Welcome to the Tracsis Interim Results Webinar. All attendees are in listen-only mode, and questions will be answered at the end of the presentation. You can submit your questions at any time by clicking on the Q&A button. This webinar is being recorded. I now hand over to Chris Barnes, CEO, and Andy Kelly, CFO. Chris, over to you.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for joining this presentation today. This is a presentation of our interim results for the period up to January 31st, 2023. In terms of the agenda for today, Andy and I will split the presentation between us. We'll start off with a highlight section. For any of you that are new to Tracsis, just a short overview of the business and our overall objectives. Andy will then give a more detailed review of the financials for the period. We'll provide much more detail around our growth strategy, what's been delivered in the period, how that then sits alongside the ESG activities that are going on across the group.
At the end, we'll give a forward look to the second half of the financial year, and then a longer-term view about our strategic plans for the growth of the group. To start off with in terms of who Tracsis is. We were founded in 2004 as a spin out from University of Leeds. The business was IPO'd in 2007, and since then has grown through a mix of both acquisition and organic growth. Over that period, we delivered 17 acquisitions to expand the capabilities of the business into a range of rail software technologies and also into a range of consultancy and data analytics and GIS capabilities. The business is growing at a compound annual growth rate of around 30% each year. All self-funded.
We use the cash, the high levels of cash generation from the business to fund both R&D and new products, often in partnership with our clients and also to fund acquisition. The group has now got a footprint in North America, a footprint in Ireland and a footprint across the UK, and we're looking to continue to grow and expand that. In total, we have around 550 employees. For the last full financial year, we delivered revenues of around GBP 70 million, and our ongoing target is to have EBITDA margins greater than 20% across the group at any one time. We have a very sticky client base with a lot of blue chip clients across the rail and wider transportation industries.
That gives us a strong defensible market position and puts us in a really strong position to work in partnership with our customers to develop new technology and to develop new products. We also, alongside that, made a commitment last year to be carbon neutral by 2030, which is both important from an employee attraction point of view and an employee retention point of view, and also is really increasingly important to our customers, many of whom are delivering public transport or related solutions in their home countries. In terms of the highlights for the period, in summary, very high levels of activity across all parts of the group. Our key underlying focus is on growing annual recurring revenue, and annual recurring revenue in the period grew by 16%.
That's driven both by large contract wins from previous years going live and hence becoming recognized recurring year-on-year revenue, and also supported by a number of new contract wins that we secured in the period and strong North American performance. We'll go through the details of that as we go through this presentation. Alongside that, we've seen a full COVID recovery of all parts of our business that were affected during the COVID pandemic. Overall, we've got really good visibility of our future pipeline, supported by a really strong order book, and by, you know, a really experienced team across the organization. In addition to that, we are implementing what we call One Tracsis. This is around simplifying the group structure to basically set us up so that we can scale the business more quickly moving forward.
We're also implementing all of the lessons learned from the 3 large enterprise-wide SaaS deployments that we, as a group, have delivered over the past 12 months. We'll share more details on that as we go through the presentation. We're continuing to invest for growth. We've got a strong balance sheet, which continues to support M&A activity. We are also seeing an increasingly large pipeline of opportunities for the next generation of product development that sits around our existing product suite. We'll provide more information on that as we go through this presentation. In terms of just the final slide in the overview, the other important part is that we are simplifying the group around common operating models.
Those of you that are familiar with Tracsis will know that the 17 acquisitions we've made historically had largely been unintegrated. They were businesses that were very successful in their own right. They were adopted into the group, but we hadn't brought them together into a more integrated operating model. That is now well in progress. We're probably about 75% through this process now. Just to explain how we're doing that, we're doing that around common operating models. How you deliver product is very different from how you deliver consultancy. It's very different from how you deliver a major sporting event or music festival. We are integrating the business around 4 service lines. We have Rail Technology UK. That is all our portfolio of both software and hardware in the U.K., managed by 1 leadership team.
We're doing the same in North America. We will have a single figurehead for our consultancy data analytics and GIS businesses. Why is that? It's because they're all professional services businesses where it's all about selling people, selling capability, selling knowledge and know-how. That is different from how you sell product. We have a fully integrated events and traffic data business. They have been integrated, one, to deliver our carbon neutral objectives by having a single vehicle fleet by having a single ownership of everything related to how we manage our carbon emissions across the group. It's also where we have our highest health and safety risk, so we bring everything together there under one operational footprint.
We will have, by the end of this financial year, four figureheads running each of those businesses and running those day-to-day P&Ls, but also taking responsibility for delivering organic growth. The entrepreneurs that used to sit within the businesses are still there, but they're now running a much more focused technology play. How do we take, how do we grow our technology pipeline? How do we interact with our customers around our technology roadmap? How do we make sure that we're underpinning this with next generations of some of the fantastic products that we already have across the group?
Therefore, we end up with a shared best practice model, which is the blue box along the bottom, in terms of how we manage our IT infrastructure, how we manage our information security, how we take the businesses to market to make sure that we maximize our opportunity to collaborate across the different product lines that we have. We have a much more common way in which we develop and support our clients, and we develop and build in all of the lessons learned from the large enterprise software deliveries that we've had in the past few months into an integrated PMO offering. We expect all of the people changes related to this to be ready by the end of July.
Then next year, there'll be some final changes made in terms of making sure we've got all of the final pieces of the IT infrastructure in place. There is some cost associated with this, which Andy will discuss in a moment, but this is an important part of our journey as a business to make sure we've got the ability to scale up more quickly, to recognize revenue more quickly, and to service the pipelines of opportunity that we have across all parts of the group. Andy, would you like to just give a, an overview of the financials for the period, please?
Yes. Thanks, Chris. We've delivered a strong financial performance in the first half, and that reflects the high activity levels right across the group that Chris was talking about, supplemented by strong performance from the Icon Geo and RailComm businesses that we acquired in the previous financial year. Revenue in total grew by 34% to GBP 39.2 million, that included 13% organic revenue growth. Really importantly for us, in the Rail Technology and Services division, 16% increase in annual recurring and repeat revenue. That strong revenue growth has resulted in a 21% increase in EBITDA to GBP 7.5 million, and we closed the half with GBP 17 million of cash in total on the balance sheet with no debt.
Reflecting the strong financial performance in the first half, we've declared an interim dividend of 1 pence per share. Just turning to the income statement in a little bit more detail. That 13% organic revenue growth reflects a number of drivers. We've seen further increase in our rail software license revenue. That includes the benefit from contracts that we signed in the previous financial year, as well as new contracts in the period. We've seen very strong demand in remote condition monitoring, and that's linked to entering the final phase of the current 5-year Network Rail investment cycle. We've seen high activity levels and increased revenue in our professional services businesses. Alongside that, we've seen a full post-COVID recovery in our events and traffic data businesses, where activity levels are back up where we saw them before the pandemic.
We've seen a strong performance from RailComm in North America in the first half. This business delivered GBP 5.2 million revenue, which was ahead of our expectations. We'll talk about the drivers of that a little bit later in this presentation. What you will notice is that our EBITDA percentage in the first half is a little bit lower than that 20%+ target that Chris referred to at the start. There's 2 reasons for that. We've had approximately GBP 800,000 of non-repeat costs in the first half. About GBP 400,000 of that relates to executing the organizational redesign that Chris referred to. We expect there will be a further GBP 600,000 in the second half, so approximately GBP 1 million in total for this financial year to complete that transformation.
The other category of costs in the first half was GBP 400,000 for a one-off cost of living allowance, where we gave everybody in the organization, other than directors and the leadership teams, a GBP 1,000 one-off cost of living support as we entered the autumn and winter last year in recognition of increasing fuel prices and food prices. Looking at the Rail Technology and Services division, here we had 25% organic growth, and you can see on the right-hand side the three main product categories that we have in this division all showed strong levels of revenue growth over the first half of last year. In operations and planning, that includes the benefit of our TRACS Enterprise rollouts, as well as a new license deployment in RailComm.
In digital railway and infrastructure, that includes the very strong remote condition monitoring demand, double-digit growth in our safety and risk management software business, and also the benefit from RailComm's Yard Automation and infrastructure offerings. In customer experience, that was driven by new contract wins and smart ticketing, as well as increased levels of transactional Delay Repay revenue. As I said before, overall in this division, we've seen an increase of 16% in our annually recurring and repeat revenue to GBP 10.8 million in the first half. We would typically expect to see EBITDA margins on this side of the business to be in excess of 30%. The slightly lower H1 margins reflect both the one-off restructuring costs, excuse me, and also investment during the period to strengthen our SaaS delivery capabilities.
We would expect to see this margin recovering as we go through FY 2024. Overall, on this side of the business, high activity levels, a large pipeline and further large software contract wins in the period. On the data analytics, consultancy, and event side of the business, we've seen high activity levels in each of the four business areas. Data analytics, GIS, and in our transport insights businesses, we've seen high demand, including for our specialist train performance and planning capabilities, and in data analytics, GIS, an important contract win in the period that we'll talk about in due course. A full COVID recovery in events and traffic data, with those businesses now being managed by a common management team.
In events, we had approximately GBP 1 million of revenue in the first half last year that was related to supporting COVID testing and vaccination centers that hasn't repeated this year. Whilst it looks like that business has gone backwards slightly, actually on an underlying repeat basis, we've seen good growth there. As Chris mentioned, the integration that's happened between the events and the traffic data businesses has been completed, and through the second half of the year, we'll be working to integrate the professional services side of this division. Turning finally to cash. The group has got a strong cash position. We typically tend to be more cash generative in the second half of the year, which is to do with the timing of software license renewals and seasonality in certain parts of our business.
We go into the second half of the year with a strong trade receivables book that gives us confidence that we'll see that unwind in the working capital investment in H2. We closed H1 with GBP 17 million of cash in total. We expect we will pay approximately GBP 8.5 million in the second half in relation to contingent and deferred consideration for historic acquisitions. That completes our contingent and deferred consideration for the majority of our acquisitions.
It leaves us with only approximately GBP 1.1 million to be paid through FY 2024 and FY 2025. Given our levels of cash generation in the second half of the year, still leaves us well positioned to continue to support in acquisitive growth alongside the organic opportunities for the business. With that, I'll pass back to Chris to start to take us through in more detail some of the key developments in the period in each part of our business.
Great. Thanks, Andy. This is a slide that we use on a frequent basis to talk through what our strategic priorities are and then to provide updates around the core areas that underpin our ongoing growth. Those four strategic priorities, just as a reminder, are ongoing strong organic growth. We're targeting double-digit organic growth each period. Is to expand our addressable markets, so that's looking for both new product opportunities but also new geographic opportunities. That's why we entered into the U.S. market last year. Acquisition still remains a fundamental part of our strategy, but those acquisitions will be brought into a more clearly structured, more clearly well-defined organization, as we talked about at the start of this presentation. Then in the top right-hand corner, this is all about implementing One Tracsis.
How do we make sure, as a business, we have a much better understood brand, market position, product offering, and are able to really maximize the opportunities that are open to the group moving forward? We'll now provide updates across the five core areas that we're investing in. Just as a reminder, on our website, in the investor section of the website, are product demonstration videos for all of the 4 green boxes that you can see on the slide here. Each of those is about 10 minutes in length. If you've got some time to look at those, they'll provide you with some really detailed case studies and examples of our strategy in each of those areas.
You'll be able to see working demonstrations of the software and the products that we offer in these spaces, and that will help to give you a much better understanding of what we do as an organization. Andy and I will split this presentation up. I'll just talk through the first two or three slides, and then Andy will talk through the following slides. In terms of our operational performance software, one of our key products in that portfolio is a product called TRACS Enterprise. It's been a product that's been under development by the team for the last four or five years. It went live with its first deployment last summer. We then went live with our second full deployment in January. Lots of lessons learned in that process.
The second go live was much smoother than the first because of a much better understanding of the dynamics that go on with these large, complex software transformation programs. We now have three further programs in our order book. One of those is for freight, two of those are for passenger operators, and they will deploy throughout the next financial year. The one key thing we have learned is around a need to sort of modularize this product better moving forward. That would help us implement the product in a much more straightforward manner, and that is something we're already starting to work on. We're looking at modularizing the product around train planning, around resourcing, and around control.
All of those factors work together today within the singular product that we produce, but we think there's a better way to architect that. That's something we're working on to, again, embed the lessons learned from our first deployments in future deployments. Today, around one in every five UK rail journeys is now using TRACS Enterprise as the fundamental product used for timetabling, used for the way in which rolling stock and crew are allocated, and being used to manage service recovery across the UK network. Some really important developments there for us as a business. In the U.S., we've also seen some significant developments in the period in the operational performance space.
We've had for or RailComm has had for a number of years, a Computer Aided Dispatching product that's used by a number of transit operators and short line rail operators across the U.S. market. Our system has never spoken to a system called Positive Train Control. Positive Train Control is an automatic train protection system that has to be used across the U.S. railway to protect against collisions or to minimize the risk of any sort of significant rail-related fatalities. Before we bought RailComm, this product was already in development. Since we have bought the business, that product has now gone through to factory acceptance testing.
The license for this product was deployed to the customer in January. This is a really important step in opening up a new product family opportunity for us in North America. Being able to combine our Computer Aided Dispatching technology with Positive Train Control opens up a really interesting market opportunity for us in which there is only other one competitor in that marketplace. This is something that we're really looking to grow moving forward. There'll be more information to follow later on this year around more detail around this product and who the client is that is the first adopter of this piece of technology. If we look at remote condition monitoring, we have seen the busiest periods we've ever had for this technology, largely driven by demand from the U.K.
What typically happens in a 5-year control period within Network Rail is that the first 1 or 2 years are used to plan major infrastructure upgrades. Years 3 and 4 are usually then about starting to procure major parts of the technology needed as part of those upgrade programs. Years 4 and 5 are around the implementation of those solutions. We have just completed year 4. On April 1st, we moved into year 5, and the demand we're seeing right now reflects that. It's demand not just from Network Rail, but from big system integrators that are doing major infrastructure upgrades as part of the planned spending from Network Rail.
In addition to that, we have got some orders through in North America for the provision of remote condition monitoring, and that's a key focus for us moving forward. The biggest area we see for growth there is actually around grade crossings or what we call in the U.K., level crossings, where there is regulatory requirements coming into North America for those crossings to be monitored on an ongoing basis. To do that, you need to do that via technology solution. We expect the RCM demand to continue, and it's an important part of our growth plan, both here and in the U.K. and in North America. The final area I'll talk around is around smart ticketing and Delay Repay. We have the U.K.'s only accredited pay-as-you-go smart ticketing solution for use on the U.K. railway.
Our specialism is in the back office functionality, where all of the smart algorithms sit in terms of making sure you have the best fare allocation to a particular journey. Linking that to automated Delay Repay compensation because we know which train you were on, and we know whether that train arrived on time or was delayed. That technology can be deployed with different tokens that are used by the customer. You can see from the map on the right-hand side here, there are three regions there, the yellow, the blue, and the green regions, which are GTR, South Western Railway, and Great Western Railway, have all deployed our technology with a smart card.
That smart card is a piece of plastic that is branded in the colors or branding of the train operator, you touch in and touch out on barriers to confirm when and where you start your journey. In those examples, the train operator owns your CRM data, and you create an online account that's linked to you and linked to your travel patterns. That's not the only way you can deploy that technology. You can also deploy that technology with a contactless bank card. You can see here there's the Welsh region is highlighted in pink. Wales are going ahead and implementing our technology, but with a contactless bank card solution. Now, with this version, you do not need to sign up for an account.
You do as you would if you're using this technology on the Underground in London. You simply walk up to a barrier, you tap your credit card. At the end of your journey, you tap your credit card again, and we know that you've completed the journey between 2 locations. The benefit of this technology is that you do not have to sign up for an account, so just because you have a bank card, we know that we can guarantee payment, and that is what you use as your travel token. In both those cases, you need a gate line against which we can actually register your tap from your credit card or from your smart card.
That, excuse the pun, but that provides a barrier to entry because where those barriers do not exist, and in many parts of the country, those barriers do not exist, you therefore can't implement this type of technology. We've been developing our own product called the Hopsta app. The Hopsta app is a mobile-based version of our, the front end of our ticketing solution. When you walk into a station, you will press In the initial adoption, you will press a button that says, "Start my journey," and that will auto-create a barcode on your phone that then provides confirmation of a valid ticket to travel on the network. The difference is that that won't have a destination on it.
As you travel around the network all day, you use that barcode, if there are barriers, to confirm where you've entered and exited the station. If your ticket is inspected by a ticket officer on a train, you can confirm that you have a ticket. As you go through the day, we use that barcode on your phone to understand where you've traveled. At the end of the day, when you've finished your journey, you'll hit stop my journey on the app, and we know that your journey has completed. In latter versions of the app, you won't need to start and stop your journey. We will geofence your phone based on your location. What it does is it means we can start to implement this technology in areas where there are not existing very expensive gate line solutions in place.
We have signed our first 6-month pilot for this contract. We're in month 3 of that pilot now. That's gonna give us some really interesting insight on customer adoption rates, customer behavior, on how we best implement that technology. We will provide more information later this year following on from that pilot to explain what that looks like and what we expect the future rollout of this technology to be across the U.K.
Lots going on in the smart ticketing space. A lot of that is linked to the future direction of Great British Railways. The government wants to have a nationwide pay-as-you-go solution. We're not quite sure what technology that will sit behind that just yet. We're in a really strong position to be part of that discussion and to have our technology very much sitting there as part of the solution moving forward. Andy, do you wanna just talk through the updates on the other areas?
Yeah, will do. In our risk management and safety software business, the core product is something called RailHub. RailHub is a platform that provides a single login that then interfaces with a number of source systems that gives you a single place to plan and execute in a safe manner, maintenance and upgrade work on the U.K. railway. In the summer of 2021, we won a large contract to deploy this throughout Network Rail. That rollout was completed in December of 2022. That's now been rolled out to 22,000 individual users right across Network Rail's organization, in addition to a similar number of individual users in their supply chain.
It's a really key milestone for us, completing this large and technical enterprise license deployment, and leaves us really well positioned to continue to work in partnership with Network Rail to now build upon the capabilities and the functionality that's included in that platform, and therefore to continue to grow the value and the impact of this product. Finally, on data analytics and GIS, we won a large new contract in the period to develop what's called an Area Monitoring System, which combines satellite data imagery with advanced data analytics to provide a confirmed audit trail of land usage that is then linked to the distribution of European Union subsidies for farmers and other land users based on how that land's being used.
This is a really important combination for us of the earth observation capabilities that came with the acquisition of Icon last year with our existing data analytics and GIS technologies. There are future growth opportunities in this area elsewhere in the European Union. We're also seeing in this space is an increasing requirement for our customers to use location data to help them to deliver their ESG agenda and to meet an increasing level of environmental regulatory requirements. Also increasing demand from our customers for help with just using the vast amounts of data that they have access to, and cleansing that data, structuring it, and organizing it in a way that allows it to be layered upon itself in order to provide real insight to deliver improved efficiency and improved ESG outcomes in their businesses.
A lot of interesting activity in this space. Very high activity levels for our business. We're now looking to grow this outside of its core market in Ireland, and see if we can continue to grow this business in the UK and elsewhere. Turning now to ESG. You will have seen, and as part of our annual reporting last year, we made a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030. We've made good progress in this area in the first half of the year.
Most of our carbon emissions come from running our vehicle fleet in the events and traffic data businesses, and therefore, one of the core strategic reasons for integrating those businesses was to bring that fleet management piece and the whole operating model under one common management team with a focus and accountability for driving that carbon reduction plan over the next few years. Alongside that, we're rolling out ISO 14001 as an environmental management system right across the group so that we can run our other carbon reduction programs in a consistent and coordinated way, and we'll provide more data on that as part of our year-end reporting.
Similarly, on the social side of ESG, we're working very hard to define and determine exactly what our targets, both qualitative and quantitative, are in this space, and we'll provide more information on this as part of our year-end reporting. In the meantime, we have produced a Tracsis vision video which tries to distill down in a short space of time exactly what Tracsis is about in terms of a vision, in terms of a purpose. That's available on our new Tracsis plc website, I'd encourage you to take a look at that. With that, I'll pass you back to Chris to cover the closing remarks and the forward-looking statements.
In terms of this, we've got just 3 further slides to share. The first one is on the forward look for the rail industry in the UK and U.S. In both those markets, we are seeing digital transformation becoming an ever-increasing topic of conversation. And we are really well placed to be part of that discussion, both with products we already have and with new versions or iterations of those products that we could develop. In terms of specific developments in the UK, the Transport Secretary has confirmed a commitment to implementing the Great British Railways organization. From a publication published yesterday, that looks like it's gonna come to Parliament in September of this year. The reason that needs to happen is because they need to be set up as a legislative body.
They need to be set up as a legal entity so that they can actually start to procure work and actually start to make a difference to the future direction of the industry and how it adopts future digital technologies. They've also confirmed that its headquarters is going to be in Derby, which is great for Tracsis because we have a number of our team based in Derby. That is all really very positive. That tells us there's increasingly a clear direction to implementing the recommendations of the Williams-Shapps review that was published in 2021, all of which is directionally really good news for the Tracsis organization.
Alongside that, new National Rail contracts are being issued to train operators to give them much longer visibility in terms of the arrangements that they have for running the train operations across the UK. There's a stronger focus on operational efficiencies, on cost savings, and there's really clearly defined quality target measures that each operator has to meet, and if they meet those targets, they get incentivizations in terms of payments for delivering improved customer service and an improved experience. Again, a lot of that feeds into products or services that we provide into those customers. UK rail industrial action has been a distraction of sorts. It's not had really any direct impact on us to date, but it does cause a distraction in terms of the need for the industry to go through a continual replanning exercise.
Network Rail have now resolved their industrial action. The train operators are expected to follow suit sometime in the near future. That will just give real clarity to everybody moving forward, which obviously is important. We are seeing in the U.S. as well, some impacts around unionized labor shortages as a result and a hangover from COVID. That is having a small impact on our, some of our implementation schedules, but in general, we're able to cope and manage with those changes. Obviously having these issues properly resolved will give us a clear path moving forward. In terms of our outlook, we continue to see strong industry demand from both passenger and freight operators, and really good senior level engagement across Network Rail and increasingly with the newly formed Great British Railways team.
There is a little bit of uncertainty at the moment with all those changes going on around who holds which budget and the delivery timelines that therefore go with the release of those budgets. We're working through those conversations with our customers, and there may be some small material impacts to us just in the short term, but they're things that we'll manage through the day-to-day operation of the business. In terms of our data analytics consultancy and events business, we have really strong visibility moving forward of our pipeline here. As Andy said earlier on, the data analytics and GIS business is having very strong demand driven by ESG requirements.
Lots of interest in location data, lots of interest in increasingly in data from across the transportation space, how we use that to drive more predictive analysis, and more, and potentially into things like AI and machine learning capabilities. A fascinating area for us to be part of. We're seeing strong demand for our operational consultancy activities. If you imagine we specialize in timetabling, we specialize in train planning, we specialize in allocating rolling stock to complex operating environments. Lots of demand for that at the moment and for the software that sits behind it. Our traffic data business has got record levels of order book. Has won several large contracts in the past few months. Despite cost of living pressures, just about every large sporting event and musical festival this summer is completely sold out.
We've got really good strong order book and a high confidence that we can deliver what will be a complex program of works over the coming months, but something that's really exciting to be part of. In conclusion, Q-Q3 trading is in line with our expectations. We have been awarded a number of new contract wins that are now in the final contracting stages, which will underpin further growth through Q3 and Q4. Our rail software pipeline continues to grow across passenger freight and infrastructure. We're making good progress in North America, and we're now looking at what products from our UK portfolio should we introduce into the North American market and over what timescales. RCM is the obvious one that goes first, but there are other areas that are of real interest to clients in North America.
Importantly, acquisition remains a key part of our ongoing strategy. Lots of opportunities being explored there at the moment, with more information to follow in the future. Overall, we're continuing to drive our innovation and deliver the large ongoing portfolio of programs that we have. We will continue to implement our One Tracsis strategy, which is all about increasing collaboration and embedding best practice across the group. Continue to pursue M&A, but in very restricted areas.
The M&A has to be in areas related to rail technology, related to recurring revenue, or related to data analytics, and GIS. We continue to commit and deliver to our ESG priorities, and implement ISO 14001. Overall, therefore, our long-term growth strategy remains unchanged, and we continue to look forward with a really positive outlook to the coming months and coming years ahead of us. Thank you very much for listening today. We will now open up for any questions that you have.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. To ask your question, click on the Q&A button and just type your question in. The first question is: Revenue growth has been excellent during the recovery from COVID, but margins have never recovered to the pre-pandemic levels. Has this business suffered a permanent downturn in profitability?
Absolutely not. It's all part of the growth curve of the business as we now implement that new structure that we talked about at the start of the presentation. We've got opportunities across all parts of our business. Pipeline is strong. Order book is strong. At the moment, this is all part of investing in the scalability and growth of the business moving forward. We expect this year to see that slight drop-off in margin performance that we've seen in H1 . We expect as we go back into FY 2024 and FY 2024, that margin to pick back up to at least the levels we saw before COVID. Our overall objective is obviously to continue to see that margin improvement moving well into the future.
Tremendous. Many thanks. You've covered this a little, but what is the impact of the strike action on the business?
Overall, we have not really been impacted very much at all. The only real area where we're seeing a small impact at the moment is some indecision around the timeline of placing future work. We have a number of contracts where we've been awarded or been told that we've been supplier nominated for those contracts, but there's a little bit of uncertainty just right now with the transition to Great British Railways over exactly when that contract will be placed with us.
We're working through those in partnership with the clients. We're told that they are critical path programs that will go ahead, but there's just a little bit of uncertainty at the moment as to exactly when some of those programs will take place. We're not talking about a big impact on FY 2023 financial performance, but they're just things, again, that help us plan for the future and make sure that we can plan with certainty moving forward.
Great. Thank you. Can you give us the likely direction of Great British Railways?
Yeah. What we believe is gonna happen is it's gonna you're gonna move to a structure where we have a regional Great British Railways director, several directors across the U.K. that are responsible for both infrastructure and train operations services within those different geographies. Today, what you have is you have a number of different train operating managing directors, and you have a range of different Network Rail managing directors that run the U.K. on a regional or route basis. From what we understand is they will come together much more closely. We will see Great British Railways setting the sort of strategic direction for the railway. Are there gonna be certain areas where there's gonna be a standard U.K.-wise, wide solution?
Are we going to continue to see multiple solutions of different types across different parts of the U.K.? What we're doing, making sure we're doing is engaging with a range of senior stakeholders right now across the Network Rail and existing train operating structures, also as Great British Railways senior figures are identified, is making sure we're engaging with them as well to understand how the transition will take place. There's still things like what the Rail Delivery Group does today. How does that integrate into the new Great British Railways structure? Things like that we're not totally clear on yet. We expect Great British Railways to set out a really clear future direction for the industry around which we can then hang our future investment decisions much more clearly.
Thank you very much. What are you seeing in terms of wage inflation and staff churn?
Our salary increase year runs alongside our financial year. We do salary reviews in the summer with effect from the first of August. In this year, that was on average around 5% or 6%. We're not seeing significant levels of staff churn. You know, we're very fortunate in that respect. People who know us well will know that we are implementing a people strategy alongside that to make sure that we continue to invest in developing people, rolling out our One Tracsis training and development program.
The other benefit of moving to that new organizational structure is it will start to create really clear career paths and collaboration opportunities for our people moving away from that siloed operating model into a much more integrated operating model. Yeah, we've had no significant concerns in that area. The cost of living allowance that we paid in August of last year was a conscious decision to continue to look after our people, and we will continue to do that.
Great. Thank you very much. How do you see recurring revenue % contribution to total revenues evolving over time?
We're absolutely focused strategically in growing that. Both organically as we continue to grow the number of software licenses that we've got in place and as a key criteria for acquisition of looking for businesses that have high quality recurring revenues as part of that proposition. Absolutely we'll look to see that growing. It's worth saying that the parts of our revenue that aren't included in that ARR metric are also both very high margin because they include some bespoke software development work that often leads to then future software contract implementations, or it includes a level of hardware sales and framework agreements or transactional revenue in the customer experience side of the business. Absolutely, we expect to see that ARR percentage growing, and we're very focused on it. Equally, the bits that aren't in that ARR are still very high value and often quite sticky revenue streams for us.
Thank you very much. Should we anticipate a focus on the U.S. for your future acquisitions?
There will definitely be a focus on acquisitions in the U.S., and we have a target list of companies that we are looking to talk to and engage with in the North American market. We would also like to, if we could, acquire into the mainland European market as well, because to organically grow our sort of very U.K. dominant products into that market is very difficult. I think a key way for us to get into that market would to be to buy into organizations that have got similar products that don't compete with us in the U.K., but would give us that footprint. Obviously, the U.K. we still, there's still a lot of headroom there for us to grow. It's a multipronged attack.
There is lots of discussion going on at the moment across the whole breadth of what I've just shared. What's really important though is that it's around the technology play, the recurring revenue play. We are not looking for distressed businesses. We're not looking for turnaround businesses. We're looking for organizations that have a really strong track record of profitability and free cash flow generation. With the level of opportunities we've got right now, you know, we can afford to be quite careful there in who we choose and how we choose to engage. North America is definitely front and center of that thought process.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. At the moment, we've got just one more question, which is what's the quantum that we can expect from data analytics and GIS going forward, and over what sort of time frame?
That business is approximately a GBP 10 million business today. I would expect that to follow, you know, the similar growth prospects that we've set for the group as a whole of targeting kind of 10% organic growth over a sustained period. I think where it gets really interesting for us is where we can start to point those capabilities back into the rail side of our business. Can we accelerate that growth by layering on to the core business today, that kind of data as a service offering, back into some of our existing client base on the rail side? That's, that's early stages, and it's probably a bit early for us to start to give, confident levels of growth rates for that. That is really the opportunity in that business to then accelerate that growth curve.
Lovely. Thank you very much indeed. That's the end of questions. Chris, do you have any closing remarks?
Just to say thank you very much for joining us. You know, our team has done a fantastic job as always over the past six months in terms of delivering those high levels of activity we've seen across the group. We're really excited about the future that's ahead of us. We look forward to providing further updates throughout the year as we, as we land, new contract wins and continue to build on our success. Thank you very much for joining us.
Many thanks indeed, Chris and Andy. To everyone listening, you'll now be taken to a webpage to give feedback on today's presentation. If you can't complete it now, you'll get a follow-up email. We would be really grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete. Many thanks for joining. This is the end of the webinar.