Welcome to everybody who's attending, or everybody who's watching this later. These are our interim results, and that's the 30th of June. So, just for those who don't know, or those who've forgotten, just a summary of what we're doing and what's important in what we're doing. We're doing a buy-and-build exercise of scientific instrument companies. We believe that there's three key factors which have promoted shareholder value over the 17 years we've been doing this. And just to remind those who don't know as well, during these 17 years, the value of the company has gone from GBP 2 million to GBP 500 million. So, what are the things which have enabled that? Well, long-term drivers for our sector, which are a lot of growth in university education in the whole world. Just as an example, the number of freshmen in U.K. universities doubled between 2000 and 2019.
Even in the U.K., it grows like this. You can imagine in more recently developed countries how much it grows. That's there for many, many, many years. The other driver is the thirst from everybody who does anything to optimize what they're doing. Of course, we know that we can't optimize anything that we haven't measured. We provide a lot of the measurement to the industry to do that. The second one is low capital use. It's very good to generate a lot of profits, but of course, we need to also be able to use these profits to repay the bank so that we can do the next deal without always issuing new shares. We have very low capital use. We have about a month of sales as in working capital and very low fixed capital. As a result, we have good conversion.
It means our profits could be used to repay the bank and to prepare for the next deal, and then a large deal pool. When we started, we counted there were 2,000 companies just in the U.K. We're not restricting ourselves to the U.K., but we found that we can do a lot of these in the U.K., and we believe people keep these companies 20 years. It means there would be 100 companies looking for a new owner every year, so that's quite a good pond to do your fishing, so of course, these are the reason why we think it's a good thing to do this exercise in our sector, but you need also execution. Otherwise, strategy doesn't lead to anything, and there's three things which are important. One is a strict acquisition discipline.
You must buy companies when you're really 100% confident there's sustainable businesses with profits and cash flow and pay sensible prices. The second thing is to have to be a desirable acquirer for people who have their business to sell. People have a business. It's all about money, but it's also, you know, their heart is in it. They've created something for 20 years, 30 years, and they want it to be in good hands, and they want to be treated properly with respect, and they want you to keep your promises. We do all these things, and I think we have the best reputation in the country, in our sector as an acquirer, and then, of course, once you own the business, you need it to have organic growth and to promote that growth. We're going to talk about it a bit later.
But really, we leave a lot of autonomy to our operations. We need always good financial controls, a good MD, and good autonomy. Mark will tell you what he does to optimize the performance of these businesses. But one of the main things is respect and happiness. We respect our colleagues, and therefore we gain their respect. And also, we like them to be happy because you don't do a good job if you're not happy. And I think they are happy, and so are we. So, this just is the history of all our acquisitions. You will notice that there's very good years when we do four, like 16, and there's years also where we do nothing. And we don't get frustrated if we spend a year without doing a deal. Well, we'll do one next year.
The truth is, during that year, you accumulate the powder that you will need to do the next deal. We're disciplined that we don't need every year to do a deal. This is a snapshot of our customers. You see a lot of universities on the left. This is our main client group. You see some very prestigious ones there, but we do business with hundreds of universities around the world. We also do business with industry when they want to test their product or improve their performance. We do business with other institutions which are dealing with compliance or with research. The best known of them is probably the CERN, which belongs to many governments. We also do business with OEM, people who have a large piece of equipment, and we provide part of that equipment. We've given some examples there.
So, the key messages of today is, you know, we're still in a period of recovery. We wish we were not, and we'd finished that. I think we probably said that last year. So, still recovering, but still continuing relentlessly to execute an unchanged strategy. We've reached record performance on many metrics for this half year. We've done the largest deal ever by acquiring Geotek. We'll talk about it later. And we're increasing the dividend 16%. We still have challenging environments. There's still places with lockdowns, and even the places with no lockdown, there's still, you know, not business exactly as it was before, and it will take time. But the main thing is that now we're able to travel, but what has not improved is supply chain challenges.
We started the year. I remember we're talking only about the six months, and I'm not talking about what happened since, but we started that period of six months thinking things would get better as, you know, a lot of people were vaccinated, and anxiety has only gone worse, and we suspect that the war in Ukraine and the lockdowns in China have something to do with it, but we can't put our fingers on this, but during that period of six months, it has not improved, and of course, inflation. My personal view is that it will last a lot longer than people think, and that we have to learn how to live with inflation. Like I've lived most of my life with inflation, either in the U.K. or France, and I think you can live with inflation, but it's different, so we have to learn that different thing.
There's a lot of younger colleagues who haven't got that experience, and higher interest rates, and of course, inflation, the impact of inflation is mitigated by Sterling tanking, and of course, that makes our life a lot easier, so the outlook is you still have uncertainty. We have a record order book for the end of June, better than previous year, but at the end of June, we had a very comfortable order book, better than ever before, and because of that, and because of the performance that we perceive now of Geotek in the second half, we have said we were confident that we would meet market expectations, but is the expectation pre-last Thursday when we announce the result? So now expectations have changed, and we think they're correct now, and over to you, I think, Brad.
Thanks very much, David, and hi, everyone. I'm just going on to the highlight slide now. A little summary of where I think we had a decent set of results in the first half of the year, maybe not quite where we want them to be, and particularly affected by supply chain, and I'll come back and talk a little bit about that later. At the same time, I think we've shifted our landscape, maybe also people's perceptions of our group a little bit with the significant acquisition of Geotek towards the end of the period. David will talk more about that later, but we look at the results, you know, revenues up 8% to GBP 46 million, and driven by organic growth of 7%.
With good revenue growth, usually comes good profit growth and adjusted operating profits up 15% to GBP 10.1 million, up from GBP 8.8 million in the previous period. Through to earnings per share as well, with adjusted earnings per share of record, just like revenue and profit was as well, up 12% to GBP 1.246 per share, up from GBP 1.11 in H1 2021. The good revenue growth was supported by growth in order intake, up 4%, and also supported by our large order book, which was still 21 weeks at the end of the period. Now, you know, maybe not quite as good as David just said, modest improvement in organic order intake, but absolutely fine, you know, still going ahead. We'll have a look at order intake in a minute so you can see how overall we've still been performing pretty well.
And I'll come back as well on supply chain, but our results are a little bit down. There's a slide I'll take you through in a little while, which will just show in particularly why we're affecting one particular company very much in the center of that. Now, what else is good about our group, though? Good profit we generate, return into cash, generated GBP 8.2 million of cash from Operations at a cash conversion of 81%. Enables us to fund our progressively increasing dividend policy of at least 10% per annum, and the interim dividend up 16% to 22 pence per share, compared with 19 pence last year. And of course, also enables us to support our buy-and-build strategy. Now, you know, there's a big number on this slide. You can see we've got big net debt. We've always had a very strong balance sheet.
balance sheet does reflect the acquisition of Geotek. So, we have GBP 55 million of net debt. But at the same time, we were able to refinance, and I'll talk about the refinancing later, but a new GBP 100 million facility with the great help of our very supportive bank, Lloyds Bank, who have been with us since the start, but also thanks to Santander U.K. and also Bank of Ireland, who I was very glad were able to come and join us in a club facility. But we finished the period, admittedly with significant net debt, but with significant headroom on our covenants, significant cash reserves as well. And you know, the ability to continue doing what we're doing with no real concern because gearing's not too high.
Looking out towards the second half of the year, my usual inevitable way is to pick up with the things that could be challenges for us and our challenges at the moment. And of course, you know, there's three things really to talk about. One is COVID. You walk around the streets of the U.K., you'd never know there is COVID. But at the same time, it's not the case across the whole of the world, and particularly in the Far East. You know, we've been affected by China's periodic lockdowns during the period. And so that hasn't gone away yet. So, that's still a drag on our performance. Supply chain continues to be a challenge, and our businesses continue to have to work very, very hard.
And not only to source components, but where we've, you know, we're unable to source the exact same component, our R&D teams, and even to help rework products, maybe rewrite software where we've been able to find a similar component, but maybe not quite exactly the same. And so, you know, unfortunately, a bit less focus on being able to do new product development and more focus on trying to make sure we can keep satisfying our customers. So, that challenge continues. And of course, the increasing global tensions out there. You know, you only need to look on the front page. You see Putin. We took a look at China as well. So, there's concerns for us out there on a global scale.
Notwithstanding all of this, you know, we've said publicly that our organic businesses have been performing in line with our expectations at the start of the year. That's positive for us. On top of that, we believe now we're going to end up satisfying the entirety of the Geotek earnout. Consequently, those two things combined, but mainly the Geotek effect, has meant that we've said to the market that we'll be significantly ahead of market expectations that existed prior to the announcement. That's a bit of a summary about what we've done. Moving on to the next slide on performance. Obviously, talked through the P&L a bit already. Just want to dwell on two or three points. One, pleasing to see operating margins up. That's really a consequence of the operational gearing in the business, as we're quite a high fixed cost-based business.
Effective tax rate under 16%, and that really reflects the benefits that groups like ours get from the U.K.'s R&D tax credit scheme, which are very good, particularly at the SME end of the scale. Although now that we've got a group which is significantly above 500 employees, we're seeing that benefit disappearing over the short term, and then lastly, for those of you that don't know our P&L that well, we do have adjusting items that take us to the statutory result. The largest two components of these are first part, the acquisition cost from the Geotek deal, and the second part being the amortization of the intangible assets we're required to recognize when we acquire businesses. Now, order intake is the bellwether of our business.
And so, really to talk through order intake, you need to see and understand the graph that's on the slide on the right-hand side. So, three lines on that graph, a red line, a black line, and a green line. The red line is our internal sales budget. So, we set that once a year at budget time, which is over the next few weeks. That line basically once there is a horizontal line unless we make an acquisition. Now, we haven't added Geotek into this yet because the acquisition was quite close to the end of the first half. But that would be the only reason why we'd step that up, and we'd then add their cumulative budget to it. The end of the graph, by the way, is the end of June 2022. So, the two other lines is a black line and a green line.
The black line is the trailing 12 months of orders. So, what does that mean in the context of the graph? Or what we're looking for, that is historical lookback for the last 12 months. So, what we really want is for that black line to be at least touching or be greater than the red line, because that way you've had sufficient sales orders with which to meet your budget. And then the green line is a shorter-term version of that. It's the last four months of orders annualized. And unsurprisingly, a much more jagged line, particularly because order intake is never smooth. So, what happened? Well, you can see we ended last year with really significant Q4 order intake, which is why you see a really big green spike. And so, what did that mean for the black line?
Actually, the black line started 2022 ahead of the red line already. So, positively for us, we're already at a rate of order intake above the level of this year's sales budget, and it's maintained nicely. Got slightly higher above that as well during the period. So, overall, this is a good picture for us. And of course, that's also why you can see that we had a 4% increase in organic order intake, and on top of that, why we were able to maintain a very large order book of 21 weeks. Since the end of the period, order book still 21 weeks. The green lines pop back up to the red line, and we're still ahead when it comes to organic order intake compared to last year. So, all in all, a pretty reasonable picture.
This profit bridge really reconciles between the performance of our businesses in the first half last year to the first half this year. Now, I mentioned I'd come back to talk a little bit about supply chain and the effect on us. Well, this is where I can illustrate it fairly well. So, reconciling between the two big green blocks at either side of the slide, you can see there's a big chunk for where our businesses have increased their performance and therefore organic growth. And at the same time, there's a red block, which is about half the size of the green block. And you know, without getting your tape measures out, etc., it's somewhere in the region of GBP 1.5 million. Now, half of that red block is down to one company.
One company, not because it's performed badly, not because it's not had enough orders, because it certainly did, but because one single component was very, very light, and consequently, they weren't able to ship. It meant to come in February, didn't turn up March, April, May, June. Eventually, it turned up in July, by which point, at the half year, it was more than GBP 500,000 down on its prior first half performance, simply because it couldn't ship a particular one of its instruments. Now, as I said, the component arrived in mid-July, and by the end of August, they were completely back up to budget. It's great. They've built the instruments beforehand, except for one thing. They take the lid off, they put the component in, they put the lid back on, metaphorically, I might add.
Then they'll test it, pack it, and ship it, and they managed to catch up within six weeks afterwards. So, really, you know, I said at the beginning, we'd like to have had slightly better results. We could have been in excess of GBP 500,000 better off, probably more than GBP 1 million of revenue as well, and only slightly lower order book. So, all in all, it's a really, really useful anecdote to see the effect that supply chain can have on businesses. And don't get me wrong, we're very, very pleased to be able to provide results that were ahead of where they were last year, but they could have been better. Now, I want to just pick up on one other key measure for us, which is return on total invested capital or ROTIC.
And you know, in its simplest form, it's a function of the multiples you pay for the businesses you acquire. So, you start on the left-hand side of the graph, just for everyone's understanding. We pay close to five times the EBIT, and therefore we start just above 20%. Now, growing ROTIC thereafter requires one or two or both things. One is you can buy businesses at lower multiples, and/or you can improve financial performance. You can see big improvement over the first part of our life. Then we made a couple of acquisitions, which were at higher multiples at six times, which were big acquisitions for us. And you can see the cliff edges that we had. But overall, we sort of settle ourselves around 30%, which is where we've got ourselves back to now.
That's been good performance over the last few years, despite fighting our way through COVID. But of course, this is an organic graph at the moment. The moment we add in Geotek, our new acquisition, which we're paying seven times for, that's going to have quite a drag, and we'll have a similar cliff edge, I suspect, when you see this at year-end, similar to the nature of Scientifica in June 2013. But overall, the aim for us, 30%, we got back to 30%, which is a pleasing place to be for the organic business, going to drop down. Then we've got to fight our way, keep improving the business to get ourselves back up there again. Quick one on diversification.
I think it's a useful slide just to show for a business like ours that exports the vast majority of what we sell. No single company in our group is, you know, responsible for the majority of our revenue. Our businesses also make different scientific instruments for different markets. So, we are diversified by scientific application. And also, towards the right-hand side of the graph, you can see that there's no one single region or country which overly dominates the geography of our group as well. And this slide really summarizes some key financial statistics about the long-term success of our group. And revenue, profits, EPS have all grown strongly throughout the history of our group. And you know, this first half is no different with record revenue, record profit, and record EPS.
Dividends have grown by at least 10% per annum over the course of the life of our group, and 16% increase on the dividend, up to GBP 0.22 per share. Our, you know, compound growth, the dividend still remains stubbornly close to 25%. We continue to focus on cash generation, which enables us to fund that dividend. It enables us to support the buy-and-build capacity of our group. Of course, the cash generation generates the ability to keep doing those deals by reducing the debt. My last point on the slide is for a group that has a business model to acquire sustainably profitable businesses, a 7.5% compound annual growth rate of revenue over the past 12 years is a creditable achievement, despite the fact that it took a bit of a bash during COVID.
So, my last slide, before I hand back to David, just to remind everyone about the refinancing we did at the end of May in line with the deal. Now, previously, we'd refinanced in May 2021 the GBP 60 million facility. Now, we could have used the entirety of that facility to finance the Geotek acquisition. But of course, you'd have all asked the question, which is, how are you going to do the next deal? So, as part of the deal, we welcomed the banks in, as I said, into a multi-bank facility. And we increased that facility to GBP 100 million instead, giving us the ability not only to do the deal, but to fund future deals as well. So, what have we got in this facility?
It's a GBP 25 million term loan, repayable on a straight line basis over the term of the facility, a GBP 55 million RCF, and a GBP 20 million uncommitted accordion, which, if activated, would add to the GBP 55 million. From a covenant point of view, our gearing is now three times. It used to be two and a half times. We've increased that a little bit. Interest cover remains the same at three times, and we no longer have a third covenant, which used to be the minimum EBITDA covenant. In terms of interest rates, you know, they're consistent with a previous facility. It was SONIA plus a margin, which started around 1.85% and ratchets up as your gearing increases. What we've done since the end of the period was to enter into a swap to fix SONIA.
We now have an interest rate of just shy of 2.9% as a fix throughout the remainder of our facility for what we've already borrowed, instead of having a floating rate. So, having said all of that, I think now's time, probably a suitable time for me to pass you back to David, who I'm going to say is going to start telling you about not only how he spent some of this facility, but also how he might spend the rest of it.
Absolutely. Thank you very much, Brad. So, we're going to talk about M&A and organic growth. So, M&A, I'm going to do that, and organic growth is Mark. So, very briefly, we're trying to buy companies which are strong exporters in a global niche. This idea of having companies in a niche market, and you're really a big player or a dominating player in a global niche, is absolutely central to the Judges' philosophy. We need to have solid EBIT margins. If you have that, you're already a good candidate for looking at it for an acquisition. We need to satisfy ourselves that they generate sustainable profits, sustainable cash flow, and that we pay a disciplined price.
Up to now, we've paid between three to seven times. I've said that three and seven were outliers, and it's more like generally it's four to six. It really is a size is very important in what you pay. Now we're allowed to borrow up to three times EBITDA. We say 2%-4%, but I think it's more like 5% today. They take time to materialize. Often, they don't materialize. It's a bit disappointing, but we have to deal with that. It's part of our everyday life, but we offer to the sellers financial certainty. All the deals we've done, except one, we didn't need to raise equity for that, so they know that we have the money in the bank.
They know that all the bank is committed to lend it to us, and they know that we will never change anything in the heads of agreement, and that we will keep our word, and that we will be respectful to the owners and to all their employees, so we have an edge in that negotiation, except that the edge doesn't enable us to pay less. And of course, our strategy is to just reduce debts and reinvest in the future acquisitions. Can we go to the next one, which I suspect is about Geotek?
So, what it does, some institutions extract cores from the soil, which is earth or rock, is either governments or academia that want to really map the earth and understand what it's made of, or mining and oil and gas companies which want to know where to drill or where to dig a hole. So, a lot of people are interested in these geological cores. And of course, there's a lot of tests you can do on a core. And we particularly talk about non-destructive testing, because once you have a core, you don't want to go and get another core at the same place, because they're very expensive to get them. So, you want non-destructive testing. And there's a lot of tests you can do. A lot of people sell instruments enabling you to do a test. But this company has one product which is exclusive to them.
Nobody has a competitor product, and it's called a Multi-Sensor Core Logger, so the key words are multi, because you can do several tests on one core without touching the sample, and logging, because once you have done all these tests, then the computer just calculates everything and can map the whole region, and so you have a map of every of the properties that you've tested, and that's done really with very sophisticated software, so it's very attractive to use these instruments, so the business has really three legs to it. One is a traditional business selling instruments, which is very similar to all the other businesses we have, so I won't say much about it.
But another one, which is a growing business, because it was not very terribly significant three years ago, is a service business where the company is really providing a digitalization service to people who have a lot of cores. Companies have depositories of cores. They never throw them away, because you don't want to go back. And but it's a bit cumbersome to go and get these cores every time. So, what this company does is they create a lab in proximity to these cores and manage with scientists. And they do just the tests, you know, kilometers of cores. And then it's all digitalized. And then the miner or the oil company, they could just look at their computer, and they know exactly they have a map showing all the possible properties that you may be interested in on this map.
The company has three customers which are on long-term contract, which lasts three years. They're long expeditions. Compared to our traditional business, it has a lot more visibility. Then you have a gas hydrate business. Gas hydrate is a very interesting thing. I won't get into too many details unless there's a question on that. It's basically at certain conditions of pressure and temperature, methane combines physically with water, and it becomes like a rock. You go down the sea or down the permafrost, you extract that core, and you want to analyze it. When you take it out, you only have methane and water, and you have nothing to analyze. This company has another exclusive product to themselves, which nobody has.
It's a device which enables to preserve that core, get it to the surface, get it to the lab, and you can do then the tests, and your gas hydrate is intact. So, as you see, we have, of course, a very large acquisition. And have you understood it well? Why do we want to buy this company and pay seven times? Well, for the size, it's a very reasonable multiple. And we were happy to be in a condition where, due to COVID and to the poor performance in the last reported figures, we didn't have to compete with other buyers. It's a company which is high exporter, global niche, complete domination of its niche, because it has no competitors, and strong margins and cash generative, and it will be enhancing profits substantially. So, it's the largest acquisition we've ever done.
We're paying GBP 80 million, which is GBP 45 million, which has already been paid, which is seven times the average EBIT of the three pre-COVID years. And then there's an earn-out, which is also based on seven times the amount by which the earnings for this calendar year exceeds the GBP 6.4 million, up to a cap of GBP 11.4 million. So, until they reach that cap, we're paying seven times. If they exceed the caps, then we will have paid a bit less. But we're not saying this is likely. The earn-out is half in cash, half in shares, and it's payable in March. During the period, we acquired all the shares we didn't own in Bordeaux. Bordeaux is a vehicle we've had for 11 years, which owned Deben, and then it bought Oxford Cryosystems. We had a partner for these 11 years and a fantastic partnership.
And then, over the period of time, we purchased more of these shares. We started at 51%. And then, when we acquired Oxford Cryo, we bought half the rest. And then we acquired another lump in 2021. And the final purchase was in 2022. The first two purchases were at four times EBIT, which is what we had paid for Deben. And the last two purchases were at four and a half times EBIT, which is an average of what we paid for Deben and Oxford Cryo. This was largely paid in cash, because that was the desire of our partner. So, who remains our friend and shareholder, although he still has shares in Bordeaux. So, organic growth. I'm now passing on to Mark Lavelle, who's our artist in that sector.
Hi there. And welcome to all. I'd like to talk a little bit about what we do with the businesses once David has acquired them. I think the place we really need to start, just to be absolutely clear about this, is our basic model is that independence trumps integration. The basic model at Judges is that we buy businesses and we keep them independent. Now, there are many larger groups whose entire model is based around the concept of integration. They buy a business, they strip out the manufacturing and move it to a low-cost manufacturing site in China. They strip out the R&D and move it to a group low-cost R&D facility in India. They move the finance team to Boston. What you've basically got left is a sales office. Now, we simply don't believe in that model.
We believe that keeping all of the bits of the business together so that sales can talk to R&D and R&D can talk to production, and everybody can talk to finance, and the MDs got their arms around all of this and kept it local is going to produce you a better result. Now, I often say that, you know, we believe that independence and autonomy trumps saving 5% on group paperclip purchasing. That's probably a little underselling the benefits of integration, but we still believe that this model is the one that works for us. Now, I personally have some experience of that in another organization, many of you may be aware of, at Halma. That's a group which used to be a little smaller than Judges is now, and not long ago got into the FTSE 50 based on exactly the same model.
So, it's definitely a model which can work. You know, if we have shareholders that don't believe in that model, then there are plenty of other companies they can invest in. But that is our basic philosophy. So, what do we do when we buy a business? The first thing we do is we try and create a very encouraging environment. We create a positive environment for these organizations to work in. We have an ethical environment. We have an ambitious environment. One of the nice facets of this is that, again, some groups tend to staff their organizations with bosses at various levels who are theoretical about some of this, many from different backgrounds. But in the case of Judges, just as in the case of the other company I mentioned at Halma, we tend to have people in senior positions who've got experience of running businesses like this.
So, when you're having a discussion with an MD about what's something you might do, and the fact that you've run a business, or in my case, a number of businesses of this size have tackled exactly those same issues personally and had to implement the sorts of solutions we're talking about, it does make the discussions much, much more useful. So, as I say, a boss who's gone through the same challenges as them, rather than a sort of HQ bureaucrat that they struggle to communicate with. We're also extremely keen for them to interact with their peers. The key in any of this is the MD of these businesses. And being an MD, frankly, can be a lonely business over the years.
So, if you've got 12 or 15 other MDs in the group that you can talk to and discuss issues, get help from, etc., we find that extremely beneficial. In terms of the sorts of things we're encouraging them to do, I would say that the first and overwhelmingly most important thing is that we're really keen for them to raise the bar on the people that they hire. That's not to say that we're looking for them to remove people. But whenever there is an opportunity to hire somebody, I spend a lot of time making sure that they're setting the bar high enough, that we use some recruitment methods which are a little bit more objective than just a quiet chat. And again, we tend to use expert help to help us out with that.
If you're an MD who's got a background in engineering, you may not be the right person to make a difficult decision about hiring a finance director. But if you've got two or three other good finance directors in the group, they'll be a great help. So, getting really good people in makes a huge difference. We also get them to very much focus on monthly delivery. My experience at any business I've worked in is it's very easy to think about delivering for the year or just for the half year. But the difference that good monthly forecasting and good monthly delivery benchmarks have is really quite dramatic. The other idea I would say is that we're really looking for them to prioritize growth. We're wanting these businesses to grow, not just plateau. And we're looking at driving innovation.
Most of these businesses are in, as David mentioned, pretty big players in their market, if not dominant in their market. And the onus really is on them to drive innovation. And in many cases, we have lots of opportunities for new products, either radical new products or just important enhancements to existing products, which can drive additional sales and also can drive additional margins. The point I made about interacting across the group isn't just around the MDs as well. We encourage all of the production directors to get together and, again, share problems, share challenges, share ideas. The same with the R&D directors, the same with the sales directors, and the same with the finance team.
It's really important that rather than giving them a load of seemingly random KPIs that they have to meet, our experience over the years has been that if we can gently encourage them through collaboration with their peers to raise the bar and get their performance from bronze up to silver, up to gold in their various different areas, that tends to be a more effective way of doing it. There is probably one final area which we tend to push for. Many of the businesses, particularly the smaller ones, have limped along for a number of years with relatively weak IT. They might have an accounting system, but they don't have a proper stock system. They don't have a proper costing system.
One of the things that we're very experienced in is we've got a number of different IT systems around the group, and we can help a company choose an IT system which is size-appropriate for them. It's not a huge system if they're a small business, but it gives them the sorts of information that they need to help them run the business better. The other thing that we do tend to do, and we've got, as you'll see on the slide, financial, operational, strategic, is try and look more about the succession planning in the group. We have a leadership program which I run, which again mixes people from different companies to try and raise the bar on their performance as leaders rather than technical teams. We're also in a group, there are opportunities for people to move from one company to another company.
Rather than having to sort of wait around for dead man's shoes, if you're a director in a business with a great MD, there might be an opportunity for you to move up and be an MD somewhere else. So, that leadership training and the succession planning is really important to us. So, I guess in total that I would say, in summary, the thing we try and do is to create a positive environment where people are encouraged to succeed, and we give them lots of help to succeed and make sure that they hire all of the people they need to do that and then deliver on a monthly basis. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Mark. Very briefly, because we've discussed all of these things, it's a summary, the outlook. You know, our business model has been robust in the last three difficult years with strong balance sheets. The long-term fundamentals are absolutely unchanged. We have the same ability to execute deals we had, you know, before COVID and before the war. We absolutely focus on shareholder value. In spite of that, you know, it's uncertainty and difficulties are still there. There's some difference in our various markets. Some have recovered better than others. Of course, we still have lockdowns in China and, you know, geopolitical uncertainty. All these things are things we have to learn how to live with. Of course, inflation and high interest rates.
My personal belief is that they will be more important rather than, you know, less important in the near future, and that the near future is not so near as that. I think we may well be landed with, you know, years of inflation and of high interest rate, and we have to learn how to live with that and how to prosper for our shareholders, but if you look at current trading, you know, we have a record 21-week order book. We had a modest increase in order intake in the first half. I think we explained why we think that happened, but it's still a record order intake for the first half. Geotek is expecting to produce a very good performance in the second half, and so, we're confident of beating the previous expectation.
So, just in two seconds, the investment case, we have a diverse portfolio which reduces the risk. We produce sustainable returns. We're growing the dividend by no less than 10% every year, which we've done for the last 17 years. Because of the rate of cover, even if we didn't improve profits in the next 14 years, we could still increase the dividend 10% a year without ever having an uncovered dividend. So, we have a lot of margin there. This is why we made the promise. It was not an imprudent promise to make. A lot of targets, value-enhancing acquisitions, growth drivers, total focus on shareholder value. We believe that our shares are immune from inheritance tax for shareholders. We've had them for two years. We're ready for questions.
Geotek is clearly having an exceptional year, meaning you'll pay the maximum contingent consideration. You've highlighted it has lumpy contracts. Are you confident that the acquisition cost isn't based on peak earnings?
We have two answers to that. I mean, first of all, yes, we don't believe that these profits are going to be a one-off. I'm not guaranteeing that the next year we're going to make GBP 11.4 million with this company. But what I think is, there's a good chance we win. I think I want to talk about the lumpiness. I've talked a bit about this. We have an instrument business which is similar to ours. We have a service business which is more regular and less lumpy than all our other businesses. We have the gas hydrate business, which is more lumpy. They've had one contract hitting this year. When we agreed the price, they thought they'd have three, and we limited the impact on two times. We realized we didn't want to have a peak year. Eventually, they had only one of these contracts.
There's one which is already contracted for next year and one which has been in the pipeline for 2019. They never had, apart from the COVID year, they never had a year without a coring contract. So, we believe it's not terribly likely they will have. But we also believe that the service contract, which is a relatively new business, will grow. I mean, you know, there's tens and tens of mining and oil companies which would benefit from the digitalization of their cores. And, you know, we hope that we can grow this business from the seeds that we've inherited. So, yeah, I don't think it's crazy to think we could reproduce these earnings. But I just, you know, what if we don't? We're not guaranteeing the performance of any of our businesses. This way, it's comfortable to have quite a few.
It's a mixture of a business which is like ours, one less lumpy, the other one more lumpy. The question, if we didn't get satisfaction on coring contract, have we really overpaid? I think I have every confidence that the company is able to exceed the GBP six million that I had produced regularly in the three years leading to COVID. You know, the result, if they didn't produce any more than that, which would be horribly disappointing, is that we would have paid 12-13 times. I think it would be very disappointing. I don't believe at all that it could happen. 12 times is what you pay for a deal of this size. Even if this happens, it's not death.
The contracts are for three years. Is there a risk that the customers won't renew their contracts at the end of that time?
Yeah, we're not counting on them renewing them. But the management of the company believes that it's possible they will want to carry on. But, you know, I'd be very disappointed if we don't get new contracts. We can't live just out of these three contracts. You know, I'm sure that, you know, we have quite a lot of time to find new contracts, and I hope we will. And Geotek will probably account for over a third of your pro forma operating profits. Is that rather high concentration? It is. But you have to remember there's really three businesses. And, you know, it's happened before. You know, it's a frightening deal, this Geotek.
I realize that among all of you, you know, some of you, I'm sure, are shareholders and some are potential shareholders. So, it looks very frightening. But it's not our largest deal in proportion to what we are like GDS that we completed exactly 10 years before. It was producing GBP 1.4 million, GBP 1.35 million. And our own company was producing GBP 1.2 million. So, it was like, you know, a much larger proportion of our expected profits than Geotek. It was like a half. It should produce half of our profits the following year. So, we, you know, we don't find it too scary.
And two questions about management. How important is it to Geotek's long-term future that the existing founders stay on? Is the business heavily reliant on their relationships? And why did management decide to sell now to Judges if the opportunity in servicing is so great?
Okay, I will answer the second leg of your question and pass on to Mark because about how we manage the company in the future is age. You know, the principal shareholder and founder of the company and chairman, but he's not, you know, he's not the MD anymore. But he reached 70 over Christmas. And I think he felt, you know, he'd had enough and he wanted to, you know, leave his family in a secure financial position. And you never know what tomorrow has in terms of pandemic or nuclear war, whatever. So, maybe he made a very wise choice. But when you're 70, you have to think one day you're going to have to sell your business. And so, he decided that was the time.
He decided pre-COVID, but it didn't succeed. Because of the advent of COVID, and now he decided to put his company in our hands. Mark, do you mind answering the other question, which is, you know, how will we survive in terms of management?
When we were looking at the acquisition, I mean, that's an absolutely, excuse me, absolutely key feature. We spent quite a lot of time talking to the team. Although the two founders have been there for decades, the managing director has been there less than 10 years and was brought in as the managing director as the two founders were stepping back. We've got a very good senior team other than the two founders. We've got a very clear path going forward to run the business with a sort of tapering involvement of the two founders. So, very important, but we're convinced that we've got that covered.
Given the types of company you normally acquire and the likely global and U.K. economic conditions over the next two to three years, are there likely to be a greater number and cheaper acquisition opportunities?
I think this, you know, there's two things. One is COVID, and I've said this many times. I think that when people have a business and they've been thinking of selling their business, they're battling with it, and then COVID comes, and they had this meltdown in 2008. They thought maybe the company wouldn't survive, but it did survive, and then COVID came, and the same thing happened. They survived.
I think a lot of people, once they've restored the earnings to the 2019 figure, a lot of people who are three or four years older than they were when they were thinking about it, the abstract, they will go and they will sell their business. So, I think we could have better condition, but not yet. And it could take another couple of years before we get, but I think we'll have a good supply of deals in 2023, 2024 of people who've reached that age and that don't want to face a third challenge if it's surfaces. Okay. A completely different thing is interest rates. Clearly, that is the thing which will impact pricing. And it's possible if interest rates are durably higher, much higher, then valuation should go down. And, you know, is it good for us? Well, we also buy it.
But I think we'll be in a better position compared to private equity, which is our usual competitor when we buy companies, and mostly the larger ones, because we're less scared. And we don't borrow on recourse. So, the bank has more confidence that we will repay them. So, yes, I think that should be good.
And in the same vein, given the weakness of sterling, particularly against the U.S. dollar, do you anticipate greater competition from the U.S. in your search for acquisitions?
I don't think so because, you know, people are very clever. They realize they're buying companies in the U.K., but they're international companies. So, you know, they may say, they may take the opposite view, and they may say, you know, I don't want to buy these companies. If sterling goes back up, I'm not going to be richer. So, I don't see it. It's different sectors. You see, you're buying property companies. Clearly, if sterling goes up, it would be good for to buy companies at rock bottom prices, but not companies which have a lot of export. I don't think it will apply to. When they think about it, they're going to think that if a company has a lot of export, it's not worthwhile pouncing on it because it looks cheaper when you convert it to dollars. I don't agree with that. I may be wrong.
We do have more questions, but we've run out of time. Do you have any closing remarks?
Yeah. First, you know, thank you for your questions. I apologize that we've only answered a few of them, a lot related to the same topic, which is Geotek, which I understand is a new deal. I wanted to thank everybody, my colleagues, Tamsin's team , and every one of you who are interested in Judges. We're always open to having dialogue with any shareholder, by the way, even outside this forum. I wish you a good six months, and I hope we see you all in March with our final results. Bye.