We held our 8th Annual Meeting on Wednesday, 22 July, 2015, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand. We always look forward to the opportunity to meet our shareholders and introduce them to our Board members and our Global Leadership Team. A special thank you to all who attended Wednesday – including a few folks who have been with us since the beginning. The Board and our leaders provided an update on what we’ve been doing over the past year, how the business is tracking, and shared our plans for 2016 and beyond.
Meeting Results
All resolutions presented at the Annual Meeting were accepted. We were delighted to confirm the re-elections of Craig Elliott and Craig Winkler, and election of Graham Smith to the Board. We are fortunate to attract such high calibre Directors. They bring a wealth of experience and knowledge of international markets to guide Xero on the next phase of its journey.
Sadly, we bid farewell to Graham Shaw. Graham joined our Board in 2006, shortly after Xero’s incorporation and prior to its listing on the NZX in 2007. Our Chairman, Chris Liddell, acknowledged that Graham has been instrumental in bringing Xero to the world stage, from a handful of employees in an apartment back in 2006, to over 1,200 employees across 20 offices today. Graham’s contribution to Xero, both as a Board member and Chair of our Audit and Risk Management Committee, has been immense, and I would like to personally acknowledge the incredible contribution he has made to Xero and wish him all the best.
Presentations
It was fantastic to introduce three of our Regional Leaders to our shareholders – Russ Fujioka (U.S.), Chris Ridd (AU) and Victoria Crone (NZ) – to present an overview of their regional performance highlights. (Gary Turner (UK) wasn’t able to attend in person). Our Chief Marketing Officer, Andy Lark, also joined me on stage to talk about our immense global growth opportunity and how we can leverage the market network effect to become the financial platform small businesses thrive on.
The Chairman’s and CEO’s presentation slides and media release are available on our website xero.com.
Growth
Our strategy remains firmly focused on high growth. I’m proud of our team’s ability to execute at scale and we well on the way to building a small business platform that will help millions of businesses thrive. In FY2015, we passed through the NZ$100 million revenue milestone, and at the Annual Meeting we provided guidance that we expect subscription revenue for the full year to exceed NZ$200 million in FY2016, based on June 2015 FX rates.
We explained how SaaS businesses need to expense the cost of customers acquisition in the year we incur them but this creates future long term margin.
We were also excited to announce that we have achieved a significant milestone of more than 150,000 subscribers in New Zealand, and over 540,000 subscribers worldwide.
To all our valued shareholders – we thank you so much for your ongoing support. We’re especially excited about our momentum for FY2016, and we look forward to sharing more with you as we continue on this #beautiful journey.
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