Right. Good morning. Hello, and welcome to Catapult's Earnings Conference Call for the financial year ended 31 March 2023. I'm Andrew Keys , and I'm moderating the session today. Please note the call is being recorded. Joining me in Melbourne is Catapult CEO, Will Lopes. In a moment, Will is gonna provide some opening comments, then there'll be a Q&A session. If you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand in Zoom, so I can introduce you to the call or send through your question via Q&A to myself. Good morning, Will. Over to you.
Thank you, Andrew, and welcome to our conference call. Joining me today is our outgoing CFO, Hayden Stockdale, and our incoming CFO, Bob Cruickshank. Before we open up for questions, I would like to remind you that we posted our results last night, which include a video recording where Hayden and I walk through each slide in more detail.
Let me take a moment to recap three key points of results before we dive into questions. First, we are confident in our path to generate positive free cash in FY 2024. This confidence is coming from our ability to significantly reduce costs while maintaining a high-growth SaaS business. In the second half of FY23, we lowered operating expenses by $11.9 million, which created an improvement of $15.4 million on EBITDA, allowing us to deliver a second- half EBITDA of $2.2 million. This generated a 40% improvement on operating cash flow from FY 2022. We ended FY 2023 with $3.7 million of operating cash flow. Despite the reduction in expenses, we were able to maintain our SaaS business at a high growth rate. SaaS revenue was up 22%.
We had record second-half sales, with annual contracts rising by 20.2% and record levels of low churn at 3.8%. The second key point is that Catapult has now entered a new phase of profitable growth. Exiting our growth investment phase, we anticipate that every additional AUD 1 of revenue will come with approximately 30% or more of profit margin. This is due to our fixed cost base now being established to support the business at scale, and the absolute cost of this base to rise modestly from here. Think 5%-8% annually, depending on inflation. While our variable cost to grow revenue is now established at 56% of revenue, we expect that to improve. The last key point is that our SaaS growth strategy of landing with wearables and expanding with video is working as anticipated.
In FY 2023, our wearables business continues to show high growth rate, with its annual contracts growing by 28% during the period. In video, we have two products: a legacy solution serving football and ice hockey, and a new solution based on the products acquired from SBG, serving soccer, basketball, rugby, and motorsport. Within our legacy solution, our annual contracts grew 7% from a starting base of approximately AUD 14 million. Our new solutions grew by 27.5% from a starting base of approximately AUD 5.3 million. This shows that our new solution is having success in penetrating new markets, its growth rate is now similar to the high growth rate we have been experiencing with our wearables vertical. FY 2023 was a pivotal year for Catapult.
We've been able to reduce expenses, maintain high growth rates, gain confidence in our SaaS growth strategy, and with our SaaS leverage now grow profitably going forward. I'll now hand it back to Andrew to start our Q&A sessions.
Thank you, Will. A reminder for participants, if you have a question, please drop it into the Q&A function. I'll gladly read it out for you, or raise your hand in Zoom, and we'll bring you to the call. Okay, Julian Mulcahy from Evans & Partners. Julian, please unmute your line and come in.
Hi, Will.
Good morning.
Yeah. Perhaps you can maybe just run through, you know, where the wearables growth has come from and, you know, what kind of teams, and then also maybe touch on where, you know, the video team growth has come in the last year and where you expect it to over this next year.
On wearables, on the P&H, the growth continues to come from, you know, expanding typically in regions that we haven't had deep penetration yet. European market, in areas in the collegiate market around the U.S., and in the second half in particularly was really around Latin America and APAC. In terms of video, as I mentioned in the intro here, really two solutions to think about, Julian. There's the legacy solution, Thunder, that grew about 7%. That growth continues to come from American football, and ice hockey, you know, primarily with some upselling there and some price increase. On the new solution, it's really coming from areas where we don't have high penetration of video, customers today.
You know, soccer primarily in Europe, a bit of motorsport, and a little bit here in APAC. I think in the results we presented, there's a slide that you can see that in EMEA, the growth rate was about 15%, you know, in video solution and about 32% in APAC this past year. Most of that is coming from cross-sell of existing customers that don't have video solutions from Catapult.
Right. I see that the number of customers taking more than two products, two or more, is now up to sort of 9.5%. Would you think that would start to sort of hockey stick in this next year or will it be the same sort of gradual build?
Yeah. I don't know if we're gonna be at a hockey stick in FY 2024. You know, I'm hoping that the growth rate continues to stay around, you know, this healthy pace of 30%-50% over the coming year. You know, the hockey stick factor for us because we're really primarily focused on cross-selling video, I don't think we're gonna see that in 2024.
Right. And remind us on the timeline of the video product being available for NFL. I understand that you were going to do it in two stages to transition across the XOS product across to the new platform?
That's correct. We anticipate that we will begin to bring that first phase to market this year. As the start of the next season comes around, we will have now a combination of the new products tied to our legacy video solution with the design that, starting the following season, our customers will have the ability to fully transfer and probably with the view of the, you know, forward season, to basically be the last season that we're running Thunder.
Right. Okay. Thanks, Will.
You got it.
Okay. Thanks, Julian. Remind our other participants, if you have a question, please drop in the Q&A or raise your hand, and we will patch you in for a question here, Will, about growth in the wearables vertical, which has consistently been at or above mid-twenties for a long time now. How confident are you in the sustainability of those rates of growth?
Yeah, great question. I think, you know, we've been, I think a CAGR now, I think about 30% for the last three years on P&H growth. The way we look forward, in terms of the growth around wearables is that, you know, we still have about, I think overall about 2,400-2,500 customers in wearables today against, you know, a base of about 20,000 professional teams. Our ability to continue to expand in those professional teams, continues to show, you know, really good greenfield. I think we saw that, this past year with a 28% growth. We're pretty confident that, I think, we're gonna keep at around that pace, going forward, at least for the near term, you know, two to three years.
The other thing to note here is that we've brought in two products to market this past year. Vector T7, which is designed for indoor sports, really with a focus around basketball. Basketball is an area that we have not been very successful over the past couple of years. We see that as a completely new market for us, and I think will continue to help us on that growth rate. The second product is something we've launched most recently called Vector Core, which is really designed to help very large organizations to support their lower- end teams.
One of the things that we've worked very closely with, you know, big teams like think of Chelsea, is that they wanna have beyond their first team a complete wearable solution across their entire academy set. They wanna make sure that that solution works, you know, hand in hand with their first team solution so they can understand where the data is, you know, how it's being used. They need something that's more simplified 'cause they don't have the large sports science staff for those, you know, larger academy teams. Us bringing both of those things to the market should continue to fuel that growth rate. I think we feel pretty excited about where we stand now and the growth CAGR that I think is still ahead of us.
Thank you. Another question pertaining to the second half performance with the incredibly significant improvement in EBITDA, which was positive in H2. Looking into 2024, where do you expect to see EBITDA?
I think, you know, for us the focus right now is really to get to, you know, return to free cash flow positive. We're very confident given the dynamics we've seen so far in H2. The turnaround in EBITDA, you know, is about $50.5 million to be positive. We're very confident, I think we will be, you know, free cash flow positive in 2024. If you wanna use free cash flow as a, you know, barometer in terms of how to, you know, you can imagine where EBITDA, you should anticipate improvement from here. I don't know if, Hayden, if you want to add anything to that.
I think that's exactly right. I think they're, you know, they're commonly viewed as proxies for each other. You know, EBITDA is ahead of free cash flow for us. You should see that trend continuing, I think, in line with free cash flow.
Thanks, gents. Our last call for questions. Give it a few seconds. All right. No more questions. Will, I'll hand over to you for closing comments.
Fantastic. You know, before I think we wrap up, I just wanna say a special thanks to Hayden Stockdale as he transitions out of Catapult. You know, Hayden has been instrumental in helping me build a great SaaS company, and I think all of his efforts can be seen in the positive results we've just delivered. You know, looking forward to doing the last week of sharing all this great, fantastic, results with all of you and having Hayden by my side, and also welcome Bob and have him transition, you know, into the next stage of our growth here. Thank you for joining our conference call, and I wish all of you a wonderful day.