Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to accesso full year results 2024. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. If you have dialed in, please select star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute. Instructions will also follow at the time of Q&A. Participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the ask a question button. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Steve Brown, CEO, to start the presentation.
Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us here on this Tuesday, April 15th, which in the United States is actually Tax Day. It is a very memorable date for all of us. I'm joined this morning by our CFO, Matt Boyle. We are here to present our 2024 full year financial results. Moving on real quick to the agenda, just so we all know where we're going, I'll provide a quick company overview as usual, share a performance update. Matt will walk you all through our full year financial results. We'll wrap up with a summary on Outlook. Of course, lots of questions, I hope. My favorite part are the questions.
Just to reposition us for anyone that is maybe new to the call, in terms of what we do, we basically create connected experience for our customers that help them drive their business forward. And what does drive their business forward? That generally helps them make more money is kind of what that means. Everything we do is around the guest experience and things that generate revenue for our customers. That encapsulates our portfolio of software. We focus on three areas: ticketing, virtual queuing, and restaurant and retail. Three big categories for us. From left to right, ticketing really is that end-to-end process that offers everything you need for admission to the venue. Virtual queuing, of course, is the way to help you avoid waiting in that long queue and help our operators drive some additional revenue as providing that as a premium service.
Our restaurant and retail sector is one of our newer categories where we are providing a unified retail and restaurant solution that can also be integrated with our other platforms to help the operator have a sort of cohesive connected experience across their operation. Our market sectors are, it's obviously the leisure sector, but in terms of the different verticals you can see on the blue squares here, we cover all the bases from theme parks, live entertainment, ski resorts. We have some business and cruise, zoos and aquariums. Anywhere you go to have fun essentially is our marketplace. Wrapping all of that around our products for queuing and ticketing and the rest of our retail solution is we have a unified payment process that isn't just where you take money, and that is beyond MasterCard and Visa and Amex.
It also includes things like Amazon Pay or Venmo, for example, PayPal. In addition to that, our payment process also includes the options for insurance to help the user protect their investment in their ticket. It includes fraud prevention mechanisms. It includes the ability to provide recurring billing or subscription-type recurring billing. Also, an incremental revenue opportunity for our venues as well as a bit for us is post-purchase advertising. That encapsulates kind of our overall product set and the markets that we serve. If you think about the size of our business, we are everywhere. We are in 33 countries. We have over 1,200 customers that we serve. We have some really interesting ones, including the world's largest theme park right here in Orlando where I am sitting today. We are the main provider of ticketing for Six Flags, Cedar Fair, which now is one business.
We have the global ticketing business for Merlin, as well as a range of queuing solutions there. Parques Reunidos, a majority-based theme park company, is one of our larger customers as well. We have the Village Roadshow in Australia. Just to give you a sense of the logos that we serve, we have really big operators, blue chip operators that are leveraging a variety of our solutions. If you look at the Middle East, Africa, although last year it was 2% of revenue, we recently announced a couple of big wins, including the Seven Project, which is in Saudi Arabia, as well as one we announced last week, which is the new Six Flags theme park in Abu Arabia, which are opening as well in Saudi Arabia later this year as the expected date. We have a very large footprint.
About 64% of our revenue is in the Americas. About 27% of our revenue is in the U.K., Europe. You can see how it's spread out around the other areas. We are starting to see that shift. Each year we see a little bit more, a little bit less percentage in the Americas and a little bit more rounding out into the other areas around the world. We have three main categories, as I mentioned, ticketing, virtual queuing, restaurant, and retail. Within that, we have a set of products. Clearly, in the top box in ticketing, we have a range of solutions that includes Passport, Paradox, our distribution program, Solution Ingresso. Each one of those kind of has its own expertise in terms of a vertical. Paradox, for example, is specialized in the ski industry.
Passport is about the attractions and theme park sector where those functionalities vary by vertical. Our virtual queuing product is LowQ, and our new restaurant and retail solution is Accesso Freedom. We sort of spare you all the detail and all the logos, but leave it to say, you know, leave it, I guess, that we have three main verticals. We have a range of products. We've grown this business through acquisition over the last, I guess, 12 years. Now we have a wide portfolio of solutions, many of them integrated and connected to help optimize that experience for the user. In terms of our addressable market, if we look at our global TAM, it's around $2 billion. If we add in some of our sort of more ancillary sectors like fairs and festivals and casinos, it grows a little bit more to $2.3 billion.
The real core, we think, is around $2 billion. As you will know, we've done about $150 million in revenue this year. $150 plus million to $2 billion, there's a huge opportunity for us as we move forward. With this range of products, we're very well equipped from a global footprint and global solution offering to tap into that marketplace. As you will have read from our R&S this morning, we delivered on the year with a 15% margin, slightly ahead of what we had anticipated. We were very diligent on the cost management. The revenue came in slightly above the range we had expected, 50-50. We said 150, 152. We came in right at 152, the upper end, I should say, of that range.
As I said in the opening comment of the R&S, you know, I'm pleased with the stability and the resilience of our business, but the results weren't at the level that I am obviously aiming for. What are we doing about that from a growth strategy perspective? First of all, I think our number one priority is to accelerate the pace of our wins. We've taken a hard look at our commercial operation over the last six or eight months, clearly trying to understand how do we increase that pace of new wins? How do we increase our market penetration across that broad map that I showed earlier? We've been working to redistribute our resources. Cost management is a priority. Just hiring a bunch of people doesn't align with our overall commitment to cost management. We're working very hard to redistribute resources.
When projects are moving on, they're not, you know, they're wrapping up, we can take some of those resources and move them to our commercial team. Our goal is to expand the reach of our sales team and, importantly, the capacity of our sales team. For a business our size, the number of actual salespeople we have is relatively small. It's less than a dozen. We are looking very hard at how we distribute those resources, where we need more, where they're located, what markets they're focused on, and what products they're focused on. Importantly, beyond that, you know, I think the sort of knee-jerk reaction is, well, just hire more salespeople. Having looked at this very closely, you know, I feel that our sales team needs a few more people, but our infrastructure actually is where we need to work harder.
Our marketing efforts need to be more targeted. We need to expand our pipeline. Our sales team needs more underlying support in the process. Things like documentation, presentations, the way we approach our demos of our products, that really is where I see a larger opportunity, actually. Our sales directors are relatively well positioned. Like I said, we need a couple more here and there, but we really need to increase that infrastructure and support we provide to them and the noise that we make in the marketplace to increase that top line funnel. I'm also in the process of recruiting a new commercial leader to oversee all of this and to provide a fresh set of eyes, you could say, across what is now a very large and relatively complex global footprint.
I'm going to be looking for an individual with, you know, perhaps sector expertise, but more importantly, sales expertise in terms of managing a global sales force and the go-to-market strategy for a technology company. We have the vertical expertise across our organization. We have lots of that. I think as we look to the longer term, we need support around how do we build that framework? How do we build that process on a global basis? It's actually quite complicated with the time differences, the regionality, the languages. I'm going to be looking for someone that has an expertise in that area to help us move forward at a faster pace. Second of all, we're looking to increase the share of wallet. I guess you could say that's part of our cross-sell or up-sell strategy.
Importantly, we've got a large base of ski customers that are one of our legacy products, which is an on-prem solution. We're now working to move those over to our new SaaS solution, which brings a significant uptick in revenue from that customer just by upgrading them from product A to product B, because obviously a SaaS solution has a different and higher recurring revenue, as well as the e-commerce component of that. Our new restaurant and retail solution is an important part of our strategy to involve more products at each of our customer sites. That is working very well. It's been extremely well received. I'm super pleased with the traction we're seeing around this product. With any new product, you never know how it's going to go.
I had a bit of a wait-and-see approach for the first couple of months, but now I have 100% confidence we made the right decision. The product is very well received by the market. As you will see, we're already securing a number of wins. Our pipeline is actually very robust on this area, doing demos consistently across our customer base, as well as customers that are not in our business yet that are interested in the product. We've also been taking a harder look at our payments opportunities. I mentioned earlier we have a payments process. Essentially what we're doing in that process is facilitating that. We're not really partaking at a very significant level in that overall stream of that flow that happens between payments.
As you will know from potentially other SaaS companies or other businesses, there is an opportunity for us to more vertically integrate into that workflow and increase our margin from our customers, but also help them perhaps with more efficient and more cost-efficient opportunities by leveraging our aggregate volume to get them an overall better deal. This is an area that we are exploring quite directly and something I think we will have more to share as we move forward. I see that as an important area to increase our share of wallet by increasing the revenue per customer in sort of a back-end way, you could say, but also in turn helping them as well with lower cost on their payments processes. We will continue to invest in new technology to unlock our growth and, importantly, continue to look for efficiencies.
We're working on, and this is the first time this bullet point has shown up, we've been working for about 15 months now on what we internally call composable commerce, but it's really our next generation of e-commerce. And our e-commerce really is our crown jewel of the overall business. Any area we touch that e-commerce front end that goes to the consumer is really a critical element in today's marketplace. Everyone is looking for mobile ordering, mobile ticketing, everything accessible via the guest mobile device. Our e-commerce product is outstanding. We're already the leader in the market across our portfolio, hands down. But there's a new generation of commerce coming, which is composable.
There are some companies out there like Shopify, which you all have heard of, that essentially is composable commerce, but it allows you to mix and match and customize that user flow in a more dynamic way. Our processes today are relatively static. You sort of go from A to B to C and to checkout. Composable commerce allows you to configure and mix and match that based upon your own use case in a way that does not involve the developers. Think of it more of a drag-and-drop type setup where we can more readily and our customers can more readily customize their flows. This is going to be something you'll hear more about across this year and next year. Our first pilot client is going to go live this summer with a very, I would say, minimal use case, allow us to start road testing the product.
This is not a blueprint. This is an actual product that we have a dedicated team working on. You know, as we look forward over the next 12, 24 months, we will start seeing our customers migrating into this composable commerce product. That will help them further increase their revenue, increase their conversion rate, but also, importantly, continue to provide support to us as the leader in the space and help us bring in new customers. We will continue to invest in all of our products with R&D, making sure we maintain our market leadership. We do not want to start slipping on that and lose any ground in terms of our growth strategy. We want to make sure our products continue to be the best there are. We are also going to use AI. Of course, this presentation would be useless if I did not mention AI at least somewhere.
You know, we're using AI in a variety of ways. We are looking at ways to enhance our solutions. We're looking at ways to increase our developers' output and their speed to market, helping them generate draft code, helping them refine code. We're working on opportunities within our QA and testing environment of using AI. There are a whole range of sort of, I guess you could say, back-of-house functions where our teams across the board are leveraging AI in different components. Experimenting with it is certainly not perfect. Looking at things like our user documentation, our user support, helping customers be able to type in a question and get the answer. We're exploring all those different areas. A lot of that is around efficiency, speed to market, and also just appeal to our customers.
We have not yet found something that is a direct consumer-facing kind of front-end AI opportunity, but we are looking at a range of those that we think are promising and will continue to update you on those as we go forward. Last but not least, we have cash. You can propel your growth by using that cash in a very smart way. This business has been built through inorganic acquisitions, through a range of different strategies to acquire different verticals, acquire different products. We will continue to do that. I believe that it is important to not get acquisition and digestion, as some say, and move too quickly. They need to be thoughtful. They need to be well considered. They need to have a specific purpose in our business when we make an acquisition. Our acquisitions in 2023 were on point.
They have all turned out to be as we expected or better. We will continue with that approach as we move forward. We clearly have the capacity and we have the proven experience to do this. By no means are we done there, but we will not just be buying things to say we are buying something. They will have a very, very clear purpose in the event we do find additional acquisitions. We are also going to continue reviewing our use of capital in terms of our cash and looking at different ways to add shareholder value. Obviously, acquisitions is probably the leading way that most of you would prefer. We also have a little bit of debt. There is a choice of paying down debt. There is a choice of share repurchase, which we have announced this morning. There is obviously the option of dividends as well.
We will continue to look at all of those opportunities to make sure we're deploying our cash in the most efficient way possible. All of those together are really the backstory around how we plan to continue growing the business and, importantly, accelerate our rate of growth. Moving on to a performance update, a little bit of the, I guess you could say, the year in review. I'll hit these highlights quickly on the finance page because Matt will talk much more about that in a few minutes. Our revenue was just over $152 million as we guided in our update around the fall time period, late summer. We were expecting $150-$152 million. We came in just above our upper end range at $152.3 million. Our cash EBITDA was nearly $23 million, which was slightly ahead of what we had expected at 15% margin.
Our PBT at $11.7 million, which Matt will explain in more detail. Of course, we're sitting on a nice healthy balance sheet with net cash of about $30 million at year-end in 2024. A lot of you are wondering what in the world is going on with the market. It's a very complicated environment, as we all know, at the moment. We've got, you know, the trading dynamics, sort of what are we working with, what we were working with last year. We have softer macroeconomic conditions across all geographies. It's not just the U.S. We saw weakness in Australia. We've seen sort of inconsistencies across all of our markets, across our different attraction types. Some are up, some are down, some are flat. Overall, it's a little bit unpredictable, to be honest.
The economic conditions out there, you know, make it a little bit more difficult for us to expect what's coming ahead. Last year, visitor attendance was generally flat. We saw some operators with nominal gains. We saw some coming in fairly close to prior year. Overall, we didn't see the market go backwards. We just didn't see the growth that we had anticipated in our initial expectations. Also, going into 2024, the beginning of 2024, looking back, we had less than optimal North American snow conditions. Some of our transactional volume in ski was less than expected in 2024. That also meant the operators in ski that had a not-so-stellar ski season in December of 2023, January of 2024, were maybe a little bit hesitant on their buying decisions in terms of buying new software. We saw a little bit of sluggishness across that marketplace.
They did not go away. They are still in our pipeline. They just perhaps slowed their decision-making a bit. We also saw the visitation and the attraction business soften right in the peak of the summer period. It looks pretty good in the early part of the year, you know, sort of January through May. When the softness sort of raises its head in June, July, and August, the operators are left with very little time to respond. It is too late to go out with big marketing promotions in July when the season really is effectively through August. You are sort of throwing money into the wind. When the softness comes in late, it is difficult for them to respond. That made last year a bit more difficult because they just did not have that reflex time that they would like to have had.
Despite all that, we still proved to be very resilient. Our transactional revenue was up 2.5%. We did not go backwards. I want to just emphasize that point because I think our results could be interpreted as perhaps the market went down. The market did not go down. The market just held steady. Our transactional revenue actually went up slightly. We were very strong at cost management, as we're well known for doing. Our sales pipeline kept its strength. Our products, our markets, our sectors are very diversified. It gives us a lot of sort of if one thing is up and one thing is down, they cancel each other out. The diversification really works to our advantage in these times. Last but not least, the regional attractions are really a substitution opportunity.
When people trade off more expensive travel on a cruise line, or if you're an American taking a European vacation or vice versa, or going to Las Vegas, you tend to stay closer to home and you go to things like Thorpe Park, you go to Legoland, you go to Six Flags. Our portfolio is very significantly comprised of regional attractions. I think that will be a benefit to us as we go into this year. We signed 30 new, we had 30 new wins. We had seven new ski customers, eight live entertainment venues, 15 new attraction wins. The logos speak for themselves. Importantly, we did not stand still. We continue to grow the business in 2024. In our next page, our news propositions, Excelsior Horizon, Excelsior Freedom, Excelsior Paradox, the acquisitions from 2023, they're all gaining traction. We've announced the wins in Saudi Arabia.
We shared with you the wins we're seeing across the restaurant and retail product. Our ski proposition, Excelsior Paradox, is clearly positioning as the leader in the space, giving us ongoing traction in that very important sector with a range of new wins there as well. You can, of course, read more about those in the full R&S. Our team quality, always an important part of our business. Our engagement survey, once again, was very strong. It's the 75%. Did I skip a page? I sure did, Matt. Thank you very much. Matt's keeping me on track here. Thank you, Matt. In terms of operational excellence, just to recap the year, we ended up at 15% cash EBITDA margin. We're pleased with that. Obviously, we expected more. With the headwinds we had, we're very pleased to still deliver at 15%. We're focusing more on profitable revenue.
You will see we've sort of moved out of some things that were either low or no margin. The labor for one of our key operators, our B2C business at Ingresso, those are helping us really work to fine-tune our margin by removing revenue that is essentially nonprofitable for us. We're excited to have expanded our leadership team with a new COO, Lee Cowley. He's joined us just a few months ago. He set the ground running. He comes with a very strong background. I've known Lee for many years. Importantly, as our lead customer, our lead contact at Merlin throughout that implementation several years ago, as part of his background, he was the CIO and head of technology for Merlin for a number of years. He comes in with an extraordinary amount of industry expertise, as well as solid backing of leading large global teams.
Really excited to have Lee on board. We're continuing to manage our headcount. You can see we're slightly down in our headcount in the year, continuing to do a lot of resource trade-off, balancing priorities, and making sure that every single person in the organization is being used to the highest and best value. We're optimizing technology cost. We have two big expenses, right? One is headcount. The other is really, you know, our technology cost around things like our hosting expenses and Azure and AWS. We've done quite a bit of work to refine the efficiency of our software to reduce the amount of demand we place on those services. For example, in our queuing business, we reduced our server costs by almost 50%. It's not a small number, by the way.
Let's say we were spending $1 million and now we're spending $500,000 or $600,000. Think about it in that order of magnitude. Our teams have been working very diligently and looking for those kinds of opportunities where we can make some code adjustments and invest some effort there for long-term cost savings. As I mentioned at length, we're refreshing our go-to-market strategy, which gets a very big box on the page because I think it's very important. Something that, when you look at the pace of our growth, I'm sure all of you have thought about and wondered, why aren't we growing more? Why aren't we growing faster? That is at this point my number one priority. People always underpin everything for us.
With nearly 700 employees, we're managing a very important work group that places their livelihood on us and our livelihood on them. Making sure they're happy, making sure they're engaged, and making sure they're giving the absolute best results is super important. We gauge that in a lot of different ways. One of them is with our annual employee engagement survey. Our 2024 results came in at a 4.1. That is very strong, placing us at the 75% percentile for comparable companies. As you will know, if you've been following us for years, we pride ourselves around this number and are very pleased that we're maintaining ourselves in that percentile.
You know, it's not just the score, the number is the number, but we get 2,000-3,000 individual comments from our employees that we take every one of those and look at them to understand what is it we're doing right, what is it we need to change, what is it we can do better. We put those into action plans at a granular level across the organization. Our turnover last year was 5%, our voluntary turnover. Of course, we had a couple more people that we parted ways with for other reasons, but our voluntary staff turnover was very low at 5%. You know, of course, macroeconomic conditions perhaps make the marketplace a little bit less volatile, but we do want to keep our turnover low somewhere in that 5%-10% range.
It's more consistent for our employees, and we retain that institutional for our customers, and we retain that institutional knowledge, which is super important. We also launched a new emerging leadership program with a team as big as ours. It's very important that we're building leaders for the future that can manage the different work teams and the different products that we operate. We're investing a lot to build up the individuals that we have leadership talent and are interested in going that direction. Importantly, I always say this last but not least, right? Our team is super important. You can see on the right a photo of some of our team members at one of our recent leadership summits. I just really can't underscore how important this is and how our customers value the quality of our team.
If you ask any of our customers, they may have had, you know, a little grumpy about something with their technology. There may have been some kind of an incident. There may have been a new deployment that they thought could have gone a little better. I can tell you what they always say is the quality of our team is top-notch. That is super important to us from a retention and a word-of-mouth standpoint. I went quickly because I want to make sure we save plenty of time for questions. Now I am going to turn it over to our CFO, of course, Matt, to walk you all through the numbers from his perspective. Matt, it is your turn.
Thank you, Steve. Hi, I will take you through the high-level numbers.
Revenue, as Steve mentioned, was $152.3 million, which was pleasing given that it was well within the range of $150-$153 million that we gave in August. That was 1.9% ahead of where we were last year. Importantly, there are a couple of things to strip out of that that enhanced the growth rate to 5.3%. If you remember, we used to support a major customer with a queuing seasonal staffing that we would recharge the cost on. That business ended in 2023. On a comparative basis, we stripped that out. We also had a B2C business as part of our distribution arm that we closed in May 2024. Stripping those two pieces of business out, we are at 5.3% growth year on year. In terms of mix, you see on the right-hand side of the slide there, we are very comparable to the prior year.
For those that have been following us for a while, a lot of our customer contracts, particularly on a SaaS basis, the vast majority are on a transactional usage basis, so a revenue share. You can see that's roughly making up what it is making up, 75% of our revenue mix for the year, very comparable with the prior year. Moving on to gross margin. Pulling out that seasonal staffing cost that we mentioned there improves our gross margin. We went from 76.4% to 78.1%, which is great. We'd expect that to trend upwards as we continue to sell more SaaS, which is a higher margin for us than other products. Again, as we move customers from a maintenance and license model that Steve alluded to onto a SaaS product, you'd expect to see margin expansion there.
Cash EBITDA, so we ended with $22.8 million, slightly down on last year, but importantly, a 15% margin, which again was ahead of where we thought we would be in August. We thought 2024, we thought we were turning out with 13-14%, but we're well above that at 15%. As Steve mentioned again, we do have cash. We're at $28.7 million at the end of the year and higher again still now at $36.2 million at the end of March, which I'll come on to when we go through the cash flow. Breaking our revenue down by type in a bit more detail, you can see that transactional revenue is by far the biggest component of our revenue. 75%, it's $114.7 million this year, which is a 2.5% increase on the prior year.
You can see in the mix there, distribution really makes up the majority of that growth, which had a really strong year after signing a large new distributor at the end of 2023 and seeing the full year impact of that play out. The ticketing and queuing businesses were broadly flat year over year, which reflects where we were through those peak seasonal periods in June, July, August, and October, where the growth in attendance was not quite where we expected it to be. Other components of our revenue, so we have got repeatable revenue that is not transactional. These are maintenance and support agreements or platform fees or recurring licenses, but they were up 3.3% in the whole. The majority of that was from Excelsior Horizon, which was the acquisition we made in June 2023.
The full year impact of that, you can see there that the maintenance support and recurring license model that that product operates was 9.1% and 48.2% up respectively. The other large component of our revenue is the non-repeatable piece. That was down 14.9%, but the majority of it is professional services, which fluctuates year over year. It very much depends on customer demand and project life cycles, and it tends to go up and down. This year it was down 15.5%. Moving on to the income statement. We covered the gross margin improvement to 78.1% being the result of removing the seasonal staffing cost that we had in our cost of goods sold previously. That was an expansion there from $114 million to $119 million, so a 4.2% increase overall in gross profit as an absolute number.
Below that, we had our reported open expenses. Steve mentioned we are managing the business very carefully at this point, particularly on a headcount basis. You can see there the administrative expenses have jumped up 1.5% to $105 million. The underlying, removing depreciation and amortization, the underlying administrative expenditure has increased 6.3% to $97 million. The vast majority of that is due to the wrap-around effects of the acquisitions that we made in mid-2023. Excluding the impact of that, the underlying administrative expenses are broadly flat. Again, in respect of managing the business very carefully, our headcount is very flat and slightly down on last year. We were at 691 at the end of December 2023. We are at 682 at the end of December 2024. The last line on that income statement is the finance expense.
They're very comparable with the prior year, up 11.3% to $2.5 million as a whole. Sorry, as a whole, the increase there being the FX loss that we had where we have a USD-denominated facility in a pound sterling entity. That is driving that increase there. Cash EBITDA is our principal operating metric. It's what we've focused on for the last few years as our guide to performance at a bottom line level. This is the reconciliation that takes you there from operating profit through to cash EBITDA. You can see there operating profit actually ahead of last year quite significantly, 32.4%. The nature of that increase really is driven by those line items that you can see below. In 2023, we had quite significant acquisition-related expenditures due to those three acquisitions, so $2.7 million.
We had a small amount in 2024 as a wrap-around effect of that, but very much decreased. You can see the amortization related to the acquired intangibles conversely jumps up 49% because of those acquisitions that we made. We have a full year impact of those acquisitions into the amortization number. The share-based payments slight increase there following the retention awards again related to those acquisitions and some senior staff movements in 2024. Lastly, the amortization and depreciation level number has dropped down 45% to $4.2 million-$4.3 million from $7.8 million. That is the consequence of having prior to 2020, those that followed us for a very long time, there was quite an aggressive capitalization policy at that point in time with $15 million-$20 million being capitalized on the balance sheet. We are now completely through that.
The amortization of those amounts is through the balance sheet, so fully amortized. We are looking at an amortization number and depreciation number that is broadly equivalent to what we are capitalizing each year. Moving on to our cash flow statement. You can see there at the top line, we had $25.7 million cash generated from operations compared to $23.8 million in the prior year. The big difference year over year there is the working capital, which has got a large outflow this year compared to an inflow in the prior year. The inflow in the prior year is somewhat being driven by the acquisitions that we have made in each year, so they are not quite comparable. The working capital really got an outflow because we had a very strong December, really, and the end of the year for 2024. It is heavily influenced by our distribution business.
Our distribution business is quite often taking the gross value, the face value of a ticket sold and passing that from a distributor or a guest to a venue. There is a gross payment flowing through our balance sheet, through our bank accounts. Depending on the time, it will impact that working capital quite significantly. You can see there in the comments to the right-hand side that working capital piece had almost entirely reversed by March 2025, and we were at $36.2 million, up from the $28.7 million that we were at the end of December, which is very pleasing to see. The other line items to call out there, significant is the $8.1 million that we paid on share repurchases. Now, since October 2023, we've repurchased 1.5 million of shares.
Today, we're announcing a further GBP 8 million, $10 million buyback that we expect to play out through the remainder of 2025. At the end of the year, we finished with GBP 42.8 million in cash total, and we have GBP 14.1 million in net borrowings on our facilities, so managing that position accordingly. That is the financial piece. Back to you, Steve, for the outlook.
Thank you, Matt, as always. From an outlook perspective, we've signaled that we're unlikely to be ahead of the 5.3% growth, the effective 5.3% growth that we saw in 2024. Clearly, we're dealing with a lot of uncertainty, and we're being very cautious on making predictions at this stage. We're ahead of our peak trading months of the summer. At this point, it's difficult to predict the future, obviously, but we also have the dynamic of Easter shifting this year.
From our transactional revenue side, until we get through that period of Easter movement, which will be the end of this month, it's a little difficult to determine what our volume really looks like in the first part of the year and to make that conclusive determination about the direction of travel because the time periods are not comparable year over year. I will say our ski season was encouraging, actually very encouraging. There were great snow conditions, people ready to get out and hit the slopes, as they say. We are still ahead of our summer period, and we are going to be very cautious. We feel strongly that it's unlikely we'll be ahead of the 5.3% growth year on year, despite the fact that our overall product strength is there.
It's a little bit on the transactional volume side, as well as the potential that operators might slow roll some of their decision-making. Obviously, we're going to continue to manage cost with our cash EBITDA margin in line. We're slightly ahead of consensus, which is in the 14% range. Clearly, the 15% that we had this year was done through some diligent cost management and revenue coming in a little bit on the upper end of our revised expectations. We will continue to prioritize, obviously, cost management and, importantly, that top-line revenue growth. I would love to come in and say, "Hey, we're just going to push through all this stuff," but unfortunately, I can't control tariffs and the ensuing ripple effect that some of those things have around customers' decisions.
I've done a lot of work on this last week, getting prepared for this call this week and all the questions that will follow. I've gone back and looked at 2007 to 2011 for some of the operators and really pulled some of the data. If you do the same, you'll see that the regional attraction operators, the ones that publicly share their information, are really resilient in these time periods because the consumers are looking for that closer-to-home opportunity that does not involve air travel, does not involve hotels, does not involve maybe as much time off of work. You just see a shifting effect in terms of their entertainment options. The large destinations will do what they can to control the demand. Unfortunately, the operators in these regional attractions are not in control of airfare. They are not in control of hotels.
They aren't in control of other effects. Them adjusting their ticket price doesn't have the same impact that a regional operator has when they adjust or do promotions. They can drive volume through those very quickly because the hurdle to go to visit a local theme park or a local attraction is very low, usually within an hour's drive to that venue. I feel confident we're very well positioned to be resilient ahead of whatever comes our way because we are sort of the example I always use is when people stop going to fine dining, you see them ordering more Domino's pizza. We kind of have that effect with the regional attractions being a substitute for the more expensive alternatives. I think overall, things will fare relatively well.
In terms of growth, this market is going to be a bit unpredictable, and we'll have to just kind of keep our eye on it. We're cautiously optimistic. Like I said, we saw some encouraging results early in the year from ski. We'll see when Easter, kind of, we get past that period, how we feel about the run rate going into the summer. We're continuing to keep a very tight rein on our costs, which is primarily around labor and staffing decisions. With that, I've left a generous 15 minutes for questions. As you all know, that's my favorite part. Everyone's always shy to ask questions, but I encourage you all. We changed services this time, so Matt and I can be on screen. We're not just a voice behind a voice. We have our faces here as well.
Hopefully, that is a bit better format for you all. We're ready to take questions and certainly happy to answer anything we possibly can. I will open the call for questions.
We will now start the Q&A. If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. As a reminder, participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the ask a question button. We'll take our first question from Tintin Stormont of Deutsche Numis. Please go ahead.
Me now. Sorry, there was an unmute button that just turned up from somewhere. We can hear you, Tintin. Yep. Hi. Hi. Hi. Good evening, guys. Sorry, morning, afternoon. It's evening where I am, so it's very confusing. Three questions for me, if I may.
Cedar Fair and Six Flags, could you get us up to date in terms of kind of where the relationship is at, conversations on renewals, possible revenue opportunities, or any price renegotiations, all of that, any color you could provide? Secondly, in terms of the Middle East clients, obviously, two quite sort of kind of landmark agreements there. In the R&S, you talk about $2 million. It's kind of the working assumption in terms of revenue to be recognized in the current year. How should we think of the potential total contract value for that business? How do you envision that kind of playing out over time? Thirdly, on Freedom, where is the average ASPs at in terms of how we should think about the business? Eleven wins. Do they tend to be kind of small, mid-sized contracts?
Are there sort of kind of big needle-moving potential contracts in the pipeline, or we should think about it more as a sort of kind of lots of small and mid-sized sort of kind of contract values?
I'll go from the last one backwards. On Freedom, Matt may have the actual average on the eleven we've signed so far. I don't know, Matt, if you know that number. I can add some color beyond that, though, if you happen to have the average.
Not the average, but typically, they're in that $25,000-$75,000 annually, depending on the size and scale of the result. They're playing out really at this point in time. We're taking revenue share agreements with these customers, signing through the back end of 2024 and seeing them play out through 2025.
At this point, we're getting a feel for where they fall in terms of their average annual contribution to the business.
To add to that, there are two right now that are in the pipeline. One is in verbal, and it's $200,000 a year expected. There's another one that is near verbal that's in the same neighborhood, maybe slightly more. They're not all going to be small, and I think it's dangerous to make the average off of just the first 11. We're going to see that profile adjust and find a cadence as the product continues to gain traction. We're showing it to operators with significant restaurant or retail commerce, and we're receiving reviews with flying colors on the functionality. That's how we're able to start seeing those wins look like they have more digits than the number.
We'll have to see what that cadence looks like over the longer term. As we've been demoing it to the larger operators, we're getting great feedback. We just have to get with only one year. It's been out there for one year. We have to get into that cycle. The number of demos we're doing is endless. A lot in ski as they're looking at Paradox and wanting Paradox paired with Freedom. A lot of Passport and Freedom. I would say overall in our pipeline, just rough number, it's more than 50% of our pipeline has Freedom alongside it in terms of the conversations we're having. It's resonating very well.
If I were putting an average on it right now, I'd probably say you could probably ballpark it $40,000 or $50,000 per win, but it probably will increase as we gain some further traction. The Middle East, those are Horizon product sales, so they're license and maintenance agreements. The front end of any of the Horizon installations has a large sort of consultation implementation fee. That leads to a license fee, and that then leads to recurring revenue of maintenance and support on that license fee. Just for purposes of protecting the client's commercials, I don't really want to share the overall quantum of what that agreement looks like. The couple of million dollars is kind of what we expect from those different agreements there in terms of this year.
That is largely going to be front-loaded into a portion of the implementation and sort of consultation requirements work that we do on the front end of these engagements. I'd rather talk about the Horizon business overall and those numbers just because it's a couple of contracts and it would divulge the customer's commercials, which I don't think they would probably appreciate. Hope you can understand that and put some framing around it at that level. Cedar Fair and Six Flags, clearly, they're a material client for us. Anything in regard to them is considered highly sensitive. I can't really elaborate, Tintin, unfortunately, except to say that we are clearly a very important provider for them with an extremely strong relationship, and they place a high value in our product. This is 2025.
2026 will be 20 years of running the Six Flags side of it, the legacy Six Flags side e-commerce. And we're at about 14 years on the Cedar Fair side and a long history across that business with ticketing and a whole range of products we support there for them at different levels from recurring payments, lots of integrations around customer support. It is a very complex setup there. On top of what they've just done is a monumental merger, and they're going through a lot of a lift to bring all those businesses together. I'll just say I think we're in a really strong position with the customer. If I felt otherwise, we would have flagged a concern in the results statement. I will leave it at that.
Thanks, guys.
Our next question comes from James Lockyer of Peel Hunt LLP. Please go ahead. Hi, guys.
Thank you for taking my questions. Hopefully, you can hear me.
Hi, James.
I've got three. Firstly, just on, I guess, the guidance, it'd be good to understand a bit more around that. I think you've said you don't expect to exceed the $5.3 million that you did this year, sort of in line with the underlying growth that you performed. Within that, professional fees reduced by 31% because it's lumpy, and the other parts grew by 8%. I was wondering if you could sort of talk us through what you're expecting within the lines of those. I mean, is it fair to think that ticketing and queuing will still grow at the high single? Maybe are we seeing professional fees reduce again? How should we think about that in terms of the shape? That's the first question.
Would you want me to go question by question, or shall I just give them all?
Yeah, we can take that one, James, first. That one on a line-by-line basis, the professional services, again, fluctuates year over year. I'd expect it to remain relatively consistent as to where it finished 2024, possibly a slight uptick depending on what projects come through. The rest of the growth will be in the ticketing piece, really, which is where we see the growth rates in the piece that Steve talked through, as well as the Freedom one.
Okay. Cool.
One of the areas we're seeing—sorry, James. One of the areas we're seeing professional services has an opportunity is with Horizon customers because that is a licensed maintenance product, but that leaves the customers to operate that in their own environment, whether it's Azure or other cloud service.
We're seeing operators asking us if we can run that for them with our tech expertise on the server and security application management side in the cloud, essentially running their cloud instance. That is something our professional services team is very engaged with on a range of the Horizon opportunities.
Okay. Cool. The reason why I ask specifically, I guess, is because that sort of the 2.5% rough midpoint, let's say, of the 0-5% is sort of in line with Six Flags' consensus estimates for 2025, which sort of almost implies you being very cautious on the growth areas of the business. You're just really trying to keep consensus sort of cautious at this point.
I think that's fair to say.
I mean, our peak seasonal trading periods are Easter, the national holidays in the U.S. in May, end of June, July, August, and October. We are yet to see those through, particularly with the shift in Easter this year to mid-May and the holidays around it. It would be remiss of us to call out, particularly with the uncertainty on macro, the expectations of wild growth. It is really us being tempered and measured and conservative and making sure we are being prudent in our expectations.
One of the things I will call out on transactional revenue is when you sign a new customer and they go live, they turn into transactional revenue. Increasing the pace of the wins, in turn, increases the transactional revenue.
It is important for us to think about, too, following the transactional revenue growth is dependent on not only the customer's transactional volume, but also our own success in increasing our win rate. We are looking at, I think a lot of times people just think of the transactional revenue as the clicks, and that's all that's in the math. That is a result of our sales pipeline as well. Just keep that in mind as you're looking at our numbers. Our view on how we increase transactional revenue isn't anchored by only the client's volume. It is also anchored in or based in what we're doing to bring in new customers.
Perhaps a follow-up to Tintin's question on the Middle East. I'm not asking for any commercial-sensitive information here. I'm just wondering around the sort of opportunity.
Do you have any sort of thoughts around the potential audience? I think the city looks like it's going to be over 10 theme parks. I'm just wondering if you had an idea of the potential audience that maybe they're hoping for or that you're hoping for. Once it goes live, are we then talking volume-based fees on that audience?
Yeah. The Horizon model is currently a licensed maintenance agreement. That one, in particular, because it was already in flight prior to acquisition, that project had been quoted quite some time ago. That has evolved and been adjusted, etc., over time, but it's a licensed maintenance model.
We are now offering, and Matt can elaborate on this more, he's very close to the revenue recognition side of this, but we're now essentially offering the Horizon product on a monthly, I guess you could say, subscription-type basis in order to improve the profile from a recurring revenue standpoint. There are other opportunities in the Middle East region. In fact, our Head of International Sales was just there calling on potential clients, Lee, our new COO, and Paolo, who was the founder of what is now Horizon, have a big Middle East run starting next week. There are a range of opportunities there, both within our existing customers and venues they may have, but also other operators that are now seeing us as being the flagship, the choice of the flagship operator and raising their hand. There's a lot of things. We have the Burj Al Arab.
You'll see on one of the pages, I flipped past, I believe it's page 12. There's a photo on the bottom, which is the large wheel, which is called the Ain Dubai. They're a medium-term Horizon customer. They just reopened that venue after some period of closure. We are not just new in that region. We already have a decent amount of customers, but there's a lot of growth happening with new attractions coming out of the ground and also operators that may have been there looking to upgrade. We think it's a really good territory for us.
I just want to push on any idea of sort of their target audience and the guests they're expecting per year.
No, I don't have the numbers on the number of guests they're expecting. I think that it's largely a local draw.
They're hoping to increase their international visitation profile. I think if you look at the sort of project, the Project 2030, I believe it's called, they're looking to increase their international tourism in. These audiences are going to be the large, large volume of people that live in these key cities, Riyadh, other areas going out to these parks on a regular basis.
Yeah. That's that, James. The volume of people attending these parks. We're selling typically into the region our accesso Horizon products on a maintenance and support basis, so really professional services on a recurring arrangement. The opportunity for us in that region, whilst there is transactional opportunity, of course, it's really for the time being. It's these long-standing maintenance and support agreements that evolve over time from supporting our own products, as well as Steve mentioned before, providing a managed service.
Helping with the hosting infrastructure that they have, which is where they see our value.
We've just given one of our signature Horizon customers with a logo you would know, a proposal that is transactional-based at their request. I think we're going to see that product evolve into a different profile as we get a chance to kind of continue working through that. Also, as we get more—we get more experience operating that in the environment for the individual customer, where we can then meter that at some level. One of the things about the transactional volume, too, is you do not end up having to count how many terminals you need or whether it is a big venue or a small venue. You are very easily able to assess what the cost will be to operate that in a venue.
You take the expected customers or the expected revenue and multiply it by a number. In your pro forma, you have a—in your budget, you have a number. I think that model is gaining appeal for a variety of reasons and also gives us longer-term sustainment on the revenue profile. It is not us sort of necessarily pushing it in cases we have customers asking to see it presented in that format as an alternative. We are going to see that opportunity, I think, look a bit different. The shape of Horizon will evolve over the next two or three years as we work through those.
Thank you. A final question just on capital allocation. Obviously, you rate-pegged down a bit of debt in the year, share buybacks, CapEx profile is coming down. How are you thinking about your capital allocation over the next 12 months?
M&A, how are you thinking about capital allocation policy?
Yeah, I can cover that, James. Obviously, today we announced the buyback, GBP 8 million and $10 million. That will take us, I would imagine, with the liquidity we've got in our stock at the moment, take us the best part of four months, if not five months, to get through in this liquidity. It takes a dramatic upward turn. As Steve mentioned on his slides, we're always looking for opportunities. They aren't necessarily ones that call you up and say, "We're available for sale. Are you interested?" They tend to be the ones that we don't want to be involved with and not necessarily enhancing shareholder value and earnings accretive. It's quite the opposite. We're looking for those things that complement the product set that we've already got, which is already fit for purpose.
If there were to be an opportunity, it would be enhancing what we already have, either from a geographic or a product standpoint. Maybe in those ancillary services regions that aren't necessarily ticketing themselves, but other products around that that you could offer as complementary to our own and increase that share of wallet that we have.
Sensitive to our debt position. Another way of answering that is if you ask three people what we should do with our cash, you'll get three different answers. Matt and I sort of deal with that every day. Our job and the board's job is to think through all those, look at our overall longer-term plans and balance how we leverage the cash to its highest return for shareholders. With our share price where it is, obviously, issuing shares to buy a company is not attractive.
I think maintaining our cash position and our flexibility to jump on an acquisition if we decide it's the appropriate one is important. Also, with our customer composition and our size, I think maintaining flexibility on the balance sheet is super important just to make sure we're being prudent with our overall structure. We could afford some more debt, for sure. Our cash generation is very positive, but I also want to make sure we have flexibility to grow the business, which I hear loud and clear from most shareholders is their priority. May not be everyone's, but that's the loud voices to drive the overall growth, not a short-term return. We are constantly balancing all of our choices. With the interest rates where they are, obviously, borrowing a lot of money isn't super attractive.
We just have to keep our mind and our head clear around, with the current conditions, what's the best approach going forward. We will continue to do that and balance that with whether or not there are opportunities on the radar or not. If they're not and we do not see anything in the foreseeable future, then we have to leverage the cash through buyback or other means back to shareholders. If we think there may be something on the horizon, then we might be a little bit more cautious in how we choose to use that cash. It really is something that we're in a really stable position. We think we're really resilient. We have options that we'll continue to use as we think is best suited for the shareholders.
I mean, is it fair to think your cost of equity is higher than your cost of debt still?
Yes. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah. Great. Thanks, guys.
Absolutely.
Our next question comes from Katie Cousins of Shore Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Yeah, you kind of touched on it anyway, but it'd be interesting to know in terms of the Middle Eastern contracts, what learnings have been taken from the Seven contracts for the newer one. I suppose the monthly subscriptions kind of go into that, but is there anything else you've been able to implement to maybe get away from some of the delays and headwinds that you've seen there? Also, in terms of the transition of some of the contracts to a SaaS model, how should we expect to think about the impact on revenues?
Ultimately, how big can SaaS get as a proportion of the group? The last one would just be around the payment options and how you're exploring there. Is that likely to be organic, or is there some sort of acquisition you can do to help speed up that process? Thank you.
Still on the floor. Hi, Katie. Thank you. First question is what we've learned on working in the Middle East. It's very similar in terms of what the product needs are, what the operational requirements are. We obviously have things like different payment processors, different compliance regulations with tax authorities and stuff that's normal in any new region. What we've learned is a legal process there is very, very, very slow. It's unlike anything I've seen before, to be perfectly honest. They're very diligent, very thorough, very cooperative. It's just a very slow process.
They have a different just approach to how they manage those. We have to manage our expectations around time to close. Even though the project date is not moving, the time to get the contract done is often taking longer than we would normally expect by like 10 x. We have learned to sort of manage our expectations and how to approach those. I think we have learned a lot around that area and will be more successful, hopefully, going forward around how those are managed. I think there is going to be an opportunity there eventually for Freedom in the region. There is a lot of interest. We are still a little early with the product to be in some of those locations, but I think we still have an opportunity there.
The Horizon question, which is all related in that, is I would not expect that you are going to suddenly see Horizon's revenue profile switch to transactional overnight, but we are seeing that shift coming into play, and we are starting to discuss it that way with customers. The lead time to turn those into contracts can be a year or so or more. I would not see that there is a material shift, but what that will do over time is instead of having this sort of license and then maintenance situation, we can get a more stable revenue profile, and they tend to keep these systems a really long time. Keeping that revenue profile at a higher level is really important if they are keeping it 10, 15, 20 years versus letting it just sort of go into maintenance for 10 or 15 or 20 years.
That is a model we're looking to adjust. Importantly, to enable us for the customer's benefit to be able to continue investing in the product at a higher level than a licensed maintenance model would allow, which is a licensed maintenance model is often not a good thing for a software company. We are looking to migrate that product over into more of a recurring revenue, whether it's transactional or just more of a monthly service fee that's not even indexed on volume. We're looking at a range of things depending upon the customer and what they're looking for. I think that will progress over time. Did I miss a third question in there?
Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. That was it.
There are a lot of ways you can approach that. One is you can become referral partners.
One is you can go more direct with white label applications into payment space. There is a whole range of things in there. We are very well equipped in terms of the inner working of this with our internal product. It is really what we are connecting to and how we better monetize what we are connecting to that I think is our opportunity. We are not going to go and acquire Adyen. That is what we are talking about is what is going on with sort of the Adyen, the Shift4, the Global Payments, the Five Serves. What is going on in that sort of acquirer space where we can help use our aggregated volume to get our customers better deals and in turn also be beneficial to us as well.
They are not really areas that I would view as acquisition of us acquiring one of those companies, but something that we would look at more carefully in terms of our commercial approach.
That's really helpful. Thank you.
Our next question comes from John Barn at Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes, John.
Yeah. Perfect. Yes, folks, thanks, Steve, and much for the presentation. Just two questions from me, please. The first is on, can you give us a sense of seasonality in the business? Obviously, offer by vertical, ski versus theme park, but how much do you see as sort of concentrated around those key months that you mentioned? The second question is, you mentioned controlling costs in the statement and then touched on server costs earlier.
Can you give us some more color on what the cost control looks like, your key areas of focus, and what we should expect there? Thank you. Matt, do you want to tackle the seasonality first?
Yeah, sure. John will cover that. We are and have by the profile of our customers, particularly with those larger major customers that we have being theme parks and attractions, we're always going to be heavily weighted towards the holiday period. The holiday period being Easter, national holidays in the U.S. in May, end of June, July, August, and October. If you have a look at our business year over year, particularly H2, where that revenue falls in July, August, and October is significantly higher than it is in H1. Again, it's the transactional piece that's moving there. I wouldn't expect that to change anytime soon.
The product we're offering is a product of theme parks and attractions, and they're always going to have some element of seasonality in there. I expect the weighting that we had in H1 and H2 last year to play out really into the foreseeable future, albeit there will be some transition as ski becomes a larger part of our business, which really runs end of October through April, but it would take some going to get it in parity to our or to really offset that seasonality that we have from the major customers in the Passport and the SaaS business that we have. It is a seasonal weighting piece.
The cost control, it's everything, honestly.
We don't have a lot of sort of admin, sort of, I guess you could say, the more trivial expenses to go and sort of take the coffee out of the break rooms. That's not what we're looking at. We don't even have those expenses to begin with because we're largely remote. Our big buckets are labor, obviously. Looking at efficient deployment of the labor, one of the things Lee has really been helping us on on the engineering side is looking at AI tooling around the development. I'd say it's a cost play, but it's really more about efficiency and time to market. An example would be all software needs to be refreshed around it ends life, right?
Can you take a product that is becoming end of life because the framework by the supplier, whatever it is, Java or whatever, is becoming end of life and you need to rewrite that into a new modern code platform? Or you want to move to a new modern code platform because that's what everyone's doing and it's more efficient. Can you take the old code, the existing code, can you drop it into an AI model and have it rewrite it into the new language versus putting three or four developers doing that for a year and rewriting a whole point of sale application when perhaps AI could have done it in a week? You can then spend a month or two, I guess, going through and cleaning up and testing it. We're looking for those kinds of things to help our speed to market.
It helps manage technical debt. It helps you accelerate feature deployment. When projects come up, it allows you to not need to go hire 10 people to work on the new project because you're getting more out of your existing resources to continue to leverage that cost base as the revenue increases. I think the opportunities around that, around customer support, we do a lot of product setup for customers, helping them use the product, helping them deploy their technology are the ways to help automate the setup of tickets, for example, that is a very manual process today. We are looking at things like that so we can continue to grow our revenue without needing to add people.
Yeah, potentially, obviously, you could lower the number of people, but our goal is really to grow our revenue and not grow our cost in whatever format that is. That's really, I think, on the labor and cost side, what we're looking at is any different opportunity we have, whether it's AI or not, to reduce our operating costs. Our server cost is material. It's not massive, but it's material. It's a few million dollars, single digit. If you can shave $500,000-$600,000 off here and there, it all starts to add up. We're looking under every rock. Some of that, by the way, is getting redeployed into our commercial efforts to help us accelerate our growth rate.
It is also about making sure that whatever dollar we spend is being leveraged in the best possible way and finding ways to free up redundant work so we can put resources into work that is helping us drive the business forward at a faster pace. That is really how we think about cost control, not just, "Hey, go cut 5% tomorrow. Go find it somewhere." It is really a more comprehensive view around optimization of our spend. We have a lot of people, obviously, and making sure what they are putting out there is as most efficient as possible. If I can use AI, for example, to bring our composable commerce product to market a year sooner, that is very valuable. That would be our priority around efficiency as much as cost control. It is also about revenue because we can only cut our costs so far.
You can't cost, as they say, you can't cost cut your way to success. We've got to really focus on driving the revenue. That's a lot about what our efficiency plays are about, is managing that bottom line cost, the overall cost, while continuing to grow the revenue.
There are no further raised hands on the webinar. I will now address the written questions. Our first written question comes from Peter McNally of Stifel. You have done a lot of integration for products. What are the key integrations going forward, and how long until you have a fully integrated SaaS solution?
That's a great question and one that I'd love to answer because the answer is that we—and this goes back to some marketing and maybe legacy materials that are out there from 2018, 2019.
One big comprehensive system that's all tangled together would be a beast, and that one that no one would really want, in my view. What we've done is integrations where they're purposeful. Payments integrations to our products, for example, so we have one payment solution that runs in each one of our products can leverage that. When you are in a ski resort and you show them your season pass and you receive a 10% discount on food, our Freedom system can validate that you're actually a valid pass member in the ticketing system. These are integrations, but you could also call them handshakes between products, allowing a customer in a theme park customer like Village Roadshow to also use our assigned seating product inside their e-commerce. That's an integration.
One system that does everything would be daunting for anyone and would not be feature-focused on ski or on attractions. Making sure these solutions can work together in a way that is more harmonious is really what we've done. I always say we're largely there. I mean, there's always something new that comes along, but having them work together is more important than having one big system, and that really is our priority. If there's sort of legacy quotes or legacy documents that say we're creating one big platform, anyone listening, please strike that because that is not at all really what was meant by that, really. It was meant that we have the opportunity to sell a customer multiple products, and they can use them together, not that we sell them one product that does everything.
We want the food system to work alongside the ticketing system and for those to be compatible. That is really the extent of the integration that is even required. Those are the areas that we focus on. Things like payments, things like any of our products being able to use our distribution system as a connecting point so they can sell tickets on Groupon through any of the ticketing platforms. Those are the integrations we talk about whenever we discuss integrations. It is not about making everything one big interchangeable product. We are really, I think, quite—we are pretty much there, I would say. Generally speaking, we are pretty much there. Something we buy new, like Horizon, has some integration work to do, but our other products are at the level they really need for, I would say, the vast majority of clients' use cases.
Our final question comes from Oliver Tipping of Peel Hunt. For Accesso Freedom customers, have you been able to cross-sell any other of your existing products? Will this be a future growth driver as the way into clients you did not previously service, or will it be mostly selling Freedom into existing customers?
Our Siriusware product has food and retail functionality at a basic level. Our Paradox product that we got in 2023 had some very, very basic food and retail functionality. Good quality, but not a really wide range of functionality that most operators would be looking for. For example, mobile food ordering was not part of that system, was not part of either system. Siriusware customers have a path forward, which is to move to Paradox SaaS solution or to Passport SaaS solution.
When they do that, they need a food system and retail system to go alongside that. The Siriusware customers will migrate to a product that is a ticketing solution and Freedom alongside that. That is the migration path. They are moving from license and maintenance to two SaaS products. Paradox has food and retail functionality at a limited level. We are sunsetting that functionality within Paradox. Customers that have been using the food component of Paradox are now actually proactively being moved. We are moving them to Freedom as we speak. Paradox will solely be the tickets, rentals, and lessons portion complemented by Freedom. The customers get a far more comprehensive product. In that case, if they want to use it just for what Paradox was doing, it is included.
If you really want to use Freedom for all the things it provides, then you need to pay the normal Freedom fee. It is kind of an upsell opportunity for us. It is a complement in those cases, but it is also a way to win new customers. The one I mentioned earlier that is a $200,000 Freedom retail client, that was really their focus. The ticketing portion is going to be tiny, but they need both. We can bring both in and give them that solution. It is the inverse of what you would normally see with large ticketing and maybe food and retail coming in along the side. That one is more food and retail that needs a little bit of ticketing. That is a brand new customer.
We're doing a demo this week, I believe, or next week for an airport that needs a food and retail solution. An airport's like a theme park in terms of food and retail. There are often third-party operators that need to operate the snack stand and the coffee shop and maybe a gift store in sort of the maybe B-tier or C-tier airports. They're looking for a product, and we can meet those needs very, very well. There are a range of new customer opportunities out there for Freedom alongside—we've sold 11. We have 1,200 customers. We have a huge cross-sell opportunity as we continue to have those conversations with customers going forward. It's easier to get those customers to take Freedom. We already know them. Parallel Path, we're also selling Freedom to people that we don't already have a relationship with.
It really is both.
There are no further questions, so I'll hand it back to the speakers for closing remarks.
Thank you all very much, and I do appreciate having so many questions today. Hopefully, those provide a little bit of clarification on something that we missed or that you all were curious to know more about. As always, Matt and I are here for further conversations if there's something we can help you with. We always welcome the chance to clarify something or to engage with any of you. Thank you all very much for joining, taking the time out of your day. We look forward to speaking to you again.
Thank you all.
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