they're looking to really invest hugely into that broadband space as part of their overall kind of connected home strategy. And so we, of course, said, cool, no worries, and that's kind of what we did. We effectively built our white-label platform. They were our first anchor customer, and it's open available for others, but obviously, having them there, working with Origin helped us kind of build and design it. And we built some design so that from the ground up, we basically use all of the same underlying systems and network and infrastructure that an Aussie Broadband customer effectively gets which is exactly the reason why Origin came to us. They wanted that Aussie Broadband experience, but they wanted it for their customers. That's exactly what we allowed for them when we built the white-label platform for them. Origin has seen some really, really fantastic growth. They've got about 65,000 subscribers now, which is over double what they had when they came to us. We've not only started to -- we not only built their -- effectively their systems and then started to sell new services, but they actually migrated all of their existing broadband services that they had over to our network, which was a program that basically took 12 months and only probably only actually wrapped up effectively earlier this calendar year. And they made a very, very big investment, as I said, because that's what they wanted, and they wanted to see that grow as part of their Connected Home strategy. Obviously, they've put out in the market that they're looking to get 600,000 customers. We believe that they can do that organically. They have 3.5 million energy subscribers currently and only a fraction of them obviously by both energy and telco services now. So we see no reason why they can't absolutely get to that 600,000 customers organically. The fact that we've built the platform that provides exactly the same experience on the network side, on the customer service side, even we've actually helped reskin our app so that their customers have advantages to all the features that our [miles yet] does. There have been some of the reasons that have led them to effectively get -- they actually won the -- I'm sorry, on this slide. the Canstar Blue award for most satisfied NBN customers. So they actually won that award from us. We had that award previously. They actually won it this year in 2022, but we actually took that as a really positive sign because it was a real demonstration, I suppose, that the experience that the Origin Broadband users have is identical to that so much so that obviously, they want this award. And that's exactly what Origin wanted to invest in when they came and they approached us and they actually said, "Hey, can we build this white label thing. So we are very, very excited to continue partnering with Origin and continue working with them as they work towards their goal of 600,000 customers. And again, using our existing infrastructure and our assets and our systems will then help us get additional scale and further margins from this segment. And you can ask me more questions about that later. I'll now hand over to Brian to talk about delivering value cycles.

Thanks, Kusi. Good afternoon everyone. Those of you -- I know many of you in the room, but some of those of you who don't know, I'm Brian Maher, the Chief Financial Officer of Aussie Broadband. I've been counting beans for over 30 years, both in the U.K. and here across a range of industries, so from health insurance through to waste management and materials handling in the steel industry. also very familiar with growth, having been the founder of 2 businesses in the past as well. So we've had the feedback from the analysts and many of you in the room today that ABB has been valued on a next growth basis. I think everything we've talked about today shows that internally, that's not how we see the business. We are still growing. At the AGM, we reaffirmed our guidance of 10% to 10.5% EBITDA margin on $800 million to $840 million of revenue. So those numbers playing out would yield a real growth of about 50% in revenue, 30% on a normalized basis and 124% on EBITDA overall and about 45% when you normalize for the Over the Wire acquisition. So we very much see that we are continuing to grow. That guidance includes $5.2 million of synergies that had already been actioned and we expect more to be actioned during this financial year. It also includes investments in a range of new systems. NetSuite for General Ledger, Workday for HRIS, Calabrio, which is a workforce management system, a new contact center system and some additional CVC management tools. So there's a big investment in systems to, again, to replatform us for our future growth. There's also a significant investment in market analysis and product. We saw some of the benefits of that today in Jono's presentation today. And his background is yielding benefits for us in terms of where we're going into the future from a growth perspective. And we've invested heavily in people. We've had some wage inflation like the rest of the country, but also actually increasing headcount in key areas. And the business is a strong cash generator, which enables us to fund the investments that we require to stable -- to position ourselves for this growth. But that investment must be done in a disciplined manner. We committed at the full year and in the AGM to provide a little more flavor and color on our CapEx profile. FY '22 CapEx was dominated by the rollout of the fiber network. We spent over $30 million on that. And we spent a modest amount on customer fiber builds that Phil touched on earlier. Looking at FY '23, we've provided an indicative profile and it can't be indicative. A lot of the fiber investments that Phil talked about, when he talked about clusters, every cluster has looked individually. And where it makes economic sense to do so. And we've got those educated risks that we can acquire additional customers, we will do so. Where it doesn't, we won't. So until we go through case by case and where it's a little hard to put firm numbers on everything. So it could be more, it could be less, but this is providing indicative range of -- indicative number on the CapEx spend. So we've got $13 million of the tail of the fiber backbone to be complete in FY '23. Most of that is now done. We still wait for some of the invoicing to flow through, but the network is largely complete. And then he talked about positioning ourselves for the longer-term growth, as everyone's talked about today, some 3- to 5-year investments. The IPv4 addresses, which are required for growth. This is an old finite number of addresses. The new IPv6 numbers are infinite -- were not infinite, but certainly plenty scope for growth. But we do need IPv4 addresses. And these are actually appreciating assets. We bought -- the last time we bought these was 2 years ago when they were USD 35, they are now USD 50, and so because there's only a finite number -- a small finite number in the world, we acquire those opportunistically as we can, and we've just secured some recently. And we also use some software for those addresses so that it isn't one address per customer. We're able to share addresses across customers. So that gives -- those assets longer life as well. We are installing fiber network hubs, which is another means of getting greater capacity out of the core network we've built. We bring customer traffic to a local hub, which we can aggregate the traffic and put it down single course, which creates more capacity, freeze up more cores, Phil was talking about the 360, 720 cores in their network, as more of those to be used for new customers down the track. So that's a really fundamental capacity investment for the longer term with the aim of getting to that 1 million plus connections. And then there's other elements that John touched on in terms of his core network infrastructure. We've got an allowance there for expansion of fiber-build which is demand-driven. And will be done where it makes sense. So there's also a fair degree of discretion in some of their spend. And we will only invest it where, one, it makes sense; and two, where the operational cash flows support the investment. And there are other opportunities beyond that, including the transition of more and more existing customers onto Aussie Fibre. And as Kusi touched on earlier, rethinking what does Aussie 2.0 look like into the future. is having a look at our core operating systems and saying, what do we want -- what do we need that to be in the longer term? And what investment do we need to make in that over the next 2 years to position ourselves for 1 million subscribers and, of course, beyond. So as crucial as financial performance is, it isn't our only -- they're not our only -- it isn't our only measure of success. I mean other stakeholders to consider. And Kusi talked about changing the game, not only for telco, but also the communities that we operate in. So we touch a bit on ESG. But ESG is not a term that we -- you would ever or rarely hear in ABB. We talk about being good to people, which we believe is the same thing. So we've got a commitment to make an authentic positive impact in the communities we serve, the employees we work with and the society we live in. And it's genuine. So we don't do it because the market says we should do it. We do it because it's who we are. It's lived and breathed in our organization every day. It's in the very nature of the business from the start, which -- there's a lot of scaling background in our business, which is all that giving back to the community and making an impact. Even though it is what we do, it's a core part of our business. We are not going to seek sort of external validation of that, and we're in the process of applying to be a certified B Corp company, which we think will happen in March -- in mid-2023, I think -- yes. And to be qualified as a certified B Corp, you need a high social environmental performance. You need to have a legal commitment to consider other stakeholders in every decision you make. Now again, as I said, that's what we do anyway. And so -- we voted that through in the AGM recently. That really is just the codification of who we are and what we do rather than ticking our box. And you have to be transparent. So we -- all the measures that B Corp -- the standards are, will get published globally compared to other companies and so your performance is transparent. Other notable B Corps are Aesop, Body Shop, Patagonia and [ Vada ]. Just looking at the elements of our community approach inclusion and diversity. Everything starts with inclusion at Aussie, diversity follows. We deliberately call it inclusion and diversity rather than the other way around. Diversity is not a target in and of itself. It just happens as a matter of Aussie's, [indiscernible] these are genuinely inclusive. And it's more than just gender. We offer employment opportunities to marginalized communities and regional communities. We've got an ambition to reach a stretch target of reconciliation action plan. We've got a dedicated inclusion and diversity manager. And again, even though it isn't just gender, we're currently recruiting for an additional NED with the aim of that director will be a female. Looking at the environment, we have a commitment to 100% renewable energy by 2025. And we've got comprehensive plans and goals at 3 scope levels. Scope 1 being direct fuel usage to our own usage. Scope 2, being emissions from purchased utilities and Scope 3 being indirect emissions from our supply chain. When we look at directly community connections, one of the key things we do offer in our company is every employee has 3 days community service leave that they can use to give back to their communities. And through our P&C team, we're looking at organizing team events where the whole team can participate in a select activity. We have a range of direct donations to organizations involved with domestic and family violence, regional rural education and mental health. And we've got a helping communities connect program, which offers distended broadband and refer from cash rebates to community organizations. And then finally, industry collaboration. So we're an active participant in the Telco Together Foundation. And our customers in the last 12 months have contributed over $150,000 to the Small Change, Big Change program, which helps build resilience in young Australians. Beyond that, that group also works together as an industry to ensure we minimize modern slavery in our supply chain around the industry. We go after most similar suppliers. So we work together to ensure we're using ethical suppliers. And similarly, in the telco space, we have the domestic and family violence action plans that we can work together. So overall, we're looking to deliver value to our stakeholders, not just shareholders, but as important as they are, but also to our role in society generally. So thank you. I'll hand back to Phil.

Yes. Thanks, Brian. So hopefully, after you've heard all that today and I had a chance to meet some of the team, you'll get to meet the rest of them after lunch. Hopefully, that leaves you with a sense of depth and breadth within the team and so on. These guys are what makes Aussie great. And I think they're [ f******] awesome to be honest. It's -- when you look at what Aussie has achieved, we should not have been able to do this if the telco market was working right in Australia. And so we've continued to take that -- those steps and continue to be the fastest-growing telco in Australia. And that's still true today, despite what a few people might think out in the investment community. Ultimately, the Aussie 2.0 strategy is very, very well advanced. And our One Team approach is what's going to basically lead that through. This acquiring Over the Wire hasn't been standard acquisition approach, we've parked off on the side and just keep it running in the way it's doing. This is a complete change in the way that we've brought that team together. We're continuing to grow across all segments. Residential has been the foundation that the business was built on, but as you've seen today, the other segments in business, enterprise and government and wholesale will be actually really key to driving the profitability growth as we move forward. Our strategic investments in infrastructure and people, where it makes sense, will continue to drive and improve those margins. And this is a real key thing. And the key part there is where it makes sense. We're not going to invest in things just for the sake of it. As much as I love building fiber all the time, Brian keeps me in check. So you're well protected there. We have a highly capable and passionate team. The team behind Aussie really is the key to our success. The people on the call centers that answer the calls that stand behind those ratings that you've seen, they are the ones who are actually the real part and what makes Aussie what it is today. And we're playing the long game. We're not here for a quarter-by-quarter type success or anything like that. For us, it's about this long-term, consistent, growing company that will all benefit from as shareholders going forward. And as Brian said, we've reaffirmed our guidance again today. So with that, that's the end of the formal proceedings. You're welcome to join us for lunch out in the floor [indiscernible]. And then we'll kick back off again at I think it's...

We're a little bit, so we might kick back in again, if everyone is kind of comfortable rather than waiting until all the way to 1 rather than waiting -- maybe through 45 minutes.

So 1:30.

1:30.

Gives you a little bit more time for questions if you need it. So yes, so 45-minute lunch break kick back in at 1:30 for the Q&A panel and would really love to see everyone stick around for that, as I'm sure you will, because you've probably got a million questions you've jaded down. So thank you again.

All right. Cool. Well, hopefully, everyone just had quick light lunch. Obviously, I wanted to make it still an opportunity to have a kind of talk to the leadership team and that kind of things. So hopefully, you guys got a chance to do that. We are going to open up for a bit of a Q&A. But first, I wanted to be able to give the 2 members of the leadership team that you haven't had a chance to hear from through the presentations. Just chance to introduce themselves. So Jane will start with you, and then we'll go to Kev afterwards.

Thanks. So good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jane Betts. I'm the Chief People and Reputation Officer, recently joined. I've only been with the company for 3 months and having a really wonderful time. It's certainly an amazing place to have joined and a very exciting growth period. So I've come from a company called Findex, which is the fifth largest accounting consulting and wealth practice across Australia and New Zealand and have previously worked for AGL, NAB, JBWere and Australian Unity. So very excited to be here and happy to take any questions along the way.

Thanks, Jane. And Kev?

Good day, guys. My name is Kevin Salerno. I'm the Chief Customer Officer. I've been here coming up to 9 years now, just a funny fact. When I started, we had 8 seats in the call center, and I think I had 12 staff. So now we have 700 staff. I look after support for residential business, enterprise and government. I look after complaints, customer experience, customer delivery. So yes, fun times.

And it's pretty modest because his team is the source of all those wonderful customer service awards that we win. So...

Yes. Absolutely, no doubt. We'll launch into it. I suppose the first kind of opportunity, so we have questions online, but also questions from the floor, but we'll throw to the floor first. So this is the opportunity to ask any questions from anyone of the leadership team. And there's some roaming mics. So if you can use those, it just helps the people online. Lift your hand up and then yes -- and you can go first or just there. And then we'll come on just yes.

Ian Munro from Ord Minnett. Thanks very much for the presentation today. I got a real sense of the growth in the enterprise business, the opportunity in front. And I think one of the comments that was made at the AGM was that you won quite major projects and price wasn't the key sensitivity in any of those projects. So just from the enterprise perspective, you've got the full sort of capabilities, it looks like now. But I guess the question is, how is the tender opportunity and do you need to, I guess, broaden the team? Do you need -- what areas do you need to really invest in to take advantage of the opportunity over the next year or 2?

Awesome, thanks. Sure. So yes, we've actually already done a fair bit of investment in the tender team. So we've got a dedicated tender writer, and we're just about to bring a second tender writer on it or a big manager sort of role. So [indiscernible], she's been brilliant at getting us on these panels. So she's been doing all that work in the background and pulling all the resources in to get all the questions answered the presales engineers and security and all those types of things. So we're actually pretty well set up there to continue basically tendering for these opportunities. We've actually -- with the acquisition of Over the Wire, we've also brought in quite a bit of talent in that presales engineering side of things. So that's key in designing those solutions and answering all that quite often millions of questions you've got to answer to get a crack at these things. So yes, we're in a pretty good place.

And if you just introduce yourself as well, that would be great when you start.

Yes, Tony Waters, QVG Capital Investor. There seems to be an industry view over the last 20 years in corporate telco land that the cost to serve in Australia is just far too great. And it's either Philippines or Sri Lanka or wherever and you guys seem to be standing alone there. and it's a huge competitive advantage, I think, in terms of that service proposition. Why don't you promote that a bit more in terms of your marketing pitch?

Cool, that's the question. Jono, on the left.

So the Australian-based support is core to our brand and how we go to market, particularly in residential today, it will continue to grow out into business and into enterprise. The key words that we're really seeking to use in the marketplace is about trust. And really the ability to deliver that from both an onshore capability, but then delving into the fact that our onshore capability is a team of experts. So the onshore nature of being Australian will be front and center of who we are moving forward, but really getting into that technical expertise side of things as well.

John Campbell from Jefferies. Thanks very much for the presentation, have been very helpful. Just 2 questions from me. One is just around how you're seeing the residential market at the moment in terms of the discounting that's been going on in the special offers and whether you're seeing that stabilizing? And the second question is more on the business side. whether you post the merger with OTW, and the fact that you're sort of now one team fully integrated, what capabilities maybe cybersecurity or I don't know, your cloud offering? What are the capabilities that you think you need to sort of take up to the next level to really avail yourself of that market opportunity that is obviously very big given the size of the SME market.

Great questions. I'll start with first Jono and then Aaron.

Just making sure I got the question down. So in terms of the residential market and the -- let's call it, the role of discounting and how we see that playing out. One of the -- first one of a better terms, experiments that we ran when I came in, was I had a very strong hypothesis that the discounting play in market didn't actually result in long-term customer growth or high-quality customer acquisition. And so we went on a short term, what I refer to as a sugar diet. So it's not that [ prior ] activity. The key test of that in terms of the hypothesis was whether or not we saw 2 things occur. First one, did we slow down our rate of natural acquisition growth? And two, did we actually see an increase in customer churn in those cohorts of customers who are more promo hopping. And what we learned was basically no, so what we did see, was a decreased ability to fight at the 25.5 kind of point of the market so the 25.10. But from a customer -- cost of customer acquisition perspective, we already knew that those were low-quality customers. So in terms of the role of promo going forward, it will be a part of our armory, but will not be an always on play for us. We are moving into a more detailed understanding of customer lifetime value and also moving into an understanding of value by channel of acquisition, which will actually play a more sophisticated role for us moving forward.

Cool And then on the [ANZ] products?

Yes. So on the second question, the first thing probably to touch on is we are cross-training and putting a lot of investment in cross training the staff across the ABB product set, and the OTW product set and also looking at what products actually belong there still because there's some things where there's cross over and you go, no point doing the same version of 2 different things, et cetera, like that. So there's a lot of work going into that so that we can fully cross-sell the entire solution to these customers. The second part, probably where we probably where we're putting focus is definitely in that cloud space. There's a massive opportunity in that cloud space. And while everything we've got there is awesome, there's more automation and things that we can bring into that to basically reduce humans doing things that automation can do. Other questions from the floor, you want to go have another crack in -- we're on the back then, yes.

[ Rob Miller from Neil ]. Thanks very much for a great presentation today. Just a question around the wholesale side of things. You've obviously got the relationship with Origin on the white label offering, and they've just won the best NBN Provider award. I think you said they've got approximately 3 million customers at a guess, I'd say some would also be over the -- sorry, Aussie broadband customers. So the potential for cannibalization there is some potentially of your own customers move to there, and that obviously changes unit economics from an ABB point of view. Can you kind of just comment on that and if there's any kind of plans in place to stop any cannibalization occurring and how that would look going forward?

Yes. So I can talk to that. So obviously, we obviously work and partner with Origin in our label kind of thing. And so their retail offering and their marketing and that kind of thing is at arm's length to us. We support and partner with them on all the operational side, I suppose. As far as the strategy goes, though, we don't really see that there's a huge amount of cannibalization. They traditionally obviously, certainly, Aussie at our routes kind of very much focused on the high speed plans, and that's kind of really what we're continuing in our residential marketing page, and I spoke to that beforehand. They're not necessarily playing in that same space. They're very much -- they've got that base of 3 million, 3.5 million customers. They're really just playing that bundling play and they're looking for basically a broadband of touch when they are relocating, they have quite high churn effectively just people either churning different -- between different enterprises or just relocating their services and their plays really around getting that attach when they do that relocation and whatever that. So it's really just around ease, convenience and price because they do bundle discounts, if you've got 1, 2, 3 parts, you effectively bundle discounts with Origin. So they're not really kind of focusing on the same area of the market that the ABB traditional brand is where it's really high speed, the value maximizers as [ Kangana ] said, and they're probably more on the bundling ease, convenience and probably more of the costs at -- was the term that you used, Jono? Price sensitive. Thank you. So yes, so we don't necessarily see a huge amount of cannibalization. And we obviously can see when we've got customers coming from one to the other, which obviously happens. But we're still very small in the scheme of things, our market share has kind of grown a lot, but it's still 6.5%, you know what I mean. So the overall majority of Origin's base are still going to be with effectively those big 4 carriers.

The other thing is we've sort of got a really deep visibility on the profile of these types of customers and the usage profile of their customers is considerably lower than an ABB customer. And so from that, they are a different cohort that's signing up. So in a way that sort of complements what ABB is doing. It's almost like having a second brand without the need to have the second brand sort of thing. And so there's a lot of benefits from that perspective as well as they do appeal to the TBG data into the market sort of thing where [indiscernible] is more appealing to the Telstra end of the market.

And so the way we're looking at it is from an ABB group perspective, it gives us the ability to play at both ends of the market, which is obviously...

Other questions from the floor?

Just with respect to the CVC debate. Obviously, it's ongoing at the moment. Can you perhaps give us a sense of where that's at? And within some of the suggestions from the NBN is obviously amending some of the price points on CVC and then having also the oversea and having an inflation adjustment to that. So the question is if there was an inflation adjustment, how do you think the industry would cope with that? Do you think that, that would erode any potential benefit from the CVC?

It's a good point. I'll jump in, then you want to talk in. So with where that's at, at the moment, yes, obviously, Ambient's kind of put their thing. I don't think they've actually lodged their new SAU yet, but it's coming pretty soon. And we believe that it's largely going to be along the lines of what's already been kind of released to the market. We don't believe that they're going to walk back from that. As to whether or not they actually intend to put through effectively inflation, price rises, certainly, they are very, very well aware of the position of the industry that they're going to basically be how did if they do. It's very much a security mechanism there, but they've made their intention quite clear, and it's in the SAU document that they want to basically move people to high-speed tiers. So I would expect we're likely to see the lowest BTs increase as they basically try and lift their overall ARPU. We may see you obviously some CPI increases, but Ambient still got the flexibility to kind of basically choose where it places CPI increases or whatever else that they've got, their mechanism they don't necessarily have to use it. And I expect that, if anything, that would effectively yes, still try and move up the low-speed users to encourage more migration on the high-speed tiers and obviously trying to hit their overall ARPU. I don't know if you want to talk to more of the CVC side of things?

Yes. Look, I think it's obviously we know today that we believe from 100 meg and above tiers that CVC will disappear entirely. But on the CPI time issue, I think, we're already starting to see major carriers increase retail prices in some instances around that. And so I think the CPI element will get passed through and not absorbed. So I don't think we'll see that as a margin hit to services over time. We've deliberately not moved prices at this point because ultimately, we think there's an opportunity, particularly early next year when some of the providers have delayed their price rises, so they've made them for new customers. But for existing customers, they've delayed that into sort of first quarter next calendar year. And so I think once the bill shock starts to come in of that price change, it will trigger a buying opportunity where people will revisit what they're doing. And so if we can hold their pricing through to when the new SAU is due to start in July next year, I think that will bode well for us and their pricing then will sit where we sort of expect it should in the market.

Yes. So you want to go some questions online, Ron?

Yes. We've got a few questions that have come through. I might start with a question from Lachlan Brown on indicative CapEx in FY '23, do you view the $10 million of custom-million dollars of customer fiber builds to be an elevated number, given the recent completion of the backbone or should we view this as BAU CapEx going forward? Can you provide any color on the payback period you seek for customer fiber builds?

I'll let you talk about CapEx and then probably fill on the fund payback [indiscernible]

So the payback profile, I think Phil touched on this in the main presentation, where you are building the first link or the first customer you're building to probably like it be investment that may not stack up on its own right. But when I look at that and look at the clusters and things around it and go do we have faith, is there existing customers we can move? Are there customers that we think we can sign up before we even commit or are there customers we think we can acquire down the track? Once you get the second customer, the payback looks pretty solid and the returns start to flow. And then beyond that, it's obviously getting additional returns, which is where the real excitement comes from that. In terms of whether the $10 million is typical of the future, I probably would Aaron to give an answer to that. I guess we'll see. As I said in the main presentation, at the $10 million itself is not a guaranteed locked-in number. It depends -- it's demand-driven. It's also based on evaluations of each case as they come up, and we'll see how we go. We're not providing really any guidance as to what we think will happen beyond FY '23.

On CapEx, question from Mike Younger is annual CapEx of $50 million here to stay into the longer term?

I'll refer you to my last answer.

I think the way to look at that is we're always assessing the opportunities that might be there and we need to balance the level of CapEx spend with returns that we can generate and all those sorts of things. And so I think it's a case of -- we don't know yet what the profile for FY '24 will go because we're still looking at all the opportunities that are out there. So I think it's a case of as we start to know and start to enter into our budgeting phase for next year, then we may or may not be in a position to provide a better response at that point.

Just to flesh that a bit because the other question on lunch, which is along similar lines is around the differential between short-term growth and long-term growth. So there are certain things that we -- that are linear in nature. So as we grow, we need new computers for staff, we need I think BNGs, which is with over 20,000 customers, so we did a new BNG. So short-term growth is basically -- if the growth continues, you can expect that CapEx to continue. The longer-term growth is -- and it's not scientific as such as there was a bit of interpretation putting those numbers together, but it's investments that build capacity that go beyond a single year, so 3 to 5 years. So we build those network hubs that could facilitate growth for up to 5 years. And on the core work that John is building in is to have a network that's capable of handling 1 million-plus connections. So those sorts of -- the IPV4 addresses, again, they should probably last a couple of years. So that's why we're trying to demonstrate it that way. But again, it's art, more than science.

Yes. So staying on the -- Brian, you mentioned the 1 million-plus connections and building a network to support that. Mike Younger asked another question, what are the most important channels in order of size in terms of delivering the 2025 broadband customer target of more than 1 million?

I wanted to ask a clarification question on what channel in the question. So we use quite a few different go-to-market channels across the different segments. In Residential, one of the most frequently discussed channels is kind of the third-party portals, so your finder.coms and things like that. What's important from our perspective is understanding the value and the payback period we get from each of those channels. And so we're doing a piece of work right now to understand the customer value and the customer lifetime value of each of those channels and the profiles of each of those channels that will then lead into the work I kind of referred to earlier in terms of that price-discounting play to actually understand which of those channels are profitable, which are not, which will return off and which we'll invest more so into. So that piece of work is ongoing as we speak. One of the most important channels for us right now in terms of high-quality lead generation is actually our own website as well as the NBN's website itself. And so we have an automated feed every day. We were able to feed into a lot of Aaron's outbound teams, a whole bunch of prequalified leads effectively from the NBN and our own website, which enables a very rich outbound telephony activity from his team's perspective. But still today, our most important channel for Residential is the inbound call center. And so we have a significant amount of, let's call it, organic acquisition activity occurring through that channel. It continues to be very, very important to us. From a marketing perspective, though, we are becoming far more targeted in the channels we use via marketing, whether that be digital or above the line with radio and TV. We're also pivoting particularly in NBN to a state-based approach where at the high level, we'll have an always-on national campaign, but we'll be very targeted in terms of the states that we're going after at a particular point in time depending on the activity that we see there. So we're getting a little bit more sophisticated there in terms of how we go to market from a marketing perspective.

Yes. In terms of the connections from a segmentation perspective, we look across all the elements. Obviously, as Residential main brand is a key contributor to connections. The Origin White label partnership is also a key growth in those royal connection numbers. So it's a combination of channels to get towards the 1 million subscriber that will be there as well as what we drive through the small business side of things. But we think we can get a fair chunk of the way there with Aussie alone, even if Origin was to stand still today sort of thing. So there's a lot of things that we still believe we can play out in that Residential space, which will drive that number towards the 1 million sub-mark.

A question from [ Nick Gadera ]. What do you make of CBA's entry into broadband, is this an opportunity as you'll see more competition in the market? And is the market big enough for Aussie to continue to grow share from the incumbents and have the other challenger players grow concurrently?

Yes. That's a -- it's a good question. And obviously, certainly, there's a few news articles and whatever else like that, about CBA's involvement. And for those obviously, who are including -- they have a 25% stake in more telecom. Certainly, with respect to how does this kind of -- like what kind of does this mean for the saturation of competitors in the market? We don't see like, obviously, it's fantastic for CBA if they want to come and play. We don't see that as a huge that we entered a market that was already extremely saturated with competition, right? So there's a huge number of broadband providers already coming out and available, CBA entering the more telecom or tendering no different to, I suppose, where we've been. We continue to stick to our routes to know those -- using our infrastructure, our technology structure and using our focus on customer experience. And we don't see why that's necessarily entry of CBA is necessarily going to change. If they do come in and they're offering awesome products also customer sales, all those kind of things, which is -- and that's fantastic. Obviously, they are a bank. They're not -- we are and have always been a technical company, and [ Finjan ] certainly spoke to that in their presentations today. If they get it right, more power to them, but certainly, we don't see it any different the market that we came into when we basically entered.

Yes. There's also, in our view, quite a positive bent to the CBA side of things in that they do have a very established brand and they do have the ability to talk above the line when they choose to do so about Telco and their ability to wake up a larger customer base and effectively make them shop and to look around the market is a very positive thing for Aussie. So we know that when more people become active in the marketplace and our consideration, our awareness goes up, we win more than our fair share. So in some ways, it's actually a positive thing to have a large brand in the marketplace actively talking.