Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Alcidion's half-year results investor webcast this morning. All participants are currently in a listen-only mode. Today's webcast will feature a presentation from Alcidion Managing Director, Ms. Kate Quirke, followed by a Q&A. If you do wish to ask a question, you can type it into the Q&A panel at the bottom of your screen at any time. Please note, we will hold on all questions until the conclusion of the presentation. I'd now like to hand over to Kate Quirke, Managing Director of Alcidion. Please go ahead, Kate.
Thanks, Sam, and thanks everyone for joining us. I know it's a very busy time of year for many of you, so I won't take up an enormous amount of your time this morning. We will be talking this morning to the Alcidion's half-year financial and operating update that we'll lodge with the ASX this morning. Also, we also lodged the presentation I'll be going through. If you want to use that, or you want to refer to it later, it is also on the ASX platform. Joining me on the call today is Colin MacKinnon, our Chief Financial and Operating Officer. We'll be happy to answer any questions that you have at the end of the presentation. Just to kick off, I'm really pleased to report Alcidion made very solid progress in the first half of FY 2021.
During that period, we delivered one of our strongest sales performances to date. All at the same time that we were also focusing on making continued improvements to the business to strengthen our operating capabilities and establish a foundation for rapid growth from here. Momentum across the business continues to accelerate, and that has enabled us to make important headway that positions us favorably for the remainder of FY 2021 and beyond. Looking in a little bit more detail at the financials as they have been lodged, I am pleased to report Alcidion delivered revenue of AUD 11.1 million in the first half of this financial year. This is a strong result. It is 36% higher than the AUD 8.2 million that we delivered in the first half of last financial year.
Our gross profit was AUD 9.8 million at a margin, at a gross margin or a margin of 88.1%, compared to AUD 7.1 million gross profit and a margin of 87.4% for the first half of last year. As we foreshadowed and detailed in the FY 2020 results presentation, we have reclassified the way we report gross profit. We've done that to more appropriately align with other ASX-listed software companies that many of you will compare us to. I'll come back to this shortly on the next slide, just to give you a little bit more detail. Those of you who have been following previous presentations will be aware of that change. Alcidion delivered an EBITDA loss in H1 of AUD 900,000, which was a 47% improvement on the H1 last year.
From a cash perspective, receipts in the first half were AUD 10.8 million, which is 17% higher than the previous period last year. As I mentioned on our last webcast, for those of you that were on it, and when we were doing the January quarter update, this figure excludes an additional AUD 3 million, which was received from South Tees in the first week of January, which was due to be received in December. We entered the second half of the financial year with a solid cash reserve of AUD 12.5 million, and that's now been further strengthened with the receipt of that AUD 3 million from South Tees. Looking a little bit around the profit and loss now, just to give you a little bit more detail around that from a comparative perspective.
This slide here is a pro forma profit and loss table that compares the first half of FY2021 to the first half of FY2020. Approximately AUD 4.8 million of the AUD 11.1 million first half revenue for this year is classified as non-recurring. However, it's important to note that approximately 60% of that non-recurring revenue is for product implementation work that is actually sold at the time that we will sell a Miya or Miya Precision or Miya Observations contract. That revenue is important in that it supports the ongoing recurring license fees that come once we've implemented that. They're very closely linked, and that is a significant contribution from a product perspective. During the half, we added AUD 17.4 million of contracted revenue, albeit not all of this will be recognized in FY2021. Obviously, we need to deliver on some of those projects to recognize it all.
However, our contract revenue able to be recognized for FY 2021 now stands at AUD 21.7 million. That's 17% higher than our full-year revenue for FY 2020, and we still have a further, well, it's six months if you take it from the end of the report, but in reality, it's four months from where we are today, remaining in this year. Any new sales that we make, a portion of those could further contribute to that revenue position as we head through the rest of this year. Of the AUD 21.7 million, approximately AUD 14 million is recurring, with AUD 7.7 million in non-recurring. As the table on the right-hand side here highlights, our recurring revenue is almost all generated from products, be it Miya Precision, Patientrack, which we obviously refer to as Miya Observations and Assessments now, or Smartpage.
With the implementation of those products being a major part of the non-recurring revenue component. Just going back to what I mentioned earlier about the classification of gross profit and how we report that and why we've done that to align better with industry practice and other ASX-listed companies. To put it simply. The way in which we're reporting in this set of financials is that all salary-related expenses for staff, be that product management, product development, sales, and service delivery that were previously in the gross profit component, have now been taken into operating expenses and are shown in the salaries and wages line in this pro forma P&L you're looking at here. The cost of sales expenses now only consists of fees paid for resold products, so the reseller agreements that we have with NextGate and [Veta, and services associated.
Managed cloud hosting, where we're providing services to manage a cloud environment. Sales commission and expenses such as travel and accommodation that directly relate to a project delivery. If we were deploying people to Murrumbidgee or Wagga Wagga Base Hospital, for example, then there are expenses related to that. They would go into that bucket. EBITDA for H1 FY 2021 was a loss of AUD 900,000 or AUD 0.9 million, or AUD 600,000 if you add back in the non-operational advisory services and the share-based expenses. You've heard me talk previously about the investment phase we've been in in terms of building the capacity and the capability in the organization to support the growth profile that we plan to have. The investment phase in those key areas of our fixed cap cost base for areas such as sales staff, IT, and people, place, and culture is now largely complete.
That'll result in a stabilization of the cost base and a move toward profitability from here. Albeit the second half that we're now in will incorporate the full year impact of investments made in H1, and some of those investments were made towards the end of H1 in terms of new people. Moving on, just to look at some of the milestones that we achieved during the half. From a sales perspective, the U.K., has been a significant focus for us, and you've obviously heard me talk about it in the past, and it has continued to be a focus over the past year, and it's our largest market opportunity.
Our performance in this market has been strong, notably the signing of a milestone five-year contract and the extension for that came shortly after with South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for the full suite of our products and services, including Miya Precision, Better Medications, Smartpage, cloud hosting, managed services, and some business change management services as well. The combined value of that contract and the subsequent extension was GBP 11.3 million, which makes it Alcidion's largest Miya contract to date. We certainly hope shapes some of the Miya contracts to come in the future. It is also strategically important in the U.K., as it is our second Miya Precision reference site in this market, following on from Dartford and Gravesham Foundation Trust.
The experience of these two early adopters and early implementations will establish a really strong reference point for the significant value Miya Precision can bring to hospitals in terms of their workflows, in terms of clinical decision-making and supporting that clinical decision process, patient management and flow, and obviously bedside care at hospitals in terms of mobility and providing that access to critical information at the bedside, and more increasingly in the home being managed from the hospital. In Australia, we saw important Miya Precision contracts signed here as well, in this half with Murrumbidgee Local Health District and with Sydney Local Health District. At Murrumbidgee, the clinical staff there are using Miya Precision and Miya MEMRe, to support better clinical decisions at the bedside. We have also implemented COVID monitoring dashboard and monitoring capabilities, for both in and out of hospital.
Of course, in Australia, they don't have many COVID patients, so at Murrumbidgee, we're actually using that for a range of patients being able to be treated in the home. We'll continue to see expansion of that as those capabilities that have been set up during COVID are now used to monitor patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and monitoring people receiving palliative care at home. At Sydney LHD, Miya Precision's been deployed in their remote hospital monitoring capability, RPA Virtual, That's again to support remote care of COVID-19 patients who are isolating at home. Obviously we have had some of that, but again, not as many, thankfully, as perhaps they've had in the U.K.,. Our discussions with RPA now are how we support that, again, moving into chronic care and other conditions that can be better managed in the home.
Both of these initial contracts provide us with a really strong opportunity to increase the scope of work for those sites and also into New South Wales more broadly, where we've seen commitment from the New South Wales government to establish a virtual care panel so that procurement of solutions like ours can be done more effectively, and also funding available for virtual care in New South Wales as well. Although our goal is continuing to secure large contracts like Miya Precision, it's really important to point out the strategic nature and the success that we are continuing to have with Miya Observations and Assessments, known to some of you as Patientrack and Smartpage. Those contracts are continuing.
We signed one in January with the Isle of Man, who are an existing Patientrack customer, for example. Some other contracts beyond Miya Precision that were signed during the half include, as I mentioned, increasing opportunities for Miya Observations and Assessments. During that period, we signed a five-year, AUD 1.5 million agreement with NHS Lanarkshire in Scotland to implement Miya Observations and Assessments across that board. That's our second Scotland board that has implemented the Miya Observations and Assessments, the other one being NHS Fife. During the period, Smartpage was appointed to the NHS Clinical Communications Procurement Framework, which is a government-led procurement in the U.K., that's been set up to help the NHS phase out pagers by the end of this year. It was going to be the end of last year, but COVID slowed that down a bit.
The framework's really important because it's an example of where the U.K., government is very innovative in doing this, that they set up and commit to frameworks that enable procurement to happen more efficiently. This then helps them to achieve their goal of digital maturity, which is a real focus of the NHS. Our appointment to that contract allows trusts to quickly and easily procure Smartpage without the need for going through a tender process. Since we've been appointed to that, we've signed Smartpage contracts with Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, as well as I've mentioned, the Department of Health and Social Care for the Isle of Man, and both of those are existing Miya Observations/Patientrack customers. In Australia, we continue to see services, contracts, and extensions signed. Alcidion has a very strong reputation for delivery of services in the healthcare IT space.
This included contracts with Northern Territory Health for program management services. Additional integration contracts with ACT Health were signed, and with New South Wales Health we signed some contracts for further technical services relating to the Child Data Hub, which has been a very successful project with New South Wales. Here in Victoria, where I'm based, we were appointed to a panel for the Victorian Department of Health as one of two suppliers able to provide implementation and support services to deploy the Victorian Health Incident Management System across the state. We're continuing to work with possible customers around using our services here in Victoria. As mentioned on our last call that I gave in H1, we also expanded our reseller partnership with NextGate to cover the U.K., and Ireland.
Our relationship with NextGate's been a very positive one, and it's great that we're able to provide this type of capability to our customers. What they do is provide a market-leading, enterprise-wide identification and provider registry for both patients and for providers of healthcare. It's about overcoming the challenges resulting from duplicate records and inconsistent data, simply because many people will have multiple identifiers depending on how many hospitals they've visited over a period of time. That software complements the capabilities of our product suite and enhances our competitive position everywhere, and now we're able to also provide that in the U.K.,. Overall, I'm very pleased with the headway we've made in all markets, both in terms of sales, but also in the operational improvements we've made to continue growing our product offering, service, and delivery capabilities.
We're entering this second half of the year in a very advantageous position. We're on track to surpass our FY20 revenue. With the contracted revenue, as I said before, already 17% higher than what the full year revenue was last year with still six months remaining from the close of this report. In addition to what I've outlined here in terms of current year, we also have revenue contracted out for the next five years because as many of you will know, contracts can be three to five years in term. We have around AUD 23 million contracted revenue that will be recognized over that time period, with 22.4 of that, the majority of it, as recurring product revenue, which we expect to be delivered at a gross margin of 85% or plus that.
Furthermore, what isn't in those numbers is that during that time of that FY 2022 to FY 2026, a number of our contracts will come up for renewal, and this happens quite regularly. Those contracts generally are just extended or signed in a fairly simple process. We would expect to be continuing to add to that forward-looking recurring revenue with very little impact on our sales team. It's usually handled by our customer advocacy team. From a market perspective, the sales pipeline continues to grow, and we're seeing healthcare procurement progressively return to pre-COVID levels in all markets, really, as hospitals have established protocols to deal with COVID cases, and also have understood far more the opportunity that digital provides them in the delivery of healthcare. We're very favorably positioned across all our markets.
In all of those markets, we're seeing a growing focus on government-led adoption of digital healthcare, and it's accelerating at pace. As a result, it is a very exciting time for Alcidion. I'm very proud of our team, the achievements that they've made over this period, and I'm looking forward to continuing to share our successes in this coming half with all of our shareholders. At that point, I'm going to conclude going through the details of the update, and I'll stop sharing my screen, and will hand over for some questions.
Thanks very much, Kate. Yep. We'd now like to open up the webcast to questions, and we'll try to get to as many as we can. Just a reminder that if you do wish to ask a question, you can type it into the Q&A panel below. The first question is, Kate, congratulations on the first half results and execution of the strategy so far. Given the product set is in place now, what are the revenue targets for 3-5 years hence?
Look, I think we're still in a part in terms of the evolution of the company and the way in which our customers are procuring software that is difficult to predict kind of what the revenue target year-over-year is going to be. I'd probably like to wait and see what the next half looks like before we start considering kind of giving forecasted revenue about that. I am very confident that we're going to continue to see the sorts of increases on revenue that we're currently experiencing. We will hope to be able to deliver that and update you more as the uptake becomes more steady in its nature.
Thanks, Kate. The next question is, Colin, thank you for your clear reporting. Given the investment in operating expenses and as revenue grows, can you give us some information on how operating expenses will grow in line with that?
Sure. As Kate has mentioned, I think, and as explained in the announcement, we think we're sort of getting to a stage where the increased investment we've been making, in both sales capability and the other overheads we need to support the expanded business, are starting to get to a stage that we're now happy with. It's leveling off and we therefore expect that to plateau. Having said that, I guess we will look for H2 to probably still see a slight increase in the OpEx for H1 because there's still some investments that haven't come through to be fully booked in the half year, and there's still a bit of investment to go. As COVID starts to affect us less, then we will see a bit of an uptick in some expenses in the area of marketing, travel, and other things which have been suppressed to date.
Certainly, we're looking for a leveling off, while we're obviously hoping that, as Kate just said, revenue will continue to grow along current lines. That's what will drive us towards profitability.
Thank you. We've got a similar question. Looking at the cost base, given the recent investments in new hires, how should we look at the expense base on an annualized basis?
Well, I think, when you look at OpEx, ignoring cost of sales, and that's as indicated in the table is about AUD 10.5 million per half. As I said, if we were to look for that to increase slightly in H2, then I think you're looking at annualized OpEx around sort of AUD 22 million, going forward. We wouldn't expect a major increase in that. There will inevitably be some increases to the business as revenue grows, but nowhere near the level of increase we've seen through recent investment.
Thanks, Colin. We've had a couple of questions come in around reseller products. What percentage of revenue are third-party products such as OPENeP? What margins do you make on them as a reseller?
From my perspective, they've never been a major focus of the business. We do it for strategic reasons. Currently, they wouldn't represent more than about 10% of revenue that we make. Generally, our margins on that are inevitably less than we ultimately make on our own licensed products. That would be traditionally somewhere in the sort of 30%-40% margin range.
Thank you. Our next question is: Which product offerings are seeing the highest level of demand at this point, and has it changed with COVID?
It's hard to say. Depends on what's going on in each territory. For example, in the U.K., Miya Precision is getting quite a lot of attention, but we still have a steady interest in Miya Observations and Assessments, which is the Patientrack equivalent. As a result of the Smartpage framework, which is one year kind of money being made available, we're seeing a really significant interest and demand in that. It will depend often on what's going on at any given time. Here in Australia, the focus is not on Miya Observations and Assessments at all because that is generally handled by the large EMR vendors like Cerner or Epic that have gone in. We're seeing a lot more focus on Miya Precision from an Australia perspective, and in New Zealand, the interest lies in Miya Precision, Medications, and Smartpage.
I don't believe there's been a significant shift across the board in terms of COVID driving one particular product. It is certainly shaping some of the ways in which our product, which is a platform that has a lot of capabilities offered in terms of the Miya Precision platform, how it may be used. Here in Australia, for example, COVID is driving the virtual care component where we're now seeing not just the integration of hospital data, but how can we bring all of that additional data that could be captured in community care and in mental health and in the home, and bringing that into a central area. That is a key driver for us in the Australian market.
The driver in the U.K., market for Miya Precision is very much around. We have people, I think, starting to become, or NHS Trusts starting to become a little dubious about the return on investment that they are making in these very large EMR systems and what they're getting out of it. We're starting to see a wave of people questioning those approaches and moving towards a best of breed solution, as we have put it, and Miya Precision being the orchestration layer that brings that data from pathology, medications, and radiology together and then adds our clinical capability to that environment. I'm sorry it's a long answer, but it's because it is quite different depending on which market we are talking to.
Thanks, Kate. The next question is, it's a two-part question. What level of sales and pipeline activity have you been seeing in the calendar year to date? Is there a pent-up demand from that COVID period where healthcare IT procurement focused on COVID-related issues?
Look, I think there will be some pent-up demand, although I have said before, and I'll continue to say, that we have seen continued sales activity, continued significant pipeline growth, particularly in the U.K., through the COVID situation. In the U.K., they've had, obviously, a far more intense period around management of COVID. I think that comes from the fact that funds are available in the NHS, and they need to be spent, and they generally need to be spent within the calendar year in which they are made available. COVID or not, those funds are available for digital health. There is some pent-up demand as we're getting in towards the end of the financial year for them. We've just heard that Matt Hancock has announced the second round of Digital Aspirant funding into the U.K.,
South Tees, for example, was someone that used that funding in order to seed the funding of the purchase for Miya Precision. That's where we're really focused. We're really focused on following the money in terms of who's got the funds to make these decisions. I'm very happy with the pipeline growth. It is steadily increasing with Miya Precision opportunities, but we are also, as I said before, seeing increasing opportunities around Smartpage and Miya Observations and Assessments because of this funding being available throughout the NHS.
Thank you, Kate. The next question is: Thanks for a great half year for investors. What does the current sales pipeline in the U.K., look like for the second half? You have answered that a little bit. The second part is, are multiple NHS Trusts looking into Alcidion over competitors?
Sorry, I didn't hear that one, Sam.
My question is, what is the current UK sales pipeline in the U.K., for the second half? Are multiple NHS Trusts looking into Alcidion over competitors?
Right. I think I've answered the first question in terms of.
Yeah
Pipeline. Yes, we are engaged with multiple NHS Trusts, and in some of those, in most of those, they will be looking at a competitor as well, because even when they use a framework, they generally need to be able to demonstrate that they are getting best value for money. We are and have continued to be involved and with a growing number of Trusts. In two weeks' time, the biggest annual Digital Health conference in the U.K., is held; Digital Health Rewired. Some of you may know that I was over there one year ago, and myself and Malcolm were doing a mad dash to get back before hotel quarantine when COVID commenced.
That's going to be a virtual conference this year, but it's very well signed up to, and we're very much looking forward to continuing to demonstrate to the NHS market through that what we have to offer. There are lots of opportunities, despite lockdown over there, to continue to get our message out, and I'm very happy with how it's being received by those trusts. Yes, we will come up inevitably against a comparison to something like Cerner, but I think the market's starting to understand that our proposition is quite different.
Thanks, Kate. The next question is: Can you provide some insight into the contract renewal process that occurs, particularly for those contracts that are shorter in length?
It depends again on the contract. We often have three or five-year contracts that have automatic extensions, so they can extend for another year or two. Those ones are fairly simple. Our support team, not even the sales team, will make contact with them. Our legal team will check that everything's fine. A letter might be enacted to extend that contract. Very straightforward. If it's come to the end of its extensions, we may need to look at the process of how that is further extended. A lot of people can just do that, can just go ahead and re-sign another contract. Some might need to test the market again. I can't even remember the last time that I've been in a market testing for a re-signing up of a contract.
Generally, if the software is already being used and the customer is happy, it's going to be very hard for anybody to displace us.
Thanks, Kate. The next question is: Given the foreshadowing of the cost base flattening out over FY 2021, is there a gross margin target in mind moving forward?
No, not really. I think we've been pretty clear about what we're looking to do. As we said through the presentation, we're anticipating that recurring revenue being at 85%+, above 85% gross margin. If you look at the gross margin now, the way we're reporting it's around 88%. I'd anticipate it continuing in that manner. In terms of moving towards profitability, I've always been pretty clear that I see next year as being a kind of moving towards profitability, maybe break even into the next financial year and growth from there. It's hard to predict. If sites come on board and we're revenuing that earlier than anticipated, it could be sooner. That's the plan that we have set for ourselves.
Thanks, Kate. We've just got one more sold revenue question before we move into some product questions. From the next 4C report, would you please break out sold revenue for FY22?
We don't usually do that until the first quarter of the next year. That's right, isn't it, Colin?
Usually it's the last quarter of the year, Q4.
Right.
We will give an initial view of sold work for the upcoming financial year.
The reason for that is that we won't have a solid position on that until we understand how much we revenue in the fourth quarter of the current year. What impacts how much we can revenue is delivery of project milestones.
Thanks. The next question, there's a couple. Are there any key capabilities which you're focused on adding to the product suite? Do you have a new product pipeline?
We are currently very much focused on delivering the depth across what we're doing. The latest that we have added has been around the clinical noting and natural language processing, which is just about to go live in Dartford. That is a key additional capability for us, and the way in which we're doing that, I think, is a big differentiator. We don't have anything mapped out other than perhaps extending what we do. For example, the work we're doing at Murrumbidgee, we may extend some of that capabilities we've talked about before into a consumer or a patient app. In terms of where we're at, I think we're really well-placed. Our proposition is excellent. We've got a couple of strategic partners in Better and NextGate.
As evidenced by South Tees, that gives them the opportunity to take our solution over these larger EMR/EPR vendors. Not saying we're not on the lookout for partners all the time, and also for M&A opportunities. In terms of partnerships, I talk to people weekly about their ability to add to what we're doing. There are some that we have loose alignments with. One is a company called Patients Know Best, for example, we refer to as PKB in the U.K., who do a lot of work in the primary care and patient-related app. We will bid with them when it's appropriate. We have some longer-term strategic ones and some more opportunistic alliances as well.
Thank you, Kate. The next question is, does Alcidion have competitors in the U.K., and ANZ? What are the relevant market shares, and how do Alcidion's growth rates compare with those competitors?
Wow, that's a big question. That could take me some time. I think I've kind of touched on this before in terms of Alcidion and the competitive landscape. What we do is quite unique. We are both an integration orchestration layer where you can bring a whole lot of systems together into a central standardized area, and then we also deploy capabilities off that platform. We make that platform also available to others who might want to hook in to the ecosystem of our electronic patient record, or the customer who may want to connect some work that they are doing. That differentiates us quite significantly. The other differentiator we have and have always had is a design-first mentality in terms of what we're doing.
We think about what this solution needs to look like in order for doctors and nurses to be engaged and for it to make their lives better. There are very few people even today that come at a system by deciding how it is our users are going to actually need to get access to that data. I'm very confident that the package of what we do is unique. That's not to say that we do not have competitors who do some of what we do, or who do what we do but are tackling it in a very different way. Obviously, in the U.K., if we're going for an EPR or an EMR engagement, people like Cerner and Epic and InterSystems are there as big players. There's a local player called Nervecentre who is kind of trying to build out a full suite EPR.
Here locally, we see Telstra Health come up in some of the conversations that we're having in that market space. If you break our products down into Smartpage, which is a far more commoditized type market, there are a lot of competitors in that market. Again, our differentiator in Smartpage is that we're not just a messaging tool, we've actually embedded patient-related data into it. When you get a message through Smartpage about a patient, it's going to tell you something about the patient rather than just, "Can you come to ward 4E and check on this patient?" We have got differentiators in many of our markets. I can't tell you what the market share of all of those competitors are. I'm sorry. I'm unable to kind of answer that one in the detail.
Thanks, Kate. The next question is, do you see similar opportunities like with the Miya Precision platform sitting on top of an EMR in the UK market?
We do. It shouldn't be any different than it is here, because what we're offering here is a mobile, easy-to-use front end to your EMR with decision support capabilities that are not as readily available in those EMRs. Is it a focus for our sales team at the moment? Not so much. We have those conversations opportunistically when they come up. We believe the opportunity in the U.K., is so significant in those that do not have an EPR yet or who want to go down this best-of-breed market, that the sales team are far better going after those opportunities more aggressively.
Thanks, Kate. We've just got time for two more questions, and if we can't get to everyone, we'll make sure we get in touch after this webcast. The next question we've got here is, with the reference sites you now have in the U.K., do you expect lead times to complete new NHS deals to shorten? Is there any evidence of this to date?
I think it's a possibility, and it's, again, using the frameworks, and I hate to keep going back to them, but they're a very important part of how we do business in the NHS. The South Tees deal was a pretty short process when you actually think about COVID hit in the middle of it. This will give you evidence of how these frameworks help. Most sales processes from go to whoa, from the first engagement, that could be nine months. We met South Tees in March. We did a demonstration. COVID hit, and they were unable to do anything really, and engage with us again until probably June, July, when the U.K., came out of that first lockdown. We went back and did demonstrations with them.
They had an external review done by the NHS because they were looking at something that was new, and they didn't want to go to tender, and they wanted to use a framework to purchase us. That review probably took about six or eight weeks. They came out recommending the approach South Tees wanted to take. We had a contract signed by September. That is a pretty speedy process, in terms of the sorts of money we were talking about. To me, that evidence is exactly what we were able to do. We had great reference site in Dartford, and there are opportunities and procurement frameworks in the U.K., that allow us to speed that up. Will that be the case every time? I don't think so. There are definitely opportunities to speed it up.
Thank you, Kate. Our last question is, given the stickiness of customers witnessed by the ease of recontracting, how do you think about exercising the pricing power that evidently exists?
Well, customers usually don't take too kindly to you using anything beyond what is a reasonable price increase over those contract extensions, if that's what you're getting at. We usually have built into contracts the means by which a price increase will occur, and we do have a price increase on recurring revenue every year as a standard contract term. It'll go up by CPI over time. If anything has significantly changed, though, if they're using it a different way or looking to add on any additional functionality, obviously we can go back and talk to them about charging more for that capability. Typically, it's generally a good idea to keep faith and trust with your customers in terms of how we do that. We tend to try to contract that into the re-engagement.
What is interesting from a pricing perspective, though, is if you'll see the difference between what the Dartford contract value and the South Tees contract value, we're clearly obviously matching that price to where we anticipate it should be. Dartford was early entry, early adopter price. South Tees is paying much more in the vicinity of where we expect that to be. As we prove that out even more, we will have opportunities to look at the value we are bringing and price that accordingly.
Thank you. That brings us to the end of today's Q&A session. I'd now like to hand back to Kate Quirke, who will close today's session.
Thanks very much. Thanks everyone for your questions. Great set of questions, and as I said, I'm always happy to answer them. Just to finish off, I'd like to, on behalf of Alcidion's board and the management team, I really want to thank you all for your ongoing support of Alcidion. I get lots of very good suggestions and comments from you, and I really appreciate that. We really look forward to updating you on our progress throughout the second half of this year. Thank you very much, and hope you have a great day.