Energy One Limited (EOL.AX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to all of you, and thank you for joining the first half of the FY '25 results presentation for Energy One Limited, just to make sure you're in the right meeting. I'm Shaun Ankers, the CEO. I'm joined by our Chairman, Andrew Bonwick; and our CFO, Guy Steel. We will go through the agenda of the presentation through the slides, and then we'll allow some of the questions at the end. I'd like to point out that the meeting will be recorded. So if you don't wish to be recorded or identified, please e-mail your questions through the [email protected] or put them in the chat. So first slide, please Guy. So I'll just go through the highlights. This has been lodged on the ASX. You're welcome to download and look at it, but I'll just read through them. So very pleasingly, this first half was the best half in the history of the company on financial metrics, which I think is a firm validation of our approach and strategy. Even better, of course, it was organic. So I think we've done well there. And hopefully, you're pleased with this result. After our reorganization and a period of market volatility, I certainly feel we're in a bit of clear air now and growing our business and the opportunity to capitalize on all of the effort put in by a bunch of people. The results show that our recent efforts have been fruitful. We've delivered a net 53 new installs in the last 12 months. As you can see from the financials, and we'll go through it, our ARR in January is up 18% on the last 12 months and margins are up. Along the way, we improved our processes. We've better engaged with our staff, and we're particularly proud about, found better ways of working together in all part of our reorganization and doing things a bit differently. We have definitely enhanced our cybersecurity and other risk management processes. I'm very pleased about that as well, and we can talk to that. But we do continue to innovate. These improvements have not been made at the risk of innovation with batteries, AI and automated trading. And we have further validated our one-stop-shop approach and positioning. And lastly, we're now an important and integral part of energy markets, both here and in Europe. So the company has definitely arrived. We're now a minor software player. We're a key part of the market and the way it operates. So I'll hand over to Guy, if I may, to take us through the next couple of slides, which are more financial.

Thanks, Shaun. I will move through the financial slides relatively quickly. As you can see there, revenue increased 14%. Shaun did talk about the latest ARR number being at 18% recurring revenue. And what we've seen through the half is Australia has benefited from particularly high project revenues. And as we talked about and forecast at the full year result, the FY '24 result, brokerage has returned back to a more typical market. We would also note that the Australian software business has been working particularly hard in their pipeline, and that's really starting to bear fruit. The quality is certainly increased from where it was 12 months ago. Europe continues to grow strongly and the eZ-Ops product continues its preeminence as the #1 product in its space in the market. The UK business also has had a particularly good half, both in terms of customer acquisition and project work as a result of that and also from existing customers. From an expenses perspective, yes, they were in -- absolute numbers were flat. But if people recall, we did have a number of one-offs, which we called out last year in the half 1 2024 result. And once you normalize for those, expenses are up 5%, employee expenses 8%. And that's certainly within the range we've talked about in terms of growing our revenue and growing our expenses by a percentage of that EBITDA margin in absolute terms doubled. However, if you do it normalizes, it was up 6% to 26% from 20%, which is a very strong result and shows the ability of the business to scale, which I think is the most noteworthy outcome in the result when you look at both the earnings and the cash earnings as well and the flow-through to cash and debt. And on that point, you'll note that net debt down over $8 million half-on-half. Obviously, the capital raise back in 2024 was a key component of getting that debt down. But pleasingly, in the current half, we've also seen cash earnings drive that debt down. Just in terms of how the results impacted by various items, I'll talk to a couple of items here. As we move through the bridge, we've talked about the one-offs last year. We've talked about the revenue growth with our consultants number, that's positively impacted by the global operations completing and the move of some of the roles that were part of that into permanent staff, such as the CISO, which has obviously been a very important part of our strategy, strengthening our cyber, and you can see that as we move through the numbers. Obviously, lower debt flows straight into bank interest costs. On the IT and hosting side, hosting obviously impacted by customer growth. And on IT, a couple of items of note. One is the security incident and event monitoring capability, 24/7 service that we've put in, deployed across all of Energy One's services servers. So that's fully functional, obviously, flows into the cost and also the investment we've made in internal systems as we globalize and corporate. And just lastly, you'll note that, Shaun talked to it before, yes, we are managing our costs quite tightly, but that doesn't mean we're not going to invest in opportunities for product and growth as they present themselves. A couple of key points I'd make on the -- what we call our SaaS metrics or the metrics that drive the business. Probably churn, it does move around a little bit, but it's always very low, slightly down on previous periods, and that also flows through to the lifetime value of customers. And when we do our LTV to CAC, that's also improved. The reason for that is obviously higher lifetime value of customers through lower churn. And also from an acquisition perspective, our acquisition -- our sales and marketing costs are up slightly, but we actually acquired more accounts. So the cost of acquisition goes down. And people will note from a net revenue retention perspective, back in '24, that if people recall, was affected by a high CPI period, which flowed through into customer pricing. We were passing through CPI of 7% to 8%, whereas now we're at about 3%. So that's very -- to a large extent explains that result. And I guess what you'd also look at is enterprise and SaaS enterprise business is pretty rock solid in terms of its retention and the way it flows through, whereas SaaS can be a bit more choppy just by nature of the size of the customers and the customer behavior. Moving down to gross revenue retention. So for people who aren't familiar with that, it's simply opening ARR minus customers lost, minus downsell. That's been pretty consistent. So as we've said, typically, where the volatility is in our revenue retention is around upsell and CPI depending on the events. Just one final point on this slide before I hand back to Shaun to talk about the business strategy. In terms of gross margin cash, that's simply our margin less amortization. But just to remember, it is a blended margin across our software offerings, our services offerings and also our implement -- or our project, our implementation enhancement revenue. So as we've said before, if you look at software in isolation, the margins are up around the 80% mark. And I think at that point, I'll hand back to Shaun to talk about the more forward-looking aspects of the presentation.

Thank you, Guy. I just take a moment to recap on our strategy, which is part of our vision to be the one-stop-shop for wholesale energy and renewables market wide. We've got a strong, profitable and stable business platform for growth now after several years. Our goal is to have and grow comprehensive coverage for both physical and contract energy, depending on how you look at that, that's either short or medium-term markets and have a one-stop-shop or as the modern phraseology will have it, it's a platform, a platform for customers to benefit from. For multiple customer types, that's who we're aiming at, diversification of customer type, and we do have very good diversification, and there's a slide at the back, if you want to look at that for both power, electricity and for gas and ancillary commodities, such as certificates or fuels for both customers large and small. So a comprehensive platform, looking after all aspects of the deal life cycle for customers large and small in multiple geographies. So additionally to that, we offer software plus tech-enabled services for customers who don't have the capability or the desire to self-staff 24/7 desks. And obviously, energy is a 24/7 never sleeps type business. So you need to be awake or operating in a 24/7 world. We have been working on building global capability to service the increasingly global landscape. We've been strong regionally, and we're parlaying that into a global capability by market growth and be a partner eventually and ultimately for multinationals and new territories. We have talked about an example, which I'll come to that a bit further on. So again, we want to invest in new technologies and be at the forefront of the industry. We want to service our customers and help to grow very important, managing risk and opportunity in the energy markets is the key to success for customers. And of course, we assess there's a very large opportunity out there, and we do have some slides that I'll come to in a bit. But just back on sort of the metrics briefly. We like a lot of companies in our space, sort of measure revenue per resource, and that grew 11% during the year, sort of proxy for efficiency. And as we can see, we're now at about $300,000 per employee, that's Aussie dollars. So we continue to grow that efficiency through the business to one way or another, be it automation or better organization and so on. So these slides quite a bit of detail on the slides, which I won't ask you to go through with me, but welcome to have a read. Suffice to say that the markets are all about renewables into the future. This one is a very good chart because it just shows you this is the Australian market where all of the growth is coming from, it's in solar, wind, batteries going forward. Obviously, unless we see nuclear, which I seriously doubt where the coal and traditional fuels are sort of in decline. Gas, of course, remains important to the market as a transition. And the AEMO forecasting that it's going to be relatively consistent through the next period of time, gas-fired generation at least. So I have a similar slide. I can take questions on that if you like, but I have similar slides for Europe. Right now, this is a good couple of slides coming up. You can see the target. So despite all this talk of what's happening to renewables, they installed 70 gigawatts of renewables in 2023. So absolutely staggering result, much more installed generation than the entire Aussie market. So that's -- these guys are taking it seriously. And so I imagine in the future, they're probably -- all the things that are happening, they'll continue to go down that road. So they're forecasting for 18% a year for wind and solar to non-rooftop solar grid scale, 9%. They have short-term markets there intraday, which are much more liquid than ours for trading. Gas obviously is still very pivotal with now LNG significantly entering the market, multiple markets, multiple hubs. And again, our platform offers software and services to all of the players in our one-stop-shop tagline. This one -- this next slide talks to the intraday traded volumes. They're exploding, right? This is one particular exchange, EPEX is one of the older ones and one of the larger ones. That's 11.5 million trades a day going through EPEX at the moment. It's crazy, and it just continues to grow. The market is increasingly sophisticated with algo-trading now taking over from sort of, if you like, manual trading. As you can imagine with that number of trades, you need to have a machine to help you. We do have a minority share in the algo-trading market, but we have a really good share in this physically scheduled part. So there's great opportunities for us to cross-sell into that and to enhance algo-trading so that we can give the customers both sides of the equation. Next slide, please Guy. And this one just again, you've seen this slide before, but it just covers the short-term exchange markets that we're working on right now. I think that slide is still true, although I think Spain is coming on a bit quicker. So just come to the highlights going forward now, we're looking forward. So the advantages coming from our global, capable business are starting to bear fruit. We've took numerous examples of shared resources across the teams. Marketing activity continues strongly, as I said, 42% increase in website hits and the website alone generates some 180 leads in the half. Again, we've got a global CRM now and part of our corporatizing and beefing up our IT, better data to capture, we can get more granularity and look at it much better now. As we published in the 4D, pipeline value increased by 16% during the year based on ARR. So the market continues to grow. Our pipeline continues to grow, and we intend on making the most of that. Cybersecurity have made terrific progress improving that. Of course, it's a constantly evolving landscape. But we do have this 24/7 Security Operations Centre, that's human beings monitoring 24/7, it's called SOC. We'll expect to get ISO27000 in this year, and that will be a major differentiator going forward. I know we've invested a lot. I know that it's difficult to understand where that money goes sometimes. But where it goes into quite apart from the cybersecurity for both us and our customers, it gives you a differentiator because it is a moat that other people -- other vendors have to cross and smaller vendors don't always have the capability to do that. And so the larger vendors like us will have the opportunity to acquire more prestigious accounts and more detailed accounts based on that. So our platform, our one-stop approach is a differentiator against our more pure-play competitors. And we have evidence that it's resonating. For example, one customer, we provide the contract management software out of the UK, power ops out of France, gas operations out of Belgium, and we do the night shift from Adelaide. Truly global. I don't think there's a single vendor in the entire world who can service that account in this way. So we are, yes, those remain open to good acquisition opportunities should they arise, and we continue to explore those likewise for any other venture or partnership that may help develop the business. We've repeatedly a continuous focus on margin expansion to accompany our efforts in growing revenue. So we continue to remain as disciplined as we can. But I should point out the caveat from there is that we will -- as we've said, we will continue to invest. We'll always do that. So margin growth is a philosophy, but investment is a necessity. So we will continue to do those things. Okay. Questions?

Just in terms of questions, I did get some before the session, so I might deal with them first, and then we can deal with the questions that have been asked by people on the chat today. So the first question was, can you please define cash EBITDA? Is it the statutory EBITDA less payment for software? I won't go for the full question, but just to note that in the appendix, the calculation is in there. So that should answer that question. The ASX release, as we have demonstrated, we expect to deliver organic recurring revenue growth in the range of 15% to 20% plus per year. I know the reference to the plus sign after the 20%. What tailwinds or factors could cause revenue growth to exceed 20%, and Shaun will take that one.

Yes. Good. Thank you. So of course, I think we've demonstrated with, I'd say, alacrity that we can grow at 15% with current ARR growth for the month of January, as I said 18%. Our aspiration is to grow as strongly as we can. Let's be clear about that. And 20% is not out of reach, 20% plus. There's no defining thing I'll point to that says it's going to make a difference at that level. But I could to a couple of things that are indicative of that. One thing is that as you get bigger, you get more noticed and you get more access to, if you like, more opportunity, so that can pivot you. But also the market is growing. And the market grows, we are essentially part of that growth. So if the market kicks on, then there's no reason why we won't kick on either, but we'll get our share of the accounts. So yes, it's definitely aspirational to get up there. I don't think it's an outrageous ambition. And certainly, it's something we aim towards, and we've been working towards for years. And I think we've got a solid data set that shows that we can grow.

We'll now move to the online questions. First question is from Andrew. How do you look at revenue per employee? Is there potential to materially increase from the $300,000 per employee level? Or will you need to employ more people for future revenue growth? And I think -- I mean, I will pass across to Shaun. I think, yes, in terms of our dialogue around revenue growth and the expense growth and percentage thereof, probably largely answers that question. I think, Shaun, your comments?

Yes. Well, so arithmetically, it's just revenue divided by employees, not contractors. But we do use it as a loose guide for how we're progressing on efficiency. Obviously, I've talked about being in some clear air now. And that's where we look at the next 2 or 3 years of this space that we're in. We're not looking a long way beyond that because the world changes. So at some point, investment kicks in with these things as well. We are investing, and that helps to improve the efficiency. But if in x years, there's another little pivot involving some big level of investment, that would probably have a material change on it. Otherwise, it is more related to getting better at what we do and the way we organize ourselves.

And Shaun, next question is from Ron. What gives you confidence in providing FY '27 guidance? Have you factored in any large contract wins in order to achieve FY '27 guidance?

So we haven't given guidance, Ron. Thanks for the question. That's not guidance. That's an aspiration for the business and a target. I often get asked what's the shape of the business going to look like going forward? It's just not a guidance question. It's a what are your plans for the business? So this is an attempt to answer that question. We're giving what are our aspirations and our goals for the business over the next few years. We still have to deliver. And of course, we still invest. But this is what we are aiming towards for the next 2 or 3 years. That's the next period of time that we ask you to focus on. And this is what we -- this is what our forecasting suggests we can get to. So I think you want your CEO to be ambitious and I'm attempting to be that way. So that's what we're aiming for.

And the backup we have in the models that the management have provided meant the Board is very comfortable putting out the sort of indicators of where the company is going capable of.

But no, there's no particular big one-offs in there either. It's -- this is a growth trajectory rather than a specific forecast.

There's a couple of questions from people who've got a hands up. I'll leave them to once we've been through the online questions, if that's all right. And I think given timing, that shouldn't be a problem. So the next question is software peer Hansen talked about the German market being on the cusp of energy transition. How do you see the opportunity in the German market for Energy One?

Well, Germany is like a market within the market in some ways in Europe. It's a big market, and it's very -- it's slightly separate from the rest of Europe in some way. I mean it's integrated, obviously, but it's a sort of market within the market that's probably the best way to put it. And all these markets, whilst they are transnational, do have local features. And of course, Germany. Germany is a market that we all -- all vendors will be taking an interest in and focusing on because of the size of it. Obviously, Hansen's offering is a little bit different to ours, addressing a slightly different segment. But we have high hopes for Europe in general and not just in the sort of traditional market that would include Germany, but also in the emerging markets because Europe just keeps getting bigger and heading east and heading south in terms of energy. And so we want to focus on all of it.

Next question is from Stella. Question for 30% cash EBITDA margin target. What is your gross margin assumption? To achieve that, do you need acquisitions, new product development, innovations or large project wins that may incur above business-as-usual cost step-up? Again, I will go to Shaun in a second, but I think we've largely answered that from -- it does become a mathematical or mechanical exercise in terms of if you -- obviously, if you limit your staffing growth, that will flow through into margin as well. So yes, we would expect to increase our gross margin. And as Shaun talked about, I mean, we've not factored in any specific acquisitions or new product development in that number.

Yes, the word I use is trajectory, Stella. That's what we're aiming for. It's nothing -- yes, there will be stuff inside there, but it's where we're aiming towards with our revenue growth and our cost control. So rather than anything in particular or newsworthy, this is the pathway that we're working on for the next 2 or 3 years.

Next question is from Andrew. Of the 23 new customer installs in half 1 '25, what were the key products driving this success? I think I probably answered this question to a certain degree when I went through the financials and talked about the growth we're seeing in Europe, particularly eZ. I mean if you look at in customer numbers, the eZ-Ops product will have higher customer numbers because it's a lower ticket size. It's not at the enterprise level, whereas obviously, when you look at Australia and the UK where they acquire customers, higher dollar number. So that -- I think Shaun that probably...

Yes. In terms of new installs to take up Guy's point, the new installs are dominated by our sort of shorter-term trading products, more light -- perhaps SaaS related, more lightweight. So 2/3 of the new installs will be in that area and the rest will be in the more enterprise end. So they do move along higher clip. And largely the ticket size is a little bit smaller. So that just explains -- that's an example of where the market moves and we move with it.

Next question is, is the growth in algo-trading a risk or weakness to your manual trading? What are you -- how are you addressing this?

That's -- thank you. That's an excellent question.

It is an excellent question.

Thanks, Steve. The -- so algo-trading is all intraday short-term in that sense, right? So be it on the physical market here in Aus like for batteries or for in Europe and more kind of on the exchanges. So those markets are now too fast for humans to get involved with. So that trading aspect of kind of being in and out, you saw 11 million trades a day just on one exchange in smaller intervals. So that's very much a machine-led activity. What we do on our 24/7 isn't that. What we do is more scheduling of assets and trading at a more contracts and sort of medium-term level, but also keeping the physical side of the market in balance, which is keeping the asset in the market, making sure that it's dispatched, making sure that the customer is making their expected revenues from it. So whereas the algo-trading is a particular type of high-frequency trading, we are, if you like, not trading in the market, we're operating the assets in the market. Hopefully, that's explained, but it's an excellent question.

So if we were operating a wind farm, for example, what we do is we set the wind farm up at the start of the day and to respond to any things that happen in the physical market. But back in the wind owner's office, there will be a whole lot of bright guys with screens that are algo-trading, the output of the wind farm and nibbling it backwards and forwards and those sort of things. So they are quite separate activities. But the guys back in the wind farm head office will be using our software to send their algo-trade communications to the market quite often. So we aim to provide a variety of products.

That's right. So our physical -- if you like our humans be monitoring the machines. That's what we do. Next question?

Next question is from Stella. Previously, you noted FY '25 to spend $1 million on ISO. How much was that spent in half 1? What are your main competitors' stage in achieving that? I mean I think in terms of the ISO spend in the business, we previously have the global operations project. Now it's more integrated with the operating teams. It is actually led by our CISO. So it's a joint across cyber and ISO. In terms of spend, it would actually be quite difficult to pull it apart as to what is ISO specific. What I would say in terms of the overall spend, it is consistent with what we previously flagged investment.

Yes. We're investing obviously in ISO with the staff on cybersecurity. I think echoing what Guy said, we've -- those numbers are sort of absorbed into the management accounts now. They're not separated out, but they're obviously part of what we do going forward. So in terms of what the competitors are doing, obviously, the big guys will have ISO. But there's a lot of up and comers who don't. And so you want to make sure you're on the right side of history when it comes to ISO, and that's what we're doing.

Next question is from Andrew. First half project was reasonably elevated at $2.5 million year-on-year. What did the project work relate to? Did these projects go live in half 1 '25 or will they go live in second half '25? I think -- I mean the project work there's no one particular item. There's a number of drivers in there. All of the businesses are increased, including the eZ-Ops business, which charges a setup fee to customers, which falls in there and they have been working through their backlog a little bit, which has caught some of that. And the other piece we talked about was broker recovering as well, which is worth that I think through for the half compared to the prior period. So it's no one particular item per se.

Next?

LTV to CAC is very solid. Is there scope to invest more in sales and marketing? I think it's the balance of the question.

Well, we did invest quite heavily [indiscernible] in the last 12 months. In fact, there might even be a slide, but certainly a slide from before the last presentation, you're welcome to look at that. But we -- it is a highly specialized sales environment. So there's obviously a limit to how much you can just throw resources at it. And you've got to have specialized people in it who are doing specialized things. So yes, there's always opportunity to tweak it and improve it. I think we've invested quite heavily in sales thus far in the last 12 months. As I said, you're welcome to look at the numbers. But again, we feel like we're in a position now where broadly we're resourced and we're capable of doing things going forward and maximizing our opportunity, of course, if the market starts to expand more or change in some way or there's some enormous push towards fragmentation. And again, we will just pivot and if it requires more sales resources, that's what we'll do.

Next question is from Stephen. Can you talk about how you compete versus the in-house development client teams, especially Germany?

Well, I don't know whether or not this question is German specific, although a lot of customers will have in-house. Not a lot. It's a popular, especially larger customers might have an in-house team or they've got a legacy system that they use and they maintain. The rationale generally for in-house is that they keep the IP themselves, and there's this kind of notion that they do that and they can control the IP and you're not using the vendor IP. That's the sort of general rationale. It's not necessarily a cost thing. So when you've got that, if they want to do it themselves, that's what they will do. Another example of where they come in-house might be more in the trading desk, if they get bigger and they want to build their own desk, you get that sometimes as well. So how we compete is that essentially, if you think about at a microeconomic level, a vendor system such as we've got here is essentially a co-op and outsourced development. So instead of developing yourself at $10, you outsource it to a vendor who's got 10 customers. And the idea is, of course, $1 for that, very simple microeconomic example. So what do we bring to the market is cost-effective solutions that also have in-build enhancements offered by other experiences with other customers. The vendors would pride themselves on having the latest functionality. The market changes, you don't have to build that or scramble to build that. I'll give you one example that I put in the CEO report in Germany, the AS4 -- perhaps that's what you're referring to, Stephen. The AS4 changes, which is a market communications protocol. The German TSOs just said, right, we'll be using this now. So everyone has to sort of play catch up. We were able to get up to speed ahead of that, just as we had done in prior years here with the 5-minute market. And once you've done that, you've got this marketing opportunity that arises from because perhaps a customer might not have the desire or the intent to build it themselves. So yes, with a vendor model, you get that sort of best-of-breed story versus doing it yourself where it's more about retaining your own IP.

And also, as you would all well know, companies are not homogeneous entities. And so quite often, our clients are the trading teams and the operating people and the IT sit in a back office over the back there somewhere. And so the operators, our clients expressed often to me and even in one of the largest energy companies in the world, he said that he likes using Energy One because if there's a the change in the market, we have to deliver it on time because we've got 40 people standing upfront using our software, needing the change. Whereas if it was all done in-house, then he's got to convince the IT group to, a, get it done on time; b, get it done on budget and please, can we have it when the market changes. So our clients are different than internal IT teams. And they really see the value of having an independent vendor.

Just in terms of people with their hands up. Caleb, I'll get you to ask your question first. And then once Caleb is done, Claude, please go -- please follow Caleb.

Just 2 questions, if I may. So I think 6 months ago, you guys partnered with PowerBot for your algo-trading solutions. Just maybe some color on how that partnership is going and how that kind of -- and the lessons you guys learned in the past 6 months and how that kind of defines your strategy and exposure towards algo-trading going forward?

Well, PowerBot, an excellent company, who provide nice technology, integrating with them is very important because our customers might want to use them for one thing and use us for the other. PowerBot recently got acquired by a competitor of ours called Volue, which is obviously sort of changed the landscape slightly, I imagine going forward without any specific information about that. So as you can imagine, we've obviously sort of reassessed what we need to do in response to that. But there's no doubt that we continue to look forward for all kinds of partnerships like that and others that might value the business. So yes, good company, PowerBot. We're a great company. And so I continue working with them.

And the second question I have is, I guess, on batteries, that's quite topical at the moment and quite a lot of customers are implementing batteries. So just on your -- I guess, your current budgeting, is R&D for batteries, I guess, towards that 30% aspiration cash EBITDA margins, is that well budgeted for? Or do you see, I guess, increasing R&D for that component quite a bit?

Well, we have a run rate for -- our capitalized, as you know, is a proxy for innovation for R&D, and that's running about 9% of revenue now. And obviously, that gives us war chest for R&D and innovation, which we'll continue to do. We feel like we're making good progress with that. If there's another project that requires additional response, we will react to that. As I said quite clearly in the CEO report that if we did something like that, then we would give ourselves a carve-out against that goal because whilst we're pressing towards increasing those margins as we should, at the end of the day, we're not going to do it at the expense of innovating for the future. But at the moment, to answer your question as best I can, it's all included and we'll keep going as we are.

My first question just relates to, I guess, what is the average tenure of employees at the moment? And how many employees own a number of Energy One shares that's meaningful to them? And I guess what are your thoughts generally on the levels of morale and cohesion amongst the company? And those kind of like non-quantitative measures of the health of the company, what's the latest there? I know that you've gone through some ups and downs over the last couple of years. How is the employee base looking now? And how aligned are they with shareholders?

Well, it's a stated goal, it's almost a question for the Chairman, a stated goal of the company to make all our employees shareholders. And that's been going on for several years. It's a program that we are particularly proud of because we can talk to employees as they're the shareholders of the company. And every year, we take advantage of the scheme, the Australian scheme, for example, they were allowed to give $1,000 worth of free shares -- tax-free shares, I mean, to the employees, and there'll be no tax implications for them. So we've taken up with Gusto that scheme and implemented it overseas as well on a proxy basis. We have performance rights where they're required for more manager type people. And it's actively a goal of ours to put shares in the pocket of people. People who've been here for a while have, actually amassed a decent amount. So we're very proud of that scheme, and I have nothing but good feedback on the way that that's gone. As for the -- in general about -- I can't answer the tenure thing without additional information for you. But we do have a mix of long-serving employees. And our longest-serving employee has got sort of 20 years under the belt, 21 years now. But one of the things we're very proud of over the last year, and I put it in my report, is that we've really refreshed our P&C. We've got a global Head of P&C and a team working on it. We've improved communication and feedback. We have regular staff surveys. We focus greatly on what they ask us to do. Particularly, we've relaunched -- just about relaunching soft launch of professional training, wherein the company is going to help our team members get a career path organized, maybe do some specialist training and that just means sort of on what they're doing day to day, but market training or leadership training, any of those things to enable them to sort of have a career with us, not just a job. And that's something we're very excited about. It has been well received. And it's just part of just generally making the whole thing absolutely seamless going forward and everyone feels like this is a great place to work, and we improve our net promoter score. So that's something we're working on as well. And at some point in the future, we'll probably release some data to give you a feel for how we're going.

And also, Claude, in the incentive programs, a lot of them have equity weightings as well. So yes, we're focused on getting everybody in the company to understand as a shareholder, how the company does well.

And so my second question is a bit of a different tack. I guess now that the share price is better reflecting the quality of the business and management that we've got, and it's obvious that fund managers who haven't had a look at the stock for the last 2 years are now very interested. I imagine they'll be in the ears of their broker mates and basically trying to get the company to raise capital for any reason. And you guys are going to be getting a bunch of people telling you in your ear, raise capital, raise capital. Can the company assure us long-term shareholders that it will not raise capital unnecessarily and if the company did decide to raise capital and fair enough if you decide you need to, but would you, in that case, please consider a tradable renounceable rights offer to ensure that, I guess, the shameless guys, the shame guys that have come lately and have ignored the stock for years that they don't get to buy stock at a discounted price now that they suddenly want it, and they should have to pay like the full price, the fair market price of what shareholders are willing to sell and not get any free kick essentially?

I'll unpack several aspects of that question, Claude. Firstly, look at what we've done over 15 years, okay? We're very miserly with our stock. I think we floated with 20 million shares, and we've got 31.2 million, what's this 17 years later. And most of that extra went to vendors and people with aligned interest of the company. So yes, right? Look at what we do. The second one thing is, yes, people are always coming to us and saying, raise capital. Yes, there are people in the broking community that spruik the advantages of a war chest for acquisitions, okay? That's not consistent with what the Board thinks is a good use of funds to just have lazy funds lying and waiting for something to buy. And so we're not going to do that. And also, you'll notice that with the acquisitions where we've raised funds to fund the acquisition that we've looked at several different mechanisms. So we've done SPPs, we've done placements, we've done bank debt. So in each case where we need to raise money, we're trying to think about how do we maximize the value to our existing shareholders. And if something like that happened in the future, we would do exactly the same thing again, what's the best optimum way to raise any funds that we need to buy something. Does that answer the question, Claude?

Yes, it does. It answers it in also a way that is very pleasing. So thank you very much to the entire leadership team for the continued demonstration of high integrity. I look forward to those many, many small-cap fund managers who realize they are underweight Energy One for the increasing panic for them to sit in and set in. And look, may it be another 10 years with you guys like we really -- we batted away the takeover, and we really did that because we want to be in part of this story as a multiyear compounder. So yes, it's great news, what you just said about being miserly with shares because that is just an absolutely key ingredient. So thanks for that.

Capital is very expensive, Claude.

Yes. And I think the other point from an accountant's perspective I'd add is we've got the cash flow to pay down the debt. So that takes care of the balance sheet.

Yes. Well, this is finally when we get to reap the reward of that extra sort of scary bit we took on when you took on the debt. And I think your judgment in doing that has been vindicated with these results. Hopefully, we need a few more results to prove the point, I guess. But it looks like now that the judgment that you made that the market was questioning a few years ago, it's now looking like that was the right judgment. So yes, thanks, I guess.

I think at this point, there's no more online questions. There is no more questions from people in the meeting unless I've missed any, which I don't believe so. We may -- unless I hear from anyone quite quickly, we may wrap it up there. Thank you all for attending. And Shaun, do you want to close with some final words?

Yes. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for attending. We've got -- we've got...

Close to 100.

Close to 100 people online. I remember when we used to have 2 blokes and a dog, so this is -- this has been really interesting.

And they were both staff.

So thank you very much, everyone, for your continued interest in the company. We continue to do what we've always done, which is hopefully, as Claude said, act with integrity and just keep growing the business. And that's what we'll continue to do. And I'll see you on the next one. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you all.