Qoria Limited

Qoria Limited

AASX:QOR
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AUD
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650.22MMarket Cap

Q2 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptJanuary 20, 2026

Ben Jenkins

Good morning everyone and welcome to our December quarter for 2025, for the quarter two of financial year 2026 webinar on our December quarter results. Tim will kick off as usual, and I'll step in on the financial side, and then we'll go to questions as usual.

Tim, over to you.

Tim Levy

Right, thanks. I see there's a few people in the waiting room.

They're coming in now. Great.

Cool. Thanks, Ben.

Thanks everyone for joining us. The December quarter isn't typically the highest selling period for us.

For a lot of our business, particularly the Northern Hemisphere part of our business, it's really about focusing on execution. It's delivering good services to customers, in particular in the U.S., getting kids back to school and getting their devices protected.

It is a big period, the December half and the December quarter, particularly for Australia and New Zealand and our Qustodio business. You'll see that reflected in the numbers that we're about to show you.

Very pleasing results, actually. In fact, it was the best sales December quarter we've ever had in our history.

From a guidance perspective, we're really pleased that we've hit all our guidance numbers and are very confident for our guidance for the rest of the year. Look, I'll quickly run through the highlights, then I'll go through the meat of the presentation, then I'll hand over to Ben to talk through the numbers, and then we'll answer questions at the end.

Massive milestones, actually, achieved in the December quarter. We were, of course, buffeted by the FX movements, the Australia-U.S.

and Euro. If we forget that, let's make some celebrations.

Firstly, we passed through 100 million U.S. dollars of ARR, which is a substantial achievement.

In constant currency terms, that meant 154 million dollars of Australian ARR. We're reporting 149 million dollars of ARR at the end of the calendar year.

We also passed through 20% of the students are on our platform in the U.S. That is an amazing number.

20% of our students, essentially all of those students are organic, and we entered that market in 2018. That is an amazing achievement.

We also passed through 30 million kids are protected by our platform, substantially more kids on our platform than there are Australians on earth. They are achievements that we should celebrate.

Now, from financial results, we added 5.1 million dollars of net ARR. That is a great result.

Over 4 million dollars in the education business was an outstanding result, again, given that's not the key selling part of the season, and over 2 million dollars in Qustodio. Qustodio is an absolute flyer, growing now at an annualized rate greater than 34%.

Our top line is growing better at this time of year than what we were doing last year, and last year, if you recall, we hit the ball out of the park for the financial year. Cash receipts, 79 million dollars, 20% up on PCP on the same last year.

A great result on guidance, and we're expecting that to continue comfortably, actually, for the financial year. Free cash flow positive, up 46% for the half.

Then probably also really another big highlight, right? Obviously, key to our financials is the North America K-12 business.

Our pipeline is on fire, nearly 40 million dollars in pipe, 14 million dollars on a weighted basis, which is 30% up on the record pipe of last year. The stage is set for a fantastic end to the financial year.

Reiterating guidance, and we think, if anything, there's upside, in particular on our ARR. Let's go through some of the numbers.

32,000 schools, that hasn't changed, but 30 million kids on our platform, 9 million parents using our tools, is up. More than 100 countries accessing our products.

As I said, 154 million dollars, I think I said on a constant currency basis, but we ended the half with 140 million, 149 million of ARR, growing at 20%. Again, that is, it would have been much higher than 19%, but for the FX, free cash flow positive for the half, and for the year we're expecting free cash flow break-even or better.

Again, I'll let Ben talk more to that. Again, a big highlight is that 14 million dollars of weighted pipeline, which sets us up for a fantastic crack at the second half of the financial year.

In fact, a big chunk of our team are in the UK right now, because their big sales event is called the Bett Conference at the end of January every year. All parts of our business are growing extremely well.

These numbers here in local currency, the U.S. K-12, 30%, Qustodio on a last 12-month basis 27%, but based on the first half of this financial year, over 30%.

That business is flying, Australia and New Zealand growing at more than 30%. Now the UK is still a little bit retarded, let's say, because they haven't had access to all the products.

That's literally happening now. We're launching at Bett, selling some substantial integration with filter and monitoring by the end of this quarter.

The Qoria filtering technology will be available in the UK, and more and more stuff to come. I'll talk more about that in coming months.

You'll see the UK, really a step change in growth in the UK in the next 12 months. Very exciting what's happening over there.

These are stats that haven't really changed. I guess if I could highlight anything, gross margins are over 90%.

Again, that excludes acquisition costs, but that compares with what most SaaS businesses report. Our margin, our gross margin, is incredibly strong.

As we are now maturing and integrating our businesses and our costs are stabilising, that's what's delivering the operating leverage in the business. Our marketing efficiency, particularly in Qustodio, where we're generating return on investments of anywhere between 300 and 400%.

It is expensive to put money into Qustodio because it does drop straight through our P&L, but it is really important because for every dollar we invest in that Qustodio business, we're getting three or four dollars back in short order. It is the right place to be investing our money.

Okay. This is a waterfall of the contributors to our growth.

K-12 new customers, new logos are still the engine room in our business. We're getting better and better at cross-selling, and we delivered 1.5 million of cross-sells.

I think cross-sells now over the half, it'd be 30-plus percent of our new ARR is from cross-sells to existing customers. Last year it was just over 23%.

We're definitely getting, with more products to sell, we're getting better at selling products to existing customers. Qustodio, as you see there, 2.1 million.

We've nearly added 5 million dollars of ARR for the financial year together. Of course, a big chunk of hit there with the FX movement.

Now, of course, there is a cost impact of that as well, which again I'll let Ben talk about, but in round numbers, around about 3 million dollars of improvement in our costs from the FX movements. Bear with me.

Just lost my screen. Okay.

K-12. What's the, a big net add for the quarter of 3 million dollars, 4.6 million gross.

That is a, it's not quite our record for K-12, but it was a little bit surprising how well that came in. This time of year it's hard to predict what sales are because it isn't the biggest selling period, but we had some outstanding results, again, particularly in the UK.

They really delivered in that quarter. Average revenue per student continues to go up.

Average sales price, as you'd expect, as we're kind of getting into the selling season, that's picking up. The real highlight in the education business is the building of the pipe into the second half of the financial year.

Nearly 40 million dollars of deals in that pipeline, and 30% growth in the weighted pipe is remarkable. Qustodio, all indicators in this business are going the right way.

The first half again, 34% annualized growth. I draw your attention to the charts at the bottom, the yellow column being the most recent result, or this financial year's result, and you see not only net ARR growth, that's substantial, but you're seeing subscriber growth.

Prior to this year, for the last two years, most of our ARR growth in that Qustodio business has come through price optimization. Now that we've delivered price increases, feature enhancements, and a little bit of investment, we're talking literally $4 million of extra investment over the year in that business, we're now seeing that turning into substantial lifts in ARR, subscriber numbers, and really good return on investments.

Our average order value and our cost to acquire customers essentially break even, and so it's not burning cash to grow that business. Of course, the way the accounting works is to acquire a customer, take that to the P&L immediately, and then you take the revenue over the life of that customer.

That is good business, and we're carefully investing in that business to make sure that we hit our guidance, but do not miss the opportunity of the financials, where the unit economics of that business are tremendous. Cash flows up 20% for the half.

We're expecting that and more for the second half. We're feeling really comfortable with our inflows.

Again, I'll let Ben talk more about that, but you see quite clearly in the charts here the cycles that our businesses go through, but we're stepping it up every quarter, every year. Operating leverage.

I guess I could highlight some things that are important. You see it through our 4C and you see it on this slide.

One, as we've been telling the market for some time now, at the beginning of the financial year, through our budgeting cycle, we make investments. The best we've made this year is, the main one we've made this year, two of them, is put more money into Qustodio marketing, around about $4 million, and invest in building out the engineering team in Sri Lanka.

Those investments were being made now in this first half of the year to deliver results going forward. You've seen that lift in our costs and of course pay rises, which you, particularly in that October period.

You've seen that lift, but as we have also gone to the market on our ARR and revenue is expected to be at least 20% higher than last year. That can be easily accommodated.

Those modest increase in costs and bets that we make can be easily accommodated in ARR and revenue growth. Now on the bottom chart on the right-hand side, what we've done there for comparison purposes is show our year-to-date result for net ARR versus cash costs.

Essentially it's a run rate view of our business on a constant currency basis, using our FX rates at 30 June. As you see, these investments that we've made in Sri Lanka and Qustodio marketing are comfortably covered by the growth in revenue in our business.

Again, leverage is in our business is growing, gross margins are great. We also have flexibility in these bets that we will make, particularly around marketing costs.

We can optimize our expenditure to make sure we hit guidance, and at the moment we're feeling very comfortable with our growth and our guidance, particularly around cash flow and balance sheet, which again I'll let Ben talk about later. Now I know there's going to be a lot of questions about balance sheet and finances, but I do think it's important, if I can just steal five or so minutes of people's time to talk about AI.

There's been a lot of chatter that we've seen recently about the impact of AI and what that might mean for SaaS businesses and software as a service type businesses. What I'm going to do now is quickly talk about the investments we're making in our business to take advantage of AI for internal costs, but also delivery for customers, but also talk about what's the broader implications for businesses like ours with the advent of agentic and generative AI.

Firstly, a quick focus on us. There's really three areas of investment in our business with AI.

One is enhancing offerings, essentially adding AI features to our products that customers may enjoy, and we've been talking about this for a while, and it's generating now literally millions of dollars of revenue in our business. We were the first in the mainstream filtering provider space to provide real-time content-aware filtering.

We can now intercept the kids' website, look at the images that they're looking at, look at the videos that they're looking at, and blur them if they're seeing inappropriate content. We can also now look at the text, every single line of text, hidden or otherwise, and make a determination about whether that should be shown to the child or not.

In particular, that stuff is focused on our content, of course, but also kids, who are brilliant at finding their ways around filtering technologies using technologies like VPNs and proxies. We can now scan in real time these pages without the child noticing and make those determinations.

There's a whole host of other things that we're doing behind the scenes with categorization and classification, and there is also some really cool things that we're doing with automations and AI chatbots and let's call AI agents that can help you with your navigation and your journey of using our product. We talk more about that in the second half of the year.

Big investments being made there, and not specifically, these things are actually delivering real contributions into our business today. Constant work across the business, we're all getting better and better at integrating AI into our day-to-day activities, and of course all of our vendors of various customer relationship management type systems are adding AI features in there.

That's saved, we highlight here about $2 million of reduced support costs, and we've reduced the amount of workload in our human moderators for our monitoring product by about 30%, with tons more to go. I won't bore you with the details, but there's literally millions more dollars of savings that we're expecting out of that customer support and human moderation by the end of this calendar year.

Then going to this question that I keep hearing about, can people code in their basements and replicate the sorts of features that you offer? Now we're doing that internally.

Product development teams globally are now being expected to use vibe coding and AI tools to not only prototype, but to build alpha-ready products that customers can use and then move into the development, proper development cycle, production cycle, they call it. We do that today, and it's something like, I think 90% of our, 80% of our teams are now using generative AI in their day-to-day activity.

We've saved 15 FTEs, 15 roles, engineering roles in our business, and these are expensive resources, $120,000 to $200,000 resources. 15 of them have been effectively saved through the use of these tools.

It's not just at the grassroots, even people like myself are using AI to build applications in this business now. It's now running rife in our business.

Okay. What's the impact of AI going to be on SaaS businesses?

Unquestionably, the ability to code is accelerating. The ability to take an idea from an idea, put something in front of a customer, and turn it into a feature that's being used by customers is moving incredibly quickly, from nine months to a year to get a feature out the door three, four years ago to three to four months.

We're actually now doing that. We've actually got a feature that shipped a couple of weeks ago that took us three months to deliver.

Now, does that mean that people can start vibe coding their way and competing with us big companies? What Bain and company say is that with the right playbook, which includes deep AI integration, strong data moats, and leadership on stands incumbents can shape and not just survive the next wave of SaaS.

Now let me go in a bit more detail what that means. There's a number of references here to third parties that have been investigating this question about what is the impact of AI going to be on dedicated SaaS businesses.

The one thing that I draw attention to is we don't sell, really, just software. What we're doing is selling mitigation of risk.

A customer, a private school in Australia, they might be spending $20,000 a year with us to make sure that kids are not watching pornography at school, making sure that they're compliant with their obligations around safeguarding and privacy. What school is going to entrust that to a backyard provider who may be half the price?

They're not going to do it. What's really important to understand in enterprise platforms, particularly in markets which are high trust and heavily regulated, like we operate in, there is a transfer of risk inherent in that procurement process, which is really what we're selling, plus of course the features.

Now, according to Andreessen Horowitz, durable moats come from restricted, proprietary, regulatory-sensitive, dynamic data sets, not the model. Yes, there is a lot of data everywhere, and you can build AI tools that leverage that data.

If you think about a business like ours, we have access to very unique data. We, in fact, we're the only one really globally that has the ability to see what kids are doing at home and see what they're doing at school and bring all those contexts together.

We also, through our acquisition of OctopusBI last year, we can now see through schools other systems: attendance systems, academic records, teacher notes. We have more visibility across the data sets of schools than I think anybody in our space.

The ability to bring all that together and add value to decision-making of schools is a significant moat that is very, very hard to replicate. The third point, which is a best in adventures, and you're seeing this across the internet, is that there is much more now a focus on vertical integration.

What was previously feature providers, little expense-type management systems and project management systems that could apply to everybody, that world's collapsing, and now people are focusing on particular industry segments, which is a vertical integration approach. We've been talking about this for three or four years, about all those entry points and all those personas that we're trying to support inside the school.

We've been talking about vertical integration for a long time. Outcome-based pricing is where McKinsey sees this world going.

It's less about the subscription per user or subscription per service, but it's are you delivering value? Again, we've been talking about this for a long time.

How do we make sure that customers pay the minimal money amount that they're spending on our services, maybe seven or ten dollars per student per year, and how do we turn that? How do we prove the value that that's delivering to customers?

Again, our acquisition of OctopusBI was in large part to make sure we can deliver measurable outcomes for investment for schools, modest investments for schools, in making that technologies. Then final piece, and I think this isn't talked about enough, accelerating time to value is really important, and that can, of course, be done with great user interfaces, which can be vibe-coded, but in the complex type systems that we do, it also requires the addition of wrapped professional services, which is something that we do, in particular around professional development for moderation, safety leads, and of course, for online safety education, and is something that's unique in our business.

We've been thinking about this challenge of protection, building a moat around your business with not just AI, but just the acceleration in software development for a long time. If I can reiterate, Qoria operates in a high-trust safety-critical environment, very regulated, subject to privacy policies, compliance obligations, and of course, we're dealing with human lives.

This isn't an area that's naturally ripe for disruption by backyard coders. Customers are not purchasing software features alone.

They are purchasing assurance, compliance, accountability, and professional services. The comment on the right-hand side is the key points I'd like to make.

I think the SaaS businesses that are at risk are those single-featured and undifferentiated workflow-type businesses, those particularly with low switching costs, and that is not our business model. The winners will be platforms with proprietary data, which we have, regulatory drivers, which we have, and a customer lock-in, which we have, because we are invested across the school stack, and we have relationships with parents within these schools.

For businesses like ours, we see that AI is an accelerant and certainly not a threat. That's a very quick overview.

Happy to provide some dedicated sessions on this over time, and maybe I'll lead to the program leaders too on the school to see if they'd like to do that. That was very quick.

Let me quickly hand over to Ben Jenkins.

Ben Jenkins

Thanks, Tim. Good morning again, everyone.

Just jump to the next slide, please, Tim. Thank you.

As you can see on the page here, free cash flow for the quarter was just over negative $2 million, broadly in line with what we're expecting across the whole half, when you consider the Q1 result and the Q2 together, just under $9 million positive. As we mentioned at the September quarterly, we collected cash really well in the September quarter, and the collections over the half were in line, almost exactly in line with the guidance we provided at 20.2%, which is really pleasing.

Something probably worth calling out here, it is called out on the next slide, but it is mentioned here, worth talking to the other one-off costs. They are all related to acquisitions that we were looking at, diligence costs, other bits and pieces.

There was three different acquisitions across the half that we looked at in a significant amount of detail, and for various reasons, we have walked away from all three of those, or been outbid on those. They are genuinely one-off in nature and corporate cost related.

Outside of that, I think jump to the... I've got control now.

I can jump to the next slide myself, going into a little bit of detail on the cost line across the board. Tim talked to the investments that were made in the business over the year.

Most of that is done now, expect costs to be broadly flat across the half, if not down in some cases, particularly in relation to fixed other costs where you have some seasonality within that. Importantly on cash collections, I think the most important, and you can see this in the chart earlier in the deck, where we comp the cash collections quarter on quarter over the last three years.

Last year we comped, receipts in the March quarter were only up 9%, and receipts in the June quarter were actually flat. They weren't up at all year on year.

We're comping a very favourable period, and that's largely due to the runoff in multi-year cash upfront that happened last year. That's washed through.

You can see that's washed through in our first half results and cash collections, but in the first half of the year we're actually still comping a much tougher period. We're pretty confident that receipts will be comfortably over 20% for the second half of the year, up year on year.

I guess the other data point that we can point to is last year, if you look at the half one, half two split, it was 60% receipts in the first half of the year, 40% in the second half of the year. A lot of people are probably going to that as the baseline.

Again, due to the profile of the cash flows last year and the flat nature of it in the second half of the year, that's probably the wrong split to look to. If you look at FY24, the split was actually 57% half one, 43% half two.

I don't expect it to be that far to the right this year, but it'll be somewhere in between those two. If you back solve through that, that gives you a number of comfortably above 20% in cash receipts growth for the second half of the year.

On that basis, net debt is mentioned on the previous slide, and with the cash on hand of $21 million, we're comfortable there's enough cash in the bank from now through to 30 June, when we start collecting cash really strongly again in the July or the September quarter, to see us through. Free cash flow for the full year should be broadly in line with the guidance we've provided before.

We generate $9 million in the first half, we will chew through a bunch of that in the second half and end up the year with a cash balance similar to what we started the year at, probably slightly lower, in line with what we've discussed in the previous quarterly updates. FX exposure, Tim spoke to this earlier.

We've updated this slightly, a little bit more in the business related to US dollars, the sensitivity to the US dollar is a little bit higher than what it has been. The other area where there is a little bit of impact is within the Qustodio business.

The majority of their revenue is in US dollars, whereas the majority of their cost is in the euro, and there's been a little bit of a disconnect there. There's a little bit of cost related to that that's captured in the sensitivity analysis earlier in the pack.

On that basis, we can go to questions. We'll let Lach in.

Lach, you should be able to unmute now and ask your question.

All right, there we go. Thank you for the detail you've given us on the free cash flow.

Can I just dive into a little bit more on the cost side? I can see that you're now more confident on the March and June cycling at least 20% up.

Can you just talk through the timing of some of the cost savings around AI? I think from the last couple of quarters you talked to it being first half heavy.

Is that right? Can you just talk about the trajectory of the cost base going into FY27?

Ben Jenkins

I think the cost savings will really be an FY27 story. I think FY26, the cost base is fairly set now, I'm not expecting any significant increase from here.

Then through to FY27, we're reasonably confident that we'll be able to keep costs flat. Not CPI increase.

We should be able to offset any wage increases with savings within the business. That'll further extend that leverage.

If you forecast out the growth that we're expecting in the business in ARR, a lot of that comes through this half of the year, then you can see a path to fairly significant cash generation in FY27.

Sure. Can I just clarify for the second half?

I think Tim talked to some of the AI savings. You have $2 million in your presentation in savings.

Is some of that coming in the second half, or is that all really in FY27?

Ben Jenkins

Some of it's cost avoidance. An example would be the moderation team.

The moderation product's growing significantly, 25% to 30% year on year, yet we actually haven't grown that team much. Rather than having to put new human moderators on, we're able to deal with that through advancements in AI.

No worries, thank you.

Ben Jenkins

Lindsay, you should be able to unmute now and ask a question.

Hopefully that worked. Can you hear me?

Ben Jenkins

Yep.

Yep, brilliant. Thanks guys.

A couple of questions. First one on the UK.

It looks like a pretty modest kind of quarter, year over year, up 6%, something like that. You've talked about that being soft until you can launch all your new products post-unification.

The questions are, one, just remind us again where we are in that unification process, and then two, once you can start cross-selling into the UK, could you just talk about where the big opportunities are, but then also where the early opportunities are? Because I think people are going to kind of want to see some runs on the board.

Where are you going to focus first, and then where's the opportunity in the UK?

Tim Levy

The sequence is to take our cloud filtering offering from the US and integrate it with the monitoring product. You essentially have a cohesive monitor and cloud filter for our cloud-only customers in the UK, and that's happening right now.

The next step is to integrate our cloud filtering offering and monitoring offering with the inline appliances, the 4,000 Smoothwall appliances that are in schools and council schools and MATs across the UK. Then the final piece is to extend that suite of features to the larger MATs, which are what's called a multi-tenant deployment.

Essentially think about multiple corporations that are managed by a single MSP. That's the final stage of the integration roadmap, which should be around about September, kind of worst case end of this calendar year.

To answer your question more directly, Lindsay, the objective of this year is really an existing customer journey, getting all of our customers acquainted with the future of our platform, the singular platform and experience. It's been rebranded as Qoria.

It's got brand new user interfaces, much more modern and user-friendly interfaces, the same that our customers in the US enjoy. A big part of it this year is about bringing those customers on the journey, making sure that they're happy.

It's going to reduce any churn that we have, our gross retention is going to improve this year in the UK. That gross retention I think's been at 86% to 90% for the last year or two there.

That will improve, and it then gives us the opportunity in a cheaper way of selling things like parental controls and classroom management and data analytics and so on. Very much an existing logo story this year, graduating from the less complex to the more complex schools over time, and that's done deliberately for technical reasons, but also those bigger clients will appreciate that this product is tested in the field before they move to it.

Then yeah, 27 for us is then accelerating new logos in the UK market, going after a lot of the business that LightSpeed has taken from us in the last two or three years.

Brilliant. Now I'll switch onto Qustodio.

Again, pretty good quarter, 2.1 I think is what you called out. I suppose my question would be, it was a little bit on my numbers, looks a little bit slower than Q1.

I think traditionally this has been the strongest quarter for consumer, that kind of Q4 calendar year period. One, could you just remind us of the seasonality in the consumer business?

Then two, looks like there was a huge marketing spend in this quarter. It jumped up to north of 4 million bucks from two-something in Q1.

Tim Levy

Just wanted to confirm that marketing spend is seasonal as well and we shouldn't expect 4 million bucks a quarter going forward.

Ben Jenkins

Do you want to tackle that one first, Tim? You go.

Tim Levy

Yeah,

Ben Jenkins

that's right. It's timing, effectively, and where it landed, either side of 30 September.

If you take the spend over the whole half, average it, that's more what you'd expect in the second half of the year. Don't annualise the December quarter.

Tim Levy

That's right. So for the half they added just under 5 million of ARR and spent under 5 million of ARR.

That's what we've told Victoria to do. Grow within the amount of money that you bill your customers.

If you need more money than that, talk to Ben Jenkins. That's really the message.

All right, and just maybe I'll sneak in a third question, just an update on the B2B2C part of the Qustodio business, you've kind of maybe scrapped that from the deck?

Tim Levy

We've got around 200,000 accounts now connected through U.S. schools to U.S.

homes, and that's now a customer base. We're getting better and better, actually.

We don't, you're right, we don't talk much about it now, but we probably should. We're getting better at signing on these schools and proving to schools that there is efficacy, that there is benefits.

There's material reductions in toxicity in schools for bringing on these programs. I should present this to the market, actually.

It's pretty amazing. We're now signing up more and more schools and getting better at connecting those accounts.

Those schools that follow our marketing plan are typically getting 20% take-up comfortably. We're still getting around 1% of those upgrading to the paid product, but just again to reiterate, we are still not marketing to that group of customers.

We're not sending newsletters. We're not sending monthly emails or aggressive upgrade now type three months off type things.

We're not doing any of that. That program is about to start.

In this quarter we're expecting to do marketing communications to those 200,000 parents, and we're also going to start doing some innovative pricing. Rather than annual plans, which is the only way Qustodio goes, it's all upfront annual plans, we're going to start doing monthly plans.

From low to high-value plans, just to A/B test to see what that sort of market will handle. That's the next stage of the journey, Lindsay, is we've now got a big enough customer base to start playing with how do we monetise it.

That's really the 26 story. We'll be talking more about that in coming months.

Good stuff. Thanks, guys.

Cheers.

Ben Jenkins

Owen, you should be able to unmute and ask your question.

Guys, hear me okay?

Ben Jenkins

Yep.

Good one. Hey, well done on the operating performance of the business.

Just to understand, ARR growth was 23%, call it year on year. The weighted pipeline's up 29%.

Qustodio's accelerating toward over 30%. Can I just confirm the guidance is 20%?

Given your expectations, you're tracking at this stage above that 20%?

Tim Levy

Yeah. I'm feeling confident about that.

If you spoke to our head of North American sales, he'll say he'll kill that. The risk in our business, as is that so much of our North American sales are done in the last two weeks of June.

We don't really know for sure. Certainly the trajectory, the underlying trajectory of growth in this business is well north of 20%.

Absolutely.

Just to hit the nail on the head here because we're getting a few questions today. Net debt 33 mil, guidance is at or around 37 mil, 4 mil for the second half.

That includes interest costs of call it 1 mil a quarter, 2 mil for the core. The cost base is running, if you look at the second and first quarter, at around that 35 mil per quarter, all in.

Annualise that for the half year, 70 mil for the second half. Looking at the cash receipts of last year around that 44-odd mil, talking Ben around that, growing at greater than 20%, that looks to like it's about a negative 16 or 15 around that number, the 17 mil between cash collections and cash outflows in the second half, plus interest costs.

Can you just give us a bit more clarity? It sounds like the cash collections should be much higher than 20% in the second half to get that.

That's where the questions are coming at today, and we haven't really talked about that.

Ben Jenkins

That's right. I think we're comfortable to say that we think it'll be comfortably higher than 20%.

Again, point you to the half-on-half splits over the last couple of years, and last year is probably not the most appropriate one to use. It's not 60-40.

We're comping a very friendly period from a cash collections perspective, as I mentioned earlier. I think reiterate the, I guess, the guidance around in line.

We're talking, it should be there or sort of 2 to 3 million dollars within that level. Maybe a little bit more burn potentially, but again, going to Tim's point, it depends on North America.

There's potential to outperform that if we get sales through earlier in the period. We can invoice it, collect it, get a good cash receipt result in June.

Maybe it spills over into July, but the pipeline's there, the business is coming, and the cash will come, whether it's across June or July. I think the big point to reiterate that you're touching on is that cash collections piece, and having a look at, I guess, over the last couple of years, not just last year.

Tim Levy

Before you run Owen's numbers, we're $21 million at the end of the half, and if we burn 17, including interest, we're... Was that what the formula is?

Yeah. No, we'll be doing better than that.

Yeah.

Maybe another question is if revenue is running at 145 mil constant currency there, what is the cash conversion ratio expected?

Ben Jenkins

I think if you went back two, three years, it was converting at 100% effectively. It won't be that high because of the fact that we've weaned ourselves off those multi-year cash upfronts to a degree.

If you look at last year, cash collections were about 109 over opening ARR of 116. I think if you...

our closing ARR is 145, it won't be 145, but it'll be in that sort of, I guess, 5, 6, 7 million dollar range of that number.

Good one. Last one, just the UK, because Lindsay was touching on it, running at kind of 6% growth, group's running at 20.

I guess, is that the expectation if you enter FY27 for the UK? All the work you've been doing, is the acceleration you're expecting?

Just talk us through what growth rate is expected to be sustainable, maybe this calendar year and into next.

Tim Levy

This calendar year, I think 6+, hoping to get nudged closer to double digits, and then the year after, north of double digits comfortably.

Good one. Thanks, guys.

Ben Jenkins

There's no further questions, Tim, if you want to wrap up, we can finish it up there.

Tim Levy

Cool. Thanks everyone, thanks for your support, thanks for attending a big call.

I feel like we've delivered clear guidance to the market about growth, cash flow collections, free cash flow, net debt on the balance sheet. We're well set up now with the right balance sheet, the right team, the right strategy.

Pipeline's good. Feeling very good about delivering all of that.

From 1 July, we never turn back, right? We start paying off debt and we're away.

Feeling very good about our guidance for the year, very well set up and looking forward to delivering. We'll see you all next quarter.

Thanks a lot.

Ben Jenkins

Thanks.