Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Corporate Travel Management Half-Year Results 2024. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Jamie Pherous, Executive Director, Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Kayleigh. Good morning, everyone. Good to be here. I'm also joined by James Patterson, and together we will present our first half 2024 results. If I can go straight to slide 5, please, the 1H24 Group Financial Results. Okay, just a quick summary here. Firstly, I want to say that the first half was a record result for CTM, and the two themes that are consistent across this presentation are twofold. Number one, you'll see that we continue to win clients well above the industry's growth, and number two, we are successfully converting revenue to strong profit growth, which we'll talk about further. This execution is best portrayed by the key financial metrics versus 1H 2023 to the right-hand side of this slide.
Revenue has grown 25% in the period to AUD 363.7 million, but importantly, is converting strongly into 96% underlying EBITDA growth, 160% PBT growth, and 162% NPAT growth. In fact, we expect the go-forward underlying NPAT to convert at approximately 60% of underlying EBITDA, well ahead of our peers. So that shows you how far we are through the cycle of recovery. Yeah, as a result, we guided to a one-third half EBITDA skew, or AUD 87 million, but we achieved more than that, which is AUD 100.7 million EBITDA for the first half. The next thing you'll notice is CTM's in a very strong financial position. We've talked about a share buyback program, which again will start up again tomorrow once we're out of blackout. Importantly, we have no drawn debt, with cash at reporting date of AUD 131.3 million.
The good thing is operating cash conversion is back to long-term trends of 85%-90%. We'll talk later in this presentation to our capital strategy. As a sign of confidence of the future and our financial strength, we're declaring an interim dividend of AUD 0.17 per share, which is a good sign. Lastly, what's really important today, we're releasing our five year strategy to the market, which I will go through in a lot more detail in this presentation. We expect to double FY 2024 profits in five years. That's compound annual growth of 15% per annum, and that's at NPAT as well. Of course, acquisitions are additional to this strategy, which you want to talk about because we think the market is in the consolidation phase. Okay, if we can move to Slide 6 if we can, please.
Okay, as part of our five-year strategy, we'll be making ourselves accountable to the market by sharing our key metrics that support our strategy. I'm pleased to share that for 1H 2024, we're executing a plan. As you can see on this slide, the first two metrics going left to right are total organic growth. New client wins at reporting date totaled AUD 0.63 billion, and as of last week, now exceed AUD 0.7 billion for the year-to-date. Our FY 2024 full-year new client win target is AUD 1 billion, and we expect to exceed this target given the strong pipeline of new clients in the business. Next is retention. This is on track to retain 97% of our client base, as we've done consistently since we listed in 2010.
The third metric talks to cost control and productivity gains, and we think that's best reflected through the metric of revenue per full-time equivalent employee, or FTE. This is up a whopping 17% on 1H 2023 and is exceeding our expectations. This is a large reason why we're converting incremental revenue to EBITDA well above the AUD 0.5 per dollar that we hope to do. Again, I want to reinforce that these metrics are achieved against a corporate travel market that has pretty much not recovered since FY 2023 versus PCP. Market consensus is that the corporate segment has only recovered to 75% of pre-COVID. So we're doing well considering we're not getting any recovery. Onto Slide 7 if we can. On this, just some awards we've won. I mean, it's important for us that we continue to focus on customer service and user experience in our business.
We're really pleased that we've been globally recognized as the best travel management company across a number of industry awards, from Best Agency, Best Events Agency, and two key sustainability awards for our innovation of our proprietary booking tool Lightning, which is really pleasing. But onto Slide 8 now. Let's go through each region's performance. And if we can go straight to Slide 9, please. Again, the group has recorded 1H revenues of AUD 363.7 million, up 25%, and record 1H underlying EBITDA of AUD 100.7 million, up 96%. But what's important is, as you'll go through this slide, there's a few things that are outside our control. The 2Q 2024 macro impact did impact our business. There's a few things going on that reduced client activity for this quarter. The first one, we had a negative travel sentiment relating to the Middle East war.
The second one, of course, which was big in the U.S., is that client travel budgets were fully utilized by around mid-September, and that was due to, if you can remember, some terribly unsustainably high ticket prices, and to a lesser extent, the slower outbound China recovery impact as well. So those macro events cost us $15 million in the first quarter. But as you'll see as we go through the regions, importantly, we've seen a very strong activity rebound in January, particularly in North America, and we think the macro impacts that impacted our second quarter have largely dissipated and are unlikely to impact the second half. Additionally, without exception around the world, we're experiencing a normalization of airline ticket prices, and the recent double-digit declines in ticket prices greatly favors corporate clients.
As their travel budgets, where in the northern hemisphere reset 1 January, will go a lot further in calendar 2024 than they did in calendar 2023. So as we explain in more detail shortly, we have a number of significant projects and investments also designed to underpin our continual above-market share growth and cost control into the long term. So let's first even go to Slide 10 and talk to North America. So again, you can see revenues only going 3%, which is really the second quarter impact of the macro, but we've got very strong conversion to EBITDA, growth of 23%, which again shows how the business is executing. Again, North America leads the way with wins, but it was clearly the most impacted region in the second quarter.
As a reference point below, I talked to the big three airlines that operate in North America and their profits for the December quarter, as you can see on the slide. The big three were down somewhere between 10%-52.5% in net profits versus December quarter in 2023. At the same time, CTM was up 10%, which really demonstrates how strong we were going in the first quarter to still have revenue up 3% and underlying EBITDA up 23% for the half. More importantly, as I said before, we're really enthused by what's happening in North America because we could see it in the first quarter. The second quarter masks the growth dynamics in both new client wins and profitability that we're seeing.
The good thing is, when I look at January, it looks like we've returned to the strong first quarter performance we had, and those 2Q macro impacts appear to have dissipated. With January EBITDAs up 60% on January 2023, and considering the market is about the same recovery, that shows you how well the underlying business is doing, and we're really pleased with that, with a lot of new clients transacting through that. So the other key point I want to make is our proprietary technology in Lightning is opening doors and selling itself, and a large reason why we're winning clients and those clients are starting to transact. But now we're through integration. It's really important to note that our cost base is expected to remain flat in the second quarter despite the revenue growth.
As a result, we expect strong conversion of revenue to profit above that 50% in the dollar target range to continue, and hence we have good expectations of a two-thirds profit skew in the second half. Now, the result of these dynamics happening, we feel very confident that we're going to still hit AUD 100 million in FY 2025, and the next slide on Slide 11, if we can move to that, shows it graphically what we think is going on. So this slide has come about from a number of investors asking us to show how things work together. But what you can see on this slide is that there's a couple of key points. First, the left-hand side shows our FY 2023 actual results in revenue and EBITDA and what we hope to do in FY 2025. There's a couple of key points I want to make.
We only need to grow 14% compound growth at revenue over the two years to hit that target. So while the second quarter macro impacted us, that's not a go-forward impact. So that's really important. Secondly, revenue conversion has to only be about 55% consistent with our post-integration expectations. You can see on the slide previously that revenue is converting at around 80% in the first half. Now, the two takeaways that make us feel confident about the next year and a half and FY 2025 is, firstly, January 2024. It was a really good outcome, and the activity and the profit augurs really well for what we hope to do in FY 2025. That's continued through February. So we're really thinking that March and April are going to be at the sort of outcomes we wanted in FY 2025.
Secondly, we expect our costs to stay relatively flat in the second half. So as revenue comes into the business, nearly all of it's going to go to profit, and that's because we're through integration, and we're starting to get the automation benefits we expected out of that integration. So you can see we feel really good about North America. If we can go to Slide 12, please, Europe. Okay, again, this is a record revenue and EBITDA for the region, with revenue up 118% to AUD 98.5 million and EBITDA up 271% to AUD 63 million. Similar to North America, we're experiencing really strong revenue conversion of profit, and that's really supported in this market by the high CTM uptake of our technology and really a doubling of the size of the business in scale, which is helping supply contracts in this region.
But what I want to point out, every region's a bit different for us. This result really masks the U.K. bridging contract contribution. The project is trading significantly lower in the first half versus the initial customer expectations that we made public to the market. However, its impact is more than offset by the significant client wins transacting in Europe and also a very strong half in other crisis and humanitarian work that included things like Israel and Ukraine, ironically, things that gave us a macro impact in the second quarter, but this was countercyclical to the business, as well as Afghanistan and Sudan.
So when we look at the outlook, we don't expect any growth in bridging, which we'll talk about in guidance shortly. And given some of these 1H projects are likely to come to an end, we think everyone that wants to leave Israel and Ukraine has. But irrespective of this, we're still expecting the underlying business to achieve EBITDA of around AUD 100 million, which is still a 20% uplift off a very strong FY 2023, if you remember.
So it's still a really good outcome for the business. Most importantly, in this region, we're really focusing upon what we're going to do and how Europe contributes to our five-year strategy. We're investing right now heavily in a larger sales team to make sure that it plays its role in the future, the compound growth continues. So if we can move to Slide 13. Again, this slide, I've had some larger investors ask to show how the region has changed so significantly since COVID, and I think this graphic shows it well in terms of the waterfall chart. On the left-hand side, you can see our FY 2019 revenue of around AUD 95 million.
The two red bar charts show, again, what we've lost in client base. We're not recovering, so the client base has only recovered to 75% and, of course, lost clients at 3% per annum, which is inside our threshold. But as you can see with the green bar charts, it's really the huge amount of wins we've had in this business, BAU and client projects of around AUD 127 million of revenue. So the key takeaway is it's client wins that underpin this growth. Secondly, just to make it very clear on the crisis projects, most of the crisis and humanitarian projects form part of an actual U.K. government department that manages crises. Like all departments in the world, governments have parts of their business that manage this. So to put this into perspective, it is BAU to us to put more perspective on that.
Since we've won this business, this particular department has had 23 projects completed in three and a half years, which is essentially one every two months. It's been a good countercyclical play for CTM because you can see things like Israel and so forth in Ukraine play out for us when activity declines in the rest of the business. I also want to note that it's very, very important to make it clear that the expertise that we have that I guess we've expanded upon through this, we're now seeing business come from outside of the U.K. government. We're seeing this as part of a global play into large corporations that need this sort of work, that need to extract their stuff when there's a crisis, whether it be a natural event or a war event, but also other governments that don't use us.
So you can read between the lines there. Okay? So that's how it looks. So I guess now, if we can then go to Slide 14, ANZ. Okay, with this slide as well, I want to make it really clear. We didn't expect much out of ANZ in this half. In fact, we said to the market we expected the first half EBITDA to be similar to 2H 2023, and that's because, as we've said before, we are carrying two sets of costs. Firstly, cost to support the legacy Whole of Australian Government system and the cost to support a new system we were implementing. This is always going to be the case until the new framework commenced, and it has commenced in early February 2024. This is why EBITDA is down 21% to AUD 18.6 million for the half.
Of course, the region also experienced a 2Q sentiment impact like the rest of the world did. But we are pretty excited about Australia for two reasons. As part of the new WOAG framework, we implemented a proprietary hotel engine, which we call Sleep Space, that provides best-practice content, choice, and user experience. Early indications are beyond our expectations, and the fact that this will be progressively rolled out through the business in CY 2024 is really positive. I'll talk to that in projects in a few slides shortly about our five year strategy because, as we said before to the market, we think hotel opportunity in CTM has been underdone, and we think this is the catalyst to change that in the coming years. So the 2H will be about working our way back to historic margins in this region.
The business is at 100% recovery in TTV, so it's really now about the revenue and the expense base that finally we can now start to optimize. So as a result, we expect revenue uplifts and cost-out benefits from the new government framework that started a few weeks ago, including Sleep Space. This will build through 2H 2024, and as we said, why we expect the profit skew weighted to the second half. And as we said before to the market, it's the last quarter that will tell us a lot about FY 2025. But a nice thing to share too, as you can appreciate through the Helloworld acquisition and the transition through a rapid COVID recovery in activity, that was difficult for us. But what I'm pleased to say is the region's had its best half of client wins since COVID.
We're getting some boomerang clients that left us, who have a promise in coming back, and that's a testament to the strong strength in our value proposition and how settled the business is at the moment. So in terms of that, we remain confident of AUD 70 million EBITDA in FY 2025 through the improved revenue, the fine-tuning of costs through AI and automation, and the new client wins. And of course, we remain very excited by Sleep Space and the impact it can have, not just in ANZ and not just governments because we're talking to other governments in the region but around the world. So if we can move on to Slide 15, please, Asia. Okay, Asia also had a record 1H EBITDA result despite the Greater Bay Area of China or the GBA recovering to only 50%.
As we said in the 2Q macro, that was slower than we forecast. Again, the common theme in the region is that it's successfully converting revenue into profit growth through automation and productivity gains, the things we've been doing through the recovery process. With revenue up 63% to AUD 32.5 million, but EBITDA up 168% to AUD 9.1 million. As we said, that was slightly off what we thought because of the 2Q travel sentiment impact, but consistent with other regions, this region continues to win new business. And like the other regions, we've seen a really strong January rebound as that sentiment impact appears to have dissipated, with EBITDA nearly doubling versus January 2023.
This is the only region where we expect further post-COVID industry recovery outside of normal 3%-3.5% annual industry growth, and that's because the market in the Greater Bay Area is only at 50%, but public airline capacity announcements, which are widely public, point to further post-COVID recovery. As a result, Asia's expected to have a record profit result despite being nowhere near 100% of COVID in revenue, which is good. Okay, now let's go to the five-year strategy. I really want to focus on this. If we can go to slide 16, if we can first, please. Look, we're really pleased to present this strategy to the market. Importantly, we aim to double profit, and that's EBITDA and NPAT in the next five years, which is 15% compound annual growth. I want to make it very clear acquisition is additional.
Now, before I go to the next slides, what you'll see are three key points. Firstly, the key growth drivers that support this strategy and what we will be accountable for, including the scorecard metrics, which we will share with the market every six months. Secondly, the key projects that we're undertaking to support this strategy, their impact, how we aim to identify future projects that will continually enhance both our customer value proposition and support productivity measures. And thirdly, the capital allocation that supports this strategy. So now, if we can move on to Slide 17, please, and I'll quickly touch on some of these growth drivers. So you can see there's four key growth drivers, and acquisition is additional. Firstly, the first one, it's all about sustaining greater industry revenue growth, right, by winning new clients.
Now, we've gone backwards to say, "What do we need to do to compound organic growth by 10% per annum over this cycle?" And what we're sharing with you, it's going to require FY 2025 new sales wins of AUD 1 billion, but that's going to have to progressively rise each year to AUD 1.6 billion by FY 2029. But importantly, we're already exceeding these levels in FY 2023, and we expect to exceed AUD 1 billion in FY 2024. So this is realistic. Secondly, customer retention and growth in client activity offset. We've now come to the conclusion in our business, and we've been very prudent to the market, that the post-COVID recovery is done. 75% is where it is. That's where it's going to stop. So from here on in, we're being really conservative.
We expect 3% growth per annum, which is lower than what the market's forecasting, and we expect to retain 97% of our clients, which means that that's a zero-sum game. The client base is somewhat like an annuity. Again, I want to reinforce that we've delivered 97% retention every year since the IPO. Again, this is very realistic. Thirdly, it's the key projects that support this strategy, and that's the productivity growth and innovation. We think that by doing what we're doing, we can keep the annual cost growth of our business at 5% or below 5%. The best way to measure the cost savings and the productivity gains is through revenue per full-time equivalent, which we'll be talking to all the time.
When you look at all those things, what that really means is that it's the EBITDA growth now that will be faster growing than revenue growth. As we said before, our end goal was that every new dollar of revenue falls to EBITDA at 50%, which is to profit at 50%. Again, we're exceeding this target in FY 2024, as we've already showed you. Again, when we put one to four together, what we expect is the company average EBITDA and NPAT growth will be 15% per annum over five years. More importantly, we think this strategy is realistic, and we've said that because we're already exceeding the 10% revenue growth or the wins we need to do that.
We think our industry growth is conservative, and we've already demonstrated that we're actually converting revenue at more than 50% in terms of every extra dollar of the business coming in going to the bottom line. But importantly, acquisitions are additional to this strategy. There is no doubt to us that opportunities are emerging as a result of two structural factors that's going on in the corporate travel industry.
Firstly, as I've said before time and time again, the corporate recovery is only back to 75%. So for our peers, that is impacting their profit and cash flow optimisation because many thought, like us, that by now the market would be back to 100%. And secondly, nearly all of our peers in fact, I think all of them, are highly leveraged to debt because they had to secure debt to survive COVID, and they secured that debt at very high interest rates.
That debt is still accruing high-interest charges. So as a result, we think there's large-scale industry consolidation to come, and we think it's really likely. So of course, as you know, at CTM, we have the strong balance sheet, but more importantly, we have a strong track record of successful M&A execution as well as synergy extraction. So again, acquisitions, to make it clear, are above and beyond this 15% compound growth but will provide additional growth. And we think, as we know because of our execution, could provide further economies of scale and shareholder value. Okay, if we now move to slide 18, where I want to share some of these projects in more detail. So on this slide, you can see four key projects we're talking to this year and into FY 2025.
So the first one is Sleep Space, and I touched on it before in the ANZ region. It's our proprietary hotel content engine that brings all content in and allows a marketplace between the supplier and the customer to be able to offer real-time offers to our customers. As we said, we've just started to roll that out. It's rolling out through ANZ, and it will be rolled out globally through FY 2024 and FY 2025. Now, the contribution to strategy, for our customers, it's user experience. It increased hotel choice, uptake, and the user experience for our customers. And of course, for us, there's more revenue in this. Its cost is AUD 10 million so far, but as I said before, our early indications is the return we're getting is beyond our expectations.
So we see this as a key part of our strategy to roll this out globally because we do a lot of accommodation around the world, roughly running around AUD 3 billion at the moment. So to get more basis points in revenue from that is very material to our long-term strategy that's addition to our 10% organic growth through new client wins. Secondly, that's working really well for us is our AI machine learning. And this is all about better servicing customers with simple tasks. We're telling the market right now, we expect that 50% of our entire global non-revenue transactions to be managed through artificial intelligence and machine learning, which will create more client-facing time. And of course, by that, the measure for us is revenue per FTE data, and that will support winning retention targets.
So we said this half revenue per FTE is up 17%, which is beyond what we want, but this is, again, a key part of how we make sure that as revenue grows, the costs grow a lot slower, and we're still enhancing our user experience of customers. Thirdly, is NDC and supplier content. And that's just not airlines. It applies to hotels, which is what Sleep Space is doing.
Again, it's all about ensuring that our CTM customers have access to all relevant content via CTM technology. We think NDC will be cost and revenue neutral, but of course, it's about user experience and supporting client-winning retention. And as we said before, having our own booking engine and portal where our own proprietary tools is a key advantage to enabling us to rapidly move with content management in real time with our customers.
So the things we've done many years ago, we see with the way the market's going is a big advantage to us because we own the things that matter, which means we can move quickly. And the last big project is Project Atlas. We couldn't tell the market about this, but now we're doing it. It's about globalizing our support services now that we've got a global footprint. And this, of course, is non-client-facing. It's backend. There'll be a one-off AUD 10 million cost in FY 2024, and there'll be an additional one-off cost next year in FY 2025, but it's about the gains we get to support this five-year strategy. We expect AUD 10 million cost savings FY 2025, and that'll be building gradually through to FY 2029. There'll be AUD 20 million of savings. So we're getting a very good return on capital from this project.
But then it's also about how we identify future projects in the business. We're not sitting still. As you guys know, we've got formal client internal feedback loops that we use to identify both customer-facing projects and internal productivity projects that enhance user experience, enhance winning clients and retention measures, but also productivity measures. So again, we've done a number of projects before, and we think we're successfully delivering these at large scale.
So now, if we can go to Slide 19, it's really important to understand that any five year strategy needs the support of capital allocation. As we said before, we're really pleased. This business is now spitting out cash at long-term rates again, and we expect between 85% and 90%. So what that means is that we've got four initiatives here that will help us immensely. Firstly, dividends. We expect to pay at 50% NPAT.
Right now, they're largely unfranked due to most of our profits being generated ex AU. We just talked about those projects and how we're challenging the business to find projects that deliver return on capital of greater than 25%. We talked about the projects this year, and we talked about how those projects will be identified in future years.
Thirdly, we're going to use our strong balance sheet and cash to support acquisitions. As we said, all the targets right now are currently highly leveraged to debt as a result of COVID survival and the 75% global corporate recovery, but we think there now remains a significant opportunity, and this is additional to that five-year strategy of doubling profits in five years. Of course, we've done acquisitions before. We think we're good at acquisition. We're good at finding synergies.
Of course, the funding strategy will be mixed on a case-by-case basis depending on the target nuances at the time. But of course, for those that have followed the stock for a while, we have a strong track record of not just execution accretion but looking after our stockholders and using a leverage of cash and stock and maybe a little bit of conservative debt, whatever makes sense at the time.
And lastly, when those first three when there's excess cash that don't support those first three, we'll be continuing with buyback. In fact, we'll be back in the market buying back tomorrow now that we're out of blackout. As we said before, we've got AUD 100 million on-market buyback that commenced late November, and we'll continue that again tomorrow. So now, if I can, I'll hand over to James Patterson, our Acting CFO, to talk through the group financial summary on Slide 20. Over to you, James.
Thanks, Jamie. If we can now turn to Slide 21, the group profit and loss. CTM has delivered a strong financial performance in the first half. On revenue and other income of AUD 363.7 million, the group earned underlying EBITDA of AUD 100.7 million, which was up 96%. Importantly, this result delivers strong underlying net profit before tax of AUD 79.1 million and underlying NPAT of AUD 57.9 million. Our statutory net profit after tax was AUD 50.4 million. Non-recurring costs were AUD 4.9 million for the half, which relate to the implementation of Project Atlas. As called out on Slide 18, approximately AUD 10 million of non-recurring costs are expected across FY 2024 for Project Atlas. We have outlined our depreciation and amortization expectations.
The impact of additional spend on software projects pushed our D&A up a half to AUD 29.2 million with a similar amount expected in the second half. This will bring our total D&A toward AUD 58 million for FY 2024 or AUD 43 million when excluding amortization of client intangible assets of approximately AUD 15 million. Our effective tax rate for the half is 25.3%. Now, moving on to Slide 22, the balance sheet. CTM continues to maintain a very strong balance sheet. We have zero debt, having not utilized our committed funding facility since June 2020, and the company maintains significant cash holdings of AUD 131.3 million, including AUD 12.6 million of client cash. The group's receivables and payables have decreased since June, reflecting the seasonally slow Christmas/New Year period. Now, moving on to slide 23, cash flow.
Excluding the impact of tax and interest, the group generated AUD 67.3 million of operational cash flow, which gives us operating cash conversion for the half of 70%. Cash conversion was negatively impacted by the timing of rail settlement payments in the United Kingdom. The impact to cash flow as a result of the timing of these payments was approximately AUD 20.9 million. This working capital drag will reverse in the second half. Technology-related CapEx was AUD 18.8 million for the first half of FY 2024, which is higher than previously forecast as a result of additional spend on projects which will deliver immediate benefits and ROI, including Sleep Space, robotic process automation initiatives, and AI. Our investment in proprietary software is expected to be similar in the second half with a full-year software CapEx forecast of approximately AUD 36 million.
And finally, the group's AUD 100 million share buyback program commenced on the 15th of November, 2023, with AUD 3 million worth of shares purchased prior to the half-year trading blackout period. Following today's release, we'll continue to buy shares under the program, which continues through until the 13th of November, 2024. I will now hand back to Jamie to talk to the outlook and FY 2024 guidance.
Thanks, James. If we can move to Slide 24, the outlook and trading update, if we can. Look, in order to explain the guidance impacts, we wanted to share how we built the FY 2024 guidance midpoint and what has changed to make it clear to the market. We do that on Slide 25. We're going to move to Slide 25, please. Okay, so if we can first look at that right-hand side chart, the first column shows the original midpoint of EBITDA guidance being AUD 260 million broken down between the underlying business of AUD 230 million and the bridging project contribution of AUD 30 million. The next column shows what has changed. So you can see first midpoint one. As we said before, the 2Q macro impact is a AUD 15 million impact to EBITDA.
It is what it is, but as we said before, we feel very comfortable that that has dissipated as we've seen a strong January rebound, and we think that's unlikely to have impact on 2H 2024. But really, it's about the bridging project underperforming that's outside our control. So as we said before, the U.K. immigration challenges and timing delays, essentially, this project is trading significantly below the customer's initial expectations. And the way we built this, we knew it was building. We didn't build much into the first half, but we built pretty much all of, as you can see in number two, the AUD 30 million of the second half. And it's just not happening. So as a result, we're taking a conservative guidance approach.
We're going to assume that there's no growth from the current levels and that AUD 25 million of estimated impact to EBITDA, it is what it is. So any future activity from this project will be upside to guidance. So what's that mean? It means the guidance being revised down. You can see revenue there, AUD 730 million-AUD 760 million, EBITDA AUD 210 million-AUD 230 million, and then we've got PBT and NPAT, NPAT at AUD 125 million-AUD 140 million. Now, at the midpoint, if we can go now to Slide 26, if we can, I just want to, again, reinforce that those two things outside our control, the macro, they are what they are, but the underlying business is performing well. There's five key points I want to make as summary.
As we said through this presentation, firstly, the 2Q24 macro impacts appear to have dissipated, and we think are unlikely to impact the second half. And that's through what we've seen in January. We've seen these big rebounds. Most notably, North America with underlying EBITDA up 60%. So we're really back on track in North America. ANZ revenue being up 11%. Again, we never expected to get double-digit growth in ANZ due to its sheer size. We thought maybe CPI plus a few percent when we take a long-term view. That's sound, and now we know costs are coming out. That's going to be good for the second half as well. And of course, Asia, underlying EBITDA nearly doubling in January. The second point is we are controlling the things we can control, and the underlying business is executing to plan.
So when you consider that the backdrop, that the actual corporate travel market hasn't recovered at all, we're doing really well. EBITDA at sorry, revenue at the new guidance, the midpoint of revenue is up 15% on FY 2023, and EBITDA at the midpoint guidance is up 31.7% to AUD 220 million. So if you think about a blank canvas and this business moving forward with a steady or no-growth market, we're already obtaining revenue of 15% growth and EBITDA growth of 31.7%, which is above our five-year annual target. And that's because point three, the metrics of the success that we're going to be accountable to the market for are already being met or exceeded. We said before, new client wins are doing well.
We've now surpassed AUD 0.7 billion as of last Friday, and we expect the second half 2024 conversion of the new revenues coming into the business will convert very strongly into profit and remain above the 50% target range, particularly North America and ANZ regions as they both benefit from a combination of the synergies they've created, the automation, and the revenue builds coming in those two regions. The fourth point, as we've outlined again, we've got a five-year plan. That five-year plan is going to deliver compound growth at EBITDA and NPAT of 15% per annum. And as we've said before, this is realistic. The key metrics that are required to execute this plan are already being met or exceeded. And lastly, to make it clear again, acquisitions are additional to this five-year plan.
We think we remain very well positioned for what we think is highly likely industry consolidation. Of course, CTM, we believe, have a strong record of acquisition execution and synergy extraction. Before I hand back to the moderator, I just want to quickly go through some appendices on Slide 27. If I can quickly go to Slide 28, if I can, appendix one. Again, this is a recap of a slide you've probably seen before. It showed all the way back when we came out of COVID how we built for recovery with acquisitions and so forth. That essentially meant that we would get back to AUD 246 million in FY 2024 if the market was back to 100% recovery. We'd have a little bit of growth on that as well to get to AUD 265 million, as you can see in that table.
Of course, the market's only recovered to 75%. So if CTM was operating at market or 75% recovery, we've extrapolated that revenue would be about AUD 607.5 million, and EBITDA would be AUD 143.5 million if we were at market. But the difference, as we've said over and over in this presentation, is that we're tracking materially ahead of that because of our execution. We're winning market share above the market, and we're successfully converting incremental revenue into strong profit growth and ahead of our target that we hope to aspire to. And if we can go to Slide 29, appendix two, again, just want to remind you of the high-quality compound ROE model we're talking about. We're a big company. We're fourth or fifth biggest in the world. We've been doing this for 30 years.
But the key point I want to bring you to now is the investment-grade metrics of this business. We've done really well since we've listed in 2010. And now what we're saying with this five year growth strategy, if you drew a blank canvas over this business, our compound growth just through organic means is double the ASX 200 average, and acquisition's going to be additional to that. And of course, we've talked about capital management. We're trying our best to maximize shareholder returns now that things are back to normal in our business. We've got dividends. We're really looking at projects that are going to deliver return to shareholders in our business as well as future acquisition opportunities and the share buyback program. So with that, I'm going to hand back to the moderator for questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. We have a large queue today, so we do ask that you please limit your questions to two per person. Your first question comes from Tim Plumbe with UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, Jamie. Thanks for taking my call or my questions, rather. Just two questions from me. The first one on Sleep Space, if possible, please. How do you think about the addressable revenue opportunity within ANZ? And if we think about that maybe against the backdrop of current run rate ANZ revenue of about AUD 170 million, please?
Yeah, it's a good question. The thing we said, ANZ, it's actually back. We're actually back to what we have to do. We're doing roughly around AUD 3 billion in TTV, which means the activity's there. It's just that we haven't been able to optimize the cost of the revenue. Why Sleep Space is so good, we think about a third of that is accommodation. And of course, the first client that we're doing this with is the whole of the Australian government. And that is obviously a minority of the opportunity. But I think they're a great customer to start with because they've got some strong nuances, which meant that we had to build this module in a way that it was fit for purpose for anyone else because the government has different demands and nuances than a normal corporate.
So what that means is that if we think how we're rolling it out, it's sort of three phases. We're talking to the rest of our government business first in ANZ, then all our clients in ANZ. And I think through this process, the next few days, that we're talking to investors, U.S. is the next cab off the rank, and they're chomping at the bit because they've got the next largest amount of accommodation as well as other client opportunities with this. So we've said time and time again that we think we're underweight in revenue from accommodation. We're really grateful to the whole of the Australian government for trusting us because they were a test case that we had to build this for. And I'm really proud of our team too because we delivered this not just on time.
It's a big project, but it's gone exceptionally well and above our expectation, which I'm really pleased with our team because it's showing they can do big projects that are complicated on time and as planned. So when I take a view, we're seeing this in the next five years as a key plank. And if you look at organic growth, we've talked about 10% organic growth. That's just by winning clients. We're hoping that Sleep Space can mean that maybe we grow that 10% compound growth of revenue, but that helps that incremental dollars per transaction. We get a little bit more out of every transaction that happens in the business.
Gotcha. And the second question, just around your comments around the corporate travel market, 75% recovered and staying there, are you referring to the number of trips taken or TTV here? And is that kind of consistent with what you're seeing across all of your geographies? I'm just thinking in terms of ANZ recovery.
Yeah. Yeah, it largely it's transactions. So sometimes you see obviously, price is a way through the roof, but we're a transactional-based business. So it's roughly 25%. I've given you a few pointers there. I mean, the latest was Sabre that came out and said the same thing. So we're all seeing the same thing. The only exception to that is Asia, which is roughly at 50% because we've got an overweight to the Greater Bay Area. But our conservative view and prudent view is we're just going to accept now that that's it. It's done. It's 75%. That the market's going to just carry on like it always has, where it's going to go at 3%-3% plus per annum. And if it does more than that, that's upside.
What we're trying to do is reset our business for the reality of how things are. I think we've made it really clear that what we're trying to do in the next five years by doubling profit organically is that those key metrics of organic growth, retention, and how we're going to get the productivity gain through artificial intelligence and ML, we're already doing. That's how we're really focusing the business. Let's get our 10% compound growth. We'll squeeze more than that to the bottom line, as we've always said. We're working really hard on those three metrics, and we're going to be accountable to the market metrics. Every six months, you're going to see us talk to those metrics.
Gotcha. So just so that I'm clear, if ticket pricing coming down resulted in increased transactions, that would be upside versus what your underlying assumptions are?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's no doubt. I mean, I called out North America purposely. I mean, there. It's something we would have never imagined, right, that customers run out of their budgets. And that's because, as we all know, you all travel, it's been obscene. The prices were unsustainably high. We never saw that coming. And that's a big part of the second quarter that's outside our control. But our customers have said to us through that period that, "Hey, look, we know that they're coming off materially, and that's a really good thing for us."
So that 1 January, we're resetting, particularly in North America. And that's a good thing because customers' transactions can go further, right? If prices are off, and some of them are off quite significantly, actually, that means they can do what they want to do at a lower cost. I think we're seeing that. North America, for January, to have profit up 60% on the prior year is pretty solid, right? It's a big business. That's where we really feel good about that.
Understood. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Julian Mulcahy with E&P. Please go ahead.
Jamie, just a question on the U.K. contract. I mean, there's still plenty of asylum seekers being lodged. So what is it about the nature of your contract? Was it just new arrivals that were going to drive your growth?
Yeah, it's a lot of things, I think. I think it's how they choose to manage it. Look, I can't say too much other than, to be fair to the government, they're doing an excellent job of turning things around like no other. They have moved a lot of people very quickly out of asylum and on their way. I think the other thing for us is that there's some things that they'd like us to do that I can't say much more than if you look at what's going on over there, it's politically difficult at the moment to put new people into things. I don't think at the moment, for example, in a perfect world, we would have all assumed we'd have a dozen cruise ships going by now.
But right now, that's not very acceptable politically, right, as you could see from what's happened the last six months. So our strong view is we have a very good relationship with the government. As you can see from other projects, we still get other projects that aren't that. We're just taking a very conservative view that it's done. Maybe after the election, things might change or who knows what. But I think we're just trying to reset the market and focus on what we're trying to achieve in the next five years.
To be clear, because they're not being relocated to the cruise ships, for example, that's why you're not getting a transaction, and they're still being accommodated where they were previously?
Correct. They're doing other things locally that fall outside our remit. It's just unfortunate. Can't control it. It is what it is.
Right. So that AUD 5 million guidance for this year, it's AUD 5 million for the next two years till the contract runs out?
Correct.
Right. Just think.
I think that works in function.
Also, so with the U.S., I mean, people ran out of their budgets by end of September. While airfares are down, I mean, it's still relatively high. So is that not going to impact in the next 12 months as well?
I can't speak for the next 12 months. What I can speak to is what we're doing. We're executing really well. I mean, 60% January on January 23 was more than we thought. February's continuing. I think the key takeaway there is that the business is really winning business, and it's starting to transact now. We've just come out of a few weeks ago original meeting about what's happening. It's really nice to hear all the regions talking about what's starting, how much is starting, when, and it is significant. I think the point we're really getting is that operational leverage as revenue comes on; we don't expect that.
We expect the cost base to be flat. That's because if you think about going back to integration, we had three or four different systems. Now we're one system. We're done. So what that means is that as this revenue comes through, there's no support costs. They're pretty much fixed. There might be some as we get bigger and bigger and bigger, some more operational costs for travel agents to support that business. But because of the AI and automation we're doing, we actually expect the next six months that cost base to be flat.
So what that means is, for example, if revenue was to grow AUD 1 million a month extra per month, nearly all of it, if not all of it, will go to the bottom line. So that's why we're saying we'd expect the second half to have a 1/3, 2/3 skew. But the real key point is how things are starting to build now. It's a momentum gain. We're winning business. They're still winning business. There's more business coming. We feel really good about we're finally there.
We're through the hard part. Integration is done. Now it's just running a business. How do we keep winning business, and how do we use automation to make sure that every incremental dollar of new revenue is going to the bottom line at rates higher than 50%? Just to make it clear again, this half, we expect it to go higher than 50%.
Your next question comes from Sam Searle with Citi. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. EBITDA for the first half, AUD 101 million. If you add back, I guess, the AUD 15 million in one-offs, you get close to AUD 160 million. I guess compared to this, the AUD 210 million-AUD 230 million implies a relatively flat second-half sequential growth. So just want to unpack that flat growth versus theoretically what's normally a seasonally stronger half.
Yeah. I think that's where it's a difficult half to explain because you've got North America is going to do well. Australia's going to do well. Asia's going to do its thing. It's really Europe. So I think what's happening in Europe as we've said it and probably if we can go back to Slide 12, if we can, what's really happening is that while that happened, you had some projects at a BAU process that happened every two months.
Israel, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan, they ironically were countercyclical because of what happened. As you can appreciate, I think it's fair to say that's our working assumption that anyone that wanted to leave Israel or Ukraine or Afghanistan or Sudan are probably done. So you look at the second half, we're saying the first half was AUD 63 million EBITDA, the second half, AUD 100 million.
We're going to lose AUD 37 million despite other growth. It's really that second half. If you take that out, you look at the rest of the business, you're going to get that sort of skew you'd expect. It's really just that. So our working assumption is that the gains you got in the first half won't happen in the second half. Now that the bridging contracts, the assumptions we made in the first half was going to ramp up the second half. It's not going to happen. That's why you've got first half, AUD 63 million for Europe. Second half, we're hoping to do AUD 37 million or so. Putting that aside, it's still a big uplift considering how strongly we're getting last year. I hope that makes sense.
Yeah, that makes really good sense. So just putting all that to one side and thinking holistically, so the AUD 15 million EBITDA you lost to one-off factors at the group's 30% margin, that's almost 50% revenue loss. So when I think about FY 2025, are you expecting to grow 10% off the AUD 730 million-AUD 760 million or 10% off something AUD 50 million higher or something close at AUD 800 million due to the lost second quarter?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, it's February 20 today. So we've got to look through that. I think the takeaway is we feel really good about North America and Australia. And I dare say those two, they will be the performers. Asia will do its thing. I think the U.K. will work through that as we get through the year, as we get further through. But the good thing about the U.K. is that just to make it very clear again, is that we do a very large department that BAU is to manage crisis. So it's very hard to forecast 12 or 14 months out. But what we do know is that we've done 23 projects, which is one every two months.
What we do know is that unless the glass is half full about the world, we would expect that there will be other civil issues in the world. We do think that there will be other environmental issues in the world. While we don't know that, we're going to guess that those things are going to continue to happen. But we will talk more to the market about that. I think the key takeaway we're trying to say is that if you blank canvas and look at this business as it is, how would you value a business that's going to compound EPS at 15% per annum, i.e., double in two years, and acquisitions are going to be additional to that?
Okay. Appreciate the color, guys. Thanks.
Your next question comes from Ben Gilbert with Jarden. Please go ahead.
Morning, Jamie and James. I just wondered if you could just talk us through just how weak you did see November, December because I think obviously you provided the update at the end of October to the market. So it feels like that AUD 15 million hit must have come pretty suddenly through November, December. And I suppose just your confidence that this isn't just a bit of a deferred reaction through January and that you're confident, I suppose, that this is a trend and that we are seeing things really sort of bottom out?
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, firstly, the Middle East war was real, right? I think what made that quite unique was the psychology of people not wanting to travel for different reasons. Without going into it, I mean, I think it was pretty toxic, some of what was going on in the world with that particular event. So what we saw that we very rarely see with the war is that there was a broad-based unwillingness to travel. That's step one. And then step two, this is this COVID comeback thing. I mean, we all travel. I mean, airfares have been obscene. And they were really obscene mostly in North America. And I think we're not just saying this. We're very close to our customers.
Customers are telling us that, "Hey, look, we're going to have to put a stopgap on travel because our budgets are through the roof." When we look at how we're spending money, it's travel that's way beyond our forecast internally. But we also were testing that with our customers who said to us that we're seeing these ticket prices drop dramatically, which they have. And then we expect from January 1 it's all over again because we've got budgets reset. So I think, yeah, it really did surprise us to the downside. But there's three things that have changed. I think, and typical of any war event, usually it's a three-month issue, and then people get on with life. Secondly, what is unique with this COVID thing is that tickets are way off, particularly inter national.
I mean, in ANZ, it'll off 20%-30%, sometimes even higher. That's a really good thing for our customers. And then thirdly, I think there's a factor that global interest rates look like they're done. So particularly in North America, I think people have a bit more confidence about investment because whilst people back then, you had this triple witch event. You had the Middle East. You had ticket prices were obscene, and people were running just spending too much money too early in their forecasts. But I think now interest rates appear that they're not going to go anymore, right? So it looks like, as an investment point of view, global interest rates are at worst flat. I think all those things are playing out.
So if I look back at yeah, U.S. is a tough one for us because we've really had the first two and a half months are very, very strong. Yeah, it gave us quite a fright, the second quarter, to be frank. But the third quarter, again, it's across the board globally. We're seeing all the things that are underpinning the business. I'm going to say it again. The underlying business is performing well. It's really simple for us. We've got to win business and make sure, as we win that business, that that's successfully turning into profit. I think we're doing that better than anyone else.
Thank you. That is all the time we have for questions today. Anyone in the queue will be provided to CTM. I will now hand back to Mr. Pherous for closing remarks.
Yeah, thank you. Look, guys, I know it's a busy half, and I expect there'll be more questions. I want to make sure if you want to ask a question, you can get a chance, please, to rea ch out to us because we want to make sure everyone's comfortable with things. But of course, we will be doing both one-on-ones and team meetings all the way through this week. So if you didn't get a chance to have your say, we want to make sure you do. So please reach out to us. Thanks again, and have a good day.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.