Hello and welcome to Catapult's first half of FY 2022 results. As we have done in previous earnings release, we are sharing this pre-recording, which will be followed by earnings conference call tomorrow morning in Australia, where we'll make ourselves available to answer any questions related to this release. During this presentation, I'll be joined by Hayden Stockdale, Catapult's Chief Financial Officer, who will cover our P&L in more depth. We had a stellar half. Let's start by talking about three significant highlights that I believe are worthy of pointing out. First, we continue to see strong SaaS growth across our business. Our leading indicator of annualized contracted value, or rather ACV, is up 43% year-on-year. Performance & Health as a vertical grew 40% during this period, and Tactics & Coaching, supported by the acquisition of SBG, was up 57%.
Now, we've been talking about our leading indicator ACV for some time here at Catapult. What's been really pleasing in this past half is that the lagging metric of subscription revenue is now catching up to our leading indicator of ACV. Subscription revenue was up 29% year-on-year, and now subscription revenue represents almost 86% of total revenue, up from 79% in FY 2021. You'll see later in this presentation that subscription revenue growth is actually outpacing the contraction in capital revenue. Another great highlight of the half, the strong rebound in North America. Following the rebound we saw post-pandemic in EMEA and APAC earlier this year, we are now seeing that also play in North America.
The America's ACV was up 28% year-on-year, with Performance & Health vertical, in particular in North America being up 62% on an annualized basis during this half. The strong growth across the globe was also played out in our ACV churn, falling to near record lows of 4.1%. Now, on the next slide, I think it really represents why we've been obsessed with the leading indicator of ACV. As you can see from the chart, ACV is having a significant impact on the lagging metric of subscription revenue growth. As we continue to grow ACV, we anticipate that subscription revenue growth will catch up to that growth rate, ultimately leading to total revenue growth. Because as you can see from the next chart, our shift to high quality subscription revenue is near completed.
Starting in FY 2020, we really started to focus in moving into a full SaaS model here at Catapult. In FY 2021, we actually stopped doing deals around Performance & Health from a capital perspective. The impact of that is that we've now seen a 9% growth of the percentage of revenue coming from subscription since FY 2021. We are quickly approaching our goal of having 95% of our revenue coming from high quality subscription revenue. Now, before I dive into the numbers a bit more, I always love to share this slide because it's a representation of the quality of teams and leagues we are working with across the globe. Over the past year, Catapult has worked with over 3,425 teams across 40 sports in 130 countries. We're doing so with the best of the very best.
As you can see from the logos on the screen, we are working with the very best of American football, basketball, baseball, European soccer, rugby, NCAA universities, as well as supporting great leagues such as the NFL, Premier League, and Formula 1. Now, if you attended our Investor Day most recently, you'll know that given the quality of teams we are working with and the growth rate that we're seeing bodes extremely well for us capturing and penetrating the very sizable TAM that stands in front of us, which I'll talk about later. Let's dive into our SaaS metrics a bit more. As I mentioned, our key SaaS growth metrics continue to accelerate. This past year, ACV grew 43%, which included a one-time $5.1 million increase that came from our SBG acquisition.
We've looked at this on a pro forma basis, meaning we've included SBG's ACV on previous periods. What you'll see is that our ACV growth on this pro forma basis was still stellar. ACV growth was at 30%, with EMEA rising at 34%, Americas up 28%, and APAC at 24%, boding very well for future revenue growth here at Catapult. Another great highlight is that our customer duration continues to stay pretty long. Average customer duration here at Catapult is at 5.5 years, and while that's a decline from this period last year, that decline is coming from the addition of new customers. We know that because our ACV churn is actually declining. ACV churn during this half reached 4.1%, and that's down 40% from this period last year.
Another great highlight is that our ability to cross-sell into multi-vertical customers meant that we expanded by 50%. This is coming from selling primarily into our large and growing Performance & Health vertical customer base. Now, looking at our efficiency metrics, gross margin and contribution margin were in line with expectation. Gross margin was anticipated to be impacted by the transition of capital to subscription sales model. In North America, as we had such a strong rebound, there was a slightly unfavorable revenue mix related to hardware sold with our video analysis package. Overall, gross margin continues to be stellar, and we anticipate that it will continue to grow our subscription revenue catches up to the ACV growth rates that we're seeing.
On a contribution margin percentage, there was a decline of 17.3%, but this was expected since we knew we were not gonna get the same repetitive COVID-related savings that we did last year, and that we were gonna accelerate investment to grow following our growth investment, capital raise earlier this year. Overall, we're very satisfied with where the numbers are. Now, all of this ACV and SaaS metric growth is now starting to have a real meaningful impact into our financial outputs. As I mentioned earlier, subscription revenue grew at 29%, and that's up from a 3.3% growth in FY 2021. Total revenue also grew strongly at 13% despite the discontinuation of capital Performance & Health deals. This was a significant improvement from the decline of 7.4% in FY 2023.
EBITDA was higher than anticipated and remained positive on an underlying basis. Free cash flow contracted in line with the increased investment in accelerated growth initiatives. As our confidence has grown from the strong rebound of the pandemic growth concerns, we have accelerated our R&D, which now have grown from 8.9% of total revenue to 17.2%. Let's cover ACV a bit more, and we'll talk about the impacts that that's having within our total business. As I mentioned on a pro forma basis, ACV continues to show stellar momentum, rising 30%. As a matter of fact, even during the worst period of the pandemic, we've been able to raise ACV at Catapult. As you'll see in a minute, this ACV growth is broad-based across regions, verticals, new and existing customers, and coming from a mixture of organic and inorganic additions.
It's coming from the return of professional sports in North America, in particular with the NCAA now playing in front of fans. What it means is it provides a solid foundation for the future revenue growth of Catapult. On a regional perspective, you could see that ACV growth was strong across all regions. In the Americas, it rebounded from 4% growth in FY 2021 to 28% growth in this half. EMEA has now been the highest growth market here at Catapult for the last 18 months, driven primarily by the strong Performance & Health sales of subscriptions in the massive soccer and rugby markets. ACV in EMEA grew 34% in this past 12 months, and APAC also saw a strong growth of 24%.
Now, one area that has been a real highlight of this half is that we've been able to grow ACV across all customer durations with the addition of new logos as well as up and cross-selling to well-established teams. As a matter of fact, 33% of our organic growth came from up and cross-selling to customers of greater than two years duration. One thing to note is that there's a large increase of ACV in our customers of zero to two years, and that was primarily driven by new customer acquisitions, but also lapped customers that are now being recaptured from a post-COVID-19 concern and are now being classified in a zero to two year category.
I think the points we made in this slide is that Catapult's ability to expand ACV on its customer base across all level of durations remains strong, and we saw that play itself out in the past half. Now, as I mentioned earlier in the presentation, subscription revenue is starting to replace capital revenue in a much more accelerated pace than we expected. As you can see from the chart on the right, overall subscription revenue is almost making up what used to be subscription plus capital revenue in the past. What this means is that we're now starting to see total revenue grow in line with subscription revenue growth of 29%. As we focus on our ACV growth, the leading indicator, it will start to have a significant impact on these lagging metrics of subscription revenue and total revenue.
Now, a huge part of our strategy, as we talked about in our investor day, is to ensure that our ability to cross-sell is high. We're very pleased with the performance we've seen in this past half. We saw strong acceleration in cross-selling, meaning that multi-vertical customers grew by 50% over the past 12 months. As you can see from the chart on the right, the percentage of multi-vertical customers is at 9.1%, a growth from 7.8% just in the last half. This is before our ability to integrate SBG solutions deeply into our product mix and our sales mechanisms. We're feeling quite bullish about our ability to continue to expand our customers into multi-solutions within our platform.
Now, one of the thesis we had in moving into a full SaaS model was that it would improve the retention rates of our customer base. What you're seeing in this chart on the left is that ACV churn continues to improve and is now almost at a near all-time low here at Catapult. Despite the challenging year that our customers experience, they continue to pick Catapult as a solution for their daily workflows. I think what this chart really represents is how deeply embedded we are within our customers' workflows. Moving on to the next slide, what you see is that the long-term cash-generating ability here at Catapult remains strong. As I mentioned, gross margin has been pretty steady, and if you look, is actually starting to improve from the last half, primarily being driven by the growth of subscription revenue.
On contribution margin, while we saw a decline from this period last year because of COVID-related savings, it's actually starting to come back from the low that we saw in the second half of FY 2021. We anticipate that as we continue to drive efficiencies within our sales mechanism and deliver higher quality subscription revenue, that contribution margin will continue to improve. Now I wanna talk about the pro segment a bit more in depth, 'cause the pro segment had a strong ACV growth of 28%. More importantly, and as a reminder, these are pro forma numbers, is that the Performance & Health vertical grew at 39% year-on-year. That means that our strongest vertical here at Catapult is growing really rapidly.
Now, Tactics & Coaching grew at 20% year-on-year, but this is before we have deeply integrated SBG, which we'll talk about in a minute on how well it's going. Why we get excited in seeing a growth of Performance & Health category at 39% is that, as we've mentioned in the previous chart, our ability to cross-sell into multi-verticals is starting to become really significant. That means that as we grow our Performance & Health category, it opens up the opportunity to expand our Tactics & Coaching vertical even further. As we integrate SBG within our performance data solutions, we anticipate that both of these will start to catch up with the same growth rate. Now, as I mentioned earlier, the Americas was really a highlight in this past half, and our Performance & Health vertical growth in the Americas really shows that.
Americas was up 43% in Performance & Health, EMEA up 38%, and APAC up 21%. As you can see in the chart on the right, which we shared during our investor day presentation, Catapult is now 5 x larger than our closest competitor. Yet, we still have a long opportunity ahead of us in terms of penetrating Performance & Health solutions within elite sports. We're growing faster than everybody else, but we still have a long TAM ahead of us. We're quite excited when we see this growth rate with the open green field in front of us. Now, from a Tactics & Coaching perspective, we really do see a significant growth opportunity looking ahead. We are really seeing some strong momentum in the SBG following the SBG acquisition way earlier than anticipated.
We've been able to sign deals around basketball, such as the one we announced in the Brisbane Bullets. That was earlier than anticipated because we had not anticipated that the software would be ready for basketball this fiscal year. We've also been able to enter new markets such as NASCAR and esports, which really shows the applicability that a tool has across different areas of our business and creating new TAM. As we've shown in the previous chart, our ability to grow in Performance & Health vertical is really strong. As we start to see the momentum of the SBG integration, we anticipate that this will really benefit our land and expand strategy in driving multi-vertical customer number growth. Now, one thing to note is that on a pro forma basis, our Tactics & Coaching still grew pretty strongly at 20%.
Why we get excited by this is that the unit economics within this vertical are very strong, greater than 90% gross margins. As we start to expand Tactics & Coaching vertical into our Performance & Health customer base, we anticipate that margin expansion, both in the gross and contribution end, will improve. Now, the chart on the right, I think, is representative of the opportunity ahead of us in terms of growing ACV and Tactics & Coaching. What you see there is the growth rate in number of customers related to vision and SBG solutions. As you can see in the last three periods, this is starting to really grow strongly. We anticipate that this will translate into strong ACV growth in the short term. One other highlight of this half was that we relaunched our prosumer subscription business.
In the late half of FY 2022, we introduced Catapult One, which introduced subscription revenue or rather a subscription business to individuals and teams on prosumer level. Now, it's still early days, but the numbers we see so far are very positive. Numbers related to activations, usage, and cancellation rates are all better than we anticipated. Now, like our pro segment, the switch of subscription in terms of revenue from capital revenue will have a short-term negative impact in terms of recognized revenue. But as you saw earlier in this presentation, the leading indicator of ACV will typically drive that lagging metric of subscription revenue, and we anticipate the same thing will happen here with prosumer. As you can see from the slide on the left, the growth in ACV has been significant even though we're still in this early stage.
Before I hand it off to Hayden to talk about the P&L in more detail, I wanted to share a couple of operational highlights. From a sales perspective, Catapult now has a penetration in the English Premier League at 80% and almost 80% with the Bundesliga. Deals such as the one we announced with Stuttgart represents our capacity to combine Performance and Tactics & Coaching in terms of video analysis together post our acquisition of SBG. The acceleration of basketball video analysis opportunity demonstrated by the multi-year deal we did with the Brisbane Bullets truly shows the power that we have in opening and penetrating the basketball market going forward.
Another great deal that I think shows the true potential of our platform is a deal we did with Boston College this past half, which was comprehensive in terms of being department-wide across multiple sports in the university. I think it shows a great example of the potential that we have with working with other NCAA universities. Then highlights for us was how quickly we were able to enter the NASCAR market and expand into the esports market with the SBG solutions. From a tech perspective, teaming up with the Super League and Sky Sports to break new grounds in terms of delivering real-time statistics direct to viewers during broadcast was a true technical achievement. We've also expanded our ability to provide insights deeply into positions such as goalies in hockey and into sports such as baseball. Our significant investment in tech capability really continues to bode well.
We are pleased to announce our new CTO hire of Param Hegde, who brings amazing enterprise data and SaaS technology expertise to Catapult. Our R&D investment continues to increase as our confidence has truly increased over the past half. With that, I'm gonna hand it off to Hayden, who's gonna talk about our P&L in more depth. Hayden?
Thanks, Will, and a big hello and welcome to everyone again. I know it must seem like a while ago, but I wanted to start just by reminding everyone of our change in year-end that we completed six months ago. What that means is that the numbers in our Appendix 4D and statutory accounts are a little odd, comparing our current September half with the previous December half. To avoid the inherent mismatch in that, what we've included in today's investor presentation here are numbers for consistent six-month periods ending September 30. September 2021 versus September 2020, which we've also previously released to the market. Righto. With that housekeeping out of the way, let's get into the numbers.
Well, as Will has pointed out, we've had a really strong start to the FY 2022 financial year, with excellent momentum in our ACV, churn that continues to find new lows, and a continued improvement in the quality of our operations, including a further significant shift in our revenue from capital to subscription. With that, our lagging indicator of subscription revenue starting to catch up to our leading indicator, ACV. Now with the shift away from capital revenue, what we've seen is our total revenue grow somewhat handsomely at 13%. As you'll see in a moment, that would've been more like 25% even as a lagging indicator, had we not shifted away from capital deals.
As we look down the PNL further, our gross profit growth, you'll see here, wasn't quite as strong as revenue, with a slightly unfavorable move in revenue mix, due in part to a strong performance from our licensing business, which has relatively lower margins. We did have some higher COGS and freight costs, but these were generally immaterial overall. Our variable costs were higher as planned. These were really centered on sales and marketing employment costs, partly due to the non-recurrence of some COVID-related salary savings, as well as the commencement of investment in our accelerated growth program. We also had the reemergence of some travel-related costs coming out of the pandemic too.
Now it's also worth noting though, that in each and every one of these cases, these cost increases were anticipated by us and the cost increases that we actually think will also yield returns. What this means overall is that we saw our contribution margin here return to where we expected it to be, which is in the mid-40s% and very much in line with our SaaS business model. The pattern in variable costs was also mirrored in our fixed expense lines. Here, the growth in our fixed expenses were also centered on employment costs, but to do with our tech product and operations team. While we also saw some higher corporate costs given the increased senior bench strength that we now have.
For the next two years, obviously we'll continue to invest in these fixed costs as we accelerate our growth program and generate value-creating opportunities. Within our fixed costs, we also had some one-off costs associated with the SBG acquisition. While we were happy to actually report that we've had a nice reduction in some doubtful debts charges coming out of the pandemic too. As a result, I'm actually very pleased to report that our underlying EBITDA margin remained positive, which was better than expected as we did contain our fixed costs despite growing them. Obviously we're very pleased with this. Now, we've spoken a lot about momentum in the Catapult business in the past, and I actually want to come back to that concept on the next slide. Here you will see we've generated strong momentum in all of our verticals.
Most significantly in Performance & Health subscription revenues, which have accelerated in their growth trajectory even more strongly than six months ago and off an ever larger base. This has been driven by a strong performance from the Americas region on top of continued growth momentum in EMEA and APAC, as well as our focus away from capital deals. Growth in Tactics & Coaching subscription revenues reflects three months of the SBG acquisition, as well as an improvement in the Americas, in particular with the return of the NCAA. In our smaller verticals, we've seen an improvement in our licensing business year-over-year, and a largely static performance from the smaller management vertical as we really prioritize elsewhere. The shift in our revenue mix is broken down in more detail on the next slide.
Obviously, we're very pleased to see such a strong $ 7.1 million increase in our high-quality subscription revenues, which is now more than outpacing a $ 2.8 million decline in overall one-time capital revenues. Now, when we announced the switch of capital to subscription, we knew it would have a negative impact on our overall revenues, and that clearly shows through here. Using the numbers on this page, you can actually do some calculations to adjust for this. On the basis that capital deals typically convert into subscription deals at a proportion of around 1/3 per annum. When you do this, you come to a number of $ 3.7 million.
That is, our total revenue would have been about $ 3.7 million higher than here, so almost at $40 million for the half, if we hadn't had pivoted away from capital deals. That's total revenue growth of 25% versus the 13% we did report. On the following slide, we show a detailed bridge for our EBITDA. Now, there are three great things on this slide. First, revenue had a positive overall impact coming out of the pandemic. Given it lags ACV, we expect this to continue. Second, the higher cost impacts are all in our control. As I said at the recent Investor Day, we can turn these off overnight if we wanted to, in order to generate cash. Now, we don't intend to do that as we see great investment opportunities, but these are all discretionary costs.
Third is the overall result, and as you'll see here, an underlying EBITDA of positive $1 million, which I think is absolutely tremendous in the circumstances. Now before I leave this slide, the last thing I just want to point out very briefly here are the underlying EBITDA adjustments. Of the $3.4 million, $2.8 million of that relates to the accounting treatment on a portion of the SBG purchase consideration. Okay, which is actually run through the P&L in a similar way to intangibles amortization, but in this case above the EBITDA line. There's also about half a million dollars for SBG acquisition costs. They are both non-cash and one-off costs respectively. Turning now to our cash flow slide. I think this has also got some really positive messages to it.
First, operating cash flow only contracted by $ 600,000 during the half, despite the significant increased investment in variable and fixed costs that impacted EBITDA. The reason for that is something that gets very little airtime in the Catapult story, which is our negative working capital position. What that means is that growth generates cash for us, not consumes it. While we invested in our growth, and that came with costs, $ 7 million, as you see here on the left. On a cash basis, we offset $ 6.4 million of that with an improved working capital position. As we scale, expect this to become a very, very powerful force. The second message here is we were only free cash flow negative because we decided to be so.
We accelerated our investment in R&D, and that's showing here at an additional $ 5.6 million. That is all discretionary spend. Indeed, we've generated over $12 million in operating cash flows for the last 12 months. If we wanted to generate that type of cash or more at any point in time, we could do so. Lastly, on this slide, we also had a loan that converted to a grant, but because the cash didn't go out of our bank account and then come back in, that's not reported in our reported cash flows. It is, however, operating cash and would have pushed our operating cash flows up another $ 1.6 million.
From a cash perspective, I think you should also note that we have over $42 million in the bank at present, and are fully capitalized. On the next slide, we give a breakdown of the capital investment we've made, which has more than doubled during the half, bearing in mind the comparative period was mid-COVID, and we had pulled back on spend at that point. It is noteworthy, we've spent 17% of revenue on R&D, which is now in line with our business model. You'll also see we continue to center the bulk of this investment into our core pro segment, and within that, it's focused on our platform and our key solutions in Performance & Health and Tactics & Coaching. With that, I'll hand back to Will to close out. Thank you.
Thank you, Hayden. Now, before we recap how well this half has gone for us, I wanted to share the key takeaways from our recent Investor Day presentation. The first is that we have a large addressable market that's made up of $ 2.6 billion in a professional TAM and $41 billion or prosumer TAM. The other component is that the market we operate of sports technology is growing rapidly and is anticipated to reach $ 128 billion in the next five years. More importantly is that the areas of growth of that market are at the core of what we're doing here at Catapult, which is performance analysis and player analysis. The other key takeaway is that Catapult is uniquely positioned to take advantage of it.
We are the leaders in performance technology, and as you can see from the results today, we're growing that leadership even more. We continue to be deeply embedded with our teams, and as you can see from the ACV churn, that continues to play out in this half. Our ability to integrate bolt-on solutions like the SBG acquisition really bodes well for our growing portfolio of high-value solutions. I think these results truly represent that our execution strategy is working and that our growth levers across this market are being pushed forward. Now, the point of Investor Day takeaways connected to this half-year result only bodes that our confidence to capture the market opportunity ahead of us has increased. Our shift to a full SaaS model is now driving strong subscription revenue growth and low churn.
The market has recovered and are accelerating new sale opportunities for us globally now. Our core vertical of Performance & Health is growing rapidly with an ACV up 39%. The acquisition of SBG has yielded numerous of significant early wins well ahead of schedule, which represents huge opportunity for cross-selling down the line. I think the positive first half FY 2022 results shows that our strategy is working and driving significant growth within our TAM. Because of this confidence, we are investing for the near and the long-term growth of Catapult. As I mentioned, we are operating in a $128 billion market with a $2.6 billion pro segment and a $41 billion prosumer TAM that are expected to grow at a 26% CAGR.
A 2.3% penetration of this TAM, including less than 30% of our level one teams, we feel quite confident and quite bullish about growing revenue here at Catapult. I think we're investing in the right things. The integration of performance data within video analysis is well underway with the acquisition of SBG. Expanding video analysis software to support new sports such as basketball, as we talked. Expanding the performance insights into new positions with sports-specific algorithms, such as will be done with hockey and baseball. The creation of a unified and sophisticated sports platform, which will support the quality of the solutions we bring to market across the board.
As we started to invest, we anticipate that our go-to-market efficiencies will continue to accelerate the scale, first at the leading indicator of ACV, and then at subscription revenue, and ultimately at total revenue. As a recap before we talk about an outlook. One, Catapult continues to show strong SaaS growth. ACV is up 43% across all regions. Performance & Health, 40%. Tactics & Coaching, up 57%. The strong growth of ACV has driven strong subscription growth, and now we're seeing the rebound post-pandemic really allow us to grow in North America and lower our ACV churn even further. SBG integration and growth is ahead of plan, and we're feeling very confident that our accelerated growth initiatives are fully funded with $42 million at the bank.
As an outlook going forward, we are confident in our long-term strategy of expanding and penetrating our large TAM. We are confident that our ACV growth will remain strong in the short-term to medium-term, and its growth rate will accelerate subscription revenue growth in the short to medium term. We anticipate that as we continue to transition to subscription sales, our revenue growth will catch up to our leading ACV metric, and we are confident in our continued ability to generate strong operating cash flow. We are aware of some elevated supply chain and inflationary risks that have had an immaterial impact to date on freight, COGS, wage cost, and inventory. With that, I'd like to thank all of you for watching and listening to our presentation, and I look forward to speaking to some of you during our earnings conference call. Thank you.