Earnings call transcript: Plenti Group Q4 2025 sees strong loan growth

Plenti Group Ltd (PLT) demonstrated notable financial growth in its Q4 2025 earnings call, highlighting a significant increase in its loan book and cash MPAT. The company reported a full-year cash MPAT of $13.8 million, marking a 126% year-over-year growth. According to InvestingPro data, the company has achieved impressive revenue growth of ~27% over the last twelve months, with an overall financial health score rated as "GOOD." Despite reporting negative EPS of -$0.06, Plenti’s financial performance and strategic initiatives have drawn positive attention, with its stock price showing a modest increase of 1.23% to close at $0.82.

[Discover 5 more exclusive InvestingPro Tips for PLT and gain deeper insights into the company’s financial health.]

Key Takeaways

• Full-year cash MPAT grew 126% year-over-year to $13.8 million.
• Loan originations in Q4 reached $707 million, a 42% increase from the previous comparable period.
• The company successfully executed its largest Auto ABS deal to date, valued at $590 million.
• Plenti’s stock price rose by 1.23%, reflecting investor confidence.

Company Performance

Plenti Group showcased robust growth across its financial metrics, driven by a strong Australian consumer credit environment. The company’s total loan book expanded to $2.5 billion, a 19% increase from the previous year. InvestingPro analysis reveals the company maintains exceptional liquidity with a current ratio of 52.88, indicating strong ability to meet short-term obligations. This growth was supported by strategic partnerships and advancements in technology, which enhanced customer experience and operational efficiency.

Financial Highlights

• Full-year cash MPAT: $13.8 million, up 126% year-over-year.
• Total loan book: $2.5 billion, 19% above the previous comparable period.
• Q4 loan originations: $707 million, 42% higher than the previous comparable period.
• Stable credit losses at 1.16%.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, Plenti Group aims to continue its focus on loan book growth, profitability, and cost efficiency. Based on InvestingPro data, analysts maintain a "Strong Buy" consensus, with revenue growth forecast at 24% for FY2025. The company anticipates that volumes from its partnership with NAB will become more significant. Additionally, Plenti is exploring potential expansion in the electric vehicle lending market, leveraging synergies with its renewable energy initiatives.

[Access the comprehensive Pro Research Report for PLT, along with 1,400+ other stocks, exclusively on InvestingPro.]

Executive Commentary

CEO Adam Bennett emphasized the company’s progress towards becoming Australia’s leading lender, stating, "We’re making very solid progress on our goal to build Australia’s best lender based on speed, service, reliability, and value." CFO Miles Drury highlighted the strength of the Australian Auto ABS market, noting, "We continue to see good strength and good buying appetite for Australian Auto ABS."

Risks and Challenges

• Potential economic downturns could impact consumer credit demand.
• Increased competition in the lending market may pressure margins.
• Regulatory changes could affect lending practices and profitability.

Plenti Group’s strategic initiatives and strong financial performance position it well for future growth, despite potential market challenges.

Full transcript - Plenti Group Ltd (PLT) Q4 2025:

Glenn, Moderator, Plenty Group Limited: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Plenty Group Limited’s Fourth Quarter FY ’twenty five Results Presentation. Today’s presenters are Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer and Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer. Today’s presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can ask a question at any time throughout the presentation or during the question and answer session by using the Q and A feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. We will prioritize questions that have broad relevance to all our shareholders.

If your question is not selected during the call, we encourage you to email us directly at shareholders@Plenty.com.au, and we will respond to you directly. I will now hand over to Adam Bennett, chief executive officer. Go ahead, Adam.

Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, Plenty Group Limited: Thanks, Glenn, and good morning, and thanks for joining the call. It’s great to meet with you, our shareholders, to discuss Plenty’s Q4 results for the period ending 03/31/2025. We’ve not previously held shareholder calls for quarterly results, but we have a focus for the coming years to increase engagement with our shareholders, and so we’re introducing these calls as part of that program. I’m delighted to be sharing such a great set of results, and I know that the extended Plenty team have worked extremely hard on all fronts to deliver them. Since joining Plenty last July, I’ve been continually impressed with the caliber and energy of our people and their collective ambition for our company.

I’m here with Miles Drury, our CFO, and our plan today is to walk you through the results and then make sure there’s plenty of time for some questions. This is a fantastic and balanced set of results. It shows an improvement against every measure. It demonstrates that we’re making very solid progress on our goal to build Australia’s best lender based on speed, service, reliability, and value. Certainly for me, the highlight is our loan origination growth.

We wrote $4.00 $7,000,000 in loans during the quarter, exceeding all previous quarter records. The fourth quarter is typically seasonally weaker due to the January holidays and February being a short month. So I was very pleased to see that q four was 42% above PCP and 6% above the prior quarter. We also had Cyclone Alfred in there, which did impact our lending volumes for a week. So I was really impressed by the team’s ability to keep working through that and deliver a great result.

This is exceptional growth that takes our loan book to 2,500,000,000.0, which is 19% above PCP and 6% above the prior quarter. This once again demonstrates that when we have everything working well together, including our loan origination, fulfillment efficiency, technology, and credit performance, we can deliver profitable growth for you, our shareholders. It also shows there’s significant growth potential in our core business and that this will also be complemented by our partnership with NAB during the coming financial year. As we announced to the market last September when we launched our NAB Auto Buy Plenty product, we thought volumes for Q4 would be moderate. We’ve seen some good growth in March, and looking ahead, we now anticipate that NAB volumes will become a more meaningful contributor to our quarterly loan origination numbers.

Let me add some color to our results announcement. All three verticals have contributed to these results. Auto loan originations were 19 a hundred 95,000,000, up 35% on PCP and broadly consistent with the prior quarter. This was a strong comp performance in a competitive market. We’ve leveraged our well priced product and strong service proposition, and we’re continuing to differentiate our offering.

You may also recall that we had a Tesla Subvention offer, which really supported the q three result and showed how we can use our technology offering to differentiate plenty and work closely with partners. While this continued in Q4, it contributed a fair bit less this quarter, but that was offset by growth in the other areas of our water offering, which really highlights to me the value of having diverse distribution channels to market. Renewables loan originations were $52,000,000 up 27% PCP and 6% on prior quarter. And I’m extremely pleased with the momentum in that part of our business as we once again build on the success of our GreenConnect platform and our key relationships to drive significant growth. GreenConnect facilitated a record number of home battery installations, and we see this as a strong source of ongoing competitive advantage for us.

Personal loan originations were up $160,000,000 to $160,000,000 up 58% PCP and 14% on prior quarter. I’m extremely pleased with the work that the team have done in this vertical to drive increased volumes and growth. We’re seeing strong demand, and the ongoing improvements to our proprietary technology platform continues to make our customer journey fast, simple, and easy. We’re also seeing greater volumes of straight through processing, delivering a great experience to our customers and reducing our cost of fulfillment. And something we’ve not historically been as good as we’d like to is repeat lending to existing customers.

So while we still have some work to do, we launched some new technology in the period to drive better outcomes, outcomes, and we’re already seeing some good results from this work. Margins have remained broadly stable through the quarter as we’ve grown our loan book. I’ll now pass to Miles to speak to credit, funding, and some other elements.

Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer, Plenty Group Limited: Thanks very much, Adam. And maybe it’s the answer just to say how pleased I am to be presenting these results today. It was a quarter or a half quarter where we saw some record after record across a lot of teams. So my congratulations again to all the team for the effort they put in. Just turning to credit.

Credit has definitely been one of the pleasing aspects of the year. So far in Q4 was no exception in this regard with the result of 1.16%. That was slightly up on the Q3 result, but that’s seasonally a lower result or a lower loss period. And so it shows ongoing stable position for our credit results. I’m even drilling into the detail a little bit more when I look at it at a product level.

This was very stable across all of our products, you know, and delivering the types of results that we would expect given the credit settings in the business. And we’ve consistently talked to the strength of the Australian consumer and their credit over the last little while. And obviously, you’ve had interest rates flat for a period then coming down. Wages are still being going up. And from the middle of last year, had the Stage three tax cuts.

And all of that’s definitely contributing to consumer credit and reflected in our stable loss numbers. Realized losses are obviously a backward looking metric, whereas arrears give you a bit of a view as what’s coming down the pipe. And in that regard, there’s also been slight upside versus our expectations. As you’ll see in the release, ninety days arrears came down slightly at the end of the quarter versus the December. And our thirty day arrears were also down a little bit, which all speaks to that pretty solid consumer credit picture.

Certainly, unemployment levels remain very, very strong across the economy, and there’s no doubt that that is contributing to borrower repayments and supporting credit from ours and other lenders’ perspectives. I think it would be, you know, remiss just to note that given the strong origination momentum we’ve got and therefore the faster loan book growth that we’re delivering, this does tend to flatter your credit numbers a little bit. The denominator is growing a lot with more new loans on the books. But even if you back out that effect, the results are still very, very strong. In relation to funding, we had a very successful fourth quarter.

And again, my congratulations to the treasury team on that. We came back from the Christmas break well advanced in preparations for our next auto ABS. And with market conditions looking pretty solid, we’re able to launch and price that by early February. At $5.00 $9,000,000 it was our largest ABS to date and, you know, delivered even results that I probably thought were a surprise to the upside. We had three investors in that deal who came in with orders each over $100,000,000 within forty eight hours of announcing the transaction, which is not something I’ve seen before in any of our other eight deals.

And, you know, based on that investor demand and support and the breadth of investor support, we’re able to continue to bring in pricing on that deal and deliver results and pricing that was inside where comparable deals were being done at the end of twenty twenty four. Obviously, there’s been some pretty significant disruption to capital markets following The US tariff announcements earlier the month. And, you know, there is some way to go in terms of the ultimate impact on that across a range of areas. I was pleased, though, to see one of our peers, Metro, announce an auto ABS on Monday this week. And when I look at the pricing that they’ve got in market, while not as low as it’s been at the absolute tights earlier on this calendar year, they’re still pretty attractive from our perspective.

So keen to watch that, but definitely a positive, you know, sign there. As you’d expect, we are making plans and have a range of different funding options to support our ongoing growth. That’s across ABS deals, across warehouse capacity, and potentially other funding structures. But even though, you know, markets are obviously a bit volatile, we continue to see good strength and good buying appetite for Australian Auto ABS. I’ll pass back to Adam to talk about just the full year in cash impact.

But again, I should note that, you know, that I’m very, very pleased with the result that’s being delivered there. So certainly a happy CFO here. Adam? Thanks, Miles. Yeah.

Let me comment on our unaudited cash MPAT

Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, Plenty Group Limited: result for the full year. So as you may know, we delivered $5,500,000 of cash MPAT in the first half of FY twenty five, and we’ve built on this with good growth into the second half where we delivered $8,300,000 of cash MPAT. So $13,800,000 cash M PEP for the full year represents growth of 126% on the prior year number and shows plenty of starting to produce some substantial profitability. And this, as I said at the first half, is where we showed some really strong year on year growth. This result is a consequence of what Plenty’s business delivers when you simultaneously deliver strong loan growth in origination, manage the loan book, manage margins and losses and drive cost of efficiency in operations, it’s starting to throw off some real good scale economies for us.

At the start of FY twenty five, we set three financial objectives for the business. Grow one, grow loan originations in the loan portfolio two, continue our profitability momentum to drive year on year and half on half cash impact growth and three, continue to improve cost efficiency. Pleasingly, we’ve been able to tick all three of these boxes, and I look forward to providing more detail around this when we release our full year results on Wednesday, May 21. So let me close my remarks by saying that I’m extremely pleased with the result and also the hard work of everyone in the Plenty team. Everyone has really worked very, very hard over this last quarter to deliver these results.

So let me now pause and open up for questions via the moderator.

Glenn, Moderator, Plenty Group Limited: Thank you very much, Adam. We will now take questions from participants. As a reminder, all participants today can ask a question by using the q and a feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen. You can simply click or tap q and a and type your question. We will prioritize questions that have broad relevance to all our shareholders.

If your question is not selected during today’s call, we encourage you to email us directly at shareholders@plenty.com.au, and we will respond to you directly. I’ll now pause briefly while the question queue is compiled. Our first question today relates to lending demand. And the question is, are we seeing any change in demand for loans in the last four weeks?

Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer, Plenty Group Limited: I mean, I’d probably April’s an interesting period because you’ve got both school holidays, and then we had the then we had both Easter and ANZAC days. So I think demand across the Australian economy has probably been impacted over the last four But I think, generally, if you if you sort of look at where you know, how how things are tracking at the moment, there’s nothing that surprising compared to to what we might have seen prior prior to that. So, yeah, I don’t think that I guess that question is in the context of global events, and I don’t think we’ve seen any any meaningful impact of global events on what’s happening to demand. If if anything, you know, demand is obviously was pretty strong in the first quarter sorry, the fourth quarter, first calendar quarter, and, you know, we we hope to see that that continue. So, yeah, April is a little bit hard to to get your head around just because of the the the the various broader impacts on it, but nothing that suggests that there’s a material impact of global events.

Glenn, Moderator, Plenty Group Limited: Our second question this morning. How should we think about balance sheet capacity to support book growth?

Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer, Plenty Group Limited: Look, obviously, you know, the business does use capital as grow. But I think the thing that we’ve been able to do, you know, over the last five years, you know, we’ve taken the loan book from $400,000,000 to $2,500,000,000 with the capital base that we’ve got. And what we’ve been able to do is, you know, is create some very effective ways to recycle our capital to continue to support the growth in the business. We continue to have available a debt facility, which does scale as the loan book grows. So we obviously don’t provide full balance sheet details.

I can’t give you exact details. That will be at the May result. We’ll give the full balance sheet details and show you where that is at. But the kind of structures and the flexibility that we’ve created in the business to manage and to support growth, I think gives us a really good platform to support the growth that we’re looking to achieve going forward.

Glenn, Moderator, Plenty Group Limited: Thank you. We’ve reached the end of the question queue so far. However, I will offer one more opportunity for participants to ask questions. As a reminder, any participant today can ask a question. Simply use the q and a feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen and type your question.

I’ll pause to see if there are any remaining questions. Our third question this morning relates to dividends and the possibility of the payment of any dividends, and if so, when that might be.

Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer, Plenty Group Limited: Good question. I know something that, you know, shareholders obviously always have on their mind. I think, as I mentioned, this business does use capital as we grow. And so historically, you know, our view has certainly been the application of cash that we’ve got is best used to support the growth of the loan book. And, you know, depending on how much we’re able to grow that going forward will determine, you know, the extent to which we need to use capital that we’ve got in the business to support growth versus when dividends may or may not may become available.

You know, the relationship of of your capital use in the business really depends on the scale of the loan book versus the rate of loan book growth. And so, you know, our ambition is certainly to continue to grow our grow our loan book. I mean, we know that financial businesses are most successful at scale. And so that is our primary focus. But certainly, as the business gets larger, you’ve seen over the last few years the way our cash impact has continued to grow year on year on year.

And so the more our cash impact grows, it does give us the opportunity to internally fund that loan book growth. And then as we generate even further cash, I’m able to deliver dividends. So yeah, we obviously the Board is very conscious of that. But at the moment, the best use of our capital is growing our business to generate a more valuable business for our shareholders.

Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, Plenty Group Limited: And we’ll share some more detail on those growth ambitions at the full year in May.

Glenn, Moderator, Plenty Group Limited: Our fourth question this morning relates to our electric vehicle loan portfolio. How do you think about the growth of your EV book, and in particular, provided from consumer demand for Teslas?

Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, Plenty Group Limited: Yeah. So our obviously, we’ve been very happy with the strategic relationship that we have built with Tesla and the suspension deal that Tesla ran in especially in third quarter and then came off in fourth quarter, and we’ve seen very good volumes from that relationship. And so the thematic of EVs is something that we’re very interested in. And again, we’ll share more of some of our ambitions for that space in May when we do the full year results and talk about our outlook and strategic plans.

Miles Drury, Chief Financial Officer, Plenty Group Limited: But we do like to think of ourselves as well placed generally on EVs, you know, particularly with our renewable energy. Our solar batteries plays nicely with EVs. I think the one thing we have been conscious of, which has impacted, you know, the opportunity to really lean into EVs over the last two years is the government’s FBT rebate, which does for cheaper EVs, you know, add some benefit to taking that up by renovated lease. So it’s it’s made it harder for us. But, obviously, you know, at some point in time, that that program comes off and then definitely opens up.

But what we’ve been doing is really, you know, using where we can use our proprietary technology platform to deliver solutions like Tesla, like Cadillac to to make sure that we’re, you know, we’re a preferred preferred supplier. It is an area that we can we can to continue to to grow into.

Glenn, Moderator, Plenty Group Limited: We’ve again reached the end of the question queue. I’ll offer one last opportunity. If you’d like to ask a question, simply use the Q and A feature at the bottom of your Zoom screen, click or tap Q and A and type your question. I’ll pause briefly to see if there are any final questions this morning. As it appears there are no further questions, we’ll now conclude the webinar.

Adam Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, Plenty Group Limited: And can I just thank everyone for dialing in? We certainly appreciate your support as shareholders, and we want to make sure you’re fully informed about your business. So we’re very pleased to have set this up, and we see this as part of an ongoing program. So thank you. Thank you very much.

Glenn, Moderator, Plenty Group Limited: Thank you, everyone. We’ll now conclude the webinar. Good morning.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.