Thank you everybody for tuning in. This is Stephan Shakespeare, CEO and Co-Founder of YouGov. I have with me Alex McIntosh, the CFO, Sundip Chahal, the COO. We are very happy to present to you, we think a very good set of numbers. Just waiting for a few more people to come in. Thank you, Hannah. Just waiting for the next slide. Yeah. We have top-line growth ahead of expectations. These are record numbers. In the sales area, we're having record sales months, month by month. We've got great momentum. It's been a good half year. That pipeline of sales is sustaining its momentum. Yet it allows us, I should say, to continue to invest in support of future growth.
As you know, we'll be addressing this directly later. As you know, we have a very challenging four-year plan. We feel very much in control of that plan, that things are moving well in that direction, and we'll talk about that properly later. Please realize that we are very much looking at beyond that plan as well into the second phase of the YouGov Platform, which has been under development and which we have been investing in significantly. We've been investing in an expansion of YouGov Profiles and expansion of Ratings into a second level, a second version of our self-service tool. We are really building heavily into this next phase of YouGov, even as we plan to complete on the second four-year plan. For the details of these great numbers, I hand you over to Alex.
Thank you, Stephan. Very pleased to be reporting a strong set of numbers, really building on the sales momentum which we're flagging in half one last year, and we saw continue into the second half. Very pleased to say that we continue to see very strong sales performance throughout this current financial year. Not all of that has converted to revenue. We do have a revenue profile for subscription products which lags. A lot of the focus on scalable, high visibility revenue is definitely beginning to come through, and we're very confident about momentum for the rest of the year. On a reported basis, revenues grew up by 28%.
We've had a little bit of an FX drag from the Euro and the US dollar rates compared to sterling, and a little bit of a benefit from some contribution from acquisitions. I'll make the fairly obvious point. 28% growth is far ahead of the industry growth and continues to demonstrate we are winning share in the core markets that we're in. Looking at the divisions, all divisions delivered growth in the period. Some significant growth coming from a Custom Research department, up 32% on the year. The Data services team, good growth at 9%. Really wanna make a specific point. Data Products, increasing growth up to 28%. Really strong focus from the sales team.
Data Products is a key differentiator for us as a company, and really is a driver for increasing our global scale. We're very pleased to have that back up to historical growth rates. I guess during pandemic, we saw a real increase in the amount of spend coming from our technology clients. As we're kind of moving hopefully into a more life as usual trading environment, we still are, but we continue to be very diversified in the number of sectors that we're in. We've seen the continued expansion in some key growth areas. Agencies, financial services and sports are a few areas we've been focusing on to augment the strength that we have in technology.
We've had a little bit of a decline in spend from government and charities, where we were doing a lot of COVID-related work. Just a small amount is being picked up by other sectors. We still have a very long tail of sectors. You'll note the purple bucket here is other. It shows the strength of YouGov's data, and that we're able to address many sectors, which provide future growth opportunities. The bulk of that is academic work, but within that, we also have retail, logistics and travel and energy, which are in their own right, fairly significant sectors. Just going through the contribution by division.
You'll see Data Products continues to be the primary profit driver for the group. That speaks to everything that we have discussed with you in the past. A lot of operational leverage is achievable through Data Products in the way that we have designed those. I think we're very pleased to see Custom Research making significant gains and really make the point, this is Custom Trackers that we've been focusing on which really utilize all of the assets that we've been investing in, using a lot of our panel, using our technology, particularly the Crunch platform, to really have high quality delivery to clients, but done in very efficient scale.
We've made a small improvement in margin, and we'll talk a little bit later in the presentation about where we see margins going next year and what we're controlling. I will preempt a question here. The central costs look like they have increased fairly significantly. Some of that is one-off costs. We've done a small amount of branding exercises. You see our slide deck has changed in its style. We've done a little bit of one-off work around the board. We've made a note. Roger Parry will be stepping down as Chairman. We have some advice there, and we also have some specific tasks that we've been working on.
We were also carrying some costs around the incubators, which we are carrying with a view to realizing some more growth from that into our growth plan, which will come after the one that we're currently in. We've had a very good period for cash conversion, very much focusing on working capital. This is probably the heaviest amount of investing we've been making as a company. In the half, we paid out the bonus from last year. We paid out a dividend. We also acquired LINK. We've been really focused on accelerating our cash collection in order to fund all these particular pieces.
Pleased to report a significant improvement on our cash conversion of 100%. I wanna make a point here, we have continued to invest in the group. We're slightly lower than we were last year, but we do make a point. We still will continue looking to invest, hopefully at the current rates, to support future growth. There's a few moving pieces in there, which I will discuss later. Some of the panel investment may be done. We are aiming to do that at a more efficient way by using chat and bringing that cost down. We have left the budget there to be able to capture opportunities where we see it. We continue to seek to bring in more technologists into the group, particularly to build out the future roadmap for the platform. With that, I'm gonna hand over to Sundip.
Thank you very much, Alex. I'm gonna talk you through our three main divisions, and then I will tell you what we've been doing in ESG since we last spoke. I'll start with Data Products. We've continued the strong momentum in Data Products, as you saw on Alex's slides. We saw in the second half of the last financial year into the first half of this financial year. We have underlying growth in the period in question of 32%, which, as you heard from Alex, is far ahead of the market. You will remember that we restructured sales teams at the beginning of the last financial year into new business and account management teams globally, and we continue to see those benefits in this financial year.
At the start of this financial year, we also appointed our very first CRO, and we're obviously very pleased with progression under his tutelage. We have recorded double-digit growth across all geographies, with the U.S. and mainland Europe recording the highest growth. Not surprisingly, the syndicated products subscription sales are prioritized by the new business sales teams and the new account management teams. These teams are driving those strong renewal rates that we are seeing coming through. Off the back of that, we're also seeing the average contract length rising off the back of multi-year contracts. All in all, we went through a slight loss of momentum last year. Some growing pains as that structure bedded in, but we are beginning to see the benefits of that change.
There was a slight decrease in the divisional margin, relatively minor, as expected. We went down from 33 to 32 percentage points this half year, but this was following expected investments to the customer experience team. That was really expected, and long term, we expect the margin to rebound back across the division. On to Data Services. We continue to see strong growth in the largest market, mainland Europe as well as Asia. Growth in the U.S. was flat, and in the U.K. we saw a slight decline as public sector and nonprofit clients slightly ebbed away in the first half compared to where we were 12 months ago.
We do expect the second half to see an acceleration, and this is due to the recent contract wins and increasingly as bundling fast turnaround projects with syndicated and Custom Research work. We did see a slight improvement in the margin of the back end integration of Custom Research, which we have been working on in the background, as we've spoken to you before, to help drive those efficiencies and also underpinned by our Centres of Excellence approach. On to Custom Research. Very pleasing growth rates here. We saw an acceleration in growth for Custom Research in the first half. This was primarily driven by strong sales pipeline in the U.S., where we're having a great success in the technology sector. We're very pleased with how that team is performing, and we expect that to continue.
We also saw broad-based growth in the U.K. across a variety of sectors. Of course, there was the contribution from the acquisition that we made in Switzerland, LINK. We're also continuing to drive the connected data proposition. This is bearing fruit, particularly with our sector and account management teams. Again, we've invested in the sales teams. We have a larger sales organization. We have more capacity and more firepower when we're approaching clients, and we are winning ever larger client projects. The margin grew to 19% off the back of operating leverage benefits and a greater contribution from our technology clients that I mentioned earlier. I will update you on what we are doing in ESG. I'm very pleased to say that we've made significant progress on all fronts this year.
In environmental, we're committed to monitoring and reducing our emissions relative to the size of our business. We're doing this in a number of ways, including we continue to proactively reduce our carbon emissions by reducing business travel, and we're doing that right across our entire business. In our London office, we are now using 100% renewable energy, and we're exploring similar options across the rest of our global footprint. We're also moving away from single-use plastics and making changes in our office operations and suppliers. On social, there's a number of things that we're doing there. We remain fully committed to making people's opinions heard for the benefit of the wider community. There's a number of ways we can do that, both internally and externally.
We are doing that so we can firstly make sure that our own panel continues to be accessible and representative. We've taken steps to ensure that the onboarding experience for all of the groups when they join in a panel is much easier, which enables us to recruit from a much broader cross-section more easily than we have in the past. We've expanded the mandated U.K. pay gap report, which is available on the website. The latest version is just up there to now include voluntary reporting on our U.K. ethnicity pay gap. We also have a D&I, Diversity and Inclusion Council to oversee all D&I initiatives internally, including the development of a D&I roadmap, which has been put together in collaboration with an external consultancy.
Finally, we of course are committed to providing a solid governance framework to support the business. We conducted an internal audit of corporate partnerships, memberships and affiliations, and we've implemented a new procedure for tracking and evaluating any potential partnerships. We continue to revise and enhance the supplier approval process. We've introduced a supplier code of conduct to ensure that YouGov only works with suppliers that align with our values and practices. Last but not least, we're delighted that we won the London Stock Exchange AIM Corporate Governance Award in October just gone. Well done, Corporate Governance team. With that, I'm going to hand back to Stephan.
Thank you, Sundip. I'd like to, just before we go to the next section, elaborate on one aspect of the ESG part. Of course, for us, the social mission is the absolutely essential basic thing that we do. Because everything that we do in our commercial work, as well as in a huge amount of other work, pro bono work as well, is to give everybody a voice. Is to give populations all over the globe, every splinter of opinion within those populations, a fair footing, a fair platform to be heard and to influence the world in which they live.
We do believe that we are perhaps unique in the degree to which all of our work has a massive social mission, and we invest such a large proportion of our work, of our data as well, directly to the public good through public data. We spend a lot, we foreground a huge amount of our data for use by everybody. In fact, we have a principle that all of our own proprietary data at top-line level can be made available to the public to serve lots of different academic and social needs. It is at the heart of everything that we do. Looking forward to the strategy, the next slide, please.
First of all, very broadly, we feel very much in control of our world. I should say, of course, we're in a very changeable world at the moment, and in that sense, predictions are hard. In terms of what we do, we do feel as if we have a lot of momentum. We have strong top-line growth as we've talked about, and that feels like it's continuing and we know how to make it continue. We are gonna control growth in the overhead costs because we have invested heavily ahead of the curve. That isn't a level of investment that we will keep going at least in one area, which is the overhead costs.
We need to keep that and we will keep that in the final year well below the top-line growth. Still growing it. We're not gonna cut in order to hit any targets. We are going to continue to grow the company in all areas, but considerably less than the top-line growth and the revenue growth in that final year because we have invested ahead of the curve and we will be taking the advantage of that to really see an upswing in our profit margins in the final year of the four-year plan. We think well beyond the four-year plan.
We think of the next plan, which may be a three-year plan, which will really be about getting the value out of the platform that we've built. We're continuing to build that platform. We're continuing to invest in that platform. We're continuing to work on ambitious growth that goes well beyond the current foreseeable plan. We make absolutely no excuse for continuing to invest in our technology platform and all that goes with it, because that is what is driving our growth and our ambition. Next slide, please, Hannah. Thanks. You are aware we've talked a lot about our previous in previous sessions about our strategic plan, and the parts of it are well known to you.
YouGov Direct has been launched in more markets, and it's integrated now with the YouGov Cube. In fact, it is going to be integrated into a bigger concept of our self-service offer. More of that in a moment. We've been expanding our global presence, 15 new markets over the last, not in the last half year, but over the last year or so. We've entered several new countries, some partly through acquisition, partly through organic growth, driven very much by client demand. We have put a lot of effort into the YouGov platform. That means we've developed and launched the first phase of Fusion, that is to say, unifying our member bases as is required to be a true platform.
The second phase of that is developing our self-service user interface to really be the best in class. That means a combination of Direct and Collaborate. These are two different pieces that we've had that have enabled Direct in the case of external clients and Collaborate internal clients to have more control over the platform themselves. That is now being unified to create an offer that turns us more and more into a platform where self-service can itself go through different levels of managed additional help. It isn't like pure self-service and pure Custom, but to have a flow between those two things, driven a lot by an expansion in Profiles. We now have global variables, global Profiles, as we call it.
We used to have that in only a few countries. We have a core set that now goes across the entire panel. Yeah, all the countries. That will be launched very shortly in the second half, and we've been expanding Ratings as well. The fact that we have over 10,000 micro brands that can be cut by over 1,000 variables really demonstrates what the power of connected data. That's just our top line public data that we share. You can imagine the richness of that is growing there, and the flexibility for how that could be used in lots of different ways. We've continued the development of Crunch, and improving dashboard tools with new functionality.
Of course, the YouGov Cube, which is our proprietary data, which is structured in a way that it can create more products and work just as well for custom projects as it does for data products. As you've seen in the growth of those Custom Trackers, for example, we've added to that observed online behavioral datasets and financial transaction data. That is growing too. We have continued, as you would expect us to build the technological and data basis of the platform that is YouGov, and that is our future.
Very quickly through this, Centres of Excellence, which you've heard a lot about, continues to make us more scalable, more streamlined company, with finance, data design, research, and customer service all benefiting from an increase in staff, building out of apps and platform aspects of the platform that enables things to be done more efficiently. That is really contributing to becoming that true platform I constantly talk about. Then one more, I think, Hannah, for me, I think there's another slide. Yes. Finally, our long-term targets. We are maintaining our journey to them. As you know, we're looking to double group revenue and double the adjusting operating profit. That is how we describe it in simple terms. It is in fact an earnings per share, an EPS, piece and how we get there, or how we aim to get there. I'm gonna hand you over to Alex.
As Stephan says, we have one eye to hitting our short-term targets, but also continuing to sort of invest to capture sort of future growth opportunities. We wanna make the point, we have a lot of focus on FY 2023, but we also see there is significant future growth potential for the company. We thought it'd be useful just to sort of paint a kind of qualitative picture. This isn't guidance. This is really giving you some insight into where we see our the building blocks to achieving our targets come from. The first part, which is looking at revenue, we make this point, it's really about sales momentum in that we're going for subscriptions where they're annual subscriptions.
We're locking in that revenue. A really good sales period gives us a benefit for future revenue, and doing the same with Custom Trackers. The plan was always to be back-end loaded. As Stephan says, we were investing up front in order to build the momentum. You'll see on the chart here, we're giving you the actuals over the first two periods of the four-year plan from FY 2019, starting at GBP 136.5 million of revenue. I do wanna make the point that the group looks significantly different than it did in FY 2019. There's a significant amount of change that has happened while we've continued to grow top line. You'll see we're pointing to FY 2022 is on plan.
I just wanna point to the growth ex-Link, which is looking at just our pure organic growth. We're really aiming to continue the current growth rates that we're seeing, particularly in customer and data products. Clearly, we'd like to see an acceleration of data services. We see all three divisions should be strong contributors to top line growth. What we wanna make the point here is that just maintaining momentum, sort of looking at the block between FY 2022 and 2023, really it should be achievable for us. We do make the point, these are our targets. These are not a forecast. This isn't a significant hockey stick or something that looks unachievable.
It is within our control, and we do make the point. The clients love the products. We're selling very well. We are very much continuing focusing on sustaining these growth rates that we have achieved. Hannah, just the next slide. This one is a little bit more backwards looking in that just so you understand our drivers for cost. Do wanna make the point that all of this is within our control. You're looking at again a qualitative bridge from FY 2019 overheads to what could be our FY 2022 overheads. The bulk of the investment has been made in staff and new teams being built in order to drive that top line growth.
As we go along the chart, I appreciate this, there's quite a lot of information on this. The biggest investments we've been making are in the sales teams. That obviously is pretty apparent in the performance we're achieving on top line. We have been making the column that's just at the end of the gray box there is other headcount is really delivery and data scientists and investment in product development people so that we can continue growing and delivering the product suite. Increasingly, we're using the Centres of Excellence model to try sort of limit how much investment we make in local teams to really generalize centralize teams that can support global delivery.
Going forward, we make this point, managing the growth in the cost base is within our control. We do make the point, we don't need to add significant more heads to deliver on the existing plan. We do make the point, we will be adding heads because we see there's benefit in going for future growth and really building out the technology platform that Stephan speaks to. Just wanna give a brief overview of sort of things that could help us and things that could drag on achieving performance. Again, sort of gross margin could be benefiting from increasing the number of the mix in data product sales. We get a lot of operational leverage coming from selling existing data to clients.
If we are moving into more countries or if we're moving into more sectors, we have to collect more data, we may have to invest more in data collection. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that would be a decision for future growth. Our operating profit is primarily dictated by staffing. If we increase sales within products, we don't need to increase staff as much. Many of our clients self-serve their own client service. They take their own analysis from the data, and we don't need to add additional headcount for that. That reduces the client service demands. We do need to reduce how fast we're growing our staff. We may make a decision.
There are opportunities for us to not do that. We're looking at using the Centres of Excellence model for an increasing number of activities around the group, which again has the benefit of lowering the overall overhead cost for the group. One of the key things that we're working on is how we get more effective at recruiting using technology for panel. Our chat technology is gonna be a useful contributor to really driving down the overall cost and also potentially increasing the retention rates within the panel, which reduces our overall sort of CapEx requirement to continue building on the panel. Obviously all those things can go the other way. We may need to be investing more in panel.
We may need more technology investment to accelerate our roadmap and our timeline. Like everybody around the world, we inevitably face some inflationary pressures coming from staff costs. That's not unique to anyone. Again, we make the point, the Cenex model is a good way of absorbing that. We do make the point, we are trying to limit central costs to the smallest possible growth. Clearly, as we get bigger as a group and we have more governance requirements, we may need to add more, particularly around ESG and financial regulations.
We may need to be adding more in technology, particularly around cyber, or just as the group is getting larger in more countries, we do need more systems to support our staff. Again, what drives that positively is really sort of controlling costs around core functions like legal, finance, HR, and the governance team. With that, I'm handing over to Stephan.
Just very quickly, as I've mentioned, we have positive sales momentum continuing across the company. Our current trading is at or slightly ahead of board expectations for the full year. We're maintaining the levels of technology and platform investment at similar levels. We have put the building blocks in place for the investments that we need for long-term targets. I never tire of saying that although we have very specific plans and very ambitious targets, at these milestone endings of these. You know, it was a five-year plan. There's now an ending, a four-year plan. We'll be embarking on maybe a three-year plan, who knows, after that.
Everything that we need to do for that and to keep growing at the rate that we're going is being put in place. There's no cutting things back in any way that could hurt our ambitions to be the number one company in our field, in our area. We continue to see no material impact from COVID-19 and as you've heard from the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Our return to office plans are underway and will be sensitive to local, obviously local concerns and local regulations. We wanna be flexible, but we also want to see staff returning to offices as much as possible, and to work in teams as they used to.
As I say, we'll do that in a very adaptive way. Processes are in place for full compliance with global sanctions, and we're monitoring all that very carefully. We don't have very obvious anything at risk from that in particular, other than, of course, what happens to the global economy. From our point of view, we see a very positive future. We're looking ahead to another great year or finishing this year and delivering on our ambitions for the next year. I hand to Sundip, who is gonna take the Q&A session.
Thank you, Stephan. Okay, so we've started getting some questions in. I believe you should be able to submit them through the Q&A function, but there's one that's come in through the chat, which we will take. Okay. One that's come in through the Q&A. Okay, let's start with the Q&A question. This is a question from Andrew Ripper. Stephan, if you don't mind taking this. Is there an optimal panel size? Do you expect to grow international panels the same percentage of populations as in the U.K. over the medium to long term?
Well, there is an optimal panel size for the Cube. That is to say, you need a certain size in order to cover all the things that we wanna put into that. If you know, it needs to be large enough to have the data to do all of your research. If it's too large, then of course you're not gonna get complete coverage in the way that you need to do for analysis. You want people to be answering most of the questions or all the questions in the core set.
I don't want to get technical about it, but you can imagine that a too large panel would mean that we would spread the data too thinly across too many people for it to be a proper connected data set. Having said that, we are now in a new era where chat allows us to have a lighter touch relationship with survey taking. It means that we can serve surveys to people based on the kinds of background or what their profiles tell us. If you in a self-serve system and you wanna talk to young mothers in Liverpool, then obviously, if you want a large sample for that, you need a very much larger sample than v ery much larger panel than you would ever have for your data products.
To achieve that, we are now looking at having layers of panel. That is to say, core panel that do the connected data part, and then broadening that out through chat and other ways like that. Rezonence allows us to reach wider audiences as well. That secondary panel, if you like, can be as large as you want because it isn't dealt with and paid in the same way. It's a complicated question, but we are very happy with the size of our panels for the work that we're doing and the work that we can foresee. We're not looking to make gigantic leaps in the size of the panel, you know, from the paid acquisition point of view.
Thank you, Stephan. Alex, I could answer this, but I'm gonna give this one to you. Fiona sent in a question. She said, "Is there any margin implication from having a larger number of multi-year contracts? Do these larger clients expect a better deal?
I'm gonna give you a very boring, it depends. In some cases where we're doing something which is mission critical to clients, obviously, they are willing to pay a premium for very high quality data that we're providing them because there is no real alternative for them to do this at scale. It is inevitable. The more major multinationals we work with, you deal with procurement more. It's a question we had a few reporting cycles ago. We do expect procurement to come and negotiate hard. A lot of what we try to do is really establish with the client the value proposition as opposed to the cost, this being a pure discussion around cost.
Where we see a little bit of margin pressure is it's not when we're getting the multi-country, multinational, multi-year deals, it's really where a client is trying to get us to do to work with them centrally as well as working with them locally. As we get sort of more effective as a global company, we can do better at that. Inevitably, more coordination globally between teams always sucks up a bit of time. I make the overall point that we're not seeing extreme pressure from the multi-country buyers of our products.
Thank you, Alex. Fiona, I will take your next question. Can you talk about staff churn and how easy is it to recruit for the Centres of Excellence? I'll start with the first part. Undoubtedly we have seen a high turnover of staff versus historical levels, and that has been very patchy across our geographies. I think we're emerging from that period of instability in our main geographies. We've seen that particularly in the U.K., the Great Resignation. We certainly weren't immune from that. In terms of other geographies, I think it's been less pronounced. What we have seen is in the Centres of Excellence, depending on the role and depending on the location. We have Centres of Excellence in four different countries.
We have more than one Centres of Excellence in India, for example. It really depends on the role that we're recruiting. If you will, our core business, which is research and operations, we've never struggled to hire the talent we need in either Mumbai or Bucharest. We obviously have a development team in Warsaw. I think developers around the world are becoming harder and harder to find the right talent. We have a pretty stringent test that we administer for development intake. The great thing is that test can be administered anywhere around the world. It's a common language. If people pass that test, they then go on to the next stage.
Long answer to your short question, but we certainly experienced it. We think we're coming through the other side of the staff churn, a period of stabilization. We certainly don't feel, well, we don't have any real issues recruiting for Centers of Excellence. There's a couple of questions on the chat. I'm gonna stick to the questions in the Q&A now, and once we get through these, we'll go back to the chat questions. There's a question from Brady. Hello. You've indicated confidence in delivering 25% growth in Data Products and Custom both this year and next. This is above current consensus. Should we take this as your official guidance? Do you want to start with that one, Alex, before we go into the rest of the question?
I will do. No, don't take it as official guidance. We do continue to make the points sort of get through this year. We are obviously giving some guidance on that. These are our management targets. Really, we are putting in place a lot of the building blocks, but we still have work to do in order to deliver all this. When we come out at full year in October, we will be providing, at that point, we will be providing guidance. Clearly what we're attempting to do is preempt a lot of the questions because it clearly is a significant focus for a lot of people who are following me, though.
Okay, slightly repetitive, but I'll go through the rest of the question. If I have interpreted this correctly, you are indicating that you are not wedded to the 50% margin targets by 2023 due to growth opportunities that you have seen, which may take you into your next phase of growth. Longer term, do you still see the 27% margin target as achievable? And what revenue base do you think is required to deliver this target?
Well, I'll start with one, I guess, ideological position. I wouldn't say the target is irrelevant. I think having a stated target where we want to achieve a higher margin really frames everything that we do as a company. It means we focus on being more effective. It means we focus on being more efficient. It means we invest in technology with an aim to reducing a lot of the manual things that we would historically done as a business. Investing in data clearly gives us the ability to achieve a higher rate in margins. There's a healthy thing for a company to continue to try beating at the same time as growing. I wouldn't say it's not important.
I think it's actually critical to have at the core of what we're trying to achieve as a business. I think we are making the point. Look, it's optically there's a significant jump that we'll be making into next year, and we will do our damnedest to get there. I think sort of longer term, yes, I think we feel pretty confident it is achievable, and we do make this point, driving more sort of automation through the platform. Either we're collecting the data and clients are using that data or like self-serve, clients are beginning to run their own surveys through the system. That has a huge amount of efficiency that we are seeking to capture by the margin.
Sorry, Alex, you're gonna have to race after this last part of this question. What percentage of revenues would you consider to be recurring, and how has this changed?
It has definitely increased. Right now we have about 50% of the revenue is recurring. That's it really comes from Data Products is fundamentally 100% recurring, and the clients are mostly subscribing to the data. We do have some examples where sort of clients are taking slices and with a view to moving them up to a subscription. What has changed has been our custom business, which historically was completely ad hoc. Every year, we had to sell pretty much the entire book of business again. We have roughly 1/3 of that now is contracted revenue. I do wanna make a point, it's not just contracted for one year.
We do have quite a number of clients that we have a three at the longest about five years of contract, where we will be running a research program for them, which is standard. Every month or every quarter, it's the same research that we're running for them, which is where you get the efficiency. We are seeing an increasing number of clients committing for longer periods.
Thank you, Alex. Stephan, could I ask you the next question from Jonathan? Please, could you offer some color on momentum in newer areas such as direct and chat? Are you pleased with customer/panel engagement?
Yeah, this is a harder area because there are so many sort of you know, this is highly experimental still, and there are areas which are being really positive and areas where we are learning and adapting. For example, there is obviously a clear interest and hunger for self-serve. To build a great interface is difficult. We've you know taken the learnings from the first to embark on a significant upgrade of that. On the chat front, there are places where we've had fantastic success, other areas where the success is not so great, different countries, also different themes and for different purposes.
I would say to you that there is a lot of upside here that we're expecting to come through. We've seen positive developments throughout the last six months. We're not obviously attaching figures to it yet. These two pieces are absolutely key to the strategy. That's why it's not a one-off hit. It's an experimental process. That is to say, some things have gone not so well, some things have gone really well. We know what we're doing here. We know how it's going to affect the future. That's all part of our next development of our strategy.
Thank you, Stephan. Alex, I'm gonna go back to you with a question from Steve Liechti. It looks like you are very comfortable on your doubling sales targets to FY 2023. While you say some cost/investment is now done, the message seems to be that the overall investment does continue. Does that mean your double margin target to FY 2023 is now less relevant or doable as you focus on longer term sales growth upside? Is any of the OpEx cost really driven by salary inflation, et cetera? You are suggesting a three-year plan from here. Any detail you can give us on why that is the right length versus previous periods? Sorry, Alex, there's quite a few questions in there.
No, that's okay. I won't repeat the margin. The point is we are really focused on our targets. The inflationary piece, one area that we obviously do see it is where we have churn, and then we're replacing staff. You'll see that the market has moved a little bit. With that, we are obviously keeping an eye on the market all the time, so that we are sort of actively retaining staff. It's obvious we do not want a brain drain, so to speak, within teams that we have invested in. You make the point. It's a pretty daft thing to say really, but we are an online company.
We have always been sort of keen to support staff in a variety of geographies. We are supporting staff mobility where we can if people want to move. We're also using that proactively to recruit people in geographies where we can find talent at an acceptable market rate. It is inevitable that we will have some inflation pressure, but we are managing that. In terms of the length of the plan, I think in part just going backwards, I think we have to remind everyone the first plan was really to kickstart growth in a company that was really starchy, doing a lot of sort of non-scalable activities.
Actually required quite a lot of heavy lifting to essentially take out, sort of non-core activities, really find what would be core, for the group, and then have the confidence to invest in those, embryonic activities, which have now become significant growth drivers. That inevitably would take time. I think now in terms of having shorter plans, that we've really got the momentum. We've got a lot of client relationships which we can build on. I think a lot of the building blocks continue to become stronger foundations for the next plan. As Stephan points to, delivering on the platform is something that's not a significant amount of time away.
We do need to do more work to deliver on it, but we should be able to get there faster. Again, this is all sort of at the planning stage. Stephan, if you wanna expand on that further. You're on mute.
Yeah. I mean, you’re talking about the next phase of our strategy. It is very much at the planning stage. We are meeting with the board in New York in a few months. At one of our annual events, the strategy day, that we’ll be looking at what happens afterwards.
We are very much, as I've said, we're very much aiming to continue to grow at these levels and to continue to innovate. It's, you know, core to the nature of this company that we want to be always doing the most interesting new things that are in keeping with, of course, the pieces that we've already built, and you know what that looks like. I do wanna say one thing about, you know, the impression that we're giving that we're confident about certain stretch targets and what lies beyond that. We do feel very much that it's in our hands to deliver on things that you expect.
We can see the buoyancy of the sales growth. We know where there are more opportunities for us, and we can see that. With that, we're very much in control over the degree of growth in costs that we find acceptable for next year, and that works for us. What we can't see, and I'm, you know, I really need to emphasize this strongly. You all know, you don't need to hear from me about how hard it is to predict where this world is going and what happens in our markets and whether, you know, the economy goes where the economy goes.
We are confident about the things that we can control, but we really can't say anything beyond that. It's obvious, but I need to state it. I don't want to give you the sense of overconfidence. We're not saying that we can hit targets 18 months from now that are still extremely ambitious. We're saying that we feel we are in control of the bit of the destiny that we can control, but there are lots of things that can happen. Please, if you allow me to say that, to say it is still a risky world and I don't wanna make any predictions that sound firm.
Thank you, Stephan. Just a few more questions. We have seven minutes remaining for questions. We'll try to finish exactly at half past. There's a question from Trevor. I'll take it, give you guys a little bit of a rest. Question from Trevor Fitzgerald. Can we have an update on large financial contracts which have been won recently and the pipeline? Are you seeing similar dynamics as you enter new geographies and build a presence? I'll kind of start with the back end of that question, please, if you don't mind, Trevor. We are increasingly working and pitching for clients that require a global footprint now and global presence.
Now there's a slight nuance in that that many of our competitors have often said they have a global presence and haven't actually had a global presence and have serviced those clients by using partners or affiliates, et cetera. We know that because our clients have then subsequently found out that that isn't the case. What we are doing is that we have been building our panels off the back of client wins. Client demand has driven us to open panels in lots of new geographies. You saw the 15 that were mentioned in the presentation. That then has meant that we are global, and particularly from the U.S. and the U.K., and these markets are, you know, we have often said that the U.S. is a primary driver of our sales growth.
Our clients that are based in those geographies are then able to buy our products across our expanded footprint. Expanding the footprint or opening a panel doesn't necessarily necessitate opening an office in that geography. There are locations and countries where we have paneled, but we have absolutely zero intention of opening a geography. It really is the ability to be able to sell our products and service our clients on a global basis, which is the first and foremost priority when it comes to where we open our panels. Often that is client-led.
I can't obviously go into too many specifics about individual contracts, just to say that obviously as the footprint continues to grow, we are then obviously able to service those clients across an increasing number of geographies, and then, naturally, that tends to increase the overall ticket price on those contracts. Stephan, there's a question from Fiona, which is, what is the biggest challenge, do you think, for the group on the ESG front?
That's a really hard question for us because I do think that what I said before is that we have such a powerful social mission. You know, we don't have to sort of struggle to think what to do. You know, on the E part, I mean, everybody can, you know, do more, but we're not a natural resource-heavy company, right? It's fairly streamlined already.
On the governance side, we do have a terrific team winning that award, you know, for AIM, the AIM Corporate Governance Award, attests to the fact that we have a really brilliant team, and we have a very strong board, and we're very confident in that area. I've already talked about the social missions stuff. Perhaps I'm sounding complacent, and that's our biggest problem, because, you know, it is a company that is very much aware of ESG. It's inherent in our work. It's what we hear back from our panelists. We know what kind of world they wanna live in because they tell us. We feel we're very in tune with that naturally. You're right. You know, we should be asking ourselves that question. I guess our biggest problem could be complacency in that case.
Thanks, Stephan. There's another question from Steve, Alex, which I'm gonna give to you. On a three to four-year view from here, what do you think the right margin for the business is?
I'm gonna give you it depends on really what the outcome of our plans are. I do make the point, we continue to see significant growth opportunities. If we have the opportunity to invest heavily into the group, to really go for very substantial SaaS revenues going forward, we may make that decision, but clearly we will come out and signpost what those decisions and subsequent plans are. I think long term, we wanna be able to see every year we can make a sort of a modest increase to that once we're past our FYP2 target. Again, without having that detailed planning, I can't really commit to a long-term target now.
Sorry, mic tends to be on mute. There's a question from Edward James. Alex, I'm gonna give this to you. Firstly, what mix of sales between the three divisions do you believe is optimal on a multi-year view, and therefore where you see the greatest growth potential? Ed, you wanna start with that one?
Yeah. It is a good question. We don't have really an ideal mix that we target. Clearly, if we were just getting subscription revenue, we would have a significant uplift in revenues. We recognize the bulk of our clients' research budget is spent on their own bespoke custom research. Having an offer that aligns the two, that we have our own syndicated data sold at rate card, and then we have a customized offer that can sit on top of that, or at least sort of lend very heavily from a lot of the benefits we have from the data and panel investment, means you're able to capture much larger contract values in the custom department.
I think you can see that in the level of growth that has come through. Really, it's less about the optimal mix and making sure we're selling things that we know we can do very well. Stephan's very clear about this internally. We don't wanna go for every single piece of research that a client may want to run. Some of that may be things that are non-core. Some of that just may not be things that we can do very well. It's very important that we wanna be the best and the biggest at what we can do and what we have invested in, and we believe we have a very compelling offer for that.
It doesn't mean we're gonna chase every pound, dollar, euro that the client is gonna spend on research. As that moves forward, clearly we'd like to see more of that coming through on platform, and that's where, to see it from a margin, we may see the economics of that model shifting, as we become more of a tech and data provider, as opposed to one which is data and research.
Thank you, Alex. We were halfway through the question, so I'm gonna finish the question. We are, however, out of time. However, we will finish the second half of the question from Edward. Secondly, please could you discuss how the amortization cost of the panel evolves over time, given the investment in the panel in recent years and the increasing average maturity of the panel?
Yeah.
More broadly, should we expect amortization to reduce as a percentage of sales meaningfully over the next 18 months and beyond?
Going backwards, yes. As a proportion of sales, yes, it will reduce. You can consider we have essentially two classes of panel. We have mature panels in U.K., U.S., Germany, where we've been running research for a very long time in those panels. They have average lives of over three years at a panelist level. We amortize investment in those panels over a three-year period. There is a buildup of activity you need to sort of put into new panels. We do make this point, we're investing in smaller panels around the world to augment the core markets we're already in. It's inevitable. You don't have the variety of surveys going through. You don't have the same volumes.
It's pretty obvious if you join a panel to take part in surveys, you need surveys to take. As you build up your research activity in a new market, it's inevitable you will have a higher churn. We're recognizing that by reducing the amortization rate for those panels. As we increase the survey volumes and get bigger in those new markets, that amortization rate will start to elongate again to three years because we'll see the average life of panelists. There's no reason why they should not become or they should not move to three years like they do in the more mature panels.
Thank you very much, Alex. Thank you, Stephan. I think we're out of time now. Thank you everyone for attending. That will be the end of this results broadcast. I believe there may be some questions that we haven't had a chance to answer, which we will follow up directly.
We will do.
Thank you, everyone.