Operator
I'd now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Ian Ball, CEO.
Please go ahead.
Ian Ball
Good morning, everyone. Welcome and thanks for joining us today to go through the Enero Group FY26 results.
I'm here with my CFO, Tracy, and we'll be taking you through a presentation. At the end, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.
With that, I'm going to get straight into it. On the first slide, page number two, I'd like to go through the highlights of our FY26 results.
Very pleased to report that our continuing operations delivered 9% EBITDA growth and 54% net profit and EPS growth. Disciplined cost management and a continued focus on operational excellence allowed us to generate these results on a slight decline in our net revenue.
In addition, we will be paying a 1.4 cents fully franked dividend, which represents a payout ratio of 31% on adjusted EPS. That's consistent with our dividend payment, which is in a historical ratio of about 30 to 50% of our adjusted earnings per share.
What we're particularly pleased about is that the group EBITDA margin grew from 10.2 to 11.8%. As I've already mentioned, a lot of that result was delivered by really disciplined focus on execution and cost management.
That's both in head office, our corporate center, and within the agencies. That's something that we will continue to focus on as we go forward, and that is enabled also by the implementation of AI, and I'll talk a lot more about that as we get more into the presentation.
I think the results for the group can be really discussed in two parts: the Australian agencies and then the results of Hotwire. For the Australian agencies, I'm particularly proud that they delivered exceptionally strong results.
All agencies delivered double-digit margins, but for the Australian agencies, we saw really top-of-the-market EBITDA margin results, BMF delivering 23% margins, up from 20.1% a year ago, and Orchard delivering 21.8% margins, up from 19%. In addition, Orchard had a record year both on revenue and on EBITDA dollar and on EBITDA margin, and BMF had a record year in terms of its EBITDA.
I think that's particularly notable in a very, very tough, competitive Australian market, where if you look across our competitors, including the global holding companies, with one exception, all of those competitors were reporting a decline in their results in this tough market. We're very, very proud of the results for the Australian agencies.
For Hotwire, we maintain double-digit margins, although as you can see from the results, they're operating in a very difficult US market, continued downward pressure from the market, resulting in a 19% decline in our revenue year-on-year in Hotwire and a 33% drop in EBITDA, but still operating at 11.6% margin. From a diversification point of view, one of the strengths, as you've just seen, of Enero is the fact that we are diversified.
We're diversified by industry, we're diversified by geography, and that we have a strong retainer base in our revenue mix. That continues in the year of FY26.
In particular of note, the retainer-based revenue that we have is 60% of our revenue. The other 40% is project work.
The strength of the Australian agencies increased their share of our total revenue. Australia and Asian-based revenue is now 54% of our revenue mix, 28% coming from the US, and the remaining 18% from the UK and Europe.
Now to turn to a bit more detail on each one of the individual agencies and first of all to speak about Hotwire. Hotwire is a business that's in transition.
We appointed a new CEO, Grant Tuffs, in January, and Grant is setting about working on improving the performance of the Hotwire business. We are coming off three or four years of decline in the Hotwire business, and we're reorienting the strategy in the Hotwire business and the operating model and the go-to-market focus of that agency.
As I said, that's work in progress. What's pleasing about the Hotwire progress is the US business, which is the largest unit in Hotwire, stabilized during the last six months, but we still have a lot of pressure in our business as it relates to Central Europe, which isn't performing as we would expect it to, and in particular, the ROI performance management unit of the business.
What we're seeing in the ROI business is that that serves core technology players. As AI enters the market, those players are adopting AI to do more of the work that historically the ROI agency would have done.
That is requiring us to shift our focus on the services that we provide, requiring us to provide those services at lower cost, and requiring us to simplify our operating model. We have a lot of work in ROI that is already underway to respond to a changing market as AI impacts our clients as they bring increasingly more work in-house and as we continue to prosecute what we think is a value-added go-to-market strategy.
That work is already underway, and that has a big impact on the Hotwire result in FY26, and we'll talk more about that when we speak about the outlook for Hotwire in the final slide. One of the bright spots in the Hotwire business aside from the US core business is the momentum that we now have in the AI Lab.
That's really in two respects. One is that we have some very strong market-based value propositions, products that the AI Lab takes to market, and we're generating significant commercial benefit from that, not only in the revenue from those products themselves, but as we embed them into the Hotwire business, we're increasing our win rates and we're increasing our stickiness with existing clients.
The second benefit of the AI Lab is it's really empowering the whole of Enero's AI transformation. I'll come and speak more about that later on, but we're very pleased with the capabilities that are growing in the AI Lab and the impact that it has across the whole group.
The other notable thing about Hotwire in responding to the pressure in the core technology market, which has been in decline, as I said, for several years, is that we're expanding our addressable market. The benefit of AI being pervasive across almost every business is that we have permission now to work in a much more diversified set of clients, and we're moving our go-to-market focus outside core technology into adjacent sectors like fintech and consumer tech, where, as you can see from the logos on this slide, we're already picking up new clients in that sector.
As AI pervades the market, being a tech-focused PR, comms, and performance marketing business, we are addressing a much bigger market going forward. That's part of the reorientation that started under Grant's leadership and will continue in FY27.
Moving on to BMF, a really great performance, as I've said before, in a very difficult market. BMF delivered record EBITDA of $8.8 million and a 23% EBITDA margin from 11% growth.
You can see there the increase in productivity that has driven that margin increase. BMF went under a really significant transformation in the second half of FY26, which will continue in the future, which was about making the operating model much more efficient, enabled by AI, simplified processes, and more efficient and better-disciplined execution.
As a result, the cost base has dropped and the margins have gone up. What's also particularly pleasing, at the same time as all of that transformation, is that BMF continues to win awards.
We won the Global Effie for ALDI's Australia "Shop ALDI First" advertising campaign, and we won the Creative Agency of the Year at the AdNews Awards. We're very proud that BMF continues to occupy the position of the most creatively effective advertising agency in Australia.
It's that transformation that we're focused on is to maintain and extend the lead that BMF has from that perspective. In addition, while we lost Westpac and Endeavour through changes in leadership structures of both of those organizations, we continue to win significant new clients.
We're very pleased to announce at the end of FY26 we had a major win with Asahi, and in addition, we are just able to announce as well that we also won Superloop at the end of FY26. We've got a healthy pipeline, and we expect that winning behavior to continue as we look forward.
Moving on to Orchard, as I've said before, a record performance for Orchard: record EBITDA of $6.1 million and a 21.8% margin from a record-breaking revenue of $28 million. Orchard's a business with two primary sectors in it: the healthcare vertical, which performed very strongly in the year, we were selected as the agency of record for Lilly's GLP-1 portfolio in Australia and New Zealand, an incredibly successful launch, and geographic expansion with Ferring, one of our key clients, where we're working with them in the US and also with Lilly in New Zealand.
We continue to win new pharmaceutical clients, and within the clients that we have, we continue to expand our remit and our growth through the excellent delivery that we are enjoying with those clients. The second sector is consumer, and we're also benefiting from new client wins and geographical expansion with Hyundai, one of our key consumer clients, which offset some reduced spend with some existing clients in, as I've said, a tough market in Australia and New Zealand.
Despite those pressures, we improved our margin and we delivered significant top-line growth. Similar to BMF, Orchard continues to win awards.
We were recognized for the PRIME Healthcare award-winning Marketing Campaign of the Year for the third time in five years. We're also awarded Optimizely's Customer Partner of the Year, second year in a row, and we're accredited across major marketing AI platforms, including Optimizely Opal.
As we turn to look at what's happened with our cost structure during FY26, it's more of the same. We continue to focus ruthlessly on margin management and cost management.
I've already talked about the agencies in looking at their operating model during FY26, implementing AI and other cost reduction measures to simplify the operating model, to simplify processes, to increase productivity, and to allow increased margins despite downward pressure on revenue. The same is true for the corporate cost center as well.
We continue to look in the corporate center as to how we can become more efficient and how we can reduce our costs. You can see a significant cost reduction in the slide there between FY26 in the first half and in the second half, some $5 million lower cost basis.
I would like to spend some time looking at AI. This has been an incredibly key focus for the leadership team across all of the agencies and the head office of Enero.
My background, for some of you that might know me, is I come from a consulting, technology, and transformation heritage, and I'm very pleased to announce the results that we've achieved in FY26 on our AI strategy and, most importantly, on our AI implementation. Unlike some other businesses that really focus and measure their AI implementation on usage, that's not where we focus.
We are focused on AI as a means to an end. The key areas that we focus on is how is AI improving our efficiency and how is AI improving our effectiveness.
In every single program and every initiative that we invest in in AI, it has to pass that test of an efficiency gain or an effectiveness gain. The initial focus in FY26, particularly for the last six months of FY26, has been on efficiency gains, and you can see those results in the margins that I've already talked about.
That is across each one of our agencies and underpinned by a corporate infrastructure. Let me talk about the corporate infrastructure first, because that's often forgotten by many businesses that are just focusing on the front-end benefits.
What's critical to us, in parallel to the agentic enablement of our agencies, is that we're able to do that with a safe, secure, properly governed infrastructure. Our client data is secure, our data across Enero is secure, and that when we connect up front-end AI agents with our back-end files and our back-end enterprise software, we're doing it in a secure way.
We audit that security with an outside firm. We have been progressing that very aggressively throughout the last six months, and we have set up a new infrastructure and a new platform that allows the agencies to build their front-end agentic enablement.
Let's turn to the individual agencies. Hotwire was the first cab off the rank for us in terms of embracing AI, and that was really through the AI Labs.
As I've already mentioned, we have three products in market at the moment through the AI Labs, and that will soon be followed by a fourth product, which we've already piloted with a client with very effective results. The AI Labs in FY26 generated a three times higher revenue result in Q4 than they did in Q1.
What we've also noticed is when we embed AI Lab capability and the products like Spark into our pitches, then we have a 30% higher win rate in those pitches than in pitches that don't include the AI capability. We're delighted with the capability that we're building through the AI Labs and the very efficient delivery structure that we have there.
Our AI Lab leader is based in Singapore, and we have most of the team that deliver our AI Lab product and capability offshore in India. An example where that's embedded into the Hotwire business is through the work that we do in data and analytics.
An example of that is that for our AI-enabled research and intelligence, we can increase the brief-to-insight time by about 50%. We're 50% quicker across platform analysis of performance media companies, and we can deliver much deeper insights through the AI enablement of the human talent that we have in those businesses.
Overall, we're generating about a 45% reduction in the time spent on analytical drafting for quarterly client reports that we pretty much do for all clients in the Hotwire agency. You can see efficiencies across the agency.
That's just the beginning. That's what we've got started on in FY26, and more of that is coming in FY27.
In BMF, we had, as I mentioned, a major transformation during the second half of FY26 for one of our key clients, where we took a process view, we examined the end-to-end process of a very complex, client-driven process across production and delivery, and we have enabled two really enormously important AI agents to accelerate and reduce the cost of our delivery on that particular client. Those agents are now being deployed across the rest of BMF.
Examples of some of the metrics that we generated on that: AI-accelerated image production reduced our delivery time by 36%, and one of the things that we get often from our clients is very complex briefs that come in all kinds of shapes and sizes—emails, documents, attachments—and can be very complex to decode and to deconstruct into the work that we need to do. We now have an AI agent that ingests all of that from multi-different files and different sources, and we've generated a 93% reduction in the time spent processing complex big briefs and deconstructing that into the work that we need to do to respond to those briefs.
That's reduced our time from days to hours, and that's days of some very expensive people in the agency. It's allowed us to be much more effective in how we understand those briefs, generate insights, and generate campaigns and work as a result of that.
Overall, if we look at the BMF structure, and in particular that large client, we're generating 31% faster end-to-end retail production. That was one big transformation.
Last week, we launched a second large transformation where we launched the rather catchy name of Noggin, as in "use your noggin," use your head. Noggin is our friendly agent for the whole of the BMF agency, available to all of our staff on all of our clients.
Within Noggin, we have generated 13 AI skills that are available at launch. Again, that's just the beginning.
We will continue to build on that skill set. Some of the skills that are available in Noggin to all of our people capture years and years and years of institutional knowledge that BMF has as Australia's most creatively effective agency.
Just to read out a few of them: The Cultural Radar is one of the agents within Noggin, senior cultural intelligence analyst specializing in Australian and global consumer culture. We know the Australian market, we've taken that knowledge, we put it into an agent, and that allows us to refine our pitches and our creative briefs, refines the Australian business.
Brand Visualizer, the second one, generates on-brand visual references and mood board assets from very brief inputs that really get our creative humans started on the journey and provide great augmentation for them very effectively. Brains Trust, this is the one that I'm really excited about, the dynamic panel of domain-relevant experts.
We've basically almost created a board of advisors of leading lights in advertising and marketing, and we bounce ideas off them. We can take a topic, and we can use that advisory board, that Brains Trust, to help us refine what oftentimes are chaotic ideas into actionable next steps.
Then there are others that we use day-to-day: Storyboard Maker, creating visual storyboards from scripts, and an Image Creator, lifestyle images for retail brands created digitally, that, again, are the starting point for our creative teams, creating something that is truly differentiated and has that superior effectiveness that we're known for. Let me turn to Orchard.
Part of Orchard's business is website design and enhancement. I think it's pretty well documented now that AI agents are generally seen as being more accurate, more effective, and certainly a lot more cost-efficient in code development.
We have developed and implemented a code-writing agent, and we continue to get tremendous returns from that. We're 43% faster on the first set of clients that we have used that agent on in Q4.
It's already reducing our first draft time on content delivery by about 50%. Now, these are just early-term, initial pilot gains, and we expect these gains to continue to go up as we enter FY27.
We're also very excited, again last week, in our launch of AudienceIQ. AudienceIQ is a synthetic audience research capability that we use to better tailor our creative to target audiences.
Traditionally, we would come up with creative treatments, and we'd have to go to external agencies to do in-depth, in-person market research, which was very costly and very time-consuming. Now what we're able to do, having created this synthetic audience, is to run many, many different scenarios at much lower cost, at much faster speed, through our synthetic audience to get real-time input so that, again, we can enhance the creative brief that we have, the content that we have, to have more impact and to create more effectiveness.
Those are just a number of the things that we achieved. They're not strategy; they're actually implemented in FY26, and that will continue to extend into FY27.
Let me now pass over to Tracy, our CFO, who's going to take us through some more detail on our key financial metrics.
Tracy Leung
Welcome, everyone, and thank you, Ian. Turning first to our statutory P&L, I wanted to talk mainly through the items below EBITDA.
Before I start on that, I wanted to talk about our staff cost ratio that forms part of EBITDA. Our staff cost ratio for both the agencies and the total group has reduced for the agencies from 72% last year to 70% this year, of our focus on operational excellence, as Ian has talked about.
From a total group perspective, that has improved from 78% last year to 75%. Now coming to items below EBITDA, our depreciation and amortization, including right-of-use assets, have remained broadly the same as last year.
Our net finance costs has reduced to $1 million from $1.2, and that is really a result of the smaller debt facility that we entered into in June 2025, as well as present value interest ending on our contingent consideration, which the final payment came out in half one of this year. In terms of our tax expense of $2 million, that reflects an effective tax rate of 24%, significantly lower than the 39% last year.
That is because we're benefiting from the release of prior year tax provisions, mainly in the US. We would expect the effective tax rate going forward to be higher than the 24%.
Then all of those items bring us to a adjusted net profit of $6.4 million, and 54% higher than $4.2 last year. Looking now at the rest of the statutory P&L, amortization on acquired intangibles, net of tax, was lower at $2 million as some of that amortization has finished.
Our statutory net loss for the year was $37.4 million due to significant items of $41.8, which is mainly non-cash in nature. I'll go into the detail of our significant items on the next slide.
Significant items for the year was $41.8 million, largely non-cash in nature, mainly made up of the $39.8 million of impairment loss in intangible write-downs that was primarily driven by the near-term performance of ROI DNA. As mentioned before, it's non-cash in nature.
The reassessment of useful life and fair value adjustments are both non-cash, with restructuring and other costs of $3.8 million largely relating to transformation costs in Hotwire globally throughout the year and of the transformation that we undertook in BMF at the end of FY26 in Q4, which will deliver better [margins?] through to FY27.
Turning next to our cash flow, our cash conversion was 62% of EBITDA for the year, and that percentage has been impacted by the restructuring costs that we went through earlier, as well as a $3 million negative working capital movement, which primarily relates to cash held on behalf of clients, and that has come down throughout the course of our year. Tax payments on a reported basis was $1.4 million, which is lower than on a reported basis of $4.9 million last year, but slightly higher than on a continuing operations of $0.7, and that's mainly due to timing of tax payments in the US.
Free cash flow was $1.1 million for the year, which compares to $5.6 million last year, and that's mainly impacted by movement of working capital. In FY26, we also had a million dollars of cash outflow relating to the OBMedia disposal, which happened at the end of last year, and that is now all finalized in terms of cash outflows relating to that disposal.
Then also in half one of the year, we also had $4 million of contingent consideration payments, which is the last contingent consideration payments that we have. Turning next to the balance sheet, at June 2026, we had net cash of $24.5 million as compared to $27.5 million last year.
Our leverage remains at zero leverage, as we're in a net cash position, and we have $11.4 million of our $15 million bank loan facility undrawn at June 2026. We also extended our facility at the end of FY26 until October 2027.
Our overall net asset position has reduced, largely reflecting the impact of the non-cash [unclear]. Now I'll hand back to Ian on outlook.
Ian Ball
Thanks, Tracy, for a very speedy review of our financial results. On the outlook, one of the commitments that I made to our investor group when I came in was that of transparency.
We started that last year by splitting out the THC group into individual agency results. As you've just heard what the results were by agency, and there's a lot of narrative and detail around that, we want to continue that theme of transparency going forward.
Part of that is that we wanted to provide a more detailed outlook than perhaps historically that we have done. In particular, talk about each of the individual agencies.
Let me get into it, agency by agency. Hotwire, I think you're gathering from the FY26 results that Hotwire is still a business in transition.
Grant joined in January and continues to make really positive changes in the business, but we are getting ahead of a very dynamic market where the impact of AI is no more obvious than it is in the core technology client group that we have. As I mentioned, some of those clients are enabling themselves with AI, and in the case of the ROI service offering around performance marketing, they are finding that they are taking some of the scope of work that we used to perform for them in-house.
That is having a major impact on our outlook for ROI and therefore our outlook for Hotwire. As a result of that, we are taking some very affirmative actions on the business structure of ROI to improve and optimize the profitability of Hotwire going forward in FY27.
More of that in a moment. The positive side of AI and the proliferation across the market is it's allowing continued diversification for Hotwire to address new clients in new sectors that it hasn't been able to address.
Particularly, that is led by the expansion of our AI Labs and the products that the AI Lab takes to market, which is helping us win new clients in those sectors that historically we wouldn't have been active in. The third point is that we've taken a decision to accelerate the performance of Hotwire, to get it up to where we would like to see it comparable to the Australian agencies, to actually strengthen our leadership.
As a result, we're in the final rounds of selecting a new leader for the core US business, coming into a strong platform, and also for key markets in our European business, where we are appointing new leaders who will be soon appointed in FY27 to continue to build pipeline and execute strongly in those markets. I've mentioned ROI at the beginning, let me come back to that.
Specifically on ROI, because of the changes that I've been through, we're expecting a revenue reduction of around 30 to 50% for FY27. Where we've seen that before, we've been very swift to act to protect our EBITDA by taking out cost and restructuring, and that's exactly what we will be doing for ROI.
On ROI DNA, we will be taking the capabilities that they have and integrating them more closely into Hotwire to deliver an operation that has a materially lower cost base, that has a simpler operating model, that's more tightly integrated with Hotwire, and as a result, minimizes the impact of what we expect to see is a continued revenue decline in that business. As a whole, for FY27, our revenue planning is somewhere between 5 and 15% below where we see the second half of FY26 on a run-rate basis, reflecting that AI disruption at ROI and the continued volatility in the technology industry.
As a CEO, it's one area that I'm spending a lot of time with Grant to manage that complex restructuring and transformation. On BMF, we came off what was a record year in FY26, with an FY27 revenue planning assumption of around about 10 to 15% below FY26 second half, reflecting the changes in the client portfolio.
BMF transformed its operating model, as we've already talked about, in the last quarter, to drive a much lower cost base in anticipation of that reduction in revenue and through the efficiency gains that we're getting through the AI implementation and offshore delivery that now is part of BMF's operating model. We will continue to prosecute those efficiency gains in BMF.
As a result, we are expecting that BMF margins will continue to improve from their very high base already throughout the year. In addition, with the consolidation of global holding companies and clients coming to repitch through conflicts or through disappointment in service levels that they're achieving, BMF has a very strong pipeline.
As we've already seen from the Asahi and Superloop wins, is very able to compete at the top level and win very competitive new business. We're looking forward to converting a strong pipeline in BMF as we move through FY27.
Part of that is that we will be developing a full-service capability in Melbourne, aside from our Sydney base, both to serve Asahi, but to aggressively go after new clients alongside the other clients that we already have in Melbourne, like Tennis Australia. On Orchard, very positive momentum, as you've seen in the FY26 results, and we see that continuing strongly in FY27.
We're going to build out geographic expansion in healthcare and consumer, and we expect to deliver additional revenue in FY27. Very strong thesis across the whole agency, agentic by default, AI-led delivery model that will continue to roll out very strongly and deliver further efficiency gains in Orchard.
Corporate: in corporate, no exception to the AI rule, agentic capability in all of the corporate functions, in finance, in P&C, in legal, is already underway, and we will continue to drive that efficiency to keep our corporate costs down and to make sure that corporate is in service of our agencies. On share-based payments, which is another element of the corporate costs, a normalization is expected in FY27 off the low expense base that we had in FY26, driven by a reduction in probability weighting and an accounting adjustment on the cost of share-based payments as we move forward.
That's the outlook, and with that, I'd like to hand over back to the operator to take any questions.
Operator
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Ian Ball
We'll leave it another 30 seconds or so, but if there are no other questions, we will close the call.
Operator
Thank you. As there are no further questions, that does conclude our conference for today.
Thank you for participating. You may disconnect.
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