PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted anytime via the Q&A tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself; however, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll, and I'd now like to hand you over to CEO Tommy Cook. Good afternoon to you, sir.
Hi, thank you very much, Alexander, and welcome everyone, and thanks very much for taking the time to join and get an update on our interim results. Before I go there, let me just, in case there's a few people that are not so familiar with us, just take a couple of minutes to introduce Calnex and who we are and what we do. So Calnex Solutions is a test solutions provider to the world's telecom and cloud computing industry. We basically provide solutions that allow our customers to validate the performance of critical infrastructure associated with whether they're working in the telecoms or the cloud computing spaces. To date, we have secured and shipped orders to 68 countries around the world, so very much a global footprint, and we run a lean business model with a global distribution channel, and we outsource our manufacturing to a local supplier.
You can see on the right-hand side there are just some of the names that you may recognize of the key customers that we sell to in a number of different sectors, both in telecoms, hyperscale, enterprise component, and telecoms network space. So what is it we do? Basically, this shows a simplistic view of developing new equipment, whether it's going into the telecom sector or into data comms, from starting the design through design validation, conformance test, manufacturer, obviously deployment, and then maintenance. And you can see from the red circles where we really focus on is that design validation conformance test. So this is the space where engineers have got a new design coming through.
They really have to put it through its paces, make sure it works under all conditions, it meets the specification, meets the standards, conformance that it needs to do, and make sure there's good yield before going into manufacturing. And so that's really a space we focus on primarily because it's a space where good test equipment can speed up the time to get into manufacturing effectively. That means speeding up the time to revenue for our customers with new products coming to market. And it's a space where the customers spend a lot of money in test equipment because really it allows them to build confidence as well that once their equipment is deployed in the many different topologies around the world, it will work under all conditions. The one other space we focus on is more the maintenance and monitoring.
This is where, in networks where if something no longer works, the engineers need to come along and try. Quite often these days, the first approach is very much just replace equipment, and if it works, then job done. If it doesn't work, then it usually means there's something wrong with the setup in the network, and you need tools that give you a deeper insight into what's going on. That ties into the ethos of providing high capability tools that we have for the design and conformance test space. That's Calnex. Let's look at the period just finished, the first half of FY 2025. In terms of the trading, we finished at GBP 7.4 million revenue for the period, which we made a loss of GBP 1.3 million. We had a closing cash of GBP 8.6 million.
For that period, we are going to distribute a dividend, the same level of dividend that we did last year at 0.31p per share. Now, in terms of what we're looking for, looking at the market, in some ways, summing up the year so far, it's panning out pretty much just how we hoped or how we expected, I should say, maybe not hoped. I guess we were hoping there may be a recovery, but that was more a hope. And the planning very much was to assume that the telecom space was not going to recover through this period. And any growth and the growth that we would get was really from our own product program and also our own go-to-market initiatives in terms of trying to find new customers. And that's really what we've seen through this period.
We did find in Q1, the order level was subdued, aligned to what we've seen reported by other companies in the sector, but it improved in the second quarter, and the key things as we go into the second half is some of our new product programs have actually come out really early in the quarter. We probably thought the 800 gigs would come out probably halfway through this quarter near Christmas, but actually the engineers got it out at the end of September, which was excellent because it means really the funnel of deals we have there, we can start working on. We have really high complexity products customers want to see working on the bench before they close the deal, so having the product out early really allows us to start and work that deal funnel, so that's really important for the second half.
And then the other thing that we were looking to create growth was our NE business. That's our network emulation business where it's not so much about products, but our route to market. And we'll talk about that later, how we look at each application that people may use an emulation product, think about how to present it to the customer in terms of really saying, how does this help you in your sector and what you're doing? And also think about the route to market channel partners, et cetera, that actually go to these customers. So we've also seen steady progress in terms of building that business through the first half that we hope to continue through the second half.
The one other significant change that happened to us this year is if you're familiar with Calnex, you'll know that in the past we worked with Spirent as our sales channel partner, and about 60% of our business went through Spirent. Now, earlier this year, it was announced that Spirent was going to be acquired by Keysight, so we decided it was time for us to separate that agreement and move to just use regional partners across the world instead. Now, we already had a partner network of about 40 partners covering different territories around the world, as well as working with Spirent. But really, we set about creating a channel that would allow us to stop working with Spirent as and when we need to once that acquisition's gone through. And I can report that that channel's pretty much in place. It's gone well.
We now have channel partners in all the major territories set up to go as and when we need to switch, but actually, in all the cases and our complete experience with Spirent, they're always a very professional company, and we've found that it's worthwhile continuing to work through this phase. They're obviously very focused on keeping business going, so what we've done is created what we call a deal registration situation. If they find a deal, then we're quite happy for it, and they feel they can close it this year, then we've said, that's fine. We'll continue under the same terms of the agreement, and we'll continue to work that while we're bringing the new channel up, so it's meant there's been no cliff edge of stopping one channel and moving to another. It's allowed us to work together, and it's beneficial to Spirent. It's beneficial to us.
So again, it's been a very positive end period of this relationship with us as we move through to the point that we will stop using them. Now, obviously, once acquisition goes through, we may still work with them in a much more focused way, focused on particular sub-customer sets where we've got good complementary products that we can work together. And that may be something that'll happen, but obviously, we'll wait and see what happens with the whole Keysight acquisition. But the key thing was that we had the flexibility to move away if that's what we need to do next year. So as we look into next year, into the second half, sorry, we still believe we're going to deliver aligned to market expectations. We had an increased backlog of orders going into the period. Of course, the uncertainties remain in the wider economic environment.
And again, we're kind of seeing the same as what the other companies in the sector reporting that it could be well into next year when it recovers. But we've built a plan, not in waiting for the market to recover, although we'll look forward to benefiting from that when it happens, but built on a plan of growth, built on our new product program, delivering extra value to customers that we could realize, and also our positioning to really get to these new customers in the NE as well. So we feel we're well positioned to create growth on our own, but also well positioned to benefit when the market does recover. I've just brought out here a little more on this channel partners because obviously, it's a significant change for us.
But we have, as I say, we now have over 75 partners signed up to give us a global footprint. And as I said, there was about 40 before, so it's not like we've signed up 75 in the last six months. But there are a whole range, not all partners are the same. We have some partners that cover territories that do quite a lot of it. They'll do a lot of business with us. But then there's other ones, like we have one in Vietnam. We hear from once every three or four years. They want to buy a unit. So the partners are all very different. Some of them cover large territories. Some cover just particular sectors. And I've picked out two examples here of people to give you a kind of feel for the kind of range of people that we've signed up.
TeraComm is a company we've worked with on and off throughout the whole life of Calnex. When we started back in going to the U.S. back in 2008, we actually worked with TeraComm. And then we started working with JDSU, who are now Viavi for a number of years. And then we went back to working with TeraComm, and then we started working with Spirent. So they're a well-established supplier. We know the guys well. They've really got a good footprint in all of the customers that we've been selling through Spirent. So again, we were pleased that we could sign these guys up. Whereas CloudDepend is a new company for us in India. Basically, they focus on the Indian companies rather than the multinationals. We've actually known some of the people in there because we'd worked with them previously in Spirent.
They have personnel that had previously worked in Spirent. Therefore, we knew them well. We've been in discussion with them over the years. We keep in touch with channel partners just in case something needed to change. And they've developed strong relationships into the operators and data center companies in India. So again, we're looking forward to working with these guys because we feel they can potentially take us to some new customers as well as covering the customers we were engaged with within Spirent. So a real range of different types of partners that we develop. And then going forward, it's not a matter of coming to the end.
We will continue to work that channel network, looking to different groups, channel partners that can take us to different customers for different products, as well as people that can give us good penetration into the people that we're already with. And again, we'll continue to manage that going forward. And I guess just on the kind of long-term drivers, we really don't see anything much changing there. We focus on the cloud computing and the build-out of the mobile network. In our belief, the underlying drivers are still strong there. The operators have, in the last couple of years, slowed down the build-out of the mobile network, but they need to start doing it again soon because that's a requirement to move forward. The future world needs more mobile access, and they will start building, and that'll start to drive the whole telecoms industry when it does.
Of course, the cloud computing world is just getting bigger and bigger. The appearance of AI, we can see that the data center guys realize that AI calls are going to require a huge amount of bandwidth and processing power. So the build-out of the infrastructure is continuing at pace. So these fundamental drivers into all the sectors that we're looking at, we believe, are still strong and are still the right areas for us to focus on in terms of our strategic focus and our product programs going forward. So at that point, I'll pass over to Ashleigh. I'll give you a review of the finances for the first half.
Thanks, Tommy.
So just in terms of a summary overview and to reiterate what Tommy just covered in his introduction, our financial performance in the period was a resilient one given the challenging and unpredictable trading environments we're still operating within. Although our revenues came in slightly under prior year levels, we were encouraged that order and revenue performance steadily improved throughout H1, with Q2 delivering an encouraging uplift on a subdued Q1, including strong order demand for our new Paragon 800G product, which will start to ship in H2, and also for our NE products. That also led to an improved order backlog position, as Tommy just mentioned, at the end of the period compared to where we started the year from, which also just gives us a good basis to start H2 with.
Our gross margins have remained robust and came in line with prior year at 74%, which is also in line with where we were planning, and the shortfalls on the gross profit pound figure are being driven by revenue volumes only, with product margin mix holding up against prior year and plan. We continue to manage overhead costs and R&D investment cash costs tightly, with those costs coming in on plan and in line with last year despite inflationary increases in the current year. Inventory sitting over just 6 million, with some further investment being made in the period, albeit at lower investment levels than the prior period. This continues to allow us to manage lead times for customers and be ready to serve and increase demand when the market conditions improve, also providing us with a good foundation on which to return to stronger financial performance in future periods.
We have a continued strong balance sheet, which we still carry, and we still carry a significant level of surplus cash on top of what is needed for working capital day-to-day management, with cash returning to over GBP 10 million in the month after the period end. Just moving on to the revenue analysis in the period. Just before I take you through the regional and product line splits, I just thought it would be useful just to remind you of our revenue model and our revenue streams. We have two revenue streams, the main one being what we call bundled hardware and software. We also have software support program revenues as well. For bundled hardware and software, typical customer will purchase one of our hardware products with a number of software options included at the time of purchase. And that's invoiced as one bundled sale.
They can then come back for upgrades or additional options that are added to the existing hardware they've already purchased through the provision of a license key. And we sell that as standalone software sales or upgrades. Bundled hardware and software sales pricing will differ from order to order as it depends on the hardware product being purchased and the numerous software option choices and mix that each hardware product can offer. And each customer purchases a different combination of software options for each hardware product depending on what it is that they need it for. So as a result of that variability, the average revenue earned per bundle will vary from order to order. And that revenue is recognized on dispatch or delivery of software license key if it's a standalone software sale. And that makes up the majority of our revenues.
And then each of our products comes with a standard warranty period, which can be extended for an extra fee. And we also sell software support programs. And that makes up our second revenue stream. And that revenue is recognized over the life of the product. So if a customer purchases a support package that spans more than one year, that revenue, the revenue that's associated with those future years is deferred on the balance sheet and released over that same number of years that the package covers. So just with that background, in terms of our GEOgraphic and product revenue performance in the period, from a regional perspective, we have three regions. That is the Americas, North Asia, and Rest of the World. And Rest of the World includes Europe, Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and a little bit of Australasia as well.
You can see from the disclosure notes in the RNS that Americas region was our biggest performing region in the period from a revenues perspective, with 39% of revenues. The rest of the world coming in a close second at 37%, and North Asia taking up the remaining 24%. The rest of the world region has been the least affected by the slowdown in the telco end markets and is able to take advantage of a more diverse sector mix from an end customer perspective, which contributed to their performance exceeding both other regions in the prior period. The revenue decline in this current period against the prior period is really predominantly due to timing of shipments and timing of revenue recognition as opposed to order demand. The region is still the highest performing region from an order perspective in the current period.
The North Asia region continues to operate against the backdrop of the U.S.-China GEOpolitical tensions, which remain in the region, so as a result, China still remains a challenging country for us. However, we've seen another strong performance in Japan and Taiwan as we continue to focus on growing those businesses within the region while China's more difficult. The Americas region continues to be the most impacted by the telco slowdown, but we did see a 53% growth in revenue from the region in the period compared to last period, the last half year, and that's driven from a revenue perspective that is driven by the sales of our NE products or emulator products, which have been successful in the cloud-based and government sectors in particular, and that's been the focus for us whilst the telco market has been slower.
We're also seeing some encouraging order demand in that same region for our newly developed Paragon-neo 800G product coming from the Americas region, which was another key focus for us in this period. Those orders were planned and will ship in H2. We're planned to ship in H2 as well. From a product line perspective, Lab Sync, so that's our Paragon-neo and Paragon-X products, that continues to be impacted by the slowdown in the telco market, as is the case with our Sentinel product, which is our telecoms-focused network sync product. Although the order demand for the 800G Neo that I just mentioned is very encouraging, and we'll start to see those orders generate revenue in the second half of the year. Our plans for growing Sentry sales, our network sync product aimed at data centers are continuing.
We saw good growth in orders and revenue for our NE product line. That's the SNE and the NE-ONE emulators. That was across a range of end markets driven by a strong demand for SNE-X and SNE Ignite, plus continued solid demand for our NE-ONE product as well. Just onto the income statement itself. As Tommy said, the revenue for the half was GBP 7.4 million, which is a decline, a 6% decline on last year's half, driven by the challenging dynamics that are still existing in our end markets. As you know, our indirect cost base is largely fixed. The tighter the revenue, the more negative operational gearing affects the P&L, the profit line.
From a gross margin perspective, gross margin, as I mentioned before, was 74% in the half year, very much in line with where we planned it to be and with the prior year. Sometimes gross margins can fluctuate by 1%-2% depending on the mix of products and bundles that are sold in the year. The mix of the margin has been constant with the prior year trends. Just as a reminder, that's the gross margin net of commissions payable to our channel partners. That's our margin. As you can see here, admin costs, so that's excluding any depreciation and amortization at this point, which is shown separately on the P&L here, that came in line with prior year as we continue with the cost control measures that we put in place last year, tight control on costs, including headcounts.
We've continued to pause on our headcount growth, excluding a small amount of graduate hires and any key replacement hires, of which we've only had very few, and as a result, the headcount is slightly reduced to 157 for the group by the end of the period from 160 at the period, the prior period end, prior year end, sorry. As you'll know, we capitalize 100% of our R&D costs and amortize these to the P&L over five years, so R&D amortization came in at GBP 2.1 million for the period, and that was as planned versus GBP 1.8 million in the prior year. I'll show you in a second on the cash flow.
We've actually not increased the cash spend in R&D, but in a period where there's no headcount increase, the amortization will increase automatically as part of the calculation as a result of prior period headcount increases in the five years prior to the current year because of the amortization policy. So loss came in, a loss before tax came in at GBP 1.3 million, driven by that revenue volume performance, the revenue volume shortfall, and the increase in our R&D amortization. All other costs were in line with prior year. So the fixed cost base, as I said before, continues to cause a negative operational gearing effect on the P&L. But as we've also said previously, we need to retain this cost base to return to growth in future periods.
The effective tax rate for the period was 24%, and EPS is currently a loss per share of 1.13 pence, driven by the trading performance on the profit. So just onto the cash flow. Total cash outflow for the period was GBP 3.3 million, which reflects both the trading volumes in the period and movements in working capital, but also was affected slightly by month-end cutoff as we saw some significant cash balances come in days after the month-end, which I'll cover in a second. So as you can see here, working capital movements were GBP 1.3 million of an outflow compared to the GBP 3.3 million outflow in the prior year. And that's predominantly driven by inventory investment.
That's as a result of a planned build-up of some demo stock for our new product releases, including the Paragon-neo 800G, and additional investment in relation to demand plans in line with previous order expectations, which do take some time to dial down through the supply chain, but shouldn't repeat into H2 or into the following year. As trading volumes increase in H2, we expect that inventory balance to start to reduce. Cash used in investing activities is principally cash spent on product development activities, which, as I said before, is capitalized and amortized over five years. As you can see here, the investment in development spend in the period was GBP 2.6 million. That was in line with the prior period, with, as I previously mentioned, the cost control measures and headcount pause offsetting inflationary salary increases and a small graduate headcount increase in that team.
The group, we had paid GBP 0.8 million in tax in the prior period in FY 2024 to HMRC based on profit generated in FY 2023. As I just mentioned, days after the period, the half-year end, GBP 1.1 million was received from HMRC in relation to that refund, plus some additional cash receivable due back for the FY 2024 R&D tax claim as well. That, alongside some other positive receivables movements from the September month-end, brought the cash balance back up to GBP 10.3 million at the October month-end. We're still holding a significant level of surplus cash on the balance sheet, which we keep in high-interest deposit accounts to maximize interest income. We still have no debt on the balance sheet, and we expect H2 to be cash-generative given the expected revenue growth and the run rate on costs.
That should take us back close to where we started the year from in terms of our cash balance. I'll hand you back over to Tommy.
Okay. Thanks, Ashleigh. Let's just have a quick look at our strategy and then do a spotlight on our kind of go-to-market activities. Our strategy hasn't changed. It's still the same as before. As I mentioned earlier, we still believe there's significant underlying growth opportunity in the build-out of the mobile network or the growth of 5G and also in the cloud computing sector. These are still the main areas that we will continue to focus on in terms of looking for new opportunities and expanding our current footprint. Of course, as we've mentioned before, we do kind of look for potential acquisition targets.
Our industry is an industry where there isn't a huge number of companies that are working in it, but we continue to keep in touch with people, and in fact, in the last year, we've focused more on strategic partnerships and looking to see whether we can work with people. Obviously, when we had our kind of overarching umbrella arrangement with Spirent, it made it hard for us to work with some of the other test vendors out there. Now that that's diminishing, there's maybe opportunity to work in terms of a go-to-market with a kind of joint proposal with some of the other test vendors.
So these are some of the things that we're looking at, as well as continuing to look for opportunities to acquire businesses that would take us to new business, new business in my mind, defined as either going to a new set of customers we don't sell to today or having something in addition to what we have today to sell to the current customer base. If you look at our product portfolio, our platforms, it looks familiar from the last time. Through the period, we've continued to enhance all these products. Engineering teams are continually to add additional functionality to align to standards, developments, customer requests, etc. The biggest change was obviously the top left-hand side there, the introduction of the Paragon neo-S, the larger one of the two. That's the 800G platform. It's actually heavily leveraged the Paragon-neo.
It's really the 800 part that's changed, but all the other rates we've kind of leveraged between platforms to get the value of that engineering. So these products are continuing to make good traction in the market, and we're continuing to enhance and develop them aligned to customer requests and obviously changes in the technology roadmaps that we address. I just wanted to take a minute to look at the two markets because actually, just going back here, if you look at the Lab Sync and even the Sync market as a different market from the NE, the Sync market was where we started in as a company, and we're well established. We are really regarded as a de facto standard for testing high-accuracy time through the network. So we're well known across the market space and have a good global footprint.
I'll talk about how we maintain that in a minute. But the NE is a market that we are developing into, and it's more about understanding how to go-to-market in that sector and get additional customers. And really, when you look at it, there's a whole group. And what we've found is that rather than present the capability of the product as a multipurpose toolkit with lots of great capability and the products are feature-rich, it's more about thinking about each sector. What is it the customers are trying to do? What's the problem? And how what we do is actually going to make it better? And that can be quite different in terms of the way you present it in different sectors, in terms of presenting to the space or defense as you would to enterprise, even though behind it, it's the same product that you're using.
As well as thinking about collateral and how you present it in terms of information, it also means that we have to think of how do we get to these customers? Do we use our current channel partner network, or do we have to sign up with new people? Do we want to work direct? Is that the best way to do it? Or do we want to work through the defense sector through system integrators or prime contractors that are taking large projects on for government agencies, bringing together lots of equipment and then really trying to get our equipment built into that? It's been really important to understand that. It's something we've really been focusing on in the last 18 months is our route to market. One of the sectors we focus on is space.
I'm going to ask now Alexander to play just a short video of two minutes to try and explain how we try and present the product very much bespoke for that application. Alexander, could you try and run the video, please?
I'm Frank Puranik, and I work for Calnex Solutions. Calnex is a premier vendor of network emulators. We have the broadest range from very high-speed network emulators to very flexible network emulators. But today, I'm here to talk to you about satellites. Satellites, satcoms in particular, throws quite a challenge at applications that have to use it, from very high latencies in the GEO environments to the moving feast that you get in the LEO environments, where there's quite a bit of jitter caused by the movement of the satellites relative to the ground.
In the middle of that is LEO, which has a bit of the characteristics of both. But if you want to test in those environments, you're probably going to say to me, "Well, we'll just do it in the real environment. We'll buy some satellite time and do it." Well, that's expensive, but there's another problem that's even bigger. The network is just whatever it is on that day. You'll either find a problem or not. And if you do find a problem, how will you get your developers to look at it in order to improve the application and retest it in the same environment? With our network emulators, you can do just that. In your lab or a corner of the office, you can effectively have satcoms conditions created by our emulator of any network design that you like and any type.
You probably want to test on the edge conditions where the network is bad. And then when you produce an error, you can get your developers to look at it and repeat it for them. And if they say they've made a fix, you can test that too. So controllability and repeatability are the watchwords of those environments. So if you have other environments that are important to you, like VSAT, we can do those too. So we control all the major parameters for these things, the bandwidth, the latency loss, and you can set those for everything you want. So what will this do for you? Well, if you don't do it, you're going to produce applications that are going to need fixing at high cost and high amounts of time. We eliminate that by testing properly at the very beginning.
So if you want to know more, come and talk to us at Calnex Solutions.
So hopefully, you get a flavor there from Frank that how we try and present it very clearly into the customer's currency in terms of how they're thinking about it, what their problems are, and trying to present what the value that we can deliver to their very specific problems. And that's really been a major focus in our NE program, is that go-to-market approach. And as I said earlier, it has actually started to bear fruit through the first half, and we hope that it will continue to grow a market through the next half and into next year. I just wanted to compare and contrast that to our go-to-market for the Sync products. As I said, in the Sync world, we're well known. They know who we are.
So it's not about kind of taking the product and actually trying to explain who we are and what the value is. It's more about staying present and staying relevant in the market. So we do a lot of work to kind of keep our name up there. We do white papers with some of the standards bodies like IEEE. Recently, there was a timing conference in Europe. It happens once a year. We did a joint presentation with NOS, who are the mobile operator in Portugal. We actually were there with one of our new products, SyncSense. We got it installed in their lab. They ran some tests, and then they presented the results. So it's about showing that we're well connected into the industry. We've done press releases with China Mobile, where we've done testing for them.
We've done other things like created kind of semi-bespoke brochures, going after different groups and working with different key players within the industry. So we need to stay relevant to the market. We need to stay engaged because it's not just about selling. We need to know where the industry's going, stay tracking, understanding which technologies our customer base is looking at, what they're going to pick up, and what they're going to need tomorrow and next year and the year after. So very much it's a different approach in terms of that very front-end engaging with customers in the two product lines. And really, what we do is try and make sure we understand how to keep that engagement, either develop new engagement with customers, develop engagement with new customers, sorry, or stay engaged with customers we already have.
So to just wrap it up, the macroeconomic environment remains unpredictable for us and challenging, especially in the telecom space. But we have got new product initiatives that have been delivered, and they've been delivered on time, which allows us to really try and develop revenue from these in H2 and also FY 2026. We expect the telecoms market to remain challenging through FY 2025. But we're not banking on it coming back. We expect that it will come back. We'll be delighted when it does come back, but we're not building plans assuming it's coming back. We're making sure we are looking for growth from what we are doing. But when it does come back, we're well positioned to take advantage of the growth back into the telecom sector because we've remained connected and relevant in that sector.
And of course, during this time, we've taken the opportunity to try and diversify our market base, going into some of these new applications for the NE to spread our base, which will be great, hopefully, more stability in the company and more growth in the future. And that's why we believe that we can continue to deliver the financial performance that we have in the market expectations. So at that point, we shall move on to some Q&A.
Perfect. Tommy, Ashleigh, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit questions. You can see that Q&A tab, which is situated on the top right-hand corner of the screen. Just while the company takes a few moments for you, the questions have been submitted today.
We'll have a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via the dashboard. As you can see, we have received questions throughout today's presentation. Tommy, if I could hand back to you just to read out the questions and give responses to what's appropriate to do, so I'll pick up from you at the end.
You got some questions? Good to go, Ashley?
Yeah. I've got a couple of questions here that I can answer, and then I'll hand over to Tommy. So first question here from David. Has the change from Spirent to new distributors impacted order intake? That came in during the presentation. So I think Tommy covered off some of that when he was talking about the channel change. We haven't stopped dealing with Spirent completely.
We've come out of the reseller agreement, but we are now acting on more of a memorandum of understanding deal registration format with them. We're still very much engaged with Spirent. That's effectively aiding or maintaining order intake levels while the new distributors get up to speed. It's working quite nicely with that sort of phased approach. Hopefully, that answers that question there, David. Next question here is from NW. What impact will USA tariffs have on revenues and margins? Very hard to say at the moment as we don't know what level those tariffs or what the kind of makeup or detail of those tariffs would look like. At the moment, we're keeping a very close eye on it. If the tariffs are low enough, we would be able to look at passing that on through price increases to end customers.
Over a certain level, those tariffs, we may have to take some of that cost ourselves, which may impact margins, but it's very hard to say at this moment in time due to the fact that we don't know what level they will be, but as things progress, we will be keeping a very close eye on that and modeling that through, so we will communicate more on that as we start to understand it ourselves.
Okay. I'll pick up one here from Stephen K. In the newer markets like cloud computing and defense, how does the sales pipeline compare with historical performance in the telecom sector? Stephen, it's kind of something you have to learn how to work with these customers. We've had some, the ones that we find most challenging to get used to is probably the system integrators that are working with government agencies.
What I mean by that is you get to know customers. Every company has its own characteristic. If we get told we've won a deal, you can almost guarantee with some companies, you'll get the paperwork the next day. There's other companies you know it'll take two or three weeks before it comes through, and you get to know that. I think, obviously, with these defense guys, it is part of the learning process to understand. You get told you've won the deal, and then a month later, you still haven't got it through. So there is a kind of difference in terms of learning the kind of signature characteristics of different sectors, different customers in terms of how they work. But I think that's just part of the kind of learning process of going into new customers.
We've always had, because of the high value of our products, we're used to engaging directly with customers. It's not unusual for us to find that there is a slight difference in behavior from sector to sector and also from customer to customer. I'll pick up the second one, the one from Marc here. Other plans to onboard additional channel partners to sustain H2 momentum? Definitely. I think this year, the focus was to have a channel that we could switch the Spirent business or the business that we've been putting through Spirent away from there. We've done that. But in terms of going into these sectors, especially in NE, and less so in telecoms, then we do expect to continue to sign up additional partners, different system integrators, etc., that actually have good connections into end customers. We would see our channel networks always changing.
There's always a bit of flux going on year in, year out, where partners that were good partners suddenly seem to put less time into our products. So you move to a different partner. That's kind of the natural channel management you expect to see, but we do think we can definitely expand further by continuing to look to create some new relationships as well. Go on, Ashley.
Yeah. One here from Mark Maurer . Are there any plans to expand R&D capacity or introduce new product lines? At this moment in time, Marc Maurer, when the markets are slower and our revenues aren't as high as we'd like them to be, we aren't looking at adding any more heads into R&D spend. The majority of that is headcount. We aren't looking to add any more heads into that until we can see significant growth on the horizon.
However, the R&D team that we do have will be looking at constant development of the product lines that we do have and new iterations of those product lines as well. So there is a lot of activity happening within our R&D team at this moment in time, even without having to add any more capacity at this point in time.
And the last question that we have here at the moment, has the strategy changed? Has the strategy changed to move away from Spirent to partners with other third parties, resulting in a significant increase in direct costs and additional requirement for staff time and operating the new structure? Has this resulted in a reduction in speed and efficiency? Yeah, there's a couple of angles to that. First of all, from a pure money point of view, you're right.
There is additional cost in terms of working with more partners. Spirent provided a lot of value in terms of logistics, shipping relationships, contractual relationships that we've had to replicate, but of course, the third-party small partners don't take the same level of margin as Spirent. So we did actually plan to hire additional people into the structure. At this point, we haven't really done a lot of hiring, just the kind of general situation, and also waiting to see how the new partnership starts to work out. Do we need more technical support? Do we need more channel managers? So we would expect to put more cost in there, but actually, we believe net to the bottom line, because we're getting more margin at the top level, net to the bottom line, it'll be at least neutral, if not positive.
Has this resulted in a reduction in speed and efficiency of operation? No, I don't think so. I mean, obviously, signing new channel partners is something that takes a bit of time, and it's one of the initiatives for the next year, is to get that channel management. Now that we've got a lot more partners, I think we need to look at the way that we manage partners in terms of onboarding them, training them, continually updating them, making sure they get the right information for the type of customers they have. So there's always an opportunity to improve the way you do things. And through channel management is something we will look at going forward. But I don't believe it's had an inherent impact in the way we do business. It's just a different set of challenges.
Perfect. Tommy, Ashleigh, thank you very much for answering those questions from investors. Of course, the company can review all the questions submitted today, and we will publish those responses out on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to you both, Tommy, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?
Sure. Well, as I said, I think the year has played out much as we expected at the beginning of the year. We expected H1 to be challenging. It was challenging, but we were pretty near our numbers. And we expected H2 to be the one that we created growth. We go into that still with that expectation. We've got our new products. We've been pretty successful at bringing key new products out.
So we've given ourselves a really good chance to continue to grow the market. Our new approach to the NE with our strategic approach to the market in terms of route to market, in terms of the way we present ourselves, is also going well. So we feel that we should be confident going forward as we go into the second half that we can deliver the results that we've advised the market. So thank you very much for your attention today and for joining us. And we'll see you next time. Bye.
Thank you both for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations?
This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Calnex Solutions PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.