Welcome to the Tracsis full year 2022 results webinar. All attendees are in listen-only mode, and questions will be answered at the end of the presentation. 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, Tamsin. Thanks very much everybody for joining today's presentation. This is for the full year results for the year ending the thirty-first of July. Andy and I will split the presentation between us as we go through the next sort of 35-40 minutes. We'll cover highlights from the financial year, in particular, how we're making progress with our growth strategy. We've got a specific section on North America following our acquisition of RailComm in March of this year. We'll talk about the progress we're making in ESG and, in particular, the targets we're committing to. Then we'll give a forward-looking final statement before we open up for Q&A. Just as a reminder for anybody that's new to the Tracsis story, who are we?
We were founded in 2004 as a spin-out from University of Leeds, and we were basically spun out to commercialize research and expertise in optimization software. The business has grown over that period through a mixture of organic growth and 17 acquisitions, which has expanded the group's footprint from the U.K. into Ireland and into North America. Over that time period, the business has delivered a compounded growth rate of about 30%, which is a fantastic achievement. Almost all of our M&A is self-funded through high levels of operational cash generation. Today, we're a business with 550 employees, revenue of circa GBP 70 million, and EBITDA margins in excess of 20%.
As you'll see as we go through the presentation, we've got a strong blue chip client base across the wider transportation market. We have a strong defensible market position based around leading-edge software and hardware products. As a business, as you'll see in this presentation, we're committed to being carbon neutral by 2030. As you'll see intrinsically, the business is all about supporting governments and countries on their decarbonization agenda as they move more and more people onto public transport. In terms of the highlights for the year, the key objectives for the year were to have the business recover fully from the impact of the COVID pandemic. They were to grow our software footprint, both through the go live of our significant order book, but also through securing new long-term contracts with a number of our customers.
It was to expand the footprint of the business into new territories through acquisition. Let's start with COVID. The COVID recovery is complete. We've seen a very, very strong revenue growth this year, largely driven by that COVID recovery. We made deliberate decisions during the pandemic to protect capability in the group, to maintain all of the core skills and all of the people that we needed to ensure that we could respond quickly once restrictions were lifted. I'm really pleased to see that that's reflected in this year's results. The teams in the affected parts of the business did an outstanding job in managing the business through the pandemic, but then also really benefiting from the recovery that we have now seen.
In terms of software growth, you can see from the numbers on your screen how much progress we have made this year. We have announced for the first time an annual recurring revenue metric, and that metric for our rail technology business has increased 13% this year. You can see specifically on the left-hand four boxes that in some cases we've seen over 100% increase in our user base for our different software products. We'll go into the specific each of those specific areas during the presentation, but you can see that we've made excellent progress in each of our core product areas over the past 12 months. Finally, coming to the acquisition point, it's been our strategic objective to grow into North America for a number of years.
This year, we had the opportunity to acquire RailComm, which was our number one target. That's a fantastic addition, great team of people, brilliant cultural fit with what Tracsis does, and that gives us a real opportunity now to cross-sell our proven technology and products from the U.K. into that marketplace. We've got a specific section on that as we go through this presentation. In addition to that, we've expanded our Data Analytics and GIS capabilities in Ireland. We now have a team of around 130 people based in Dublin. We've now added satellite imagery abilities, otherwise known as Earth Observation, to the business. That allows you to look at changes in land usage, changes in asset performance, flooding, environmental damage, and enables.
That complements really strongly not only what we already do in Data Analytics and GIS, but also what we do in the remote condition monitoring space. Overall, the team has done an outstanding job this year in terms of helping us achieve all of our key objectives. Alongside this, we get asked a number of key questions. Just to walk you through those questions, the key questions we get are. Do we have the management bandwidth to deliver the growth potential of the group? How are we coping with the risks around retaining and attracting top software and technology talent? Do we have a business model that's scalable, and hence can we maximize all the opportunities that are in front of us in terms of growth?
Are we continuing to silo sell or do we now take a more group-wide approach, and hence are we seeing new opportunities arise? And what's our approach on ESG? In answer to those questions, we have strengthened our leadership team this year. We've brought in an experienced group managing director to come and help us with the significant pipeline of large software programs that we have in front of us. His expertise is in that sector, and he is helping us to drive all of our activities in terms of bringing together how we deliver technical support, how we deliver testing and QA, how we deliver our software development processes to make sure that we've got a model that can easily expand to cope with our increasing pipeline of new opportunities.
Our group people director has come in to help us drive a real focus in training and development of our teams. During the year, we launched the One Tracsis leadership program, which over 100 of our staff are now enrolled in. That program is focused on how do we develop the next generation of talent, focused around ensuring we remain an entrepreneurial, agile, fast-to-market business. That's had a really positive reaction so far. It's got a long way to run yet. It's an 18-month program for each person that joins that program, but it's a really important part of helping to facilitate more collaboration, a sense that we're much more of a single organization with a singular purpose.
We're taking much more of a key account approach with new business development because we know that under Great British Railways, we will see the divides that currently exist between the infrastructure side of the business and the operator side of the business come down, and that will open up new opportunities for us to be able to sell products into new areas of the rail market, but also to get different parties to collaborate so that there's far more effectiveness in terms of how some of our systems help the railway deliver a better customer experience for the consumer. Then finally, at the bottom, you will see in our annual report when it's published next month, that we now have a very detailed review of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and the roadmap that we have for the future.
Andy will talk you through the headlines from that later in his presentation. From an overall headline perspective, we're committing to be carbon neutral by 2030, which is really important for our employees. It's also very important for our clients because it's an increasingly important question when we're going through a procurement process. It's also important for us as an organization just to show our commitment to the wider environment, sustainability, and to also commit to the governance of the overall business. As an intro, we're really pleased with the progress we've made. We're very much on track to deliver our long-term growth strategy. I'll now hand over to Andy for him to talk you through the more details around the financial performance of the group.
Thanks, Chris. In terms of the headlines on financial performance, we're reporting a strong performance for the year, characterized by high levels of revenue growth. Total revenue for the group grew by 37% to GBP 68.7 million. Included within that is organic revenue growth of 24%. That reflects both the post-COVID recovery in our events and traffic data businesses, and also strong organic growth in our operational planning and customer experience businesses in the rail technology division. As a result, our annual recurring revenue in rail technology grew by 13%, as Chris mentioned. Alongside the strong organic growth, we've seen a good contribution from the acquisitions of Icon Group and RailComm that we made in the year, which collectively have delivered GBP 5.3 million of revenue.
Our adjusted EBITDA increased by 9% to GBP 14.2 million. In the prior year, we were still claiming some benefit under the U.K. government furlough scheme to the tune of GBP 900,000. When you adjust for that, the growth in EBITDA that's more reflective of the 13% growth in revenue is closer to 17%. As a group, we're highly cash generative. We finished the year with GBP 17.2 million of cash in total, and that's after investing GBP 13.5 Million in the year in acquisitions and contingent and deferred consideration. We don't have any debt, so we're really well positioned to continue to invest in the growth of the business. We restored our dividend at the half year.
Having completed that COVID recovery, we're proposing a final dividend for the year of GBP 0.011 , bringing the total dividend for the year to GBP 0.02 per share. This slide breaks down our revenue components in a bit more detail. There's a lot of information on here, so I'll try and step you through it. In terms of color coding, anything green is our rail technology side of the business, and anything blue is the data and analytics side of the business. In rail, we split out remote condition monitoring separately because the majority of that revenue is hardware. You'll see in that remote condition monitoring that we delivered revenue that was similar to what we achieved in FY 2020. In the first half of the year, we had a slight slowdown as a result of the record performance in FY 2021.
We found that our customers still had some kit that was on their shelves that was waiting to be installed. In the second half of the last financial year, we got back to run rate performance that was consistent with H2 of FY 2021. That business is well positioned to grow and is also very relevant to the North American market, as we'll discuss in due course. Rail software showed very strong growth of 21%. That includes the benefit of the RailComm acquisition and also from new contract wins in the year for TRACS Enterprise and for our Smart Ticketing products, which Chris will cover in more detail later in the presentation. On the Data Analytics, Consultancy, and Events side of the business, data informatics showed very strong revenue growth for the year, including the benefit of Icon Group and organic growth for Compass Informatics.
Our traffic data and events businesses, these were the ones that were most impacted by COVID in terms of activity levels in their markets. You can see that both of them delivered strong revenue performance in the year and completed that post-COVID recovery. Events was incredibly strong. Demand there throughout the year was particularly high. Our team did a really good job of being able to deliver against that. Within that GBP 15.7 million of revenue this year, there was approximately GBP 1.4 million associated with supporting COVID vaccine and testing centers that we would anticipate would fall away in FY 2023. Traffic data had a slightly slower recovery or more prolonged recovery. By the time we got to Q4 last year, that business was, again, back to pre-pandemic levels.
Even though there's a little bit more volatility in that market on a month-to-month basis, we have seen a recovery there versus the impact of the pandemic. Finally, transport insights. Revenue growth there includes the full year benefit from the Flash Forward acquisition that we made in February 2021, as well as good underlying levels of demand for our rail consultancy. The chart on the right shows the proportion of recurring and repeat revenue in each side of the business relative to total revenue. This is most relevant for us in the Rail Technology and Services division, and one of our strategic goals is to grow that level of recurring revenue. What we've included in that GBP 21.1 million is revenue that comes from our multi-year recurring software licenses, and it also includes a baseline level of remote condition monitoring hardware sales.
What we don't include is where we have license agreements with customers before the product has gone live, where we're working with the customer to develop and customize the product. We only include the revenue streams from those licenses in ARR once that product has gone live. Looking at the income statement, you can see here the strong revenue and profit growth. The reason that EBITDA margin went backwards on prior year is reflective of that increased mix of revenue from the lower margin Data Analytics, Consultancy, and Events business. Now the activity levels have become more level. The other thing to highlight here is the fact that our statutory profit before tax decreased when our adjusted EBITDA increased. The main driver of that is to do with earn-outs and contingent consideration on previous acquisitions, particularly Bellvedi, which is a key part of our TRACS Enterprise offering.
The earn-out contingent consideration during the final year of Bellvedi's earn-out has increased significantly in the year on the back of those contract wins. As always, with earn-outs, we're very happy to pay it because it means it's a sign of success and strong performance in the underlying business, and that cash considerations is self-funded out of underlying business performance. On a division-by-division basis, our Rail Technology on the left-hand side, again, there's a slight reduction in overall margin in this division, and this is the impact of RailComm becoming part of the portfolio. RailComm is currently a lower margin business than our U.K. rail businesses, and that's because its product offering today has a lower proportion of software elements relative to hardware and installation elements.
We don't see anything intrinsic in the North American market that means we can't move RailComm up to being at a similar level of margin to our U.K. business, particularly when we start to bring across and cross-sell some of the existing U.K. products in the North American market. We'll talk more about that in due course. On Data Analytics, Consultancy, and Events, this was the side of the business that had that GBP 900,000 profit support last year from the furlough scheme. The 5 percentage points reduction in adjusted EBITDA does include that element. We would focus on this side of the business much more on margin improvement than necessarily revenue growth. We're looking to move that margin up more towards a sort of mid-teen level in the near future. Finally, looking at cash flow.
The business does generate a high level of operating cash. We did see a GBP 4 million net investment in working capital this year, which again reflects that revenue recovery curve that we've seen, particularly in the events and traffic data businesses. Both of those have very large revenue contributions in June and July. We saw a net investment in receivables. We haven't had any bad debt incidences. There's no issues with recovery there, and we'd expect that to unwind in the current financial year. In addition to the GBP 13.5 million consideration investment in acquisitions and earn-outs, there was also GBP 600,000 of deal costs.
We had a bit of a catch up on a CapEx perspective, so again, those traffic data and events businesses that are more asset intensive, we weren't investing as heavily through the COVID period. Now that we've seen that recovery, there's a bit of a catch up on CapEx there. The cash flow in financing activities includes the cash impact of restoring the dividends at the half year. Closing cash position of GBP 17.2 million in total. We don't capitalize any of our R&D costs, so what you see here is all very clean. We anticipate there's about GBP 9 million of cash outflow in FY 2023 on remaining earn-outs and deferred consideration. That will be funded from free cash flow, and that is mainly the last remaining elements of the large earn-outs that we've got in the business.
After that, we've just got the Icon earn-out, which would be in the region of GBP 1 million beyond that. That whole picture gets a lot clearer after FY 2023 and clearly gives us much more of that free cash flow that's available to invest in the future growth of the business. With that, I'll hand you back to Chris to go through in more detail the elements of our growth strategy.
Great. Thanks, Andy. Just as a reminder for everybody, in terms of simplifying our investment case and enabling people to understand where we're investing for growth at the moment, this is the slide we use to do that. We are looking at delivering sustainably 10% organic growth across the group. We're looking to expand our addressable market. This year we've done that in North America, and we've done that in Earth Observation. We're looking to do that through acquisition as well as just doing that through organic measures. We're also looking to increasingly integrate the group so that we get far more synergies and far more commonality in our approach across the organization. Those remain unchanged. Then we're investing in five core areas.
Four of those are in the rail space, which are numbered one to four, and then we've got a fifth area which is linked to Data Analytics and GIS. As usual, we'll just give a one-page update on progress in each of these. What's important to mention on the rail technology areas is that we held an institutional investor day on the third of October. For that event, we have created product demonstration videos on each of the areas one to four, and they are available via the investor section of the Tracsis website. Each of those is 10 minutes in length.
There are interviews with the managing director of each of those parts of our business, which walk you through the history, our value proposition, our current market position, and what the future opportunities look like, as well as a demonstration of the product, what it looks like, and why it's delivering the benefits that it is to our customers. If you have not had a chance to look at those, please do, because they're a great opportunity to really understand what it is that Tracsis does on the rail technology side of its business. If we go through each of the areas, we'll start with TRACS Enterprise. This is a big program we've been developing for the last four years.
It takes a number of our on-prem products and integrates them together into a single end-to-end enterprise solution. The system has finally gone live with the first customer. It went live in July of this year. It covers the entire end-to-end operating system that the train operator uses. It's everything from timetabling, short and long-term planning, rostering and resourcing, including looking at training matrices and our drivers and crew trained to be on the trains that they're on, and how they can therefore more efficiently allocate staff across those services right the way through to on-the-day control. What we mean by that is that the operator can now respond to events that happen during the course of the day and use our tools to actually scenario plan the best way of recovering those services.
It's a huge step forward in terms of being able to give a train operator a single system that they can use. You can see from here, they currently got about 300 daily specialist users and 5,000 train drivers using this system. It's been a challenging implementation because it's the first system of its type that's gone live in the U.K., but that system has now been running for almost four months. You know, it will become a great advert for the skills and capabilities of what the Tracsis team can deliver in this space. We've got five other passenger and freight operators that are already contracted with this product, so are part of our order book.
They're not reflected in our annual recurring revenue metric because they're not live yet, but they will go live over the next 18 months. They will build on the lessons learned and the successes of the first project that we've implemented. Then what we will see is that product become increasingly productized as we get to define the best practice, processes, and solutions that sit behind this product. Then we'll be able to roll this product out to more operators and make the rollout faster in nature. Huge achievement from the team, and, you know, a great statement of what Tracsis is capable of delivering. Then if we look at remote condition monitoring, so we've had this business for a very long time now within the Tracsis organization.
We have over 24,000 hardware units now installed. Those units range from ones that are literally just black boxes that are recording information on an ongoing basis, but from which you don't retrieve any data, through to ones that we're retrieving data every 5 ms to be able to evaluate asset performance and system performance at any point in time. We can do that through a product called Centrix, which is our data acquisition platform that sits on top of the RCM solution. We've seen over 20% growth this year in that user base as the industry really starts to understand the power of this product and how it can be used to move towards much more predictive maintenance rather than what's called frequency-based maintenance.
What I mean by that is today, people have to physically visit an asset every three months or a predetermined period of time to actually inspect it. Under preventative maintenance, you actually only go to site when you start to see a deterioration in the performance of that asset. It greatly improves the effectiveness of the network because you intervene before there's a failure, and it also makes it much more efficient in terms of where you can deploy resources because you can focus the resources on the areas that are of most interest. We've also been showcasing this product significantly in the U.S. now through our RailComm team.
We've seen some fantastic interest at the industry events that we've been at, with long queues of people waiting to try the product, understand what it does, and this is something that is very easily exportable into other overseas markets. That's one of our key focuses that we'll discuss when we look at the North American growth strategy shortly. The third area to update everybody on is Smart Ticketing and Delay Repay. This year, we have now implemented a further two Delay Repay contracts, so we're now live with over 90% of the U.K. rail train operators. That's a great place to be, and we're now seeing a strong recovery in revenues as passenger numbers return onto the railways.
We have also seen good growth in our Smart Ticketing platform, so we've seen another deployment of our ITSO smartcard platform. We are in the final stages of agreeing a contract for the first contactless bank card version of this technology. We've also been developing a mobile app version of it as well, which removes the need for expensive gate line technology within railway stations. As you can imagine, there's lots of stations in the U.K. that don't have gate lines, so either in remote locations or in locations where it's simply too difficult or expensive to implement that technology. This will open up the pay-as-you-go Smart Ticketing platform to be able to use anywhere in the country.
Lots of demand in this area, lots of interest in the products that we have to offer, and we've also been committing a lot of R&D funding in this area to accelerate the technologies that we have available to us. If we look at risk management and safety software, this year has all been about the rollout of a major software contract that we secured the license agreement for in July 2021. At that point, we had 20,000 users of this product in the U.K. supply chain, so that's 650 organizations that deploy staff onto the railway. This year, and the rollout finishes next week, we will have a further 20,000 users using the system from within Network Rail.
That's a huge achievement from the team, and that program has been delivered in partnership with EY. This has put us on an important step in demonstrating the skills that we have as an organization in terms of delivering the digital transformation journey that the industry is looking to go on. It's already stimulating conversations around, well, what are the next products that should be added into the RailHub platform that brings together a whole digital infrastructure for Network Rail and the supply chain to be able to deliver, you know, safely and effectively future infrastructure upgrades and maintenance works on the railway. The final update is in Data Analytics and GIS. As we've already spoken about, we acquired Icon Group in November 2021.
That business is now integrated together with our existing team to create a 130-person business that now has a broad breadth of capabilities around data science, data insights, data analytics, GIS, remote sensing, and various other things that can be used to really interrogate data sets and to give people a much more insight into how you use data to make long-term decisions that are in the best interest of a transport infrastructure or an environmental footprint or utility performance. This is something that we're very keen to become part of a wider offering. We've got a lot of activity currently in Ireland. We'd like to see much more activity now linked to our U.K. transport client base. That will be a key area of focus for us moving forward. They are the five key updates.
Lots of good progress. We have a strong order book. We've got a very strong pipeline across all of those areas, and that puts us in a really strong position moving forward. I will now hand you back to Andy just to talk through the North American growth strategy and our analysis we've been doing on the addressable market.
Thanks, Chris. I suppose the starting point for this is to say that we're really pleased with how RailComm is performing. It's a really solid business, good growth opportunities, and in terms of the team and the fit with Tracsis, it's been a really positive start. What we've got on this slide are some data points to help you to understand the size of the opportunity for Tracsis in the North American market. The track length one comes with a bit of a caveat because in the U.S. there's an awful lot of straight lines of track that aren't particularly asset intensive, so that's not what we do. When you look at some of those asset categories and things like track circuits, switches, barrier crossings, these are the sorts of assets that our remote condition monitoring products would typically monitor.
You can see that not only is there a significantly larger market and significantly higher numbers of these assets, but the penetration of coverage in terms of remote condition monitoring is much lower as well. Take circuits, for example, approximately 45% coverage in the U.K. market. In the U.S., that will be less than 5% probably. A significant opportunity for us to go after. In terms of what the industry looks like in number of operators, it is a much more disparate market than exists in the U.K. You do not have that same model of one infrastructure owner and a number of operators, much more disparate in the U.S., hence the importance of finding a target and a landing point like RailComm that already has those customer relationships and has the sales team that can get in there.
What we're seeing are some nice spaces within that where Tracsis can play. In terms of the growth opportunities, there's three that I'd like to highlight here, and they kind of go in sort of order of sequence of timing. Fundamentally, RailComm as a business today, its core products are in yard automation and computer-aided dispatch. We see really good organic growth opportunities for these well-established products, good brand, good customer relationships. We acquired the business with a strong order book that's unwinding, and we have won some new contracts and new orders for those products since we acquired the business. A really solid foundation to build from.
On the left-hand side, as Chris mentioned, remote condition monitoring is then the first probably of our product categories in the U.K. that we'll start to cross-sell into the U.S. We have done this historically through a reseller. We have sold a small amount of remote condition monitoring product into the North American market, so we know there's a market for it. Now combined with RailComm sales reach, we've got the opportunity to really push that harder. It's a very transferable product, pretty much just change the power supply and those units can be installed and used in North America as well. That's our first area of focus.
On the right-hand side, what we are finding now that we're opening discussions and conversations with RailComm's clients, is an opportunity to also bring across some of the operational software and the TRACS Enterprise type software for the transit operators in the U.S. Which again, the operating model they have at the moment doesn't have that software solution. Some of it is very basic and run out of Microsoft Excel and solutions like that. We see an opportunity to bring that across. That's not trivial, so that won't be tomorrow, but that's more of a sort of a medium and longer term growth opportunity. In terms of the competitive environment in those areas, these are those four product categories, and these logos are the main players in those markets.
It's a mixture of some very large multinational companies, Wabtec, Alstom, and Siemens, and some smaller, more regional-focused U.S. businesses. What we see here is a nice space in the middle for Tracsis to play in, but similar to what it does in the U.K. market, both from a product perspective, so many of our products that have the credibility and the track record of being used in the U.K. with the robustness and the sales reach of a U.S. sales team in RailComm, but also the ability, moving across these product categories, to integrate and join up our software solutions so you get a truly integrated solution similar to TRACS Enterprise rather than these individual items solving particular problems. As well as that product growth opportunity, there's an M&A opportunity here to be a consolidator play in that kind of mid-market position.
We can't see anybody else who's doing that in the rail technology space in the U.S. at the moment. In terms of the potential size of the market, we've done an early estimate of what we think this might be on a fairly prudent basis. It is a bit of an estimate because some of this market isn't very mature at the moment and still being formed. What this diagram shows is in green an annualized revenue contribution from RailComm today. The blue is what we think our competitors are currently delivering. Then what you can see in each area is significant white space and significant growth opportunity for Tracsis in these markets.
One of our experienced U.K. rail managing directors has relocated with his family to the U.S. this summer, so he's now in place, and he's focused, fully focused on delivering and executing this growth strategy in North America. Before I hand back to Chris, I'd just like to briefly touch on ESG. Chris mentioned this at the start. Sustainability and positive sustainability outcomes are absolutely intrinsic to what we do at Tracsis, and that's on both sides of the business. It's not just about that modern railway, but also on the Data Analytics side of the business. A lot of the customers we work with also are focused on positive environmental and sustainability outcomes. This is something we're really proud of. It's something that's really important to us, and it's increasingly important to our people in terms of retaining and attracting talent.
Being a business that really makes a difference helps us to stand out and it's something that we're very proud of. In terms of our own operating model, as Chris said, there'll be much more detail on this in the annual report that we publish in early December. We set ourselves a target of being carbon neutral by 2030. About 75% of our carbon emissions come out of our fleet of vehicles. That's mainly events and traffic data businesses. There's a very clear target there to fully electrify that fleet of vehicles and also to make sure that we're using 100% clean energy in terms of our buildings and other facilities. We've articulated that. We've got a very clear strategy of how we're gonna deliver that.
Again, this is really important these days, both to us as a business, to our people, and increasingly to our customers. We're being very clear on our ambitions here. I'll now pass you back to Chris to cover an update on the markets and the outlook for the business.
Great. Thanks, Andy. Just in terms of the three final slides here. The first one really is to talk about the U.K. rail market. Now, there's clearly a lot of questions and uncertainty around the structure. You'll all have heard of Great British Railways. There's clearly a lot of industrial action at the moment. We'll just give our thoughts on that just for a couple of moments. The Great British Railways structure has made progress, but it's now waiting for legislation to be passed through Parliament, which isn't gonna happen in this year, but it is hoped will happen next year.
There's a Great British Railways Transition Team has been established, which has taken experts from across the industry and now basically laying out the strategy for the future of the industry, which will see much more collaboration and closer working between Network Rail and the operators. Those changes are kind of universally welcomed, and I think we will see them slowly being implemented either pre-legislation or post-legislation, starting through the course of next year. They are all directionally work well for Tracsis. We've been participating in some of those conversations. A lot of the future is around digital transformation, which is absolutely what we do. Rail industrial action is a bit, it's a sort of a double-edged sword.
The constant changing of operators' timetables, and the location of rolling stock and crew actually plays to our strengths because that's what a lot of our tools solve. However, it does make a distraction for the industry, and it does potentially slow down the pace of large program implementation because of restricted access to key people who are absorbed in the operational challenges that exist at the moment, so we're all hoping that comes to a swift conclusion in the coming weeks. In the U.S., we're seeing a little bit unionized labor shortages having an impact on some of the implementation schedules. Again, we do not install any of our equipment on-site, so we are often reliant on customers providing that resource.
That's something we're working in partnership with our customers to make sure it doesn't become an issue for us moving forward. In summary, we're not seeing any delays to procurement. We're not seeing any reduction in interest for any of our products. If you look at what our products do, they provide either safety critical related outcomes, they provide operational efficiency outcomes, or they help drive increases in passenger revenue. Whichever way you look at it, they have a net positive benefit in terms of the overall benefits case that the industry is looking to gain from its future direction of travel. We continue just to push on with our growth plans here and to continue to push on with translating our order book into future revenue.
On the other side of the group, as we talked about earlier, we're just seeing, you know, ongoing demand for large sporting events and music festivals. As an example, there was lots of news last week about Glastonbury putting its prices up, yet every ticket sold within an hour. So incredible demand, and we're seeing that still across a huge number of other events. Take Peter Kay's latest tour, again, sold out almost within minutes of those tickets going on sale. So we're continuing to gear that business up for very strong levels of demand, moving forward. We're seeing strong interest from regulated industries around our Data Analytics and GIS expertise.
The Irish government in particular has got some strong EU funding, which it's using across a number of areas, and we're benefiting from that. In the U.K., we're seeing strong demand for our operational consultancy services, you know, which specialize in helping train operators and transport operators deliver better and better services to their customers. We've also been awarded a multi-year renewal of our large U.K. traffic data survey, which is a big part of what we do in our traffic data business unit, which again gives us confidence in the long term, as well. Overall, we've got good pipeline, good order book, committed teams. The only thing just to mention on this side is if there was any kind of U.K. government spending review, this is the side of our business that's most susceptible to that.
We're not seeing any evidence of any slowdown or anything at this stage, but we're just flagging that for transparency. In conclusion, we've got Q1 trading has been in line with expectations. We've got a long and strong order book with a continuing pipeline of opportunities across all parts of the rail industry, in particular across passenger, freight, and the infrastructure space. We're continuing to look at a range of acquisitions, so acquisitions remains a key part of our ongoing growth strategy. In summary, we're gonna continue to be innovating in new products and continuing to deliver the ongoing projects that we're committed to.
We will be continuing to integrate the group together, and looking at opportunities for greater collaboration and how we embed best practice so that we can continue to scale and grow the business. M&A will be increasingly focused on rail software and technology acquisitions, so helping us drive up our ARR metric. We'll be implementing the ESG priorities that Andy touched on and that are outlined in more detail in our annual report. We'll also be implementing ISO 14001 this year. Overall, we've got really clear long-term investment plan for the group. We've got very clear strategic growth targets for the group. We're in a really strong position to deliver on that moving forward. Thank you very much for listening. We will now open up for any questions that you might have.
Thank you very much indeed, Chris. To ask your question, click on the Q&A button, and indeed a few people have already done that. Can you expand on the pipeline of opportunities in Smart Ticketing and any early opportunities with Hopsta?
Yes, we can. We are seeing a range of different interests. Each operator kind of can make their own decision in terms of which format of our Smart Ticketing platform they want to use for pay as you go purposes. Some are choosing the smart card version because you can brand that in the colors or in the branding of the train operator, so it's very easy for a customer to identify the product that they're using. Some, as we've mentioned, are using the contactless bank card format, which is very similar to how Oyster card works in London. And then Hopsta app, as we've said, is a new product from us designed to kind of alleviate the need for expensive gate line technology. That's a product we've had.
The first version of the app has been used. We've been showcasing that to customers. We're now developing the version of that ready to go into the pilot phase, and that will be ready, we hope, sort of early part of the new year. We've got a number of train operators talking to us about that technology and exploring being part of a pilot. There'll be more news to follow on that at the, probably at the half-year results point when we'll be able to talk much more about our views on user adoption, the response from the train operators in terms of the technology, and a clearer view on what the future for that technology looks like.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. How should we think about the competition in the U.S. split between larger and smaller players?
What you should see, Andy, is there's two sides to that. When we first looked at the North American market for acquisition, the bad news was, we couldn't find a Tracsis-like business, so somebody that was a technology consolidator with multiple different products already established in the market. The good news is, because that company doesn't exist, we could fill that white space in North America. RailComm, we wanted a business that had a really good footprint, a proven track record of delivery, and which we could use as a platform to grow to kind of repeat what we've done in the U.K. Now, we won't repeat it in the sense of creating lots of separate silo businesses. We will create it as one single organization.
We would now love to be able to pick up different acquisition opportunities in the U.S. and build our size and scale to actually become that sort of mid-ranging rail technology provider. We wonder if there's opportunities to carve out particular opportunities from larger providers which are perhaps no longer core to them, in addition to actually attracting smaller organizations to come and join the business. We've obviously got a great track record of acquisition, so that puts us in a strong place to be able to deliver on that strategy.
Thank you. Someone has a follow-up question. Would it be better to integrate RailComm before contemplating further acquisitions, unless you're adding bolt-on to RailComm?
RailComm is pretty self-sufficient. In fact, RailComm has got a lot of sophisticated business processes already sitting behind its organization. Actually, it was very easy to bring it into the group and make it feel very much part of the group from day one. Experienced managing director has moved with his family into North America to give that bridgehead back to the U.K. businesses. As far as we're concerned, we've got that proven platform. We've got an experienced management team there. We've got very capable team sitting behind them. If we can bring the right level of training and expertise into our U.S. team so that we can support through localization, the export of our products from the U.K., we don't see any reason why we can't push forward with that straightaway.
Thank you very much. What other geographic regions are you actively investigating with expanding the rail operations business?
Andy, do you wanna answer that one?
Yeah. I mean, we would, you know, we'd love to expand the business into Northern Europe as well. I think we are conscious of getting the right balance between opportunity and bandwidth. In the near term, we wouldn't necessarily be looking to go halfway across the world. We certainly geographic expansion is one of the avenues for M&A. As Chris said, more expansion in the U.S. and North America, expansion into Europe, would absolutely be keen to do that.
Tremendous. Thank you. Are you looking at expanding into the bus network?
We already do some work, particularly in our transport consultancy into the bus industry. We do have connections there. Again, in terms of future growth of the business, we are open-minded about diversifying in the transport space. As Chris said earlier, the key criteria for us are high quality businesses, high technology elements, growing recurring revenue. If we can find those targets in other parts of the transport space, then yeah, we're absolutely open-minded to it.
Tremendous. At this stage, we just have one more question, which I think. Oh, no, there's another one just come in, which I think you've already answered, but you may want to expand. Following the scrapping of the Transport Bill and consequent delay to Great British Railways' implementation, what impact, if any, do you feel this will have for Tracsis?
It clearly causes some uncertainty, but at the moment we're not seeing any kind of direct impact onto us as an organization. Clearly when we get to a situation, let's assume the industry does go to the Great British Railways model, that will clearly open up opportunities where the industry decides to standardize upon particular solutions that it might well apply nationwide. That might apply to its retail platform, it might apply to how it does ticketing, it might be about how it applies particular technologies. That clearly does open up the opportunity for a larger addressable market and perhaps easier procurement routes. It also opens up the threat to obviously other people coming into the market and potentially taking market share from us.
I think Great British Railways model, whichever way it goes, is a positive for the industry. We see it as a positive for us as an organization because it will largely be driven by digital transformation, and that's what plays to our strengths. What we're trying to do as much as we can is be involved in those conversations, ensure that as much of our leading edge tech as possible is in play with the different independent operators and with Network Rail. Whenever we get to that point, you know, we are one of the dominant suppliers of those technologies and are proving to the industry, the benefits that that brings them.
you know, we will continue to provide everybody with updates on how that transition goes, and we're hoping sort of by the time of our half-year results next year, we should have a lot more clarity in terms of that timeline.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. Final question at this stage, which I might need your help with. Could you integrate your RS and GIS localization with an acquisition of, say, LiveEO, it says. I don't know whether LiveEO is right or whether that's typing.
That business could be integrated in a lot of different ways. What we've got is a fairly specialist provider of Data Analytics and GIS. There are varying sizes of organization that provide that type of capability. Some are very large multinationals, and some are specialist consultancy type businesses. I think for us at the moment, what we would be interested in doing is expanding that footprint into Europe primarily, and also building the capabilities that we have into our current U.K. transport clients. Our focus is less on further acquisition and more integration, and it's more on how can we overlay it as a very clear product offering on top of the software and the products that we already sell into the transport space. I hope that answers the question.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. As far as you're aware, does Tracsis attract Business Property Relief, in terms of IHT purposes?
I will turn to my finance colleague on that. Andy?
Yeah, I don't know. That's one we'd have to take offline, and we can follow up on.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. That's the end of questions. Chris, do you have any closing remarks?
No, just to say thank you very much everybody for joining. You know, Andy Kelly and I couldn't do this without a fantastic team of people that work for us, and without the support of the wider industries in which we operate. A big thank you to everybody that's contributed to our success, and we're very confident that we can continue to grow the business and to you know, be an important contributor to the industries in which we operate moving forward. Thank you very much, everybody, and we look forward to catching up in the future.
Chris, Andy, many thanks indeed. To everyone listening, you'll now be taken to a webpage to give feedback on the presentation. If you're unable to complete it now, you'll receive a follow-up email. We'd be really grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete. Many thanks for joining. This is the end of the webinar.