Good afternoon and welcome to the Calnex Solutions PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. 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 will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Tommy Cook, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Hi. Thank you, Lily, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks very much for taking the time to hear the update from Calnex on the results of FY 2023. Before we go into talking about 23, let me just take a couple of minutes for the people that may be less familiar with Calnex to just go over who we are and what it is we do. Calnex makes test instrumentation primarily for the telecommunications industry, but more and more for anyone that's running a telecoms type network, whether it's in a data center or in an enterprise as well. Fundamentally, all our customers use our equipment to prove performance and conformance of their equipment to the performance that they expect from the network or their equipment. We already have a global footprint.
We've sold in 68 countries around the world. We run a lean business model and use global distributor channels to create that footprint together around the world. If you look at our customer sets, it breaks into kind of four main buckets. Top left is the telecoms equipment vendors. You get companies in there that you'll recognize, like Nokia and Ericsson, Cisco. We sell into their R&D teams where they are developing pieces of equipment and they need to verify performance before they release it into production. That group represents roughly around 55% of the business that we generate. Bottom left we have the network operators. Again, familiar names AT&T, BT, China Mobile, that run the large networks. Again, our business is split in two parts there.
One part we sell into their R&D teams that evaluate new equipment prior to deploying in the network. We also have Maintenance products that we'll talk about through the presentation as well. The third group of the telecom space is bottom right. That's the component manufacturers. Your Intels, Broadcoms, Qualcomms of this world that make very sophisticated chipsets. They sell our chipsets to the equipment vendors who build them into equipment, then send sale products on to the network operators. They represent around 6% or 7% of our business. I think I forgot to say the operators are around 15% of our business. The last part, that's a growing part and currently around low 20s%, 23% heading to 25% of our business, is what we've termed hyperscale and enterprise.
These are either large companies running their own networks, but also of great interest are the companies that are running the big data networks of the world or data centers, and these are a focus for us as we'll talk about later. If you look at the life cycle in terms of why do people need to test? Well, at every stage of a life cycle, building new equipment through to manufacture, through to building networks, maintaining networks, there's a need to test. The areas that we focus on are highlighted with a red circle there, and it's primarily what we call design validation and conformance test. This is the R&D teams are building a new switch or a router or a piece of mobile equipment.
As they get the first prototypes back or the pre-production units, they need to fully verify that the equipment's working and it'll work under all conditions once it's deployed in the real world. They've got good design margins so that they don't end up having manufacturing issues with a low yield. Also if they're claiming conformance to international standards, again, they need to prove that they actually do meet these standards before they start shipping to their customers. The other part that we focus on is in the far right here, is what we've called Monitoring and Maintenance. To date, we've actually been focused on the Maintenance part. This is after, for example, a mobile network out there.
If there's a problem at a base station and a base station won't work correctly, then they have to send their engineer out to un-understand what's going on so that they can verify the correct the problem. The other part that we're looking at now is Monitoring as well, where you've got actually a deployed Monitoring system that actually touches most of the nodes in the network and sends information back to the central system to say that there's a problem or there's an issue out at a particular node. Again, we'll talk about that a lot more later on. Calnex is really, you know, since we floated on just over 2 .5 years ago, since we floated on the main market. Through that time we've proven that we're a profitable cash generator business.
We've got a robust balance sheet. We're considerably larger than we were 2.5 years ago. We've had three years where we've grown very healthily, both in revenue and profit and in terms of staff size as well. Key to us, and we'll talk a lot about this later, is the strong customer relationships that we have and also relationship with our partners across all territories. We have a large expanding addressable market and challenged as all businesses are to keep growing that as we move forward. Although at the moment as we'll talk about, there are some challenges in our sector where the kind of macroeconomic effects are slowing down spend or making some of our customers be more cautious with their spend in the near term.
Underneath that, we believe we are in a good place because the drivers for the networks that we're involved in, or the parts of the market we're involved in remain healthy. The build-out of the mobile network often referred to as 5G. The move to cloud computing, the need to build data centers to host the cloud computing and then put test services running in cloud computing are all continuing to grow and show no sign of slowing down. Our markets remain very healthy. That's who Calnex is in a whistle-stop tour. Let's just talk about last year, FY 2023. We are really pleased with what happened in 2023. It was a great year. We grew our revenues 25%, to GBP 27.4 million, and profit pretty much lined up 21% in that period to GBP 7.2 million.
We generated cash with a healthy closing cash balance of over GBP 19 million. We at the AGM in August, we will propose a final dividend of GBP 0.62 per share. I say it was a great year, it's not just because of the numbers, but also from an organization point of view, we had a great year. We've been growing a lot lately, and as you continue to grow, things need to change to deal with the different challenges you get. We've gone through a number of changes within the organization which have all been successful. Now as an organization, we feel we've matured and grown over that period as well.
One of the biggest issues we had to deal with last year, the same as everybody in the technology sectors, was the problem with supply chain component shortages. If we look back now, probably this time last year was probably the darkest hour. It was a really torrid time for our manufacturing teams, working with our contract manufacturer and our R&D teams trying to manage, get components if you couldn't get them, get replacement components. I'm pleased to say it is much better now. I'm not saying the component industry is back to normal, but it's definitely in a much healthier place. All our products now are back down to normal lead times that we would expect and not the extended ones that we were managing last year. The team really did a great job of getting us through there.
It really was down to that relationship and strong relationship we have with our contract manufacturer, Kelvinside , that allowed us to work closely with their procurement team and interface with our operations and our R&D team to deal with the many, many challenges these guys had to deal with last year. Through that time, we've continued to innovate in our products, and you'll see later on that we've got a number of new releases and new things that we're coming out with. Of course, one of the key things that we're trying to do is strategically grow our relationships with the hyperscale customers.
We've had some early success with these guys, and we believe there is a number of opportunities in there that we continually want to build relationships, develop good relationships with these customers, and then hopefully convert that into healthy businesses as we move forward. We've made good progress over the last year, where we already have a strong relationship with one of the hyperscales. We have seed units into two of the other ones. These are early units into their R&D team while they're evaluating the need, whether they want to put timing synchronization across the data centers or not. We engage very closely with them and help them do that evaluation and make sure we are seen as the partner of choice if they choose to go ahead and do that. M&A has been part of our strategy and for a number of years.
In April last year, we acquired iTrinegy in Stevenage. Year one was very much about the integration of that team, building out the team over the period so that we're ready to create growth this year. I would say that we're pretty much on track with the roadmap we laid out. The team's almost twice the size it was when we acquired them. We've put people into sales, into business development, into product marketing, as well as engineering, to really round out that team and make sure we had a strong team. This year will be about trying to really push and make sure we can create good growth into that new set of customers for us. At that point, I'm gonna hand over to Ashleigh, and she's gonna cover the financial review. Ashleigh.
Thanks, Tommy. Just before I take you through the financials, I thought it would be useful to briefly remind you of our revenue model, as I've done in previous presentations, and it will also be good for those of you that are new to Calnex just to understand our revenue drivers. Calnex generates revenues through the sale of bundled hardware and software, as well as software support and extended warranty programs. typical customer will come to us to purchase one of our hardware products, and within that sale will be a number of software options included at the time. That is invoiced as one bundled sale to that customer.
That same customer can then come back for upgrades or additional options that are then added to the existing hardware through the provision of a license key, and we sell these as standalone software sales or upgrades. Bundled hardware and software sales pricing can differ for each order, as it really just depends on what hardware product is being purchased and the numerous software option choices that each hardware product can offer. It really just depends on what each customer wants to purchase, combination-wise for what they need. That revenue is recognized on dispatch or delivery of the software license key if it's a standalone software upgrade and makes up 90% of our total revenues. You can see that from the graph in the top left of this page here.
That has effectively been the trend for the last few years, and you can also see that in the trend is showing there for 2021 and 2022 as well. Each of our products comes with a standard warranty period, which can be extended for an extra fee. We also sell software support programs, and that makes up the other 10% of our revenues, as you can see here. That revenue is recognized over the life of the product. Moving across the top of the slide to the middle pie chart, as you will also know, our revenues are generated across a global customer base and distributor network.
In the past few years, we've had an almost even split of orders and revenue across our 3 geographic divisions, Americas, North Asia, and rest of the world. That just helps give us a spread of risk. These last two years, we've seen a slight decline in the portion of total orders coming from North Asia as a result of the continued U.S.-China geopolitical tensions. As you can see from the chart, this region still contributed 27% of total orders on average over the last three years. I'll come back to the geographic split in just a minute on the following slide. As you'll remember from previous presentations, and from what Tommy just said on slide three, our sales are predominantly derived from telecoms customers, where the end application is a telecoms network.
However, non-telecoms customers, as Tommy was saying, include those hyperscale data center and enterprise customers. At the top left here, we show that on a 3-year average rolling basis, at this moment, this graph here excludes our recent acquisition just for a second, because just to get a like for like comparison. These non-telecom customers represented 25% in FY 2023 compared to 23% in FY 2022. If you add back in our, the sales of NE-ONE, our acquired product in FY 2023, the 3-year average percentage of non-telecoms rises to 26% in FY 2023. Just moving on to the bottom of this slide to the left-hand, starting from the left again.
As you'll have seen from previous presentations and from what Tommy just covered in on slide three, our customers are some of the largest in the industry. Over the last 3-year rolling period to March 2023, our top 10 customers contributed 47% of total orders. In addition, the average length of relationship we have with our top 10 customers is 10 years. Although there are customers within that top 10 that have been with us much longer. That just demonstrates the repeat nature of the business that we do with them. We'll see customers come back to order from us frequently as they may want to order different bits of kit for bits of the same kit for multiple sites. They might want to add new kit as they grow their labs and testing requirements.
They might want to add new software options or upgrades, as I just talked about. They might want to move on to our newer products and functionalities that are released to the market. Repeat revenue demand is metric that we measure across the whole customer base of Calnex, not just the top 10, and that's what we're showing here in the middle chart here, at the bottom. You'll see here the 3-year rolling profile for repeat orders generated across the whole group are an average 74% of total revenues. In FY 2023, we received orders from 305 customers, an increase on 233 customers in FY 2022. Both metrics here have the effect of NE-ONE customers being introduced into the mix in FY 2023 as well.
There's just a case study here that I won't cover in detail that we've shown before, but just It shows the nature of a typical customer, and their life cycle with us and or their history of trading with us, and the makeup of them buying hardware and software upgrades and how that contributes to the revenue and orders that we get from a typical customer. Just moving on to the detail on the geographic and product performance in the period. This is this year specifically as opposed to averages. You'll see from the disclosures, and notes in the RNS that we released yesterday. The rest of the world region for us was our biggest performing region in the year.
In particular, within that region, Europe contributed to the majority of the growth within that region. In the North Asia region, just mentioned, has been operating against the backdrop of the U.S., China tensions which remain in the region. As a result, China specifically is challenging country for us within the North Asia region as a whole. However, we've seen a strong performance in Taiwan, and there's continued ongoing potential in both Taiwan and Japan. The Americas revenues saw growth in the year, which you'll have seen from the numbers as well, and that there was a strong start to the year. However, orders were impacted in the latter period due to the challenging macroeconomic environment we're dealing with. Onto the product line revenue drivers. We experienced revenue growth across all of our major product lines.
Lab Sync growth has been driven by PAM4 release, as well as underlying growth in existing platforms. Network Sync, which includes our Sentinel and Sentry products, has performed very well as a result of the diversification of our customer base within this product line, which now includes data center customers Tommy talked about earlier. Cloud & IT saw good organic growth from SNE sales as well as incremental growth from our newly acquired product, the NE-ONE. Just onto the income statement itself, just to bring that together. You'll see the revenue growth was 25% in the year, growing from GBP 22 million to GBP 27.4 million.
We did see an incremental beneficial foreign exchange effect to total group revenues, which I mentioned at the half year, and that was obviously as a result of the strengthening of the US dollar over sterling in the period. 80% of our revenues are USD generated. As a result, just over a third of our revenue growth on the previous year came from positive currency movements. At the same time, we saw the supply chain delays easing, as Tommy was mentioning earlier as well in H2. As a result, our order backlog, which was higher than normal at the half year, unwind over H2, allowing us to meet our revenue targets for the year. Gross margin 76% in the year, and that's in line with the prior year margin.
As a reminder, that is gross margin, that is net of commissions payable to our channel partners. We saw a rise in costs as a result of increases in component prices and general inflation over the period. However, we were able to increase our pricing through discussion with our distributors earlier on in the year, which helped maintain our growth margins. Just moving down to underlying EBITDA for a second, then I'll step back to talk about the costs that sit within that. This is EBITDA stated after charging R&D amortization, because our R&D amortization is such a large component of our P&L. We like to put this second EBITDA KPI within our P&L just to aid the reader in understanding our P&L drivers.
As you can see, underlying EBITDA grew by GBP 1.6 million in the year, and that's driven by the trading performance, the revenue performance on the top line. Margins were 29%, which is in line with last year as well, and that is also against the inflationary increases in external cost pressures within the non-direct cost base as well. We were also able to maintain those profit margins at that level as well, which was great. Large cost component, as you can see, of underlying EBITDA is the administration costs. Administration costs in this table excludes depreciation and any amortization because they're shown on separate lines. That was GBP 9.9 million in the year, and that, as you can see, was an increase of GBP 2 million on the prior year.
This increase includes the planned investment, including run rate from the previous year as well in management, sales and support teams across the business, which was all in line with our growth strategy at the start of the year. We also saw an expected increase, which again, was budgeted for in travel costs as COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted across the majority of our regions. We also saw a small incremental increase in overhead as expected as well to the Stevenage site as a result of the Stevenage site, sorry, after the acquisition of iTrinegy. We have an additional site now from April. The majority of our overhead costs are sterling-based and with the exception of our overseas sales teams. As a result, the group's overhead cost base in general has not been materially affected by FX movements.
There has been some FX movement, as you might expect within our overseas sales teams, especially, the ones based in the States. As you all know, we capitalize 100% of our R&D costs currently and amortize these to the P&L over five years. Amortization of R&D costs, as you can see here, was GBP 3.3 million in the year. That's versus a cash cost of GBP 4.5 million, which I'll cover in a second in the cash flow. An increase on the prior year is similar to previous years, due to the planned ramp up in R&D head count in the year but also previous years just due to that five-year amortization profile. That's all to support our growth strategy and project plans.
Profit before tax, as you can see here, was GBP 7.2 million in the year. The margin was 26% compared to 27% last year. The small difference there was due to an increase in intangibles amortization, which will be the same number for the next five years due to us bringing on a GBP 1.3 million of intellectual property intangible asset as part of the iTrinegy acquisition. That, that asset is amortized to the P&L over a 5-year profile. That adds GBP 0.3 million to that number. The effective tax rate for the period was 18%. The increase for in corporation tax rates and underlying corporation tax from 19%-25% is built into that.
However, we were able to benefit quite well from our, the R&D tax credit schemes that are available to us, so that got us back down to the 18%. Earnings per share, as you can see here, saw good growth. Majority of that is driven by the revenue, the profit performance, but we also saw an incremental increase in benefit to that because of the decrease in the effective tax rate. On to the cash flow. I'll just pull out some key items here.
You can see, from the cash flow summary, GBP 3.7 million of a cash inflow in the year, and that total cash figure includes the GBP 2.3 effect of the acquisition of iTrinegy, which we funded from cash balance. That just demonstrates the strong underlying cash generation in the period. Pre-acquisition, our cash generation was GBP 6 million in the year. Net cash off from operating activities was GBP 11.1 million in the period. Working capital movements can differ year on year just depending on the timing of when we get payments in from our distributors which are on set days. So often happens just a couple of days after the year-end or a couple of days before.
An outflow of GBP 0.5 million was expected. That's predominantly as a result of the timing and volume of shipping and invoicing to customers, so no surprises there. Key cash flow items, moving down the cash flow. As I mentioned before, cash spent on R&D activities was GBP 4.5 million. That's all capitalized and amortized over five years, as I mentioned previously. The dividend was. The dividend here is the combination of our final dividend paid or final dividend for FY 2022 paid in August and then the interim dividend for FY 2023 paid in December. As Tommy mentioned earlier, we're proposing a final dividend, for, if approved at the AGM, that will be paid at the end of August.
Just moving down the other, the other things just to mention here, GBP 2.3 million net cash impact of iTrinegy, which I've covered. That was the acquisition that completed on 12th of April, 2022. That was two entities that we acquired as part of the acquisition, iTrinegy Ltd and iTrinegy Inc. Both will be hived up into the Calnex U.K. entity quite shortly. We put surplus cash balances, as we've said before as well, we've done this for a couple of years now. We put surplus cash balances into high interest deposit accounts. Under accounting rules, you have to show some of them as a fixed term investment.
You'll see that there's two cash balances effectively on the balance sheet. We pull them all together on this cash flow here. To us, closing cash, including fixed term deposits, was GBP 19.1 million, which gives us a really healthy cash balance to take into this current year now. Still no debt on the balance sheet, and we still have our GBP 3 million RCF sitting there, still not utilized since we opened it up as part of the IPO. Just the last slide here, I'll just touch on really briefly. Just gives you a bit of a flavor of the kinds of things that we're doing around ESG and our and the progression that we've made in the year around ESG in general, particularly environmental and social aspects of it.
We follow the QCA Guide to ESG for small to medium-sized entities from a framework perspective and from the perspective of embedding an ESG methodology within the business. We also work very closely with our investors to understand what's important to them with regards to ESG. We've recently been scored by one of our investors using the Integrum framework for ESG scoring and came out with a rating of very good, which is the second rating down, which for a company of our size and for our first go at being scored, we were very pleased with. Just a couple of things here. We've created a corporate giving scheme, which we created at the start of this year, the FY 2023 year, sorry.
That's 1% of our budgeted profits are allocated to this fund. It's employee-led, where employees are encouraged to propose charities or organizations for us to donate some of the fund's money to. As you can see here, our fund of GBP 70,000 this year was used to donate to 84 different charities and organizations across not just our local head office area, but any area that's local to our employees, wherever our employees are located, which is core to our goal to making a meaningful impact to our local communities, either from a social or environmental perspective. We also continue to, and we always have, we're continuing to invest in training to enhance skills, leadership development, mental wellbeing awareness across the organization.
We're also working with external bodies to support the future of talent and engineering. Our products are innovative, leading-edge solutions, as you might already know, minimizing the impact on the environment for our customers, and we are continuously looking for ways to reduce the impact on the environment from our own product manufacture process. There are various projects happening within the business to understand what kinds of things that we can do that are within our control within the business model that we have to try and not only reduce our environmental impact, but also help us understand and gather data and report on our environmental impact as well. That's everything from me. I'll pass you back to Tommy to talk through the strategy.
Thanks, Ashleigh. Let's have a quick look at the strategy and I guess in particular, what's happening in the market and what we're doing to try and increase our addressable market. As we all know, back in March, we had to downgrade our forecast for FY 2024 because across the board, as we've been seeing exact same as the other big players in the test equipment market space, that customers are becoming more careful in terms of their spend on capital equipment and most of our equipment is bought out of capital equipment. Very much this is the way that our customer base I've seen over the many decades I've been involved in this, that's the way they behave when they get concerns and just slow down capital equipment spend because it is the easiest lever to pull.
It really seems to be driven by the macroeconomic situation, not by sector specific problems. In fact, when you look at some of the reports coming out, it still shows that there's a growth. The growth remains healthy in the build out of the mobile network, that there is a need for that. Also then from a data center point of view, again, there's a real need to expand these data centers and increase the numbers out there because of the amount of utilization that people want to use in cloud computing. From a market point of view, we continue to see that our fundamental drivers across our markets, our core markets are still there. They haven't really changed.
We are in a tighter situation where customers are delaying spend, but again, from a funnel point of view, we are starting to see a funnel, a longer term funnel building. The big question is when's it gonna convert? Deals are being delayed. We're not seeing any deals canceled. Things that are in our funnel suddenly, you know, the engineering teams that we're working with are being told they're not allowed to buy anything at the moment. We work closely with them, and it's an opportunity to strengthen relationships because they're having a horrid time as well. They want the equipment, but they're being restricted from getting it.
We sometimes lend them equipment, but we continue to build that relationship so that when they do get the chance to start to spend, RFQ is quite close to the top of the pile and one of the first ones to cut. The market remains strong. Definitely the global macroeconomic effects is affecting us in the nearer term, but we still believe we've got a strong market. In doing that, we, you know. From a strategy point of view, this strategy slide is the same as it's been for a number of years.
We continue to see that the two key markets that we're gonna track is looking to innovate products to capitalize on the growth of 5G or the mobile network build-out, and also from the cloud computing, both from focusing on the building of the infrastructure to create data centers, but also focusing on testing services and applications that run on top of the cloud service, the cloud network as opposed to in office. These markets remain strong and remain our key drivers. We continue to look for M&A. As you know, we acquired a company last April, as Ashleigh was saying, and we have continued to look for other targets, and we've had some interesting discussions through the year.
As I've said before, it's a sector, there isn't thousands of companies making test measurement, there's a few, but we are being quite a lot more systematic at going round. When we see a company that's right for us, that creates new business, and my definition of new business is it takes us to new customers or allows us to sell something in addition to what we're already selling to our current customer base, then that's what will be the fundamental driver to take forward on acquisition and bring them into the company. If you look at our product portfolio, for people who have seen this before, it'll look quite different. I'm gonna in the next slide talk about the changes in a bit more detail. Our Lab Sync, which remains a key product for us, there's been a number of enhancements over the year.
Our platforms stay the same. In the Network Sync, there's two new platforms we've got. We've got the Sentry product, which is more focused on testing networks within data centers. Remember, a data center is almost just a big network in a building. It's the same product, a similar product to Sentinel, but more focused on what the data center guys need. We've got a new product that we've literally just launched called SyncSense, and I'll come back and explain a bit more what that is. When you look at our Cloud & IT , there's quite a change here because now we've got three versions of SNE. We used to just have one. Again, I'll tell you why we've got three in a minute. Of course, we got the NE-ONE which came from the acquisition last year.
What I want you to do is just take a couple of minutes to try and express how we find new opportunities, either selling more of the products we have, but also trying to expand the addressable market into for the current products we have, but also looking for new products and how that comes about. There are a few interesting dimensions to the world that we live in terms of how we continue to move forward. First of all, if you look at one of our main products, Paragon-X, or the Lab Sync product, we are dominant in that market. We're the market leader. We're regarded as the de facto standard for high accuracy time transfer testing. Today we cover every interface. We can test every interface from 100 Mb up to 400 Gb.
In terms, as you can see in the top left there, the ITU-T have standards that cover this technology, so does O-RAN, and they're continually moving these standards. We have a continuous program of enhancing our product because our customers need to. When new things come into the standards, then they need to prove that they conform to these standards. We have an engineering team that continues to release things once or twice a year, enhancements to the product. Every so often we need to make bigger steps forward, and we've just started our work. Today, the highest speed interface that's just arrived in the network is 800 Gb. Now we can get access to the technology that will allow us to deliver 800 Gb support in the Paragon-Neo.
We've just started a project now, and that will deliver mid-FY 2025. I wouldn't expect it'll have any impact on the revenue this year. We may get the odd early order, but it's really about FY 2025 where that will make a difference. You know, the whole movement in the, in terms of the higher and higher rates in telecoms just continues incessantly. Later this year, we'll put a small team on starting to investigate the technology to add 1.6 Tb interface support to Paragon. That's not gonna get launched till FY 2026 or 2027. It's way down the road. In fact, in a couple of years, we'll start working on 3.2.
You may say, "How do you know you're going to do that?" That's because really, in my time in telecoms, there's been 14, 15 generations of the next higher rate. Really for telecoms to not go to the next higher rate is a discontinuity. Going to the next higher rate is not the discontinuity, it's the natural thing to do because the demand is there and technology pushes forward that allows them to move higher and higher bandwidths of data at more cost-effective prices. You can see here there's a long-term plan. There is a, there's a roadmap for this product. There's, there's an element that changes every year as things change in the standard, but there's also a long-term plan for the product to actually follow the wave and continue to ensure that we stay the market leaders.
If you look at our network emulation products, in the past we had the SNE and we had the Attero. We first introduced the Attero over 10 years ago. We acquired JAR in Belfast, and that's where the SNE came from. That was back at the end of 2017. We've now moved a whole portfolio across onto that platform, and we've generated three versions of the same platform, the SNE, the SNE-X, and the SNE-Ignite . Why have we done that? It's really because there's a huge range of potential applications that we can target with this product. There's many people for many different reasons who need to emulate networks to allow them proof performance. They all have slightly different requirements.
The SNE-Ignite is a hardware-based implementation, it's used for applications that really need high accuracy performance, and people would buy that product. We have the SNE at the lower one of the three there, which is more about low speed applications, but need high complexity in terms of the networks they emulate, and we have that product. In the middle, we've created the SNE-X, which really sits in the middle and addresses the high port density applications. The reason we do that is it allows us to create collateral that presents these products to customers very much the way that they need to understand it, so they can see the value in what they do.
It also allows us to price the products in the market to make sure we maximize the potential for the company. Now we've got a full range of products there that we feel. The SNE-Ignite really replaces the Attero in the market space moving forward. It's a common software platform and a very, you know, high degree of commonality in the hardware platform. It allows us to move the product portfolio wherever we can find applications that we can be successful in. Of course, last year we acquired iTrinegy. We got the NE-ONE product at the bottom, and it's far more focused. Whereas the SNE is focused on testing equipment and networks, the NE-ONE is focused on testing applications that run on top of these networks.
That might seem a subtle change, but there is a quite a significant change in the way the product needs to present and the subtleties and the capability that it needs to present to the users that actually need these different products. Really, we are really trying to push this to say that we have this broad portfolio of network emulators that can test whether you're testing applications, testing equipment, low-speed equipment, high-speed equipment, broadcast equipment, any type of equipment, we can actually deliver a solution there. The NE-ONE this year very much is pushing to see how we can expand that market.
We're gonna focus on things like federal and defense, where we know there's a higher degree of spending going on at the moment, as well as things like gaming and enterprise migration that we've been focused on the last few years, again, to expand into new customers with the current portfolio. The third example is to look at the data center world. As you know, we actually were successful in a major win inside one of the big hyperscale guys with the Sentinel product. The Sentinel was designed to maintain telecoms networks. Because the same technology was taken from the telecoms world into the data center world, we were able to take the product across.
Of course, it's more in terms of its form, fit, and function, it wasn't quite right for that application, so we've created Sentry as a new product that's far better aligned to what the data center guys are looking for. It's got a high degree of commonality from a technology point of view with the Sentinel, it allows us to configure it differently, again, aligned to what these target customers need. Through these discussions with our customers that we've been engaging with, we're seeing an emerging opportunity for Monitoring systems that monitor all the nodes. Very much Sentinel and Sentry are there to solve problems. Once there is a problem, you send your engineer across along with one of these boxes that gives you deep insight and allows you to figure out what's gone wrong to fix it.
A Monitoring system is more like a fire alarm system. It basically tells you there's a problem. There could be thousands of nodes out there, and basically all that data's sent back to a central point and allows you to then figure out where the problems are. Where we feel that we can get the edge there is when you come to the world of timing, which is very different to virtually every other aspect of telecoms. When you're monitoring other aspects of like links being up or down, the equipment tends to give you a simple, "Yes, it's working. No, it's not working." Then you can dispatch engineers. In the world of timing, life's not that simple.
What you get is a lot of parameters that you have to be able to interpret and compare to what's happening in other nodes to interpret that data and then guide the engineers. That's because we are regarded as the experts in understanding this, we believe that's where we can get an edge. This is a brand-new product. We've only started to engage with customers in the last month, and we're speaking to the data centers as well as a few pilot customers in the telecom sector to see whether this is a new arm to the business that we can expand into and create additional revenue for the company. Lastly, you know, these are quite big changes that we've talked about and hopefully end up being big changes for the company. On a lower level, we continue to expand our addressable market.
A couple examples of how we do that. We were successful with one of the tier one chip manufacturers that was creating a chipset to test time, delivered, operated and supported all the timing protocols. They bought a Paragon-Neo from us 'cause they needed to prove they conform to the standards. We worked with them to make sure they maximize the value of the purchase, which has encouraged them to buy more. Through that, we actually showed them how they could use our product to demonstrate the performance of their chips to their customers. They went out on the road and demonstrated it. Of course, that helped us a soft promotion of our product. We get additional benefit from their customers coming to us and saying, "We have seen your product.
We need one of them. Once they take that chipset and build it into their whole system, then the whole system needs to get checked again to make sure it still conforms to the standards. You can't just rely on the fact that your the chipset that you bought was conforming, then the whole system would. You can see how we can expand our reach and get new customers. The second example we have here is a tier 1 equipment manufacturer, a company we worked with for many, many years, we've sold into many of the labs around the world, and they buy the Lab Sync products, the new the Paragon products. Actually, through that strong customer relationship, they actually introduced us to some of their colleagues in the building that actually needed network emulators.
Through that, we were able to actually build that relationship, show them what our product said through that introduction, then ultimately sell them the network emulation products as well. When the Lab Sync guys go and sell to their customers, in terms of selling their product out to the operators, the operators will often ask, "Well, how are we supposed to maintain this equipment once it's deployed?" They would, at times, will say, "Well, you may wanna look at Calnex. They've got some equipment." You can see how customer relationships is not an optional extra for us or a nicety. It's absolutely central to our strategy of building a market. We build relationship with customers, not only, as Ashleigh showed you in the graph, to get re-recurring income from this...
Sorry, repeat income from the same customer in different sites, but also to find new opportunities for new products, be there with them, identify that opportunity, and also get into other customers. To summarize all that, looking back, I guess FY 2023 really was a great year for us. You've seen the results. We're very proud of the performance we achieved. There was a lot of things happened under the covers as well in terms of inside the organization, that we're very proud of what happened. Unfortunately, at the turn of the year, as we had to downgrade in March, you know, we did see customer spending-pulling back. It's stabilized, I would say, but it hasn't perhaps got much better. We basically need to just wait until that confidence comes back into the market. We're continuing to engage with our customers.
We don't give up on our customers just because they won't spend. It's the complete opposite. We work closely because they would like to spend, and they're frustrated that they can't do it, the engineers and engineering teams that we speak to. We try and help them through that time to make sure we build the relationship, and we can get business in when it comes back again. We have started to see the orders, the long-term or the medium to long-term funnel building, which shows the demand remains there. When you look below the hood in terms of our core drivers and industry, nothing's changed. The driver there, the need, and the desire to build out the mobile network has not changed.
The need and the desire to expand the number of data centers out there, the bandwidth that they can offer to their customer has not changed. We believe we continue to be in a strong place. As you see, we've been working hard to come out with new products. We've got a number of other initiatives to continue to push to ensure that we maximize in a more difficult market than we had last year. You just need to go out there and shake more trees and make sure you get business what's there, but also be well-positioned when the business comes back, we can return to growth. That's the end of the formal presentation.
Tommy, Ashleigh, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and thank you to all investors for submitting their questions. Could I please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where it's appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Okay. Thank you. I'll take the first question. There's one here from Stephen. Stephen has asked: Do you have a target for return on capital, for example, ROE, ROA, especially given your capital allocation approach of retaining most of your earnings and continuously deploying incremental capital? We do have targets, absolutely. We don't publish them. We are continuously looking and refreshing the way and the way that we target, particularly our return on investment on R&D spends. From a deploying incremental capital into the R&D side of the business, which is where a lot of... As you can see from the cash flow, a lot of our cash ends up.
That is, that is intrinsically linked to where we believe the value is on the revenue side and the order side in future periods. We do look at that from a new product perspective, because we're bringing on the new products that Tommy has talked about. A lot of them will have different types of ROI metrics. And we are because we are growing our different product ranges, we have to come back and look at those ROIs or the total RO-ROI for the business on a continuous basis.
When it comes to investing cash into R&D, absolutely hugely important that we have these targets. We just don't publish them.
Thanks. Stephen managed to get his questions in early, I guess we should respect and answer them early. The other question Stephen had was typically how often do your repeat customers place orders with you? At least once every year every two or three years? If there's no single typical figure, can you please provide a rough range of orders frequency from your repeat customers? Really, they tend to spend aligned to projects. If you look at most of the projects that the customers that we work with are working on, they'll run for anything from a year to perhaps 18 months, even two years if it's a really big project.
Individual teams tend to buy associated with projects early on, as they start to know that they're gonna have equipment to test, then they'll buy and until they start on the next project. What you see is really within a team, that sort of cycle. Somebody like a big customer, one of the big, tier one, equipment manufacturers, they have 10, 15 teams around the world, and sometimes each of them are running multiple projects. That's why you see like that picture as like in a spiky spend pattern because it just. There is a bit of when these happen, sometimes they line up, sometimes they don't. If it's a smaller company, then again, sometimes it is more the 2- or 3-year time that they'll buy something. They may come back and get minor enhancements.
It's also dependent what's happening in the standards. They may buy a product, and it may be 2-3 years before they buy another platform product, but they may buy enhancements during that time because if the standards have changed, then when we put enhancements on this from the standards, then that's a charged upgrade, and they'll upgrade at that time as well. That's sort of kind of. If you kind of relate it to our customers, what they're up to, that kind of, you know, 1-2- year period is, is a good indicator because really, as I said, it's about buying aligned to their fundamental needs as they start and progress through projects. You got another question, Ashleigh?
Yes. So William has just asked what our market expectations for FY 2024 with regards to revenue and EBITDA are. We have the guidance that's in the market at the moment has the revenue just given what's happening in the wider macroeconomic situation. We have a just over a 10% decline in revenues compared to this year is the market guidance. It sits at GBP 24 million. The revenue and the guidance at the moment. That comes down to. I'll give you a couple of EBITDA figures because of the fact that we show underlying EBITDA as well. That comes out to about GBP 8.5 million at EBITDA, pure EBITDA level and just under GBP 5 million at the underlying EBITDA level.
Profit before tax, which is one that we also track quite closely, the margins on profit before tax, will be sitting closer to the 17% level, compared to where we've been recently at the 26% level. Hopefully, that gives you a bit of detail there.
James had a question here as well. You previously referenced the constraints on the customer budgets. Do you have any visibility on when that might change and anything you can do to influence this pricing? Yeah, I wish I knew, James. You know, at the end of the day, it's really the confidence coming back into these larger organizations that they release the budget. You know, the people that we work with and primarily sell, you know, there are a number of layers down from where these decisions are made. When it comes to pricing, you know, unfortunately, in this sort of situation, it's not about the price. To suddenly give a 10%, 15% discount, it won't ease it.
It's just they're not allowed to spend the money, and they can't get it through the procurement department or get it authorized up to the level. In fact, it's dangerous to lead with discount because they'll take the discount, but then you'll still get the order next quarter just without discount. All we can really do is, you know, keep working. Quite often the situation is that it's not an absolute can't spend a penny, it's just there's an extremely high bar and a very small budget. In cases that when it becomes critical, we can support them in terms of creating a, an argument to the managers or the budget holder to encourage them to put the money there. It's really there is an element of waiting in for it to come.
We, you know, in terms of in a particular deal if they can't get it out, but it is about continuing to build that relationship so that we do help them. We might lend them the product. Again, sometimes you lend them the product that they can then It makes it easier for them to demonstrate to the manager or the budget holder how this is gonna make such a difference if we just had it. That's the sort of, kind of low-level things that we are doing. Have you got another question there, [Ashleigh]?
Sure, yeah. Gareth has asked, are any staff members still working remotely, or are all employees now back in the office? For our U.K.-based offices, that's Linlithgow, our head office. We've also got a Belfast office and our new Stevenage office. We operate a hybrid model, which means all staff members are asked to come in on a Tuesday and a Thursday, and then they have the choice to either work from home or work from the office on the other days of the week. We find that works really well for collaboration and getting the staff together from a sort of cultural perspective on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It just gives people also some flexibility on the other days as well. We've always operated a remote model when it comes to our overseas staff.
That's always been the case, even pre-COVID, just because of the spread of our sort of global reach. We've, our sales teams have always effectively worked from home or on the road, so we don't have any actual formal offices in any of our overseas locations.
Okay. William asked, are you worried that China will steal IP on your products? No. Why, why do I say that with confidence? Especially our high-end products, if you take the lid off, you're not going to, you know, you can see what components we use, but that really doesn't solve your problem. You know, a lot of what we do in something like the Paragon that's been... It's the market leader, it's really the knowledge of how to design these devices, and we base all our devices on FPGA type technology, so you need to get inside and figure out what's happening inside that. You know, we take the same philosophy with all our competition, you know, and that is, can somebody do what we can do? Probably. Good luck at trying to catch us.
That really is the picture I showed with Paragon. The fact we need to keep moving. If we just stop and stand still, then the world will catch us. If we run fast, nobody will catch us, that really is the philosophy of how we beat anybody, whether in China or the U.S. or anywhere. In fact, about 10 years ago, there was a US company that co-copied one of the early versions of Paragon, and by the time they come out and had a data sheet pretty similar to us, we already had a bunch of other enhancements. We could basically say to customers, "Well, if you want last year's model, that's fine, but I thought you needed to test all this other stuff." Really it's up on our own.
It's down to us to stay in the lead by being faster than everyone else, stay connected to the standards, stay connected to the customer to make sure nobody catches up with us.
Gareth has asked another question. Do you have any hedging policy in place relative to your US dollar exposure? We have some natural hedges already built into the business model essentially. Our dollar driven cost base when it comes to a large majority of our sales team outside of the U.K.. We also are, we have a dollar cost passed through to us or the, or the dollar effect cost passed through to us from quite a lot of the majority of our cost of sales originates in US dollars from our component from our outsourced manufacturer. And that gets passed through to us when the time is right from their perspective.
those natural hedges.
Allow us to offset some of the US dollar exposure. We do work very closely with our advisors and treasury advisors on when hedging might be right. At this moment in time, we don't have any hedges in place because we feel that's right for where we are at this moment in time. We do constantly look at hedging within the business, depending on where the US dollar and sterling are sitting at the moment in time.
Okay. The last question here is [Merfil]. He's saying, "What can you say about your position in the market in relation to the other competitors?" The first thing I would say, just for the avoidance of doubt, you know, the kind of change that we're seeing over the last six months, nine months, has nothing to do with competitive pressure at all. The competitive landscape really hasn't shifted very much over that period. In general, you know, if you look at our product lines, let me just maybe flip back here. Just this easier one. Oh, pressed too many buttons. The Lab Sync, as I mentioned, we are the market leaders in that. On the left, the Lab Sync products, we are the market leaders.
We have a competitor in China that competes with the Paragon-X , which is not as high accuracy as the Paragon-Neo . In the high accuracy domain, we are in the lead, so we have a strong position there. When you come to the Network Sync, obviously we're getting new products that have just come out that are unique in the market, so we have no direct competition. We're also still trying to understand how big these markets are. The Sentinel, we are the only maintenance tester. There are what we call installation testers, which are more like a general purpose toolkit. They cover many technologies. They cover timing, but they also cover many other things. Really, we are unique. Our competitors that have installation testers very much argue that we're not unique, that you don't need a unique tester.
A general purpose toolkit will do the job. It's really our job to convince customers they need a specialized tester. As we move forward into more into mobile networks with far more density in terms of the number of radio heads, small cells, micro cells around, then we believe that message will become stronger and stronger. In the Cloud & IT space, there are a number of competitors in some of these smaller segments. We are the only company that's got such a broad portfolio. In some ways especially, it was part of that reason to create these three platforms out of one base, was to give us a much stronger competitive position out there as well. There is competition. We feel that at the moment we are in a strong position.
I think we're coming out with some new things that hopefully strengthen our position going forward as well. The last question I think, which will be the last one 'cause we're just about out of time: "Can you say any more about the seed sales into the hyperscale?" Really these are into the R&D teams, you know. Basically some of these other hyperscale. The telecoms world's a very mature industry. It's very predictable, as you heard me talking about the different interface rates. The data center world's a much younger industry. People are still trying to figure out themselves. Rather than looking to standards and copying or repeating what other people do, each of these guys are trying to figure it out themselves. These seed units are really into their R&D teams.
We might sell the odd one or two more. That's not where the business is. What we really are trying to help them do that assessment of timing and hopefully come to the conclusion they want to roll timing out across our networks, and that's where we've got the opportunity to create a much bigger return. In that market space, the biggest challenge with these guys are that they often quite like doing it themselves. They have the ability at times to do it. Really it's more about persuading them, and that's partly where the relationships come in. That's saying, "This is very specialist.
You'd be better to let us do it and help you than basically use your own medium resource to build that. These are really part of the relationship building and hopefully in the future they'll deliver significant extra business.
Tommy, Ashleigh, thank you. I think you've addressed all those questions you count from investors, and of course the company will review all questions submitted today. We will publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, Tommy, could I please ask you for a few closing comments?
Sure. Well, thanks very much everyone for taking an hour to listen to us today. You know, it's not the best. You know, we've been in better environments for sales than we are today, but that's life. You don't always get it the way you want. You know, at the bottom thing, the key thing from my point of view is that the market drivers remain there. They remain strong. They haven't really shifted. There's macroeconomic effects. You can't be immune from what the rest of the world does. We need to just work through that. We've got a great set of new products coming out. We've got low level initiatives in terms of building relationships with customers. We believe the market remains strong and there will be new opportunities for us going forward.
We continue to believe we're on a good track. We just need to deal with the short-term challenges, and hopefully in the future we can soon get back to a more growing trajectory. Thanks very much for your time.
Tommy, Ashleigh, thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will 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. Good afternoon.