The Management of Clear Objective has committed to endeavouring to provide Shareholders with updates on core company activities on an approximately 6-monthly basis. The following is the update provided to shareholders in attendance at the company’s AGM on 11 June 2026 with regards to the Company Environment, Products, Operations, and Business Conditions.
Company Environment
- The company continues to make use of a shared office facility in the Brisbane CBD, which provides a more flexible working environment, enables incremental growth and delivers cost savings when compared to traditional leased office arrangements.
- The current location is serving the company’s requirements well, however, Management will review the arrangement on a 6-monthly basis to determine the cost/benefit between the ongoing rental of a shared office facility and leasing our own premises under a commercial lease.
- All of the company’s server infrastructure resides in a managed data centre, with the current 36-month arrangement due to expire at the end of September 2026. Management will review the options available post-September to ensure that the company receives value for money for the appropriate levels of service and security.
Products
- A huge amount of effort and resources have been diverted in the current Financial Year to deal with the retirement of SAP’s support for Crystal running on 32-bit machines (particularly Windows clients).
- This coincided with changes to Microsoft Windows printer support processes, which impacted ALL customers and required substantial effort, 4 – 5 months, to re-write those parts of the existing Clear Enterprise product which were affected, i.e. core business processes such as emailing and printing documents.
- It is important to note that these changes had not been communicated by Microsoft, and that Clear Enterprise was NOT the only commercial software application affected by Microsoft’s changes.
- This resulted in a release of Clear Enterprise version 3 (3.3.6.5) scheduled ONLY to cater for these changes. This release had not previously been planned. Originally, a release was foreseen as occurring in the Sep or Dec quarter of 2026.
- ALL customers will need to upgrade to the latest release, therefore, there is likely to be little appetite for another major upgrade in quick succession. Further releases to V3 will have to be considered, however, the company is keen to focus on the bringing to market of the newly architected release (incorporating database independence and 64Bit architecture) – currently dubbed Version 4.
Operations
- A number of early customers are now approaching the end of their initial license term, which provides an opportunity to convert them to subscription fees, rather than the legacy up-front license fee approach. The future rollout of Clear Enterprise version 4 will also provide an impetus for customers to transition to subscription fees.
- More than 75% of active customers are now regularly purchasing pre-paid allotments of Professional Services hours, which can be used for any of the company’s Services. This has driven a significant improvement in revenue-generating engagement with customers, which has resulted in forecasted year-on-year growth in Professional Services revenue of 55 – 60% in the 2026 year after a poor result and the restructuring of personnel in 2025.
- Securing and empowering key personnel in Customer Engagement and Product/Service Design and Delivery will be vital to the success of the company, and achieving the business metrics, as well as the progressive succession of Senior Management/Leadership.
- Obtaining funding to acquire the right people, and the subsequent lead-time before they become deliverable, still present major challenges in a lethargic business environment without access to substantial cash reserves. The company is spending significant time and effort managing its plans and commitments within the limitations and timing peculiarities of working capital.
Business Conditions
- Obviously, there is significant uncertainty in the outlook and taxation impacts on privately held business in Australia which make up the vast majority of the Clear Objective client base. As previously stated, Clear Objective is continuing to reshape the business to focus on tight ongoing engagement with customers to assist them in incremental improvements to their business processes and systems and potentially broaden the breadth of service offerings and therefore the revenue footprint of our business.
- Investment in broader new business sales/marketing initiatives will be maintained at a minimal level until there are signs of improvement in the economic environment for consumers… the company will focus on leveraging its expertise in specific complex industry segments and in the supply chain.