Good afternoon and welcome to the essensys plc results for the year end of 31 July 2022 investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of the 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 will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to make the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Mark Furness, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Thanks, Alessandro. Hello everyone, and welcome to the essensys FY 2022 results presentation. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. Alongside me, I have our CFO , Sarah Harvey, and our COO , Alan Pepper. We are here, we are real, but to save probably the far end bandwidth, we're gonna turn our video off right now as we dive into the presentation. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the essensys story and our business over the last 16 years, we've created software and technology that allows for the automation of the management and operation of flexible workspaces for the commercial real estate industry. You'll know many parts of the industry with names such as WeWork and IWG.
Increasingly now it's the major global landlords who are facing into the opportunity that the changing environment of work is presenting. Our customers now, and for many years now, are actually the world's largest global real estate brands and companies. As I say, commercial real estate is transforming, and that's a really important point to note when we think of the long-term structural change and the structural opportunity that that's creating for essensys and our platform. The change in workspace and the way people work is leading to landlords and the wider real estate industry at large starting to develop more regularly the types of products and services that their occupiers and tenants now demand. We've, you know, for many years, we in the U.K. have known the world of serviced offices. We saw the evolution of coworking in recent times.
Now we're seeing more of turnkey spaces, move-in ready spaces, large buildings really starting to adapt to support the types of requirements that today's companies are delivering to their real estate providers. There's really three key drivers, both for the opportunity for our product development roadmap and our products, and for the changes in real estate. Firstly, it is that move to flexibility. The world of commercial real estate, as you know, is moving away from the 25-year plus long-term leases for big empty boxes model that has served it well for the last 200 years. It's moving to a world where flexibility is at its heart. JLL predicts that nearly 30% of all office space by the end of the decade will be delivered with some form of flexibility built in.
Enabling that flexibility for the industry is digitalization, and actually occupiers are willing to pay a significant premium for these technologically digitally enabled workspaces where productivity improves and time to value reduces. Obviously, there's a third very strong driver to this change in real estate, which is sustainability and environmental and the impact that real estate has and can have in improving those ESG credentials. As work has evolved, and it's evolved rapidly over the recent times, you know, post-COVID, with economic uncertainty, we're now seeing buildings evolve, and they're evolving to meet that change in demand from the occupier base. Tenant spaces, it's all about productivity. It's all about reduced time to value, move-in ready, plug-and-play spaces.
It's about flexibility in these buildings, and it's about making sure that we get efficiency benefits as companies in these large buildings as we can use the shared resources, whether that be meeting rooms, common areas, amenity spaces, and they're all adding to the net value that is delivered to their occupiers. It's all about making that journey in a building as frictionless as possible. Just for reference, that building you see in front of you is one of our customers' buildings in Chicago. It's formerly known as the Sears Tower. It's now the Willis Tower in Chicago, and that building is powered by essensys.
As the, if you like, the supply side of the real estate industry is evolving, actually to deliver these type of more flexible solutions, these more customer-facing real estate solutions, it is really complex, and that complexity is huge the larger your portfolio of buildings. For our customers like CBRE and JLL, who manage and operate thousands of buildings, imagine the complexity and the systems and the processes and the people to deliver just even one new client move-in in a building. Those systems, that complexity, has been at the heart of the problem we've been trying to solve for 16 years. The way we think about this is we use our software and automation to remove this complexity completely. What was perhaps days, weeks, or months of resource-intensive activity has really changed.
It's transformed with our software into one person, non-technical, can use our software. It takes 2 minutes, and our customers are ready to move in, so their customers are ready to move in to our customers' spaces. Very transformational, hugely accretive in terms of return on investment, and it's really all about supporting that digital transformation in real estate. That is the market we serve. They're the structural changes that are happening, and that's the outline of the long-term growth opportunity that will unfold over many years in front of us. How have we performed in FY 2022? Well, firstly, against a really challenging economic backdrop post-COVID, and obviously with major global uncertainty now, we're pleased that revenue and EBITDA were both in line with market expectations. Actually ahead in terms of our closing cash position, as Sarah will talk to shortly.
A really strong U.S. growth, which is our primary growth market and the world's biggest single real estate market. We've pushed hard into terms of our global expansion to support our global customers. We have now operations fully established in APAC, so across Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia, as well as across continental Europe and obviously in North America. We also now have customers live and sites live, buildings live in all of our operational regions. Everything we do is underpinned by the quality of our product and the essensys platform, which has been, if you like, a full rearchitecture of our existing capabilities into a more powerful capability for the next 20 years. That product's now available across all regions with some really exciting product launches that we talked about previously to come later this year.
We have a very strong, high-quality customer mix. Those largest real estate organizations, the household names in terms of commercial real estate, are increasingly customers of essensys, and Alan will talk to that improving customer mix and also how the customer mix has changed in the UK, particularly relating to that increase in churn in our non-core smaller site customers in the UK that have perhaps been with us for many years. Now, our job is to continually monitor and evolve our strategy to get the best return we can for our customers, our people, and our shareholders. Accordingly, we've optimized that strategy through the year. We're focusing as we look out to real capital efficiency when it comes to our growth, aspirations and ambitions. Importantly, cash conservation based on the current climate and our certainty in terms of our return to profitability.
Worth noting that prior to our IPO, this has been a bootstrap business, so we bootstrapped our organization all the way to 2019 and our IPO. Just before our IPO, this business was a 35% margin business at steady state, with broadly all of that 35% turning to cash. It is really important to realize that this is a long-term structural opportunity in the world's biggest asset class. It is not gonna happen today, but it is happening with ever-increasing certainty, and it is touching every element, every corner of real estate as we see flex and the world of hybrid working become more and more embedded in working practices from the very biggest companies through to the very smallest. Now, with that said, I'm now gonna hand over to Sarah, who's gonna talk us through our financial performance.
Thank you, Mark. If we take the highlights page, as Mark said, we were really pleased with the performance in what was a challenging backdrop to the year. Total revenue grew by 6%, and revenue and adjusted EBITDA came in line with consensus expectations. Of that GBP 23 million, GBP 20 million was recurring revenue. That was up 5% year-on-year, and the mix was a similar mix to prior years. 86% versus 87% in the prior year. We were very pleased with our closing annual recurring revenue for the year, which came in at GBP 21.9 million. That's up 11% year-on-year. In terms of looking at sites that were not live at the year-end but are now contracted, that's worth GBP 2.3 million of annual recurring revenue.
That compares to GBP 1.6 million when we came out with our trading update in August. On the right-hand side there, you can see the split by region. You can see there that North America, our key growth market, contributed GBP 13 million of that GBP 23 million. That represents 17% growth year-over-year. Actually, their recurring revenue was 23% growth year-over-year. Very strong performance coming through from North America. Slightly different story in the U.K. and Europe. We saw an 8% decline in revenue. There are some very specific reasons for that this year, which Alan will come to in the operational review, very much driven by the flexibility we have allowed some of our customers and some churn in the lower value tail of our customer base.
Finally, on terms of the regions, you can see the first revenue coming through from the APAC region. That was newly established in the year, as Mark said, as part of the expansion strategy. We closed the year with GBP 24.1 million of cash, slightly ahead of expectations, and a strong position to continue our strategy. At the bottom there, we show a split in terms of the product mix of the business. Our core strategic product is the essensys Platform and Connect. We have those as one product class, and that represents the vast majority of our revenue for the year, and it grew 9%. In terms of those sites, that closed slightly down year-on-year at 458, down from 474 the prior year.
Again, Alan will touch on the drivers behind that. Our Operate business will represent from now a reducing proportion of total revenue, and that's because we are servicing the customers who use Operate, but we're not actively looking for any new Operate customers. It's a GBP 2 million revenue stream. It did decline 11% year-on-year, and half of that decline was driven entirely by a single customer insolvency which was announced during the year. Moving on, looking at our income statement, we've touched on the growth in revenue and the driver, in particular North American growth. Looking at gross profit, that was fairly flat year-on-year, and that really represents a year of investment for the business.
It is the investment in setting up new regions, establishing data centers in those new regions, and some investment in automation, which will then benefit us when we reach further scale. Similarly, with the overhead base, that is an investment year of FY 2022 and, you know, we grew our overheads in line with the plan, and that really we will see an annualization of that in the current year, but we're pretty much at steady state now of where we need to be with that. That meant that our adjusted EBITDA came in in line with consensus and our loss before tax slightly ahead. Moving to the cash flow statement, we can see the strong cash balance closing the year at GBP 24 million at the bottom there.
Pulling out a few elements of the cash flow statement, we had a positive impact of changes in working capital. That is despite doing a strategic inventory purchase during the year. That was a specific decision we made, and I think announced at the half year, and it was during a critical time of concern and uncertainty about global supply chains. We wouldn't anticipate doing the same again, and we managed the cash flow in relation to that through the end of the year as well. The big line that increased in terms of the cash outflow is the payment of asset development costs. That is primarily the internal development work capitalized and paid as part of our investment in the people who build our product, and again, that was in line with the plan.
You can see a slightly lower cash outflow in terms of lease liabilities. That's primarily reflecting a rent-free period in one of our spaces, so that will normalize again in the next year. As I said, closing on a very strong cash balance ahead of expectations. With that, I'll hand to Alan.
Thanks, Sarah. In my new role, sorry.
Yeah.
In my new role as COO, I'm gonna cover off sites and customers, how we're seeing the evolving customer base moving forward and also a bit of an update on what's going on in the regions. In terms of absolute sites, and here I'm talking about Connect sites rather than Connect and Operate sites or Connect and Platform sites. 458 sites at year-end, down slightly from last year-end. That's primarily around movements in single site customers and our big customers recontracting, and I'll touch on that in a moment. Similarly, customer numbers broadly flat, but where we are replacing low or no growth customers with new customers who are gonna give us more revenue in the future.
Again, I'll touch on that in a moment. Good to see net retention up back over 100% as our existing customer base started growing again through the year. You'll see there staff numbers up to 180 year-over-year as we're taking advantage of having raised the money last June, July. We're implementing our investment plan in terms of software development people, go-to-market staff, and the establishment of our APAC business. That's the key drivers there. You can see on the right the SaaS numbers per region. As Sarah mentioned a moment ago, GBP 2.3 billion of ARR contracted as at now for delivery throughout the first half or so of this year.
That's 53 sites, so that's up 20 on this time last year. We're about GBP 1 million more of contracted ARR than we were at a similar point last year, which is good. Moving to customer base and just talk a little bit about how we see the customer base or how we have seen and how we continue to see the customer base evolving. Customer numbers flat year-on-year. The 19 customers that we lost through the year, with the exception of the one U.K. insolvency that we previously reported, the rest are exclusively single site and small operators with who have been customers for some significant time.
The reality is that the platform is not really appropriate for them going forward, and we aren't seeing any growth for them. We have, however, replaced them with 18 customers who all provide significant multi-site potential going forward, which is good. The other point to note on that is that those customers are all paying recurring revenue per site that is 10% up on the sites that we lost. In terms of site numbers, site numbers are down year-on-year. The churn there broadly half related to our retained customer base, so existing and ongoing customers optimizing their estate as we come out of COVID. Half of those related to us recontracting with our three largest customers.
As part of that recontracting process, which gave us securer long-term income, we agreed for those customers to exit a number of sites, from our perspective, earlier than otherwise would have been the case. In return for that, we obviously have future growth, exclusivity and some pricing increases in those contracts going forward. The balance of those site losses, as I said a moment ago, smaller sites, single site and pricing up. How do we see that whole customer base evolving and how does that transfer in or translate into longer term revenue growth? About half of our customer base now is landlords, and of the 11 customers that we have contracted today, where we haven't yet delivered service, nine of those are landlords.
The key thing to note around landlords is that they provide a built-in portfolio opportunity for us. Once we've gained the first site, it becomes about, you know, increasing our penetration within their estate, and we're not reliant on them necessarily finding new buildings, because they already have them. How does that then translate into revenue? Some detail on this slide. You can see on the left there, the new customers we've signed in FY 2021, they added GBP 400,000 worth of recurring revenue in that year, and that had virtually tripled by the time we got to the year just ended. We've added GBP half a million of recurring revenue on new customers, bear in mind this is just the new customers, not existing customers rolling on.
They're already contracted for that to increase, and we'd expect that to increase through the year as they add new sites. Obviously we've got an existing contracted new customer balance that will flow through the year. The key thing here is our focus on winning customers who can deliver us 20 sites or GBP 1 million of ARR. That takes time. You can see that from this situation, but there are plenty of examples of that. In some specific examples here of customers we've signed more recently. A customer signed in 2021, some customers signed in 2022, and also our contracted pipeline. The first customer up there on that line is JLL. First site went live in 2021 with them.
We're now live on 9 locations. We have 3 sites contracted, and we've got a further 4 expected in our pipeline currently. We would expect to see them becoming a three-quarters of a GBP 1 million plus customer in FY 2024. You can see how that will have taken 3 years to grow that business to heading towards GBP 1 million. There are other examples there in that sort of EU landlord halfway down the slide. That's the customer we signed in Sweden just before Christmas. We're live on 2 sites. We've got 4 in pipeline. We'd expect a further 2 later on in the year. They've got a broader portfolio of about 35 buildings in central Sweden.
Expecting to see them become a half million GBP plus customer through into FY 2024. Finally on this, just those customers that we've recently signed, we're not yet live with. An Irish landlord. We've already got three sites in pipeline contracted. They've got 92 buildings in their portfolio, so there's absolutely an opportunity there for us to have 20 locations, 20 sites with them, and a GBP 1 million worth of recurring revenue. Their global property manager there is CBRE. Similar example, one site due to go live. We've got five in the pipeline. They've obviously got, given the type, they've got thousands of buildings in our estate, and we can absolutely see us getting to a GBP 1 million of ARR with them going forward. I'm just going to quickly go around the three regions.
We're now established obviously with personnel in all three, and leaders for those. In North America, key things here. Ongoing strategic customer engagement. We renewed our largest customer who's based in the US, that's Industrious, at the end of last year, at the end of 2021, going into 2022. We have renewals with our top three other customers in the US ongoing at the moment. They'll be signed relatively shortly. We're seeing those customers also start to expand internationally. Industrious made a couple of acquisitions, one in Europe and one in APAC. We have engagement with Tishman Speyer's operations outside of the US as well. Signing up new strategic customers. EQ, which is part of Blackstone, signed up last year delivering sites.
You can see a couple of other examples there of significant property operators or owners for whom we are providing service. It won't be of any surprise that a significant proportion of our contracted base for new sites is in the U.S., that's 41. We've got a very broad customer pipeline, new customer pipeline, which obviously we're working our way through at the moment with 63 in that pool. Then in U.K. and Europe, James Lowery joined from British Land at the start of the year. We've renewed the top two customers, that's Landmark and Argyll. I referred to them a moment ago in terms of where we saw some reductions in site numbers. That's most of those in the U.K.
They are, however, expanding again, so we already have a contracted pipeline with them. We have good strong pipeline with a couple of a number of new strategic customers in the UK, a couple of large flex workspace operators, and real estate investment trusts with existing flex operations. The European business and operation is live with people in mainland Europe, and customer sites live and pending. We have, as I mentioned a moment ago, a couple of sites live in Sweden. We're due to go live in France and Ireland at this side of Christmas. With Industrious' acquisition, we have portfolio opportunities to move forward with the business that they bought, and we're working through that at the minute.
Finally, on the U.K. and Europe, we're seeing more landlords offering a plug-and-play flex solution, which plays to us and our first site with a German real estate investment manager signed and due to go live imminently as an example of that. Something we've never really touched on before, but in the U.K., we've got a particular customer base that's focused around life sciences, and we are seeing that grow as well. Finally from me on APAC, Eric Schaffer joined at the turn of the financial year last year, so between FY 2021 and 2022. He's now established a team and we've got people across Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia, and first customer sites live with JLL in Australia. We've engaged with more than half of our target customers.
That's those customers who, with the potential to deliver us GBP 1 million of ARR, and that's giving us good pipeline. Hong Kong is finally emerging from COVID, and we're seeing some activity there as well. Those customers all providing good broad opportunity across the region. This region in particular is the one that will benefit from our new capital-light model that Mark will touch on in a moment to allow us to expand without significant further investment. That's it from me.
Thanks, Alan. Moving on as we run to the end of the deck. Everything we're doing are really underpinned by our product market fit and the quality of our products for clients. First wanna touch on the progress we've made with the essensys Platform. The essensys Platform, if you like, the way we think about this is we all our customers, all of their buildings, their portfolio, we plug them directly into the essensys Cloud. It's a global private network that allows for us to control and deliver our services across a high-quality, secure, private network. That control, if you like, that connection allows us to do some really interesting things with our technology in terms of automation.
We have an intelligent automation engine that really, if you like, drives huge efficiency savings for flexible workspace operators and landlords when it comes to managing these spaces. These are very dynamic buildings, very dynamic environments with lots of tenants coming and going, visitors coming and going. You've got to manage access to services, to network, Wi-Fi, doors, rooms, and booking and meeting rooms in real-time dynamically. Our intelligent automation engine is designed to do that with zero touch, and that allows us to create these amazing in-building experiences. When we think about access control, it understands that it's Mark Furness entering a building. It'll automatically connect me to the right network.
It will automatically give me access to those doors that I should have access to, and it will remove those access permissions the minute I leave the building. Again, it's all about high levels of automation, creating very efficient, seamless in-building journeys for our customers and their tenants. One of the things we haven't spoken about is one of the design principles we brought into the essensys Platform when we started to re-architect it a few years ago. For those of you who are familiar with the world of software as a service, many organizations refer to this as something called product-led growth. Put simply, it's the software working as its own distribution engine for new value, new functionality, new modules for clients. Allowing people to see and activate and buy new capability directly within the software.
That reduces sales effort and sales touch, reduces time to value to zero, and increases stickiness and upsell and expansion with our customers. Two recent examples of capabilities we deployed are our dynamic booking engine, which also as well as allowing people in these spaces and tenants to book across portfolio, meeting rooms, desks, offices. It also allows for the publication of that inventory out to third-party sales aggregators. If you like online meeting room and online booking platforms too. We also have a Smart Access solution, which we're really excited about, which is really unlocking the power of your mobile device to use that as the tap into all of the value in a building, whether that's to release a print, open a door, book a meeting room, and have that journey just completely seamless using your smartphone.
We'll talk more about those in the months to come. What does the last 12 months mean in terms of how we've evolved our strategy, and what does the future look like for our business? Well, it is important that we optimize at all points, our business and our strategy, and so we have, this year pushed really hard towards the acquisition of those high-value new logos. Alan talked to the evolution of the customer mix, the improvements in the quality in our customer base, and the expansion opportunity that now provides. It is absolutely right that we moderate the investment into new customer and new logo acquisition and turn our attention to the higher return of our existing customer base as they expand through GBP half a million and GBP 1 million of ARR each customer.
It lowers our customer acquisition cost and lowers sales cycles and increases lifetime value. To do that, obviously that allows us to focus on really capital efficient investment program and really cash conservation through the next two years. By doing that, we can reduce our burn rate rapidly in the coming months, that takes us with a level of increased certainty to our return to profitability. That's supported by further new initiatives, things like the capital-light model that we talked about. Just for those who don't know, we deploy our own regional data centers to support the delivery of our services.
In those areas that is economically unviable for us to do that for many reasons, or we don't wanna deploy a quarter of a million dollars worth of capital into that area with the associated additional data center costs. We've developed a capability, a technology capability that allows us to run over the back of other people's networks, like the wider internet connections. That means that we can be taken into new areas. Sweden is a great example of an area that's being served by this capital-light model. Once we get the sufficient scale that supports the investment to the data centers, that will see us increase margin from those regions, and we're able to turn that quickly. Talk to the improved customer mix. Over 50% of our customers are now high-value landlords.
Actually, I also just spoken to the importance of, if you like, upsell opportunity being delivered by the distribution engine within the platform. If you like, that is how we're thinking about the optimization of our strategy in the last 12 months. Just to touch on a brief summary and therefore an outlook. Performance, very resilient. That reflects a lot of the quality of our high-value customers. Also, we have seen the reduction in our U.K. base as those customers who've been with us for probably 13, 14, 15 years, who are really no longer designed for in terms of our technologies, as they migrate away to non-essensys solutions. All really thinking about the U.S. and the performance in the U.S., it is the single biggest market opportunity.
We've done exceptionally well since we entered that market in 2016, and that expectation to grow rapidly continues. Supported very, very ably now by the expansion in our UK and European capabilities, our push through Continental Europe and into APAC, again, on the back of profitability. Focus on your people and the product, and the profits will follow. We have to adapt to endure. We've raised a significant amount of capital in the last 18 months, but it's really about now making sure that we put that money to work and hold on to that capital to make sure that we get our return to profitability with increased certainty. The macro opportunity is, quite frankly, huge.
Our ambition is undimmed, and we remain critically and absolutely focused on the types of high-value customers that our products are designed for. The change in real estate is significant. It is structural, and it will happen over the long term. We are well-positioned to capitalize on that, provided we remain super focused on efficiency and remain as lean as we can. Ensure we have the cash that we need to support the initiatives as we need to deploy. That really is all about making sure that this business is as profitable as possible, as quickly as possible. With that, I'll end the slide deck. Just close the slide. One second, and then we'll move into Q&A.
Mark, Sarah, Alan, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, just please do continue to submit your questions just 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 received a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and if I could just ask you to read out those questions and give responses where it is appropriate to do so, I'll pick up from you at the end.
Great. Will do. Thanks, Alessandro. I think thank you. I can see already a number of questions from names we're familiar with who've been on our essensys journey for a little while now. Thanks for your support. One that we've had coming in, an early one. You talk about losing quite a lot of legacy UK sites, whereas there is no expansion opportunity and service costs are high. I understand the focus on larger customers, but aren't these existing single-site customers incrementally profitable and therefore worth more sales effort, even allowing for service costs? Since there's no acquisition cost and the software costs are sunk, who is winning these accounts? And are you supporting an entrant whose next move will be to come after the larger accounts?
Yeah, I think Alan has spoken in detail about the shift in our customer mix. 16 years we've been working with this industry, and one of the things that we've seen change in the last decade is the increase in the number of landlords that are delivering their own flexible workspace operations. We're actually seeing a decrease globally in the number of small single-site pure play workspace operators less than there has ever been. That's one dynamic at play, but I think a more important one for us is how we embed in the larger customer. Our largest customer, Industrious, is today significantly less resource intensive on a unit basis and as a group than any of our other customers. It's because we've become embedded.
The familiarity with our software increases across the organization. They develop their own in-house training programs. If you like, we become part of their standard operating procedure. While acquisition of those type of customers is undoubtedly high, once you've got them, actually that embedded nature leads to a few things. One is very sticky. To give you an example, we've had zero attrition, no churn in those high-value customers in the 16 years we've operated. Now, as well as that, we also have a position where because we become embedded, they will actually create an industry network effect. This is an industry where if you like, people look to the first movers, the largest players. They look to Hines and Tishman Speyer in the U.S. They look to JLL and CBRE, they look to PATRIZIA and others across Europe.
They look to how they're doing things, and so their ringing endorsement of essensys will drag us to, if you like, the wider community of large landlords in the industry. Hope that answers the question. Next question is, we talk about an improved LTV to CAC ratio. It's probably in your deck, but in case not, what is the ratio? For those who don't know, LTV to CAC is lifetime value, so the total cash retained for a customer over time, should I say, versus the total acquisition cost of gaining that customer. Now, as we are vertically focused, historically ours are very high LTV to CAC ratios.
As we increased investment through post-IPO and into new regions and into new acquisition, our LTV to CAC ratio, which was historically over 6 to 1, actually came down towards that golden number of 3 to 1 that people talk about in terms of real efficiency. Actually this year, running about 2.5 to 1, but we'll see that return as that focus on expansion revenues is pulled through in future years. Still very efficient sales organization. Next question is from Michael. You mentioned further product launches in FY 2023. Do you see any of the current macroeconomic challenges hindering your ability to deliver on these? Well, I think we are always responding to certain challenges.
Sarah talked before about inventory build, strategic purchase of inventory to make sure we could deliver for our customers through FY 2022 and FY 2023. We are still able to leverage our balance sheet, our position, and our purchasing power to make sure we secure supply chains in a sensible fashion for our near-term requirements, and we don't see that changing. One of the things we must be aware of, though, is that our customers, big, large global landlords, their investment horizon is 50, 100 years in these assets. They're thinking about how they deploy capital for a long-term horizon. These are very deliberate investment decisions in these assets, these buildings that will take us along with them. You know, yes, sensitive to macroeconomic challenges of course.
That, you know, talks to how we've evolved our strategy in terms of cash, runway and certainty. But absolutely we're making sure we take the steps needed to secure those things we need to do to deliver our new products. Next question is, geographically, where do you see the greatest growth potential, and are you targeting any new areas as you get established internationally? Well, we've had this year a significant push into those new geographies. We are unbelievably focused on the returns profile, our likely penetration levels and how much we are able to win in those markets. That saw the markets identified across APAC, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia and obviously into mainland Europe. We're really focused on those areas we go to.
Additional areas will come on stream as we get pull from our big, large customers. Alan's talked about some pull from a customer into Sweden. We see pull from customers into Mexico and Brazil, and we can support them. I think it's really important to differentiate how we think about investment decisions around operations and go to market in those areas versus the opportunity that some customers will bring that we can serve. At the moment, it's focused on those regions we have established now, move them all, you know, all into a considerable scale phase. That obviously generates operating cash flows to give us opportunity to move into new adjacent areas. Question on sales cycle. What's the typical sales cycle from a timeline perspective, and how confident are you in executing the pipeline of opportunities you have?
Well, the great thing about working with very large organizations and their deliberate plans around investment and their assets is that we have great visibility into how they are thinking about their expansion into their buildings. We have really strong visibility with our biggest customers and with our increasing number of landlords into how they're thinking about their pipeline. Alongside of that, the sales cycle, which is a long sales cycle, it is normally between 6 and 12 months for the new logo acquisition. That's only the first early sites, but as Alan mentioned before, new sites come on stream with increasing regularity the longer we get into the relationship. Pipelines baked in, our qualified pipeline fully developed across all regions now with new logos, early-stage pipeline and closing pipeline.
Yes, a high degree of confidence in terms of how we see our pipeline today. Next question. Do you develop all your software platform or outsource to a third party? Where is the development team located, and are there any challenges with recruiting and retaining skilled people? Well, there is always challenges with attracting the right type of talent, committed talent into any business. We, like all other companies, are looking for that edge to make sure we get the very best people in our organization. That, if you like, challenge is ever continuing, and we do as best as we possibly can with all of the tools we have available to get the right people in the company.
In terms of our development of our software platform, we have been historically supported by a small outsourced capability, which we run in Vietnam to support ongoing maintenance of our platforms. Really when we think about innovation, the heavy lifting, and the rapid evolution of our platforms, we've done that traditionally out of our HQ in the U.K. We still do that, continue to do that because actually in terms of efficiency, it is a much more efficient program in terms of delivering new capability and new functionality. I'll pass this one to Sarah, which is: Is the strong dollar good for essensys profits?
Thank you, Mark. Yes, we did benefit from the dollar movement against sterling in the last year. In terms of our total revenue, at a constant currency basis, that was a 4% increase. Now, when I look into the U.S. specific revenues, we said 17% growth in their total revenue. That equates to 12% on a constant currency basis, and the 23% that I quoted in terms of recurring revenue is a 19% on a constant currency basis. Still very strong, but you can see that we did benefit there. In terms of how that flows down to profit, clearly in the U.S. some of our cost of goods sold will be incurred in dollars. We'll get the opposite reaction there.
We do have staff out in the U.S., so there are payroll costs there. The majority of our cost base, in terms of the support and, as Mark said, the development that is based in the U.K. This year, yes, our profits did benefit from the movement in the dollar.
Next question is, again to Sarah: Would you consider trading shares in the U.S. sector?
You know, there comes a time when that might be the right thing to do. I think in the current climate that's not necessarily something we're looking at.
Next one is for me, which is: Will Mark be buying more shares in the near future? Of those of you who are familiar with the U.K. public markets, I'm currently a 31% holder, and therefore I can't get approval from the markets, because that would trigger an automatic takeover approach if I continue to increase shares. Hopefully that answers that question. In terms of my view on the all-time low share price, you know, we have a huge amount of transparency in the business looking backwards as a public company. What that doesn't allow us to do is give you huge visibility of what's going on and what the future looks like. My views on the share price being at an all-time low are, you know, undoubtedly frustrated.
Actually I see what the business is doing day to day. I see the opportunity. I look at our balance sheet strength, GBP 24 million of cash at the year-end, our return to profitability, the type of customer mix and the evolution of the market. Actually I think, you know, that is a result of many things, but all we can do is deliver over the weeks, months and years ahead against the opportunity. Just to give you simple math, you know, our target, the proxy for this is we have 100 high-value customers. Those 100 high-value customers at very minimum levels bring us 20 buildings each one worth $1 million or GBP 1 million of ARR per year.
That takes us, you know, in the years ahead to GBP 100 million of ARR with significant further expansion opportunity and product upsell opportunity. Yes, I still have huge ambition, and I'm still very excited about the opportunity ahead. I think one final question I think we've got here, which is one for Sarah, which is: When are you expecting to reach cash break-even?
In the medium term, we are looking through to getting back to cash profitability, and we're certainly looking to do that with the cash reserves that we've got today. Towards the end of the three-year period from now.
Great. Thank you, Sarah. With that, I think I'm just gonna do a quick scroll and make sure I've checked everything. I think, Alessandro, we've answered everything.
Yes, Mark, Sarah, Alan, thank you for that. I think you've addressed all those questions from investors. Of course, the company will review all the questions submitted today and will publish those responses on the InvestorMeetCompany platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Mark, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Alessandro. Firstly, thank you everyone for taking the time to join us today. I know there's lots going on in your lives, and I really do appreciate the time you take to learn more about our business and the opportunity ahead. It's great to see some familiar faces, long-term holders, like Tom Hill on the chat today and the Q&A. Great. Thanks for the time. We think it's a great time for essensys, a very interesting time for the world of property and real estate and one we're looking forward to execute on. Thanks again. Have a great day.
Mark, Sarah, Alan, thanks once again 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 that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of essensys plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon.