White was sanguine on the various economic pressures affecting global supply chains, saying that its CargoWise software offered value to customers regardless. In the past year, it has picked up major clients including Kuehne+Nagel and FedEx.
“When times are good and businesses are growing quickly, they need solutions that help them grow the company, and we do that very well. Equally, when times are tough and margin compression’s happening, you can also look to the product to increase efficiency and to strip out costs,” he said.
“Actually, we get a lot of customer engagement during those times. They say I can’t sit on my laurels, I’m going to have to do something serious here in order to maintain my profitability, and that’s when they start cutting costs, and that’s when we’re adding value as a software product.”
Over the past year, the company has enhanced its customs-focused offering while also introducing a new warehouse suite and a product for cargo owners. It said it grew its workforce to about 1800 people, of whom around 60 per cent are working on product development, and that it had shipped more than 1100 product enhancements in FY23.
But unusually for a software executive, White is cautious on artificial intelligence. He said that while he personally uses ChatGPT and thinks large language models will have a huge impact on efficiency in certain areas, in general, he believes AI is a big “A” for artificial, with a tiny little “I”.
“We’ve been talking about machine learning, data science and automation for a long time, and we use it extensively in our product. But I tried very hard for many years not to say the letters AI in any conversations because it’s misleading,” he said.
“ChatGPT’s fantastic. I’m able to do research in five minutes that would have taken five hours before. I think it’s a breakthrough. AI is here to stay, the letters AI are definitely here to stay whenever anybody tries to raise capital for the next five years. But frankly we’ve been using those things that underpin AI for a long time and will continue to do so.”
WiseTech announced a fully franked dividend of 8.40 cents per share, up 31 per cent year-on-year.
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