EBITDA rose 17.5% on a one-off tax credit while losses widened 19.6%

Stripped of that item, underlying trading margin would have been negative, which means the headline EBITDA growth does not reflect improved core profitability.

Group revenue fell 21.5% to $33.8 million, entirely driven by Motors revenue collapsing 50.5% to $10.6 million, while IoT revenue rose 6.8% to $23.2 million and now accounts for the majority of group sales. Operating loss narrowed 8.5% to $0.872 million, but profit before tax worsened 15.5% to a $2.0 million loss and net profit after tax worsened 19.6% to a $2.1 million loss.

Cash and cash equivalents rose 82.2% to $3.6 million and net debt to EBITDA improved from 9.71x to 5.85x, but gross borrowings fell only 5.4% to $8.7 million.

Capital raise is explicitly linked in the filing to balance-sheet leverage, with NZ$15m capital raised.

The EBITDA improvement is not a clean operating signal: a $1.2 million one-off tax credit sits inside the reported EBITDA line, so the 17.5% growth figure overstates the pace of underlying earnings recovery. This matters because investors relying on EBITDA momentum without adjusting for the one-off item would misread the trajectory of the core business.

The revenue mix shift is structurally significant. Motors, which was roughly half of group revenue in HY25, fell to about 31% of a much smaller revenue base, while IoT's share rose to nearly 69%. IoT gross margin held flat at 40.9% and Motors margin improved from 18.0% to 21.5%, lifting blended gross margin, but the group is now a smaller, more concentrated business than a year ago, which raises the question of whether Motors has stabilised or continues to shrink.

Working capital moved favourably: owed working capital fell from $13.9 million to $4.0 million and receivable days dropped from about 90 to 76, which helped operating cash outflow narrow slightly to $0.861 million from $0.923 million. This looks more like a one-off unwind of prior working-capital build than a durable structural improvement in collections discipline, so the improved cash outflow should not be extrapolated forward.

The company's own historical first-half share of full-year revenue was 57.9% in the prior year, but that pattern is not confirmed as repeatable this year given the scale of the Motors decline, so a simple annualisation of the current half would be unreliable.

Without quantified guidance, the release supports only a qualitative read: the group is smaller in revenue terms, more IoT-weighted, still loss-making at the PBT and NPAT level, and dependent on non-recurring income to show EBITDA growth. It does not support a conclusion that underlying trading has turned the corner.

The EBITDA gain is not durable because it depends on a one-off tax credit rather than volume or margin recovery, and the group remains loss-making before and after tax on a growth basis of -15.5% and -19.6% respectively. The narrower operating loss and improved gross margin from segment mix are more indicative of underlying direction, but they occurred against a revenue base that shrank by more than a fifth.

On the balance sheet, net debt to EBITDA improved materially and cash rose sharply, but gross borrowings fell only modestly, and the operating cash outflow, while smaller, remains negative. Some of the improvement in working-capital metrics reflects a release of prior receivables rather than a repeatable operating efficiency gain, so the cash position should be read as improved but assisted rather than purely organic.

This briefing cannot assess forward FY26 revenue, EBITDA, or cash-flow trajectory because no quantified guidance or comparable forward-work figures were supplied in this release.