Hi, everyone. As the guy jt said, I'm David Dicker, and I'm the CEO and Chairman of Dicker Data. Great pleasure to present our results from last financial . Another sensational result, really good result under the circumstances. It's all been very difficult, but our company has performed exceptionally well and everyone's really delivered. Very, very satisfying. We're up to AUD 2.5 billion in sales, and all the other numbers are absolutely fabulous. Without further ado, I'll hand over to our CFO, Mary, and she will give you the full rundown. Thanks, Mary.
Thanks, David. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this call. Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the late lodgment of the deck. I was expecting it to be a little bit sooner, but we're happy to go through it now and then take some questions after that. Like David has said, that was another exceptional year in terms of highlights and results. Plus, in addition to that, key of course, was our acquisition of the Exeed business in Australia and New Zealand. A transforming transaction for our New Zealand business, placing us as second largest distributor there. Added to that was access to the Australian Exeed business, providing us with a new segment that we previously didn't participate, being the retail space, albeit in a selected format.
We also recently announced that we have entered into the business sale agreement to acquire the security and IT division of Hills. Both these transactions highlight our growth aspirations and our intention of expanding our opportunities in the converging IT market. Another milestone and one we're proud of was the recognition of our diversity and inclusion within the company. That was us winning the inaugural award with ARN for that category. In terms of the financial numbers, FY 2021 results was another strong year with strong growth recorded across all areas of the business. Like David said, revenue finalized just under AUD 2.5 billion, which was an increase of 24.2%. Our recurring revenues in software have now increased to AUD 520 million, an increase of 19.7%.
Net profit after tax finalizing at AUD 73.6 million, up 28.6%. If we take a more detailed look at our results in terms of our trends, we can see that the financial trends in terms of revenue continuously growing 17.4% CAGR, EBITDA 25.5% CAGR. You can see in terms of gross profit margins being maintained, albeit slightly lower than the previous year, and net profit before tax margin continuously increasing.
Looking at the 12-month result in a little bit more detail, like I said, gross profit margin has slightly abated to 9.3% compared to FY 2021 29.6% as the market normalized following the opportunities that were created on the onset of the pandemic. Even though still a disrupted market in FY 2021, the margins have abated slightly because everyone's become used to dealing in that environment. In terms of our operating costs, they increased by 15.2% but have actually declined as a proportion of our revenue down to 4.7% as the company continues to benefit from scale. Operating profit before tax, excluding one-off costs, finalized at AUD 106.1 million. That was an increase of 29.6%.
Looking at our New Zealand business, with the acquisition of Exeed, we're definitely expecting significant growth there. Revenue growth of 127.6% was recorded, with revenue finalizing at 345.3 million NZD. Included in that number is five-month contribution of revenue from Exeed, which was 152.1 million NZD. Excluding the Exeed contribution, New Zealand revenue still grew 27.3%, which indicates our intentions to keep growing that territory, even excluding outside of the Exeed acquisition. What we did see, though, was gross margins coming down on the previous year, predominantly because there's a large proportion of contribution of retail business with the Exeed business.
We will be looking to balance that out as we integrate the businesses in the coming year. Profit before tax increased to AUD 6.6 million. That was a 221.6% increase. Turning to the balance sheet. Now what was a high, something to point out in FY 2021 was our increased investment in working capital. Being in the disrupted market with supply chain disruptions and chip shortages, and Vlad will provide a bit more color around that in the business update, has meant we've had to invest further in our working capital, particularly around inventory that significantly has increased on the prior year, almost doubling.
It comes as a result of the business growing but also taking a more strategic approach around inventory management and inventory availability in a market that had a number of constraints. Despite all that, we do see that has been a key differentiator for us in terms of the opportunity to keep growing. We definitely are looking at managing the working capital investment. In light of the situation around supply issues, we feel this is the right strategy and the right place to put our investments. On the cash flow side, we closed with cash of AUD 7.4 million. The cash closed lower, particularly around cyclical investments in working capital, so cash from operations finalized at AUD 20.5 million.
Cash was deployed in working capital predominantly, and then of course, the Exeed acquisition, which was funded via a debt facility, being a cash advance facility, hence the increase in drawings and finance activities for the year. The company continues to pay the ly dividends and, in the FY 2021 year, dividends of AUD 0.42 per share represent an increase of 27.3%, up from the AUD 0.33 per share in FY 2020. That included a final dividend which we declared in February to be paid tomorrow, which was at AUD 0.15 per share. We will continue to maintain our dividend policy of a 100% payout of net profit after tax, and we'll continue to pay in quarterly installments. We will be retaining the same dividend policy.
In terms of investments and the discussion around the working capital increase. Fortunately, we moved into our new location at 238 Captain Cook Drive at the start of the year. It was completed in February and officially opened in April. That has given us the increased space to actually allow us to cater for the additional inventory holdings that have become necessary as part of this disrupted environment. The timing was actually perfect to be able to give us the opportunity to continue to grow and manage the inventory in that space. We are also, as a result of sort of these growth expectations, in the process of planning for the expansion of the warehouse.
We did say that there is vacant land out the back, which is already DA approved for a new warehouse. We expect to go to tender on that in April 2022 and hopefully looking to commence construction in June. Because with the Hills acquisition previously announced and last week, and the Exeed integration and the growth in our own business, we do feel that it is better to be planning ahead and have the work commenced in terms of the expansion of the warehouse. Speaking about Exeed, just an update of where we ended up in the second half of the year in terms of the integration. The acquisition was completed on the sixth of August. The revenue contribution from the Exeed business in total was AUD 183.1 million.
That was five months contribution. The integration of our Exeed Australia business is near complete. All the inventory has been relocated from Melbourne into our Sydney warehouse and we have exited the Melbourne warehouse in terms of the Australian integration piece. There's a lot of work underway currently to integrate the Exeed New Zealand business into the Dicker Data entity. On the Hills acquisition, which we announced last week, the company has entered into a business sale agreement to acquire the security and IT division of Hills. This is a whole new segment, and Vlad will provide further updates in terms of the overall opportunity. In line with what I previously said, it represents 50 new vendors, some of them key players within the physical security space.
A whole heap of new customers and opportunities around customers that are particularly in the security space that sits adjacent to our IT business, and we're looking at how that would converge and the opportunity to cross-sell into that new customer base. The way the physical security market works, there is some trade centers and branch offices, and we'll be looking at how that is going to be leveraged. The purchase price is approximately AUD 20 million, and it's a net asset purchase. Effectively, that's predominantly inventory, net of provisions and entitlements. The final price will be determined based on where inventory finishes once the transaction completes. It is subject to Hills' shareholder approval, so we will be providing an update on that as it progresses closer to completion. That's all from me.
I'd like to hand it over to Vlad now to provide a business update and a bit of further color in terms of the numbers that we have finished on for FY 2021 and the opportunities we're looking at for FY 2022.
Thank you, Mary, and thank you, David. Good morning, everyone, and once again, thank you very much for the opportunity to present. Like David and Mary said, we had a fantastic 2021, and we're all very, very proud of what we've achieved. Like I was saying at the end of 2020, which was also a very successful year for us, it was the year of lots of good opportunities that the people when people moved home and start working from home, hybrid working gave us a lot of opportunities in 2020. 2021, it was a very different situation. It was the beginning of digital transformation acceleration. That's what moved a lot of growth in 2021. Like I said at the end of 2020, it's just the beginning. It's a very beginning of that acceleration.
We as a business trying to position ourselves very strongly to take full advantage of this acceleration of digital transformation in many, many years ahead of us. Chance, obviously, you've seen us taking advantage of a fantastic opportunity of acquisition of Hills, which I'll touch base in a second. Continue focusing on our software and cloud business, continually focusing on our audio-visual in unified communication business, our data center infrastructure business, and obviously all our digital device business, putting ourselves in incredibly strong position to continue to take advantage in 2022 and beyond. Now let's go to the slide number 13 and look at what are the current market challenges before we look at the overall strategy and opportunity.
COVID, of course, while it looks like it's getting closer and closer to the end, it's still with us. We still have a lot of challenges that it brought, especially anything to do with supply chain constraints, chipset shortages. There's lots and lots of disruption happening in the market in terms of getting the right product and solutions and giving it to the people who need it. Demand is very strong. Market activities is exceptional. That acceleration is happening on all fronts of our industry and of our economy.
The challenge is to get this stock and everything to do with it in the right time, just in time, and to give it to the people who can use it, and who can start transforming their businesses and digitize their businesses. Obviously us being a local distributor, we use our key competitive advantages of being very adaptable to ever-changing circumstances, to being very agile and very flexible and open thinking. Obviously, when we look at our continued investments in our inventory and capital, that's part of the strategy. We're seeing now the ETAs blowing up to three to six months at some point, and we know that our competition is very much still sticking to certain KPIs and SLAs that is globally governed.
We always been known in the market for holding slightly more stock. For our customers, we took another step to ensure that we always have more inventory, right inventory, so we can support not only our larger projects but also our mid-market and SMB customers. That's proven to be very, very successful. It's the right strategy, and we always feel that we are one to two steps ahead of some of our competitors when it comes to it. I don't think this situation of the supply chain is going to change anytime soon. Our logistics arm is very, very strong. Our partnerships with the key logistics and freight companies is very strong. Once again, we're very flexible and very agile when we work with all our vendors, and they're absolutely loving it in those circumstances, in those positions.
We're gaining some even more trust from our partners and building even stronger relationship with our vendors. We're showing the market how we can be very successful even in those challenging times. Now we're moving to slide number 14. We're looking at IT markets and our strategy. Once again, every year we're taking 1%-2% market share by continuing to evolve our strategies and our tactics around what we do. This is approximate share of IT distribution market, both Australia and New Zealand. Looking at our corporate and commercial market, we're doing incredibly strong and continually growing.
Now with Exeed and Hills security divisions coming on board, we will have over 8,000 active partners, which is absolutely fantastic, looking for a great opportunity to cross-sell, up-sell, and drive more solution sales into lots of different segments. Now, of course, if you look at a New Zealand market, we're bringing Exeed New Zealand and Dicker Data together. Like Mary said, we're becoming a very strong number 2 market player in New Zealand. Once again, it's giving us a fantastic leverage and cross-sell when Exeed brings over 2,000 active partners in New Zealand.
We already, even though we haven't fully integrated in New Zealand, we already have started to see some great benefits of this strategy, not only on the customer side, but also talking and exploring a lot of great new vendor partnerships in New Zealand exactly to the strategy and exactly how we thought it's going to happen. I'm very, very happy with the way it progresses right now. If you look at the next slide, this is our vendor portfolio. It's growing in the right way, it's growing in a quality way. Again, we don't have as many vendors as some of our competitors, but the vendors we do have play a very critical role in the digital transformation of our region.
We wanted to make sure that we are known as a key fundamental part of this, of this move. Obviously, we must have a great portfolio of vendors, and I'm absolutely convinced we have the best vendor portfolio out of all distributors in Australia and New Zealand. This is just a next slide. This is just some of the industry recognitions that happened last year. It was a very, very proud year. One of the, like Mary said, one of the most proud moments when the industry recognized Dicker Data as a quality leader. We have been in the running with the finalists like Microsoft and like other big tier one global giants, and it was incredibly satisfying and emotional for us to get this recognition.
It's just recognizing our internal culture, our diversity, and our equality that we're driving through our organization. On the other side, we've been recognized again as a strongest hardware distributor of the year and many other recognitions by our top vendors, putting us as a very strong leading value distribution partner in our region, in Australia and New Zealand. When we look at the next slide, the hunt for the new vendors never stops. This is part of our job, this is part of our role as a distributor in this region, is to continue to understand what evolves, what new innovations happening, which new vendor partners bringing a innovative and breakthrough technology that we can partner with them and assist our customers to continue transforming their businesses.
Some very strong acquisitions last year, , NVIDIA, Jabra, and so forth. Some really good names. Out of all of these, most significant one, I would probably say, would be VMware as the global leader in the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud solutions. Cloud is one of our big focus areas, big investment areas, and VMware become a glue in our strategy, which was missed for many years. I've been incredibly happy with the progress of our partnership with VMware last year in 2021, which only been six months. We're looking for an absolutely amazing year with them this year. The partnership is growing and growing really well. Hunt for the new vendors never stops. Like I said, there is a number of new conversations both in Australia and New Zealand on the table, so we continue evolving.
If we look at the next slide, I've always presenting this slide. This is very critical and important slide. This is our long-term vendor relationships and diversification strategy. Once again, if we look at financial year 12, when our top vendor represented over 60%, and while we've been very, very fortunate working with this particular vendor for over 28 years, it did represent a certain risk to the business. We have completely removed those risks. We now have over 51% of the vendors representing our tier two, tier three vendor sets. We still have our top five vendors represent or 50% of our business, and that's exactly where we all want to be. This is our long-term strategy, and that's how we would like to retain it.
Again, it's a really well-balanced business between a very good diversity of vendors and a very good diversity of partners that we're servicing but also focus and specialization. We are a value-added distributor. Any vendor we work with, especially our top 20, we need to have a similar skills level as the vendor itself. When partners work with us, when customers call us, they need to make sure that they talk to very skilled professionals who provide them with an absolute level three, level four customer service, which is very, very important for us. This strategy continues to evolve, and as you can see, it's been absolutely fantastic in the last 11 years. Next slide, we'll look at where the revenue is coming from and how our business looks like and where the growth came from.
You can see that we've had an equally fantastic year with hardware and software. The reason why software grew 20% year-on-year is phenomenal, but it's slightly lower than hardware, is because in 2020, one of our major desktop virtualization vendors, Citrix, had an absolutely phenomenal year. When everybody obviously moved to home, they needed lots of virtual desktop installations, and this vendor had such a strong triple-digit growth this year that, of course, coming into 2021 and normalizing their sales, it had a very, very normalized year. Hence, we didn't have 30% or 40% plus growth in the software business overall. Otherwise, we would've. Which is very, very good. Like, we're exceptionally happy with growth of both hardware and software.
If you look at the hardware business, our devices continue to grow. Demand for devices has been very strong. Demand for devices is as strong coming into 2022. It's just the way we need to manage our inventory, the way we need to invest in our inventory, and manage our cash flow. The opportunity is absolutely there. Networking business has rebounded. 2020 is when all large network refreshes around the country were put on hold. We've seen in 2021, those projects have come back to life. Some of our key networking vendors like Cisco and Juniper and HP Networking have done really well, producing a very good, healthy 22% growth.
We're seeing networking as the biggest opportunity and the biggest growth, again, driven by 5G rollout this year. This is very exciting space to watch, and we have every single strong vendor under our roof. Our skill set and our pre-sales and post-sales services within those vendors is very strong. We had a very strong in our AV and UC market, 55% growth year-on-year, which is phenomenal. We continue growing in our print business, which is very small. Again, this is all to do with the capacity in our warehouse. As we know, printers are very big, so we need to be very mindful of where we're focusing, especially when we're under such a big demand from other categories of the business.
We need to be careful how much we've been focusing and how much space we're basically taking in our warehouse. Server and storage business was a little bit soft last year. Still, couple of different reasons. One is the super big data center explosion project is still slow to come back. Another thing is the supply. Unfortunately, when it comes to server and storage and data center infrastructure, it could be up to five and more vendors part of the solution. Each vendor has multiple product sets in a solution. And if one single product set is missing, then we cannot complete the entire solution. It's not as liquid and it's not as flexible as some of our other divisions in hardware.
With that in mind, that challenge of a supply chain has a little bit bigger impact on our server and storage business. Although we are seeing even stronger demand for those projects. Even with those challenges and supply shortages, I do believe we'll be able to turn this into a nice positive growth this year. Looking at our software business, like Mary said, recurring revenue is where our focus is. We're absolutely now putting a lot of investments in our platform, where we make it very, very easy for our customers to bring their renewals and recurring revenues, subscription business. This is happening. We're winning more and more subscription type businesses from our vendors as well. Customers loving our platform, so this is what's driving this growth.
We're looking at another big growth here. Looking at opportunities. Slide number 20. I think I've mentioned a lot already. I'll just very quickly go through the key points. Security is a big piece. We've always been very passionate about security. We're building a very strong security practice. Hills' acquisition giving us 50 strong security vendors that come on board in Victoria, so we're super excited. Security is not just about physical security, electronic security, or analytics and software security. It's the combination of that. It's the solution. Face recognition, AI, innovation is coming to play. We do believe that security is going to play a major part in Australia and New Zealand in the next five years.
We're building our skills, expertise, vendor portfolio to be a main security practice in Australia and New Zealand when it comes to value add distribution and support of our partners. Software continue to grow. This is a very big focus, a big business. Devices, we've mentioned before. Demand is very strong. It's just getting the right stock and keep growing. Hybrid cloud is very dominant. We now have the strongest channel-driven cloud vendor, Microsoft, and we are a leading distributor for Microsoft. VMware on board. We have a lot of great products that we're moving into that hybrid cloud world. Smart office is becoming big in 2022. People are coming back to the offices.
When they do come back to the offices, they need very big smart rooms, collaboration spaces, innovation centers, and experience centers. This is what we're supporting. This is what we're building with our partners. That, of course, builds into the pro AV unified communication. Data center infrastructure is still a very big business of ours. It's going to go from strength to strength this year. Networking, I told you, I feel if it comes to the numbers itself and crunching the numbers, it's probably going to be the biggest opportunity this year. Retail market is new for us. We're evolving as we speak. We're looking and learning and analyzing. So far, it's been a very good experience. It perfectly fits into the profit margin models that we run within the organization.
We're gonna continue to build up on that, but we will be very careful with this market. We wanted to make sure that we don't become a box mover or a purely transactional type of a distributor in this market. Otherwise, obviously, it will be very hard for us to compete, perhaps with some of our competitors. As long as we can provide a lot of great value to both our retail partners and our vendor partners, we will continue to expand this market. Looking at the overall sheer opportunity of this market, that's probably going to be the biggest one that we've yet ever been exposed to. It's a multi-billion dollar opportunity. We just need to find our niche way to grow this market.
Now we're gonna move into a little bit more. I'm gonna mention already a couple of times, big push on the physical security. Hills represents our opportunity. Not only that, we are getting 2,500 active partners, security system integrators, electric system integrators, operational technology system integrators. All these customers are new to us. We will be able to enable, train, and teach them of how to bring IT solutions into the space. I mean, all physical surveillance technology is all IP-based now. It's no longer analog. When it comes to IT, it means it's the IT area. Within IT, we have a great deal of expertise. That market convergence trend is starting to appear a lot more. All the industries is converging, and we do believe that this is very, very big opportunity for us. I mentioned about retail markets.
Once again, it's a big business for us in New Zealand. It's getting bigger and bigger in Australia. Big opportunity for us. We just need to be mindful of how we're going to handle this. We now have a very good idea in our strategy for the next couple of years. 5G rollout is going to drive a lot of innovation, data explosion, so storage business is gonna grow, networking business opportunities, cloud, where all the data is going to store. Edge technology is going to drive. Lots and lots of great opportunities. When we look at 5G, and we look at all the key vendors that are driving the 5G revolution here in this region, we have all of them under our roof.
Unified Communication and Audio Visual is a big area for us. Like you've seen 55% growth last year. We can expect another very strong year. We've just opened up a couple of new partnerships in this area, so that it will continue to drive growth this year. Obviously work from anywhere. We've looked at hybrid cloud device. We also having a Windows 11 refresh cycle this year. A lot of experts in the market, in the global market saying that's going to drive another big cycle of demand for PCs. I think demand is very strong as it is. We just need to get a bit of a better supply chain.
I think we'll be able to enjoy the full scale of growth that is available in front of us. All right. Well, this is my part of business update, where I see the challenges are, where I see the opportunities are. Now I just open up to the 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 are on the speaker phone, please pick up your handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Edward Gato from CCZ. Please go ahead.
Hi, David, Mary, Brad. Congratulations on the result in a tough environment. Really pleasing to see. Maybe just checking if you can hear me all right quickly.
Yes, all good. Thank you, Ed.
Great. Perhaps if we just follow on from what Vlad was saying there about the devices. In earlier commentary, there was discussion regarding the work from anywhere trend in Windows 11 driving continued strong growth. Just continued strong demand. I was just wondering if you could provide any indication whether you expect that segment to continue to show growth, just bearing in mind that segment was growing very strongly this year and the year before.
Yeah, I'll probably take this question. Yes, we've had a very good year and a great demand last year. We see no signs of slowing down demand for devices and PCs. In fact, we need to get more stock that we can offer to our small SMB customers. The biggest challenge last year was all the stock that's coming in was going to our mid-tier SMEs and the large enterprise deals. If you looked on our website as well as in probably any other IT distributor website, we had very limited stock to offer for our what we call is our run rate business.
Having a little bit better stock now going in 2022, and having that available to all our small partners, you know, we probably would see a slight better balance within our business. Like I said, Windows 11 refresh is going to drive more demand for devices as well. Look, it's yet to see, we had a very good device sales in 2020, 2021. No reason to see it's not going to happen this year. All global chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD are forecasting another good growth this year. Is it gonna be exactly the same as the last year? It's very hard to say. So far, demand is very good.
Okay. I just wanna make sure I understand. I guess continued strong demand doesn't necessarily translate to growth. Would it be fair to just forecast the numbers as moderate to low single digit growth, or is there any sort of like qualitative commentary you can talk to there?
From the forecasting models and from what other vendors are saying, all our top vendors that we represent with Hewlett Packard, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, ASUS, and others, everybody is forecasting somewhere around high single digit growth. Now, we have a very good tendency to grow a lot above that. Like you've said, a strong demand not always results in a growth in sales, because obviously we have challenges with some stock management and so forth. It's a very fluid situation. It's a very quarter-on-quarter based. All I can tell you that I have not seen any significant sign of any decrease in demand. If you look at last year, the way we've managed our inventory, the way we've looked at and worked with our vendors, we grew more than our vendors last year.
We took some share from our competitors, and we're obviously gonna continue to look at doing the same. Yeah, that's all I can comment. I mean, we're in a good position to at least grow with vendors, and hopefully we'll do better like we always do.
Okay, great. Yeah, appreciate that. That's really useful color. Maybe just on software. Would it help if you could provide some color or detail, but quantitatively or qualitatively if it's appropriate, like about whether the growth during the year was driven more by the perpetual side or subscription side? I just noticed that you combined the segments in the presentation.
Uh-
Yes. Just in terms of combining the segments, it's because categories within our vendors and the way they go to market with the products change. In effect, we're seeing we've grouped the recurring revenue as both renewable and subscription, as it was more meaningful that way.
Yeah, I can add to this as well.
If Vlad wants to add anything.
I can add to this as well. Renewals really grown. This was really good. Subscription grown faster. Both for us is recurring. Both for us is very much, keep pushing and keep growing it. The answer to this is depends on the vendor. Like for example, look, with some vendors, we just, we're just growing subscription, new subscription business really, really well, because each vendor has its own strategy. Microsoft, for example, they deliberately slowing down their perpetual, slowing down their SPLA, getting their hosters to move into subscription and that's exactly what we're doing. Our new subscription business have grown faster. Some other vendors, they're very happy to sit on renewals and drive a lot of renewal strategies. It's all depends on the vendor.
Some software vendors don't have subscription model, and that's where our Dicker Data Financial Services comes very handy. This is where we can offer all our partners and our vendors monthly subscription base, not only on software but on hardware as well. Unfortunately, I didn't give you a specific answer, but both areas are doing really well for us.
Okay. That was very helpful. Then I might ask one more question before I jump back in the queue. I'm sure there's a lot of questions on the line, and we're catching up then very shortly. Just on, I guess, wages and staff costs, there's a lot of, I guess, concern when speaking to clients, particularly say that some of the other stocks we cover, t here's a lot of competition for these people. I'm just wondering if you could speak to like what you saw in regards to wage inflation and also maybe how variable wage structure that Dicker Data has might help you from wage inflation.
Sure. I can probably take some of that call. Yeah, it was difficult in terms of recruitment and new roles. Definitely was a year where it was a bit harder in terms of filling new roles. The structure of our remuneration models, particularly around key business units and business managers is a performance-based model, and therefore as the company continues to grow in segments, whether it's revenue or gross profit, the participation is there in the key business unit remuneration structures. It sort of inbuilt in terms of how our staff are compensated.
We haven't really experienced any major movement within our headcount structure other than possibly taking a bit longer to fill roles that previously we could have filled in a shorter timeframe.
Okay. Thanks, Mary.
I don't know if Vlad had anything else to add to that. Sorry, Vlad, I cut you off before.
No, Mary, you covered it really well. This is just our incentive and remuneration structures internally. It's very, very unique, very specialized. We didn't feel as much of these movements, especially when it comes to key decision-making roles, executive roles. We've pretty much sustained most of our management. Also, look, one thing I'd like to mention as well, which is very, very important, is our culture. We have a very, very distinct internal culture, and I think that sense of pride and loyalty is very, very strong within the organization. It's also a very, very big factor.
Because of that structure is why we would never get full leverage of the cost base. The headcount salary wages line grows as the business grows, but it's managed that we do get some leverage, but it's not gonna be full value, and the cost stays steady.
Okay. Well, thanks very much for that. Just, yeah, once again, congratulations on a great result, and I'll jump back in the queue.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Heyden Li from Evans and Partners. Please go ahead.
Hi all. Thanks for taking my questions. Just around the margins, obviously the chip shortages has provided margin growth opportunities for Dicker Data, and we saw that especially in the uplift in margins in the Q3 update. Now, from today's result, it seems Q4 margins saw a bit of a reduction. I'm just wondering how much of this step down in the Q4 is from the greater Exeed contribution being in a lower margin retail segment, and how much is from a normalization market normalization, as you called out, Mary?
Well, definitely the Q4 would have the contribution of the Exeed business for the full quarter. You know, approximately 50% of the New Zealand piece from Exeed is retail trading at lower margins. It would've been a contributing factor. In terms of, we were always expecting the margins to normalize or pull back from where we finished in FY 2020 just because of the amount of sort of immediate disruption that happened in that year and having us placed in a position of being able to capitalize it. As the market normalized and more people got used to working and operating within that environment, we expected margins to come back. We are trading above our last four-year average.
It's still, a solid result in terms of being able to maintain those margins above that 9.1%. I don't know, Vlad, if you've got any further color on the margins for the Q4 .
Yeah, no. Again, I think you've highlighted really well that large, very large Apple New Zealand business, of course is, while it's still profitable, but it does drag it a little bit down. I think obviously taking the strategy of investing a little bit more into holding slightly higher stock levels, while we're grabbing a lot more opportunities and winning a lot more business and driving some good top line growth, from time to time, we need to be quite mindful. And perhaps we're taking a few opportunities to liquidate some stock and just getting into this cash flow cycle. I think a bit of balance of both, I guess, where it kind of dropped a little bit, but nothing significant.
It's very strong. Still very strong. Long as we're above 9%, that's our aim. To be above 9%, double-digit growth, quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year. That's our aim.
Okay, great. Thanks for that. No, indeed, still very strong margins. Just to sort of reiterate, above, you still expect above 9% even though the Exeed contribution kicks in more? That's the whole.
That's the aim.
Longer term margin profile? Okay.
Yes. Yeah, that's the aim. We're aiming somewhere between 9%-9.5%. Like you've said, it's quarter-over-quarter, yeah?
Yeah.
I mean, we had a lot of education deals. Some education deals that we shipped out in December. Slightly slower margin profile. Another thing as well, what I've said before, unfortunately, it's just the nature of our industry. Large corporate partners, big, enterprise PC customers, they're demanding the stock and they drive big volumes. The margin profile for this customer base for us, it's slightly slower. We just basically didn't have enough stock to give to our smaller partners. I think as we will be able to get this SMB growing, I mean, it's still delivered a fantastic result last year, but if we get this similar double-digit SMB growth this year, and I think it's already. I can already feel this is happening.
We do have a much better stock profile right now as we speak and we've had for the last couple of months. I think that will kind of counterbalance those other big retail businesses, so that it'll continue to keep our margin above 9%.
Great. No, thanks. That's very helpful. Just one more from me. Vlad, you called out security as an opportunity, but not just physical. With that Hills IT acquisition, I know there's some large international vendors as part of that coming through. Perhaps could you expand on the extent of revenue synergies we should be expecting or what would be possible, so in terms of introducing new vendors to existing customers and existing technologies from your portfolio to the new customers acquired, if that makes sense.
Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, I'll make myself a little bit more clearer here. The overall security portfolio, in my strong conviction, will converge. We will see a lot of security software vendors and what we call an electronic security or physical security, which involve, video surveillance, face recognition, AI built , sensors, IoT sensors, all this is going to come together. It's already coming together, but very, very slowly. At the moment, when you look at the business, it's still very siloed. I'll give you a quick example. I think it would probably be easy to demonstrate. When you build a big commercial building, you have your electrical system integrators doing all the electrical work, and then you have your security system integrators do security work.
You have IT guys come in and do the on-prem data centers is required, or they take all the workloads into the cloud or whatever they do. The IT guy providing all the security levels to running the this commercial building or anyone who is in the commercial building. I do believe that electronic security and a software security will be coming together, converging together, and working together. I do believe that a lot of security specialists is going to be specializing not only in a software layer, but also in a electronic security and a physical security layers. For that, we need to be ready, and for that, we need to skill up and provide those skills into the market, which at the moment is pretty much non-existent.
You either work on one side or the other side. We will try to be at the heart, in the beginning of that transformation, which is super exciting. That's a long-term vision, right? Immediate, if you want to see the immediate impact on our business, of course, it's an existing business. Over AUD 100 million of existing electronic security cameras, sensors, and all that sort of stuff. We will be able to cross-sell all those into our IT partners, which we have over 6,000 of, and all the security system integrators and the electric system integrators that comes with Hills. We're of course going to offer them some of the IT products which they currently buy from different distributors. That's an immediate uptick, and opportunity, I guess.
Yes. Great. Thanks so much for that, guys.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Dicker for closing remarks.
Okay. Thanks very much, everyone. Thanks, Mary. Thanks, Vlad. Thanks for the questions, and thanks for everyone, for listening. That's it. Have a good day.