Gentrack Group Limited (GTK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Gentrack's strategy presentation. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Gary Miles, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Daisy. So welcome all. We have a great lineup today. And I'd like to thank you for your cooperation and your continued support. So today, we're going to share our 3-year strategy. It's a reset strategy. It's a strategy about growth and leadership. We are introducing this through our half year results 3 weeks ago. The results showed progress, early progress, but there's more to come. I've been in the role now for 9 months. This had given me time to get a good understanding of the business and to come forward with a confident plan that we can deliver against. So it's the middle of the night here in London. I would like to jump right into it. So if we can move to the next slide. So we have an agenda here. I'm [ not going to read ] the agenda. It's important for me that you're exposed to the entire team today. I'm looking forward to them presenting and sharing their expertise. We've assembled a world-class leadership team. The team is working very well together. We are saving the financial section to the very end, where James Spence, our CFO, will give clear metrics for all on the financial targets and KPIs that we're running the business against over this 3-year strategy. This is an opportunity for us to share our strategic outlook on the business and the industry and what's transpiring and our role in it. It's also an opportunity for you, as one of our 3 main stakeholders, investors, customers and our people, to engage with the leadership here today. So I would encourage you, we're going to save questions till the end. We set aside 30 minutes. I would encourage you to put questions in during the process, so we can queue those up appropriately. We also will not be having one-on-one shareholder meetings following this specific strategy day. So once again, I would encourage you to jump in with questions and engage at the end. So with that in mind, let's move forward to a very important slide, which is our purpose. So our purpose is to bring utilities into a sustainable era. The purpose drives our strategy. It drives the way we act, the way we operate and the way we impact the market in which we play. Our vision, I'm going to read this directly, so excuse me, but our vision is we see a world where people understand and are empowered to responsibly use precious water and energy resources. This is why we aim at Gentrack to be the go-to innovation partner to the leading utilities and service providers globally. Our mission is to relentlessly drive our customer success by developing better cleantech solutions. It's clear, it resonates well with our people and our customers, and this is what we're building the strategy around that we will show you today. So if we move to the next slide. We are building this 3-year strategy on the basis of a very strong foundation. Okay. People ask me, "Gary, what have you found that's good and bad in the business?" I've been in the business now for 9 months, as I mentioned. The #1 thing that I feel is amazing about the Gentrack business are -- we have more than 50 great customers. We have innovative challengers who are bringing great technology, great customer experiences, some of them digital only, some of them fully engaged with the front office and back office, but innovators that are coming into the deregulated markets in which we operate, taking market share and growing. Some of them becoming -- used to have the Big 6 in the U.K. Now you have the Big 8. Some of them moving into the league of the Big 8, so we've helped them grow as they innovate and differentiate with their brand. We also work with some of the largest brands on the market, the large incumbents that need to transform to be cloud-based, agile to be able to run a very slick operation and to become innovators themselves. And this transformation at scale is not trivial. And we've been able to do that with some of the largest players on the market. I've been fortunate -- or directly, one of the first things I did in the business is I reached out to all the CEOs or CTOs of our customers. I've met with all of them. We have an intimate relationship. We're building with our customer base. I use this term because it's important [indiscernible] we're a vendor. We have a relationship where we need to understand what their business is. The retailers depend on our services as a main supplier and partner for them and their growth plans in this business. So these people are at the end of our WhatsApp. And more and more, I'm getting to see them. I actually had some face-to-face meetings this week, which was great as we move out of the COVID era in certain locations. Also, we have 500 experts that understand energy, water, airports. This should not be underestimated. The collective know-how inside Gentrack of the utility business is phenomenal. And we're going to talk to a large energy supplier or a small one that's entering the space, a new challenger that's entering the space. This experience is invaluable and convincing them that we're the right partner to work with and to lean on for new innovations and growth and running their -- helping them run their business better. I would say that one of the biggest strengths that we have, that we've built upon this foundation a knowledge is, if you look at the industry, it's our belief that there's not a technology player out there with as rich a portfolio to be able to do business-to-business and business-to-consumer for gas, electricity and water. This multi-play approach is very hard to do. We do it well. We've managed to get a large leadership position, particularly around B2B energy and water in this space. And this is a functional footprint that gives us strength as we move into new opportunities and to be able to adjust to new things that the industry requires. So this space is the foundation upon which we're building our strategic growth. So let me move to the next slide and talk a little bit about the environment in which we operate. So I've called this slide the 3 Ds, where we talk about decentralization, deregulation and decarbonization. So first of all, on the energy networks that we work with themselves are changing significantly. They're moving from a centralized architecture, where you have generation, transmission and supply, to a much more complex, dynamic and interesting decentralized architecture. Effectively, retailers, over time, with a base of consumers that have electric vehicles or power packs in the home, power walls in the home will have a power plant that can be dynamically turned on and off. It's the same thing for corporations that have major assets, whether it's solar or wind or hydro or other that can also be managed. So this is a concept of flexibility in the energy space where you can turn assets on and off, you can power them, you can fully optimize them and load them battery sources when energy is affordable, and then pull out of them when energy becomes expensive and to start to balance the grid. This is a super-dynamic space that's changing the way we have a -- what has historically been a supplier to consumer model to effectively a 2-sided business model of prosumers and suppliers. On the deregulation front, this -- the largest impact of this besides having many new entrants that come into the market and dynamic innovative offerings for consumers is there are cost-to-serve pressures that can become very significant. If you look at this chart on the right, this shows the margin pressures that have happened in the U.K. over recent periods with price caps and other types of deregulation and competitive environment, where you have very, very easy switching, which we facilitate, by the way, between suppliers; the negative margins; high churn. So how to combat this? We are building -- our primary development requirements and operational requirements around protecting the profit of our customers in this industry. This means to be able to automate everything, everything that you can to automate it, to have a smart retailer with the best experiences to reduce churn, to have profit as a design principle and the technology that we build and the operating practices that we embed in our customer space. So this is a very important dynamic in the industry. And as any market deregulates, this becomes a competitive differentiator. Finally, decarbonization. There's a 5.5 trillion carbon industry. The industry needs to go to 0. This is arguably the largest threat that humanity has faced. What is the impact on the retailers? This is significant. So consumers and corporates want to better understand how they use energies. They don't necessarily know what a kilowatt is, but they want to understand which energy sources in their home or in their corporation are pulling from the planet's resources, how can they pump back into the grid, how can they make money out of it. A lot of this comes down to clear and effective charging, clear and effective bills to make this experience meaningful and useful. And these consumption patterns are driving which retail -- which energy suppliers, utilities these consumers go to, which is affecting change in the retail space. So these 3 dynamics are making the energy industry -- and water, by the way, is following. It will probably not follow at quite the same pace but is following. But it's making -- the utilities probably the most dynamic industry in the world today that's experiencing major, major change, major transformations. And to do these transformations, it's hard. It takes a strong partner, and this is the place where Gentrack intends to lead. So if we move to the next slide. So how do we address -- how do these 3 things affect the way a retailer makes decisions? First of all, to survive and win, utilities must modernize their core offerings to be smart, agile retailers. This is super important in order to move into the new sustainable era. A lot of the industry has historically been serviced by 2 of the ERP cross-vertical solutions providers now or some in-house development. It's our view that as you move into a decentralized environment with all the specifics of the regulatory and geographic requirements that having a horizontal platform that works across many verticals does not address the needs of the industry. The industry needs utility-specific expertise that meet the geographic and regulatory requirements of the industry and all the prosumer and all the charging and unique requirements of the industry. This means that this environment, the historical legacy systems are up for renewal. Now to showcase this, I will share with you an example, that in our core markets, just the Tier 1 -- for the Tier 1 suppliers in our core markets, 1/3 of them have already made a selection to move off these legacy systems to new age systems like those of Gentrack. Another 1/3 are in process today, and we believe the final 1/3 will follow. Now that is in our core markets. Now our core markets lead the globe in many ways. So it's, in our view, a very safe assumption that the rest of the world will follow. Whatever captures this market for cleantech should control and be the leading provider for the next 10 to 15 years. So the size of the prize is significant. But the challenge is also very, very hard to do multi-play B2C -- B2B for gas and energy and water is a very difficult thing to do. You'll hear from Zeev Berkowitz, our COO, that will talk about the fact that in general, globally, major B2B transformation programs, 50% of them fail. Zeev is an expert in this space. He's -- there's probably a handful of people on the planet that have done as many transformations as Zeev. He knows it's very, very challenging to get customers through to safe harbor, to manage scope and control, to make sure that customers don't move forward with operational parity but move into a new operating paradigm with new technologies. So to be able to do this, it's a unique asset. We believe we have the skill, and this will serve us well in this transformation. Now I'd like to talk about the fact that billing is a controlling -- billing and care is a controlling hill for many clean technologies. So if you -- and Loukas will talk about the types of innovation that you have. But the clean technologies that come around billing and care, okay, I've mentioned some of them here. You can look at smart digital prepay. So historically, billing systems in the utilities space did postpay. Now they move into prepay. It doesn't makes sense to have a second billing engine for that. Meter data services, all the information that's coming off a smart meter and all the data that's coming feeds into the billing system. So why get this from a third party? Big data and analytics. Most of the key information that's required for analytics and smart decision-making is actually inside our system. Demand forecasting, how -- when one of our customers gives a quote to a major corporate for a 3-year quote, they need to forecast the demand, and then they need to check it daily through the lifetime of that quote. This is very intelligent software that needs to be regularly brought up to date against the billing system. All of these examples are cleantech examples. How you can start to balance the grid, do time-of-use cost base charging, move into new types of pricing models, these rely on the billing system. If they're done separate from this, it's not elegant or even maybe effective way. So we see billing and care as the core to cleantech growth. And we are already out, rolling out new services, and Loukas will talk about some of these in his presentation following mine. So if we move to the next slide. I'd like to talk a little bit about the tailwinds and headwinds in the business that we have today. So the tailwinds which are driving momentum, pushing our ship forward are good. So first of all, we have a new brand. You can see it reflected here. It's fresh. It's dynamic. it's resonating well with our employers -- our employees. Our employees are the brand ambassadors to the world. As they go out and do co-projects with our customers, they talk about the essence of our brand and our values. We've been communicating this [ brand ] of late outside, talking about our new logos, our new wins, our customer success stories. In the last 2 to 3 years, Gentrack has been relatively quiet in the social and external space. Now we're making noise about this and is resonating well and helping with our image and our momentum. The second thing is employee pride and engagement is up. There's no single event that occurs to do this. Now if you look at -- we had -- I've mentioned before that there are some turnaround elements to this job. And then we came in with a new CEO, a lot of change. It's not a simple period. It hasn't been a simple period for our employees. There was a time when the employee engagement was in a state of change. And we focused on customer centricity in key employee programs, and we have turned the corner. I would say, employee engagement and pride is in a very strong place. I feel fantastic about it. People have a clear understanding of where we're going. They see the wins that we're engaging with our customers. They see the appreciation that we have with our customers. And this is a major, major step and the part of our 3-year strategy. If there's one thing I leave you with in this strategy session, the #1 thing we've achieved over the period is that our customer engagement is in a great place. So we had several projects in flight. We had a backlog of cleantech innovation that our customers need us to deliver. I have a saying that low-hanging fruit is also fruit. We were able to go in and work with these customers, address their backlog, bring them cleantech innovations, bring them cost savings, meet the regulatory requirements that are continually coming to the business, meet them on time and on budget. And our engagement with our customers is in a much, much better place and is driving the growth that you see in the numbers that we presented in our half year forecast and will continue to drive growth for the business, as our customers turn to us more and more for billing and care and beyond into cleantech. So this is a great step. Another tailwind that we have that's helping us with momentum is we opened our India center. I'd like you to understand that this management team moves fast. We brought in new management in calendar quarter 4 of last year. We had our India center opened by February after a very thorough multi-country competitive process. We now have 50 experts working in the center. They're coming up to speed on our technologies, the industry, our processes. We've invested a lot in the training. I believe that this team will start to have -- it's already having a material impact, but we'll start to have a very material impact in another 3 months. This center gives us scale, and it gives us price points that we need to be competitive and effective and lead in this market. And we will be growing this India center significantly. We'll always have close proximity to our customer resources as well as resources in the India center. This is the equation that we think works for the market, but this is a strong engine for the company. Culture of winning. There's no prize for second place. I don't need to spend much time on it. We are a winning organization. When we enter a competitive process, we play to win. We have new logos in energy and water, and we'll continue to post new logos. The last thing I'd like to say, which is not included in our 3-year strategy but is a significant opportunity, is our core markets in which we operate lead the globe in many ways around cleantech. And as the world deregulates, if you can succeed and lead in these core markets like we do, around cleantech, around cost to serve, around innovation, around customer centricity, you should be in a strong position to do this in the rest of the world, as those suppliers that start to deregulate or come into deregulated markets look for strong, capable partners and move them into a successful business position. So let's talk about some of the headwinds that are actually creating a drag on revenues. So first of all, we have some prior period attrition. That attrition is either -- whether it's insolvency or service provider decided, for example, to build their technology, they operate for a while, and then they come off of our system. In that case, we have continual revenues that continue beyond the period of decision and then hit the business 1 to 2 to 3 years later. So these are affecting our growth or impacting our growth in fiscal '21 and '22. James is going to be very specific with the numbers at the end of this strategy day. We believe insolvencies in the U.K. will continue. That's probably a reality. We don't have a crystal ball here, but this is a real potential. Competition is playing catch-up in some places, has some win momentum, I have to say. And we respect competition. We take it seriously. We're comfortable in this domain we can compete and win, and we will do that. Having said that, I would like to say that it's one thing to win a deal, it's another thing to deliver it at scale. I think some of the competitors are still improving in this space, and we will see how that plays out. Our image from prior periods, I think, has some impact on the -- in the competitive marketplace. We are addressing this, and we are rectifying this, our new brand, our new technologies, our marketing communications, and this is on track. Finally, on a global basis, not specific to Gentrack, clean technology expertise is in high demand. This is a problem for any technology company today. There's a war on talent. We believe that talent actually resonate -- or gravitates well towards our employee value proposition, which is part and parcel to our brand and our purpose. Having said that, this is -- we actually have more work than we have resources today from our customers. It's a good problem to have. And we've ramped up the hiring engine, and we will manage this problem in a positive outcome. So these are the headwinds that create a drag on the business. Now let's move on and talk about growth. So we have here a pretty straightforward growth strategy. It's -- there's -- we have 3 pillars to growth, which sits on top of our foundation we'll talk about. There's no magic here. These pillars are about experience, execution, hard work and passion. So let's talk about them. First of all, we have a strong base. I've spent some time discussing our base. We have fantastic customers. They're depending on us more and more. We are going to serve them better and better and better. We had some customers, when I came into this role, that were actually not profitable customers, and they created a disproportionate drag on profit. We reset those accounts. Geoff and Mark are going to talk about this. And we are doing more and more for our customers. We plan to bring constant innovation. We want to understand the insides and outsides of their business. We've doubled the customer-facing team that works hand-in-hand with our customers to understand where they're growing and make sure they get a clarity that if we can, if we choose to help them, we will be the right partner to help them do that, to help them make a profit and succeed and grow. The second pillar for growth is our new logos. So we have posted some new wins of late. There are some Tier 1 players left on the market that are coming out for decision. I mentioned this earlier on in the presentation. There's also some Tier 2 players. We -- I want to make clear, though, Gentrack is focusing on the Tier 1 largest suppliers. We have the scale to service these guys. These contracts are very large, very significant, and we're out attacking and building the pipeline in this space. They can move the needle materially, and we are pushing this direction. You'll also hear, as to open a parenthesis, from James Williamson, as the CEO of Veovo, our airports business, we're also moving into the Tier 1 of the airport sector. The airport business prior to the pandemic had been mostly in the mid-market and had been moving into the Tier 1, some very successful airports when the pandemic hit. And this is also a Tier 1-focused play that we're being known for as a Tier 1 supplier. The last growth factor is managed services. So we have had some historical managed services. The business had not chosen to scale this out to a wide number of customers. We launched our managed service proposition 3 months ago. We already have new logos. This gives us long-term sticky revenues. It provides us growth and provides us very intimate partnership with our customers. We believe that we can run a highly profitable managed services business that allows us to grow and to help our customers. If you centralize this function, and you can do it in a cost-effective offshore/onshore model, this can bring great value to the customers. And Zeev will talk more about our managed service business. In closing of my section, I'd like to say that there are 2 faces. In the B2B space, there's 2 faces to industry leadership. One is great technology. I've said it before, I'm a technology-oriented CEO. I believe the best technology wins, and we are committed to having the best technology on the market, period. And Loukas is going to explain to you our technology strategy, how we're investing and what we're doing there to -- end-to-end across the business to have a technology leadership from development to delivery and onward. The second face of leadership is delivery expertise. In the B2B space, it's not that you build and they will come. You have to deliver major programs or many, many small programs and fly in a mission-critical, highly secure basis. And we have this muscle. We have this expertise and know-how. And this will -- these 2 things will serve to make Gentrack a leader to transform and move utilities into a sustainable era. So with that in mind, I would like to turn over to Loukas Tzitzis, our CEO, who will take us through -- take you through our technology strategy. Loukas, to you.

Hi, everyone. My name is Loukas Tzitzis, and I'm the Chief Technology Officer of Gentrack since January 2021. This is my second stint in the utilities industry. My professional background has been in technology-related industries as for over 20 years, where I have participated and led 3 major technology transformation programs. Over the last 9 years, I have held technology and business executive roles with global remits, and I was thrilled to be invited to join Gentrack at a very exciting time for the company and the industry. When I joined, the cloud journey of Gentrack had already started. And Gary asked me to focus on 3 things. He asked me accelerate the portfolio of cloud journey as well as build a pipeline of cloud-native innovation to extend the portfolio of Gentrack for the cleantech era; be a customer-facing CTO and work hand-in-hand with our delivery and sales community, so that our install base will want to join us in this journey towards cloud and cleantech; and finally, leveraging the existing assets, design and build a future-proof global platform with the ability to cater for regional differences. At Gentrack, we pride ourselves on moving very fast. There's still work to do. But as you're about to see, we have made significant progress on these objectives, including innovations, which I will cover in the last slide. You heard Gary on how we see the industry evolving and some of the challenges and related opportunities. Our significant advantage is that we did not have to start from zero. I have been here for just over 5 months, and I was lucky to find a very strong technology team and a very solid product functionality that has supported for many years utility meter-to-cash needs across both B2C and B2B. With this in place, we knew that we needed to shape our portfolio around the concept of an out-of-the-box, functional, Software-as-a-Service core, packaged with a clear extensibility layer to provide our DevOps team the ability to create, adapt or extend functionality when and where required. You can see a functional overview of our end-to-end capabilities on the left. Going beyond supporting energy, gas and water billing capabilities across both B2C and B2B, which we have been doing for a number of years, we have already addressed the need for enhanced digital customer engagement capabilities. The functional aspects that I really want to highlight though are our focus on profitability, end-to-end customer experience and our data and analytics capabilities. When it comes to profitability and end-to-end customer experience, these are more than functional elements. These are design principles for us. Our entire portfolio considers profitability across all supply processes and decision-making points to ensure that we proactively support our customers at a time when margins are under tremendous pressure. With regards to end-to-end customer experience, we see that the customer base of utilities has much higher expectations. And therefore, we have evolved accordingly to ensure an optimal experience across all user journeys. We're focusing on vertical innovation at the edge of the grid; customer service best practices, including lessons from other industries; and the introduction of artificial intelligence and robotic process automation-related capabilities. In the area of data analytics and insights, we have built functional capabilities that allow utilities to significantly augment their decision-making processes. We have seen tremendous demand in this domain, and this is an area that we expect to continue being a growth driver in our customer engagement. I have been talking about the functional side of our portfolio, but as a company, we firmly believe that nonfunctional aspects are equally important, even more so with the level of agility and pace of innovation required in the market today, the pressures on time to market, time to value and cost to value, portfolio long-term successes dependent -- absolutely dependent on the design, architecture and technology choices that the company makes. You can see some of the key choices we have made on the top right of the slide. With the realization that utility providers are increasingly embracing the cloud as well as the benefits and economies of scale, scalability and standardization, we have put cloud nativity at the core of our portfolio. You will have seen the announcement of our partnership with AWS, and we are greatly benefiting from this relationship towards building our portfolio based primarily on serverless microservices. We have chosen a serverless approach for our portfolio due to the automated scalability, faster time to deployment and, ultimately, cost efficiency compared to a container-based approach. However, when and where required, we do support a hybrid mode of operation by complementing the serverless approach with some functions deployed in containers, for example, as is the case of longer-running functions. The second principle is all about how do we execute. We're using a CI/CD DevOps approach, and I should note that the company has been using both of these concepts for more than a year now. Our new partnership with Contino is further strengthening our competencies in this area. And by utilizing DevOps, we have removed organizational silos and improved collaboration between development, delivery and operations. Very importantly, we're able to innovate and deliver to our clients in a more automated and high-quality manner. The third principle of open API-first architecture is, in fact, a core belief of the whole organization, from Gary down. We believe that this type of architecture is the right way forward for the industry as a whole, and utility should enjoy the benefits of flexibility and not suffer from locking. By using our API-first approach, we ensure that our applications are easily extensible, leading to faster time to market for our customers and improves customer experience for their customers, and importantly, we create an environment for faster innovation, both internally as well as in collaboration with clients and key partners. Lastly, on our key principles, security and privacy are built in our foundation. We have decades of experience of operating the current regions which are quite advanced in terms of compliance requirements. Together with foundation provided by AWS and our regular monitoring of the evolution of regulation and installation, we ensure that we stay up to date with developments. With our functional depths, industry experience and our product and technology foundation, we believe we have some very compelling market strengths. Firstly, as you've heard from Gary, we really do not believe that there's a company in the market today with an equal, bill anything platform across energy, gas, water, covering both B2C and B2B. The bar for the expertise, experience and functional depth and breadth required to cover these lines of businesses and segments is extremely high, and we believe that we're extremely well positioned to continue succeeding in our core markets and beyond. The enrichment of our portfolio with the data and insights foundation enables the creation of a much deeper relationship with clients as we augmented their decision-making capabilities. Last but not least, with the extensibility layer of our portfolio is a critical enabler towards rapid and monetizable business-driven innovation. We focus on innovation efforts on cloud-native and serverless deliverables that extend our platform capabilities while still aligning with the principles that I spoke of earlier. In effect, what we're doing is we're packaging a set of platform capabilities that are used by our extensibility layer, and we're therefore able to extend our Software-as-a-Service core and build new functionality, create regional-specific or even project-specific functionality as well as create, for example, connectors to other industry systems by other companies. And this is how we bring innovation to life. Moving on to innovation. We see that innovation at the edge of the grid and the emergence of consumer-owned distributed resources is creating significant disruption to existing business models. This will force utilities to become more agile, redefine customer value propositions as well as utilities having to learn how to operate with multiple operating and revenue models. We think that our focus on digital enablement and DevOps powerless -- serverless microservices deployment is exactly what is required to address these challenges. And our innovation efforts have already started generating returns to date. Let me give you some examples. You heard also Gary speak of data and analytics, and I spoke of the tremendous demand we see in this domain. And we really see that our capabilities in realtime data access, data business layer visualization and our data and insights foundation, together with our new partnerships with Qlik and Snowflake, are contributing to improved data-driven decision making today. Our meter data services offering is already in production in the Tier 1 ANZ client, with the customer achieving significant operational and business KPI improvements. This particular solution, by the way, is an excellent example of the approach of extensibility of functionality that I spoke of earlier. Through the microservices-based functionality extensibility capabilities that we have and our design and architecture principles, we have been able to address both the 5-minute settlement requirement in Australia as well as the half-hourly settlement requirement in the U.K., and we're introducing smart Time of Use tariffs as well. Smart digital prepay and 2-sided business model support helps utilities generate new revenue streams while reducing bad debt as well as create better relationships and business models for the cleantech era. Demand forecasting and control utilizes machine learning and AI to intelligently optimize a system towards using energy at low-demand times and deliver improved profitability as well as reduce costs for end consumers. Gentrack for network ensures accuracy of distributor charging for a future with much more data and many more sources will need to be consolidated with the emergence of distributed energy production. As you see, we have made some serious progress in 5 months. The evolution to the cloud is ongoing, and we still have work to do, but I am satisfied with our progress. The fast execution that you have seen has been made possible by the existing team as well as some of the key new product and technology leadership hires. These new hires are professionals that have been involved in global portfolio creation and transformation before. They all come with global vendor background and hands-on experience in product management, product marketing, DevOps power development and delivery of enterprise software. But we want and we will move even faster. As we speak, our plan for the second half of the year is to hire a significant number of resources across India and existing operating theaters to accelerate our development plans even more. I mentioned earlier that we still have a lot of work to do, but I want to highlight again that we have such a strong foundation of existing functionality for energy, gas and water across B2C and B2B, but we truly believe no other company comes close to that. And when you combine that with our pace of execution, our progress in design and development, I'm confident in the success of this new product strategy. Before I hand over to my next colleague, I want to stress that we're a technology-first company that knows how to build and bring to market the best tech and products. By working as a team with our delivery and operations colleagues, we're laser-focused on delivering value to customers and ensuring a small evolution towards the cloud and the cleantech era. This type of teamwork is not possible without the right leadership in place, and I'm lucky to have in my corner Zeev Berkowitz, a professional whose experience and track record in delivery, operations and transformations is second to none. I will now hand over to Zeev to explain how we deliver our portfolio and value to our clients. Zeev, over to you.

Thank you, Loukas. Hello, everyone. I'm Zeev, Chief Operating Officer. I oversee the delivery and execution of the company in the last 7 months since I've joined. Before joining Gentrack, I was leading the delivery of a large global software company of mission-critical systems, including execution of multiple transformation programs, some are the largest and most complex in the industry. And I'm happy to be here today. Loukas described the product and road map going forward, which is the key to our growth. Besides the product, it is essential to have strong delivery and execution capabilities to transform, deploy and maintain the systems in production. It is a necessarily condition to convert the technology and functionality of our products into a well-functioning systems that deliver unparalleled value to our customers in their transforming markets. Delivering to 80 distinct existing customers, each with its own uniqueness and with the existing dynamics in the market, regulation, competition requires a strong delivery machine. Gentrack has a track record and legacy in delivering at scale. Having these end-to-end capabilities is a key differentiator for us in the market. In the last 6 months, we initiated a program to take our delivery machine to the next level. So far, we made a major leap forward, and we see improvement in execution performance, customer satisfaction and financial results. I would like to take you through some key points of our plans, and I will start with running the transformation programs. With the disruption happening in the market, we expect, and we actually see it happening, customers will have to transform and upgrade their systems. Transformation projects are not easy, especially for mission-critical systems that power the core business. I've seen in my experience, over 50% transformation projects that start do not get to an end. Some others are over time, over budget and undervalued. We have proven capabilities to deliver successful transformation. Over the last 2 years alone, we have completed 10 transformation programs. Recent one in Hunter Water that you can see the testimonial from the Managing Director on the right-hand side of the slide. Transformation programs are complex. And we know how to handle high complexity, not only for B2C transformation programs, but also for B2B and for multi-play transformation of water, electricity, gas. In these programs, B2B or multi-play, complexity is growing exponentially. And we have proven tools, methodology and experience to handle these and bring these programs successfully over the line. In transformation project -- programs, experience of the team is crucial for success. We have very experienced and engaged transformation experts that together have track record of completing over 100 transformations. To take our capabilities to the next level, we intend to elevate few areas. In our complex programs, one size of plan does not fit all. We are building the right methodology and approach for each transformation according to its own characteristics and uniqueness. We are using a couple of frameworks to choose the right program management method, which is crucial for the transformation success. We are also looking into ways to offer more agile methodology for transformation through method of minimal viable solution that was implemented recently in few digital transformation programs, and it helped to reduce risk and improve time to value. We are also looking at addressing one of the transformation risk area of data migration. We are developing practice and technology with one of our technology partners to build continuous migration. Instead of migrating bulks of data in a batch way from souce to targets, in continuous migration, we'll move record by record in a continuous way, a couple of seconds for each record. If there record fails, it goes back to the source system being fixed and reprocessed. In this way, risk is reduced and secure minimal interruption to the business. I would like to take you through the way we develop upgrade and deploy changes. We have a large development shop, with over 250 engineers to support and maintain the systems for our customers. Regulation changes, adjustment of our customers' differentiating processes and deploying innovation are driving high demand for this service, and we expect it to further grow. We have started transforming our development processes to become systematic, consistent and predictable at scale and to drive better quality and throughput. And we see initial good results coming through. And we obviously aim to do much more. We are also improving our scalability. As mentioned before, we opened a technology center in India. And we already have 50 [indiscernible] end of the year, about 30% of our engineering workforce will work out of India besides, and I want to emphasize besides, our growing engineering teams in Australia, New Zealand and in the U.K. To improve our scalability, we are reducing the lead time to onboard new engineers by half for opening business school and improving training techniques. Our engineers are working in a global model across 4 locations. It enables us to have more resource flexibility and better utilization. So the movement to India, we also have a better cost structure, and we expect to see this trend continuing going forward. Company-centric is important to us, and we give it high focus. It was mentioned before. We assigned Customer Success Manager to each customer. It is working closely with his counterparts at all levels. Through this proximity and intimacy that we are creating with our customers, we can react faster to their request, build trust and better monetize our services offerings. The next area that I would like to take you through is maintenance and hosting. We are hosting applications for 60 of our customers. These are all mission-critical systems that the whole business rely on for their operations, customer management and financial activities. These systems require top level of reliability. We are in the process of implementing monitoring console that will continuously and proactively monitor the system and its performance and be able to alert on any issue. We will also take a proactive and preventive action to secure high-service level availability and reliability of the system. We'll also provide our customers with visibility into the system performance for monitoring selected set of operational and business KPIs, so the customer can have visibility on what we call eyes into the system. We aim to offer our customers to migrate the systems to the cloud and accelerate the migration to the cloud. Leveraging on our recent agreement with AWS, we are in the process of creating the tools and automation for flawless migration to the cloud. This migration will allow our customers to benefit from better availability of their systems, scalability and reduce total cost of ownership. Security is an area that gets high focus. Loukas referred to it in his presentation. We are continuously taking measures to improve information security and data privacy. We look at development happening in the market in this domain and taking action to strengthen and tighten our plans. Recently, we completed the ISO 27001 certification, and we are engaged in GDPR audits. Other initiatives to strengthen physical security, vulnerability and data privacy are now in progress. Gary mentioned the managed services offering and potential. Earlier this year, we started to propose our customers managed services mainly for their back-office operations. We have deep knowledge of the industry processes, and we know best the systems that powers and automates their processes. Bringing the 2 together with the ability to execute, meaning running billing, handling exceptions, investigate revenue leakage, fix data, reconciliation of payments, et cetera, together with economies of scale and economies of knowledge, create better -- create a compelling offering to our customers, offering that help them to improve KPIs and reduce cost to serve. We have proof point in existing and new engagements. For example, we achieved billing rate of over the 98%. We know that in many cases, it is about 93%, maybe 95%. And we managed to help our customers to recover GBP 10 million of lost revenue in the last year in the U.K. through our assurance managed services offering. There is an opportunity to further improve performance for automation, robotic process automation, higher sophisticated automation for increased improvement opportunities. And we are on to looking to extend service coverage to have it 24/7 and improve TCO through our India center. This is a sticky and multiyear business. It also creates intimacy with the customer that can serve in the future as a lever for system upgrade and other services. Since we launched the services a few months back, we won first multiyear deal with Orbit, and we are currently in discussion with additional 10 customers. Geoff will refer to it in his U.K. regional strategy discussion coming up. To summarize, besides the great product, Gentrack has delivery powerhouse that can deploy and maintain software reproduction and translate the capabilities of our products into unparalleled value to our customers. And doing it at scale in a profitable -- this is what sets us apart. With the elevation and the tuning of our delivery machine, short and long term, we are only getting better. We are improving execution across all parameters and provide better support to grow the business. The work that we do is contributing to the underlying financial performance metrics that James Spence will cover in his part. Thank you, and I will now hand it over to Geoff, who will kick off the regional strategy discussion.

Thank you, Zeev. Hello, everybody. I'm Geoff Childs, the General Manager for the U.K. and Ireland utilities business. I've spent the last 15 years in the utilities industry working for and with the main Tier 1 operators as well as helping many of the new challenger brands enter the market. I was co-founder and led the center for energy supply from start-up and have been working with Gentrack now for 4 years. The U.K. energy market is a highly competitive market with circa 50 energy retailers operating actively in the market today. The U.K. energy retailers' ability to make profit is under constant pressure in a fast-moving dynamic and competitive market. With the drive towards net zero and the focus having sharpened and gained momentum from the recent pandemic, consumer behavior has made a step change shift with households and businesses wanting to understand where the energy they're using comes from and how they could use it better with less impact on the environment. With the national rollout of smart meters in the U.K., this has opened the door for our customers to innovate and create different products and tariffs for their end consumers. The U.K. consumer is more and more demanding today, wanting real-time data to take control of when they use energy and then if it's at the right time and from the right sources so they can reduce their carbon footprint. Our tech is at the forefront of this shift in the U.K. consumers' behavior. And as energy markets deregulate across the globe, it should put us in a strong position to grow into new markets. And I just wanted to confirm, [ Joanne ], can everyone see me on the camera because I'm seeing a different picture?

Yes, we can see you.

Okay. Thanks. Sorry about that. Right. So in terms of growth for the U.K., I am focused on driving double-digit growth net of prior period losses. We are still expecting some drag on our revenues for FY '21 and '22 due to those prior period losses. And we may still see some SOLRs happening, insolvencies in the coming years. But I do expect the U.K. to be back to strong growth by FY '23. Before I talk about our strategic approach and plan for the future, I wanted to share with you today the solid foundation that we have in the U.K. to support our strategy. I would like to take this opportunity to remind us all that Gentrack in the U.K. is the market leader in B2B energy, the market leader in B2B water and the market leader by number of energy suppliers. Overall, we have more energy suppliers using our core billing platform than any of our competition. We are in a unique position in Ireland as we have the platform which supports both the regulatory and the functional requirements needed for this market, and we have our first customer operating in both the Republic of Ireland and the Northern Ireland. We are recognized as the provider of latest tech to energy and water suppliers in the U.K. and have some of the most innovative challenger brands operating on our platforms in the U.K. today. We have, in recent years, not only supported the latest tech new entrants to the U.K. market but have established a firm foothold with some of the major incumbent brands now, and we are supporting them at scale. You'll see from the slide, we have major brands such as E.ON, npower, Shell, EDF and ENGIE, all using our software to run their business-critical operations as well as the 3 of the major retailers in the U.K. B2B water market. Our new customer-centric engagement model, which Gary touched on earlier, along with our new team of client business executives, has been reflected in our improved customer satisfaction survey scores, which is driving our growth. And our clients are repeatedly recognized by the leading industry benchmarks on their greater customer service, which, again, is underpinned by our platforms. So there are 3 areas we are focused on for growth. Firstly, we have improved our relationship with our existing clients. And again, as Gary mentioned, including the process of resetting contracts with some of our clients, which were either unprofitable to us or very low revenues, our customers are coming to us first when they want to innovate and leverage tech to give them an edge. And one of our unique selling points, which is consistently fed back to us, is how we combine our deep industry knowledge with tech, and we do that like nobody else in the marketplace. We have held innovation sessions with all of our key clients and have identified multiple opportunities where they need our help to deliver innovation and maximize clean tech to deliver on their strategy. Off the back of these sessions, we have already up-sold additional capabilities, including things like time-of-use tariffs, meter data services and our new data analytics capability, all of which you heard previously from Loukas' cover-off. Overall, from our engagements, we are finding ways to help our clients and, importantly, help them protect their margins, their profitability and give them better control of their business. Our second potential of growth is the rollout of our new managed service capability, again, which Zeev talked to and touched on within his presentation. We have run this at a small scale previously. And we've now packaged this service up into a scalable and successful offering with the potential to up-sell this to all our clients. Since launching this new service, we've already secured one long-term client and are actively assessing the introduction of this service with a number of other key clients. We -- it gives us a good intimate knowledge of our customers, and I believe it will bring us robust, long-term and sticky revenues. Our third and final area for growth is where we are seeing some of the major tier brands in the U.K. looking to shift away from their current solutions. We are engaged with some of the major players in the U.K., and we are looking to secure growth for the U.K. and Ireland from these relationships. In summary, we have some drag in our revenue still in front of us. There is increased pace in regulatory demands on our customers, and we may see some more SOLRs insolvencies happening in the future. That said, we have a strong base. We're bringing new capabilities and clean tech to our clients. And we are targeting Tier 1 new logos that will be coming to market in the short term, albeit with long sales cycles. I'd like to now hand over to Mark, who will be covering off the APAC region. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Geoff. Hi, everyone. My name is Mark Humphreys. I'm the Australian Country Manager here at Gentrack. I've worked with software and utilities for over 20 years, worked with energy and utility customers across Asia, and I've been with Gentrack for 2 years. Allan Sampson is our Country Manager for New Zealand and Singapore. He's on the call as well should you have any questions to him. So Asia Pacific for us are the markets of Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. We also have customers in Papua New Guinea and Fiji. So we're operating in 5 countries today in Asia Pacific. So we're excited by the opportunities we see in network businesses, New Zealand. We see growth opportunities in Singapore, both with existing and new customers. But today, I want to focus on Australia. Now that's because we sat down as a management team in November last year, and we looked at the growth opportunities in Australia, and we decided to invest for growth in that region. We did that because we've got a strong leading position in Australia today. We've got a strong customer base to grow from. In addition to that, we see strong drivers for growth in our 2 core markets: energy retail and water. Energy retailers are investing in digitization. They're doing this to continue driving down cost to serve, and they're doing it to increase customer intimacy. Look, one of the really important aspects of the market in Australia is that regulatory complexity is continuing. We've got a really strong regulatory solution and model that is already in place of our customers. They rely on it. They like it. It's really important. Managing regulatory change well is critical to our customers in such a cost-sensitive market. So we've helped customers through major market changes, big disruptions, Power of Choice in 2017 and 5-minute settlements that is rolling out this year go live in October. And we've got a pipeline of work for the next 2 years of regulatory change as well. It's a really important building block for our business. Water companies are investing. They're investing to transform into customer-centric businesses. So in their words, they're moving from a property-centric view to a customer-centric view. To do this, they need our solutions to understand customer consumption patterns, to proactively address customer concerns with bills, to interpret sensor data from smart meters. And by the way, some of our customers in Australia are leading the trial of smart water meters here. So we sit at the heart of the digitization trend. That's digitization for efficiency and digitization for driving customer efficiency. So let me talk next about the Australian business and particularly what sets us apart from our competition in this market. So first, our customer base in energy and water. Having a stable and valued customer base is just a great place to start growth from. We have 7 of the 15 largest water companies in Australia, measured by connection points. We have the largest B2B or C&I retailer. Our 2 largest energy customers in Australia billed $7 billion a year through Gentrack. That talks and that's testament to our scalability and our reliability for them. But in addition, you've heard Zeev talk about it. But in Australia, we have well-developed muscle on delivering these projects. Gary has talked about delivery excellence as well. It's just critical for us. So I want to emphasize this point. Over the last 2 years, we've completed 11 projects. Six of these have been to take customers to our cloud product. And that's just so important in an industry where there's a history of failed billing projects. We have never failed a billing project, never failed. So we're proud of that reputation. Look, a big part of that is our staff and our knowledge and our expertise. We have 73 staff in Australia. They're local to our customers, and that's really important for us because customer relationships matter in a B2B business. We want and we need to understand our customers' business, and we build relationships with their teams. We get to know them. We work with them closely. If you look at my leadership team as an example and the team of team leaders here in Australia, it's about 14 people. Collectively, amongst that group, there are 146 years of utility knowledge and 217 years of collective billing knowledge and experience. This is just a huge advantage for us. You can't buy this experience of market knowledge or of regulatory change or billing technology. So important for us. So how do we build on this base? And how do we grow in Australia? So we've got a number of growth drivers in Australia. I'm going to talk today about 3 levers that we are pulling to drive that growth. We talked before about investing in sales teams. So we've doubled the sales team in Australia. We've hired salespeople who are bringing enthusiasm and energy and strong sales backgrounds and methodology. They're in place today. In energy retail, with that team, we'll keep leveraging our market-leading status in B2B. We'll continue targeting the Tier 1 and the Tier 2 players and keep looking for opportunities to replace those incumbent billing systems as market forces drive more change. In energy retail, we will play and win in the new entrant market but only selectively. You won't see us going after every new entrant in the Australian market. Lever 2, data and analytics. Loukas talked about it before. We're rolling this out with our customers. We have 4 sessions that we've run. We have discussions in various stages. We have the next 4 customers targeted. It's so important for us because our customers' CIOs talk about democratizing data across their organizations. It leverages the billing data that sits in our database of record, and it also moves us beyond billing as a solution for our customers. So we do that by driving predictive analytics to anticipate customer behavior, to drive cost savings and increase customer satisfaction metrics for our customers. So our analytics and data access solution put us at the heart of this. We'll grow in the water space. We have a strong pipeline of water opportunities in various stages of advancement today. We're bidding with partners who round out our solution for that customer transformation journey. We have a much clearer go-to-market of where we partner than we did 12 months ago, and we'll be targeting Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers, which for us are water companies who have over about 50,000 connection points. But we're also looking with interest at a trend amongst smaller water companies who are combining to procure shared services because that also potentially grows our available market for water in Australia. So look, I want to leave you with 3 things: really strong competitive position in Australia, a really compelling offer for the Australian market and a team that delivers that. Combine that with the innovation that you've heard Loukas talked about, and it gives us a really compelling offer in a market where customers are investing in change. So with that, I'll hand over to James Williamson, and he's going to talk you through our Veovo strategy. James?

Thanks, Mark. Good morning, everybody. I'm James Williamson. I'm the CEO of Veovo, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Gentrack Group. We're focused on airports and the transportation sector. And for the next 10 minutes, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about us and where we're going. So first, our vision. Veovo sees a world where travel just works, where instead of endless queues, delays and stress, journeys are efficient, painless and tailored around the traveler. Our mission is to enable the world's smartest and most complex airport and travel providers to realize this vision. We deliver the technologies that enable them to make smart decisions, to preempt issues before they occur and ultimately deliver travel that's more efficient, greener and as frictionless as possible. We do this through delivering technology that learns from real-world data and enables decisions that are joined up between the stakeholders. We've already got an impressive customer base within Veovo. Our technology is used in more than 100 airports globally. That's across 5 continents in 28 countries. Now airports are our primary market, but we also use subsets of our technology to support some rail operators, metro operators and to control road traffic in some of the world's busiest cities. We're on a journey to continue to strengthen our value proposition as we focus on attracting the larger, more complex airports and travel operators to our platform. We've already made some good progress on this over the last few years, attracting major customers in Europe, the U.K. and North America. But it's our intention to continue this trajectory to fuel our growth by focusing on the Tier 1 to Tier 3 airports. The Gentrack Board have been highly supportive of the Veovo business. And our objective is to be the go-to partner in travel and the recovery that's to come. The Veovo platform can largely be categorized in 4 key areas. The first is airport operations. This really is at the heart of what airports do. Our systems control the flights, the resources being used, those stands and gates, for example, and coordinate the airport stakeholders to execute the airport's mission. Ultimately, these systems enable airports to perform better and make better use of their assets. These are absolutely business critical, and airports simply can't function without them. And our second capability stream is revenue management and billing. And this really grows in our Gentrack heritage and enables our customers to build their aero, so airlines, but also non-aero customers such as retail and hospitality. This helps them reduce revenue leakage, attract new airlines and ultimately provide more commercial innovation. Guest engagement is all about getting information to the passengers at the right time to deliver a better experience. Finally, we're world-class in passenger predictability and flow management. This technology, put simply, measures the movement of passengers from the moment they turn up at the gate at an airport or a train station through to boarding the plane or the train. Our customers are using systems to measure queues, control crowds, improve the customer experience, but possibly, most importantly, at the moment, to reduce their costs and make better use of their assets by better understanding passenger turn-up profiles and how they can deploy their staff. If you traveled in 2019, particularly in New Zealand or Australia, there's a good chance that one of your journeys was touched by Veovo system. We helped more than 800 million passenger journeys, over 4 million flights, and we helped our customers manage more than $4 billion of revenue. As a business, we grew by more than 20%, and our EBITDA was also more than 20%. Now it's no secret that the pandemic has hit travel and, particularly, aviation very hard. We have fared better than most. We entered the pandemic in a strong position. We've got a great customer base with very low turnover. Our recurring revenues are strong, and those are -- that's really a reflection of how critical our systems are to these customers. And we've got great people across 5 global locations who are absolutely passionate about our products and totally committed to our customers' missions. And that's really reflected in low attrition rates and great NPS scores from our customers. At the beginning of the pandemic, we took some big decisions to make sure that we retained profitability throughout, but more importantly, that we could collaborate with our customers closely to help them reconfigure their airports and reduce their costs and see through the uncertainty that they've been facing. We've also taken that time to refine our strategy, which has led us to focus on investing and accelerating certain areas about technology development that we think are important in the recovery to come. I'm pleased to say we've also added new customers during this time. Of particular note is Swedavia, which is an airport group that runs the 10 largest airports in Sweden, and they have taken our revenue management suite; Perth, a major Australian hub, who have taken our ops management and revenue management suite. And we've also added a major East Coast European -- sorry, East Coast, North American airport and a major European airport to our passenger predictability suite. Veovo is ultimately focused on emerging stronger from the pandemic. We're trusted and respected by our customers, and we're making sure our platform and our strategy is aligned to their needs going forward. And particularly in the post-pandemic world, that means doing more with less and improving their ability to handle the change that's still to come. Now it's not all doom and gloom. Guest travel restrictions remain on much of the world. But where travel is possible and where there's a strong domestic market, for example, in the U.S., we're actually seeing passengers come back quicker in greater numbers than we expected. A great example of this is our customer in Orlando, who are actually forecasting in the coming month or 2 that they expect to get back to around 90% of their 2019 passenger levels. And we're hearing similar stories from our other U.S. airports. Ultimately, all airports are on an evolutionary journey. They're focused on improving the passenger experience, keeping their costs as low as possible whilst looking to recover their revenues . Ultimately, they want to do more with less. They want to handle more aircraft and more passengers using less assets, less staff, whether they're at level 1, which are airports that are quite manually driven and quite disconnected organizations; or where most of the world's airports are at level 2, which are airports that have increased automation, better collaboration within the stakeholders but still are ultimately quite reactive organizations as situations evolve; or if they're world-leading, and these are what we consider airports level 3. These are the airports who move their event horizon further forward, try to make decisions before problems occur and ultimately have a smart long-term plan that they continuously adjust based on the recommendations of the changing environment around them. The new battleground going forward is what the industry calls Airport 4.0. This is where we've truly seen intelligent airports, where the passenger journey is largely automated and where the airport is focused on optimizing the flow of passengers, the flow of aircraft and the interaction between the 2. This is where the world's leading airports are going to look to achieve in the coming 2 to 5 years and the industry as a whole will be trying to achieve over the next decade. In response to this, Veovo has 3 core strategic pillars. And the first is we believe that to work with the world's best airports and transport providers, we have to have the best technology. We started a transition to the cloud before the pandemic, and we've now moved our entire passenger predictability suite to being Software-as-a-Service, and we're now a long way through moving our operational suite, too. We're also now accelerating our investment around Airport 4.0 capabilities, so intelligent decision-making, smarter planning tools and performance optimization. Our second pillar is about being a strategic partner to our customers. We have a clear go-to-market strategy that's focused on moving our customer base into those higher-tier airports and operators. We've invested in our sales resources, particularly in markets that we see likely to have a stronger recovery. And we've been developing a partnership model to work with system integrators and prime contractors who have a greater global reach than us and already have great relationships with some of our key target customers. And we're seeing some success from that already within North America. We're also strengthening our position with our current customer base through both bringing them inside our innovation process and helping them guide and shape our road maps, but also investing in customer success management to make sure we nurture those relationships and that those customers are getting the best possible service out of Veovo. Our final pillar is about scaling for growth. We've already started our move to Software-as-a-Service, but we're going to extend that to a greater range of managed services for technology and also business services in some of our key capability areas. We see a real opportunity here that as the pandemic has forced our customers to significantly reduce their staffing and own capabilities, they're looking to Veovo to step forward, not just as a great application provider but to provide a much more rounded and complete service. This will allow them to reduce their cost of service to their customers whilst leveraging Veovo capability to ensure a world-class service. We also think this will enable us to increase our pace of innovation as we can bring capabilities into operation quicker. Ultimately, Veovo's return to growth will come with the return to travel. We're focused on enabling the smartest, most efficient and most agile airports in travel operations. We're doing that, leveraging that world-class team of specialists and increased size portfolio of business services and ultimately delivering the best technology in their class. I'll now hand over to James Spence, our CFO, who will be going through the financial metrics.

Thank you, James, and thanks to all my colleagues for their presentations today. My name is James Spence. I'm sitting in our Auckland office today. I'm the CFO, and I've spent much of my career in the energy industry internationally. The last 10 years in Australia, where I was previously CFO at Direct Energy Australia and subsequently ERM Power until it was taken private 18 months ago. I'm going to round up with one slide, which highlights the revenue and profitability targets for FY '24, which we're sharing today for the first time. Firstly, before I come to the metrics, an introduction on the work done to arrive at these numbers. In the first quarter of this calendar year, we did a bottom-up analysis of revenue projections for 3 years by customer, both existing and new potential customers in our existing geographies. Important to emphasize that these targets are not including international expansion. The work took into account our anticipated technology investment and innovation as well as our strategy to grow revenues in the areas you've heard about today. On the cost side, we've reviewed our delivery spend, as you heard from Zeev earlier, looking at the most efficient geographic mix of employees, including a mix of both proximity resources, i.e., close to our customer markets, as well as team members in our new India center. We've also made assumptions around the productivity benefits over time from our new global delivery model, which we're already starting to see. You heard our plans for technology innovation from Loukas. Consistent with this, we've made assumptions around strategic R&D spend, which we plan to be around 15% of revenue. And you can see that in the third row of the table. Now this might not be perfectly linear in every year, but over time, we expect it to average around that number. Note that this is a non-GAAP measure relating specifically to new investment in innovative technology for our customers and excludes more routine elements of R&D expenditure, which in combination make up our total R&D spend. So in terms of outputs from the strategy work, let's now turn to the revenue and profitability targets you can see on this slide. Firstly, looking at the top row in the table, we expect compound annual growth rate of our annual recurring revenues to be in excess of 10% per year from FY '21 forecast level to FY '24. Note, this will absolutely not be linear. As in FY '22, as noted on the slide and mentioned earlier, previously lost customers, which will contribute around $10 million of utilities ARR in FY '21, are expected to leave us this financial year. These losses are the mix -- are the result of the mix of SOLRs, i.e., supplier of last resort situations, in the U.K. and specifically a U.K. customer which is expected to move to in-house technology later this year. We are not giving FY '22 revenue guidance today. We expect revenue growth from the growth pillars, which have been a theme through today's presentation, i.e., strengthening our base, winning new business, expanding our managed services will significantly mitigate that reduction in FY '21 customer losses. This revenue growth is expected to be driven both in utilities and energy and water, as you've heard from Geoff and Mark; and airports, as you've just heard from James. The U.K. and Australia remain our biggest markets in utilities, and the growing pipeline of opportunities we see in these geographies, combined with our investment in innovation, opening up new growth opportunities, underpin these revenue projections. Obviously, there's a spread of potential outcomes, both to the upside and downside, with a small number of Tier 1 logos able to make a material impact. Moving to the second line in the table. We expect total revenue, which includes both the nonrecurring revenues or project-based implementation revenues and annual recurring revenues, will increase in total by around 30% by FY '24 off the FY '21 baseline. Nonrecurring revenues, likely to be lumpy by nature and will depend on the client timings. I covered the third line on R&D spend earlier. So looking now at the fourth row in the table where we highlight our key profitability measure. We see cash EBITDA margin in the range of 15% to 20% by FY '24, an improvement from where we are today, which is around 10%. This will be driven by improvements in delivery costs and productivity you've heard Zeev speaking about earlier and a reduction in the proportion of corporate costs, which are expected to stay fairly flat as revenue grows. These cost improvements will be offset by increased R&D spend and sales and marketing expenditure. Note on the slide the specific definition of cash EBITDA we're providing, which includes all R&D costs plus noncash share-based costs that excludes the direct real estate lease costs. We haven't provided cash flow information or plans on future funding or, indeed, distribution plans. Analysts will be able to derive a cash flow projection from the information provided in addition to our interim disclosures. With our net cash at the half year of $22.4 million, this plan would result in significant cash generation, adding to our existing position, giving us flexibility for future investment opportunities. Finally, our intention is to maintain these metrics at reporting periods and provide an update to the market on how we're tracking towards them. That might be as simple as traffic lighting with periodic refinements as our confidence increases towards these targets, and it's possible we'll add to these metrics over time. That's all for me. Thank you. We'll close this session with a short video from our Chair, Andy Green, and then I'll hand back to Gary to wrap up before the Q&A. [Presentation]

Gary, you may resume your presentation.

Okay. It was great to hear from Andy, and the support of the entire Board is amazing. We want to thank them for their help and the strategy. I want to leave the forum with 3 -- with the following key messages. You've seen the caliber of the team. They are people-centric leaders, very execution-oriented, formed the foundation for growth and execution of this strategy. We are committed to have the best technology. We are doubling this with a delivery powerhouse. The delivery organization provides a lot of the core capabilities that drive the profits that James laid out in this 3-year projection. I'm confident in the organization. Our customer responses have been very positive. They're going to get better and better. We have some prior period headwinds. We're dealing with them. In general, the business is growing. We have a healthy and improving cash balance, and we're well placed to take advantage of the clean tech revolution. So with that in mind, I'd like to turn over to the audience for questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] I don't see any question coming in queue. [Operator Instructions] There is none in queue right now, [ Joanne ]. I'm handing it back over to you if there is any.

Thank you. We have many questions on the online chat, so I'm going to ask those now. We have a question that is focused -- bear with me. Question here, the productivity cost and customer satisfaction goals for the Indian delivery center are impressive. What are these based on? Are there examples or benchmarking? Does the 30% of engineers target imply redundancies in New Zealand? That is from Phil Campbell.

So maybe I'll take...

Yes, Zeev. Please.

Yes. So we measure the success by metering simply a throughput of the [indiscernible], of the engineer. We measure quality. We want them to be at least, I would say, equivalent with the teams that we have in Australia, New Zealand and in the U.K. We measure them on innovation, how much innovation they can introduce into the processes. And we measure the time to recruit, how fast we can onboard a new engineer when we need to scale up. It doesn't come at the expense of any engineer, and I mentioned it, I emphasized it in my presentation in the U.K., Australia or New Zealand. On the contrary, we are also growing the teams in these 3 locations. We don't compromise on the proximity and intimacy, co-innovation and co-creation with our customers.

Thank you, Zeev. The next question is from Shezad Okhai. James, in your cash EBITDA forecast of 15% to 20%, I'm assuming that all R&D, including strategic R&D, is expensed. Is that right?

Yes. Thanks very much for the question. The answer is yes. That's the short answer. The longer answer is we will look at our reporting periods at the appropriate level of capitalization. We're not saying today that we will not capitalize any R&D expenditure. If appropriate, we may do that, clearly following the accounting rules. But for the purpose of the strategic targets that we're indicating here, you should assume that the cash EBITDA numbers include all R&D costs, yes. Thank you. Now [ Joanne ], I can see there are quite a few questions on FY '22. If you want me to go and cover those in one go, I can.

That would be great, James, if you can do that.

Okay. Look, there are quite a few questions on FY '22. So rather than respond to them separately, maybe I can just try to capture all briefly now. Thanks for the questions. First of all, I do want to say the emphasis on what we're preparing today, what we've shown today really is around the strategy. There are no numbers provided today that should be considered in any way guidance for FY '22. We are not providing guidance for FY '22. We will in due course when appropriate and when we're in a position to do that. Now look, I can see that -- from the nature of the questions, I think where people are going is can we try and understand more about what's in your forecasting process, how have you arrived at these numbers. But let me just, if I can, spend a couple of moments just talking a little bit more about the process. This is obviously a pretty hot topic in the tech sector in Australia at the moment, so I want to try and give a level of comfort into the -- into our processes. What we do is we have monthly processes to -- where we manage our forecasts. We have finance managers dedicated to Australia and New Zealand, to U.K. utilities, airports internationally and to delivery and R&D. And every month, we do a customer-level bottom-up forecast, which all of the ELT, the executive leadership team members you've met today review and challenge and update each month. Gary and I review it in a lot of detail, and that ultimately goes up to the Board. We've taken a very similar approach here for these 3-year forecasts. Now clearly, there are more assumptions that we make over a 3-year period, and there's some level of uncertainty in those forecasts, and I referred in my presentation to some of the risks. But you can assume that the way we have approached setting these targets is the result of a detailed bottom-up process with -- at a customer-by-customer level, both for existing customers and new customers. And that's how we've looked at this. And clearly, there are risks and opportunities associated with the targets we're setting today. Coming to some of the specifics being asked, we've highlighted that there's $10 million of annual recurring revenues in our FY '21 numbers, which we do not expect to repeat into next year. And that is the result of -- primarily, the majority of that $10 million, to answer a specific question, is related to U.K. supplier of last resort situations and an element, as I referred to a customer who has developed their own tech. So that will -- we expect that to roll off this year. So if you think about that, that means that our -- if you like, our baseline ARR is around $70 million in FY '21, excluding those losses. We've shown the total of $80 million for FY '21, which includes that $10 million. And we see that -- you can deduce from the numbers we've provided that we see a total revenue of -- just following what we've provided, 30% uplift on the FY '21 number, which would imply about $130 million of revenue in FY '24. In FY '21, about 20% of our revenues are nonrecurring revenues, NRR. We haven't said what the split between ARR and NRR will be in FY '24, but if you were to try and estimate, you could take a similar proportion, which would leave you, assuming that we are -- our ARR target in FY '24 is around $105 million. So that would leave you, assuming that we're getting from a baseline of $70 million, to around $105 million. Now that opportunity will be filled from exactly what you heard us talking about today, the 3 key growth levers, growth areas that we've talked about. That's from our strong base of customers that we have, new logo wins and growth in managed services. Those are the 3 pillars of growth that we see bridging that increase in revenue. Now I'm not -- we are not going to break down the components attached to all 3 of those. What I would say is our detailed modeling, we have that at a low level of granularity, but we're not -- I'm not sure you'd expect us to, I appreciate the questions, but we're not going to share that with the market today. So that's a bit of a long-winded answer, but I hope I've covered 6 or 7 of the questions that were in the queue there. Thank you. Back to you, [ Joanne ].

Thank you, James. Question regarding managed services now. In managed services, can you talk about the services provided? Are these targeted at Tier 2 customers? What is typical contract tenure? And what is the EBITDA margin profile over the life of the contract? That's from Shuo Yang.

Zeev, do you want to take that?

Yes. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Yes. So type of services is back-office operations. I mentioned in my presentation [indiscernible].

[ Joanne ], has Zeev frozen on my side?

I think we've lost Zeev. Can any of you take that question...

No, I'll take it. I can take it. Sure, I'll take it.

Yes, thank you.

So look, managed service is new for us. We've been doing it for one customer for quite some while. So we have the expertise and metrics that allow us to safely price this service moving forward and come with credibility. Managed services are generally long-term contracts. It depends. Some of them are tactical in discovery, that kind of is a beachhead to push this in. We expect the profit margins of managed services not to be a drag on overall profit of the business. It will also get better and better as India comes up and we have more automation. In general, we would like to serve, obviously, longer-term managed service contracts. This is going to be -- this is going to evolve. This is a new segment for us to sell and execute towards. As Zeev mentioned, we have 10 discovery programs in place with carriers. The customers that we have today are mid-tier customers. However, some of the discovery processes we're doing are with Tier 1 carriers, customers that we have. We think it's applicable to both, and we plan to sell it to both. So I hope I answered your question.

Thank you, Gary. The next question is from [ Tim McArthur ]. How many software engineers does Gentrack employ? Are all engineers based in New Zealand? Or have you offshored some functions?

[ Joanne ], I think I'll take this one, if that's okay. I hope everybody can hear me. So first of all, not everybody is in New Zealand. As we speak, I believe, we're close to 300 engineers that are split across operating theaters. And I believe that these numbers are, in fact, net of the airport business. And we're talking around 300 software engineers as we speak. And as I mentioned, we have some plans to significantly hire some additional resources in the second half of this year for software engineer.

Thank you, Loukas. The next question is from Shuo Yang again. Can we presume -- sorry, excuse me, can we assume product technology M&A does not form part of the strategy going forward?

That's correct. We're not going to roll that out. We're always looking at opportunities to scale this business faster, but it is not baked into the strategic numbers. We mentioned that our cash position is getting stronger. Our share price is improving, so this gives us more opportunity, but they are not baked into these numbers.

Thank you, Gary. The next question is from [ Zen Jen ]. Could you please include Net Promoter Score in your metrics by products or in aggregate?

That's an interesting question. I actually think the Net Promoter Score is more of a consumer services metric. We are looking at evolving this to a more intimate customer engagement score. We will probably not report that in our metrics. We think that the driver for this is revenue growth from our core customer base, but -- and the numbers that affect attrition or the lack of it. At this point, we don't have plans to include it in our metrics, but we'll consider that. Thank you.

Thank you, Gary. And a question now from [ Chris Steptoe ]. Will you be sending U.K., Australia staff to India to ensure product transfer, knowledge transfer?

I can take it, and Zeev, please feel free to jump in. We aren't sending anybody to India right now because of the unfortunate situation that struck India with the pandemic. But we are investing a lot and upskilling the India team on our technologies a lot. We're doing this in a virtual way, just like we're virtually delivering programs. We think this is acceptable. We would like to put some core people long term in India that are from our team to help with -- to crystallize that knowledge and have it spread. Same thing with Indian resources to proximity locations close to our customers. This is all part of the plan. We've done this before. We know how to upskill these teams. We've done it in multiple locations, and we feel very confident with the progress we've made so far. The pandemic is not making it simpler, as you can imagine, but we have this in hand.

Thank you, Gary. A question now from [ Peter Christie ]. What percentage of total Gentrack revenue is from Veovo?

[ Joanne ], why don't I take that one? Look, if you look at our last interims that we published 3 weeks ago, you can see that approximately 20% of our revenue comes from Veovo. Thanks for the question.

Thank you, James. A question now from Phil Campbell. Can you please -- can you explain the chart on Page 19 of the first pack, managed services, payments made due to breach of license conditions?

Yes, I would take it, [ Joanne ].

Okay, Zeev.

Yes. That -- our customers are paying for some breach of their KPIs to their customers, for example, not sending bills on time or wrong bills, and they have to pay penalty for that. So through our involvement, we are fixing the processes. We are fixing data, some things in the actual process. We can reduce this number significantly, as you could see in the chart.

Maybe just to be clear, this is an industry challenge. So the regulator often fines retailers if they violate some kind of customer credibility points, inaccurate bills, late bills, things like this. This is a standard industry challenge that we are in a good position to help with, and with our managed services, we can improve this significantly. As we talked about, every dollar to the bottom line is material for our customers. And this is one of the metrics we use to help our customers improve their bottom line performance. Zeev and co. have set out a number of KPIs that we can do success-based results against. This is one of them. He mentioned a few of the others on the call as well. Thanks, Phil.

Thanks for that, Gary. We've had a number of questions around competition. I'm going to bundle those together. And perhaps, Gary, you can address those together. There were previously announcements of Gentrack implementations at E.ON, npower and EDF, but it now seems that Kraken has the retail and you have the commercial, E.ON and npower. What is your position with these customers? And secondary to that, have you lost any customers to Kraken by Octopus or Kaluza by OVO? Do you have much revenue exposure to either Octopus or OVO today?

Right. So some of the revenue exposure that James mentioned and the $10 million number is the overall installation coming on to Kaluza as they move subscribers over. So we've seen that. We have not seen that from them in any other location. We had a small loss to Kraken, I think, in 2019 of a small retailer. In general, from a competitive perspective, there are different business models. It's our belief, and we're biased about it, that there's -- you're a retailer or you're a service provider, a vendor providing enterprise software to other suppliers, it's very, very, very rare to succeed at doing both. It actually changes the financial metrics of the company and its road map, conflicts and things. It doesn't mean that it can't happen, but we think that the operating model of an energy supplier to mechanize their specific processes and push that on to other energy suppliers will resonate to some customers, but the majority of them that won't because they have -- they want to do -- service riders generally, particularly in incumbents, want to do things their way. There's specific requirements and is better serviced by a traditional vendor. And this is -- we see this as a strength and a competitive weapon that we'll take into this fight. So I hope I answered the question.

Thank you, Gary. I'd like to draw things to a close now. I thank you all for your questions, and thank you for participating.

Thank you all.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. Stay safe. You may now disconnect.