Pureprofile Ltd (PPL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Pureprofile's quarterly business update for the 3 months ended 30 September 2026. My name is George Kopsiaftis, and I'll be your moderator today. With us, we have Chief Executive Officer, Martin Fliz; and Chief Financial Officer, Melinda Sheppard. Good morning to you both.

Good morning, George.

Good morning, George.

Okay. The format for today is for Martin and Melinda to spend around 30 minutes discussing the results. This will be followed by a question-and-answer session. This briefing will be recorded and will be available on Pureprofile's website. And with that, I'd like to hand it over to Martin and Mel to get us started.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, George, and thank you very much for everybody who has joined this morning to run through our Q1 investor presentation. So the first slide, I will actually hand over to Mel.

Thank you very much, Martin, and good morning, everyone. So as you can see on this slide, we've made an incredibly strong start to FY '27, delivering another consecutive quarter of record revenue and record EBITDA. Revenue was $18.3 million, which was up 14% compared to the same quarter last year, and it was 19% growth in constant currency. EBITDA increased 27%, up to $2.4 million. And that difference in growth rates is an important feature of the result and something that we're really proud of. But I'll come back to the increased operating leverage that we have in the financial section. Really pleasingly, our ANZ business had an incredibly strong quarter with growth up 21% to $9.6 million, and that was across a really broad base of clients. The rest of the world revenue increased 7% to $8.7 million with growth of 16% in constant currency. So the foreign currency exchange masks some of the underlying rest of the world performance. Our platform revenue more than doubled to $8.8 million for the quarter, and it now represents 48% of the group revenue, which is really an amazing milestone for us. And also very excitedly, we have now hit another client milestone working with 1,035 clients globally, which we're really proud of. Our rolling 12-month annuity revenue reached $16.9 million compared with $16.7 million at June. And that's now representing about 1/4 of the group revenue on a rolling 12-month period and provides a good ongoing revenue base for us. And finally, as we announced a little while ago, we extended our $2.5 million CBA facility to November 2029 on improved terms, which we are really pleased with as well, considering the current environment at the moment. And that's it for me. I'll go through some of the financial results in more detail after I hand back to Martin.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Mel. So for those of you who don't know just what we do at a glance, so we connect real people with businesses answering their crucial questions. So the circular one here is businesses come to us. And now as Mel said, we've gone over 1,000 clients line across the world, which is great news. So brands, businesses, governments come to us with questions that they want to ask about their industry, their business, their consumers or competitive consumers. We then engage with our audience that could be through surveys, could be just with data that we gather on people through that, gather the answers, gather the information and then deliver that back in a various format. So that might be through SaaS front-end products. It might be through direct computer API access or now we've started to develop something called MCP access, which means directly through the LLM. So if you use Claud or OpenAI or Perplexity, you actually very soon will be able to access Pureprofile data directly through those platforms. And that goes back to the brands, governments, et cetera, and answers those questions. So it's a very simple process that we run, but it's all underpinned with real people. How do people work with Pureprofile? Well as I said, we have clients. They either come to us through our Datarubico tools. So that's a self-service tool. And they might come to us through managed service. We've got over 150 people sitting in India and the Philippines where somebody comes with perhaps a survey or a request and we do some manual work to that or it's direct with computers or very soon directly through the LLMs. So clients now have a myriad of ways that they can access the Pureprofile data, and that's also enabling us to scale into our clients. Global footprint today. So over the period, we did delivered insights in over 111 countries. through our audiences around the world. We physically now have 14 locations globally. So we've developed and established a true global distribution network now, as Mel talked about, 1,035 clients. So really excited to tip over that 1,000 line. And we have 271 staff globally. And that, if you remember, we talked about that in our quarter 4 update. So that was even though we added CRNRSTONE, I think it's 15 or so people, we were able to do a restructure in the business with AI efficiencies. So that number has come down not only relatively, but actually in real terms as well as we've become more efficient, and you've seen that follow through with the EBITDA margin expansion. $18.3 million of revenue. So that's on a direct level rather than on a constant currency level. So very excited about that. Another record quarter for Pureprofile as we've seen really in every quarter for the last 6 years and quarter now. Platform revenue, that growth of platform revenue, EBITDA margin expansion and also scale, we can work with more clients in more markets now. So really excited to see that tip over 40% of our revenue. And then annuity revenue so that we can start to or able to predict where Pureprofile is nearly $17 million. So people who have followed us for over 6 years now be very familiar with this slide as they would all of the slides, and it's really great to see this evolve as it has done. I am now going to hand back to Mel, who is going to go through the finances in some detail.

Wonderful. Thanks, Martin. So just a reminder, everyone that all the numbers in the release today are preliminary and unaudited and EBITDA and EBITDA margin exclude significant items, which include share-based payments. So I think the headline from this slide is that our EBITDA grew faster than revenue, which is something that we're really proud of. We've been working really hard to get operating leverage in our business model. So against revenue growth of 14%, EBITDA increased 27% and really importantly, our EBITDA margin improved by 1 percentage point to 13%. Now what's really great about these results is that our overall operating expenses only grew 10% during the quarter. And importantly, our employee expenses only increased 5%. So if you've been following us for the last 7 years, you'll know that our employee expenses for a good period of those 7 years was growing in line with the revenue growth. And this is really where you're starting to see that operating leverage in our model as we see a lot more of our revenue going through our platform, meaning that it's a lot more automated, and we don't require the same level of resources to actually grow the revenue to the same extent that we might have previously. We did have a small FX loss of $79,000, which is a little bit lower than what you've seen in other prior periods. So looking at the regions, as I said at the very start, ANZ grew 21%, which has been like the strongest quarterly growth that we've had for, I'm going to say, a very long time in that business. The CAGR over the last 6 years has been 17%. So you can see it's sort of like an outlier of a quarter, which is fantastic. Now we do -- 5% of that growth is related to the acquisition we did at the very end of FY '26, the CRNRSTONE business, which is now being rebranded to Pureprofile Qual, that accounted for about 5% of that revenue growth. But when we delve down into the detail of why that region is growing so strongly, we can see that our volume of projects has increased. And importantly, the higher average revenue per project has grown substantially as well. So we've seen growth from a broad client base. So it's not just the top clients growing. We've had a lot of new clients come on board. We're seeing more complex projects and work come to Pureprofile because the quality of what we do is really high. So we are seeing an increased share of wallet across the portfolio, which is really fantastic. When we look at the rest of the world, the growth pattern is slightly different. The pace of project growth has moderated somewhat during this quarter. Average project revenue was pretty much the same as what it had been in prior years. Typically, our rest of the world clients do multi-country studies, so they are more -- quite more complex research anyway, which is kind of what we're starting to see a little bit more of in Australia. So the reported revenue increased 7% with constant currency growth of 16%. The currency movements brought the Rest of the World revenue down by about $700,000 in the quarter, and that's principally because of that business builds a lot of revenue in U.S. dollars and pounds. Okay. So if we go on to the next slide, please, Mark. So this slide puts the quarter into context of our longer-term growth. So on the left, you can obviously see this beautiful progression from $5.4 million revenue in FY '21 right up to $18.3 million this year. And that represents compound annual growth of approximately 22% over 6 years. It's kind of been sitting more at the 20% for us in prior years. So you can really see the growth is really starting to come up a little bit. Now the chart on the right, which most of you would be pretty familiar with, shows how the geographic mix has shifted over that period, where rest of the world revenue accounted for about 30% back in '21, and it's compared to 48%. Now if we looked at this in constant currency, the rest of the world would have slightly higher growth. So that's obviously moderated the split a little bit over the quarter. And look, I think we're going to see that this mix will shift around a little bit depending on FX rates. I mean we haven't seen the level of volatility in FX rates, certainly in prior years as we've seen over the last 12 months. But I suppose the broader trend that we're saying here is that we've built a much larger rest of the world business alongside continuing to grow our ANZ business. So this gives us a really good broad revenue base and a stronger presence in the markets where we're focused on growing market share, being the U.K. and the U.S. And a key part of our strategy is really to start investing more in the U.S. now to bolster that rest of the world revenue growth even further. So let's go on to the next slide. So these 10 charts are very familiar with what you'll see every quarter in all the reporting periods. So I'm not going to go into too much detail other than, as I said, ANZ revenue itself has had 16 -- 17% constant growth over the last 6 years. Rest of the world has been 32%. Platform revenue up 83% CAGR for the last 6 years, and EBITDA is up 20%. So you can see that we're starting to see that bigger jump in the EBITDA growth that we've kind of -- we've been growing that bottom line for consistently, and now you're starting to see that operating leverage. So that's fantastic. Just want to go on to the next slide. So as we do around this time of the year, every year, we publish our financial guidance for the year. So what we're -- and at the start of the financial year in or around September, October, we put out the guidance. And then what we'll do is we'll come back to you each quarter, depending on how the business is going and either tighten that range and provide an update as we will each quarter as we move along. So we are putting financial guidance out of $72 million to $75 million now on the $65 million we did in FY '26, this represents about 11% to 15% growth. We did -- in FY '26, we did 14% growth during that year. And then the EBITDA margin range is 11% to 12%, and we did 10% growth in the prior year. So the key focus to allow us to continue to hit those numbers is we're obviously going to continue growing outside of Australia. Obviously, we're having a very strong run in ANZ, and we are expecting that to continue. But we are really heavily focused on shifting more into the U.S. business. In our last update, Martin and I talked about how we have a new startup, our first boots on the ground in the U.S. that joined in June. She's had a very strong first quarter, and we will be looking to building out that team further this financial year. We're going to continue to focus on our margin expansion and growing our revenue faster than our underlying cost base. That's really important to us and continuing to use AI and automation to increase productivity across the board. Now the final thing is just -- obviously, it's an interesting climate that we're in at the moment. There's a lot of shifting economies at the moment and interesting macroeconomic conditions. So this is what we believe today, obviously, so we're assuming that our trajectory stays on track from where it is. But overall, we've had a really strong start to the financial year with the record revenue and EBITDA and the growth that you've seen across particularly the ANZ business and a lot of our revenue coming via the platform. So our focus now is really to carry on that progress through the year and continue to improve margins. So I'll hand back to Martin so he can talk through the corporate growth strategy.

Thank you very much, Mel. Again, we've kept it really simple. This is the same strategy that we had 6 years ago, and it works for us, which is, number one, be a global business. We've gone from 5 countries to now 14 countries around the world, a true 24/7 operations team. And again, as I said, offshore and onshore combination of both. And that's really important to us. As Mel alluded to then, it gives us different levers and the U.K. and the U.S. where we have really, really low market share by investing in those markets and which are much bigger than the Australian market, gives us the opportunity to counter any economic headwinds that might be around the world. And actually, I was in the U.K. 2 weeks ago, and I was in the U.S. last week. And actually, for our industry, it's very positive in both markets. So it's important that now we're able to leverage our global presence. Technology and AI, we added AI about 2 years ago into this slide. And technology, as Mel pointed out, we really didn't have any platform revenue 6 years ago. And today, we have over 40% platform revenue. It gives us high margins. It gives us the ability to scale quickly and options for clients to work with Pureprofile. It gives us the ability to launch more products into the marketplace. And then finally, focus absolutely on being a data and insights company. And certainly, data is absolutely so important in this AI world today because AI is empty without having data. So we're in the right place at the right time. Our moat, it's really important to understand what the moat is for Pureprofile. The first and most powerful moat for Pureprofile is we've built up and we have audiences around the world, 20 million-plus panel members in over 42 countries today. We collect that data with consent and with transparency, and we're experts in managing audiences, building audiences and maintaining audiences. And that's so important because, again, it's having that data and being a data company is what's key in our industry today. Yes, technology is important. But again, with AI, you can do a lot of boding quite quickly. But where we look at technology is how we're delivering our insights. So that's over 48% now, as we said, of our total revenue from platform solutions. It is a level and it is a base to grow from and clearly important and moat to Pureprofile. Global coverage, over 111 countries, we delivered insights from. And we have scale, so improving around feasibility utilization, cost efficiency across the business. We're a 22-year-old business. We're not a start-up, but we're growing at start-up levels. And then the other part of the moat is having a trusted relationship with clients, and that's over 1,035 clients, 94% revenue from repeat clients. And we're in the top 50 quality base suppliers around the world. That was an industry survey that was done by a company called Verisoul. So we have a really strong moat in the company to allow us to kick on in this AI world that we live in today. Why do we bang on so much about the U.S. because it's a global opportunity. So the U.S. in our $153 billion market, the U.S. is 54% of the industry. It's about 40x larger than the Australian market and the U.K. is 11x larger than the Australian market sitting within 24% of Europe. And in Australia, we're #1 against all these global players, and that's where we're winning our market share from. We do a better job. That's the bottom line. Higher quality audiences, higher-quality data better delivery and better relationships with clients and consistency, consistency of growth and consistency of people and talent across the organization is why we're winning handover fist against the competitors. And then when we look at AI, we've got a number of internal solutions that gives us efficiency means we don't have to add people at the level that we're growing revenue. We've got some client-facing solutions enables us to have scale. And then we have some new clients in the AI space and again, allows us to have scale and growth in clients. Our growth journey '21 to '24 was about restructuring the business, both externally from a financial standpoint and internally from a people standpoint, '25 to '27 was about rolling out better systems, better back office and better tools for clients, better tools that we could use. So we fully reengineered our whole core technology, and we started to see that efficiency, that EBITDA margin growth come through whilst we always grew at the top line. And in that whole period and looking forward, we've never done a raise within the growth. The growth has all been within cash, and we made 2 acquisitions within that period as well, iLink Australian panel company and then CRNRSTONE, our first foray into Qual business, and we'll see that roll out globally now. And then 28% to 30% as we look forward, it's a real focus now on growing that U.S. business through organic growth and then acquisitions out of cash of the business, deepening our client relationships. You've seen that growth because that's not just more clients, but that's also share of wallet within existing clients, scale that platform and reoccurring revenue through our automated solutions gives us that bottom line growth, increase our proprietary panels, audiences, human data around the world. It gives us, again, an absolutely, as we talked about, moat and strength with clients and also increases our margins. We'll look to roll out that Qual capability, qualitative capability globally. So we've had CRNRSTONE now for 6 months, restructured CRNRSTONE fully integrated, rebranded to Pureprofile Qual, and we're now at the stage where we start thinking about that rolling out globally. Higher margins continue through AI, through automation, through working with clients in a more efficient way. And at the top end of the guidance, that's 20% EBITDA margin expansion against 15% revenue growth. So you can see that expansion coming through and then establish us as a data source of training for the AI engines and models. So really exciting -- excited, sorry, about the next couple of years. For '27 and beyond, revenue growth will come from that U.K. and U.S. market share. We didn't hire as many people as we normally would hire at the end of quarter 4 last year. That and now we're looking to build out boots on the ground in the U.S. was our first time I talked about that, having more people in the U.S., General Manager, physically in the U.S. as well and then look at a small acquisition, scale new products and that global reach as we see that and start to leverage that global reach. Margin expansion come through revenue faster centralized costs. I think it's in the numbers. I don't think we talked about it here. But last half -- last quarter 1 and last half, we were very excited that our salary line increased less than our revenue line. And I think it was somewhere around 10%, 11% versus 14% growth. And this quarter, our salary line actually increased 5% versus that top line 14% growth. So that is absolutely part of our DNA and filtering through in the business now. We've got better purchasing power within partners, buying third-party data when we need to and then utilizing technology processes, et cetera, to increase margins. And then shareholder value. Again, we've talked about that before. We're starting to pay tax now. So that possibly puts us in a position at the end of this financial year to start thinking about fully franked dividends, which we weren't able to before. It's earnings accretive acquisition, so out of cash. We're paying down the debt each quarter as well. And then we continue to maintain that disciplined capital allocation. We've always grown through our own disciplined investment as a business rather than going out to raise and dilute. So in summary, 14% growth, fantastic currency killing us in Australia at the moment, the strength of the Australian dollar, so 19% in constant currency, very happy with the growth in quarter 1, which actually is a continuation of quarter 4, where we saw the ANZ business being really strong and the growth coming from both regions that's continued into quarter 1. 27% margin expansion for EBITDA performance -- sorry, 27% dollar improvement, so outpacing revenue growth. So again, saw that in quarter 4, saw that in the full year last year, and that really is -- we're leveraging that now. And we're seeing operating leverage aside for the business, 65.5%, and then we're heading towards the $72 million to $75 million year next year. We haven't added any -- increased any core cost -- so seeing operating leverage as well as efficiencies coming from AI as well as scale from our platform businesses. 13% EBITDA margin, highest EBITDA margin we've had as a business, very excited about that. 1,035 clients. So that's up from 997 at the full year. So that's great to add 38 new clients in the year, again, small share of wallet when they start, we'll see that come through and increase. Given guidance, so 72 to 75 and 11% to 12% EBITDA margin and look to make that -- update that as we move through the quarters. And then our priority -- absolute priority boots on the ground in the U.S. and a small strategic acquisition. So that is our quarter 1 and a little forward look of where we're heading. So with that, I will hand back to George.

Great. Thank you, Martin. Thank you, Mel. Quite a few questions here. So let's get started. First question, platform-based revenue has continued to grow at a fast rate. But why has gross margin been flat or slightly softened in the past few years? I thought platform-based revenue is typically higher gross margin.

I'm happy to answer that. So it's a very good question. The shift for a lot of revenue going through the automated platforms really helps us at the EBITDA margin line, and that's what you've been seeing in the last, I'd say, 6 to 9 months where you're seeing our margin increase and the fact that our growth in employee expenses has completely moderated from being in line with the revenue growth down to, for example, 5% for this quarter. So it means that we don't need human beings to do a lot of the buying and selling, I would say, through -- with the platform. So that's where we see the improvement. It doesn't necessarily save any money at the gross margin line.

And just to add to that, the cost line, people are accessing answers to their questions through our data. We've got the same cost. So we're paying incentives or reward to people for sharing their information, whether that information has been shared through a managed service or through platform. So as Mel said, we need no people or less people to deliver through platform within Pureprofile. So it's EBITDA margin.

I know some companies will put employee expenses related directly to revenue generation and their cost of goods sold impacting their gross margin. Pureprofile doesn't do that. as you would see from our income statement when we put out in the reporting period. So all our employee expenses sit as an operating expense, not -- and are not captured in cost of goods sold.

Next question, how many AI LLM company tenders have you bid? How many converted and what revenue? And is it recurring or one-off training data? And what does panelist consent allow you to sell?

Great questions. Panelist consent fully covered to be able to -- whether it's behavioral data that they've downloaded a small app, and we're looking at what websites people have been to or their financial credit card bank account expenditure or whether it's answering questions with 3 surveys or however they do that, it's fully consented GDPR compliant privacy compliance software. So fully covered from a human standpoint. They know what data that we're sharing. They know it's anonymized. We are -- it's second question, it's typically today is one-off projects, not as reoccurring projects. They're looking to discover something, which could be translations of something or reading scripts or taking photographs or carrying out tasks as a one-off process. And at the moment, it's all through intermediaries. So it's not direct. We haven't directly worked with any LLMs so far, but it's all through intermediaries. And I think actually, we just released a case study some work we did with OpenAI in the last quarter. So there's a brand everybody knows quite well, and that was some direct work -- so I stand corrected on what I just said. But the majority is through intermediaries and we have done some direct work.

Great. Next question, can you give a split between the U.S. and the EU growth in Q1?

Yes. So if we look at the rest of the world revenue of $8.7 million, the U.S. accounts for under half of that revenue and over 40%. We will start calling out the U.S. separately at a point in time, particularly as we start to get further expansion. So we'll report on ANZ U.S. and rest of the world. Yes, I'm comfortable saying it's just over 40% of the rest of the world revenue. So it's still -- it's quite substantial. And that really shows, to be honest, the opportunity that we have by investing further in the U.S. and particularly having boots on the ground. That's why we really feel that's the right strategy for the business.

So it's our second biggest market. And the real important, again, just to reiterate, number one, low market share. We have like 0 market share in the U.S. And so that's a great lever to be able to pull for us as a business if there are economic headwinds around the world that we seem to believe there are. So that's a great lever. The second thing is that when there are economic headwinds, we're not reliant on marketing and ad spend and ad revenue. Actually, if there are economic headwinds, then an insurance company wants to understand about its own audiences or its competitive audiences at that moment, can it convince people to come across them, can it increase their spend. Automotive, am I looking to change my car? Am I going to electric, et cetera. So what we see -- and we've always seen this during the 22 years and the 6 years that we've been doing this together, Mel and I, we've had COVID and obviously, now we've had a bit of economic headwind around the world. What increases the need for businesses to ask and have questions answered. So we see this all as a great opportunity. AI, fantastic, winning, as we said, through intermediaries work, more work being needed, more questions being asked and levers that we can pull by having low market share. That's been the story of us for the last 6 years, and we carry on doing that.

All right. Great. One more on Rest of the World. Next question. So it's good to hear Martin observed positive momentum lately in the U.K. Do you see rest of the world work volume resume growth in December quarter at all?

Yes is the answer to that question, absolutely. I mean we've still got the constant currency issue, but we'll report both whilst the Australian dollar remains strong. But yes, we -- the boots on the ground that we've got in the U.S. have really brought in some great numbers in Q1, also some new large clients that we weren't working with before, and those are computer to computer, so actually API connectivity. And then when we talk about this MCP connections through the major LLMs, the majority of that work again comes from rest of the world, the bigger market and especially the U.S. So tech developments, the boots on the ground in the U.S. shows that we expect that to tick up again even if it's only on a constant currency.