which is the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and the lands from which all of you are joining me today. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who've joined us on the call today. As this is our half-year results, we are joined with Rebecca Wilson, our Chair joins us, along with our Chief Financial Officer, Matt Gepp. As is our usual approach, we'll take you through a presentation covering the key financial and commercial highlights for the half, followed by our thoughts on the outlook ahead, and then we'll open up the call at the end for Q&A.
All attendees do have the opportunity to ask questions at the conclusion of the presentation, and if you'd like to ask a question, can you please use the Q&A button or function at the bottom of the screen? We will aim to answer as many as possible, and we will also group together similarly repetitive questions together to avoid repetition. In order to allow Matt Gepp and I to focus on your questions, which may be financial in nature, our Chair is going to take her Chair role and manage the questions for us today. If we run out of time or we're unable to answer your question, we'll, we'll, we welcome you sending via your question via email to investor@alcidion.com, and we'll try and address as many of those after the call as possible.
Just a reminder, this webcast is being recorded and will be available on our website later today. Before I go through the results, I thought I'd take just a moment to remind shareholders and, you know, prospective shareholders of some of the core problems that we are trying to solve, and the types of solutions that Alcidion offers to our customers using our flagship platform, Miya Precision. As is probably known to many of you, although, you know, this could be through direct experience with the healthcare system or just by reading newspapers or looking at articles, you know that the healthcare systems globally are facing a multitude of complex challenges, and those challenges adversely affect stakeholders at all levels, be it the healthcare administrators, the clinicians, the patients, and of course, the families of patients.
From our perspective, many of these challenges can be traced to three fundamental problems: clinicians not having enough access to accurate and up-to-date, and more importantly, easy-to-digest and read patient medical histories, some of which span many years and sometimes decades of information. There's a lack of real-time visibility on a patient's journey as they move through the hospital. You know, that includes bed management, discharge, what is holding them up to be getting home to their own families, and also unnecessary staff administrative burden due to the legacy nature of some of the systems that they've got, the disparate systems that don't talk to each other. Our primary undertaking at Alcidion is to provide solutions that address all three of those problems, and to achieve it via a cloud-native, modern, and modular technology platform, which we call Miya Precision.
Miya can ingest data from multiple disparate systems, and it can then be used as a core system of record, but also a system of insight, allowing easier access into that information, allowing that information to be presented to administrators and clinicians in a way that supports them to ultimately improve the delivery of patient care. Due to the modular nature of Miya Precision, we're able to scale up and down the platform, depending on the functionality that our customers need and the budget that they have at any given point in time. In the slide that we've shown here on the screen, what we've presented in the pink bars are several of our most common solutions, and each solution is aimed at addressing one or more of those healthcare problems.
As I'm sure you can probably appreciate, the complexity of the interconnected nature of healthcare often means that, those solutions cross over multiple problem sets. For illustrative purposes, to sort of allow you to connect it, we've shown various customers under each of those relevant solutions and where they sort of more accurately fit. Albeit, for some of our cases, our customers will be across multiple solutions, and the Hume is a really good example of that, who use Miya Precision for Command Centre, they use it for Patient Flow, and they also use it for our Remote Patient Monitoring capabilities. We currently operate across three key geographies, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
However, as we outlined in FY 2025, we are increasing our efforts to expand into new markets, with the Middle East and Canada being the sort of the priority areas we're interested in. We are making good progress in those markets, albeit as you would expect, it takes time, and we're being judicious about the manner in which we go about that. Looking to the first half financial results now, it was a strong performance for the business across all areas, and really a continuation of the momentum that we established throughout 2025 or FY 2025. I won't steal Matt's thunder too much, as he'll go into greater detail on the financials straight after me, but I would like to touch on a few key points.
We delivered first half revenue of AUD 25.5 million, up 44% on the prior period, and that was driven predominantly by a higher recurring revenue contribution from customer wins that were sold in FY25, and coupled and, you know, added together to things like the Leidos contract expansion and the Northumbria contract expansions. The Annual Recurring Revenue, or ARR, as of the 31st of December 2025, was AUD 31.1 million, up 9% compared to the ARR as of the 30th of June 2025. The growth in our ARR is attributed to several of our contract expansions in the first half, as I mentioned above. Over time, we expect our AARR, it's very hard to keep saying that multiple times, to progressively increase as a % of our total revenue.
Notwithstanding, there will always be some implementation revenue, given the nature of our contracts and how our customers engage with us to implement our solutions. It's also worth clarifying that ARR does not include any of the multi-year capital upfront licenses, despite the fact that they do recur again upon the renewal of the contract term. Typically, those upfront capital licenses could be three, six, three years, five years, or ten years in general. During the year, we signed AUD 23.6 million in new total contract value during the half, of the first half, which was up over 29% on the prior period. We delivered strong half-year underlying EBITDA of AUD 4.2 million, up 675%, or in dollar terms, a AUD 3.7 million improvement over the same period last year.
Gross margin was lower than we saw in FY 2025. This is due to the particular construct of the contracts that we've signed in the first half. That being that there's been a larger portion of third-party product in the deals we've done this year. The Sussex deal also has a third-party component for medications management. We expect the gross margin for this year to be lower than it was in FY 2025. We also expect that to be an anomaly of this year. We, you know, expect to return to gross margin in the higher 80s in FY 2027 and beyond. Whilst we've already reported cash flow in the Q2 update, just reiterating, we delivered an operating cash outflow of AUD 2.6 million, which was an improvement of AUD 1.7 million over the prior period.
Worth noting, we ended the Q2 with a seasonally high debtor balance, and the majority of which has actually been collected in the quarter. Little bit on the operational highlights of the first half. We further expanded our relationship with North Cumbria, and we've had multiple expansions. The most material one is the one with Mosaic that we have announced to the market. They also bought Smartpage Clinical, and recently, after the half, more recently, have expanded and taken Smartpage Non-Clinical, which is looking after the orderlies and cleaners in the hospitals. We have also signed a material expansion with Leidos, leveraging the capability of Miya Precision across a greater number of care settings and applications.
As shareholders are probably aware, you know, our work with Leidos and other consortium partners is focused on the deployment of a healthcare knowledge management system for the Australian Defence Force. It's a major government project, one of the most significant undertaken in this country, and one in which we're very pleased to, you know, progressively increase our involvement in, as we have been clearly delivering into that project. Post the period end, we were selected by the University Hospital, Sussex, as their preferred provider for their new electronic patient record, and I'll touch on this further in the presentation. Before we move into the detail on the financials, I really want to take a moment to acknowledge our Alcidion team and also several of our customers.
Many of our customers during the half have been recognized within the health industry for their key, for key areas of excellence. The Health Service Journal, which is a major and well-respected UK health publication, each year hosts an event nominating a suite of digital awards across a range of areas. This year, Miya Precision customers have been nominated for six awards, including South Tees for Digital Transformation Organization of the Year, and University Hospital Southampton for Digital Team of the Year, in recognition of the work they've done on Miya Emergency Deployment. We congratulate everyone for their nominations and wish them luck when it comes to the awards in a couple of months' time.
Full credit goes to our customers for that work, but I really want to congratulate the efforts of our project delivery and implementation teams, many of whom have been heavily involved in some of those projects that we outlined above that are coming up for awards. On that note, I'll hand over to Matt, who can give you some further detail on the financials.
Thank you, Kate, good afternoon, and thank you to everyone who's joined us on the call today. It looks like our chief marketing officer is there on the right as well. I'd like to start by saying that we're very pleased with the H1 results released this morning. With the revenue, as Kate has already mentioned in the highlights, our Alcidion delivered AUD 25.5 million revenue in H1. That's a AUD 7.8 million increase on the prior year result. AUD 2.1 million of that increase came out of the ANZ business, and AUD 5.7 million came out of the UK business.
In ANZ, we saw an AUD 2.9 million increase in recurring revenue, driven by the third Leidos expansion announced in November, as well as the inclusion of a full six months of recurring revenue from Peninsula and NALHN, both of which were signed late in the first half of the prior year. That was offset by a small drop in ANZ services revenue of around AUD 800,000, which is largely attributable to the Hume Project, which was completed in prior year H1, as well as the Leidos implementation revenue from the original two contracts, which was materially completed in the prior year.
Neither of these contributed to the current year H1 revenue, although we will see an increase in services revenue from the ANZ business in H2, as work on the third Leidos extension started late in the half, and will continue for all of the second half of the FY 2026 year and into FY 2027. The UK saw an increase in recurring revenue of AUD 2.7 million. That's a result of the recurring revenue from the Haldar Flow and the North Cumbria EPR deals, neither of which featured in the prior year H1 result. UK services revenue added AUD 2.1 million, again, mostly driven by Haldar and NCIC implementation revenue. Both of those projects contributing materially in the six months to December 2025.
In addition, you'll see that we recognized an AUD 1 million capital license from the North Cumbria Mosaic expansion, signed in September. As Kate alluded to, you know, we did see downward pressure on the margin % in the half, as we signed a higher volume of deals with third-party vendor involvement, most notably Mosaic. It's important to note that these deals contributed to the record increase in revenue, which saw us go on to deliver an AUD 5.7 million increase in the margin to AUD 21 million. As Kate said, it is our view that the margin % will return to historical levels next financial year. Excluding LTI and restructure costs, salaries and wages increased AUD 500,000 half-on-half, with staffing levels unchanged from June.
This increase is a result of annual salary increases, as well as increased superannuation in Australia and pension costs in the UK. OpEx increased modestly across all categories in H1, adding AUD 380,000 to the costs versus the prior year. With the strengthening of the Australian dollar, we saw a reversal of those prior year unrealized FX gains in the half. As a result of the increase in revenue and margin, we've gone on to deliver an underlying EBITDA of AUD 4.2 million in the half, a AUD 3.7 million increase on the prior year. NPAT for the half is AUD 1.3 million, and this includes a AUD 1.9 million amortization charge on acquired intangibles, consistent with half of the AUD 3.6 million charge we saw in the FY 2024 year numbers.
Can we move to the dashboard? Thanks, Kate. On the top left here, we can see that H1 revenue is a record half-year result for our CDN. At AUD 25.5 million, it exceeds the previous highest half, being FY 2025 H2, which included a material capital license component of AUD 8.4 million from the North Cumbria EPR deal. Looking at the bottom left, what's here is that this result is underpinned by recurring revenue of AUD 19.3 million, as well as the fact that we've delivered almost as much implementation revenue in the half as we did in all of 2025. It goes without saying that our teams are extremely busy at the moment across ANZ and the U.K.
In the top right is a geographic split, with the accelerated growth in U.K. H1 revenue discussed above, we see the U.K. contributing just more than half of the total H1 result. Again, in the bottom right, reinforces the contribution of increasing recurring revenue, which makes up 76% of the H1 result. onto the revenue model slide. Here we demonstrate the onboarding of new customers and the progression of our revenue build. Through the implementation phase, where we typically see implementation revenue make up 10%-15% of new TCV value, with Miya Flow implementations taking three to six months and larger EPR implementations taking up to 12-24 months. In the middle, capital licenses are a feature of U.K. contracts. As a rule, we don't see this structure in ANZ.
Typically, these are paid upfront for 5-10 years before rolling onto an annual license subscription. Moving on to the right of this graphic, all new contracts, annual licensing and support and maintenance. This is usually billed quarterly or annually in advance and is the component of the contract that contributes to the steady build in ARR that we are seeing in our numbers now. On to the balance sheet. We end the half with AUD 14.2 million in cash. Consistent with previous H1s, we see a larger trade receivable balance than we see in June. This is partly the driver for improved cash receipts in H2 and results from the timing of a larger billing cycle late in the half.
We don't capitalize staff expenses to the balance sheet, so we see a steady year-on-year decrease in the carrying value of the intangibles balance, down AUD 1.9 million in this half, with an expectation that it will decrease by around the same amount in H2 this year. Trade payables are higher than usual, with the business carrying some of those H1 third-party vendor costs I mentioned earlier. Finally, on this page, we usually see deferred income decrease between June and December. This is a result of larger prior year Q4 invoicing in advance, unwinding throughout H1. On to our cash flow. As I mentioned, we end the year with AUD 14.2 million in cash. That's a material improvement of AUD 6.5 million on last December's cash of AUD 7.7 million...
H1 receipts at AUD 17 million are around 11% higher than the prior year. As those who follow us know, historically, Alcidion sees much stronger collections in H2. An operating cash outflow of AUD 2.6 in H1 is a AUD 1.6 million improvement on the prior year, and as discussed above on the balance sheet slide, is adversely impacted by those working capital movements, which are just a seasonal feature of Alcidion's billing cycles. Our business model does not require heavy CapEx spend, with full-year CapEx rarely exceeding the AUD 150K level. We spent AUD 32K in H1, mostly upgrading kit for staff. Kate, I will hand back to you to continue the presentation.
Thank you, Matt. We've included this slide because it really gives you a good illustration, I think, of the progress the business has made over the past 18 months. It's worth noting and reflecting on the fact that this is almost AUD 100 million of total contract revenue added, with the contract terms being generally three, five, or 10 years. As we know, and hopefully, you as shareholders are coming to understand, healthcare customers are very sticky. It's likely many of these customers will be with us for many years beyond their initial contract period. As I said at the start of the presentation, in the first half of FY 2026, we signed approximately AUD 24 million in new sales.
Primarily, there were 2 material contract expansions in that and a number of other renewals and small contracts. In September, we signed a $6.8 million expansion for the North Cumbria EPR contract with our third-party partner, Mosaic. They provide a product called MediViewer, which will provide it to North Cumbria as an electronic document management system, which assists the trust in digitizing their paper records, the stuff that still comes into hospitals in a paper format. Including that recent expansion, the combined TCV of the North Cumbria EPR contract now exceeds $45 million over a 10-year period. There are still, you know, further engagements with them and further opportunities to expand that again.
The implementation there continues to progress on schedule. Given the scale of the deployment, it'll definitely run for the balance of FY 2026 and into FY 2027, and being run in a phased manner. In November, we signed a AUD 12.3 million TCV expansion to the flagship contract that we have with Leidos for the Healthcare Knowledge Management System for Defence, a project referred to as JP 2060. The TCV for the original contract runs to June 2028. This contribution of AUD 12.3 million is about 2.9 years' worth. There's actually the ability for this contract to be extended out to 2036.
Adding together the recent expansion, plus what we had prior, the ARR of the Leidos contract exceeds AUD 5.5 million now, and given the length of the project, really underpins some of the financial stability of the Alcidion business well into the future. This was the third expansion to that original contract, and it continues to demonstrate the depth and breadth of Miya Precision platform. While we've continued to develop further modules from that, this land and expand capability and continuing to expand over time in line with our customers' needs and ability to buy is why, one, we continue to invest in engineering and product development because we can continue to sell it.
The emergency department module is you know, a perfect example of something that we have developed that is now creating a really, a new and strong revenue stream for us. During the half, we also extended some smaller, long-standing customer contract renewals. In Scotland, we extended our relationship with NHS Lanarkshire for a further three years. Second extension of that or second renewal of that, and that was for Miya Observations and Assessments. We also renewed our contract with Bolton for a further three years, again, for Miya Observations and Assessments. They also have a second contract with us for Miya Flow, Miya Access, and Miya Command. Whilst these are not material enough to announce individually, these extensions you know, can contribute AUD 200,000-AUD 400,000 or more annually.
Multiple of these play an important role in maintaining reference ability, but also growing that long-term contracted recurring revenue base for us. I'm sure now, by now, all of our shareholders are across the announcements that were made in January about Alcidion being named as the preferred provider for University Hospital Sussex, for their new EPR platform. UHS Sussex is an existing Alcidion customer for Patientrack observations, and it's one of the largest acute trusts in the UK. It has seven hospitals across one and a half million appointments per annum. It will be another milestone contract for us, and it's under negotiation now. We expect the minimum term to be seven years, and the total contract value to be around AUD 35 million, and we're still working through finalizing all of those details.
It came following a competitive tender process, and it will see us deploy Miya Precision modules as well as better medications management solutions, so there is a third-party component to the contract. The combined offering will provide the clinicians at Sussex real-time access to patient records, really streamlining and supporting that clinical decision-making. We expect the contract to be signed in the middle of the Q4 . With implementation to begin shortly thereafter and running for around 18 months, depending on the final agreed scale and breadth of the deployment. This contract will mark our third EPR contract and underpins our growing referenceability in the UK market, along with a lot of our best-of-breed solutions and our Flow Access Command solutions. The NHS and the UK market continues to be very important for us.
From a customer perspective, you know, we really believe the flexibility that Alcidion provides customers to adapt their budget and their capability, and to really focus on that, return on investment and the importance of increasing productivity, uniquely positions us in an environment where, you know, healthcare is looking to ensure that they get bang for their buck when they invest in technology. I'll move on. I won't talk about this in any great detail, but I would like to make a comment of that, you know, deployments that we've made during the year are really important, and they're not necessarily the part of the business that generates investor headlines. For us at Alcidion, it is one of our highest priorities, and it is an absolute strength of Alcidion.
We are consistently rewarded by our customers with positive comments and ratings around our deployment capabilities. Giving our customers a seamless implementation experience sets us apart from many others in the industry. Some who outsource their capabilities, but others who don't have that really deep technical knowledge and understanding that we have, which many of you may recall, comes from an acquisition we did of MKM Health some, nearly eight years ago now. In addition to the above, you know, a seamless implementation experience builds trust with customers, and it builds the confidence in our customers to buy more additional modules from us over time.
We've just held a two-day conference for our Australian customers, it was absolutely fantastic to have so many customers presenting their success stories and advocating for the benefits of deploying our solutions. We had representation from nearly every customer. We heard stories and presentations from Hume, NALHN, Leidos, Alfred, University Hospital Southampton, dialed in and gave a presentation, there were many notable keynote sessions. Your customers don't do that unless they're happy with the service and the solutions that you are providing them. I've presented on multiple occasions now that our sales strategy is based on land and expand, the relevance of this becomes even more compelling, the bigger the customer base that we get, the more customers we have, the more opportunities there are to sell the different modules.
The sales strategy involves getting that first site, and then expanding the capabilities. That sales strategy has been highly successful for us over the last couple of years, delivering significant upside from initial contract signing. From Leidos to North Cumbria, Hume, Dartford and Gravesham, South Tees, the list goes on and on. In fact, there are probably more customers that have bought additional modules than not. As I've alluded to, North Cumbria have consistently added to the contract, and we haven't even gone live yet with the first part of that phase of that project. This. I'm going to talk a little bit now about the growth pillars and the strategy going forward, and how we're executing against that. We first presented this slide at our FY25 roadshow back in September.
We still remain focused on these growth pillars. In our core markets, we continue to scale, leveraging our strengths in Patient Flow, virtual care, and that broader clinical modular offering, that in some cases supports EPR, but in other cases is supporting projects like the knowledge management system for the Defence Force. Following several new wins in FY 25, particularly in South Australia and Wales, our deployments and early success are being watched closely by neighboring and related customers in those jurisdictions. Given the enterprise nature of our business, these sales cycles, of course, take some time. However, the growing referenceability that we're seeing, you know, tends to lead to a shortening of those procurement cycles over time. The U.K. market is one that I know is, you know, often of very keen interest to shareholders.
This market is maturing, and we've recently seen the announcement that the next round of funding to support analog to digital under the 10-year plan, will be known as the Frontline Productivity Program. It's going to have an emphasis on investment in digital solutions that optimize their prior investments, and focus on delivering measurable productivity benefits within the year that can be demonstrable in giving a return on investment. Whilst the EPR procurements continue, and they will continue, the focus will also be on getting funding from the center to deploy modular solutions that have proven productivity benefits, and that is a place where Alcidion shines. We continue to evolve and innovate on the product. It's always been part of, at the heart of what Alcidion does.
We are a very innovative company in respect of healthcare technology, and we're certainly seen that way by the industry. We created Miya Emergency, a module which was developed in response to identified need from our customers, and helped demonstrate that not only our ability to innovate, but to commercialize that functionality and to turn it into value for shareholders and customers very quickly. Over the course of 2025, we released several new capabilities with including Miya Scribe, Miya Insight, and Miya AI. Some of you may have read our most recent announcement where we announced that we'd put Miya Precision's Concept Detection, which is part of our AI capabilities, registered as a Class I software device in Australia and the U.K.
Concept detection is an AI assisted feature within the Miya Noting module that analyzes the clinician's notes and their documentation to identify medical concepts and suggest an associated code. We call them SNOMED codes, which is basic terminology and allows us to be more efficient. We demonstrated some of this new technology over the last couple of days. It's very exciting. It is really an opportunity to continue to grow, to help clinicians to use our solutions more efficiently and get more out of it, but also to speed up the time and the safety of their workflow. We recognize the important role AI technologies are gonna play moving forward. This registration helps us to advance our AI commercialization strategy, strengthens our competitive position, but also demonstrates to our customers.
In a market that is quite risk-averse in respect of taking on technologies that they don't fully understand or have control over, by us taking these approaches, we are demonstrating what a good partner we are to our healthcare customers. Moving on to the next slide, I want to touch a little bit on the expanding to new geographies. We've continued to work on establishing our Alcidion presence in Canada and the Middle East. We did the work to identify these as being the next two core markets for us to look at. We have identified in Canada, we've identified and engaged with several potential customers, and our increased presence at marquee trade shows hasn't gone unnoticed.
We've certainly been able to look at how we can, without, you know, spending an enormous amount of money, look at how we can gain traction in that market in a small and steady, incremental way. I'm very pleased with our progress there. I never expected that we would deliver material revenue contribution from these markets in FY26, but we are building the case for it. In the Middle East, we, you do business there slightly differently. We expect to appoint a reseller partner in the very near term, and the network and market knowledge that the partners in these countries in the Middle East have, helps you to reduce your in-country presence. They typically get reimbursed by them selling contracts.
Both those markets present a significant upside opportunity for us in the business, we believe, but as I said, unlikely to make a contribution in this financial year. We also I just touched on some of the product capabilities. I think I probably haven't moved ahead as fast as I needed to. That was the marketing update. Looking forward to the outlook, we entered the second half with total FY26 contracted and renewal revenue right at this point, or at the end of the first half of AUD 43.1, and that's without any revenue contribution from new sales in the second half, or of course, UHS Sussex.
As I mentioned earlier, whilst the UHS Sussex contract negotiations are ongoing, we would anticipate a contract similar to North Cumbria, where we receive an upfront capital license fee payment shortly after signing. One difference to North Cumbria is there is better medications included in this, so there will be a third-party component to that contract. Based on the current timelines, we expect that to be mid-Q4, with the timing being relevant, as we position our guidance going forward, obviously. Given the recent contract wins, and with a clear focus on accelerating new sales in both our existing and new markets, we're also incrementally investing a little in a couple of key areas in the business. Specifically, we are expanding resourcing and sales and marketing teams, and we've done that. We did that.
If anyone who follows us knows that we have strengthened the UK sales team. We've done that because we believe we can get even greater pipeline conversion from doing that. We also have looked to increase marginally the deployment capabilities, which I indicated when we signed the Outback contract, we would need to add a few additional staff to do that deployment. Assuming that the UHS Sussex contract lands as we expect, the above marginal staff increases are taken into account, we've released guidance for FY 2026, that revenue is expected to exceed AUD 50 million, with EBITDA to be in excess of AUD 5 million, with an operating cash flow to remain positive and in line with FY 2025 operating cash flow of AUD 5.8 million.
I talked about our growth strategy on earlier slides. To summarize, we are continuing to scale in our existing core products and markets, particularly Patient Flow, integrated care records, virtual care or Remote Patient Monitoring, and Emergency Department, in particular in the U.K. Our increasing reference ability in these markets has us really well positioned to maintain the current momentum. Our evolving product functionality and market adjacencies really revolve around deepening our AI capability and looking at entry into new models of care, like hospital in the home that requires Remote Patient Monitoring. We've progressed our geographical expansion in Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., with several procurement opportunities and partner discussions underway.
In addition to the above, we do continue to review potential M&A opportunities, but we are quite selective about that, keeping in mind that we are quite focused at this point in time on the above three growth pillars. Following our strongest financial half to date, I am very excited about the position Alcidion's in at the moment, and the opportunity this presents for us to build the market and the future opportunities for our business. The health tech landscape is evolving, and at each turn, our value proposition is getting stronger and stronger. As we deliver on our promises to our customers. On that note, I will open up for questions and stop sharing probably.
Thanks, Kate. I just wanted to do a collective thank you for the many questions that have come in that have started with congratulations. I'm not gonna repeat those, but just wanted to say thank you. We really appreciate that. The questions really fall into four buckets, which is, again, not surprising. UK market and the EPR opportunity, specific questions around contracts and customers, some on the financials, and we'll finish with AI. I also appreciate, Kate, some of these questions have come in well before you actually covered many of them in your presentation, but in respect to shareholders asking the question, I will pose some of them again for you.
Can you just please start by giving an update on the market opportunity for Alcidion in the UK, expanding from acute hospitals into areas like mental health, community health, and how you're viewing that market now?
Look, really interesting. The mental health and community care market in the U.K. is really interesting, quite different to what you see in Australia, because they actually operate them as separate trusts, whereas here we integrate mental health generally into the acute care trust. You see a real separation where all the money has been going into the acute care trusts, and the, you know, community and mental health are certainly sort of a little bit second cousins in terms of those investment. We're seeing a shift from that. We believe that we're well-placed. We actually already have our first trust in Hereford and Worcester, which is in fact a mental health trust using Miya Precision.
We're certainly looking as we see more investment moving into this area in the UK, we see it as an opening up market opportunity for us.
Next question is around how much your future pipeline is concentrated in these large-scale UK EPR contracts like Sussex, versus the expanding footprint of Miya Precision within your existing customer base.
I think there's three parts to the pipeline. The three big buckets, putting aside renewals and so forth. One is the EPR contract. That does contribute to the pipeline at the moment. There are active opportunities for EPR still happening in the U.K. I suspect to see that for the years to come, as there are still customers that are renewing, they're customers that were part of the first wave of the EPR program. There are the new customers for us that are very much around emergency department flow, Remote Patient Monitoring. They are new customers, not add-on customers for Miya Precision, they're not EPRs. The third bucket is those expanding opportunities.
I would say the first two buckets still make up probably 70% of the pipeline, maybe a little more, and then the add-on. As you see more new customers, you will see the modular nature increase.
Perhaps just one final question on the EPR market in the UK, just in terms of, you know, you just said you're seeing opportunities. If you could just expand on that and how Alcidion is, its strengths, competitive strengths, in that market at the moment?
Very much for us, we're the modular play, we're the quick wins, return on investment. We are definitely seeing in the EPR environment that the money, the stipulation from the center is that you need to be able to have quick return on investment. Having quick return on investment is not something that plays to the strengths of the big U.S. legacy providers, the Epic, the Oracle, and so forth. Those with the modular play are well positioned. We are very selective in, I've said this many times, in the EPRs that we go for. We do not bid for all EPRs. We review the market engagement requirements very carefully, we tend to go after the ones that we feel we have a high chance of winning, or at least a high chance of being in the last two.
You know, our competitive advantage when you go to our customers and say: "Why are you selecting us?" It is speed, it is reputation in the market, it is the capability, and the ease of use of the product. We are consistently told that Alcidion products are as easy to use as they look.
Just a final question. Obviously, connected to the EPR opportunities in the UK was our acquisition of Silverlink. Just your views on whether Alcidion has got the return on investment that you expected from that acquisition.
I think I've probably answered this a few times in different ways over the many calls we've had since we did the acquisition of Silverlink. Without Silverlink, Alcidion could not be in the EPR market. It's as simple as that. The return on investment is there because we would not have Northumbria, South Tees, or Sussex.
Okay, let's just move on to some contract or customer-specific inquiries or questions. Can you please quantify the TCV of the Smartpage Non-Clinical win for NCIC? Is this the same or more than the AUD 1.5 million TCV for Smartpage Clinical?
Matt may know this better than me, but I think it's very similar. We typically sell them for about the same price each.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure it's pretty in line.
Yeah, you happy for me to chip in there, Kate?
Yep.
Yeah, it was about GBP 600,000, which is around AUD 1.2 million, so a little bit lower, but...
Okay. thanks, Matt. After sales of Miya Flow into Hume, NALHN, and Peninsula Health in 2024, there has been no further reported sales of Miya Flow in Australia. What are your expectations for the product in 2026?
Look, we continue to see interest in Flow solutions across Australia and New Zealand. We know New Zealand's been a bit challenged in respect of any investment in technology, we're starting to see some shoots that they might be starting to turn their head, they actually have a digital plan, investment plan now. The first half for us has been one of contract expansions, which is really demonstrating the value of the land and expand opportunities. You know, in essence, we've gone back to NALHN and Hume and sold them additional modules. You know, that has been, you know, a very positive part of the fact that they were sold in FY 2024 and in 2025, then we can sell them into this year.
We've got numerous engagements with potential new customers focused on Flow, they'll continue through the pipeline at the rate they proceed, which really depends on the customer's, you know, procurement processes. Flow is very much still a part of the positioning into Australia.
Kate, on renewal of Bolton and Lancashire, is there an uplift in ARR from the prior contract?
Yes, there's always some, even if it's only CPR, but sometimes there is more than that, depending on what the contract allows us to do. There is always an uplift each time, in respect of those contracts.
Just one question in relation to the recent dual AI registration. Can you provide any forward forecasts on potential additional earnings to come from this recent announcement? How easy or difficult it will be to add on to new to existing customer deals?
Again, it's part of this whole strategy to continually evolve the modules and capabilities that we can sell back into existing customers. You know, our strategy will be to enable this to be licensed to existing customers that don't have it. It also has value, and it positions us competitively when facing off against competition and other customers. You know, we all know, you all know, I can see lots of questions on here about AI, that, you know, healthcare is a bit averse to deployment of AI too aggressively at this point in time. There are elements that lend themselves very well, and obviously, the big volume of data and being able to search through it is a really excellent example of that.
It allows us to position ourselves as a leader in this area and somebody who is driving forward. South Tees have actually got that capability already deployed now in test, and they're literally just waiting to move to the to upgrade to our latest release before they will turn that on and go live. Then we'll be able to, you know, show that. That ability to have that in test was part of some of the work that Sussex looked when they did an actual reference visit to Tees, so it's worth something to us to, even in a test environment at this point.
Kate, I'll keep going on the AI questions. Then we'll finish with the financial questions. There is quite a lot. It's both from a positive opportunity perspective and a defensive perspective. Let's start with this one. To what extent is Alcidion exposed to disruption caused by agentic AI? Perhaps if you can just speak to this in detail, including how you're sort of managing those risks or any sort of protective or moats to your position.
Okay, there's two points to this. First of all, we think agentic AI is amazing because we're using it aggressively in our business. Claude is everybody's best friend in Alcidion. It's being used in our engineering teams, it's being used in our product teams, it's being used in testing. Pretty well everyone is using it for elements. We understand the value of it. We only really started adopting this in May of last year. It has revolutionized a lot of the work that we are doing in terms of speed, and in that then allows us to get these new features and capabilities to market more quickly, which allows us to position ourselves. Why can we do that?
We have built a platform of data that is standardized, recognized, and safe, upon which AI capabilities can be built. That is the moat that organizations like Alcidion have built in healthcare. Unlike, you know, just using agentic AI to change a process or redo something more quickly, when you are using healthcare data, that healthcare data needs to be standardized. We need to know exactly where it's coming from, and we need to be able to demonstrate the veracity of that data in terms of its use. I don't feel threatened by somebody coming along and being able to build Miya Precision. We have got a really strong reputation. That is a large part of what customers buy from us, as much as they buy what we do.
We keep an eye on it, as I said, we use it in our own markets, and we will need to be agile and flexible and keep an eye on it. At this point in time, I believe in the healthcare sector, having a really, really strong data foundation is going to be very important to protect us from that.
Great, you've actually answered quite a few questions that have come up on that subject, so I'll just skip to this one. Is there any contribution from AI in the lower salary and operating costs?
Look, I would say we run a pretty tight environment anyway, and you will know that we took quite a lot of headcount out of the business back in 2024. As a result, we've become very efficient in what we do, and we've used AI to, you know, support those individuals to become even more efficient. I don't see it contributing in the short term to a further reduction in headcount at Alcidion.
Okay, perhaps just one final question on AI. Is the business seeing an opportunity with AI to reduce development time or implementation time more specifically? How do you sort of see this shaping?
Yeah, we've definitely seen it in development time. Development for us is three phases: it's requirements definition from the product team, it is the engineering time to build it, and then it's the testing time to go through those processes. All of our teams are using AI at various levels along that, and we are measuring some of the increase, the percentage increases in productivity and time. We're using that time to invest in faster development. We're using it to get products out the door more quickly. We're getting better quality, so less rework through doing that because the testing is a lot, you know, is identifying this, and we're able to measure it. We're definitely deploying it. It's very positive for our business, but we run a pretty small team comparatively to a lot of healthcare.
IT organizations. It's pretty efficient in terms of what it does.
Thanks, Kate. Let's just move now to some specific financial questions. This one comes up quite regularly, and I think it's worth asking and getting your response. In the first half, annual recurring product revenue was AUD 19.3 million, so if I multiply that by two, I get AUD 38.6. How do I reconcile this to your ARR figure of AUD 31.1? What am I getting wrong?
Well, I'm so going to leave that to Matt.
The ARR figure we released is a 12-month forward ARR figure for calendar year 2026, and it's very simply just that. You can't multiply H1 by 2 because H1 incorporates the licensing for the Leidos agreement. You can't just double H1 because that's not a feature of the H2 ARR.
Okay, thank you. Some questions around the AUD 50 million revenue guidance. Just in terms of giving some color on what's included in that, for example, are you including an upfront fee for Sussex?
Yes, we are. It includes an upfront fee for Sussex. It includes an acknowledgement that there will be a third-party component of the Sussex contract that goes to Better Meds. It includes a small-ish increase in OpEx salaries and wages. As I said, we have added some additional sales, marketing, and a couple of delivery heads at the back end of or towards the end of the half, so we'll have six months of that coming through. Yeah, that's what goes into it effectively.
Great, that's answered a couple of the questions that have come through specifically on OpEx. Could you please also frame expectations around TCV for financial year 2027? Like, how... You know, in terms of, you know, the type of growth you're expecting.
We don't usually sort of anticipate that necessarily because, as you can imagine, I'm thinking anyone that's been following us for some time knows that no two halves are the same in terms of the construct of how these contracts fall. If you look at the TCV year-on-year over the last few years, it has been growing steadily year-on-year. We have got a very strong pipeline. I can honestly, hand on heart, say it's the strongest it has ever been in terms of total value by a lot. That is because there are a number of large opportunities in that in those processes at the moment. Yes, we expect TCV to continue to grow.
How much it converts each year is different depending on each deal, as well as whether it has an upfront component or whether it's an annualized deal. If you look back historically at what we've achieved over the last couple of years, we're expecting it to continue in that very positive trajectory.
Fantastic. Just, one final question around gross margins. How do you sort of think about gross margin as the long-term target?
Look, I think we expect to revert roughly to where we've been prior to this year, so in the mid to higher 80s in terms of gross margin. This was a year that just had an unusual amount of third-party components to what to what we sold. It's all revenue for us. It all helps us to build our profile as a modular EPR provider. It just so happens to have landed in a different construct to what we've seen historically or what we expect to see in the go forward.
Yeah, Kate, let's just finish with one final question in relation to new opportunities in Canada. You mentioned that there were procurement discussions underway. Does this mean that you're sort of at that RFI or RFP stage or contract negotiation stage with those potential customers?
I can say we're involved in RFIs, in Canada at this point in time.
Fantastic. Thank you. Well, that's all of the questions, so over to you for concluding remarks.
Thank you very much. As I like to do at the end of all of these calls, I'd like to thank you as shareholders for, first of all, for being part of the Alcidion journey and for taking time to attend this call and to ask a lot of really great questions. I'd like to also thank the board for their guidance and support that we've had over the first half. I'm very much looking forward to continuing the momentum that we have had in the first half into the second half, but also throughout 2026. Thanks again to the Alcidion team for their incredible hard work.
Thank you.