Episode 208 — Special Bonus: Why SiteMinder Could Be the Most Misunderstood Stock on the ASX (with Scott Middleton, Terem Capital)
The Contrarians catchup
This week’s drop is a special bonus deep dive, replacing the usual Saturday Ask Us Anything. Adam and Adir are joined by their good friend Scott Middleton from Terem Capital — the software and tech-services fund that Scott has been building into one of The Contrarians’ favourites.
Scott rolled in fresh off a huge win. “This past month we locked in our first 10 bagger. So we’re pretty happy with that one, and that’s a really active investment, not a passive one.”
Terem’s hunting ground: $1–10M revenue software and technology services companies, mostly Australian, mostly active rather than passive.
Adam: a 10x in this market for asset sales is “pretty incredible… it is stiff, tough out there.”
Adir attempted to claim partial credit for the Kangaroos’ tear-jerking weekend win. Adam was unmoved.
The real reason for the special: Adam, Adir and Scott wanted to deep dive SiteMinder (ASX: SDR) — a stock the three of them think the market has fundamentally misread.
The below is NOT investment advice.
What SiteMinder actually does
SiteMinder is a channel manager. If you’ve ever booked a hotel through Booking.com, Expedia, Trip.com or Luxury Escapes, you’ve used a SiteMinder-style middleware without knowing it. It sits between a hotel’s property management system (PMS) and the dozens of online travel agents that want to sell its rooms.
Adam: “Effectively it acts as a traffic controller between the hotel systems — what’s called a PMS — and travel booking websites like Booking.com.”
Adir: “I own a hotel and some people are gonna book. So I’ve got software inside my hotel that runs my hotel — that’s the PMS. But now I need people to book my hotel. If I’m a boutique hotel, probably most people are not gonna come and book directly… I need plumbing that pumps it all in there and a smart system that keeps it right. That’s what this business does.”
Where it sits in the market:
The enterprise tier (Marriott, Hilton, Accor, IHG, Hyatt) uses DerbySoft, which is a different beast. The mid-market (Shangri-La, Peninsula) tends to use SynXis or TravelClick. SiteMinder sits below all of that — boutique and independent hotels, B&Bs, anything roughly under 200 keys. About 650 integrations, ~53,000 customers, and the smaller boutiques use the Hotelier product, which Scott described as “the Shopify of hotels.”
Why this is hard to vibe code your way around:
Scott: “There’s a great framework I came across from a venture capitalist in the States — the eight moats around AI. Workflow, data, scale, ecosystem, regulation, distribution, network, and physical. When I look at this business, the ecosystem that it has with those 650 integrations — none of the large language models can do that, because you’ve got to go and sit down with someone from Hyatt, you’ve got to go sit down with someone from there. You’ve got to get access to the API.”
Adam: “You can’t just rock up to Hyatt or Hilton or Marriott or Accor and say, give me a connection. They’ll laugh at you. Wait in line, wait ten years.”
Two businesses, one go-to-market
SiteMinder used to be a pure subscription channel manager. Over the last five years it has bolted on a transaction business — payments, a hotel-side website builder, a mini-PMS for very small operators, and “Smart Pay” sitting underneath the whole thing. The transaction business is now growing 39% half-on-half; the subscription business 18%; revenue per user up 23%; revenue on platform up 12%; churn around 1% per month.
On COVID and stickiness:
Adir: “The crazy thing we experienced at Catapult — people stopped playing professional sport. Stopped. Who could ever imagine that? For years I used to say Catapult’s essential. I didn’t know if that was true — it was a good narrative. And then COVID came, no one was playing sport, and nobody cancelled their subscriptions. They fired staff. They didn’t cancel the subscription. I’m like, oh my god — I was telling the truth.”
Scott: “If there’s a piece of software you subscribe to that is essential to your organisation running and bringing revenue in the door, you’re not turning it off.”
The numbers nobody is reading
H1 FY26 results: revenue from $104M to $131M, statutory loss reduced from -$13.3M to -$4M. Cumulative reported losses since inception of $662M.
Adir: “Those retained losses — some shares have a massive $400M reserve on the balance sheet. I think they had convertible notes, and as the value of the company rose, the value of those convertible notes rises. Like employee equity. So I think they’ve more likely lost 200 or 250 mil. My point is more — it’s lost all that money, and now it’s basically at breakeven.”
Scott: “If growth kind of continues the way it’s going, they could be posting a profit this half.”
On reporting honesty — the bit Scott picked apart:
Scott: “I got a bit excited reading this one. Finally there’s some decent SaaS metrics in the opening. The LTV to CAC ratio was nice to see. Not everyone puts it in.”
Scott: “But then I got upset when I came to the way they talk about annual recurring revenue. And then under that, they have transaction revenue. That is not ARR. Even in their own definition, it says this only occurs when a transaction takes place. There was an ASX company two or three years ago that treated it like this — and when COVID happened, everyone stopped sending SMS, and their ‘recurring’ revenue fell off a cliff.”
Adir: “ARR is an unnecessary metric for this business. They have subscription revenue. They have usage-based revenue. The dream business is a subscription business that jacks up its revenue also with usage-based. That’s a great combination — they don’t need ARR as a metric.”
What’s the EBITDA tho?
SiteMinder claimed adjusted EBITDA of $11M for the half. Strip out roughly $15M of capitalised R&D (i.e. the cost of the people who built the software, parked on the balance sheet as an intangible) and the honest number is negative $3M.
Adir’s case:
Adir: “EBITDA — earnings before interest, that’s loans. Tax, money you pay the government to get no services. Depreciation — reducing value of tangible assets. Amortisation — reducing value of intangible assets. One of those intangibles is the tech developers you employ. They build software. You can’t just expense it, because it lasts a while, so it goes on the balance sheet. And then it hits the P&L as amortisation. But EBITDA excludes amortisation. So if you’re going to trumpet EBITDA, fine — but if you’re going to really factor in what it took to run the business, you’ve got to put in all the money you paid those staff this year.”
Adam’s pushback:
Adam: “Xero does exactly the same thing. WiseTech does it. SaaS does it. Just because other people are doing it I’ll put it in a good article — but I don’t see why these guys are any different. When you’re making $100M and you’ve got $20M in those extra costs, people kind of just look at the net profit.”
Scott referees:
Scott: “It’s not that Adam’s wrong. It’s common. Everyone does this. It comes down to R&D and the way R&D is treated. R&D being included above the line as income, getting money from the government — that’s a handout. This should be a tax offset, not revenue.”
Adir: “Basically, you’re right. It should be in the line. Like a tax. It shouldn’t be in revenue — it should be a reduction in expenses.”
The takeaway: ignore the adjusted EBITDA number. SiteMinder also publishes cash EBITDA, which leaves the R&D spend in. That’s the honest number, that’s the one to anchor to, and it’s the one Adir is comfortable with for FY26.
The bull case at $750M
SiteMinder IPO’d in November 2021 at $5.06, hit $7.10 days later (market cap ~$2.2B), fell to $2.96, rallied to $7.68 in October 2025, and has now been smashed in the broader “SaaS-pocalypse” to a market cap of $796M — an all-time low as a listed entity.
Adir: “This is why you can’t let the stock market shape your sense of self-worth.”
On what insiders did at IPO:
Adir: “There was, like, $500M plus taken off the table at the IPO by insiders. If you add Les Szekely’s sell-down to that, they’re almost at one times their current market cap on insider sell-down alone.”
On the SaaS-pocalypse mispricing:
Adam: “The actual SaaS part of this has almost no churn. You’re not gonna vibe-code something that costs you $200 a month, and you can’t vibe-code it because it’s actually too complex. The other part is transactional revenue, which isn’t really SaaS at all — it’s like a credit card processor. Visa and Mastercard haven’t been hit. So SaaS-pocalypse should not have impacted this business.”
What it could earn
Roll forward the H1 numbers and you get a plausible FY26 cash EBITDA of around $20M and an FY27 NPAT in the $20–30M range.
Adir: “If you had the same valuation as today, by the end of FY26 you’re looking at probably 30 times forward NPAT. That’s not crazy for a business like this at all.”
Scott: “I go straight to margin of safety. I don’t think it’s cheap today — you’re paying a forward multiple.”
Adir: “If they produce results at the end of this fiscal year that are just consistent with consensus, the market will remember — hang on a second, what the hell were we selling this off in the SaaS-pocalypse for?”
The verdict
Three buyers in the room.
Adam: “I’m actually a buyer of this business at this price.”
Adir: “I’m a buyer. At this price. I would buy this twice. Not investment advice.”
Scott: “Yeah. Buyer.”
The risks they could find: a deepening Middle East conflict that suppresses global travel, a US tourism slowdown (already happening — APAC has now been overtaken by EMEA, and US growth is decelerating “mostly the Trump effect”), and the cyclicality risk that grows as the business leans further into transactions. Nothing that would obviously halve the share price from here.
So we end with a rarity - not only something The Contrarians agree on - but a stock they’d all buy as well.
Not investment advice.