Speaker 1: What's really interesting in the energy market is pricing is complicated.
Speaker 1: Huge data sets. If you get it wrong, it's expensive.
Speaker 2: You went through a bit of a tough patch a
Speaker 2: couple of months back, didn't you?
Speaker 1: I would like to be in 40 countries, 400 million
Speaker 1: meter points. We have big ambitions. A good programmer is
Speaker 1: working with a swarm of programming agents that are actually,
Speaker 1: you put them to work so you can 5x or
Speaker 1: 10x your productivity.
Speaker 2: Is it do or die time for some of the
Speaker 2: big power companies? Adjusting to a world where power is
Speaker 2: shifting might take some help. Gentrac is a company that
Speaker 2: wants to position itself between the customers and their bills,
Speaker 2: and the businesses and their charges. How's that all going?
Speaker 2: CEO Gary Miles gave me some of his time. Let's
Speaker 2: find out.
Speaker 3: Investing involves risk. You might lose the money you start with.
Speaker 3: We recommend talking to a licensed financial advisor. We also
Speaker 3: recommend reading product disclosure documents before deciding to invest. Everything
Speaker 3: you're about to see and hear is current at the
Speaker 3: time of recording.
Speaker 2: Gary Miles, Gin Check CEO. How hard can it be
Speaker 2: to bill somebody for power?
Speaker 1: Power is tricky, actually, Garth. People have solar panels on
Speaker 1: the roof. They've got batteries in their driveway. Batteries are
Speaker 1: starting to pump power into the grid. You don't want
Speaker 1: to pump it into the grid to make some money
Speaker 1: on your bill and then drive off and run out
Speaker 1: of juice. Time of use, it's becoming trickier. And that's
Speaker 1: for consumers. When you get into big businesses, you know,
Speaker 1: grid scale kind of energy needs, it's complicated.
Speaker 2: So you cover the whole range from someone who might
Speaker 2: just be getting a bill once a month from a
Speaker 2: power company right through to a big corporate that's got.
Speaker 3: Four or five thousand.
Speaker 1: A big corporate that's got offices all over New Zealand
Speaker 1: and they want to flex pricing and trading because energy is,
Speaker 1: you know, it's an expensive part of the mix. And
Speaker 1: so they have, you know, the big companies have their
Speaker 1: own trading and pricing teams that are making sure they
Speaker 1: can optimize this.
Speaker 2: And you're keeping track. You're also helping them work out
Speaker 2: what the best prices are.
Speaker 1: So we help retailers make propositions that can help their
Speaker 1: customers manage their energy prices, have options, make the most
Speaker 1: out of their mix of needs. And you have things
Speaker 1: like load shifting. So you say, hey, if you end
Speaker 1: up can shift the energy consumption to a period when
Speaker 1: It's not during peak. You can save a lot of money.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, sometimes you can get paid
Speaker 1: to pump money into the grid. I'll give you a
Speaker 1: really interesting example. There's one of our customers in Australia
Speaker 1: has what's called the battery of the nation. And it's
Speaker 1: actually two lakes. And when the grid is overheating, it'll
Speaker 1: fill one of the lakes and take power off the
Speaker 1: grid and maybe get paid to do that. And then
Speaker 1: when the grid needs energy, It'll drain the lake and
Speaker 1: push power into the grid. So it's a complicated space,
Speaker 1: believe me. And it wasn't so complicated before. You had
Speaker 1: dumb meters, pretty fixed, stable energy. So billing was simpler.
Speaker 1: People didn't have digital engagement to understand it. And now
Speaker 1: it's more complicated. So the IT systems need to support that.
Speaker 2: EY surveyed people around the globe, consumers.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: 78% said, we're doing all we can already to save power.
Speaker 2: Power companies, you've got to help us here. You've got
Speaker 2: to help us recommend better ways. You're helping them recommend
Speaker 2: the better ways?
Speaker 1: Oh, for sure. I mean, if you look at what's happening.
Speaker 1: So in Australia, one of the really, in some states,
Speaker 1: the number one energy contributor to the grid during the
Speaker 1: day is rooftop solar. because it's been subsidized by the
Speaker 1: government and then they've got batteries on the side of
Speaker 1: their homes. And we provide systems that help manage when
Speaker 1: do you pump that power from the battery into the
Speaker 1: grid and make money? When do you run your house
Speaker 1: off the battery or when do you run your house
Speaker 1: off the grid? How can we help them save money?
Speaker 1: How can you return make a shorter return on investment
Speaker 1: for those kind of consumer energy resource assets like solar
Speaker 1: and battery so that we can get more renewable batteries,
Speaker 1: renewable power into the grid that's not going to, you know,
Speaker 1: burn fossil fuels.
Speaker 2: So this is a virtual power plant.
Speaker 1: It's a virtual power plant, yeah.
Speaker 2: Ours is tiny here in New Zealand, like 4% of
Speaker 2: the people have got solar.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty small in New Zealand, but they also
Speaker 1: do things like you've got, you know, your boiler and
Speaker 1: things can start running during a certain time and we
Speaker 1: can offload when that boiler kind of heats up and
Speaker 1: stores hot water in your house, these heat cylinders. So
Speaker 1: we're helping control that, so that'll stabilize. Because what's expensive
Speaker 1: is dealing with these peaks on the energy market. And
Speaker 1: here in New Zealand, we have a lot of renewable energy,
Speaker 1: but I can tell you the retailers and the gen
Speaker 1: tailors are pumping huge sums of money into providing better,
Speaker 1: cleaner power on a stable basis. It's not a trivial
Speaker 1: project at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: If I understood right, your plan was to try and
Speaker 2: be a company that was sort of at the forefront
Speaker 2: as all of these power companies around the world shift
Speaker 2: out of some legacy systems into new systems. Yeah. How's
Speaker 2: that going for you?
Speaker 1: It's going well. So when I joined the business a
Speaker 1: little over five years ago, we were in four countries.
Speaker 1: We had about 40 retailers around. And I saw that
Speaker 1: as an amazing platform because– Australia, New Zealand, the UK,
Speaker 1: where we operated, were really, really dynamic energy and water markets.
Speaker 1: Let's focus on energy from this perspective. Anyway, I saw
Speaker 1: that as a great platform to modernize our technology with
Speaker 1: those clients. And then to take that technology that works well,
Speaker 1: and like in a lot of ways, Australia, for example,
Speaker 1: is living in the future as far as the energy
Speaker 1: transition is concerned.
Speaker 2: Does that mean we're living in the past?
Speaker 3: No, no, no.
Speaker 1: New Zealand is always on the forefront of stuff. But
Speaker 1: we have a lot of stable energy resources, geothermal and
Speaker 1: things here. So it's not as volatile. So Australia is
Speaker 1: hyper volatile. But anyway, so the objective was to then
Speaker 1: harden and modernize our technology and then take the learnings
Speaker 1: from retailers and gin tailors in this part of the
Speaker 1: world and go help other retailers and gin tailors transform.
Speaker 1: So now we're in nine countries. We're looking to expand
Speaker 1: into Europe or expand into Southeast Asia. We now have
Speaker 1: customers in Singapore and Philippines and Fiji and Papua New
Speaker 1: Guinea and a place like that. And we're looking to
Speaker 1: really land Europe. I mean, that's a big focus for us.
Speaker 2: So it's hard to do a new thing with new customers.
Speaker 2: You've got to do a new thing with old customers
Speaker 2: first to prove it, right?
Speaker 1: I think that having been there and done it and
Speaker 1: have customers that talk about it is when you're dealing
Speaker 1: with major enterprise systems, I mean, these are huge systems.
Speaker 1: They need to be cyber secure. They need to be
Speaker 1: very robust. And it's a big investment. So the real
Speaker 1: key is how can I amortize that across as many
Speaker 1: meter points around the world as possible? It's kind of
Speaker 1: unit economics. And to be able to spin up big
Speaker 1: enterprise systems in faraway countries, to sell in faraway countries,
Speaker 1: to deliver it, is not trivial and we've proven we
Speaker 1: can do that. So we want to do it. We'd
Speaker 1: like to be in 40 countries, 400 million meter points.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have big ambitions. So that's the journey
Speaker 1: we're on.
Speaker 2: Do you put people there or is it all virtual
Speaker 2: or is it a mix? How are you doing it?
Speaker 1: So it kind of depends. If it's a big, big
Speaker 1: kind of country presence for us, we may set up
Speaker 1: an establishment, but in general, we prefer to put people
Speaker 1: in to land the system, train a local software integrator
Speaker 1: or support company that can do the ongoing change work.
Speaker 1: For us to be in 40 countries, we don't, you know,
Speaker 1: we're not all polyglots. I don't know. You know, we'd
Speaker 1: really like to work through some Accentures and Capgeminis of
Speaker 1: the world where they can take our technology and deploy
Speaker 1: it around the world, and we'll help them do that
Speaker 1: with resources. But we don't need to establish a lot
Speaker 1: of people in every country.
Speaker 2: So these are these forward-deployed engineers that we're seeing a
Speaker 2: little bit in some of the frontier model companies, AI companies,
Speaker 2: where they're sending people out into the field to basically
Speaker 2: teach customers how to use their product. You've got the
Speaker 2: same thing?
Speaker 1: So we do have four deployed engineers. The first thing
Speaker 1: we need to do is land our product. So if
Speaker 1: we're going to go in and we're going to replace
Speaker 1: a legacy old IT system, this is a pretty big project.
Speaker 1: It can take 12 months. So we go in and
Speaker 1: we do customer migration, we land the system, we do training, etc.,
Speaker 1: It's part of that and following onto that, more importantly,
Speaker 1: once they have the system, we bring four deployed engineers
Speaker 1: that work with our AI capabilities to really rapidly bring
Speaker 1: solutions to the business or to IT in a super
Speaker 1: cost-effective way.
Speaker 2: Has that changed much in the time you've been doing it?
Speaker 1: It's changed unbelievably. It is astounding, even since February. I mean, November,
Speaker 1: the pace of some of these frontier models started to
Speaker 1: accelerate quite a bit. Now we can do things with clients.
Speaker 1: I'll give you an example. We're working with our AI
Speaker 1: environment right now where we went to the business. We
Speaker 1: had a three-hour interview on a problem they wanted to solve,
Speaker 1: a complex problem. We recorded it. We all agreed we
Speaker 1: could record it. We recorded it. We took that transcript online.
Speaker 1: We put it through AI. It created a specification. Then
Speaker 1: we had that specification approved by the customer. Then we
Speaker 1: used AI to create the agents to go run it,
Speaker 1: and we were done. Whereas in the past, I'd interview you, Garth,
Speaker 1: and I'd, what do you need? And we'd write it down,
Speaker 1: and then we'd go back, and we'd ask the programmers,
Speaker 1: is it clear? And then they'd come, more questions, back
Speaker 1: and forth. weeks as opposed to really days.
Speaker 2: Is the AI solving the problem or is it just
Speaker 2: helping connect the people in your business that are solving
Speaker 2: the problem? Is it doing something itself? Or is it
Speaker 2: just speeding things up?
Speaker 1: Well, it kind of depends. As a software company, it's
Speaker 1: pretty interesting today. And I don't know, I'm sure with Sharesies,
Speaker 1: you've got a bunch of people out there investing in technology,
Speaker 1: software engineers. They'll know this, right? So if you're using
Speaker 1: AI today to help you kind of prompt code, do
Speaker 1: some code development, then you're checking it all, you're maybe
Speaker 1: getting a 20% or 30% efficiency gain or throughput. The
Speaker 1: good AI programmers are actually... doing a lot. You can
Speaker 1: listen to Eric Schmidt. He's got a video, the founder
Speaker 1: of Google. He says, if you're programming today, just stop.
Speaker 1: It's not good for your career and it's not good
Speaker 1: for the company. Honestly, that's how much has changed, which
Speaker 1: is kind of sad because programming is a profession. We
Speaker 1: got where we wanted to be because we like to program.
Speaker 2: You're a programmer.
Speaker 1: I've done my programming in the past. Probably not the,
Speaker 1: I'm not a frontier model programmer at this point, but
Speaker 1: I work with AI, for example. But anyway, what I
Speaker 1: was going to say is, The good programmer is working
Speaker 1: with a swarm of programming agents that are actually you
Speaker 1: put them to work. They know your environment. They know
Speaker 1: your code base. And you put them to work and
Speaker 1: a task. And then you go to lunch or you
Speaker 1: put three more to work. And you come back. And
Speaker 1: so you can 5x or 10x your productivity.
Speaker 2: You're the ringleader. You're not the act.
Speaker 1: Well, you're always part of the act as a ringleader.
Speaker 2: But, yes.
Speaker 1: Now, when we talk about AI with our customers, so
Speaker 1: they have call center agents. They have payment collections agents.
Speaker 3: They have people.
Speaker 1: You know, field services, and it's a different type of AI.
Speaker 1: So in the past, you would maybe have a pod
Speaker 1: of customer service reps supporting a group of customers. Now
Speaker 1: you may have a customer service reps with a pod
Speaker 1: of agents supporting that customer's decisioning. So it's all changing
Speaker 1: pretty quickly.
Speaker 3: Factor.
Speaker 2: It's the company you guys bought. It's a little company
Speaker 2: that like went from having one customer to 12 months later,
Speaker 2: New Zealand company, Wellington Tech Company. How on earth do
Speaker 2: you look at a company and go, you had one
Speaker 2: customer 12 months ago, now we're going to pay you $ 25,
Speaker 2: $ 35 million for what you do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, first of all, how long is a piece
Speaker 1: of string when you acquire something that's kind of early revenues?
Speaker 1: It's tricky. So what we're interested to do is bring
Speaker 1: great people and technologies into our team that have experience
Speaker 1: that can help us scale globally. And what's really interesting
Speaker 1: in the energy market is pricing is complicated. It's super
Speaker 1: huge data sets. If you get it wrong, it's expensive.
Speaker 1: If you can forecast well what energy usage the grid
Speaker 1: or your customer book is going to require, and you
Speaker 1: can price it well, then you run a profitable business
Speaker 1: and you run a good hedge book. So you have
Speaker 1: to hedge your energy. Without that, you're in a lot
Speaker 1: of trouble. So pricing is disproportionately important. Jess and Simon
Speaker 1: and the co-founders and the team down there, it's a
Speaker 1: really rock solid technology team that understand pricing well. And
Speaker 1: we can take that and plug it into our portfolio
Speaker 1: and bring a lot of value to our customers and
Speaker 1: I think new customers and existing ones. So, you know,
Speaker 1: we decided if you translate it into pounds, it's, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not, it's still a pretty reasonable price. And we
Speaker 1: think it's going to be a very good acquisition for
Speaker 1: Gentrack and our customers.
Speaker 2: You think a lot in pounds. You're based mostly in London.
Speaker 1: Well, we think in Kiwi dollars too because we're listed
Speaker 1: on the New Zealand Exchange.
Speaker 2: You're a very global team, right?
Speaker 1: But we're a global team. So we've got about 800
Speaker 1: professionals around the world. We have our utilities business and
Speaker 1: we have an airport business. Our airport business is in
Speaker 1: about 160 airports around the world. So Gatwick and Schiphol
Speaker 1: and Miami and Auckland and Sydney. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: we're Like if you've touched Gentrack, if you've traveled probably
Speaker 1: on an airplane.
Speaker 2: Not that a lot of people traveled for a while there,
Speaker 2: and then not that a lot of people are traveling
Speaker 2: a little bit, you know, because the price of jet fuel.
Speaker 2: Does that hit? Do you find that the business dries up?
Speaker 1: So wildly we're finding that passenger flows are not declining
Speaker 1: that much. Jet fuel pricing because of this mess in
Speaker 1: the Gulf is definitely a concern. It's wild how they
Speaker 1: found some workarounds to some extent for this. But it's
Speaker 1: nothing like when I took over. GENTRAC and we were
Speaker 1: in the middle of COVID. I mean, that was a
Speaker 1: bit of a problem for our airports business and our
Speaker 1: airports customers. I mean, if you look at one of
Speaker 1: our airports customers who will remain unnamed, but let's say
Speaker 1: a big airport in Southeast Asia, the airport's revenues, not
Speaker 1: GENTRAC's revenues to the airport, but the airport's revenues were
Speaker 1: down 97% during COVID. Our systems keep airports running smoothly.
Speaker 1: And like I said, we're pretty global in that regard.
Speaker 1: And from a people perspective, we have a few hundred
Speaker 1: people here, more than 200 people in New Zealand. We've
Speaker 1: been growing. We have a couple hundred people in Australia.
Speaker 1: We have people in Denmark and we have a lot
Speaker 1: of people in the UK.
Speaker 2: You've just hired some new people as well. I think
Speaker 2: you got one like in Tel Aviv, another one in London,
Speaker 2: someone here. How do you keep a really united view
Speaker 2: when you've got people spread around the globe?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Gareth, that's what I call the tyranny of distance
Speaker 1: in this regard. That's tricky. But we're not unique to that.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're a global company. Most companies these days
Speaker 1: are global. You have global scale. It's important. You have
Speaker 1: global perspective. You know, we see stuff in the energy
Speaker 1: markets or water markets and other parts of the world
Speaker 1: that our customers here can like to hear about and
Speaker 1: benefit from. We take them on client exploration journeys so
Speaker 1: they can learn from each other. But, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of interesting. When I took this job,
Speaker 1: it was pretty easy to look at the interweb and say, wow,
Speaker 1: that's it. tricky time zone difference from the UK to
Speaker 1: New Zealand. But only when you get in the seat
Speaker 1: do you realize really that the overlap in the working
Speaker 1: day is pretty small. So we've found ways to work
Speaker 1: around it. It's just like any global company.
Speaker 2: So you're just up 24 hours a day?
Speaker 1: I'm just sleeping way too little. But no, we've gotten
Speaker 1: a good operating rhythm. So it's good.
Speaker 2: I want to talk a bit about how the company's performed,
Speaker 2: you know, share price performance, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: You went through a bit of a tough patch a
Speaker 2: couple of months back, didn't you? Can you try and
Speaker 2: unravel that a little bit for me and explain what's
Speaker 2: changed since then?
Speaker 1: Yeah. So first of all, we grew for about the
Speaker 1: first four years of our operation on 25, 26% CAGR.
Speaker 1: That's fast growth. So when I took over, we're about
Speaker 1: $ 100 million and now we're pushing around 230. We've always
Speaker 1: been profitable. So we're cash generative. So that's good. So
Speaker 1: I think we performed really well on a lot of fronts.
Speaker 1: We came out with G2, which is our new technology stack.
Speaker 1: And when you come out with a major enterprise stack, oh, look,
Speaker 1: we know how to sell well. The vision of G2
Speaker 1: is great. We know how to deliver well. So our
Speaker 1: story is a good story. But our pipeline really wanted
Speaker 1: to see it in production. And they wanted to kick
Speaker 1: the tires. They bring the sandbox. And we were still
Speaker 1: in that process of deploying it with our first few customers,
Speaker 1: which we've done now. So we need to get back
Speaker 1: to winning a bunch of new logos. I remain really
Speaker 1: confident about our global potential. And we're just putting our
Speaker 1: head down. And the share price is important. And you've
Speaker 1: got people here that care a lot about it. We
Speaker 1: care about it. But I can say as a CEO,
Speaker 1: we're really focusing on value and customers and growth. we're
Speaker 1: pretty confident.
Speaker 2: I just want to touch quickly on incentives because I'll
Speaker 2: be frank here. You hit the headlines last year, the
Speaker 2: local paper took a look and said highest paid CEO
Speaker 2: on the exchange there, obviously as a result of the
Speaker 2: way that the incentives and so on and your, and
Speaker 2: your package worked out. Do we have a problem here
Speaker 2: in New Zealand with paying people?
Speaker 1: That was a, that's tricky. And so it's tricky to
Speaker 1: respond to, but I'll try to respond to it. It's
Speaker 1: fine because we're a transparent company. I, We had an
Speaker 1: interesting situation. So in the private equity markets, which private
Speaker 1: equity is private investment of companies, so they'll go in
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of acquisitions of public market organizations
Speaker 1: into the private space and a precedent of creating a
Speaker 1: lot of wealth in that private market. And they incentivize
Speaker 1: executive teams with a lot of shares because they want
Speaker 1: to align incentives between shareholders like Sharesies and the executives
Speaker 1: that are working hard to produce that. We put in
Speaker 1: a double hurdle. So we had to make earnings per
Speaker 1: share forecast, which a lot of our shares investors in
Speaker 1: the early days said, wow, you set a high bar.
Speaker 1: And then we had to move the stock up. And otherwise,
Speaker 1: we got nothing, nothing. And we ended up making those
Speaker 1: numbers and getting some shares on paper. Now, I didn't
Speaker 1: go sell those shares because I believe in the business
Speaker 1: and didn't sell any of them besides to retire some
Speaker 1: tax obligations that you have to pay in the UK
Speaker 1: in advance. And we believe in the business. And so
Speaker 1: that that would, you know, that looks like a big number.
Speaker 1: You know, at some point, as we perform really well,
Speaker 1: we'll probably be rewarded for that. But we'd like to
Speaker 1: try to reward all of our people and our shareholders
Speaker 1: and bring them the gains, and that's what we're aligned
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 2: So, yeah. That's an eloquent explanation, I suppose. The question stands,
Speaker 2: do you think we've got a problem here in this
Speaker 2: market with rewarding people?
Speaker 1: Look, there's a disparity in income and people can decide
Speaker 1: to you know give money away and do things with
Speaker 1: their money as they get it and I think if
Speaker 1: you look at the wealth creation in places like the US,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's much, much higher percentage of shares. If
Speaker 1: you look at the NASDAQ and things, it's just a percentage,
Speaker 1: not to mention real numbers. I think that it's dangerous
Speaker 1: for the public markets to put this under the spotlight
Speaker 1: too much, because it can put the public markets in
Speaker 1: New Zealand at risk of disappearing into the private space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: should there be more equitable share pay structures across the
Speaker 1: country and things? I think we'd probably better leave that
Speaker 1: to the government to figure out. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: I answered your question.
Speaker 2: No, I think it's fair because I think there's a
Speaker 2: lot of searching questions just about how healthy the local
Speaker 2: exchange is at the moment.
Speaker 1: This is something the New Zealand exchange needs to really
Speaker 1: consider and the press and all this type of thing
Speaker 1: because you do want to attract talent into the public
Speaker 1: markets and grow the economy and have a vibrant place
Speaker 1: for people to make investments and get returns. It's a trade,
Speaker 1: you know, but it always comes with some controversy and
Speaker 1: I get it. I get it.
Speaker 2: I suppose talking about the market for talent, was I
Speaker 2: right thinking that you've made some hires here and some
Speaker 2: of them out of that same pool of people that
Speaker 2: worked with de facto folks to develop that product. I
Speaker 2: think Nick Kennedy was one that I was looking at
Speaker 2: when I was looking right down your list, or am
Speaker 2: I getting too granular?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they work together with the factory team. Jess and
Speaker 1: Nick and Code work together.
Speaker 2: So a lot of the time you are not so
Speaker 2: much just looking at what the technology can do, but
Speaker 2: who are the bright people to bring in?
Speaker 1: Oh, 100%. I mean, it's all about talent. I mean,
Speaker 1: as a CEO, the thing where you don't want to
Speaker 1: compromise is on your talent ever because it's a talent run.
Speaker 1: I mean, it goes from the management team to the,
Speaker 1: the four deployed engineers to our programmers and our visionary
Speaker 1: and our product managers. So it's all about finding the
Speaker 1: top talent. And we are trying to do that all
Speaker 1: over the globe. And if you're an aspiring engineer out
Speaker 1: there and looking for a job to do super cool
Speaker 1: stuff around the world, please send me a note. We're
Speaker 1: keen to hear from you. Honestly, I mean, I'm doing
Speaker 1: a job because it's competitive. You know, it's a competitive space.
Speaker 2: Before we wrap up, I'm just thinking we've talked a
Speaker 2: bit about AI, how you use it. Data centers, we've
Speaker 2: got a data center debate here in New Zealand now.
Speaker 2: How much of an opportunity did the arrival of those
Speaker 2: hyperscale facilities present? Are they a simple problem for a
Speaker 2: power company to solve and a water company to solve?
Speaker 2: Is this something that you see here and around the world?
Speaker 2: is something that GeneTrek's well-positioned to take advantage of.
Speaker 1: Oh, look, I think on these data centers, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of heat that goes on to them
Speaker 1: about water usage, and now they're recycling water, and they
Speaker 1: generate a lot of their own power. They set up
Speaker 1: subsidized power or whatever, their own power investments near their
Speaker 1: data centers. That's a huge investment, a data center. Like
Speaker 1: AWS has three zones here. It's one of 39... global
Speaker 1: data center zones in the world to invest in New Zealand.
Speaker 1: That is a major investment. I think it should help
Speaker 1: the New Zealand economy. And all those data centers need
Speaker 1: to be as power neutral as possible. I think they're
Speaker 1: really working on that because it's a big part of
Speaker 1: their business.
Speaker 2: But does that cut you out if they're trying to
Speaker 2: work out their own solutions?
Speaker 1: No, I think all of our customers would like to
Speaker 1: supply them all of their power. But That just doesn't
Speaker 1: exist in this day and age. You have private companies
Speaker 1: going out and bringing power sources into the grid. It's healthy.
Speaker 1: It's a healthy situation. So, look, I mean, the AI
Speaker 1: hyperscalers are spending a fortune. We'll see how that long-term
Speaker 1: investment works out for them. But, you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of the highways of the future in many, many ways.
Speaker 1: So I think we're entering a new era with, AI.
Speaker 1: It's a super fast movie. I find it fascinating. It's scary,
Speaker 1: I have to say. But it's fascinating. I would encourage
Speaker 1: everybody to go out there and try to understand it
Speaker 1: and see how it's going to evolve their career. And
Speaker 1: you talked about some of the stuff that some people
Speaker 1: that are close to you are doing. And I think
Speaker 1: that's a pragmatic way to look at it, Garth. So
Speaker 1: go out there, grab it, you know, jump in and
Speaker 1: it's amazing what's happening. That's what I'd like to, you know,
Speaker 1: close with, I think.
Speaker 2: Thanks very much.
Speaker 3: Thanks, Garth.
Speaker 2: And thank you as well. We hope you got something
Speaker 2: out of Shared Lunch this week. Kumotu, that's us.