Megaport Limited (MP1) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This morning, we have an Investor Presentation and an Operational Update for the Third Quarter. Michael Reid is going to take you through a slim-down version. You'll notice that we don't have unaudited financial statements nor do we have a 4C because that requirement is no longer around, but we will take you through how the business has been tracking for the last quarter. Over to you, Michael.

Thank you, Steve. And look, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Emily should be listening online, that's Steve's wife, and it's 24 years anniversary today. So, congratulations mate. And Emily, hopefully, you're not listening to this recording, but I'm sorry for taking him on this special day. So, let's start the investor presentation operational update, 3Q FY '24 highlights. Revenue, $49.5 million, up 30% year-on-year. That's an $11.4 million increase for the year. EBITDA up 92% year-on-year, tremendous turnaround in the business, $14 million, up $6.7 million. Net cash flow, $13.4 million, up $21.9 million year-on-year, a really tremendous turnaround in the business, and we'll go into a little bit more detail on the next slide. Cash at bank were up 50% year-on-year, an increase of $24.5 million, landing us at $73.1 million cash at bank. We've been talking about a continued strong cash flow turnaround in the business. And in the chart on the right, you can see how that turnaround has played out over the past few quarters. We're at $13.4 million of net cash flow. And what we've highlighted here is a $5.5 million of one-off net receipt for rev share. If you excluded that one-off $5.5 million, we'd be at $7.9 million of net cash flow. Our net cash position is $59.2 million, up $28.2 million. And as I mentioned before, cash at bank is $73.1 million, up $10 million quarter-on-quarter. The story of Megaport has been the profitable sustainable growth. We have a tremendous opportunity to scale this business globally and we're doing that in a profitable fashion. So as you can see, in 2Q FY '24, we had $15.1 million of EBITDA and the story has been the investment in reigniting the go-to-market engine. We took on a whole heap of sellers as we've referred to in the first half. Most of those folks landed towards the end of Q2. And so you can see the impact coming through in Q3, which is as expected at about $14 million of EBITDA. Annual recurring revenue, $199 million of ARR. This increased $7.7 million or 4% quarter-on-quarter. We had some FX tailwinds and excluding those FX tailwinds, we grew the business $4.4 million or 2% inside the quarter. Third quarter FY '24 revenue generating KPIs. We've talked a lot about the move to revenue-generating KPIs. These KPIs are continuing to be revenue generating. As you can see the breakdown, total services, customer logos, ports, VXCs and IXs, MCR and MVE. We didn't expect a turnaround in metrics based upon the investment in the go-to-market given that most of those folks came in at the end of Q2. So, what we have here is 3Q, and we're going to talk more broadly about the progress that we've had with the go-to-market team. Sort of getting back in the helicopter view. Stepping in the helicopter, Q1, we started with people, product and profitability. We hired world-class talent. We innovated from a product standpoint and we added a whole range of profitability inside the business. Q2 saw us execute the strategy. We re-built the go-to-market team. We added 3x quota-bearing sellers in North America. We rebuilt the digital marketing platform. We actually put a huge amount of effort into product innovation. I'm incredibly proud in the first half and even in the last quarter, the innovation inside the product team. We continue to strengthen the balance sheet. That was Q2. This session is around reporting on Q3, so the build in go-to-market momentum. Huge discussion around the restart of the marketing machine. I'm going to share on the next slide some of the progression that we've had here, very exciting. We're pouring fuel on the fire or gas on the fire in the U.S. to start that new sales team that we've had landed in seat towards the end of Q2. We've expanded the existing sales team. So, you heard me talk about 3x quota-bearing sellers in North America. So, the investment that we made to get what I would call up to table stakes in North America. We've continued the investment. What you'll see from us is we've got a tremendous opportunity to continue growing Megaport globally, and we need to continue to expand where it makes sense profitably and sustainably. And so you saw us actually open up new roles in countries around the world and I'll talk through that shortly. We will continue to invest in that sales expansion globally. The 400-gig backbone upgrade, we've referred to that in the previous quarter. And the actual progress of that 400-gig backbone is still underway. That gives us an opportunity to add tremendous speed, 10x the speed that our customers need, and we're going to go more broadly into the strategic nature of that. In Q4, which is where we've landed right now, this is refined and optimized. We've put in place the team. We've changed whole heap of technology to support that go-to-market machine. We've reinvested to start to turn on all the vectors for growth inside Megaport. And what we do now is we double down on the proven successes in sales and marketing. We continue with the geographic expansion. You heard us talk about Megaport Reach and the ability for us to access a whole range of new data centers globally and do that in a way that makes fiscal sense. And as I've said, we'll continue market expansion. We can open up TAM by landing in new markets. We can also open up TAM by increasing speed. And so that's something we'll talk about shortly. We will continue to see us forever innovate from a product standpoint and there's so much opportunity for us to lift up the stack from network as a service provider. And lastly, I'm going to take this and discuss the strategic investments for long-term growth. But firstly, let's take it to the marketing machine. And for those of you who follow us on LinkedIn, you would have seen towards the end of the year, we went to hire a team to go and rebuild the Megaport network, sorry, not network, rebuild the Megaport website, which you can see scrolling through here on the screen. It's beautiful. It's just been launched. It's incredibly fast. And so let me just give you a bit of an update on that. In 2016, I think over a weekend, using a blogging platform, the original Megaport website was built. And if you look at the scores on the top right, that was the before, 25 speed on mobile and 44 on desktop. It was suitable for the time, but certainly hadn't evolved with the times. And so we're leaping forward to be one of the fastest websites available on the market. And if you look after, you can see 95 score on mobile, 99 on desktop. So Henry, you've got a little bit of room for improvement there, which lift you up to 1. But why is this important? This is the front door to the business. This is the way our customers experience us when they first land on the page. And so not only do we need to ensure that it's fast and great user experience. But Google and all the SEO scoring checks that speed. So, it's super important for us to actually have a go-to-market perspective related to a digital side. Now the investment in the digital machine can turn on, we can pour gas on that fire and start pointing with advertising, et cetera, back to a beautiful website that's fast. In the back end, there's been a huge amount of work to rebuild the Marketo back ends and the sales force integrations to get this machine to a point where we can take a lead, respond to it incredibly quickly, whether that be a chatbot on the -- or actually not a bot, it's a human, a chat on the website all the way through to actually connecting with our frontline sellers or straight into the portal itself, so you can build product-led growth. Go-to-market progress to date. So, we've ticked off a few of these on the left. I'll bounce through them, but just to reset where we've gone from and where we are. So, the go-to-market progress in FY '24, 13 new quota-bearing salespeople in seat was what we said in July 27. We've actually gone beyond that. So, we're not only we've executed, we've continued to expand. And again, we're doing that in a profitable sense. And we're doing that where it makes sense for us to invest based upon the opportunity that we see. We reorganized territories and introduced new comp plans and it's performing really well. We've transformed the way in which Megaport engages with our customers. We've added customer success functions and pods to ensure that we're actually loving and protecting the customers that we've got and giving them an ability to expand with us. We've upgraded go-to-market operating models and tools, quite a significant upgrade there. And also we can see inside the conversations that our folks are having out there so we can ensure that we pivot the business immediately rather than waiting and looking in the rearview mirror. We've closed the largest deal ever, $1.4 million of ARR, which is a $4.2 million TCV deal in Q2, and we continue to see opportunities of a much larger nature, shall we say than what Megaport was traditionally used to, which is where we're pushing the business towards. Green shoots and go-to-market in 3Q FY '24. Let me note that it is early days. These folks landed in seat towards the end of Q2. They're in ramping phases, but early signs of ARR growth on access products is -- we've seen that. So basically, an improvement year-on-year from a growth perspective of what is our access at ports, MCR and MVE growth from the new frontline sellers. We've seen increased contribution from channel and I think that's worth highlighting with the way in which we've organized the team, it means that additional push for all of our frontline sellers also working closely with the channel partners that are in the regions that they support. And we've already seen that work out and I'll talk a bit more broadly around some of the events and so forth that we've been using to drive that. New hires contributing as expected. I would say that folks come in to the business. I'm incredibly pleased with the talent that we brought in. We have a very early insight to how they're performing based upon the fact that our folks can join in their calls. We can see how they're going. We can see how our customers are responding, so we get very early insights as opposed to waiting sort of 6 months in the future and realizing actually, we could have been helping coach and mentor these folks in a better way. We've pivoted towards solution selling and this is showing early signs of promise I'll talk a bit more broadly about that as we go into the next slide. Compensation driving the appropriate behavior. As you all know, with sales folks, if you set the right compensation, that is basically the run sheet as to how you should show up and what you should be going after. We've got that right and it's starting to perform in a great way. So, very happy with all of those pieces. Now, we have been going into a lot of detail over the past 3 quarters, 4 quarters around the go-to-market transformation. We're going to spend less and less time going into the detail on this transformation moving forward because we're getting to a point where I would say we're at table stakes. We really did have a massive transformation from where we were to where we are. And what we'll do is I'm going to start spending more time, which is on the next slide, lifting up and talking more about the strategic investments for long term and giving you insight. But let's continue on this journey from a go-to-market transformation in the next phase. So firstly, there's an ongoing focus to improve effectiveness of the go-to-market team. This is forever. We constantly look at what's working, what's not. We take signal from the successes that we're having. We take signal from where we're not being successful and we can adjust. That goes right back to product. It goes through every part of the business. And if you look at the lead generation to customer process, that is a big part around getting that website right, getting our -- all of the experience from when a customer first lands on our website, how quickly we can respond and when we can actually either get them straight into the portal or respond into that. So, there's a whole range of process that's gone on there, and we'll continue to invest in that space. We've seen additional refinements to sales messaging. As we pivot what we're offering to market, we see globally, how our customers are responding, what they love, what they want. We've seen AI explode as a great example and we're having to actually update our messaging around that. We're continuing to build out the go-to-market team with new roles and these new roles are expanding upon what I originally said back in Q1, and this is what I would say is par for the course, where it is standard for a growth business. We see opportunities in South America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. Specifically, we've opened roles in Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Brazil, Spain and ANZ, and some of those roles are already in seat. Some of them have hired and others are underway. Really happy to say that we've hired a new Head of Sales Enablement. She is a rock star. She's coming and her job is to help ensure that the team that are in the organization today stay up to date with all of the latest and greatest and any new folks coming into the business that will have constantly come into the business as we grow and expand, get up to speed as quickly as possible. We've reengaged with our customers and channel via Megaport World Tour. If you have been sitting under a rock, you may have missed it. But if anyone is on LinkedIn, you'll have seen that I think we're at 40-plus cities, maybe more and counting. Folks all around the world are getting back in touch physically with our customers and partners. Believe it or not, it was -- I think it's something that's been a little bit forgotten since COVID, but it really is important to actually drive that engagement in the field and actually start to fuel the fire that we have going on. And so that's been a huge initiative and I'm really proud of the folks that are going to execute against that. I'm sure they're looking forward to having some time with their families when it turns off. Sadly, it never turns off. The world just keeps going and the tour continues. So, I'm in Europe shortly, continuing that tour and looking forward to that. Now this point, first, AWS Direct Connect Network Service Offering on AWS Marketplace. It's a bit of a mouthful. What does that mean? Well, AWS has had this tremendous incredible marketplace for a long period of time. Most of that is SaaS providers that they offer an ability to procure through AWS and they pay their AWS sellers on that. And never before have they offered this to a network provider, a direct connect network provider. And so Megaport actually pioneered the development to land a Network-as-a-Service platform on the AWS marketplace. So that means we are the very first direct connect network service offering that you can as a customer procure through AWS Marketplace. Why is this interesting for us? One, it gives our customers a great choice. But two, it actually gives us access even deeper to the AWS sellers globally because it retires their quota what sits on the marketplace and that is incredible. And so the partnership deepens and they can start to drive Megaport engagements into their customers and they're compensated on that. We've reactivated the expansion of DC footprint and the broader ecosystem. This is an important message that I'm going to go into on the next slide. As we start to get in, I would say, we're deep at the moment in the go-to-market. Let's jump into helicopter, sort of rise up and look more broadly at the strategic investments that Megaport needs to be investing in for long-term growth. And we truly have a tremendous opportunity to scale this business in many different ways globally. So, if you look at this on the left, I've broken it into 2 areas; Scaling the Network, we'll talk through that; and then the Geographic and Ecosystem Expansion. Now this is above and beyond a whole heap of the go-to-market, the product, marketing, all those different factors. These are the strategic investments that we need to continue to make to go big. And if you look at the first one, it's scale the network to meet the demands of AI. What does that mean? What we're seeing is an explosion in AI and I'm sure you've all heard about it, but we're seeing data centers expand faster than ever before. We're seeing GPU as a service companies pop up everywhere. We're seeing NVIDIA being invested and you name it everywhere. And what does that mean? It means companies need to move huge amounts of data from one location, be that an existing cloud or an on-premise data center through to GPU farms where they actual process and build AI in effect. And so what does that mean for us? It's an amazing opportunity for Megaport to do the same thing that we've been doing for clouds, but for the next cloud is moving that data around. So what does that mean? We need to invest in that 400-gig backbone again, to provide 10x the speed that we're providing today, which is 100-gig across the wider network. You'll see us make investments ongoing there. We need to scale the network procurement economics to enable faster, more disruptive services and then drive bottom line growth. More to come on this in the future. But basically, we're looking at opportunities for us to scale that network procurement economics to ensure that we provide incredible opportunities for our customers and we can do that in a very profitable way. We're looking to expand the product set and this is all about innovation, but there's 2 parts of innovation. You can do the sort of big new product, a separate area or you can do what is, I would say, low touch incremental high revenue products. And a great example of that is increasing speed, increasing locations, increasing the products that we provide within the set that we have today. Global WAN is a really good example and there's more that we need to continue to add to that and you'll see coming out in Q4. We've seen a need or a tremendous need to move between cloud providers. And so what you're seeing and I think if you saw on Friday, you'll see that AWS announced 25-gig on-ramps in effect to customers. We've seen lots of other cloud providers lift the speed. Now what does that mean? It means people need to move faster between those clouds. We're seeing more clouds, not less. We're seeing customers take on more sophisticated and complicated networks, so to speak and so we get to speed that up. The geographic and ecosystem expansion continues. We talked about reach, but this is where we need to continue to land strategic data center expansion. You'll see us push hard on this in the future. You'll see us land in new countries and expand to more addressable markets. This opens up our TAM. You'll see us land more AI and GPU as a service on-ramps as we aggressively pursue this new space, which is really exciting. You'll see us land virtual edge partners. So, more and more partners gives customers more and more choice and an ability to offer more and more services to our customers. You'll see more cloud providers. And there are new cloud providers appearing. Niche cloud providers have made tremendous impact in certain areas of the business. And if you've joined one of our tech calls throughout the weeks, you'll see some of those new cloud providers that we're seeing tremendous success and we need more of those. We need more cloud on-ramps to go and connect to them in the locations that matter. And lastly, you saw us roll out our Internet Exchange locations globally. We will continue to roll out IX locations where it makes sense and we will continue to push IX peering. It's a bit like a shopping center. If you just had one shop in there, it's not that valuable. Once you have more and more shops and the shopping center becomes a great place. So, the more peers, so to speak, on those IXs, the more value it provides. So, that's a very much a helicopter view of the business from a strategic investments perspective. As we start to talk more broadly, we'll focus in the future more on this style of discussion rather than a very detailed go-to-market as we've landed at what I would call more of a table stakes. So last slide, outlook and guidance. FY '24 EBITDA, as you'll see on the ASX this morning, we upgraded $56 million to $58 million, narrowing the range, increasing the bottom and top from 51% to 57%. We remain -- FY '24 guidance is confirmed for revenue $190 million to $195 million. The CapEx guidance that we upgraded the previous quarter remains at $20 million to $22 million, subject to any strategic investments that we would make. The green shoots in the go-to-market team, we've talked about those previously. They are evident, albeit very early days with lots of opportunity to continue to grow. The strategic investment for long-term growth. This was something that had been paused for a number of years. That previous deck, the slide I just shared, we've turned that back on. And we've been doing that in an aggressive way throughout the last 9 months and you'll see us continue to invest moving forward. And that's the great news about being in a healthy financial position that we're in. We can continue to invest where it makes sense for growth. The next update will be at the full year results on the 22nd of August. But before we go to that, we're going to run through some questions. I've got Leticia on my right here, who's going to join us, our CFO; and Steve is going to take questions right now. So, let's hand it over to Steve Loxton, 24 years.

Thank you. We'll just run through the questions. If you want to add yourself to the list, please raise your hand, and I'll dial-in you in. The first question [Technical Difficulty].

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can.

Happy anniversary, Steve. Just I guess just the one question. In terms of, Michael, a bit confused about your comments about green shoots that are evident in the quarter because if you look at ARR growth, that's ARR growth, that slowed, customer adds is also soft. So, just wondering what exactly are you seeing in terms of green shoots? And it feels like this churn is impacting your underlying momentum? Is that what's dragging it down? So, if you could just talk to the green shoots that you're calling out, but we're not really seeing the numbers. What's the disconnect, I guess?

Yes. I think it's in the definition of what is green shoots. And so if your definition of green shoots is ARR, as we've been pointing out, you won't see -- we've shared for the past 3 quarters that we won't be seeing that turnaround in metrics inside Q3. And so therefore, what does a green shoot look like? Well, from -- and that's -- and it's broad. And that's why I've been very clear around the fact that this isn't a metric that we can update you on. This is actually us giving you insights into how the new team is performing, how it's playing out, et cetera. So that's what I shared, if you look back, just jump back to the -- those green shoots, as an example. And remember, when we land new business, the ARR is a little bit of a lag because of the new access products and then we have VXCs that come on. So, you still -- it's a lagging indicator. So, a lot of the KPIs are all lagging indicators for the success of a go-to-market turnaround, so to speak. And so what we're referring to are the green shoots that we see having hired the right folks inside the business. And so what we can see, which is not a lot of metric that we report because this is how folks are compensated internally. But when we compare ARR growth from your access products, specifically inside that quarter and we compare them to year-on-year, we've seen a dramatic increase inside that. We've also seen increased contribution from channels. So, when we measure actual what opportunities have come from the channel from a revenue perspective, we can see actually the channels that we're investing in actually lifting. But again, it's all, as I've been referring to, you will never have seen those. We've never expected to see those KPIs turnaround inside Q3. And we always refer to green shoots and KPIs towards the -- after the investment of the team that's come in. We've literally had folks in seat for 3 months as we've ramped people through the third quarter as we look back. So, the green shoots are specifically related to what we can see as opposed as to the KPIs, which I think we've been very clear with not expecting those KPIs deterrent.

So can I just clarify, is churn, so you're seeing new access products. So, it's churn a factor that's -- that you're seeing something -- some churn come through? Is that what's happening?

No. Churn is not an issue. No change in churn for the -- for a long period of time to be measured.

And just clarify, Michael, your previous guidance for green shoots was 4Q, you start seeing the ARR come through revenue in FY '25. Is that still the case?

We said that we would see -- and this is the example, green shoots. I think the challenge with giving more metrics out, the green shoots is to give you a perspective of what we're seeing. Green shoots, not giant trees that have been growing. And so giving you a perspective of what is the success of the turnaround of the folks. If you look at the discussion that I shared from a strategic investment, the business is not just a go-to-market function. We obviously need to continue to invest in all those vectors for growth as opposed to just miraculous turnaround, so to speak, from the go-to-market machine. So that's why we refer to green shoots rather than ARR or metrics, et cetera.

Just to clarify, Siraj, we did not ever say ARR improving in Q4 FY '24. What was referred to as KPIs with ARR being 6 to 8 quarters after the change. If we could ask Kane Hannan from Goldmans, go ahead with your question, please.

Maybe just again on the green shoots comments just to sort of avoidance of any doubt. So basically, you're saying, could we expect any improvement in the KPIs in the fourth quarter, customers, logos, I think you did 242 ports, 69 logos the June quarter last year. You've made that sales investment. So I mean, is it a reasonable to assume that would pick up in the fourth quarter?

I think what's -- and I've shared this a lot. The metrics in KPIs, we could, as I've referred to, you could double Megaport's revenue to not move any KPI other than the ARR. And what I mean by that is we've -- if you take customer account and it's -- we don't go to this level of granularity. But as an example, very, very low spend customers moving in and out of the platform versus a very, very high-spend customer moving in or moving out is more important than the overall number, so to speak, i.e., if you had one customer at $1 million of ARR move out, that's a big problem. But we had 10 new small customers at $2,000 move in. That would be -- would show 9 net new customers, but that's actually not a great outcome. And so what I mean by that is, as we pivot the business to much more high revenue-generating services, which is what we've been focusing on, you'll see -- you won't necessarily see the appropriate signal in the metrics that you've got. The same applies for VXCs and services, we could deliver you a cloud VXC for $200 a month. We could deliver you a long haul, which is our global WAN, and that could be up to $6,000 or $7,000 a month. Both of them count as a single service. Obviously, orders of magnitude differs from a revenue perspective. And so when you're thinking about the frontline sellers, what can you move, you're trying to move the larger revenue options. And so a lot of the noise in the machine of our 2,600 customers, et cetera, moving in and out, won't always give you the signal, so to speak. But without breaking down more and more metrics to give granularity on that, the metrics that we've been sharing for the last how many years we've continued, but it won't always give you the appropriate signal.

And then just the revenue guidance. I mean I think the top end of your range as you're doing $50-odd million in the fourth quarter, basically the same as the third quarter. So, like what do you guys need to see for revenue not to be at the top end of the revenue range or above? Is that just the FX impact?

It's definitely an FX impact, Kane.

And then just one quick one. Just that AWS Direct Connect Network Service. Just talk a little bit about how that agreement came about with AWS? Is that something Megaport wished for and sort of instigated? Or did they approach you guys around being on the Marketplace? Just keen to hear a bit more about that, please?

Yes. So, we're 11 years into a partnership with AWS. We, one of the largest connectors to AWS on the planet. And so we've been a strong partner in that space for a long period of time. We've been requesting to land on the AWS Marketplace for a period. They're also keen to have us land. But if you look at how the Marketplace was built, it was built on SaaS products and the premise was SaaS products that land in the AWS platform. So for example, my previous company, when we would sell more ThousandEyes, it would mean that the platform that ThousandEyes sat on which was an AWS would expand and grow. And so their viewpoint was to put SaaS platforms that help AWS grow. Now in our case, we're saying, well, we don't live inside your AWS platform. We actually do, but we -- the thing that helps you grow is the connections and they never put the connections inside that. And so this has been a big leap forward in terms of the integration from the teams. So, it's never been done before. So, the engineering teams work on both sides of the house, both AWS and Megaport to get us to a point where we could be the very first provider to land in that space. So, it's a big -- it's actually quite a big leap for them because it's a move away from traditional SaaS on their platform to actual network connectivity. It makes sense, but it's new for them. And so it's a great opportunity for us to offer our customers an ability to procure through AWS, which if you're familiar with the platform, that's a big deal for many customers. It's simple, they bill, et cetera, all those pieces. But the other piece for us is that it gives us an ability to talk to all the frontline sellers at AWS because they now get paid on the services that Megaport provides through the marketplace and against their quotas. So, it's a big deal.

Thanks, Kane. If you have further questions, please rejoin the queue at the end and we'll come back to you if we've got time at the end.

Guys, can you hear me?

We got you.

I'll just ask a couple and then get back in the queue. Michael, just -- I mean, if I think about the different drivers behind revenue growth, I guess you've got some different components to that, right. Some of them are probably headwinds at the moment. Some of them will be tailwinds. The headwinds coming from the maturization of the existing customer set. So, new customers added over the last 6 quarters has been softer and so you've got less of that maturity tailwind coming through to benefit the business. Offsetting that, hopefully, you should start seeing an acceleration in terms of new customers added and revenue there. Can you talk a little bit about those different moving parts? And then taking that into account, what should we be looking at the fourth quarter? Or what will you be looking at the fourth quarter in terms of the KPIs that are provided in terms of looking at that acceleration or trying to see the underlying improvement in the business?

Yes. It's a good question. So, there are really only 2 levers. There's expansion of existing customers and you've got net new logos. And that is the 2 drivers for revenue growth. The expansion of the existing customer base that separate those 2 comes back to how we love, protect and offer new services to our existing base. Our existing base is always going to be -- and every company once you get to a certain size, always going to outsize and dwarf what you can deliver from a new logo perspective in terms of impact. It's super critical to add new logos. So, you're constantly monitoring and Siraj asked the churn question before, you're constantly trying to monitor your churn situation and the expansion. And to your point, customers that sign up early with Megaport and you've seen that with the bubble charts over the years, expand faster. And that was one of the statements that I said with green shoots. What we're seeing is the sales team adding on newer growth in access, which is ports, MCRs and MVEs and what happens with that is they add more and more VXCs connectivity. It's true that the company had been on a pause phase for 3 years. So there is, I would say, the tide running out from that perspective and the fact that the company didn't have the appropriate investments to scale new data centers, new countries, speeds across all these different factors come into that. And so that, when you say, what am I looking at? I'm looking at all of these different factors to understand, all right, has churn unchanged, and we haven't seen a change in that. Is expansion somewhat of an opportunity for us to invest in? Absolutely. And that comes with, if you see that, the focus around adding higher speed connectivity to those existing customers and then bringing on customer success folks and frontline sellers to go and take that to market. So that's really, really important, but it takes time and these are lagging. And I think one thing that's important is that the investment now lags for revenue for a period of time. And so what's so important is that we are making these investments and we are clear on what the right investments are to grow for the future of Megaport. And you'll see us continue to do that. The separate piece is new logos. And I talked about that logo movement. We want high revenue-generating logos more so than we want lower revenue-generating logos. We'd love them all. However, it's obviously the focus from a frontline seller, it's far more important that the frontline sellers are not spending time on a $2,000 a month opportunity versus a $50,000 a month if that makes sense. So, it's about focusing the team at the highest revenue-generating piece. And again, that then it's harder to move the metrics that are specific to what Megaport has been reporting for a long period of time. So, there's 2 elements to that equation. But the most -- I think most important piece is the existing base and what you're going to expand on and the opportunity there. And we need a huge amount of focus to continue to ensure that we do that, which is why I go back to that strategic investments on that previous slide to say that this is what's important for Megaport and as I said, it's lagging. So, we haven't had the benefit of the investment for the past 3 years. And so we aren't seeing that benefit play out, which is why we need to invest now, but it is a longer-term play to actually see that play out in revenue. Long-winded answer, but you asked a pretty deep question.

No, that makes sense. And then just the other one is a bit of an easier one. In terms of the 13 quota-bearing sales added, just can you remind us where is that coming from? And where was that in its previous peak?

So, if you look at specifically for North America, we had 4 frontline sellers. We had 1 primary customer success person. We were up to -- I think it's 14 frontline sellers in North America, 8 customer success folks and I think it's 7 or 8 solutions architects to support that team. I specifically referred to North America because it really -- it was just totally off. I'd say we're up to what I call table stakes there. I think there's more opportunity. But as I said on previous calls, it's like crawl, walk, run, do this in a profitable and sustainable fashion versus like a growth at all cost mentality and just throw headcount at it. So, we're hiring the right folks, ensuring they're up to speed and successful. And we're doing that globally, which is why I've referred to the fact that we've opened up Italy, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, U.K.. So, there are plenty of other options for us to continue to grow there. Spain, yes. And from here on in, you'll see us get this to what I'd call as table stakes and then we start to just improve and build upon, which is why it's all about optimizing and understanding what was successful and doubling down where it is successful. And you've got to actually -- I mean, when you go and turn every knob like we have done, Megaport has been through a pretty wild ride. A year ago, we're in a very, very different financial position to where we are today. So, everything went from everything being off to everything now turned on. Well, when you turn every lever on, you're going to be very careful around ensuring you understand what of those levers is making the most impact and what are you going to put more wood behind the arrow with and more investment, which is why you'll see us constantly measure that.

Thanks, Tim. We have a question from Ware from BofA. And the question is, can you talk a bit more about the progress you've made moving to contracted VXCs? Is this process still ongoing? And how customers reacted? And are you getting customers take up longer terms in return for discounts?

Yes. Yes is the answer. In fact, I had a report just run last week to see what is the impact that's been made from the changes. Basically, so just for context for those not familiar, Megaport has only ever delivered a month-to-month service for our connectivity. You could contract a port, an MCR, an MVE and access product, but never a VXC, which is the connectivity piece. That was obviously something I personally was passionate about changing. And I think that, that was a philosophical discussion here at Megaport in terms of how we were built. We rolled that out. I think it was in, I want to say, January. And already, we've seen a huge number of VXCs that are getting reordered or provisioned, moved to contracted. And obviously, in exchange for higher discounts. No different to your -- I'll give an example of Disney+. If you go and sign up for a year versus month to month, you obviously receive a discount. So, for customers who are actually very happy to pay for longer-term contracts with us anyway, they now have an option to do that. It was such an important move for us because it also gave us the opportunity to then sign up and sell global WAN services, which we've been -- which we talked about, but it also goes into a lot of other products that we're now starting to bring to the market. And it gives us a way to be far more competitive because we can ensure that a customer is going to hang around versus just a peer for a month and disappear. So, it's a much more strategic bet for the company. It helps us win better deals, but it also gives us some consistency in terms of long-term contracts from customers instead of just churning off, so to speak.

Okay. Thank you. Next call from Annie at Barrenjoey, please go ahead with your question.

Sorry, it's actually Eric. Annie, does do all the work. But anyway, 2 quick questions. Michael, I just noticed your ARR per service and ARR per port momentum was a bit better this quarter. And that's obviously you guys are incentivizing your sales force to sell longer and bigger services rather than just pure net adds. I'm just thinking, though, if going forward, you're going to be selling more global connectivity and larger and more complex deals, should we be focusing on those ARR per service numbers in that next quarter rather than the net adds? And what sort of visibility have you got? Sorry, long-winded question one.

That's correct. Yes. Good.

Question 2 is you've sort of touched on what you've done to sort of term out or add incentives for taking 6 to 12-month contracts. I'm just wondering, is there any sort of timing difference here because you sort of answered Siraj's question, no real change in churn yet, but if at the current time that those sort of term contracts may make it less easy for someone to sign up? Is that impacting your gross adds, but you haven't really seen the churn benefit yet. Dumb question.

No, fair question. We offer choice. And so you still have -- what's important is if you jump on our port, you can absolutely still procure month-to-month. But if someone is procuring a month-to-month service as a very good example is just literally moving for a period of time from 2 to 3 months, you would take the month-to-month at an increased cost. But if you're going to take a service for a longer period of time, you would take the 12 months. So, it's not that it's -- it doesn't prohibit, we still offer the flexibility that Megaport has been known for, but we just incentivize longer contracts. So that doesn't -- shouldn't change there. On the ARR per service, you're right. And so as we push -- as I've referred to, again, back to the metrics, it's like a focus of the business just to go and provide higher revenue services to our customers. We're not getting away from the fact that we've built this tremendous base of cloud connectivity. But as we go up the stack or across or down the stack, which a way you want to refer to it, we can offer more revenue services more sophisticated or even just much fatter pipes. It could be as simple as that, which is why that 400-gig backbone upgrade is really important. And what you'll start to see, to your point, is more ARR per service, which is why the metric, so to speak, could be giving the incorrect signal, i.e., you could actually, to your point, you saw us increase ARR per services. That's a very good pickup. And that's what I would see longer term for the business as we ensure that the frontline sellers are selling higher revenue. The value proposition of the product continues at that $200 cloud connectivity, but also adds all the data center interconnects and all the different connections that we have long term, the global WAN services that we're bringing out and a whole range of others. If you look at some of the sophistication that you can build with MVE, you can build incredibly sophisticated global Network as-a-Service offerings with firewalls and tunnels coming from every different location and then splitting up into multiple cloud. All of those deals are really large long-term contracts and that that's what's really meaty for Megaport. So yes is the answer to your first question. And I think I covered your second question.

Paul Mason from E&P. Please go ahead with your question.

And just a quick one for me. Some of the detail we've heard from you in the last couple of quarters has involved like a whole bunch of like system rebuilds and things like that. I was just wondering, like in terms of like things like restoring your CRM to full operations and stuff like that. Like have you leased through all that now? Are they still sort of like things like that beyond just hiring people that you guys need to rebuild in order for everything to be at highest performance?

Yes. We -- I'd say it's an ongoing story forever. However, we've had -- if you look at the biggest challenge that we had -- well, not the biggest, the sales force platform had been sort of left for a period of time. And it was -- I think it was, it needed a lot of work, let's put it that way. We actually had to hire a number of folks to actually get this thing back up to speed. We've got a great leader in that space, but was literally burning out. We've added a bunch of different platforms that give us tremendous visibility in the frontline sales piece, which I think I've shared at some of the other calls. That investment is probably the single greatest investment we've made in terms of visibility across the business. We can see not only from sales, but we see all of our customer engagements from a customer service perspective. Even our accounts receivable, account payable people can go and look through that. Our product teams can go and see what's going on at the edge. So that's probably the biggest leap forward. The Marketo back end, which needed a massive overhaul, which is what I announced the digital team. So, the marketing machine needed probably the biggest amount of work. That is -- I'm very proud to say based on some of the folks, but Henry leading that chip that is relatively sold. I say relatively because there's more integration to be done. But the back end that was broken is totally fixed as of I think it was January or February, which means we can move forward. Now, the website becomes key to that. All these sort of building blocks become key to what we need to deliver is a, what I would say, a very traditional business of our size, which just was not there.

And just one more for me. Just on the MVE sales and sort of bigger strategic sales, I mean some of your partners like Cisco or Fortinet or Palo Alto, they've all had like pretty rough revenue periods in the last couple of quarters. It looks like a full-blown recession in firewalls is [ foot ] at the moment and things like that. Like has that had any impact on your ability to get things sort of restarted? Or do you still think like you can just like sort of look through that environment in terms of like getting the sales organization re-fired up?

Well, for us, we're not reliant upon -- like the bigger vendors who really need to, if you take Palo and so forth, they're selling big firewalls, big, big refresh firewalls. We don't need them to sell a big firewall or refresh for someone to add MVE. We just need someone to be thinking about their network. And so if they're already a firewall customer with Palo or Forti or Cisco, we have an ability to just go and add those services in there. So, we've got lots of examples right. Now we are customers for the last sort of 3 years, have been rolling out SD-WAN with say Cisco and then now adding MVE to that platform. So my point is if they were successful in the past and I have that in the platform today as a customer, it's something that they can add to Megaport. We don't need Palo Alto to go and have a really big sales quarter for them to add on to Megaport. In fact, usually, it's lagging any way. And the reason I say that is because they typically roll out their SD-WAN and then they start to spin up their SD-WAN on our platforms globally. They test it out typically and then they go and put in like a 3- or 4-year contract. And so I wouldn't draw any linkage to their quarters being tough to us because I don't think they're linked personally. Yes, I think that's -- and I think you asked, is that causing us issues. I don't believe so. I'm not seeing that. But what you will see from us is more and more choice offered to customers in MVE. What we're seeing is a lot of customers asking for other vendors to land in that space or other versions of products that we're aggressively investing in bringing them on to the platform, which is what I referred to in that strategic piece. So, you'll see announcements shortly on that.

Nick Harris from Morgans. Please go ahead with your question.

Steve, congratulations on 24 years. Great outcome. Congratulations to Emily too. Hopefully, a pretty simple question from me. Maybe Leticia, just your guidance, obviously, for Q4, if you kind of unpack it, expenses are lifting a little bit more in this quarter than they did in the last couple of quarters. Just that lift, is that mostly around wages on the new sales people that you've hired plus hiring a few more? Or are we also seeing you lift your digital marketing spend to build pipeline now that you've got Marketo and your website mostly humming? Is it a broader sort of spend?

Nick, it's the staff cost, it's also the marketing and digital, so not just digital and marketing events as well. And then you've got professional fees as well as the travel and entertainment factor as well.

Thanks, Nick, very much. Andrew Gillies, if you could ask your question, Andrew from Macquarie.

Guys, can you hear me?

Yes.

Perfect. So, just a quick one for me. On say, DC Fiber Connect, it's relatively easy to see that the bandwidth opportunity is a lot higher. I was just wondering what the cost of upgrading sort of the network to 400-gigabits per second in the U.S. was, if you're happy to disclose it, just to help us understand? Obviously, it's a much larger opportunity, but what does the bandwidth upgrade cost to you guys?

I don't think we'll give specifics on it because we haven't broken it out. But what I will say is that if you're building a company from scratch, it's very difficult to build out these high network -- high-speed networks. Because Megaport has been here for the past 11 years, we have a huge number of connections that are currently running across different links all the way -- if you take the U.S. as an example, it's like a spider web of connections. And so actually, when you upgrade links, you actually turn off small links as well. So, you actually have an ability to take the existing connections and revenue that you're receiving and you can actually associate them towards the higher speed. And I wouldn't say it's a huge cost in comparison to the opportunity that we have currently from a revenue perspective and connectivity and also what it brings for us. We could go pretty hard in that space, in my view, and offer tremendous value back to the customers. And I talked inside that if we go to that strategic investments for long-term growth, rolling out 400-gig backbones more broadly is really key. It does not take long to actually get a payback from a 400-gig backbone when you start to have customers buying 100-gig connections, very rapid if you think about it. In fact, it's pretty simple. If you had one 400-gig backbone and you had 4 connections across it, it doesn't take much, 4 connections to deliver that versus before where you've got lots of 1-gig connections, it's a different story.

And then just the last one on the Wasabi partnership, if I could. I know it kind of hasn't been discussed on this result, but it's part of AWS Direct Connect. Can you just help me understand the economics of that deal and kind of what it means for the business from a strategic perspective?

Sorry, you were linking with Wasabi to AWS. Was that a…

Isn't it available through AWS and separately as well?

I'm not across the available -- so Wasabi is a separate cloud provider to AWS. They're actually a competitor to AWS and they provide cloud storage. And so they typically compete with S3, which is the AWS cloud storage platform. They provide some pretty impressive cost savings, so to speak, that will be their value proposition. We see Wasabi as an incredible niche cloud provider. We've on-ramped it to them in many locations. I think we've got something like 60 customers inside that space. So, the linkage between AWS and Wasabi is probably not relevant. I think the separate piece is we want to focus on adding choice for our customers so that when our customers choose to move from one cloud to another for specific services, in this case, that's an example of purely storage, they have an opportunity to spin up via our cloud router and ability to go from AWS or Azure or GCP or wherever it may be across into Wasabi as a storage platform and then they can still move data back and forward. So, the AWS partnership is about the AWS Direct Connect, which is our direct connect specifically to AWS being on the -- being able to be priced and procured through AWS.

Yes, sure. I was more referring to the fact that it's available through the AWS platform is my understanding, but that's okay. Can you share any details on the economics at all? Do you have any economic share? Or is it just strategic?

Economics for Wasabi?

Yes. So, say is it just a VXC that customers will be connecting to Wasabi, is it a port, how do we think about that?

Yes. So, if you look at it, no different to the other cloud providers. We have on-ramps in effect. So basically, high-speed ports plugged into a Wasabi in locations that by the way, we have this for lots of different cloud providers. And you'll see us have more and more GPU as a service providers as well pop-up and they're already popping up in the portal. So basically, we will -- our goal is to ensure we offer choice to customers to ensure they want to get to wherever they need to get to from a cloud perspective. And cloud is now pushing into AI, et cetera. Wasabi is the same. And so what it looks like is an on-ramp in the portal. So, if you actually go into our portal and you drop down and say, add a cloud, you'll see Wasabi come up, you click add Wasabi, you can click a speed and then you basically use the service key in that particular instance to provision the two and it connects. And so on your side, if you were in the cloud only, like in cloud native, it would be a Megaport cloud router that gets you from say, AWS to Wasabi, if you're on-premise in a data center, you would need a physical port and so you could have multiple sort of scenarios play out depending on how you wanted to connect to them. And so what's -- your point was like what is the pace? Well, if you're moving huge amounts of data and this is where the AI story comes into play, but also with Wasabi, you need big fat pipes to connect between them. And so basically, a very large VXC is what you'll end up having connecting between them, which is again, going back to why it's important for us to upgrade the network as well as our cloud operating capability, et cetera.

We probably have time for one more question. Roger Samuel, if you wouldn't mind going ahead with your question, please.

My question is around your strategic investment. Can you quantify how much you are spending on that strategic investment? And I just want to clarify if any investment that you're making this year, is that included in your EBITDA guidance for FY '24?

So, there are multiple vectors, and that's why sort of -- it's not like do one thing and you've sold Megaport. It's like every part of the business, we need a great go-to-market. We need humans inside the business. We need a world-class product. We need the automation back and all the rest of it. But when it comes to long-term investments, which is what I shared here, there are a number of different areas there. So, if you look at each one of them, they're all different. So, if you look at the 400-gig backbone, that's actually rolling out 400-gig connectivity globally. And we've already talked about that for North America, which is included in where we are, I'm looking at Leticia budget side. The scale and network procurement economics to enable fast more disruptive services is stuff that we're exploring right now and looking forward to the future. The expanding product set is just constant innovation. The faster cloud connectivity becomes like infrastructure that we roll out to the sites that matter. So, each one is different. All the different data centers we're rolling out, we've talked about the strategic data center expansion, you'll see that ramp up in Q4 and beyond. A lot of that investment is infrastructure that we have available, we will eventually run out and we'll need to procure. But again, I don't think it's material expenditure that needs to be in the business. I'll let Leticia to sort of cover off that side.

So, we have been working through our stock -- inventory stock and reordering as required to, particularly around that -- the focus on the 400-gig backbone upgrade. That's included within our CapEx guidance for this financial year.

But in terms of the EBITDA guidance, is there any strategic investments included?

Not at this stage outside of what we've outlined here. It's the incremental spend around the investment in the go-to-market machine, which is more than just staff costs, it's the associated costs with that as well as the marketing and digital and making sure that we're investing in the right areas for that.

The caveat that we record for the CapEx expenditure for excluding strategic investments does not necessarily relate to this specific slide, i.e., we could choose to do a very large strategic investment that isn't currently in play. In this instance, this is strategic investments that we need to continue to do for long-term growth. And in most of these cases, if not all of them, we are all guns blazing. And so that is the move from sort of where that was paused for 3 years to where we are today is all of those levers have been pulled and initiated, so to speak.

Okay. Thank you very much, everybody. I think we've hit the top of the hour. If you have any further questions, I'm happy for you to call through and I'll take those. And if I can't answer them, I'll flip them on to Leticia or to somebody else. Here -- this is the end of the quarterly update. We'll next hear from you on the 22nd of August for the full-year results. Thanks very much for attending.

Thanks, all. Appreciate your time. Cheers.