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Welcome again, everyone to our next At The Helm series!
At The Helm is a deep-dive into the intangibles of a company (aside from their reports and statistics) by talking to the key people behind the scenes.
The ones that run the day-to-day of the companies, and knows the ins and outs.
This week, we talked to Thomas Laboulle, the current CEO of Toku.
Toku was recently listed on the Singapore Exchange in January 2026. It is an AI-powered customer experience platform that provides cloud communications services.
It’s been almost 2 months since its listing, let’s check in with Thomas to see how Toku is doing.
Q: Congratulations on the successful listing of Toku on the Catalist Board. With the company trading for 1.5 months now, what is your take on investors' interest in the company so far?
We are encouraged by the level of engagement we have seen since listing. We have had constructive conversations with both retail and institutional investors.
Many are focused on understanding Toku’s business and technology, and how that aligns with our business strategy and goals.
Most importantly, the IPO was not just about raising capital; it was about:
Resetting the company’s capital structure
Opening a new chapter as a publicly listed entity
We are still early in our journey as a listed company, and our focus remains on:
Delivering consistent growth,
Improving operating leverage,
Communicating clearly
Over time, we believe sustained performance will translate into deeper investor conviction.
Q: Let's talk about strategy. From the prospectus, Toku is shifting towards the higher-margin subscription and licensing segment to achieve a higher blended gross profit margin. Could you comment on what kind of margins the Usage and Subscription & Licensing segments are generating?
The Group does not disclose margin details by individual revenue stream. However, the structural differences between them are significant.
The Subscriptions and Licensing segment carries materially higher margins than Usage, which is why a gradual shift towards software and licensing revenue remains central to the Group’s margin progression over time.
On the Subscriptions and Licensing side, these are recurring software access and feature licensing contracts, typically annual or multi-year. Because they are built on our proprietary technology rather than third-party pass-through costs, margins are structurally superior and more predictable.
As this stream scales, supported by our channel partner programme and deeper enterprise adoption, we expect it to have a progressively positive effect on our blended gross margin.
Usage segment’s revenue, which accounts for the bulk of our top line, is predominantly voice and messaging traffic flowing through our connectivity platform. The margins here are influenced by carrier and infrastructure costs and reflect the volume-driven nature of that business.
However, as AI-powered capabilities such as transcription, summarisation, and sentiment analysis gain adoption within the Usage stream, we expect the margin profile of this category to improve over time, since these value-added services carry a higher margin than traditional connectivity.
In short, the margin expansion opportunity comes from two directions: a gradual shift in revenue mix towards higher-margin software, and improving margins within the Usage stream itself through AI-enhanced services.
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