Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining today. Really appreciate you taking the time out to listen to the H1 presentation on the results for PLC. I think the two guys we have here in the room are fairly familiar to you all. I am Dave Meaden, CEO of Idox. To my right, I have Anoop Kang, who is our CFO. Somewhere tucked away in the background, we have Jonathan Legdon, our COO, who is there in case of emergency to answer any really difficult questions that we might get later in the presentation. Again, thanks for your time today. It is a great pleasure for us to be able to take you through the results for H1.
For those of you who are very familiar with us, you know all this stuff already, but Idox is a software business that delivers very specific software, with great market positions and scale in the markets that we serve. We work across land property and public protection. That helps us deliver world-class planning, land and property and public protection services, mainly to local government in the U.K. We have coupled and added to that geospatial data services that provide organizations with the right tools to leverage spatial data, gain insights, and improve their efficiency and decision-making. We also have an assets business that provides solutions that reduce operational risk and ensure regulatory comPlianz in complex build and operate environments, such as infrastructure, oil and gas, energy, and utilities. That software helps organizations streamline their asset management processes.
In our communities division, our software is helping to transform health and social care plans and giving better outcomes for those with SEND requirements. We are also strengthening the democratic process by enabling accurate, transparent elections and expanding participation in those things as we go forward. That is our business in a nutshell. I am sure we can talk about more of that as we go through this presentation. Our highlights for H1 in FY 2025 are really good, and we are really pleased with the outcomes that we have had. Our revenues are up 4% to GBP 45 million. Recurring revenue growth in that is up 9% to GBP 29.8 million. Our adjusted EBITDA has increased 6% to GBP 13.9 million.
Thanks to the efforts of all the teams and the teams led by Jonathan, we've had another record intake year with our order intake up 9% on the previous year, which beats last year's previous best. Out of that, we have some really strong foundations with a real focus on the future. It is continued progress across the group, lots of new wins both from our existing clients, but also new customers. I'm sure we'll talk about a few of those as we go through. Our solutions are proving to be market winners, and it's really exciting to see some of the clients that we're now adding to the portfolio.
As we know, local government in the U.K., which is a chunk of our business, is undergoing significant shift, but most of that shift aligns perfectly with Idox's core capabilities, and our market shares enable us to reach out to them and help them on their digitization and AI journeys. In health, we've done incredibly well with our social care products and also with the work that we do around sexual healthcare. That part of the business has also been very strong, as has our assets business. Anoop will talk about each of those in turn in the next few moments. As you know, we're a buy-and-build business. We're careful in the assets that we bring on board. We're highly selective on those. That is to ensure that we integrate them well. Our track record in those areas has been outstandingly good.
In the year, in the half year, just after the half year, we were able to announce the acquisition of Plianz. Again, we'll talk to that a little bit more to strengthen our positions in social care. With that, I'll hand over to Anoop, and Anoop's going to take us through the financial highlights, and I'll come back on and talk a little bit about our forward strategy a little bit later on.
Great. Thanks, Dave. Morning, everybody, and welcome to our 2025 half-year results presentation. Firstly, I'll take you through the results for the group as a whole, and then I'll pull out some key themes and highlights by the individual segments. Overall, the group delivered a solid performance for the period in line with our expectations. We delivered revenues of GBP 45 million, which were up 4% on the previous half, and continue to demonstrate the positive momentum in the business. Our recurring revenue was also up at 9% at GBP 29.8 million as the business continues to focus on securing multi-year repeatable contracts. The proportion of recurring revenues against total revenue was up 3% on 2024 at 66%, with strong growth in our land, property, and public protection division.
We delivered revenue growth of 3% in our LPPP division to GBP 29.7 million and 4% growth in our communities division to GBP 7.4 million. The assets division delivered 11% revenue growth to GBP 7.9 million. Our adjusted EBITDA was up 6% at GBP 13.9 million, along with an improved margin of 31%. The group ended the period with a record order intake for the half at GBP 58.7 million, up 9% on the previous half, with some great wins across LPPP and assets, providing good visibility into the second half and into 2026. The increase in EBITDA and lower tax charges contributed to delivering a 17% increase in our adjusted diluted earnings per share to GBP 1.48 per share. Consistent with previous half-year results and in line with our policy, we do not propose an interim dividend.
However, our intention would be to declare a full-year dividend in consideration of our financial performance position and future confidence. We continue to focus on cash generation and strong cash management throughout the business. As a result, we delivered an operating cash conversion rate against adjusted EBITDA of 141% and moved from a net debt balance of GBP 9.9 million last year-end to a net cash balance of GBP 0.2 million at 30th of April. The group continues to have in place its RCF facility of GBP 75 million and accordion of GBP 45 million through to October 2027, providing the group with significant financial resources to continue further bolt-on M&A. In addition, the group will utilize its RCF to repay its EUR 13 million Maltese bond, which is due in July 2025.
Overall, it's really pleasing to be able to report a solid performance for the six months ending 30th of April 2025. Now, on the following slides, we set out the group's track record over the past few years. The group has consistently delivered over a number of years in line with expectations. For example, over the last five years, we've delivered a 9% CAGR both organically and through M&A, going from GBP 57.3 million to GBP 87.6 million in 2024. Furthermore, we've achieved a 9% CAGR over the last five years in terms of recurring revenue, taking it from GBP 35.7 million to GBP 54.5 million. We've increased our recurring revenue by a further 9% since the last half- year.
During this time, we worked with customers to develop, maintain, and extend new relationships over a longer term, which has contributed to order intake growth of 62% between 2021 and 2024 to GBP 101.7 million, representing a CAGR of 13%, with a further 9% growth since the last half- year to GBP 58.7 million, which is in fact a record order intake for the half-year period. As a result, we have continued to ensure delivery of profitable growth at a 9% CAGR between 2020 and 2024, with margins consistently at or exceeding 30%. We have delivered a further growth of adjusted EBITDA of 6% to GBP 13.9 million for the first half. Moving out to breaking out the results in our reporting segments. Starting with LPPP.
As a brief reminder, LPPP includes our regulatory services of planning and building control, our on-prem and cloud solutions for land charges and planning, our address management solutions, and more recently, our geospatial capabilities. The LPPP division continues to form a major driver for the group and accounted for 66% of the group's revenue and EBITDA. Overall revenue for the division in H1 was up 3% to GBP 29.7 million, where a 12% increase in recurring revenue was partially offset with an anticipated reduction in non-recurring license revenue, given a lower period in renewal cycle that we were expecting during the course of 2025. Local government, including cloud and geospatial, contributed well to performance of the division in the period. Of the GBP 29.7 million of revenue, GBP 19.7 million was generated from recurring revenue streams, representing 66% of the total division's revenue.
Non-recurring revenues were down by 12% at GBP 10 million, as expected, and driven by a lower level of contract resign activity in the period. Our order intake for the period was GBP 37.1 million and included customers such as North Yorkshire, Calderdale, Swansea, East Lindsey Councils, and London boroughs of Bexley and Barnet. In geospatial, we secured a major three-year contract with Vodafone, as well as new contracts with customers such as National Collection of Aerial Photography and Millar & Bryce. We reported an adjusted EBITDA for the period of GBP 9.2 million, representing a 31% margin for the period, which was up under 30% reported for the full year 2024. Turning to our communities division. The communities division comprises our social and healthcare, elections, and ResearchC onnect solutions, and provides its services predominantly to the public sector.
The communities division accounts for 17% of the total group revenues and 19% of group EBITDA. Now, whilst election events can cause variability in the revenue streams from one year to the next, other parts of the division have typically acted as a counter to such cyclicality. Overall revenue for the communities division was at 4% in the period at GBP 7.4 million. Revenue in Lilie, our sexual healthcare solution, was up 10% on the prior period as we continued our ongoing work with customers including Royal Berkshire NHS Trust and the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. Election revenues were up 8% and included work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Welsh Government. Our Research Connect services delivered good performance for the period with a 3% growth in revenue.
Whilst overall revenues in our social care solution were 8% lower than last year, they did, however, deliver a 2% increase in recurring revenue with customers such as Lambeth, Reading, and Manchester Councils. Overall recurring revenue for the division grew 4% to GBP 5.2 million and accounted for 70% of the division's overall revenue. Despite not being a general election year, order intake has remained relatively good, with work winning across each of the solutions in the division. Overall, the division delivered an adjusted EBITDA of GBP 2.6 million, generating an improved margin of 35%. Moving on to our assets division. The assets division provides document management and control solutions to asset-intensive industries, facilities management solutions, asset tracking, and transportation solutions. The assets division accounts for 17% of total group revenues and 15% of group EBITDA. During the period, revenue grew by 11% to GBP 7.9 million.
EIM returned to growth, with revenues 2% higher compared to the prior period. Revenue in iFIT, our asset tracking solution and transport, were over 30% up on the previous period, with non-recurring revenues accounting for most of the improvement in performance. There was strong order intake in assets, up 80% in a period, notably in Q2, therefore carrying a stronger order book into the second half of the year. New EIM sales included significant contracts with Berkshire Hathaway Energy, PacifiCorp, and San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit. New wins and resigns during a period for iFIT included Birmingham, Belfast, Tayside, NHS Trusts. Recurring revenue grew 2% to GBP 4.9 million. Overall adjusted EBITDA for the period was up 31% to GBP 2.1 million compared to GBP 1.6 million in the corresponding period last year, and was driven by iFIT, EIM, and transport.
Moving on to the group's cash flow for the period. The group generated net cash from operating activities before tax of GBP 19.6 million. Against the group's adjusted EBITDA of GBP 13.9 million, this equated to a conversion rate of 141%. The group paid GBP 0.9 million in taxes in the period and GBP 4.6 million in CapEx, with notable investments in local government, cloud, and geospatial. The group paid the 2024 dividend of GBP 0.7 per share, which resulted in a cash outflow of GBP 33.2 million. After interest, lease, and other items totaling GBP 0.8 million, the group moved from a net debt position of GBP 9.9 million at the end of last year to a net cash position of GBP 0.2 million at the end of the period. Finally, moving on to guidance and outlook. This is consistent with communications in the past, reflecting our outlook for the business.
We expect the group to deliver mid-to- high single-digit growth in 2025, excluding any further M&A activities. From an EBITDA margin perspective, we expect short-term margin to remain broadly consistent, given the increase in national insurance contributions from April 2025. Over the medium term, we expect to head towards a 35% adjusted EBITDA margin, driven by increased efficiencies and continuous improvements in our geospatial margins. In terms of cash generation, we continue to expect the business before M&A to generate good levels of cash over the medium term, and therefore reducing the sort of overall net debt position we will experience in the second half of the year. The half-year point is typically the highest point for cash generation. We would expect, as in the past, to experience some working capital unwind in the second half, along with a circa GBP 8 million investment in Plianz.
We have a healthy M&A pipeline with good progress on a number of strategic targets. We have significant facilities to further fund our M&A ambitions with our GBP 75 million RCF and GBP 45 million accordion. Just finally, in terms of the remainder of this year, we are pleased with a positive momentum in the first half, and we expect to continue this for the remainder of the year. At this point, I will hand back to Dave, who will talk us through the rest of the deck.
Thanks, Anoop. I was talking to our team here at MHP Group this morning, and we decided that we might have been an awardee for being a really, you know, solid and boring business at some point in previous histories. I am pleased to tell you that our strategy has not changed.
We focus very clearly on things that we think we're very good at, and we focus very clearly on things that we know and expect that we can deliver and execute on. As Anoop's pointed out with some of the CAGR points he made earlier in both terms of our growth and our margins and the work that we do to improve the quality of our business over time, that track record has been really strong, and we expect that to continue going forward. As we say, that's because we have a very clear strategy for the organization. It's supported, of course, always by our four pillars. We focus very heavily on revenue, on margins, communication, and constant simplification of our organization.
As it gets larger, w e like to ensure that we do not encumber the business with unnecessary bureaucracy and that we continue to make things as easy as we can to work in our business, both for ourselves and for our customers. Our strategy is built around very strong market positions in what we believe are good, strong, growing markets that have excellent tailwinds, and that allows us to have a clear focus on the operational metrics that we believe drive the business. We are scaling through targeted M&A, which we believe will improve margins and cash over time. We believe that we found a very strong growth opportunity in geospatial, and Anoop talked to some of the successes that you have seen in that part of the business. We can clearly see and feel supported in our assertions that there is a GBP 300 million addressable market for us there.
Our goal is to get 10% of that market growing forward by 2028. We have a business where we will aim to grow margins, focus on our cash generation, and also deliver a rule of 40 business as we move forward, where our growth plus our EBITDA margins total that magic 40 number. Our business today, built for scale, trusted for impact, our specialist software solutions and our geospatial data services power the performance of government and industry, driving productivity and a better experience for everyone. Yeah, we're focused on market leadership. We know from our experience over many years of working in these sectors that market share has a direct correlation to margins and margins driving cash, cash driving our ability to fund future investments in the business and continue to be leaders in all the sectors that we work in.
The acquisitions that we make are meant to both hone our expertise and add to our capabilities and provide us with greater knowledge and positions for our customers going forward to be more significant to them as we move forward. We feel that's a very important part of both delivering ARR growth and also embedding ourselves in partnerships with customers that we can work with that give us success over time. Very focused on our financial stability. As Anoop said, our recurring income continues to increase. We're very, very pleased with that, 66% of our revenue now is recurring. We have, as Anoop pointed out, up to GBP 120 million available to us for further M&A activity. Our people, of course, are absolutely integral to the success that we have.
We spend a lot of time, effort, and money to make sure that we're developing our organization at all levels. I'm really pleased that in the half, certainly 5% of people in Idox were promoted to new positions that have shown our investment in leadership and our investment in general management capabilities have been soundly rewarded. Our average tenure across the business is just over eight- and- a- half years, which I think is outstanding. We aim to be a values-led business. You know, everything we do, we do with a sense of integrity. I appreciate that many organizations now may be taking their foot off ESG commitments and various other things that have happened. We're not.
We have a very active ESG group across the business, all made up of people that volunteer their time to get involved in things that they believe are important both societally and for us as a company. Our ESG outputs have been fantastic over the last three years and will continue to reduce both our carbon footprint, but also concentrate on the work that we do across the equality, diversity, and inclusion activities as previously outlined, and we remain fully committed to those. Now, in terms of M&A, I think we're delighted that we managed to conclude on the Plianz acquisition just after the half year. As previously, we provided what we hope is a sensible and clear checklist for the types of businesses that we believe would be additive to what we do here at Idox.
You know, Plianz fits absolutely into that checklist that we provided last time. The key things for us are that, you know, from a strategic perspective, the M&A targets are enhancing our existing software offering, broadening our capabilities to create new and innovative solutions, and draw upon our existing expertise and client relationships. Obviously, they need to drive profitable growth, increase our recurring income, help us realize synergies in cash generation, and we hope drive shareholder value through good accretion. Of course, that means that we're looking to buy at sensible prices, embellish those businesses with our expertise, and also allow those businesses to benefit from the infrastructure that we've created to create synergies moving forwards. All of the acquisitions that we've made, which are listed on page 17 of this presentation, I think you can see that that play has worked incredibly well for us.
We have a very, very strong track record of executing and integrating acquisitions, starting with SysGoMe back in 2019 that has formed the bedrock of our Idox cloud propositions right through to Emapsite that we concluded in 2023 that is now part of a very, very successful geospatial division. We're looking forward to Plianz, welcoming all our new colleagues, integrating them into our business, and learning from them as to the things that they're doing for customers that we can take forward and implement across our clients. On the next slide, you'll see we've called it expanding our digital capability with the acquisition of Plianz. The business itself aligns very, very clearly with our current social care offering.
Plianz is offering financial solution management software that helps organizations such as local authorities and, in some occasions, legal practices to manage the financial affairs of vulnerable people with needs that are perhaps unable to make those decisions for themselves. The business has a very clear outlet. It is a market leader in that area, 90% of its income is recurring. We think there is plenty of scope there both to grow its revenues and we believe margins as we go forward. Importantly, there is also an AI roadmap in place there, which will help decision-making and the bureaucracy of those activities simplify over time. We are very excited about that. It gives us significant scope to grow our revenues and increase our market reach.
Now, many of you will have seen that our public services have been under pressure for some time, and there is a changing landscape amongst both the police forces, the NHS Trust, and importantly for us, local governments here in the U.K. What we're seeing to date is that those budget pressures reflect and increase organizations' reliance upon high-tech and good, reliable tech solutions to deliver more for them as they rely more on technology and perhaps less on people, or at least freeing up people's time to do more important work. That continues to drive our business going forward. Labor have outlined a very exciting set of changes that they'd like to see for planning reform and to ensure that more house building and more infrastructure building is undertaken in the U.K. We think that's a really strong tailwind for our business. We think that's terrific news.
We're seeing also the consolidation of local authorities into more strategic units. We'll give examples in a moment of areas in which, because of our market share and presence, we believe that favors our organization moving forward. We see Idox being the platform of choice for local authorities as they move forward to support their future decision-making. It drives the need, obviously, for scalable solutions and larger organizations that have more capacity to support those decisions. The digitization and cloud adoption we expect to continue and perhaps accelerate in pace. The government has announced, you will have seen, you know, following things like the McClifford review, an investment in AI and AI-driven processes, which are very exciting, not just for local government, but for us here at Idox.
We're investing in a number of pilot solutions that we think will be really interesting for our clients moving forward. We're looking to seize market share in high-demand, high-growth opportunity areas. Just to give a few examples of the sorts of things that have been going on. On slide 20, Driving Transformation: North Yorkshire Strategic Partnership. The North Yorkshire Strategic Partnership is now the largest unitary authority in England. We secured their GBP 2.4 million contract to be their platform of choice for planning, building control, and all of the activities that we deliver around public protection. It's a very exciting area for us. We've delivered that solution ahead of time. All eight authorities are now working on the Idox platforms. It's providing them with a smarter and faster way of delivering services in an intelligent, agile, and cost-efficient manner.
Moving to an on-premise system delivered by Idox directly to the customer is a very exciting reference point for us as future consolidation plays out and works across the country. Excellent case study for us, really good delivery as we firmly come to expect from our teams at Idox. We've done a fantastic job there. On slide 21, just to update you on what's been going on in geospatial, Anoop mentioned that during the half, we managed to secure a significant contract with Vodafone. I'm not sure we ever give the value of those contracts out, but it's a multi-million GBP contract over the next three years and is terrific. I mean, it's great and brings together a lot of the expertise that we've pulled together and built in our geospatial business.
We're assembling a very strong blue-chip client customer base, lots of great examples of how large organizations are using geospatial technology and information to deliver improved outcomes and insight to their businesses. It has given us a lot of confidence that the 10% market that we're looking to gain in the addressable market space is available to us and can help accelerate the growth of the company as we go forward. I mentioned laterally about AI and what's been happening there. We spent quite a lot of time ensuring that we've got internal processes and activities that allow us to use AI in a very safe way and in a very knowledgeable way, focused on client outcomes and the things that they might wish to do. That has given us a great deal of confidence to go and build pilot processes with some of our clients.
We think that offers a great deal of opportunity moving into the second half. A lot of this, of course, is around planning, ensuring that planning applications can be dealt with swiftly and quickly and effectively, but also helping to make sure that the customers are able to deliver all the prerequisites that local authorities require for there to be a valid application in the first instance. The things that really excite me are seeing things like sentiment analysis that allow local authorities to understand that planning applications that are coming in and what the public's view of those things are, not just from the letters of support and opposition that they get, but actually to judge the sentiment of those letters very effectively is also proving really interesting.
I think the whole area around chatbots and the way that AI is improving that, the customer experience and the ability to automate many of the processes that go on is also very, very exciting for local government, not just in planning, but in the way that they deal with public services generally. All of those areas are getting our attention. We're building out our capability and expertise, trialing things with customers. I expect the next two or three years will be a very exciting time for local government and other public sector organizations. We're going to see a lot of new pilots going up and people experimenting with the technology to figure out what really works for them and what can then be deployed at scale. Overall, in summary, our positive momentum continues.
I think some of the notes that have come out today have been, you know, very complimentary about our ability to execute and our consistency of performance. We continue to perform well and in line with the board's expectations. Myself, Anoop, Jonathan are spending quite a bit of our time exploring other M&A opportunities that we can add to the business for growth. That combination of strong growth in recurring income and attractive bidding pipeline provides good revenue visibility for the remainder of 2025 and into 2026. We are looking forward to another successful period. With that, I'm going to stop. We'd be very happy to take any questions you may have. Thank you again for spending your time with us. It's greatly appreciated.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad.
We'll pause for a brief moment to allow everyone to signal for questions. Thank you. We'll now take our first question from James Lockyear of Peel Hunt. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, guys, and thank you for taking my questions. I've got three, please. You flagged the 4% revenue growth for the period versus the 9% recurring revenue growth, which is mainly timing of renewals. Could you remind us over the next couple of years how the shape of renewals will be? Is this year a low, for example? How should we bring up the cadence over the next few years for that one? Second question, obviously excellent to see the Vodafone deal that you announced. You call it a major win for your geospatial business. Could you tell us a bit more? What are you doing for Vodafone?
Was it incoming or did you reach out and is it Vodafone specific, or could you look at other telcos as well? Finally, I note within the EIM part, you signed San Francisco's BART transit operations there. There are obviously many transit operations around the U.S. and elsewhere. How should we think about the potential for that one? Thank you.
You got that.
I think it was progress around EIM and the potential for growth.
Okay. Do you want to do the first?
Yeah. I'll have a go at the first one. James, I know that you and I spoke about the shape of renewals. When we talked at the end of last year, we did anticipate the renewal cycle being at a lower point over the course of FY 2025, with it rebounding over FY 2026 and then 2027.
Imagine you have got a three-year contract. Effectively, what will happen on our sort of on-premise solutions is there is, so James, I think you want to go on mute maybe. Yeah. As I was saying, on-premise solutions, we have revenues where part of the TCV, the total contract value, is basically attributed to license value, and then part of it is attributed to support and maintenance. Under the accounting standards, you have to recognize the license element in full for the whole duration of the contract on day one. Effectively, what that means is when in a year when you have not got a significant level of resigns coming through, you will continue to have your recurring revenue on the support and maintenance, but your license revenue will fall in that year.
In a year when, next year and a year beyond, basically the level of resigns is higher in proportion to the ones we've had this year. That non-recurring license revenue will increase for FY 2026 and FY 2027. When we get to 2028, we would experience a similar reduction, assuming status quo and no further transition to cloud, but we do not anticipate that to be the case, clearly. Conversely, that has been the experience in LPPP this year, but in iFIT, within our assets division, their non-recurring revenue this year has been very strong, and it is sort of the inverse of what I have just described around LPPP. They have had a very strong year in terms of resigns or a strong period for resigns in this first half. Hence the reason their non-recurring income has been very strong in the first period.
Great.
In terms of Vodafone, absolutely delighted to welcome them as a customer. Daniel and all the team across at Emapsite as well as our new geospatial division have been doing great work in just spreading the word about our capabilities in the area. Alex Wrottesley joined us a while ago to lead up that division. Alex and Daniel and all the rest of the team there have been doing a great job integrating our capabilities and presenting them as a unique offer into that geospatial market. It is gaining a tremendous amount of attention. I think the other side is that we've struck up a very strong working partnership with Ordnance Survey.
That coincides with Ordnance Survey wanting to expand and extend the reach of geospatial businesses and wanting really strong businesses like ourselves to serve clients directly and for them to come away from perhaps dealing with clients directly themselves. I think the stars aligned a little bit. I think we have a very strong proposition for telcos, which is not just around mapping, but extends into all of the data services that they might require and integrating that with software that just makes their life easier. We call this curated services. It just allows them to do things quicker, faster, and we end up being an extension of their own capabilities. We're excited about that.
I think we are looking absolutely to extend our work, not just into the areas around sort of telephony and the sort of things that Vodafone are doing, but extending that also into utilities, extending it into projects that deal with infrastructure generally. That seems to be a real source of growth for us at the moment, and we're pleased at that. We are absolutely going to be actively working with customers that are dealing in those areas over the course of the second half of the year and expecting that we'll continue to be very successful in acquiring new clients as we build out the expertise that shows that we're specialists in the area that they're working to and we're making the benefits of geospatial really tangible for those customers.
Now, in EIM, I didn't get the question because you're a little bit fuzzy, James, but if you could repeat that one to me, then I'll have it.
I got the question.
Right. There you go, Jonathan. You can do that one.
That's fine. I think James is asking about the win that we had at San Francisco Bay Area, sort of rapid transit. BART, I think we call it in our business. They're a new client to Fusion Live. It's a three-year deal with them, about $300,000 over the next three years. I think that's just another customer in what's been a quite successful first half of the year for EIM. I need to mention that our order intake was up 80% on prior year in the first half.
If we think about our opportunities in the second half of the year, we do not think that is going to slow down. That actually looks like quite a lot of momentum that we will get there. There are particular markets that we go target for our EIM solutions. BART is a great example of a growing market, I think, as James alluded to. There is lots of opportunity in the U.S. for these types of deals. It is great to have another sort of industry that we can go to. We are very strong in oil and gas. We are very strong in nuclear. As we found in the new green energy markets as well, that has been quite a good hunting ground for us. We will continue to sort of take our experience that we have in those markets and go sell more into those particular areas.
Yeah, I think that's been a really good deal for us.
Thanks, Jonathan.
Cool. Thank you for that. I have a quick follow-up, but it's just very tiny. You've given us the GBP 300 million-mark TAM you're hoping to get to 10%. Where are we today?
Six months in. How does that work? I think, look, without being flippant about it, I'm sorry, you know me well enough. You know I'm going to give you the flippant answer. But without being too flippant, I think deals like Vodafone are a really good signpost for the types of things we want to do. As I say, it's a significant multi-million deal over three years. That gives us a lot of confidence that we're fishing in the right areas and building expertise in those key areas that's distinctive and different from what other people are providing.
I think that for us is always the unique factor. We continue to build the business, not just in terms of our sales presence, but also in terms of our delivery capability. We are now putting together a really strong offshore team in Pune. Alex and the management team have been strengthened. Our delivery capability has grown. We feel absolutely on track. I think there will be significant developments on that as we go forward. We are thinking all the time about how we can bring combined software and data solutions together that are very repeatable for customers. I think that over time will drive significant growth there. You can expect to see it continuing. I think we have made a really, really promising start.
That is great. Thank you, guys.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from Julian Yates of Investec. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. Just two from me. The first one is on the merging with the local authorities. You're saying that you're hoping market share would go up. That's the plan. That makes a lot of sense. Could you talk a bit about the TCVs, the total contract values that you're getting from these potential deals and what that means for your installed base? So will you see an increment in terms of your overall contract uplift, s o will you have to do more for less, give away more of your suite to your installed base as it comes up for renewal? Or will you actually be able to achieve overall pricing uplift and TCV uplift? Because obviously, as they merge, you're going to have customers on one side, not on the other.
Some may say, "Right, we want more, but we want less pricing," because that is the whole point, I guess, of these LAs coming together. That would just be interesting there in terms of the pricing and your overall, I guess, profits and revenues from there versus what you are currently delivering. The second one is going back to geospatial, actually. You mentioned Idox, steady and boring, but geospatial is not steady and boring. Especially with your GBP 300 million addressable market target, could you talk about what you are actually doing in terms of integrating the assets within the business? You have got the three or five assets there. How is that going on the ground operationally? Are you going to split that out into a separate division? You talked about that before. It would just be helpful from an operational point of view, what is going on there.
Does your 10% target include M&A, or will that come on top of that? I guess lastly, the margin that you're delivering from that, it's a bit below LPPP level for obvious reasons. Just talk to us about how that moves up. Is that from integrating? Is that from efficiencies, operational leverage? A few thrown in for good measure there.
No, they're great questions. Happy to sort of take them on, really. I think if I start with the local authority one, and I know I've got Jonathan for backup here. I understand the assertion and the assumption that as local authorities combine, one of the things they're clearly looking for is operational leverage themselves, making sure they're getting better value for money. As you say, doing more for less. In our experience today, the more for less is not just about creating efficiency in buying.
It's creating effectiveness in organization and operational delivery. What we're finding in places like North Yorkshire is that we have the consolidation of the local authorities coming on board, but they're doing more with the Idox platform and doing more with the other things that we can provide in order to provide them with that value. For us, the TCVs are going up when those consolidations are happening. Because classically, for example, we'll be doing hosting or transitioning them to the cloud. They'll be taking our operational performance software that shows them how effective all their operatives are being and all their staff members are being in dealing with particular types of claim and so on, providing the dashboards for performance as they go forward. Experimenting, as we said, and maybe piloting some AI capabilities or data standards work that have been funded by MHCLG.
These are the types of things that sort of come to play. You're right, there are always deals that we end up sort of negotiating with customers. The net result for us is always that they're margin- enhancing and they're usually revenue- enhancing for us rolling forward as we deploy more of our capability to help the customer do more with software and not have to invest in the manual processes that go around that stuff. I think North Yorkshire was a good example, GBP 2- million contract over three. It just provides a really strong platform for the customer to go forward. For us, we love that because it creates sticky clients and gives us relationships that we can develop over time to keep providing. As we develop new technology, we have a large client base under which to go and deploy it.
The worst thing in business and software businesses is that you have great software, but you only have a few customers that would adopt it. Here at Idox, we've got a significant market position that allows us to invest in software with a really strong capability and possibility that customers will deploy that more extensively than perhaps if we were selling brand new business to new name clients. I think that for us is a really strong position.
Dealing with your point about Idox and as integrating our geospatial assets and thinking about that as we go forward, Alex and the team have been doing a great job of bringing all of those businesses together and really focusing on what it is that we want to put our R&D spend into and what's going to provide best outcomes, not just for customers, but best financial outcomes for us as an Idox. Really interesting to focus in on certain sectors that we think are proving very useful to go and deliver against and providing a mixture of data and software. Examples for us is we like the flexibility that the geospatial stuff gives us, but we do have a—I hate to use the word land and expand, but that's essentially how it turns out to be.
We end up with customers that may come in for one of the product areas, and then we get to expose them to the capabilities that we have at Idox, and invariably, they become customers of two, three, and four of our product sets and data sets. That is why we feel positive about our ability to gain market share going forward because we have all those capabilities that clients can get from one place rather than having to go to several places in a non-integrated way and do that work for themselves. Examples would be our address management customers taking data services, maybe taking things that we had in the portfolio from our businesses like ThinkWhere, for example, that help them consolidate all those data aspects together.
We've seen a number of those sales during the first half of the year, and I think they set exciting examples for the work that we can do going forward. As you say, I thank you for upselling our business, and I apologize for downselling it. The geospatial bit is really exciting, and I think we're seeing great growth in it with some really strong execution. Looking forward to repeating that as we go forward, really. Sorry, Jonathan.
Yeah, if I could just add to, hey, Julian, it's Jonathan, just to give you a sense of a practical sense of that integration work. As you mentioned, there are four businesses there that we brought together as Idox geospatial.
Just to give you a sense of where we're at, we're operating as one sales team there, one engineering team, one strategic sort of leadership team in terms of our decision-making on product strategies, data strategies, how we bring those to market. The integration of those businesses is complete. It's not in flight. It has happened, and they're operating as a single geospatial business already under Alex's leadership.
Thanks.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question from Kai of Canaccord. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. Morning, Jonathan. Can you hear me?
No. I don't know what's going on there, but we can't hear you.
Yeah, yeah. Just wave if you can. Okay. Cool. We've had a couple. The first one was just around cloud adoption.
I think typically, certainly in the enterprise world, moving from on-prem to cloud is typically a sort of 30%-50% uplift in the TCV. I'm just wondering, is that kind of a similar ballpark for you? In that context, what do you think cloud penetration is at the moment among your local authority customers with your solutions? I'm just wondering kind of where we are on that journey. The second one was just around the more short-term questions around the second half, where I suspect some of the things that happened in the first half might reverse. I'm just wondering, obviously, there won't be an election, so I suspect there's some sort of tough comes from last year in communities. iFIT, I suspect, also will be less strong, but then maybe LPPP will snap back.
I'm just wondering kind of if you could perhaps give us a bit more color on what will drive the growth in the second half organically. Thank you.
Right. Jonathan, I do not know if you can take the first one because I got part of it, but I think it was really around the sort of cloud, how we see the uplift of those things and what the penetration of that is.
I think, yeah, I think that is what I heard, if that works.
Yeah, I will try and put a little bit of color on that. I actually think your answer on the market consolidation question is a similar sort of position when it comes to cloud adoption and what we see in terms of annual recurring revenues and how that moves up.
It is an opportunity for us to actually expand our portfolio there and for people to use more of our software. I think in those cases, that is actually helping us drive up revenues and actually see a higher increase. I think that is helping us with our pricing when it comes to cloud adoption, that supplying more as well as the uplift is giving us the opportunity to actually increase our rates. I think one of the things that we have seen in our customer base is we have seen a lot more activity in the new business market for cloud adoption. Within our existing clients, we have seen a movement more to, like we have seen in North Yorkshire, the adoption of Uniform as a cloud solution as a hosted solution.
The combination of those two things has actually increased in our percentage, I guess, of customers who are actually having solutions deployed to them in the cloud. I think our observation is we're seeing much more activity in the new markets, winning strong deals there. I think what we've actually seen in the last two to three years in Uniform is an uplift of customers of around 20% taking on cloud adoption. That's what we've seen in the last two years. Uniform on-premise customers moving to Uniform in the cloud, that's increased to about 23%-24% over the last two to three years.
Yeah. I think the point you made is we've been very successful in winning new clients.
Classically, from the sort of older competitors in the market who have had a reduced number of customers, we have been competitively winning in the cloud, which has been the major focus area for us, really.
With compelling events, isn't it ? I think in those cases where they have got all the technology, competitive solutions, there is a compelling event driving the local authority in that case to go seek a new cloud solution. That has actually been driving a lot of the market change.
Anoop? T hink there was a second question around drivers for the second half.
I think it was around the drivers for the second half. I mean, I think, Kai, you are right. The second half of last year did not have the benefit of the general election.
I think from where we currently are at the moment, I think in terms of the first half delivery, 66% recurring revenue, I think it's more of the same of that coming through in the second half. You do get ups and downs with the different levels of business units that we have, but we expect to make sort of more progress around some of the project work and some of the new wins that we've had in the first half. They're around professional services, clearly not to the level of the first half, but we still have some resign activity and renewal activity going on in the second half and a number of exciting opportunities around the geospatial area. I think at the moment, from where we're standing, is that we have a line of sight in terms of our sort of year-end position.
Yeah.
Sorry. And then just one follow-up. Apologies for the apology of the line. Just one question was, among your local authority customers, what is the current penetration of, I guess, cloud solutions and hosted solutions versus on-prem? Off your on-prem. Thank you.
I just lost that last bit at the end. I think I mentioned. Go on.
It's around levels of adoption of cloud amongst our base of customers.
Yeah. The number I quoted in terms of Uniform, how much of that customer base is delivered as a cloud solution is, I think I mentioned about 24%-25%. In terms of the Idox cloud as a percentage, I'm going to have to go and do a little bit of math on that and calculate that.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question from Ciarán Donnelly of Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Yeah.
Thanks, guys. Just a couple left for myself. Firstly, and maybe just slightly connected to one of the previous questions, is there a rule of thumb in terms of what the order intake should translate into recorded revenue? I guess just in terms of what kind of visibility that order intake provides you into full-year numbers. Two, I guess just in terms of your comments around M&A pipeline, in terms of the Plianz deal, is that the kind of size we should expect a deal going forward? Or in an ideal world, what does kind of the sweet spot of a deal look like in terms of size, etc.? Thanks.
Right. I'll try the first one.
Ciarán, I think it's not that straightforward, as you can probably imagine, because within our Research Connect business, we have a lot of orders, a lot of customers of very small value. Then when you look at some of the LPPP contracts, we talked about North Yorkshire, GBP 2.5 million. Not only is the pound sign sort of very, very variable, but actually the duration is also very, very variable. On average, though, I think if you were taking an 80/20 split and you looked at the larger portfolio of our contracts, I would say they range between two-five years, s ort of two to two- and- a- half years for the sort of order book to be. That's not order intake, so the order book.
Our order book at the end of last year, I think, was about GBP 94 million, something like that. We've taken in GBP 58 million of orders in the first half. We've delivered GBP 45 million of revenue in the first half. The balance there is sort of over GBP 100 million still to deliver. I would sort of say visibility of that is probably sort of over the next 18-24 months, and in some cases beyond that.
In terms of M&A pipeline, we never comment on all of the deals that we're doing, but I think you've seen over a period now the size of deals we've done. We would love to accelerate that, to be doing either more deals or doing slightly larger deals. I think the pipeline is very reflective of that.
We are conscious of our own effort and time that we spend in deals. We'd like to do things that perhaps are a little bit larger, but at the same time, they have to make financial sense. I mean, a few years ago, money was very, very cheap. That was fine. Now the barrier is a little higher. We need to make sure at all times that the things that we're spending our shareholders' money on ultimately are going to provide a sensible return and a sensible level of accretion for them to be attractive to us. As you know, in the market, prices still vary quite wildly. Some people have very strong opinions as to what their businesses are worth, and we feel maybe sometimes they do not align with the commercial realities that we're all facing.
Other times, we think we can genuinely find things where we can both improve the revenue and profitability of businesses under the guise of Idox that makes them attractive and accretive for shareholders. They are the things that we are looking at, but I would hope and expect that you might see the size of deals just going up a little bit as we go forward. The important thing for us always is that they make absolute sense for customers, that we can take them going forward and make a success of them. We are just very conscious that M&A is very easy to do, but sometimes more challenging to execute. We are always focused on delivering outcomes from the things that we acquire. That is always a guide of thumb. I would hope that some of the deals would start to increase in size as we went forward.
Thanks.
Maybe could I just ask one more, actually, just thinking about it? With respect to the Vodafone win, could you just give us an insight into, I guess, timeline in terms of what that sales pipeline looks like? And I guess maybe just on the process itself, how competitive was the process? Yeah, any detail around that would be helpful, thanks.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's fair to say that the process itself was competitive. I mean, you can imagine an organization like Vodafone is going to attract the attention of a lot of players in the area. Of course, part of that for us is the provisioning of the fundamental maps that classically come from Ordnance Survey. Our MapShop provides the accessibility and capability for doing that kind of work. The attraction of the deal for us is how we can help them going forward.
I hope and think that that was a differentiating factor when they came to choose us because I think they've seen very directly the impact that geospatial information can have on their business. For us to be able to talk lucidly about what we could do for them, the sorts of benefits that other organizations have received from deploying through Idox has been significant. I think that was a factor for us. I do not know if we were able to talk about the sort of forward momentum of that deal, but absolutely competitive. We're sure that will continue to be the case going forward. I think what I should also point out there is it's not that there are eight or nine of us as direct competitors that are lining up to bid on a very generic contract. It is not like that at all.
There are people with particular angles and capabilities that are coming together to bid for those types of contracts. It is about creating differentiation and aligning yourself with the client's needs in that area that I think were decisive factors.
Thanks a m illion .
Thanks.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from Ian Robertson of Progressive Equity Research. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. I'm sorry. I'm going to follow on from the theme of the last question, which was about the Vodafone contract. Within geospatial, what should we be expecting about the structure of these contracts, particularly within the commercial area where being talked about, "Oh, we're going to more SaaS. It's going to be more about recurring revenue," which implies short term, and now we've got a three-year contract. Is that a one-off?
Is it a sort of, "We should be expecting a handful of these a year," or what? Further to that, but on an execution side of things, on Plianz, you brought in some new guys there. They're obviously quite techie. You also have contingent consideration. How do you handle making use of those techie guys across the whole group while still tying them into contingent consideration?
Yeah. We can take those two things. I think I'll offer a little bit of an intrigue, and Jonathan might want to add to the stuff around Vodafone. I think our aim with the geospatial things, when we brought together, particularly Emapsite, was to say, "Look, there's a lot of in-year revenue that gets generated." We were very keen to expand the number of one-year deals that they were doing into three-year and four-year and five-year renewable deals.
What we've seen during the first half of the year is a number of those customers that were classically on 12-month contracts become comfortable with signing up longer-term contracts because of the capabilities and also the sort of commercial presence that Idox has and the security of that. I do not know if you want to add anything to that, Jonathan, but that's absolutely been part of our strategy is to take longer-term contracts from both existing and new clients.
Yeah. I think that gives the client assurancy, gives us assurity. I think clients are looking for that from their partners. I think that's a demonstration of their feelings towards us as a supplier as well, that they want to enter those longer-term relationships. But it's absolutely been part of our strategy. It means that you can focus on the value-added processes over a longer period of time.
You're not having to chase on an annual basis to actually get the contract renewed. You can sign up for three and five years. Therefore, when you go to that customer with other propositions, the return on investment is clearer over a three- or a five-year period. It's a much better position to actually be working with a client on. I think it just creates lots of value both sides.
Thanks for the question on Plianz. We're really proud of the work that we do in integrating our teams. We like to make all the people who join Idox sort of aware of the Idox experience. We are a friendly and engaging company that does support people. I hope that our new clients, colleagues, are already enjoying that. They've all been submitted to my CEO broadcast this week.
They have different views on the back of that. We do take the time out to explain to everyone what's going on across the group every six, seven weeks. We just think it's really important to update people, to recognize people, and to give people great feedback about what's going on across the business. I think the point you make is absolutely right. We do want to ensure that we are able to use the technical capabilities, the expertise, and the pizzazz of people, their entrepreneurship, and the energy that they bring right across our business. At the same time, we have to make sure that the deals we make on behalf of shareholders, where there is some latent potential earnout or whatever it might be that's available to people, are available.
We try and make those criteria as simple as we can so that the business isn't encumbered to run standalone. At the same time, it's clear that if we're successful, then the people we bought the business from can also be successful. I think we've managed, in most cases where we've done that, to bring together criteria that make everyone sort of comfortable and happy, but allow us to maximize the capabilities of people and the economy that we can generate by scale as being part of Idox. I don't know if you've got anything you want to add to that .
No, I think that's—I would agree with everything you said there.
Great. Thanks.
See you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question from Dan Ridsdale of Edison. Please go ahead.
Oh, hello. Can you hear me?
Most of my questions have been answered already, actually. I am just interested in the shape of the geospatial business. Obviously, the growth of that business and the margin expansion is quite key to the 35% EBITDA target. I guess in geospatial, we typically associate that geospatial segment with quite a lot of services work, with quite a lot of on-premise work. In terms of that margin expansion, is that—yeah. Do you expect that business to eventually have a similar sort of mix to the rest of the business, or is it always going to be sort of more, have a greater proportion of services and sort of on-prem type software? The other question was whether you saw, regarding Rachel Reeves' sort of statement about increasing NHS spending on technology by 50%. I am just wondering whether that has any relevance to yourself.
Great.
I think on the geospatial side in terms of margin expansion, our strategy there is to pre-prepare more things, i.e., invest in things that we believe are generally accessible to markets and are repeatable. The example I have given in the past, just because I can relate to it from my own experience, is housing associations are users of geospatial data and information, whether that be to assess for insurance purposes, the value of their real estate under their ownership, or whether it is to understand their ESG risk and what is happening in flood risk and so on, or it is to do with condition reports for their local properties. If you did that every single time for every single housing association, then you incur the cost each time of doing that.
Our approach is to be able to say, "Look, there's a portfolio of services and data here that are relevant to the entire market. Let's invest in creating that so that every time we're tailoring that need for a particular client, the customization perhaps is maybe 20% rather than 80%." That is the way that we think we can help improve the margins as we go forward, as well, of course, as selling those things more at scale rather than as one-off projects and programs. That is definitely in our sweet spot. That is what we'd like to do. That is why we think we can get margins to come up towards our group margins rather than remain in the lower digits that they were perhaps previously. That is the strategy there.
In terms of Rachel Reeves' announcements yesterday and over the previous periods, look, I mean, I think, as I said earlier, I think it's been a period of great experimentation for public services in trying to deliver new tech and digitization that allows them to improve the way that they deal with citizens, but also improve their own internal processes and cost of delivery. The very nature of the requirement to make those improvements necessitates the use of technology. That's where we're in good spots, I think. In particular, in the NHS, we're digitizing the tracking and management of assets and allowing them to understand how those assets are used in hospitals. That's creating tremendous savings across the NHS as they find that they're not losing things. They're not having to hire new things because they can get the reuse of them.
They are returning things to people when they are rentals on the times they should do in order that they are not incurring further costs. Those things are real practical day-to-day things that hospitals are doing. Papworth and other hospitals throughout the U.K. are making tremendous efficiency savings as a result of doing those things. We are really pleased that the government is focused on not just spending money in these areas, but driving greater efficiency. I think that is going to be very helpful to the continued use of iFIT and those products going forward.
Great. Thank you.
Appreciate the question. Thanks.
Thank you. That was our last question. I will now hand it back to the host for closing remarks.
Great. Once again, thank you for coming on board today. I say this each year, but we know there are plenty of things that you could be doing.
There are always plenty of announcements. We are very grateful for the time you spend with us getting to know more about Idox. I really hope that over the last sort of six or seven years, we have been able to show that we are not just an organization that talks the game, but actually delivers the game. I think for both the customers, for shareholders, and our stakeholders here at Idox, it has been a really good part of the journey. I think the most exciting part of that journey is ahead of us. We have positioned ourselves well in great markets, and there are some tremendous opportunities for growth in this company over the next few years. Again, thanks for spending your time with us today, and look forward to seeing you all in due course.