Michael Reid
Analyst · Citi
Fantastic and congratulations for a huge amount of work from the team. I think just acknowledging the finance and HR and the legal team that have made 2 acquisitions come to fruition. The finance team has done all the multiple announcements since April, plus the end of the financial year results and on top of that, a debt facility process, which has been astounding. So Tish, you are allowed to have a little break, maybe a couple of days after this. Strategic update. So for those of you who haven't been following, we are now what is a globally distributed automated infrastructure company. So people are, well, what is Megaport and what do we do. We do 3 things. We deploy compute, network and storage, which are physical infrastructure assets. We deploy them in data centers all around the world. We own that infrastructure. We use our capital to procure that. We physically install it in the data center that we lease. We then stitch it all together with fiber, and then we run that. Now we run a software automation layer that we have built and managed in-house. That is the sort of crown jewels of the business that automates the deployment in seconds for all compute and GPU, for all network globally and then for all the storage elements as well. The 3 pieces make up the trifecta to what is all IT infrastructure service in any application that you have ever used in your life. You can see how we're distributed and broken down around the globe. We are in 31 different countries. We have 330,000 pieces of physical fiber that we lease and stitch together 3,000 network devices, 13,000-plus GPUs and CPUs and scaling at a rate of knots across 1,100 data centers. This is an incredible business with an impenetrable moat that is just scaling at a rate of knots. Like, look at this thing, it's incredible. So we're super proud of what's been built there. But as I say, a picture is worth a thousand words and a demo is 1,000 PowerPoints. So instead of putting 1,000 PowerPoints in here, I'm just going to do a very quick demo to show you what that actually means, assuming I can switch over here. Just checking everyone can see my screen. Is that coming through? Yes, all right. So what you can see here is Planet Earth. We obviously -- we have 2 options. We have the flat Earth version, which Leticia is fond of. And we've also got the spherical version. I'm a spherical guy. So let's zoom in. What you've got here is every single data center that Megaport has rolled out across the globe from a network standpoint. This is specifically looking at the network part of the business. We are compute, network and storage, and this is the network element. So if we just take a look at the United States, this is me logging into the portal as a customer. I can see all the different connectivity and different products that we've deployed. We'll pick a clean location, and we'll just zoom in on that. So we'll take 13 data centers clustered over in this particular location. We'll keep zooming in. There is 12. You can see all these different data centers sitting in this particular location. So we've got NTT Global. We've got QTS Portland, Flexential, EdgeConneX and we keep scaling. We go right down here to 2, and there's another -- there's Digital Realty Portland. So what you've got in this very small location in Portland is a whole range of data center operators that we're currently live and active in. And this is when we talk about deploying data center locations. This is what we do. So what happens is a customer has their own compute hardware sitting in this particular data center and they need to go and connect. So let's pick EdgeConneX here. We click on there and we can choose what product we want to create. We want to create a port. We want to get access from our server that we've got in that data center. We want to access connectivity to the outside world. We've picked the data center, we click next. We scroll down and we choose what side it's a port. So this is the Megaport at the 100-gig location. We'll give it a name. We'll choose whether you want to add a cross-connect, which is automated for you. We can actually deploy that. Month-to-month terms, you name it. You can add all sort of technical details, but we'll just click next and click add the port. And what we've done, as you'll see, it has gone blue. We now have deployed physically a physical 100-gig port in that particular location that I'm going to connect my data center infrastructure to. So I could be a bank and I'm running a server in there with all my applications and I need to connect somewhere. So we take the port and we go and add a connection. And we say, I want to connect to a cloud, to a private data center, to Megaport Internet, to an Internet exchange, to a marketplace, to a service key, to Megaport Storage, and we keep adding more products. But let's say we want to connect to cloud, and we'll scroll down. These are all the different cloud locations. We'll choose Amazon Web Services, a hosted connection. And every one of these locations is physical infrastructure that we've built out around the world, over 300 different cloud on-ramps. And so you can see, these are all the different connections. A blue and a red connection adds diversity. It's that simple. Let's choose a location. We'll choose up to Seattle. You can see how many milliseconds delay. We'll choose a blue. We click next, and then we give it a name. We give it a speed. Let's say, 25 gig, and we just click next. All you need to know is your AWS account ID. The platform automatically stitches in the AWS portal, gives you a piece of fiber, in effect that is yours, that you can access through that at 25 gig from your data center. We click add and then we're done. And you'll see that connectivity is now live. So that's -- it's that simple. We go back to that particular location. Every time we go and add products, we grab that same product and we say we would like to connect that to, say, a global WAN platform, and we want to go and, say, connect into Brisbane, Australia. There's NEXTDC. Let's go in. It's 148 milliseconds all the way from the U.S. to that particular location. We'll click next. We'll give it a name. We'll give it a speed. Scroll down, click and you got all this cool technical stuff you can add in, click next, and we've deployed. And what we've done is we're traversing across many, many different subsea cable that's already built. You are now stitched in and connecting across to Australia. So that becomes the network component of this piece, and the network stitches it together. And then we go into the compute side of the business. And so the exact same thing. We look at live demo to shareholders, and we go in here, and we have this beautiful thing that says create a server. So when we click create a server, first of all, we have created network. Now we're going to create compute. You have options. You have bare metal, bare metal GPU, virtual machines, and there's a whole range of other cool stuff that the team keep building. These are the locations that we have physically deployed infrastructure in. So imagine walking into a data center and seeing racks and racks and racks of servers, all spinning, lights on and you name it, let's say, 70% of those servers are customers and 30% are waiting to be deployed. So let's say, take North America. Here is Ashburn. That's where the home of the clouds. We'll scroll down and you've got all these different types of servers that you can deploy on demand at the click of a button. Core optimized memory optimized storage. Let's just choose this one, rs4.metal. You can see how much it costs per hour. You can scroll down. We can even predeploy an operating system. So the platform is searching through all the servers and deploying operating systems that make sense that we expect the customer to utilize. Why is this important? Imagine pulling an iPhone out of the box, and it didn't have an operating system on it. It would now take you 20, 30, maybe 2 hours to download and then get it up and running. We can actually predeploy the operating system on you, which means it deploys in 5 seconds. So we can scroll down, choose hourly. This is live. And so I click deploy hourly. And in effect, what it's doing is taking a server in that particular location, it's deploying it. And in less than 5 seconds, it's on. It's on with an operating system live in Ashburn. We can click into that. I can't tell you how complicated the software is to allow you to physically do that, mind-boggling. Massive shout-out to Edu and his team that actually made that happen. If you have a look down here, you can see all the different options. This is a live server. It's available. You can ping it. You can put your own software and do whatever you want to do. Then you can manage it. You can say down here, look, I want to out of band remote access, move it, install it, delete it, you name it. You can scroll down and add a database, add Kubernetes, add a network or add storage. And so this is the next pillar. What we've talked about is network. We've talked about compute that we've now deployed. And I would like to add a storage bucket onto the side of it. So if you think of it, in your laptop that's sitting in front of you got a compute, a little bit of Intel chip or something sitting in there. You've got some memory. You've got a storage, which is a little bit of a hard drive and then you got a WiFi device. That's your compute, network and storage in terms of a laptop. It's what we do, too. It's really that simple. So we click storage, we click object, block. We've got different options. Let's take object storage. and you can start to create a bucket. It's really simple. I'm going to create a bucket, and I get to choose, super high-performance storage delivered in seconds on our VAST platform. And then we look at our standard cost-optimized storage that crosses between VAST, Wasabi and a few other components inside there. And now you can start to see where we've deployed that. So let's look at a very low-cost storage platform that you can deploy from anywhere. Let's just say you wanted to create a backup out of your cloud to make sure that if there was a problem with the cloud, you had a full backup that's actually protected. And if say, you were attacked from a cyber perspective, you've got complete control. There's North America, all the different locations, Europe, Asia Pacific. This is a truly global platform. Let's say, Ashburn again. And all you need to do, imagine that you were trying to protect your data. If you have ever heard of these sort of CryptoLockers and so forth, where they break into your laptop and then they encrypt all your data and ask you for Bitcoin. 70% of the time that, that occurs, it actually has already encrypted your backups. So your IT team says, don't worry, I've got a backup. They start downloading it and you realize that's also encrypted. How do you protect that? One button from Megaport. You click this, you go right and you've object locked it, you click retention, how long you want to keep it for. So for governance, you click 30 days. You've got an immutable backup for 30 days, you click create the bucket. So that is compute, network and storage, all delivered via software, all on demand. The only thing I'm going to go back to is I'm going to delete this server because what it shows you is the fact that it's on demand, and I actually want to sell this server to someone so it's live. So let's just delete this. I will have to copy and paste this piece so I don't fat finger it, and I've deleted it. Now what has happened is that server has been deleted. It gets wiped 3 times, made available back in the portal. Okay. So hopefully, that gives you a perspective of what compute, network and storage really is without 700 slides. So we go back to this -- I think this is probably, I would say, like almost strategy on a page. These are the investments and strategic pillars that unlock TAM, total addressable market. So if we look here, I will just get my laser pointer, each one of these rings, Tish called them the onion rings. Each one of these onion rings or rings, in effect, represents a product that opens up total addressable market. So one of the key pieces to continued net retention, one of the most important factors if you're investing in a tech business, is to ensure that technology is awesome, customers love it, pricing and all those components are covered off, but the company is continuing to invest in new products and making things that customers -- that solve customer problems and that they love. And if you don't do that, you don't earn the right to get your net retention, your growth starts to slow. So this is this sort of continued investment. And you can see in the past 3 years, we've gone from what was a cloud connectivity company in Virtual Edge, adding Global WAN, data center interconnect, DC Internet, NAT Gateway and a whole range of security that we've just launched in the last hour of along including DDoS and IPSec and you name it. That represents the network part of the business. The compute component, which is CPU and GPU elements, came with the Latitude acquisition, and that team innovated incredibly fast and added storage to that pillar. And so you can do 2 things. You can continue to add rings and you can also expand the ring. And so the expansion of the ring is building. That's when we added new data centers that I talked about before, new markets, new countries, taking the same product set and landing in new locations, or even just expanding capacity, going from 10 gig to 100 gig, from 100 gig to 400 gig. That will actually expand the ring. That's the build-out. The innovator, all the developers and engineering teams sitting there building awesome compute products, network products, storage products, AI products and security that you'll see continually invested in that space. And you should expect from us constant updates around what we're bringing to market to solve customer problems. The last one is where we invest. And so we expand product and engineering to constantly invest in that space around innovation. We expand the go-to-market because the last piece that you have is when you build beautiful cool products, you need to go and tell the world about them and take them to your customers. And the last piece is you can build that either internally with your innovation team, or you can look to acquire strategic acquisitions. Latitude and Extreme are great examples of that. And actually, they represent 2 things. Latitude adds a new ring, whereas Extreme expands the existing ring. So you're actually seeing acquisitions that hit both expanding the ring and adding a new ring. So if you had to ask what our strategy is. We're adding ring and expanding them. And then you'd say, well, what constitutes a focus from a product standpoint? So these are the guiding principles specifically for product or an acquisition that we are looking at. And so we're very disciplined around what we look to acquire. If you look at Latitude, we acquired a company the same as Megaport, total automation, super important. That gives you the ability to be instantaneous. You saw us deliver that server in less than 5 seconds. If you can automate the infrastructure, you can deliver at global scale. If you can make it incredibly resilient, I can do something that you can't do as a customer, I can do it much more resilient than you could do yourself. We make it flexible, so you can turn it on, turn it off, add it, change it month-to-month per hour, whatever it is you make it super flexible. If you can make it self-service, you can add this magical thing called product-led growth, where people jump on the platform and start to add products and you reduce the amount of team that you need to service it. If you make it super easy, just that alone is what you have actual entire companies existing just because they're easier than something else. Add the best support, make sure the pricing is super disruptive and make sure that the whole thing is profitable and you have the ingredients for an incredible company. That's Megaport. That's Latitude that we have brought into the business and everything else will scale from there, and every single product lives and breathes off of that. We've done some very, very large strategic deals, whatever it was, 1 point something billion that we've gone and announced. And a lot of folks are looking to say, well, how does that play out? What is the time line? What does it look like? It's different to what you've ever done. So what we've sort of broken down is just so that you can have sort of an understanding of the process that we go through. There is sort of sales, finance and legal, procurement and then operations. And it's pretty obvious, you could sort of play this through, but I think we get a lot of questions about how it sort of works. So first of all, we would have a customer that we would talk to. They either come to us, they're introduced to us, they are existing customer and they'd say, we want to do a whole range of CPU, a whole range of GPU, or whatever it may be. Now we don't have it in the portal or the platform. So these are custom strategic deals. We would work on pricing, which is pretty tricky because pricing is only available for a very short period of time because of what's happening from a market perspective around supply/demand, particularly memory, if you are across it, sort of 2 weeks and pricing changes. So you've got to be very, very fast here. Contract negotiation can happen in parallel or very quickly. This is a very quick process. That can happen incredibly quickly, too, for sort of traditional enterprise, a bit longer. But you need to operate very quickly in this environment because by the time you've gone through your sort of contract negotiation, your pricing could have gone up. So everyone moves fast. We need to ensure we're funded. So we can't announce or do a land a deal that's not fully funded, which is what we've gone and put from a debt perspective before that was the capital raise, before that was the debt, et cetera. We then land signature, and we announce that, obviously, if it's material to the market, which is why you've seen those announcements. Separate to that, we look at DC contracts. So we have to procure the hardware, and then we also, at the same moment, need to make sure it's got a home to live in with power. So that is a very fast process to land, actually, the data centers that we're going to land in. In many cases, we're pre- talking to hundreds and hundreds of data centers anyway because we live there, but that's a very fast process to land that contract. And then we would say there's an equipment delivery period of time. And this is where I think the market sort of -- it's just worthwhile being aware. This can take time. And I think we've called it out on the next sort of slide, 6 to 9 months for delivery and all these different components can play out. So to be clear, you don't deploy the CapEx until it's sent. But you do have deposits that you pay prior, and we still have to announce the full thing fully funded is how we've played that. So we've got GPU, CPU gets ordered, network gets ordered and storage. These are the pieces of the puzzle that make up the AI, data centers that we're building out, mainly for inference and also some -- you can look at that for training and so forth for smaller pieces. But yes, this becomes the inference cloud and effect that our customers procure. The team then builds out the data center. So the data center actually has to get delivered on their site from a data center perspective, which is the build-out, the ready-for-service components, putting all the power, making sure it's available, getting the racks actually physically installed. The team then rack and stack. It's a very fast process because we're only talking about small numbers of servers. It's a fast process. They call it a week to rack and stack, and then a month to get the whole thing sort of set. It depends upon the size, the scale, the complexity. So that would take time. We test, make sure it's up and running. We hand over and give delivery to a customer. And from that moment, it instantaneously starts billing and it becomes sort of -- that's why you'll see sort of step-change jumps in our ARR throughout the year as we turn on the take-or-pay, which is the entire cluster, then it just starts billing. And then we have a live customer, we continue to manage from an operations perspective. I'll spend a bit of time on it because I think it's important. These are pretty sizable deals that we're doing, and we're rolling them out in many different locations and executing many different contracts to many different customer. But the team is on fire. So a quick update on the strategic contracts and the GPU pool. So strategic contracts, what we have, as we pointed out, very specifically, you need 3 things. You need the power, you need the network, you need the compute element. You also need storage. You need to sort of procure all the infrastructure to get that power. Lots of questions around whether we have access to that, et cetera. Just clearing the market here. We have equipment, space and power has been procured for all contracts prior to today's announcements. Delivery and deployment is progressing through FY '27. The addition of these new long-term contracts brings $1.3 billion of TCV and a total ARR of these long-term contracts. Once deployed, remember, as we deploy them, and it will take time, we'll add $435 million of annual recurring revenue. And then we've supported that with $826 million of capital expenditure. So that sort of breaks down the strategic contracts. On the right side, we're building out a GPU pool, which we spent a lot of time sort of taking the market through. It's basically exactly the same infrastructure in clusters that we build out. It takes 6 to 9 months to sort of procure, and get that deployed, and then you've got to ramp. So once we have physically deployed it, we ramp that to the market. That could be 3 to 6 months from deployment and then you look at your average paybacks sort of distributed through that for the on-demand platform. We're one of the very few companies in the world that I think will deliver true on-demand B300s as an example to the market. All right. We've shared this slide in the past, and this is sort of like, yes, okay, well, geez, Megaport is changing and what's happening and where have you come from, where have you been? It's funny because when we look back, we've had so much transformation in this year. But if we were to bring ourselves back to this moment last year, I asked or in effect, we told the market that we were going to actually invest more in building out the go-to-market teams and start to grow. So we went through this period. We were building the company. There was that period where the world caved in and we said, look, let's prioritize profitability. We saw a decline in net retention. The entire world sort of tightened post COVID. We then did this massive transformation where we said, all right, we're going to start to invest in the company because we're seeing all the net retention stabilize. We're seeing an opportunity for growth. We invested in the last year to continue to scale that and to see that revenue to start to scale. Now, we said that that's what we would expect. We had a transform and reset, and in the FY '27 to '29, we'll see an acceleration in revenue. Well, you can see that we're ahead of it. We're already seeing incredible growth from those investments that you allowed us to do as our shareholders, and we're returning that to you. Next year is continue to accelerate revenue, capitalize on all those prior investments, continue to expand the TAM, execute all these contracts, aggressively grow that market share, and we're going to continue the investment with revenue growing faster than costs, as we promised. We've accelerated the revenue through the reinvestment as well. So what you've seen is actually our revenue has been accelerating, and I showcased that by the incremental ARR, the net retention, the growth rates, everything is to plan. So okay, cool. So then what's in the future, what's beyond that? So FY '30 and beyond, if we continue at the rate of scale that we're at, which you can see how we're performing just in the last sort of since April, you'll see us to continue to build out this business. We're going to be significant scale -- significant scale in FY '30 and beyond. And at that point, your growth off that base is so large. We'll be a global leader in automated infrastructure as a service and your sort of sustainable 20-plus percent growth. When you grow at that rate with infrastructure, you become highly profitable, and you convert a huge amount of that scale into free cash flow. So we're in sort of still in an investment phase to get ahead of it. But as we get up to that point, it starts to spit out cash, which is -- that's sort of the future on that side. So here's the guidance update. I know you're all waiting for this. We get to sort of talk through the success of what we've built and get really proud about that. You've probably all just flipped to the last page. I'm still excited about the previous. Now let's give you the full guidance. So this is pretty astounding, actually. We're going to call group revenue for FY '27 between $620 million to $730 million. That is 100% to 130% year-on-year growth from a revenue standpoint in guidance. You can see the breakdown between the 2 businesses. The network business is $315 million to $325 million, and the compute business is $305 million to $405 million, is the contribution of those 2 businesses in there. Our EBITDA is moving to 38% to 40% of the revenue that lands. And then you can see the CapEx that we'll be deploying inside that year to service a lot of those existing contracts that we've just announced, and that's where we're at today. So that's a pretty exciting, I think, finish. And then we'll hand over to questions. So Tish is going to join us and look forward to taking some questions from the audience or our analysts.