Catapult Sports Ltd (CAT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
November 8, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Andrew Keys
executiveAnd welcome to Catapult's first-ever Investor Day. This is Andrew Keys speaking, Catapult's Head of Investor Relations. In the spirit of reconciliation, Catapult acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and the community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all our aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. I'll now hand over to Catapult's CEO, Will Lopes, in Boston.
Will Lopes
executiveGood morning, and welcome to Catapult's first-ever Investor Day, and thank you, Andrew, for the introduction. We are very excited to have you all on board here and to share really, I think, the great Catapult story about not only what we've been doing, but the growth potential that stands in front of us. We wish we were doing this in person, but hopefully, this virtual presentation will be as informative and get you as excited as we are about the future of Catapult. With that, my legal team always asks that I share the following slide. So let's consider that shared. I'd like to make some introductions today of the speakers you will hear on it. In Melbourne, we are joined by Hayden Stockdale, Catapult's CFO. With him is Andrew Keys, who is our Investor Relations leader, and also will be moderating our Q&A session later on. And here in Boston, I'm joined with Chris Cooper, Catapult's Chief Operating Officer. We have a pretty packed agenda for today. We're going to talk about our industry and the sports technology market, how we've assessed that opportunity in terms of creating a TAM. We're going to talk about why we're uniquely positioned in this industry, a little bit about our strategy and our business model, and then we'll end up with looking ahead and how we see Catapult becoming a different company in 5 years. We'll take a short break, and we'll do a Q&A session. But before we get started, I'd like to share a video with all of you. I think this video encapsulates the mission and vision of what we do here at Catapult and the impact that we're having in teams across the globe. And so with that, let's share that video. Let's press play. [Presentation]
Will Lopes
executiveNow as you can see from that video, we're a pretty passionate group of people here at Catapult, and we believe what we're doing each and every day matters. And our vision is to unleash the potential of every athlete and team on earth. Now if you're new to the Catapult story, we are the leading vertical SaaS solution for elite athletes globally. What we do is to create performance analytics as well as tactical analytics that are helping teams make better decisions in each day. What I mean by that is that our goal is to help teams, leagues and athletes improve their decision-making capacity related to performance. And when I say we're the leading SaaS solution, I'm not just making that up. Our numbers tell that story. We're a company of scale. We are now 5x larger than our next competitor. And what you will hear today is that the TAM standing in front of us is over $40 billion. We're a company of high-quality revenue. The bulk of our revenue today is contracted and what we call our leading indicator, ACV, annualized contracted value. And we have world-class churn, standing at 4.1% today. But more importantly, Catapult is a growth story. In the last 12 months, our ACV has grown 43% year-on-year. And a new number we're sharing today is that in the last half year, our subscription revenue has grown 29%, nearly catching up to that ACV growth that we're seeing. But what truly brought me here to Catapult nearly 2 years ago was the fundamental of its business. We're a company that generates 74% gross margin. And when you remove the cost of sales and marketing, our contribution margin is at 45%. And our ability to improve and expand this margin is great. Now there are 3 key takeaways you're going to hear from us today during this presentation. The first is that we have a large addressable market. Standing in front of us is a professional TAM worthy of $2.6 billion and a SAM worthy of $1.4 billion available without any major R&D. We also have a prosumer TAM worth $41 billion, and we're operating in a sports technology market that not only is vast, but growing. Two, that we're uniquely positioned to take advantage of it. We are leaders in performance technology, and we are deeply embedded with elite teams across the globe. And we have a growing portfolio of high-value solutions that allows us to take advantage of this large addressable market. And three, we have a sophisticated execution strategy to do so. Our product strategy is strong. We have a go-to-market that allows us to have multiple growth levers. And not only do we have a deep strategic moat today, but our ability to expand it is really, really strong. Now I know I'm excited to share all of this information with you. And I hope at the end of it, you will be excited about our story as much as we are. With that, I'm going to share the mic now with Chris Cooper, our Chief Operating Officer, who is going to talk about our industry. Chris?
Christopher Cooper
executiveThanks, Will. Good morning, good afternoon or good evening to all of you, depending on where you might be in the world. I could probably steal a phrase from my Australian colleagues to say good day and cover everybody. Look, I'm really excited to take you through our industry numbers. I'm going to focus around 3 different areas. I'm going to start out with what are the main components? What's really driving the industry? How large is the industry? How is it growing? What do we anticipate the growth to come to over the next 5 years? And obviously, how Catapult fits in with all this? So let me kick off with the components. So if you look at the key landscape across the sports tech industry, it's really 5 key areas. It starts with talent identification. This could be anything from youth league development all the way up through professional scouting. From there, you move into preparation and performance. This incorporates both Tactics & Coaching as well as Performance & Health. And this is really the most data intense area of the sports tech industry, and more importantly, the one where Catapult has its deepest roots and its strongest penetration. From there, you move into a team management. It's really broken down primarily into 2 areas. One is athlete management. This could go from as simple as onboarding of an athlete, ongoing communications, training schedules, things of that nature, but also starts to incorporate organizational strategy, brings in the culture, brings in succession planning, a little bit longer-term thought process with that. From there, you move into another very innovative area in terms of game day. You start to really see a lot in terms of live data, live video analytics that are coming into play. We've all seen the development and the advancement of officiating. And then finally, what's really interesting and innovative is the development around venues and really the proliferation of smart stadiums all over the world. Then finally, you get to commercialization. Obviously, this has to do with strong media engagement, both from a live perspective but as well as secondary viewing. And equally important and growing is the betting community as well as fantasy sports. So it's these 5 areas that really make up the overall landscape, start to drive the development and the growth of the industry overall. So let me jump in a little bit in terms of the size. So the size and the makeup of the industry is really around 2 broad areas: professional, which incorporates elite teams and athletes; and prosumer, which incorporates amateur, recreational athletes and teams. Those 2 areas together are anticipated to grow over the next 5 years to nearly $130 billion. What's actually really driving this, what's important, and this brings off of the previous 5 components I just walked you through, is really an enrichment of the fan engagement, but also team performance and team decision-making. And what's most important and actually what gets us excited here at Catapult as well is data is at the core of all this. This is really why we're excited around the growth of this market because data is driving the growth of the market. So dropping into the professional level just a bit. It's already a relatively sized, large-sized market at nearly $18 billion. It's anticipated to grow at roughly 17.5% over the next 5 years, ultimately reaching an area of a little over $40 billion by 2026. Again, very strong, very solid growth from an overall perspective. However, what's exciting to us with Catapult is within the area, within this professional area, the sports analytics and the wearables segments are really among the most aggressive growth areas. If you just go back 3 years, these 2 areas combined would be a little over somewhere between $2 billion and $2.5 billion. Today, they've already reached in excess of $8 billion. And over the next 5 years, we're looking at that doubling or more than doubling to over $16.5 billion. So really strong growth in both of these areas. Dropping down just a bit more detail. If you look at the sports analytics component, now a couple of things to pull out of this. First of all, it's actually the strongest growth in terms of CAGR across all the areas within the sports tech industry at 26%, almost 26.5%, anticipated to reach a market size over the next 5 years of nearly $6.5 billion, and strong growth across the globe with a little bit stronger growth capping in out of APAC, but nonetheless, very strong numbers across all 4 key regions. However, what really gets us excited here at Catapult is the fact that our core competencies align very well with the major components of the sports analytics area. So whether it's from player and team analytics, data interpretation, health assessments, video analytics, all these pieces that are showing your strongest presence and strongest growth are actually right in the center of the wheelhouse for Catapult. So we feel really strong. We've got a nice win behind our sales, and we're going to make a lot of great progress in these areas as we go forward. And something just to add a little bit more icing on the cake with that is the area of the sports that are growing the most aggressively within sports technology are areas in which we already have a strong presence or a growing presence. It could be anything from soccer, American football, rugby, ice hockey and continuing stronger presence in the likes of baseball and basketball as well. Let me shift now to the consumer market, and I'll start with consumer wearable, which I think most people know what that is. Overall, right now, it's about a $35 billion industry. It's anticipated to grow a little over 20% over the next 5 years, reaching a total of somewhere in the neighborhood of $88 billion by 2026. So again, very large already, but looking to grow even further. However, from Catapult's standpoint, what's actually more interesting to us is the consumer wearable market that's really focused on sports application, that's actually going to outpace the normal wearables market, i.e., at 21.4%, anticipated to reach over $45 billion in total market size and again, well distributed across the globe in that regard. And finally, we did a little analysis from a bottoms-up standpoint here at Catapult. And right now, we estimate that there's probably somewhere south of about 100 million athletes that are tracking their fitness on a regular basis. However, we anticipate that number to more than double over the course of the next 5 years, exceeding 200 million. And again, just more juice and more ammunition in terms of where we think Catapult is really well positioned because it's within this area in which we can actually deliver from a prosumer standpoint. So with this, I'm going to turn it back over to Will. He's going to take you through our market assessment opportunity. Thank you very much. Thanks, Will.
Will Lopes
executiveThanks, Chris. So as you heard from Chris, the market and the industry we operate is vast and growing. And it really adds a lot of wind behind our sales. So now I'm going to walk us through how I've looked and how we've looked internally of taking that market industry and really creating an addressable market that's focused around the products we have and the products that are in our road map. First, it's worth noting that in sport, there was a design that's very pyramid-driven. At the very top of that pyramid are professional teams and leagues. That makes up about 20,000 teams across the globe. There are competitive prosumer teams, and we believe given our analysis that there's about a little over 8.5 million of them across the globe as well. And with a focus on team sports, we know there's about 652 million competitive prosumer athletes. Now what we've done here at Catapult is taken this pyramid and broken them down into 5 distinct addressable groups. And we typically look at team sports and individual athlete. Within the team sports, we believe all 20,000 professional teams are addressable by the solutions we have and the road map that we have built. Now we've broken those down into 3 different levels that are typically driven based on the level of sophistication that they utilize in terms of their technology, the budget of the team, the size of staff and some of the regions they play in. But we also believe there is over 160,000 prosumer teams that are addressable by our existing solutions. These include high school, junior academies as well as research institutions. And within the individual athlete market, we believe there's over 200 million athletes that are addressable by what we're doing here at Catapult. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about the team sports first, and then we'll talk about individual athletes. Now if you've been following the Catapult story, you probably have seen this slide before. In team performance technology, there's really 4 verticals that are distinct and are connected to how teams think about their performance. Performance & Health is how the teams think about their athletes and their athletes' well-being. Tactics & Coaching is how they prepare for the game, self-scout and opponent scout. And there's Management, as Chris has shared. And a small sliver of the performance technology is also Professional Services, which is how people are utilizing consultative help to understand data and data insights. What we've done is looked at each of those 5 customer segments across these 4 distinct verticals. And we've built a bottoms-up exercise that allows us to calculate the ACV potential by teams in each vertical across the specific segments, sports and regions. So give 2 examples here of what we've done is we build these value pools around what we believe are end-to-end solutions that customers are looking for in order to solve a problem they have in terms of performance. So for example, on-field monitoring is something that we do today with our wearables analysis. It allows teams to collect information about their athletes and understand how they manage that training load so they could get the best performance out of their players. Another example of a value pool is off-field planning, where I want to customize and individualize how I train my athletes in the gym so that they are prepared either preseason or during season. A good example of that would be in soccer. I may want to train my striker to have strong burst speed, but I want to train my defenseman to have strong stamina. And I want to individualize those plans and make sure that I'm measuring and monitoring along the way. So what we've done is looked at all the value pools across the 3 main important verticals, which is Performance & Health, Tactics & Coaching and Management. We've looked at those value pools across different sports, different regions and different customer segments to essentially come up with what we believe is the ACV potential per team. In this example here, baseball in North America for level 2 customers represents an opportunity for us of about $27,000 per year, assuming we were supporting them across all value pools. Now to complete our TAM calculation, we did this for about 7,200 different value pool combinations again, across 3 verticals, 15 sports, 4 geographies, 4 segments and 10 value pools in each of those verticals. And what we found is that our TAM in professional sports is worth $2.6 billion. And our SAM, meaning what we could service and address right now, is $1.4 billion. Now what gets me excited is that each of these verticals are exciting on its own. And as you can see, Performance & Health and Tactics & Coaching are truly the areas we should stay focused here at Catapult. But if you look at the right side of the slide, what you notice is that our penetration from a TAM perspective and a SAM perspective is still fairly nascent. At 2.3% and 4.2%, respectively, it says that not only do we have a greenfield in front of us, but a very vast greenfield. Now in addressing the prosumer individual athlete market, we did a similar bottoms-up exercise, where we looked at the amount of athletes that are playing serious recreational team sports. There's about 652 million of them across the globe. Applying some filters in terms of technology and financial capabilities, we've brought that number down to about 205 million that we believe are addressable. And looking at what we support today in terms of technology, sports and geography, that number drops to about 39 million that are serviceable right now. Now part of what we've done is also assess what a customer is willing to pay for performance technology related to improving their team performance. And what we've discovered over the past year is that the average individual athlete is willing to spend about $200 annually on this, which means that we have an individual prosumer athlete TAM worthy of $41 billion and a SAM nearly close to $8 billion. Now that means that our professional TAM and our prosumer TAM is very sizable. But as Chris mentioned, at the core of the technology and what's happening in the sports tech world is data. And what you'll hear a little bit later today is that a lot of the solutions we are building have great applicability across many sectors. And so not only does Catapult have a sizable professional TAM, a sizable prosumer TAM, but we also have large adjacent markets that our data represents and is unique to. We already have fingers in a couple of these areas such as media, where we have our licensing business, in an area where it's worth $44.6 billion as a market today. eSports, where our video analysis package has applicability in what's happening in that world. That market alone is worth $1.7 billion and growing very rapidly. And we know that what we build here for performance is applicable for nonsports-related high-performance areas such as the military, the police segment as well as firefighters. And just to give a sense of numbers there, if you look across those 3 areas in the U.S. alone, there's over 3 million potential clients. So Catapult is operating in a space where the market is vast. The areas of fastest growth in that market are areas that we are core to, and our TAM is significant and growing. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about how we are uniquely positioned in this industry because it's driving our strategy and how we think about our product and our future here at Catapult. Now before I do, I think it's important to understand that in this pyramid of sport, performance is at the core of the athlete's pathway. And what I mean by that is that regardless of the level you are in the pyramid, player development is true to this ecosystem. Meaning regardless of where you are in the pyramid, your coaches, and typically, the athletes are worried about how to improve performance. The variation that occurs between these different layers is typically the level of sophistication and the data and the insights they're looking for. So in the early days, it's really about physical capabilities, learning some tactics. As you get more sophisticated and maybe you jump into a professional level, it's really not only about tactics, but it's the technical capabilities, injury mitigation. And when you are at the very top of that elite market, you're not only thinking about all the things I've mentioned, but you're also thinking about mental strength, focus, motivation. Why this is unique and important is that at the core of what we do here at Catapult is performance. That is the core value proposition that we offer. There is a standard 5-point performance model that is used in sports around player performance. And Catapult has solutions deeply focused on 3 of them, and we have a road map to support the other 2. But why this is important and why it makes it unique is the fact that what we're building as a solution becomes applicable across each level of that pyramid. And not only does it allow us to find new data insights that helps us show the benchmarking between and within levels, but it helps us learn how to improve performance along the way for all players. Now when I say it's the core value proposition, it's also worth noting that we're leading the way. We are today 5x larger than our next competitor in elite performance wearables, and we have over 3,250 teams globally. Another unique position about Catapult is that we work with the very best of teams and leagues across the world. We support 40 sports globally across 150 countries. As you can see from this chart, the logos that we work with represent the very best of American football, the very best of basketball, the very best of our European soccer, leagues and confederations as well as motor sports. And to give you some highlights, we were excited to announce earlier this year that every NFL team is now a client of Catapult. Over 3/4 of the Premier League work with us, and the bulk majority of Formula One are using our solutions during race weekend. Now we're not unique in this recently. No, we've had a long history of doing so. Starting with our first deal with the AFL in Australia to bringing in Premier League teams, NCAA, NHL, confederations, we have established ourselves deeply in the world of elite sports. Now what makes this unique is that it's built a level of validity within our market. As we go across and down this pyramid, we could always point to the fact that we know how to deal with sports at the very best level, and that gives us an advantage over the competition. Another point that makes Catapult unique here is that we have a growing portfolio of high-value solutions. As we talked about these verticals, what you realize is that not only do we have sophisticated performance analysis, sophisticated video analysis, but we have solutions across management, professional services, media and across the different levels of the pyramid. Now why this is unique is that typically in this space of sports technology, most companies operate within a vertical, and most of the time, they're operating within a vertical within a sport in a single region. And that means that our ability to bolt on a variety of new solutions gives us an advantage and a go-to-market strategy, which we'll talk about in a minute. Last but not least, one of the strategic uniqueness about Catapult is how deeply embedded we are in sports and in region. Our level of distribution is unlike any other company in this space. Not only do we have a global footprint across 40 sports, but we're working with the very best in terms of stakeholders within those teams. It gives us an advantage to bring things to market that other companies don't have. Two, as I mentioned, not only have we been working with the best of the very best. But the trust they have entailed in us shows when you look at the lifetime duration of our customers that are greater than 5 years on average and the historically world-class ACV churn that we have. But probably most importantly, rather, in this is how deeply we are embedded into their daily workflows. Our video analysis are generally used for over 10 to 12 hours during season of a sport -- by a sport team, including all the hedge coaching staff. Our performance analysis not only are used by training and sports scientists, by every athlete that's on the team. And why we believe this is a strategic advantage and uniqueness is that they are getting used to Catapult solution each and every day, and we're building the next generation of buyers in sport. So let's talk a little bit about the strategy and how we look at utilizing this vast TAM in front of us, this market size that is growing, and our unique advantages to win and grow within this space. Let me remind again that our goal here at Catapult is to help team, leagues and athletes improve decision-making capacity related to performance. Now this goal informs how we look at our market strategy. I want to we're going to talk about, strategically, a couple of different things. First, our product strategy, then our go-to-market strategy, and then how we look at efficiencies and scale. Let's talk a little bit about product strategy. There are really 3 components that we think are important for us to be successful. The first is something I've been talking about here at Catapult from the day I joined. And that is that we needed to create and we still need to evolve a unified and sophisticated sports platform. Now what I mean by this is that all of those solutions that you saw that are high value to our customers, they need to make sure that they come together. And that the data that you could discover in one is available and usable in another. That's creating data fluency. And why data fluency is important is that it allows us to create and find new insights about performance of athletes and teams, which, in turn, gives us the ability to contextualize that data across all the solutions that we have. And it causes a flywheel effect. The more solutions we have, the greater amount of data we have access to, the more we're allowed to find insights that allows us to contextualize that data, and in turn, discover there are new solutions that really help our customers perform and do well. That is one of the things that are driving -- that is driving, rather, our product strategy here. The second element is that we want to utilize our platform to drive new solutions, which means that it gives us the opportunity to expand our TAM. Now we talked about how our TAM today in professional sports is about $2.6 billion. But we know, given our road map and the value pools that are still in front of us, that as we build a sophisticated platform and bolt on new solutions to it, we can see the ability to expand our TAM to 3x that size. And there are things in our product development road map today that we're very excited about. Things such as new tracking mechanics, refined analytics, things around contextualizing performance in a way that has never been done before that probably will revolutionize this industry. Things as simplifying how you understand that analytics and how you understand performance overall that will also help those in the entry level of the pyramid to improve how they approach sports science. And things such as creating and supporting training setups at the beginning of the season, post-season reviews in areas where maybe the team doesn't have 20 sport scientists to do so. So we see our platform not only as a place that builds a one-stop shop, finds new insights, but a place that will allow us to expand our TAM in a significant manner. Which gets me to my third point. From a product strategy perspective, what we are trying to build is performance blueprints for our customers. The fact that we will have a platform in an industry where we are the most comprehensive solution in terms of sports and volume, will give us the capacity to build the most scientific-based analysis not only because we have deep sports science expertise, but because that value of -- that volume of data will allow us to do things with machine learning that no other company can. And that allows us to personalize and customize that insight in a way that other companies will not be able to. But ultimately, it allows us to create impacts to our customers' performance in a way that's predictive and prescriptive. At the core of what we are trying to solve here are these performance blueprints, where anyone across that sports pyramid could really understand how their training mechanics, their tactical mechanics could really lead to better ways of performing. And by utilizing our platform, our ability to have access into new solutions, our volume of data and our regional -- across region expertise gives us the ability to do performance blueprint that's truly unique in this industry. Now let's talk a little bit about our go-to-market strategy. There are a number of things that are driving, I think, our look in terms of growth. But at the core of what we do from a go-to-market is a focus of land and expand with professional sports. We know it's important for us to establish beachhead relationships, primarily in the Performance & Health category, and expand it into other vertical. Sometimes we start with video analysis and Tactics & Coaching, but primarily in Performance & Health. We know we have established leadership in this vertical. We know we have deep market trust, and we know we've been working with the very best. And so the ability for us to find new logos and work with new customers within this space and then bring and utilize our platform from an expansion perspective is really, really strong. Now let me show you why we believe this. This is a real example of an NCAA customer here in the U.S. 6 years ago, they started with us with a performance solution -- with a performance analysis solution. Over the years, they added other solutions related to Management, other solutions related to video analysis and Tactics & Coaching. And what you could see is as we build trust and a relationship with that customer, they went from a spending close to $25,000 annually at the start of the relationship to now nearly reaching $500,000 or $0.5 million annually by adding other solutions. And as you can see, as we add new solutions within our platform, our ability to expand the value of the -- what we bring to market, to our customers, will translate into long-term generating ACV for the company. Another important component in terms of go-to-market is our ability to aggressively penetrate the 3 customer segments we talked about. But here, we're showing the team segments. Now I get asked this quite often since I've been here at Catapult. Have you fully penetrated the very top of the elite market, our level 1s? And what you can see is that the opportunity in front of us is still pretty vast. Our penetration in Performance & Health is under 25% of that level 1 team. And our Tactics & Coaching is still under 15%. And when you look across the other levels, you'll also notice that our level of penetration is still nascent. Now we've created a granular plan to penetrate each level based on the region, the sport and their budget as well as tied to the road map of what we're building. And we feel very passionate that our ability to aggressively penetrate each segment will come to fruition in our long-term strategy here at Catapult. Equally important for us is to pay attention to how we're doing across regions because it allows a level of scale and a level of expertise that other companies will not be able to have. And as you can see, we do very well across the globe, but we still have significant opportunities in North America, EMEA, APAC and LATAM, where as we scale within region, what creates an advantage for Catapult is the ability to deal not only with local currency, local language, but also having regional expertise of specific sports. And we know specific sports are important. We not only operate across 40 sports, but we believe that our ability to create specific insights that are very customized to a sport will allow you to deeply penetrate all the different sports that are around the world. As you can see from this chart, the opportunity for us to expand in soccer, basketball, other sports such as American football and rugby, are still pretty vast. And one of the things we've been very hard at work here is to ensure that our insights are tailor-made for them. The last couple of weeks, we were very excited to announce 2 very unique introductions in terms of analytics. Not only did yesterday we announce a new baseball analytics, but earlier last week, we also announced a hockey analytics around hockey goalies that truly is unique in the market. And we believe as we continue to focus on sports and position-specific analytics, our ability to create something that is truly tailor-made for a sport will help us to aggressively penetrate each of the sports segments. The last component in terms of go-to-market is really talking about how we think of supporting stakeholders during their weekly workflow. Now as an enterprise SaaS solution in sports, we know there are organizational influencers as well as organization consumers. We believe it's important for us not only to work with the influencers, whether that be a head coach, performance director or a video coordinator, but also to ensure that our solutions are meaningful and customized to their organization customers, whether that be an assistant coach, strength and conditioning coach, a video assistant, a general manager or the athletes themselves. Why we believe that's important is because as I mentioned earlier, what we know is that during this weekly workflow, customers are spending multiple hours with our solutions. And we want to ensure that their experience with what we do here at Catapult is always positive because we know that the assistant coach on that right side of the chart will likely be the next organizational influencer when they become the head coach. We know that the strength and conditioning coach will eventually become a performance director. And we want them to become familiar with Catapult solution and feel that we're supporting their needs even at the early stages. Now why we believe this is important, I'm going to share a video that I truly believe describes the impact that we as Catapult are providing to customers across different segments of the consumer. And what you'll see is that not only the head coach, but the performance director, the trainers, all look at what we're doing as something unique and special. With that, let's press play. [Presentation]
Will Lopes
executiveAs you can see, what we're doing there is truly remarkable in helping not only athletes, but the entire staff within the team. Now not only do we want to ensure that we have a good go-to-market strategy in terms of product and growth, but we also want to ensure that in the next few years, we become more efficient and sophisticated about that growth. An important component of our strategy here at Catapult, which really translate in terms of our contribution margin, is that we're going to become and we're working very hard in becoming data-driven and sophisticated about qualifying our leads, that we're focused on developing a scalable model when it comes to selling and bringing customers in at a lower level of the pyramid, and that we're making cross-selling a core competency of the company. As our platform expands, we know that one of the most important things we need to do is to ensure that we could get customers across multiple solutions. And that core competency will allow us to become more efficient and cost effective. Now before I wrap up and pass on the mic to Hayden, I get asked quite often as well, "this market is pretty vast Do you see an expansion of it inorganically?" And we feel pretty confident about where we stand with our existing R&D and our road map. But of course, we're going to assess M&A opportunities along the way. Now there are 3 lens that are important for us from an M&A perspective, which -- it's important that I share here today. The first is that we have a high-discipline approach to M&A based on the rule of 40. Many of you who understood what we've -- the transaction we did with SBG would understand that our big focus in products that allows us to have long-term revenue, both at the top and the bottom line, are important. But our folks -- our disciplined approach to M&A means that we understand a couple of things. First, we know that buying a solution typically is more expensive than building one. And that bringing cultures together within companies is also very difficult. So we want to ensure that if we are doing a transaction that we see a pathway that really allows to build on that rule of 40. And we see partnerships as a great way of testing that. Now we also want to make sure from a second lens that the product that the company from an opportunity perspective has is similar to what we have built here at Catapult in terms of its specific attributes, that it has the ability to expand regions, it has the ability to cross sports, that it's future-proofed, that it offers customer value and data sets in a way that allows us to build that platform and that flywheel. And in many cases, it truly needs to accelerate our time to market. And also that we look internally to ensure that any M&A opportunity for us is really taking advantage of Catapult's unique position today, that our global sales and support infrastructure could help scale. Our expertise across sports and within elite environment could really create something new, so that 1 plus 1 equals 3. But most importantly, how we approach M&A is with the focus that our #1 priority is to deliver value to our shareholders and our customers. Now before I end it, I think -- I hope you understand that what, ultimately, from a strategic perspective, we're trying to accomplish, is that we want to use our competitive advantages to deepen our strategic moats. On the left side, what you see is the competitive advantages that we have here at Catapult: a large base of customers in the elite sport world, a leadership and performance analysis that's unlike anything else, a unique ability to contextualize data around performance within video and video analysis that's truly new in this space, the ability to have a footprint that is global and growing, and a market trust and a support infrastructure that is unlike other business. And if we combine these advantages with the strategy I just shared, we are truly believers that the strategic moats that we have today such as the ability to bolt on new solutions to our platform will create new moats such as being a multi-solution one-stop platform. It will give us the ability to create unique performance insights and algorithms at a level of scale across multisport that most importantly will create the following, and that's actionable, predictive and prescriptive insights that will give us the ability to build performance blueprints that will impact teams across that pyramid and the next generation of athletes. With that, I'm going to hand it off now to Melbourne, where Hayden Stockdale, Catapult's Chief Financial Officer, is going to walk us through some of the business model areas related to Catapult. Hayden, take it away.
Hayden Stockdale
executiveExcellent. Okay. Thank you, Will, and hello, everyone, as well. I'm very conscious of time. So I'm actually going to do a jump straight into it from here. And just to give a little bit of framework here, too, on the following slides, there are really 2 things that I want to do. The first is to really sort of show that we're focused on the economics of what we do. And then the second thing I want to point out was how can we be held accountable for and how can we also measure the success of the strategy that Will just outlined? So I'll flip to the next slide. Now to this end, I think it's very important to actually remember that what we want to do is to provide an ongoing stream of value to our customers and also to ensure that we're going to be appropriately rewarded for that value. So the first measure of success that really dovetails with this is to move to full subscription, okay, to drive all of our revenues towards subscription. And here, you'll see we're not quite there yet, but we're making great progress. And we're also getting very close. So this was a process that really started a few years ago in FY '19. And then we really accelerated at the start of this calendar year when, for all intents and purposes, we really discontinued all capital deals in our Performance & Health vertical. Now this is going to come at a significant short-term cost to us because subscription revenues only get recorded at about 1/3 of the amount of capital revenues, while our cost structure actually remains the same, which means for all of this year, all of next year and also for part of the year thereafter, we're going to record lower total revenues than we would otherwise. Now this was a hard decision, but I actually also think it was very much the right decision because what it does is it actually gets our earnings stream a lot closer to our value stream and also a lot closer to the way that we think, which is all about recurring subscriptions. So in FY '21, you'll see here that we were at 79% of total revenues being subscriptions. And in advance of our full set of first half results, which we're going to publish next week, I'm actually really pleased today to announce that we've actually hit 86% on this metric. So we've advanced another 7 percentage points towards our goal of 95%, which only leaves 9 percentage points to go to completely close this gap. And I'm very hopeful that it was not going to -- it won't take too long to deliver that. Now as we move to full subscription revenue, it's also really important, I think, to take stock of what that means for our economic model and the metrics that we'll be able to produce. One of the key benefits of subscriptions is to really get to look into the future certainly a lot more than you do to, say, capital revenue, which really becomes history as soon as you won a deal. And this predictability and this foresight into the future is really, really interesting not only from sort of like an internal planning and agile decision-making sort of type perspective. But what it also means is I can tell you with a high degree of confidence a minimum to how we think we'll perform in the coming year or so. So let's just step through this. On the right-hand side of the slide here, we have 3 key leading indicators that gives everyone an idea of how well we're going to do into the future. The first is ACV, which is a leading indicator of revenue, and it tells us how revenue is likely to expand in the next 12 months. The second are variable costs, which is really the cost of delivering that revenue or that ACV. Now this is really our cost of goods sold, our sales and marketing expenses and the like. So in the short term, we're actually investing more heavily in these, but over time, we'd expect these to be reducing as a percentage of ACV as we get more efficient as we scale. So obviously, as these do come down, then contribution margin goes up. And contribution margin is the key measure of our operating efficiency. It's also, really interestingly, a key long-term valuation metric for us as it captures the operating worth of the business in any terminal value calculation. So as we strive to create value for you, as shareholders, expect contribution margin growth to be a real key focus of us into that long term. Now separate to these 3 subscription economic metrics, what you'll also achieve with growth is operating leverage with our G&A expenses. And we'd expect these to come down as a percentage of ACV, also as we scale. This then just leaves us with the R&D investment, which is the cost of generating future ACV growth. But I think what you should really note here is that both these G&A and R&D costs can be throttled up or throttled down depending on the growth outlook. And in the event that we ever go ex growth, then we'd expect to be able to pull back heavily on those costs. So our EBIT margins rose and closed in significantly towards our contribution margin. Now if we apply and expand on the subscription economics for Catapult today, you get these 5 SaaS metrics that we've been reporting on quite regularly for the last year or so. These measure our growth as well as the quality and efficiency of that growth. The first is ACV, and we've spoken a little bit about ACV, in fact a lot about ACV over the long period of time. So I'm not going to add anything further here. The second is ACV churn. Now ACV churn is a great measure of the stickiness but also the embeddedness of our products and also how engaged our customers are. And it gives us good confidence as well in investing in our sales yield into the future. Then there's lifetime duration, which is a similar measure of quality and where we're actually adding ACV growth within the age profile of our customers. Are we adding it with new customers? Are we adding ACV really with our long-standing customers. Next is the number of multivertical customers that we have. Now this is an absolutely key measure for us right now given the emerging but also the secular importance of cross-sell to our growth story. So it's also a key measure of the embeddedness of customers given that they'll have multi-solutions, and it's very difficult to extract yourself in those circumstances. And it's also, therefore, a measure of the value of those customers to us, too. And then lastly, on this slide, we have the all-important contribution margin, which above all else measures our SaaS efficiency. On the next slide, I really want to give you a flavor of where this can all lead us to in our stated ACV growth ambitions. So as a starting point, we're currently sitting here between the $50 million and $100 million ACV mark in the table. And the percentages shown there really reflect where we would be today on a normalized basis, okay, so on a non-COVID, non-skewed, positive cash flow type basis. And as you can see, we're aiming to really grow our gross margins over time towards 90%. And as we do to actually deliver efficiencies with our contribution margin heading north of 60%. We'd also expect our percentage of fixed G&A costs to lower as we scale to generate EBITDA margins well into the 30s. Long term, this is actually really important for us, as you've heard will speak about, as it underpins our all-important Rule of 40 goals. Now we'd also anticipate R&D to stay broadly sort of in the high teens as we continue to see attractive growth opportunities into the future although we're going to remain very cautious and very measured in our approach to that. And the net result of all this is going to be very strong post-investment net margins north of 20%. Now one thing to note here, and I really want to emphasize this again, is that from a defensive perspective, if growth were ever to dissipate or even slow for a period, or if tactically, we just decided it was appropriate, then we can collapse any and all of those 3 expense lines, the variable cost, the G&A, the R&D, and rely really heavily on the high gross margins to produce cash, in fact to produce lots of cash at any point in time. Now all of these percentages have been graphed on the following slide. And what they show are some really interesting growth characteristics and inflection points. So from a growth perspective, the unit economics and the operating leverage combined here to create this enormous margin expansion, as you can see, where our EBITDA -- sorry, our EBIT margins, which are plotted here, rise towards our contribution margin and our contribution margin rises towards our gross margin. And then there are the 2 marked inflection points, interestingly marked 1 and 2. The first one of these comes as our contribution margin really outpaces our cost of running the business or our G&A expenses. Now it's at this point that EBITDA turns positive and continues to grow quite strongly as ACV grows. The second inflection point comes when our contribution margin surpasses not only the cost of running the business, being G&A, but also our cost of growing the business, being R&D. And here, continued organic growth at that pace becomes self-funding and cash flow starts to really, really accelerate. Now the final point I'd like to note here, too, is that prior to embarking on the accelerated growth investment program that we announced recently, we had already passed that first inflection point. And we're very confident we'll do so again within the next couple of years. So with that in mind, how are we going against these metrics? Well, let's have a look on this next slide. And here, you'll see that we've grown almost 55% by adding $21 million worth of ACV in the last 2.5 years. For ACV churn, how has that gone? Well, as Will pointed out, we have absolutely smashed that metric to well better than world-class standards, and it's now sitting at just 4.1%. Our lifetime duration metric remains really solid at around 6 years and has only moderated slightly due to growth in our new customers. Our cross-sell is also really importantly absolutely smashing it. It's up 150% in 2.5 years, while our contribution margin has actually stayed comfortably here within our target range, right? So all up, I think we are very, very much on track to achieve our long-term goals, certainly with what we've done over the last couple of years. Now speaking of long term, on this last slide of mine, I really want to leave you with a flavor of how we expect to deliver on this business model that I've just outlined. Here, you'll see the various margin components for the different elements of our business today, culminating in the current margin blend on the far left of that chart. Now importantly, the engine room and the focus areas of our growth strategy are really centered on the high gross margin verticals of Performance & Health and Tactics & Coaching, which you'll see in the middle left of that chart. And most importantly, here is to understand that this is where we'll be incrementing our gross margins from, okay? So for instance, the SBG acquisition came with margins very similar to what you see here in the middle of that chart in Tactics & Coaching. It had gross margins north of 90% and had a contribution margin around 70%. But importantly, we can also increment at these types of margins organically, too. And here, I'll reference our cost of -- sorry, our cross-sell from Performance & Health into Tactics & Coaching, which mind you, was actually going really, really well right now. So if you think about the land-and-expand strategy that Will expounded on, the variable cost of the expand bit is typically lower than the variable cost of the land bit, okay? So the CAC is lower. So expanding into high-margin video from still very high-margin wearables with a potentially lower variable costs associated with cross-sell is just the type of business that we want to pursue. And the very fact also that we have a Tactics & Coaching business today, which has margins, as you see in this chart, should also give you a lot of confidence about our ability to generate those type of margins organically in that sphere today. And it doesn't take even close to 10x growth at those Tactics & Coaching type gross margins in order to reach our overall targets from the previous pages. And what does that mean? That means that from when we -- from where we currently stand, we are very well positioned to deliver on these targets into the future. We have a large and growing TAM. We have a leading market position. We have the leading technology, and we have the global sales force and infrastructure to execute. And I think that's a great segue to hand back to Will to talk about looking ahead. Over to you, Will.
Will Lopes
executiveThanks, Hayden, for that. I think as you heard today, our story here at Catapult is pretty unique. We do have and are operating in a vast market with a TAM opportunity in front of us that looks incredible, with a business model fundamental, as you heard from Hayden now, that has the ability to expand its margins in a way that is really special. But more importantly is that we're building solutions for teams that are sticky and growing. And we think of ourselves as a place that's just getting started because we know that companies that build the best of breed in vertical software, particularly in industries that create this level of stickiness with a SaaS model that Catapult is representative of, creates great value and change for the industry, customers and ultimately, shareholders. Now in order to accomplish what you heard here today, we have assembled a great world-class team. Catapult, when I joined, had fantastic leaders already that understood the business of sport with a long focus on how to win in this industry. Joining them, I knew that I needed to complement this great team with some new faces. And what we have here today is a team that has the level of skill, passion and common vision to really scale Catapult to the next level. I hope you also understood that Catapult not only is operating in a fantastic market space but our ability to grow has multiple levers: cross-vertical, down the pyramid, new products, ability to actually enter adjacent markets and in many ways truly accelerate our data insights and analytics in ways that hasn't been done yet. So I'm going to remind you how I started this presentation. There were 3 key takeaways I wanted all of you to have. The first, we have a large addressable market, represented by a $2.6 billion professional TAM, a $41 billion prosumer TAM operating in an industry that is growing to $128 billion and are growing quickly. Two, we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of it. We are leaders in performance technology. We have earned the trust of our customers, and we're deeply embedded with them across the globe. And not only do we support multiple sports, 40 for exact, but we have a growing portfolio of high-value solutions that allows us to expand with our teams in unique ways. And again, we have a sophisticated execution strategy to get there. We strongly believe in our product strategy. We believe -- it's not only helping as we see the results of bolting on something like SBG into our system but also our ability to grow into market with the growth levers, I just talked about. And importantly, from this Investor Day, is that we have wonderful strategic moats today, and our ability to deepen them are even greater. So when I look at Catapult in the next 5 years, I see a Catapult that's truly different and bold, one that we'll actually be operating with over 5,000 professional teams at the top of the pyramid, offering the best-in-class sports data platform that is there to offer. We see a world where in the prosumer market, we will have over 0.5 million athletes operating and working with our solutions and a best-in-class training and education platform for the amateur athletes, unlike anything else out there. Now when I came to Catapult, I knew that the ingredients were here to build something that was truly spectacular. And I knew that the outcome of that was going to be growing our ACV to levels that were truly dramatically different than where we were right now. And so we set this high growth ambition at the end of FY '20 to 10x our ACV. Now the pandemic may be slow to stay on a little bit in FY '21, but even so, we were able to significantly grow our ACV during that period. And I'm really excited when we announced our SaaS metrics a few weeks ago that at the end of our first half of FY '22, our ACV was already at $58.8 million. So my confidence in our ability to hit our ambition continues to grow while I'm here at Catapult. I know my team's ambition and confidence also continues to grow. And I hope what you heard here today gets you as excited as it's gotten us. I want to thank all of you for taking the time to join us today. I want to thank all of you for hanging in there and listening to this presentation. We're going to take a short break, and we'll be back in 5 minutes to do some Q&A. Thank you. [Break]
Will Lopes
executiveAll right. Welcome back, and I needed to do a little H2O break, but we're back, I think, feeling pretty relaxed. I appreciate -- I think the number of questions that have come in. I'm going to hand it off now to Andrew down in Melbourne who I believe is moderating and looking at the questions coming in, and we'll kick it off and hopefully have a good time. Andrew?
Andrew Keys
executiveThanks, Will. Okay. Let's get into it. And for participants, please feel free to put your questions into the Q&A function, and we'll take it from there. Our first question is from[ Raymond Zhang, ] and I'll direct this at Hayden. In terms of the data on the number of wearables competitors, have we based that purely on numbers from their websites?
Hayden Stockdale
executiveWell, the answer there is, yes, in some senses -- some cases, I should say, very much from directly publicly available information, such as websites. But look, we've also triangulated that with a lot of internal data we have. We know, for instance, exactly who certain customers use if they're not using us from previous sales experiences. So there is a little bit of internal intel that goes into that, too.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. And another question from Raymond. Can you please provide more details regarding the COGS relating to the unit economics of the video hardware segment, for example, the hardware, freight, data center royalties, et cetera?
Hayden Stockdale
executiveYes. So look, on an individual deal that it can change, might be a laptop reserve or something like that and then we will load up our software on it and we'll provide that to a customer. We make a small margin on that hardware component. It's nothing significant. You will see some indication of that, I think, on Slide 60 or 61, whatever the number was, the final slide of my deck. There's nothing really to add beyond that. And look, it's a very, very small part of the business. You'll see it doesn't really skew down our overall margins. And more importantly, as we grow, it's going to become less and less a percentage of our business as well.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. Thanks. A question which I'll throw to Boston for the answer. This is from Stefan Stefanovich. In order to grow the prosumer business, you need a strong consumer brand. Have you considered leveraging your relationships with Elite teams to promote and raise Catapult's brand awareness?
Will Lopes
executiveYes, it's a great question. I think part of what, hopefully, we passed on here today was that I think the first and most important thing is to utilize our solutions to make sure that it's applicable across the different layers of the pyramid in sports and ensure that those solutions are becoming easier and more digestible for particularly the prosumer athlete on that front. The second -- I don't know if focus of ours is to utilize our existing Elite clients to drive awareness. But it's certainly to utilize, I think, the validity that I think we get by having so many Elite clients on it. So I think the combination of what we do for Elite plus the value of the software plus the value of the data, so how do you compare it to a pro athlete, how do you benchmark against a top division 1 athlete in a NCAA school, we believe those are really powerful messages that will allow us to drive growth on the prosumer side.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. Thanks, Will. Next question is from Roger Walling at ICE Investors. What is the key to scalable growth for teams with a modest budget? And how do we adapt products for teams with limited human resource?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. That's -- I'll take that as well. I think that's -- the reality is that we're doing that already, right? What you saw hopefully across the presentation is that our ability to penetrate different layers of that pyramid, different segments in terms of sport really shows the adaptability of our software in terms of very sophisticated clients to -- and I don't want to say less sophisticated, but perhaps I think as you put it, clients that don't have the level of staff, I think, to kind of really manage the data insights from a sophistication perspective. So I think we're doing and adjusting in terms of relations to budget, technology that are really supportive to our customers across those different layers. I think a core part of the strategy for us, particularly from the product perspective, is when we get to, I think, our -- the third point I made around performance blueprints. And we know that as we become more deeply embedded into areas where the level of staffing and budget sort of lowers, we want to make sure that we're providing a solution that's a bit more predictive and prescriptive in terms of how to use what we're building here at Catapult and that in terms of growing into that market, we're also doing so efficiently. And so the reality is that Catapult has been built in many ways as an enterprise sales organization. And so we have a very high rate of BDMs to teams. And as we start to move down that pyramid with more prescriptive solutions, we also need to ensure that our go-to-market within it is more scalable and efficient, which is a big part of what we're focused on right now.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. Thanks, Will. Next question is from Troy Cairns at Quest Asset Partners and he's provided some context as well. The TAM and SAM numbers that we've calculated are enormous versus our current market positions. Given that Catapult is the leader in the space, it begs the question, where are all these dollars currently spent? And then maybe to use an example, if you take the current SAM of $1.4 billion, where is that spent now?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. It's a good question from Troy there. The reality is that it's spent in a variety, at times, of non-dedicated support solutions, right? And so when you think of it, for example, let's take video analysis as one. Video analysis is one of the areas that almost every sport, regardless of where you are in the pyramid, will tend to pay or do or spend some dollars on trying to solve. Now if you're at the very sophisticated top of that Elite market, you're utilizing things like what we have here from Thunder and American Football and SBG from our recent transaction, European soccer. But you may be using other solutions in that market. One of the competitors we have in the video analysis market, for example, is Huddle, and we know they participate in that area. But as you get below that level, the reality is that there are video analysis solutions that are just not sport-specific that also gets utilized there, right? So you may be using as simple as an iMovie in a Mac or you may be utilizing cameras that perhaps are not capturing certain data points as it relates to support. So we know the value in these areas exist. We know they're spending it. Sometimes, they're spending it across different areas that are outside of sports technology. When you think of performance technology, also, what we found is that depending on the segment, either -- if you're at the very top of that Elite pyramid, what we realize is most people will have a solution or working on getting a solution. So typically, it's us. And we're leading by far, I think, in that area. But as you come down in the pyramid from a performance technology, what you start to find is that actually, there's not a lot of people yet using a solution or they're using very simplified solutions like an Apple Watch or a Fitbit on it. And what -- part of what we calculated in the SAM is to look at, for example, if we took -- let's take a Division 2 or Division 3 league, where we've been able to actually bring a customer in, fit their team out with performance analysis solutions and video analysis solutions, we get a sense of what that team is spending on an ACV perspective. We looked at what they're spending across other areas. And as we've brought in other teams within that segment, what we made -- the assumption of this bottoms-up exercise is that the budget is there. Sometimes, the awareness is not quite there on it. Hayden, I don't know if you want to add anything to what I just shared, but hopefully that covers it.
Hayden Stockdale
executiveNo, I think you hit it all there, Will. I have nothing to add on that.
Will Lopes
executiveGreat.
Andrew Keys
executiveAll right. Thanks. I've got a couple -- 2 questions from Chris Savage at Bell Potter. I'm going to direct the first one to Hayden and the second one back to you, Will, in Boston. The first one, your ACV analysis suggests cash flow breakeven is at around $100 million, which looks like a couple of years away. Do you have sufficient cash at hand to get to breakeven? And then the second question really is how much of your 10x growth in ACV comes from acquisitions?
Hayden Stockdale
executiveGreat. Okay. So with respect to the first question, the very short answer is, yes. Organically, the capital raising that we did recently will get us back to the point where we are cash flow positive on our current plan. Now as I pointed out in the conversation, that is dependent on what we do with R&D if we accelerate or continue to accelerate that beyond 2 years. That may change. But certainly, our plans right now, absolutely.
Andrew Keys
executiveThank you. Plenty of cash.
Hayden Stockdale
executivePlenty of cash.
Andrew Keys
executiveWill, 10x ACV growth and how much of that comes from acquisitions?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. That's -- I think it's always a very difficult question to answer, right? I think over -- when we look at the market, I think as Chris presented, it's quite vast and it's growing very rapidly. And so I think what we prioritize is obviously speed and value to shareholders and value to customers. Now there are -- I think when we look at our R&D and our roadmap, I think we feel very confident that we have the capacity, the intellect, the know-how to actually 10x our ACV without acquisitions. The real question is, are there opportunities out there that represent a time to market, a business model fundamental or maybe a customer value that is truly unique and could help us accelerate that process? And so I think part of what we do is extensively assess the market, extensively assess the opportunities so that as we're looking at our R&D roadmap, we're trying to balance time-to-market investment in terms of what we want to do internally and opportunities that are external. So I would say this, I think to 10x the ACV from where we are, it will probably be a mix of organic and R&D -- sorry, organic and inorganic. But it's hard to kind of get a gauge of how much from one versus the other because it is -- when you put those 3 lens from an M&A perspective, what you also start to find is that there aren't a lot of companies that have the ability to cross sports and regions, that have the ability to create a customer value that I think we believe we're creating organically as well. So -- but it will probably be a mix of both. It's hard to tell.
Hayden Stockdale
executiveYes. And I'll just say, look, if we see value for our customers and our shareholders and we have the capacity to capture that value, then we certainly want to do so.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. Great. Next question is from [ Boris Redondi ] one of -- works for an investment institution in Europe. So he's burning the -- he's doing the late hours today. Will, do you need another acquisition to really penetrate the video market in Europe?
Will Lopes
executiveWe don't feel so. I think we feel pretty confident with what the ingredients that I think SBG, as a team, had built. And quite honestly, I think what we're seeing just a few months in is that the level of enthusiasm of the combination of what they have with what we have here is really creating something truly unique. And so maybe, Chris, you could say a few words about sort of the SBG integration and how it's going. But I don't -- we don't see a need from a video analysis perspective from an acquisition. And I think what they've built, we're actually really excited by. Do you want to like maybe say a few words on how well SBG is going?
Christopher Cooper
executiveYes. Actually, the integration is going really well. I think one of the most important components, and Will alluded to this, was the cultural component. And culturally, it's been a terrific fit. It's been great engagement from literally day 1. There's also been recognition of value from both sides. So a lot of what SBG had done in the case of motor sports, that then translated into soccer per se and rugby specifically. People here, that have a real deep expertise in American football, are starting to see how that can apply as well and start to build solutions for the future building off of that. So again, it's going terrific from our standpoint.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. Thanks.
Will Lopes
executiveAnd sorry -- Andrew, I just want to say thank you, Boris, for staying as late as you have. That's impressive.
Christopher Cooper
executiveIt will be until good morning now.
Andrew Keys
executiveI think he deserves that thank you. And related to the, I guess, the video conversation, Julian Mulcahy from Evans and Partners had said, can -- and how is the addition of SBG helped our ability to cross-sell? Can you provide some specific examples?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. I mean to be very honest, I think we've been just surprised at how well and how fast the integration is going. And I think from a cross-selling perspective, we've seen some very positive response very early on with basketball clients that we knew through the SBG transaction. Their software had really been honed around European soccer -- not European soccer, soccer. But they were doing very well with European soccer teams. But our ability to bring it and have conversations here with the MLS customers, NCAA customers in particular, I think, have been very excited. To give you an example very quickly, we've been able to deploy their solution into the University of Kentucky, which is one of the largest programs from sports, in general, but specifically in basketball. We've had some great conversations and not yet to be announced agreement with a couple of NBA teams that I think we're feeling pretty good about. And then on the other side, there's also been conversations around American football and rugby that have gone very, very positive. We've started sort of this early stage before the solution has actually been customized for those -- for American football specifically, to make some presentations of how we could see the integration of performance data and the video analysis tool that SBG had created. And I think it's been overwhelming positive response across it. So we're feeling, from a cross-sell perspective, very good. Obviously, I think the combination of ensuring their technology is customized for each of these sports that it's working very well with the performance data that we have here from a wearables analysis. But it's going tremendously well, and I think the reaction has been very positive.
Andrew Keys
executiveThank you. One more on video and then we'll change tact. This is from [ Raymond Zhang. ] Is the plan for the SBG Hub to act as the central platform to store and distribute client data documents, analysis, et cetera, like a CRM system would?
Will Lopes
executiveNo. I think what Hub does, in many ways, that's truly unique and I think very positive is that it allows for modifications in terms of video, tactics, video playlists that are needed to be reviewed by different parts of the staffing, the coaching staff as well as the athletes, to review it basically outside of the console, right, and allow for that flow of information to exist also outside of the console, so the console, which has been very positively received on it. We think about a CRM perspective, I think the reality is that we have a lot of ingredients here at Catapult that have been very console software design driven that sits at either in a laptop or some form of PC inside the facility. And a lot of what we're doing is pulling and extracting a lot of the value that we've built here from software perspective and bringing it to the cloud in many ways, which I think will allow us to actually iterate and build new aspects such as CRM components at a very different and faster manner than what we have today. But I think ingredients -- all of this is to say, Raymond, is that bringing in somebody like Param, our new CTO, what was very unique about his experience was that he actually had done exactly this, where he had taken a set of software that wasn't designed to communicate across each other, taking components of each of those software and turn them into very well-designed cloud components that then allowed the existing software that's there to speak to each other, but also the ability to build new solutions such as a CRM, as you put it. And that's exactly what he's working on and why we were so excited to announce him joining the company.
Andrew Keys
executiveThanks, Will. Two questions from Michael Aspinall at Jefferies, and we'll deal with the first one. Can you talk to the progress so far for the road map for creating data fluency across the organization?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. I mean it's going, I think, exceptionally well in the sense that we feel -- I think the last time we did a market update, which I guess would have been the full year results post June. I think we said our target was to ensure that at least the performance in video analytics and data front, we're starting to talk to each other before the end of the year or probably close to first quarter of the following calendar year. And we're feeling pretty confident that actually we're going to hit that target and we're going to actually see some really interesting stuff -- bring some really interesting stuff to the market. I think the component of data fluency given hopefully what you saw or the multiple solutions that we have, it's really something that I think we're going to be working on here for probably the next 2 to 3 years. I think data fluency is one of those things that good SaaS solutions work on for a long time, particularly as you add new bolt-on solutions or you create new values to your customer. But I think where we stand today around a data infrastructure that's truly robust and cloud-based, the ability to at least start to connect the 2 major data points, which are performance and video, we're feeling very confident on where we are today.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. And Michael Aspinall's second question maybe for Will and Hayden, the accelerated investment program, what will that deliver, and when will it deliver?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. Lots of ACV very soon. When we talked about the accelerated program, I think there were a couple of areas that were really important to us. And I'll let maybe Hayden touch upon them from a financial perspective. But it was, one, to ensure that the infrastructure to scale the organization was there, right, that we had the right tools to measure and drive the company internally in a different way. So ensuring that our efficiencies of go-to-market, our ability for support, our ability to truly scale this organization from where we stand today at $58 million to 10x that, I think it required some modifications. Two, was really the ability to invest in R&D in a way that allowed not only the cloud infrastructure that I just kind of talked about, but truly the ability to bring this platform to life in a way that you could bolt on solutions in a new unique way. And we're feeling very good about it. As I mentioned, I think that we're actually, in some ways, we're ahead of plan in that area than I think we anticipated. And then the last one was to ensure that we were capturing the growth potential in front of us, both on sort of the sales and marketing end on it. And I think the growth -- take away the SBG acquisition, on a pro forma basis, we grew ACV by 30% in the first half. You add that in and it's a little over 43%. And so I feel like in those 3 areas of focus, we're actually already starting to see some results on it even in early days. Hayden, do you want to add anything from a finance or other perspective to it?
Hayden Stockdale
executiveYes, certainly, I'll add a little bit of color there. So the money that we raised, roughly, call it sort of $25 million that we had sort of allocated to the accelerated growth program, roughly sort of 70-30, so 70% really focused on things like product and technology, R&D type investments, and then the balance, circa $8 million, on things such as sales, infrastructure and the like. Now as it related to the $8 million, the sales, infrastructure, you are best probably to think of that as a onetime lift over a couple of years in some additional mission firepower into the infrastructure of the organization, things around revenue operations and the like that Will touched on during the presentation. And really the cost of that will show through in a mixture of the variable cost line as well as the G&A expenses. So it will impact and lower our contribution margin as well as our EBITDA margin over the coming couple of years. But we very much believe that as we scale, that we're going to get a very good return on that. But similar to a lot of the other decisions that Will and the exec and the Board have been making recently, we are very much making these investments for that longer term, okay? And there can be some hard decisions with a short-term cost, but very, very much creating shareholder and customer value. As it relates to the investment in the product and R&D, you're probably best to think of this in two ways. Certainly, from a return perspective, think about the rule of 40, okay? So a mixture of growth and margins coming out of that. We would certainly expect it to be more heavily weighted towards growth in the short term, but very much the ability to generate some very attractive, think of sort of 90%-ish type margins, gross margins going forward. And in terms of a time frame around when we would expect to see that sort of hitting our P&L or hitting our financials, the return on an investment, if you think about the process of R&D and product development and the like, it's sort of typically up to about 2 years. Now I'm not saying that we'll invest all the $17 million today and get a return on all of that in 2 years' time. This is an investment that will come over 2 years and then yield returns sort of beyond that. But it's, I think, also really important to note that we have a very big product and R&D program underway already. And historically, we haven't stopped the funds, but it was underinvested in a certain way. So we're really looking to accelerate that investment, put the foot down to the floor on some of those products that we've already got in the pipeline. And so I think we'd actually expect to get some return on that even within a shorter time frame than 2 years. Yes, that's some color there for you.
Andrew Keys
executiveThank you. Thanks, Hayden. Thanks, Will. Next question is from Owen Humphries at Canaccord. And it relates to the goal or a target of 5,000 professional teams into the future being customers. Some context, please. Does this relate to higher market penetration? Is that where it comes from? Or is it a mixture of that and broader industry awareness or is it new products?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. I mean, I think when we look at that vision, it's really about penetrating the market faster and deeper than where we are. What we see in terms of what we're building, particularly around the video analytics tool and combination of that performance data, it gives us the ability to contextualize something that I think it's going to be difficult for others to copy. And as we've been building, in particular, these unique insights that are very sport-specific like what we just announced with baseball and what we just announced with Hockey. Bringing that into video, I think, gives us an advantage in terms of sort of penetrating that market that I think others will not have. Now the way we look at that is, I don't think it's an awareness problem, right? From particularly when you take that Level 1 environment and maybe that Level 2 environment, the world knows who Catapult is. I don't think that's typically the issue that delays us penetrating the market. It's typically, either there's a solution there that we're trying to remove out. And I think on the video world, that's more the case than not. On the performance world, it's really around educating how do I actually get the value out of this because they understand what it is, they understand that others are working with it, but they haven't quite fully committed to how do I pull that value. And I think to us, it's about simplifying and making it more predictive and more prescriptive. So when I think of that 5,000 teams, it's really about penetrating the market just with what we have and maybe a combination of what we have that's really creating new solutions. But I don't believe that it requires deep awareness building to get to 5,000, nor does it require significant new solutions to get to that number.
Andrew Keys
executiveThanks, Will. Another question from Troy Cairns at Quest Asset Partners around pricing. How do you think about the price lever and its connection to growth? And is it more likely to be a driver in the medium term? Or is it something that you may benefit from in the shorter term?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. So it's interesting. So we've taken a tact here at Catapult from very early days that we believe that our product should stand on its own and the quality of the product is really what we bank on, particularly from a pricing element and pricing lever. That doesn't mean that we don't believe there is price elasticity both ways, right? I think the reality is that we've been optimizing around the product itself and I think what customers have been kind of willing to pay. Now I think for us, where price levers play in, that I think becomes -- I think it's more of a medium-term to long-term perspective. When you look at that, I can't remember the slide number, but we did, one of the slides that you can see, the different ACV values within value pools. And as we're starting to enter new value pools with new solutions, it gives us the advantage to not always charge for all of them and create combinations of things where someone may see more value on one value pool versus another. And so the ability to create these packages that are subscription based, that maybe will allow us to be smarter about how do we deal with competitive pressures around pricing. I think to us it's actually a true advantage, right? And I think that in the medium to long term gives us a completely different perspective on pricing. Now I'll say the last thing also that I believe is more of a medium- to long-term view as well. And I think Chris kind of alluded to this, particularly on how the sports tech market is changing. And it's an industry that, when you look at it today, it's still I think about $40 billion and growing very rapidly to about $120 billion plus. And what I think that will do is that it will put an emphasis on the output of what that technology is driving and actually create some price elasticity in a positive way for Catapult. And so for example, the more the technology that we have become sophisticated and it becomes widely used for injury prevention, as an example, I think will change the perception that if I'm spending $10 million on a top athlete, and that $10 million athlete last year was sitting on the bench for 20% of the season, the value that I place on technology in helping me make sure that, that athlete is at peak performance every major game may change because I'm going to be more comfortable with technology, I'm going to be comfortable with its output of technology. And so for us, I think there's sort of a price lever perspective. There is the combination of multiple solutions that allows us great packaging that's quite unique. And I think ensuring that the perception of the output of the insight really starts to reflect the performance of the team on the field. And I think the more we could bring those 2 things together, I think the more elasticity in terms of pricing and levers that we will have.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. Thanks, Will. Next question is from Stefan Stevanovic and it relates to, are there any impediments, main impediments to achieving and quickly capitalizing on the growth opportunity at Catapult, and he has provided some prompts; is it a sales force impediment, is it a regional market impediment, or is it to do with product development, new releases?
Will Lopes
executiveYes, it's a great question. I don't know if there's one monolithic impediment that I could point to. I think what I would say is that we've been hard at work here at Catapult to ensure that the solutions we have really start to operate together in a single platform. And I think that in many ways historically was an impediment because I think they were not taking advantage of the position that each of these solutions had within the market, right? So for example, our leadership and performance analysis was not helping drive our video analysis and vice versa. And I think a lot of the work that we've been trying to accomplish in the last 12 months with some of these accelerated investments is really around solving the ability for one solution to drive the value of another. So I think that's one. I feel really good about where we are there. And we've been working really hard, but I feel really good about it. I think, two, you get scale teenage years in companies because what you tend to do is, as the company is growing pretty rapidly, and Catapult was going through that, the process, the design to support it over time just wasn't thought through, sort of, on day 1, right? And it shouldn't be actually. It would be a waste of time and finance. But as you can imagine, the sales process, the sort of the operation process here was designed with a set of teams in mind and a set of scale. And I think as we started to accelerate that, we needed to ensure that the infrastructure was there to support it. And so the way that impacts typical parts of the business from a growth perspective is that you don't want to accelerate regional penetration too fast because you don't have, for example, the training setup, you don't have the infrastructure from a support of logistics as a good example, how do you get hardware and software and sort of customer service and customer success people in market. So I think some of that has held the opportunities for us to accelerate some growth. And I feel like the job that I think Chris Cooper in particular has been doing around reviewing those processes and ensuring that we're now thinking of scale, I think, has been very positive. And we're feeling really confident there. And I would say, the third, I don't know if it's an impediment, I think, the third bump in the road at least for me in my 2 years here was that I saw the first two issues pretty clearly. I knew what we needed to do. I knew we needed to bring a new set of team and a new set of executives to help on that front. I knew we were going to be in a journey in terms of technology and infrastructure. And I was very excited because those are things I know I could solve. The bump in the road was the pandemic that I think occurred and caused a bit of delay. But I feel, at this point, for the most part, that impact is starting to fall behind us, I think, across the Board. I think what we were able to accomplish in the first half of this fiscal year, it was very, very positive. And I think as those first 2 ingredients start to come together, I think then it's really ability of executing. And I think execution sometimes is, it's never simple and a clear straight line, but I've taken companies before from this level of revenue to the billions. I think the executive team that's here have all had that experience. So I don't think any of that scares or concerns us. I think it's about fixing these first 2 ingredients and then getting the pandemic behind us.
Hayden Stockdale
executiveAnd maybe I'll just add to that. Just on that last point, I don't think it not only doesn't scare us, I actually think it really excites us. But just to answer sort of the impediment or put maybe a different sort of lens on that. If you're asking the impediment question from the perspective of, say, a bottleneck and the lead time to actually debottleneck something, then the lead time to debottleneck the R&D and the tech and everything takes a lot longer than the lead time to debottleneck sales issues and things like that. And the very fact that we do have already a global sales force. I mean we have people on the ground and I think it's 26 countries today around the world. These are wonderful countries that from Australia you don't actually often think about. These are countries like Paraguay and Colombia. So it's our ability to scale that up, we can do that really, really well. And for a smaller company, that's a real impediment for them. Like for us, that's not an impediment. So I worry a lot more about the R&D and the tech pipeline and that's very, very much where the focus is, because that's the thing that's going to unlock the value in that long term and also potentially the short term.
Andrew Keys
executiveOkay. Thank you. Anthony Porto from Morgans has asked, what is the propensity for customers that we've identified that would fit into Level 2 and Level 3 of the tranches of the Pro market. And also, can we share some detail around our potential or existing lower-touch points from a sales approach into those markets?
Will Lopes
executiveSorry, what's the propensity for them to become customers?
Andrew Keys
executiveYes, propensity for customers or potential customers in Level 2 and Level 3 as we've identified of the Pro market for them to pay for Catapult technology?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. So I think I'll go back and point out, first, I think it's very high because it's happening, right? We don't look at Level 1, 2 and 3 as areas where like it's an untouched territory and we're like walking in and exploring for the first time. We know those markets actually very well. So for example, when you take a Level 2 in that pyramid, we're talking about NCAA, typically the Vision 2 customers, which we have hundreds of customers there today, spending across solutions that I think are sophisticated and high ACV. So the propensity for those customers to use what we have and to spend money on it is there. I think -- maybe this goes back to a little bit of the previous question, like what's the hurdle for maybe expanding that a little bit faster. As you get further down that pyramid, it's really around staffing. So I don't have enough people on my staff that could utilize all the solutions that I think Catapult brings to market. And so I want to make sure that when I am paying for something, I'm getting the most value out of it. And so the way we look at that is, how do we simplify, not only sort of things around UX and data that's important, but also how do we make it so that it's predictive and prescriptive on it. But I think from a Level 1 to Level 2, the propensity is very high, I think when you get to Level 3, then the question becomes, can you simplify the software so that I could deal with the lack of staff. But the budget exists, I think, is sort of the point. And I'm sorry, I can't remember the second part of the question was, can you tell us about the lower level...
Andrew Keys
executiveThe sales approach, like is there a -- can we share any detail, is there a softer lower-touch sales approach?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. Yes, that's a good question. So the way we look at it, if you actually look at that pyramid and kind of think about professionals -- or maybe let's do this, I mean I think if you look at it like Level 1 to Level 2, 3, 4 and then 5 sort of like 3 distinct buckets. I think the best way to think about it is, we approach it in ways that I think most enterprise SaaS business approaches. At the very top level, what you want to have is a very high-touch one to very few BDM sales relationship because those are very high ACV generating customers. They're complex. They're sophisticated. Their level of what they want to accomplish out of your tools tends to really be at a different rate. We're very good at doing that today. And I think that's really one of the level of expertise that we have across the globe, is that, that enterprise high-touch, the very elite level, I think, is really unique and a differentiator here in Catapult. When you look at that middle tier, really, I think our approach is no different than how you would approach sort of a midsized company in an enterprise level where you want a mixture of touch, but really, it's a much medium design. You typically accomplish that with a combination of inside sales mainly with maybe a handful of field reps that could help sort of welcome somebody on board. But you're really focused on how do you do it from a centralized operation rather than having salespeople across the globe doing it. We're deep into building a good inside sales function. As a matter of fact, we've had a good inside sales function. And so the penetration that I think you see in that Level 3 teams has mainly been driven by a very medium- to low-touch marketing design. And then when you get to the bottom of the pyramid, really, it's about an almost no touch design. You really want a self-service mechanism that allows people to have the ability to buy, learn, install and get going on their own. And I think that's an area that historically has not been a focus of Catapult. And it is an area that we're focused on now, it's how do we improve the ability not only for individual athletes, but maybe those entry-level teams, whether it be a high school or a youth academy, to be self-service, right? How do they find and understand what the product is. And then also from a marketing perspective, how do we target those people and get them to learn what we have here and what we're doing for elite teams at a very cost-effective rate. And so we've built a great new marketing team here at Catapult, and a big part of that is really around driving efficiencies across those 3 buckets, the high-touch enterprise level, medium touch inside sales, and then really the self-service low-touch area.
Andrew Keys
executiveThanks, Will. A question from Chris Savage at Bell Potter. Hayden, I'll throw this one to you. When you see Catapult meeting the rule of 40 and having both ACV growth and EBITDA margins added together exceeding the 40%?
Hayden Stockdale
executiveExcellent. Okay. Look, one thing I'm very averse to doing is giving any guidance for the future. So I don't really want to put a time frame around what our growth is going to be and what our margins are going to be going forward. But I do want to leave everyone with a very strong impression that we are very, very guided by that rule of 40. We see it's critical that we add growth in the shorter term, because if you do it the other way around, you end up with really high margins, but really high margins of basically something that's very small, which doesn't get interesting. So we want to establish that growth. We know that growth is there. We're chasing that, but we're only chasing it if we know that the very high margins are there. And I spoke a lot about that, about pursuing gross margins, circa 90%, and incrementing in that business. We've already done that organically. We've done it with the acquisition of SBG. So our ability to generate growth is very much there. We think we have the ability to generate ACV growth north of 30% and to sustain that into the long term. And that really is underpinning what Will has spoken a lot about, which is the 10x growth aspirations. And we think that will come, obviously, with the high associated margins. But I'm not going to sort of get into the finer elements of timing of some of that.
Andrew Keys
executiveAll right. Thank you. Next question is from Anand Vasagiri, who I think is on the West Coast of the United States. So good afternoon to you, Anand. Regarding the achievement of the ACV growth, is there any consideration or need to reorganize parts of the sales force? If so, how might you do that?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. I don't know if there's a need to reorganize. I think there will be a need to augment, I think, the sales team, the way we have designed. And I think it will go back again to -- from a growth perspective, is really around designing efficiencies around sort of what's enterprise level acquisitions, what's sort of that midsized inside sales acquisition in terms of growth and then, again, in that self-service component. So typically, what you want to do in sort of this type of design is that you want to create a level of branding and awareness that I think is supporting all 3 of those components. You want to ensure that your design in terms of the marketing and growth operations, particularly around revenue ops, is also underpinning all 3 of these designs. And that, I think, is a little bit of a change for us here at Catapult, which is already well on their way and almost complete. I think we've modified our marketing team about 1.5 years ago. We've brought in a fantastic revenue ops leader in Courtney, who's really been tremendous in terms of helping underpin sort of these 3 levels. So I think the next stage is really ensuring that then the focus of your sort of sales reps that are at the enterprise level, for example, are really focused on the right TAM, right? And then you're building an inside sales organization that is focused within their TAM, right? And then you have sort of a performance marketing organization that's focused sort of at that lower-level self-service TAM. That's different. And that's a change that actually we've kicked off most recently here at Catapult. We feel pretty good about where we stand. It's not something, I think, we haven't done as an executive team before, but that's probably the area that I think we need to augment just to ensure that the areas of focus around the right TAM continues to be managed and that you're using then the right metrics that are basically underpinned by the sort of the performance component, the branding and awareness component, as well as the revenue ops component across those 3 different layers.
Andrew Keys
executiveThank you, Will. Next question is from Julian Mulcahy at Evans and Partners and seeking some position on how the trial of the new consumer offering, Catapult One, has performed and in the, I guess, the execution of Catapult One, what key lessons from the previous prosumer offering did you take on board?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. I think so for us, what we're trying to do with Catapult One is still -- I think, we're still in sort of learning mode, right? And I think one of the things that we have communicated to the investor community, including probably many of you sitting here watching, is that we will come back and do essentially a consumer, prosumer review more deeply than I think what we did today, particularly as you saw, the potential there from a TAM perspective is truly significant. And I think we want to make sure that we're focused on what we're driving there. I think Catapult One, which for those of you who don't know, is sort of what we rebranded and kind of relaunched at the late, really early fall here in the northern hemisphere around it. There are a couple of things that I think we were trying to modify and get some lessons from, where, one, we wanted to understand the propensity to have customers jump into subscription and what were the hurdles around that. Once we have passed those hurdles, how are they reacting to the product, the retention rate around it. So I think that's been one of the focus areas of learning. The other aspect is also, how well can we approach this sort of self-service marketing design, not just for individuals, which we knew we had some history here from sort of the earlier days around the consumer offering, but also and probably more importantly, how did that impact the team sales on it. So a good example, we knew that we were having individual athletes come in who wanted to get performance around their soccer performance in a high school, right? But then a week later, we would get a call from the coach or the coach would reach out to our sort of elite side of the house and say, I have a kid who's using this technology. I'd like to actually utilize this technology for the entire team. How do I combine the 2, right? And I think that was another component that I think we really needed to understand and learn from, because I think it was a problem with the old design on it. So I think it's understanding the subscription market, understanding the dynamic of individual to team within the prosumer market. And then I think the last bit that I think we've been really focused on learning is our ability to drive awareness and traffic at either a scale and low-cost manner and really understanding the dynamics of that as it relates to regions and sports on it. Because if you could fix those 3 ingredients, we know that we'll build a very strong subscription-based business as we have in the elite sports. And we believe the product road map, for example, allows us to really take what we're building for elite and have great applicability down. And if you get that right, eventually, you have the other way as well. So this is all to say, Julian, and I think it was Julian that asked the question. This is all to say that I think when we come back and have a bit more in-depth, I think those are 3 areas that I think we're looking forward to sharing. What I will say from an overall perspective is that, so far, there's been some great positive things we've learned. There's been some surprises, not overly negative, just things that I think we're trying to still test into. And nothing we've done in terms of going from a onetime payment to a subscription has had a significant impact, I think, in terms of the potential of revenue that I think we were driving before, which is very positive for us because it means that this transition is going fairly smooth while we're trying to learn and not having a real deep impact on both the bottom line or the top line.
Andrew Keys
executiveThanks, Will, for all that detail. Question for you, Hayden from Stefan. How do you think about capital management going forward? And given the subscription model provides you with more visibility on forward revenues, would you look to seek debt funding?
Hayden Stockdale
executiveYes, absolutely. So look, we have a small debt facility today. We actually utilized that briefly during the COVID pandemic when we were concerned that a health issue would turn into a liquidity issue and a credit issue in the market, having lived through the GFC and all that type of things. So we still maintain that. It's not an active part by any means of our capital structure. But look, you're absolutely right. At the right point in time, your debt becomes more interesting as part of our capital structure. But that right point in time really does require the consistency of cash generation to be there in order to service that debt. So yes, at that point, absolutely, it's very much on the cards, and we know that doing so would be advantageous to shareholders. So yes, very, very much in the forefront of mine, but not something that's really going to be that domain in the short term.
Andrew Keys
executiveYes. Okay. Thank you. Well, I think we'll take a couple of more questions, which will enable us to finish up around the half hour. Back on the core business or the Pro business, which region do you see delivering strong growth over the next couple of years and why so? Will?
Will Lopes
executiveYes. Look, I think our primary growth areas continue to be North America and EMEA. Mainly because I think the level of, obviously, budget and I think our focus around soccer, and particularly, I think the larger sports like American football, baseball, and basketball, and its concentration of value here in the U.S. Those are really, I think, core growth areas, and I think they will continue to be our most important areas for the next coming years.
Andrew Keys
executiveAnd last question from Michael Woodhouse. You referred to the commercialization of betting and fantasy sports. Can you unpack this opportunity a little given the large evolving sports betting market in the U.S.?
Will Lopes
executiveYou want to talk a little bit about sort of just that area and then I could talk about sort of our strategy on it, but you want to...
Christopher Cooper
executiveYes. So I think within the bedding and fantasy sports area, obviously, that's a growth area. You're starting to see a lot of funding coming into that, and you're seeing those companies starting to probably broaden out of it and bring in some ancillary businesses that they think can add value. And again, it all comes back to providing data. But in this sense, data for the better or for the customer in order for them to obviously try to win more. So from our standpoint, we do obviously see it as a growth market. Fantasy sports, I think, is actually more interesting from our perspective because then, again, if we are able to get data at the right level and it can be a nonraised and perhaps shared in some capacity, there could be some interesting value there, again, more from the fantasy sports standpoint.
Will Lopes
executiveYes. What I would say is that if you look at commercialization of data, I think, as Chris mentioned, there's been quite a bit that's I think come in and sort of impacted that industry. Quite honestly, I think the way we look at it is there are sort of 2 masters in the world of sports, right? There is the fan base that is driving, I think, media, it's driving betting, it's driving engagement in many ways. And you either are building a technology that is serving that, or the second master, right, which is the teams trying to win and perform -- at the end of the day, our primary focus is on this one. We have not and we don't spend a lot of time looking at sort of the media and betting, particularly betting, I think, I would say, and fan engagement area. I think there is some very interesting stuff that I think we could do with media, particularly if it makes sense for the teams that we're working on and the leagues that we're working on. But it's not an area that I think we stay focused. And it will be very interesting to see what occurs from a sports technology industry overall in the sense that what you are starting to see, right? And I think to me the most exciting component around the report around the industry is that the growth now is no longer really coming just from the media side, which tends to lead technology. The growth is actually starting to come from the analysis side, right, and sort of the performance component, which I think puts us in a great driving seat. So that I think the point is, hey, you take the commercialization, quite exciting, it's probably the largest part of the sports tech industry today. But now all of a sudden you look at what used to be under $2 billion of wearables and sports analytics, is now projected to be over $16 billion in a very short amount of time, I think, really starts to change the dynamic of that conversation.
Andrew Keys
executiveAll right. Thank you to all the participants for sending in questions. We covered a huge amount of ground there. Thank you, Hayden, and thank you, Chris and Will in Boston, and I'll hand back to you, Will.
Will Lopes
executiveYes. No, I appreciate it. And thank you, Andrew, for facilitating and making sure that we got this going Look, I'll keep it short. I think we spent quite a bit of time telling the Catapult story. We're very excited about what we have in front of us. I think I've been just honored by the level of enthusiasm that I think I've seen from my team. But I've seen from the organization overall in terms of what we're really trying to do. And I think the mission we're in, in terms of really empowering athletes and sort of unleashing their potential here in a way that I think is truly unique. I appreciate all of you for dialing in. And I just want to thank everybody who's behind the scenes helping actually set this out. I know we weren't able to do this in person, but I think overall, I think we were able to complete this without a hitch. So I just want to thank everyone who's working across on this Investor Day presentation. So with that, I bid everybody a big thank you, and I wish you all well and looking forward to talking to many of you in person in the coming weeks.
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