EROAD Limited (ERD) Earnings Call Transcript
May 24, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Good afternoon for those joining in New Zealand, and those joining from overseas and U.S. Good morning for those investors and supporters in Australia as well. So I'm Mark Heine, I'm EROAD's CFO -- CEO sorry, accompanied by Margaret Warrington, our CFO today as well. Okay. So I'll just go quickly through the agenda for today. So we'll start off with Margaret and myself go through our financial results for FY '23, including our financial performance. I'll then talk about our strategy for the year and conclude with our outlook and guidance. Just to start us off, I mean, it's fair to say that FY '22 was a challenging year for EROAD. We had lost a way when it came to our cost base to our customers and to innovation. FY '23 has been a year, where we've had to turn it around and change. I just want to recognize that we have been deeply focused on changing and representing a rebuild and refocus for this year. [ To ] this year, we have to demonstrate our -- to shareholders our ability to execute. We have done this. We have delivered revenue and guidance to -- revenue and earnings to our guidance. This year, we also give our shareholders confidence that we can find a profitable pathway going forward. We have done this. And today, we will have a clear pathway to grow into free cash flow positive by FY '26. I am actually proud of the results that we're presenting today to our shareholders. I'm proud of our ability to promise what we -- to deliver on what we have promised. I'm also proud of the fact that we are on our way to achieve free cash flow positive, as a company, and we've got the right dedicated team together to help support us on that journey. So we turn to the key highlights for the business. First and foremost, if we focus on normalized revenue for the company, it was ahead of where we had guided. So we actually landed at $165.3 million for our normalized revenue for the year. Our reported revenue was $174.9 million, and we'll go through a bit later the change of our contingent considerations impact on why $165.3 million better represents our position for the year. Our normalized EBIT, so once we take into account contingent consideration and normalizing for integration was a loss of $4.5 million. That was ahead of where we had -- it was better than what we had thought we are going to do, as we updated guidance around negative $6 million to negative $3 million early this year. We are focused on our cost-out campaign as well. So we have realized $10 million in annualized cost FY '23, and we'll go through some of those cost-out later on in this presentation. For FY '24, we are focused on targeting an additional $10 million of cost-out, and we'll go through that as well. I'm happy to say that our future contracted income continues to increase and it rose by 16% during the course of FY '23 to almost $220 million. We have also improved our asset retention rate with our customers, that improved 93.4% in FY '22 to 94.8% on a global basis in our current financial year. AMRR has also improved as well, up 14% to $153.7 million for the year, about $8.6 million of that represents FX gains through the year, but has shown sort of progress there in terms of our customer base and getting recurring revenue into the business. We've also grown net units as well by 18,000 to take us to about 227,000 connections in the business for the year. Our free cash flow numbers have also improved from an outflow of $45.1 million in FY '22 to an outflow of almost $30 million in FY '23. And importantly, we've got a handle on costs in a sense that in the second half of financial year, [ with cash burns at ] $1.8 million per month down from $4.2 million during the first half of the year. As to our R&D costs, that was around $37 million for the year, a bit heightened from what we had previously, but was within what we had guided the market to, and we do expect revenue to go down -- sorry, R&D to go down to $30 million in the following -- in this financial year. So we look at our results overview, we focus on 4 main areas to ensure we delivered on this year's result, to remain credible and capable to deliver on our future plan, and those 4 areas touch on our strategy. So for those, who joined us for Investor Day, we did update our strategy in March to the market, and it's focused around 2 key areas. First is turning around the core, and for us, that is right-sizing the cost base for us, as a business; to move us to generate positive free cash flow. Second is around realizing growth in North America, and we put in place the right frameworks and fundamentals to enable that as well. We also indicated at the Investor Day that we're doing a strategic review at the moment with Goldman's, and that's really to look at what capability we can bring in the North American market, whether it's from a go-to-market technology or capital approach to help us accelerate our growth in North America. That process is ongoing and we'll update the market, as to how we're getting on, as any developments materialize. The second area that I would like to focus on is our financial headroom. We do have the financial headroom to execute on our strategy. As I mentioned before, we realized $10 million in cost-out and focus on further $10 million for this year. And we brought our cash burn down to $1.8 million a month in the second half of the year, and we're focusing on bringing it down further. We do have liquidity of $27.5 million available via credit facility, as well as [indiscernible] cash as well, and Margaret will go through that later on in the presentation in our [ debt ] profile. I'm also delighted to say that we've got the right executive team in place. Margaret was appointed as a permanent CFO from 1 December. Akinyemi Koyi continues as our President, North America, and Konrad Stempniak has joined us, stepped into the role, as the AGM -- EGM, sorry of ANZ at the beginning of the year. Aaron Latimer has rejoined us as our COO and very much focused on procurement side and supply chain side, the front of the business. We've got a new Chief People Officer in Shelley Prentice, who joined us in April. And in North America, we have 2 key hires we brought on board. First is Steen Andersen, who has over 25 years experience in SaaS businesses, and he joins us North America, as our Chief Transformation Officer make sure we realize [ that ] strategy into the business. And we've got a new CTO, also based North America, who is going to join us in Q1 of FY '24, who's got deep experience in telematics as well. We're also focusing as part of our strategy on making sure that sustainability is at the forefront of our organization. So Craig Marris steps into a role, as our Chief Sustainability Officer and given the need for our customers to get the right insight into the business, Dean Marris is our Chief Data Science Officer as well. And finally, we've been succeeding with our customers, too. We won Sysco in North America, which is over 9,000 connections in that market. We also won this year Fonterra, which is a massive deal for our business in the sense that we're bringing on a marquee customer, who's taken a full suite of our solutions, not only our [ in-car ] telematics device and Ehubo and our camera solution, but also our rollover solution and our satellite tracker as well. And finally, we've renewed ABC in North America with a further 6,000 connections as well. If you look at the key metrics that we measure ourselves by, we set these at our Investor Day in March. So it's going to -- the screen is [ distorted ], sorry. So first to AMRR. So we were $134.6 million in FY '22, and we hit $153 million in FY '23. That is the range that we set ourselves to a target of in between 11% and 13% for AMRR. I do note though that some of that does is made up by [indiscernible] of $8.6 million, which improved that number. We are focused on making sure we grow AMRR in the future. It's also pleasing to see the churn within the number that we have set ourselves as well between that 5% and 7% band. R&D as a percentage of revenue and our free cash flow margin will take more time to reflect organizational changes we put into place, but they are heading in the right direction, as a business. And while our average lease duration has fallen slightly, as we bring on more enterprise customers with typically longer contract period, we expect this to rise in the future. Here, we dig into a bit more around our revenue and our EBIT. Note, in particular, the step change that bringing the Coretex companies into EROAD has had on us. So first, normalized revenue, once we've adjusted for content consideration is $165 million, a 45% increase from the prior year. In terms of operating costs, they have risen on the basis of inclusion of Coretex and particularly our personnel expenses have. However, we are seeking to offset those going forward by focusing on our cost-out program. And our normalized EBIT was negative $4.5 million for the year. Turning to the market. First, just want to acknowledge New Zealand. It continues to execute very well here. We always set ourselves a target of having net new subscriptions of between 9,000 and 10,000 new subscriptions each year, and we've hit that -- we've hit 9,500 during the course of the financial year. So we're really pleased to see how we continue to deliver on new units in that market. We also know that we can grow further, and particularly in the light commercial vehicles segment. During the course of last year, we launched our new cameras product in terms of Clarity Get and Clarity Locate. Those are certainly targeted towards the light commercial vehicle parts of the market, providing that customers the ability to track what the vehicles are doing. And then if they wish pay-per-view for any camera footage that they may want to add on, and that provides a bit of a tease around what our camera solution can provide them. Our customers continued during the financial year to add further subscriptions in terms of SaaS services. I said over 1,500 customers add over 13,000 additional subscriptions to make sure that we can provide them with additional functionality into their business. And finally, we had significant renewal profile of almost 30,000 renewals during the course of the financial year. Looking at Australia, well, that's a much smaller part of our business, it is profitable and the key metrics do remain strong. We do have a strong asset retention rate in the Australian market. But I do note that during the course of the year, we did lose one of our enterprise customers, which will roll out during the course of FY '24. We are really excited about the potential in the Australian market, in particular, we see customers, who do like to adopt both the EROAD hardware -- legacy hardware, the Ehubo solution, as well as customers wanting to adopt the solutions that we brought on from the merger with Coretex, too. So it gives us the ability to target different plates with the right solutions for them over time. We do see some really good opportunities presenting themselves in Australia over the course of the financial year coming up. We look forward to seeing how we can grow in this market. And finally, in North America, we grew by 8% in net new units during the course of the financial year, and we are seeing momentum build. And I think it's really important to reflect on the success of winning Sysco in the market and what that actually means for a business like ours. Sysco is the world's largest food services company with over [ 650,000 ] customers globally, a large majority of which are based in North America. We are helping Sysco with a range of parts of their business. Not only are we going to help them manage their compliance risk, as a company, but we are providing new mapping and routing solutions to them to help their drivers be more effective and efficient on the road. We're also deeply integrating our data into the back end of Sysco to help them get more real-time information of what's going on with their vehicles on the road, so they can better service their customers around timing of delivery as well. It's a great partnership that we're developing with Sysco. In addition to that, Sysco has gone on the journey with EVs as well, and EROAD is partnering with them on that too. Not only are we helping them with the ELD compliance for EVs, which is the challenge they've had, and then we are going to help support them on move away from internal combustion engine vehicles. But also we're helping them understand what is the right -- help to optimize what the right vehicles for them to use from a EV perspective as well. So we're working closely with them, too. So it does help us on that sustainability journey and focus on enterprise customers. It does present opportunities for us as well there. So I might hand over to Margaret on the operational efficiency metric.
Hi, everyone. So it's really pleasing that given the focus on cost control, we're pleased to report that our CAC or cost to acquire, as a percentage of revenues remained relatively flat year-on-year, and but you'll see that CAC is -- on a per unit basis has increased. That largely reflects that we're targeting enterprise customers, where the costs often are incurred in a different period to where the unit growth was -- is occurs. These metrics are likely to have a bit of variability, as EROAD grows in scale. Our enterprise customers do help us drive better revenue and as the unit increases. That's reflecting the fact that you see the stagnation in the cost to acquire, as a percentage of revenue, but you see growth in the one on a per unit basis. It will move around over time. Our cost to service reduced, and that reflects the cost-out program, the synergies with the Coretex merger and the benefits of achieving scale. It's also reflecting our strategy, where we're working to make sure we align our service model with our customer segmentation. In terms of operating costs, this year, operating costs include a full 12 months of the combined EROAD Coretex Group, the prior period only had 4 months. As we've signaled over the past few months, management have been focused on driving out costs and enabling the business to become free cash flow neutral by FY '25, while continuing to grow. The graph on the left demonstrates that in most OpEx areas, we held costs, as a percentage of revenue flat. 3 notable exceptions to this were cost of goods sold, SaaS and personnel. In terms of cost of goods sold, it will mirror revenue for outright hardware sales, which has grown this year from $2.5 million to $6.9 million. SaaS cost growth is due to the mix of customers, while our large enterprise customers are profitable, the mix of customers drive different costs into our cost base than our SMB customers do. One of the examples of that is the SaaS costs, where we sometimes set up a separate instance for our platform to support the bespoke solutions we provide those customers. The initial impact of the FY '23 savings target of $10 million, as seen in these results with the full impact of these savings continuing into FY '24. The largest of our operating cost is personnel. So we'll split that out as an example in the graph on the right to detail the impact of the cost-out program. Personnel costs grew in FY '23 due to the additional 8 months of Coretex and the impacts of inflation. As part of the realignment of our cost base, EROAD has had an overall reduction in permanent FTE of more than 100 since 2022, I should actually say positions rather than FTE because we've managed and controlled each position, as vacancies occurs. This equates to an annualized savings of $9.6 million, of which actual personnel costs have a benefit of $3.5 million in FY '23. Ultimately, this cost-out work has contributed to an improved outlook for operating costs in FY '24, and it's also enabled us to realign our business requirements to our new strategy. This will allow EROAD to hold operating costs flat, as we've grown FY '24, even with revenue growth. The $10 million of annualized costs, we have already identified compensates for the expected increases in areas, such as SaaS and [ inflationary ] pressures, as we grow. Normalized for the Coretex acquisition, our free cash flow to the firm for the year is minus $29.9 million, that's an improvement on FY '22 of $15.2 million. As a result of our success in reducing the cost base and improving the operating structure of the business, free cash flow has consistently improved over the last 18 months. The key reasons for the improved cash flow are growth in our EBITDA, both revenue growth, along with cost management. There's been a collection of some of our [ data ] growth we experienced in FY '22 and improved inventory risk, as local supply chains ease. This has been offset by increased R&D with the work on integration. In the graph on the left, you can see the trajectory we are tracking on. The second half of the year, free cash flow is a significant improvement on the first half year. This provides further credibility to our FY '24 to '26 targets that we've set for free cash flow neutrality by FY '25 and then positive beyond that. In terms our debt, our monthly cash burn, as Mark mentioned earlier, fell to $1.8 million in the second half down from $4.2 million in the first half. And that's given the ongoing improvements to our business, as we execute future cash burn to reduce we -- sorry, as we continue with the ongoing improvements to our business, we expect future cash flow -- future cash burn to reduce, I'll get it eventually and for our growth to be managed within our current facilities. We have sufficient headroom in the $90 million facility, and we have remained compliant with all our debt covenants. Our debt largely funds our property, plant and equipment, which is mainly the hardware used by our customers. Our current PPE net book value is $61.7 million, while our [ net year ] is $62.5 million. As mentioned on the Investor Day, our leasing model does mean that EROAD pays for the hardware upfront, the hardware and the cost to acquire is repaid within approximately 21 months. As we pivot to enterprise customers in longer lease terms, we'll see the back half of that lease contribute to cash given our hardware has a useful life of about 6 years. Our goal is to achieve scale that enables us -- that enables our operating cash flows to be sufficient to fund the hardware outflow in the R&D. This will be achieved through both revenue growth and margin management. Well, R&D increased in total dollar terms, largely that's due to the inclusion of Coretex and the related integration spend. As a percentage of revenue, R&D is declining. And we've reiterated our expectation that our strategic discipline and targeted road map for R&D spend, we'll see that metric improve further in the coming years. This will further improve our cash generation. We signaled that we expected to spend $38 million on R&D, and our actual spend is coming in just below that at $37.2 million. Of this, about $8 million was related to integration activities. Next year, we're expecting to spend a total of $30 million, and we'll continue on our trajectory and the longer-term target of 13% to 15% of revenue for R&D. At the recent Investor Day, we discussed the 3G replacement program to ANZ with the impending shutdown of the 3G networks. We knew the shutdowns were coming. And although the dates were only confirmed maybe in the last 6 months to 12 months, we've been working towards a replacement plan for some time. However, COVID and the subsequent global supply chain issues, as well as continued strong unit growth have limited the access we had to 4G compatible units for this program, meaning we couldn't accelerate as fast as we wanted to. Without the cost impact of this replacement program in ANZ, EROAD would have been free cash flow positive. It's worth remembering, we've already gone through a similar program in North America, and while the volumes were less at scale, it was still successful. Although, this is not being necessitated by our networks, it does create an opportunity for us to upgrade services and engage with our customers. Across ANZ, almost [ a third ] of the units are already 4G compatible with the Australian units more than 70% complete. We had -- excuse me -- we have a new unit product, it costs us less, which is great. And more importantly, it simplifies the upgrade process for the majority of our devices. That means a large percentage of our devices can be swapped out by the customers and within 15 minutes. As mentioned at the Investor Day, this program was a significant one for us. It has been necessitated by the telecommunication network shutdown. It is our view on the information available to the market that this will, will not reoccur within the next 2 years. Our product remains current and useful within that time frame. We can compete -- sorry, we can complete the program with an existing facilities and the cost impact has been factored into our plans. Even with this program, we are confident we can target -- we are confident we are on target to deliver free cash flow neutral by FY '25 and positive in FY '26. Lastly the integration progress, Coretex. Well, Coretex has been mostly integrated within the 18 month window we expected. We made decisions to pause some work, and there are some areas that will require further progress to be made. The businesses are now fully integrated for our day-to-day operations. Our sales and customer support teams and platforms are combined. The new integration platform that sits between 360 and what EROAD has been built. Whilst further work will continue, we did elect to slow progress to enable better cost management. Ongoing work is planned, so that we can share our products between the platforms, but this is driven by EROAD rather than our customers. It hasn't slowed down sales and customers are continuing to use each of the platform and the different products. It's us that wants to be able to give our customers access to new features and over time, a single user experience. [ I'm just going to ] pass back to Mark.
Thanks, Margaret. So now I'll cover off our strategy update. So some of this may be familiar for those, who've joined us as part of our Investor Day in Sydney. But it's really important to remember that at the heart of our strategy is cash generation and appropriate revenue growth for the business, and we're deeply committed to enable that, and it has 2 [ limbs ] our strategy. The first is around turning around the core and the second is growth in North America. So what that means for us is reflecting EROAD, who we are today. As we've merged entities together, we have multiple solutions for our customers. And what we want to do is to enable them, so we can consolidate, so it's more simple. We also have to bring customers on right now, particularly enterprise customers that may be custom builds to help enable them to join our solution. We've also seen that our development of our software and hardware has had a longer time to market than what we'd like, sometimes in excess of a year or more. So reflecting on our strategy, turning around the core is focused on how do you one decrease inefficiencies in the business through our personnel and corporate costs, and we'll go through the next couple of slides that outline exactly, where we're focused on removing those costs in that business. The second is streamline our R&D function and refocusing spend. What we're doing is rather than having many spend R&D approaches, which may take longer time to materialize the return on investment, we are focusing our investment on what we have right now in front of us, [ for our ] customers to enable us to get a quicker return on investment from them. Finally, we're looking to tailor our service levels to drive performance. We know from our customers that they have different needs across the size of their fleets. We had a number of our larger customers' needing more bespoke support, whereas the smaller customers can be accommodated by our customer self-service solution. So we are focusing on how do we segment the customer base we're better targeting around their needs and what we can accommodate. When it comes to North America, we are targeting the transportation vertical with whole-of-fleet solutions. What that meant is those customers that we know we can win with, including [ ODFL ] that focuses on less than a truckload solutions. We can actually focus on them better, provide solution to them and we'd note that other [ LTL ] providers or other [ long haul ] trucking companies out there that we can focus on to revenue units from them. We're also looking to complete a scalable and competitive product offering for the enterprise fleets in the U.S., and that's focusing on our platform making sure that it's the right fit for purpose platform for our customers, but also then looking at where do we have a competitive advantage for our customers. We know we're really good at integrating our solution to the back end of our large customers and hoping that data realize efficiencies within their business. So we see that as a point of differentiation for us, and we're going to be focusing on that. Equally, we know that sustainability is a point of difference in the market that we can bring to enterprise customers, so we're focusing there as well. Finally, we are scaling up our North American sales team. By bringing more people on board, we know we can increase the pipeline opportunities in the North American market. So during the course of this financial year, we're looking for the right talent to help build up the right sales team we need in North America to focus on enterprise pipeline. If you look at the timeframe and the horizon that we're targeting [indiscernible] FY '23 was a busy year very much focused on our current corporate cost base that we had. We have reduced our overheads from a corporate perspective. And as Margaret mentioned before, largely driven by head count reduction, as well as other overheads we can reduce. For example, our property portfolio and elsewhere. For FY '24, we're targeting our customer segment, as I mentioned before, that is the key area that we think we can do better on for our customer needs, particularly as those over 85% of revenue comes from our top 1,800 customers. Our smaller 7,600 customers account for about 13% of revenue. So [ getting us right ] will mean that we can hopefully focus from a spend point of view on our investment in the right area. Margaret also outlined the focus in FY '24 and further on our accelerated 3G replacement program. We're also looking at our product stabilization and simplifying our platform. So as we have these 2 platforms from EROAD and Coretex simplifying them into one common platform going forward. A key focus for us will be the roll out of Sysco this financial year because only a small number of units were rolled out during FY '23. The large majority as well as integration targeted to be completed during the first half of FY '24. And finally, there's ongoing cost-out, which I'll outline a bit further on the next slide. And lastly, the longer-term horizons around growth in North America, and that's very much predicated on growth in the large enterprise customer base, but we know we can win. Capitalize on our sales and product improvements that we've been making across the business. As we grow in scale, we have to rationalize the cost base and produce great economies of scale and development in other areas of the business. So for me the focus there really on the right-hand side around FY '24 and what we're targeting for further reduction in our spend. One is around product simplification. We know we can do better around consolidating our product suite and eliminating duplication from what we're doing. And it's been a large program work in our R&D function to make sure that we go to market with the best solution for our customers rather than having 2 or 3 out there, as we're merging the company together. Another area is corporate efficiency. We are focused very much on streamlining our process and systems and that's across the board, whether it's an R&D bringing product to market to make sure we can do that fast and have fewer folks working on it. Orders in the corporate function as well and having fewer people enabling our back end, so that we can realize better cost-out of the business. In terms of supplier renegotiations, our greater scale now means we are able to get better terms from our suppliers, and we are focused on doing that particularly in the contract manufacturing side, as we're simplifying our hardware product suite. And finally, we're still focused on expense rationalization, making sure that we are very disciplined on our travel costs, and our costs around other discretionary activity we have in the business. So looking at the year ahead, as I mentioned earlier, we are committed to having a sustainable and profitable growth profile going forward. If you look at our strategic review in North America, we have commenced that and we are identifying potential opportunities up there, mainly focused around from a go-to-market or technology perspective, but also potentially from a capital perspective, as well as to how we can derisk and accelerate our North American plans. The review is on going, and we hope to update our investors further at our ASM in July. When it comes to guidance, we are providing guidance to the market this year. On the revenue side, we're targeting our revenue to be between 175 and $180 million, which is a growth of between 6% and 9% in revenue. For EBIT, we targeted normalized EBIT [ up to ] 0 and $5 million. And R&D, as we noted at the Investor Day, we're keeping at level $30 million for the next financial year and going forward, too. And we do believe that provides us with sufficient R&D investment to continue to innovate in the market and grow, but also making sure that we drive the right efficiencies in the R&D part of the business. And we do continue to target $2 million of cost-out in this financial year. We are resolute that we want to be free cash flow neutral by FY '25 and positive by FY '26, and our results this year did demonstrate our commitment to achieving that. There is still work to be done, but we do have the right team, the strategy, and we are well prepared to tackle the opportunities that are ahead of us, as a company. We do have a clear pathway going forward, and I look forward to advancing that over the course of this year and the years ahead. So what we might do now is might turn over to Q&A. So [ I must say ], I could stop sharing the screen and see participants. So we can do this in 2 ways. One, you can raise your hand, and we can take you off mute, and you can ask your question. Secondly, you can please really welcome to ask a question in our Q&A chat as well. So be with us, the technology is about [ ropy ] today, but please put up your hand, and we can answer. So Guy, I see that your hand up. So I'll take off -- I'll take off mute. Can you ask a question, Guy?
Yes. Maybe just the first one for me. And just in terms of North America.
Sorry, I can't hear you.
How about now? Can you hear me?
Sorry, Guy, go again. My computer was on mute. So sorry about that.
Yes. Sorry. Can you guys hear me now?
We can hear now.
All good. Just my first question is just around the North America review. Maybe firstly, just whether or not any options have been taken off the table? And then secondly, can you maybe explain how a partnership might look? Like can you actually differentiate the tech stack that you have between the markets in terms of -- I don't know, if there's any risk of giving away additional IP? Or is the partnership that you might look at based more around, say, a reseller agreement?
Sure. So you just mind repeating the first part of the question, Guy just...
Just whether or not...
[indiscernible] Graham noted back in March, look, there are no options on the table outside of, we're not looking to divest North American business, so that's off the table. So that there are a range of opportunities we've been considering, albeit very early days at the moment. And they go from SaaS partnerships to hardware technology advancements to look at it from a cloud perspective and so forth. So there are opportunities we are considering. And then, it really links into the second part of the question, as a company, we're looking at focusing our R&D investment better or where we have a competitive differentiation, which historically has been around compliance, and we're now targeting around sustainability and fleet efficiency and the partners may help us in terms of going to market quicker. And a good example of that is our camera partnership that we've had historically, when we brought Clarity to the market. We work closely with the contract manufacturer on that camera, as they are the experts and invested into the right platform from a camera perspective, we brought our secret sauce in terms of compliance in telematics to that journey, so we could further accelerate and bring to market quicker a camera than we've done it ourselves. So that's one sort of historical example, here, where partnership like this could help accelerate us. We do also look at where from a hardware perspective that can help open up further customer base that we may not be targeting right now. In North America, we do have a mix of direct and indirect go-to-market channels. So if there are further ones that we can utilize to have a broader customer base, we can target, we'll be really open to that as well. So those are the kind of areas that we are focusing on. As I said, the conversations are in fairly preliminary stages, but as they become more significant, we'll certainly be updating the market.
Yes. And on the segmented customer servicing or prioritization of service across the customer base, I mean, how far -- is that fully implemented? And like what has been the response from customers so far for that?
Yes. So we've been rolling out a customer self service platform, which [ is in beta ] for a while is now going to production with the customers. So that's been rolled at the moment. It's in transition with some customers, as you sort of take them from perhaps they will be using the phones to more of a online resolution of concerns. So we are going through each market that we're in, a plan to help take the customers on that journey. So it's relatively early days on that. There's been good visibility of tickets and invoice and so forth that customers can access in this, and they do like the fact that they can get them immediately. So we do hope that adoption will drive up, as we implement those transition plans during the course of this year.
And I guess just the last one, can you give us any additional color just around those customers that were churning off in North America?
So in North America, we churned one customer, who have got 900 connections, and that was in relation to that they've been bought by larger customers, part of consolidation in the industry, and I believe [ they rolled ] off our solution for that.
Guy, quite a variety of reasons, so -- and mainly in the SMB base, which is a fairly competitive part of the North American market. In terms of -- and a chunk of those customers, we're not -- we don't hold the direct relationship. There's a channel partner between us. So it's difficult to tell for some of them. In terms of the fleet resizes, which in effect add into that number, they can be seasonal in nature. So basically, we've got customers, who have taken part of their fleets off and perhaps not at the moment, and so they're counted in that number. It's about 2,000, we disclosed it. But they haven't removed their whole fleet, and they still are being [ build ] on across other units. So again, many of those are through a channel partner. So it's difficult to tell. It could just be seasonal fluctuation or them swapping units out because some of those customers have been doing the 4G upgrade albeit it's substantively complete, but some of them still need to swap them [ out ] in the truck. So bit tricky to tell, but most of the stuff we can see is SMB and for a variety of reasons.
Thanks, Guy. While we wait for other questions, I -- we do have a couple in the chat. So the first one relates to larger customers we lost in Australia and U.S. Do you know where they've moved to? So in Australia, we did lose one customer in a year. They've gone, I believe, to a specialist provider in that vertical that they operate in. We were down to last 2, and we were attractive, as part of the process, but they have gone down a certain routes. [ They are ] different to our solution. But we do -- we are still competitive in that field with those customers. In the U.S., as sort of Margaret mentioned, there's been a range of different customers that have sort of left us, we have some churn, some of the SMB based are going to more low cost, low value and less [ specificity ] in terms of the solution provided. For the larger ones, it's a bit of a mix between there is some legacy players still out there, who are competitive and also the likes of [ Telstra ] we'll see more, more as well. So it's a bit of mix of who we see customers churn to. The good news is we are definitely competitive, if not better, than those out there in the market. And now for example, Sysco churn from a legacy player in the telematics space to us, and we're up against [ Telstra ] as part of that and to beat them. So [indiscernible] markets, where some times, you do lose unfortunately to a competitor there.
And just to add to that, we're winning -- we're winning, if you take the SMB example, where we're losing some customers, we're also winning SMB customers at the same time. So it goes to Mark's point.
[indiscernible].
And we have some questions here that Josh has e-mailed and Josh and Craig has e-mailed in. So I'll just work through them and read them out. I think he is in a bit of trouble with the Zoom call at the moment. So his first question was what normalizations you are accounting for in guiding in the FY '24 EBIT? And it's to do with the 3G, the replacement program is what were expected to normalize for. Quite tricky to anticipate what we're going to end up seeing in either accelerated depreciation or scrap with units returning with a value because it will depend on customer profile and how those units are swapped out. So we are providing for it, but the mix of that will change over the life of the program. And we signaled at the Investor Day that the cost of goods sold and the program cost are expected to be between 5 and $7 million. So [ that would be other area ] that feeds into those normalizations. Josh's second question was you disposed of $9 million of hardware assets during the year. Are these 3G ones that he is further referring to the PPE note in the financial statements. I've been told by my team I'll have to blame the accountants for -- sorry the auditors for this one. Basically, no, what we are required to do, as we've explained to you guys, the units flow back and they come out, they come back from a customer, they can be refitted and flow back out to a customer. As they do that, as they will come in from a customer and go into inventory, we actually have to record the returning value, as a disposal and then we would push it back out as an addition. So when you're looking at that and considering that you should look at the additions and disposals together and almost net them off. It's just idiosyncrasy of accounting that we require to put them separately. And we will -- as I've just mentioned, we will have either accelerated depreciation or some scrap likely as we do the 3G swap-out, and we increased our provision this year to start to accommodate that. Next one, you may have already answered Mark, but I'll read out. On the strategic review, I appreciate this is still going, but have you done any narrowing of possible options as anything off the table?
So I think I answered that, Josh, as part of earlier going back to Guy, look, we're very open to different approaches there, and this is still an ongoing process, but outside of divesting North America no options out of table. We do plan to obviously update shareholders, as soon as we can, where there is significant development on that front. And then the final one, we have answered also, Josh raised the 1,500 unit customer [ you use ] in Australia are -- when do those units be taken out? I believe it's largely FY '24.
Yes. So we're expecting the units to start rolling off in the next 3 months to 6 months, but the integration process, the customer is currently going through is pretty complex one. And so we think estimate 3 months to 6 months, they'll start and probably take up 12 months to roll off.
Correct. So there's been some further questions in the chat. So do we need a capital raise or do you need a capital raise? And do you believe that you would get shareholder support for a raise, given the poor recent performance? So as I first want to acknowledge this, we have in FY '22, we certainly had poor performance in terms of our cost base and how we performed as a company and I absolutely acknowledge that. When bringing together the plan FY '23 and FY '24, we've been very focused on what are the capital constraints that we have and where we need to go as a business. We do not need a capital raise to execute on our strategy that's before us. So we do have sufficient liquidity in the business to enable that. So we do not plan a capital raise at this point in time. What management is really focused on and acknowledging the point about poor performance is we know we need to deliver for our shareholders. So in FY '23, we're very focused on making sure we did perform when it came to revenue and earnings and cost-out, there's still work to be done on that front. But we need to be proud of the fact that we have achieved guidance and actually surpassed that as a business revenue when we normalize that. So we are turning around the company and [ getting us ] to where we need to get to, but it does require further work. But in relation to from a capital raise, no, we do not need a capital raise, as a business. Anything you want to add to that to Margaret or? So next question is digging into a bit of detail for Margaret, could you please repeat what you made on Slide 14, where the changing P&L profile, as you move to more enterprise customers and have a different depreciation profile.
Okay. I think I'll give it a go again, please ask another question if you don't think I do well enough the second time around. So and to the point I was making on that particular slide was around SaaS costs. So what we're seeing is with larger enterprise customers because of their bespoke solutions and integration, the SaaS cost we need to set up separate instances. So our average SaaS cost on those particular deals can go up in some instances compared to the scenario we were running our platforms for a large group of people, and they don't need a specific instant for them. So that's what drives some changes in the SaaS costs. So as we merged with Coretex, that was -- if you looked at the different profile SaaS costs on 2 businesses on average EROAD's SaaS cost was smaller, Coretex's was higher because of that bespoke instance. So as we merge them, we've seen a growth, is the point I was making.
Hope that answers your question, but please feel free to raise question for clarification on that front. Next question relates to what are the contingent consideration still owe and how much? So the way that the merger with Coretex operate was that depending on achievement of certain metrics, contingent consideration up to about [ $30.6 million ] could be received by the Coretex shareholders. That was measured end of last year, and all consideration has been paid up. So there was about 10.8 million in shares, so I think it's about 1.8 million shares, which is valued -- sorry, 10.8 million because it's valued at [ $6 ], I think it was and it's [ $8.5 ] million in cash that was also paid out, too. So there's no additional contingent consideration that's payable, as part of the merger with Coretex. Given you're still expecting to burn cash in 2024 and probably 2025, how the discussions with the bankers? Is the CapEx figure relatively fixed figure? Just sort of 3 questions here. Then how much of this is not new customer driven? Why is so much upgrade for New Zealand 3G? I'll kick off and pass it to Margaret. So look we do have good conversations with our bankers, and they -- we will continue to update them about how we operate as a business, and they're happy to see us deliver on the guidance that we've given to market. I might hand over to Margaret in terms of is the CapEx figure, relatively fixed figure?
In terms of CapEx, clearly, it's driven by either our decisions around 3G replacement or our growth profile. So when you say is it fixed, it's clearly fixed per unit. We now -- although we just employed a new contract manufacture that saved about 25% on the cost of one type of our product. So ultimately, the CapEx will be driven by growth in the pace of the 3G replacement program from our perspective. Just -- in terms of -- so we've signaled -- I was just looking at the next part of the question, which is how much of this is not new customer driven. I think we've signaled that we had approximately 80,000 units to swap out over ANZ, and we're expecting to do that over the next 2 years to 3 years. Our units do fall back to 2G. So we can continue to operate in New Zealand. Our units will operate and some do operate currently on 2G, and that our network is not shutting down the same timeframe, as the 3G network. I think, I have addressed the last part of that. too.
Correct. Let's go back to the point. I mean, look, we do have a $90 million facility in place with the bankers, that's sufficient for us to execute on our strategy. So we do talk to our bankers and have support from them, as a company. Are there further questions in the chat, no. Are there further questions, people want to put their hands up, they may want to ask of us as well. We'll give you one just a minute or so to ask any further questions. Okey dokey. If there's nothing further, thank you for joining us today. Please feel to reach out to Margaret and myself, if you do have any follow-up questions. As a company, we are focused on the right track. After challenging years behind us, FY '23 was a year, where we did achieve and deliver on what we set ourselves. In FY '24, we are absolutely committed to continue to do so as well. So we look forward to sharing our results, as we continue into FY '24. So thank you, everyone, and appreciate the time.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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