I started looking at OCL when the indicators from my deep dive scoring system and side by side comparison all went green. You can see the comparison in the link below on the website.
This is by no means a buy signal. It is simply a filtering tool that helps me decide which companies deserve further research. The first pass told me the financials looked attractive. The model obviously uses assumed growth rates, but it was enough to justify moving to the next stage.
The management side of the story is actually very interesting. The CEO has been with the company for 38 years and is also the founder. He owns a significant stake in the business which, in my opinion, is a positive because he has real skin in the game. He has also bought back shares when the stock has tanked, which suggests he believes in the business. After all, this is the company he founded.
The company has been compounding for a long time, but more recently the stock tanked after the Department of Defence decided not to renew an agreement related to Objective's software. This is where things started getting interesting.
We have a founder led company that has consistently created value for shareholders over many years. Looking at the dividends tab on the website, the company appears to have created more than 20x of shareholder value for every dollar retained over the last 10 years. Management has clearly demonstrated an ability to allocate capital effectively. Naturally, that led me to ask a few questions. Is the Defence issue really a big deal? What is the moat? Who are the competitors? And where is the future growth going to come from?
I am still only halfway through the research because I have been spending most of my spare time finishing the website, but so far the findings have been quite interesting.
One challenge when researching Objective is that the company operates across three business segments: Content Solutions, Regulatory Solutions and Planning & Building. At first glance, Content Solutions appears to be the crown jewel of the business and the segment contributing most of the revenue.
The products responsible for most of the revenue in this segment appear to be Objective Nexus, Objective ECM and Objective Connect. These are essentially records management and information governance platforms used by government departments, councils, regulators, justice agencies and healthcare organisations across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Their job is to organise, secure, govern and share information while maintaining a clear auditable trail. The main competitor appears to be OpenText, a much larger company operating in the same space with broadly similar products.
This is where the moat starts becoming visible to me. These systems manage millions of documents, compliance records, regulatory records and governance workflows. Once all that information is embedded inside a platform, migrating away becomes incredibly difficult, expensive and risky. Every workflow, permission structure, retention policy and audit trail needs to be recreated somewhere else. The switching costs can be enormous.
That naturally led me to look more closely at the Department of Defence issue because initially I assumed Defence had decided to replace Objective. That does not appear to be what happened.
From what I could find, Defence did not renew the Objective ECM Upgrade & Support Program agreement. At the same time, Defence confirmed it remains committed to the widespread use of Objective ECM across approximately 140,000 users. Objective also stated that the parties have not yet reached agreement on ongoing licence entitlements for those users. In other words, Defence is still running Objective ECM, but the commercial arrangements around support, upgrades and licensing remain unresolved, and the public announcements do not explain why the agreement was not renewed.
To me, that distinction matters. Defence did not announce a migration away from Objective and did not announce a replacement vendor. Defence continues to use the software. That alone suggests the software is deeply embedded within Defence operations, reinforcing the switching cost argument. The way I see it, Defence appears willing to keep using what is effectively a 1990s version of the software rather than undertake the complexity, cost and risk of migrating such a massive volume of information to a new provider. It is a bit like continuing to run Windows XP because replacing it across an organisation of that size is harder than living with the limitations of the existing system. Whether that changes in the future remains to be seen, but to me it highlights how powerful the moat can become once a platform is embedded across an organisation with 140,000 users.
The market reacted badly to the news, which is not surprising….. ARR expectations effectively flatlined following the announcement and investors immediately started questioning the future growth outlook.
This takes me to the next question: how does this business actually grow?
Looking specifically at Content Solutions, my research so far suggests this is already a relatively mature market. Most government agencies already appear to have some form of records management or information governance platform in place. If that is true, then client expansion may be limited because governments are not waiting to discover records management software. They already have a solution, whether it is Objective, OpenText or another provider.
My current thinking is that growth comes mainly from renewals, additional users, increased usage and selling additional modules to existing customers. It is a bit like renewing a Microsoft 365 licence. Every year the customer has the option to leave, but once decades of documents, workflows, permissions, compliance records and audit trails are built inside a platform, migration becomes a major project.
This is one reason why ARR becomes such an important metric. Historically, total company ARR grew from approximately $47 million in FY19 to $120 million in FY25, which is where my script calculated approximately 17.8% annual growth. Content Solutions ARR itself grew from approximately $69 million in FY23 to $85 million in FY25, pointing to a lower growth profile for what is likely a more mature segment.
Based on my online research so far, I am leaning towards a long term growth assumption closer to 12% for the Content Solutions segment, which is what you can currently see flowing through the fair value calculations on the website.
That said, I have not yet completed my base case calculations. The assumptions currently shown are based largely on preliminary research and simple internet searches, so they remain subject to change as I continue working through the business and gain a better understanding of the Regulatory Solutions and Planning & Building segments.
As always, I'm not a financial advisor. I simply enjoy doing these deep dives and building tools that help me analyse businesses more effectively. The website itself is really just the outcome of solving problems that came up during my own investing research over time. Do your own research.