Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Integrated Research Limited fiscal year 2022 half year results investor conference call. 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 one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. John Ruthven, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Good morning and welcome to the FY half year results briefing for Integrated Research. My name is John Ruthven, and I'm the CEO of IR. With me today is Peter Adams, our Chief Financial Officer. This morning, we posted our results presentation to the ASX website, which we will be referring to during this call. Integrated Research, or IR, as we are better known, is a global software company providing performance and experience management solutions for critical business systems. We have three product lines. Collaborate for Unified Communications and UCaaS, Transact in the payment space, and Infrastructure for HP NonStop environments. We have a substantial global enterprise customer base, including more than 25% of the Global 500. Moving to slide three, titled CEO Key Messages. IR is executing a phased multi-year transition.
We are confident that our strategy is right to make our solutions more relevant and expand our addressable markets into higher growth opportunities. This will lead to higher quality earnings. In the first half, we delivered some encouraging early results. Total contract value, or TCV, was up 8% PCP, driven by an 88% increase in new business and a 424% growth in SaaS users. By contrast, we had a challenging half in the Americas, and a plan to rejuvenate growth is underway. With a strong balance sheet, we are self-funding our growth. An adjusted EBITDA of AUD 15.6 million for our on-premises business funded a AUD 12 million investment in our cloud business. Net cash was also well up on the prior period.
We have a positive second-half outlook with expected growth in TCV and NPAT, driven by new products and new customer wins. As I move to slide four, TCV for the half was AUD 31.7 million. Europe and Asia Pacific TCV results were also up strongly. There was a greater percentage of new business relative to the same time last year. We achieved an overall 400% increase in cloud and hybrid users on the platform. On the flip side, the Americas experienced a dip in TCV, noting that the current half was not a strong period for renewals. Pro forma revenue is a trailing measure of amortized revenue and is 7% down. Not surprising after the difficult 2001 financial year. Moving to slide five. Customer wins are a critical validation of our strategy and value proposition.
Our strategy, in simple terms, is to extend our value proposition to customers and prospects with new capabilities and support them on their platform of choice, on-premises, hybrid or cloud. During the first half, we onboarded Thomson Reuters as a new customer through our BT relationship. Importantly, they are the first customer for the just-launched Collaboration Space Management product. Like many large enterprise customers, their environment is hybrid, which plays to our strength. We also extended our relationship with BP through our partner HCL. In this case, they added MS Teams capability to their existing on-premises licensed products for nearly 100,000 users. In doing so, they too become a hybrid customer. Sloan Kettering, one of the world's largest cancer research centers, joined our customer ranks and is a proof point of the growing success we are having with our healthcare industry focus.
They are a large Cisco environment and licensed our on-premise solution, including support for video. Lastly, we extended our relationship with The Standard Bank of South Africa, a customer for nearly 20 years, expanding our footprint to support increased transaction volumes. This sample of wins demonstrates the high-quality customer base and the ongoing expansion of our business model with SaaS products. Slide six really highlights two things. The strength and quality of IR's customer base and the early signs of positive momentum as we execute our plan. Customer retention remains high at 97%, with many large customers having been with us for more than 15 years. We previously communicated a shortening in contract length, now 2.5 years, which is mainly in the Collaborate portfolio and represents the underlying decisions customers are making in terms of their future environment.
Importantly, our strategy and product suite supports them whether they are on premises, hybrid or pure SaaS. The most exciting aspect of our first half performance was new business, up 88% on the prior corresponding period. With the addition of great brands and organizations like Thomson Reuters, NYPD, Bank of New York Mellon and more. SaaS users added to the platform was an amazing 424% growth. These are key indicators of our progress in executing our phased multi-year transition. As previously shared, we're working through a clear plan with key performance indicators to support the transition. This slide reports on progress. First half had some mixed results. Customer retention and new business TCV was ahead of plan. In fact, new business TCV was 38% of total TCV.
The launch of Collaboration Space Management through a strategic third-party relationship demonstrates good product innovation progress, as did the certification of our ServiceNow integration. We added 23 new customers, which is behind our plan, but up on the prior year. While gaining momentum, we are behind where we want to be on new products to existing customers and the percent of TCV from products released in the last five years. This includes our new SaaS products. Second half pipeline is stronger for both new customers, new to existing and SaaS. I'll now hand over to Peter to provide a detailed overview of our financial performance.
Thanks, John. We are on slide nine, titled TCV Revenue and Cash. The key metrics that management focus on the most are in the top table of this slide. Both definitions and reconciliations have been included in the appendix of the slide deck. The reason we chose Total Contract Value or TCV as a measure of performance is because it provides the organization to sell on-premises, hybrid, and cloud solutions with equal incentive. Previously, the upfront revenue model provided a bias toward on-premises solutions. This is the first six-month period where sales management have been incentivized on TCV. TCV of AUD 31.7 million was up 8% on the previous corresponding period. Noting that it was not a strong half for renewals, the performance was mixed. APAC and Europe up strongly and Americas down compared to previous corresponding period. We will talk about geographic performance shortly.
TCV for new business was up 88% to AUD 12.2 million. We take encouragement from new sales. Our sales processes have become sharper, and while not yet seen in the first half numbers, we believe that we have a much stronger TCV performance in the second half, backed by this additional selling maturity, a stronger renewals pipeline, and products becoming more market relevant. Pro forma subscription revenue of AUD 34.4 million was down 6% over the previous corresponding period. This result is not a surprise given the disappointing FY 2021 financial year. Remember, pro forma subscription revenue is derived by amortizing license fees over the contract life and adding related maintenance. It is therefore a trailing measure from TCV performance in prior periods. As we move through time, pro forma subscription revenue will rise from stronger TCV performance.
Cash receipts from customers was AUD 37.7 million. We would expect a close relationship of this number to pro forma revenue, since customers typically pay annually over their contract term and pro forma revenue is broadly aligned to recurring revenue, with the exception of one-time throughput revenue like testing solutions and professional services. The 11% drop in cash receipts is partly timing. We saw a strong catch up in the cash receipts for the month at AUD 7.1 million, up 57% compared to January of the preceding year. The two call-outs in the statutory results are maintenance fees down 24% and subscription fees up over 300%. Increasingly, most of our contractual maintenance is part of a term-based license contract, and that base remains solid.
However, within the portfolio, there are independent maintenance streams associated with perpetual licenses where we are experiencing higher level of cancellations. As the portfolio transitions further to term-based license contracts, we should see a more retentive portfolio. We're starting to see revenue come through from our cloud and hybrid solutions. Subscription fees of AUD 0.5 million is up 314% when compared to the prior corresponding period. There are 440,000 users on the new platform in either a hybrid or cloud capacity. It should be noted that hybrid revenue has both license and subscription characteristics in the classification in the SaaS accounts. Turning to slide 10. We've continued our seven-year series of revenue on a pro forma basis. The top three charts represent the geographic segmentation in their natural currencies.
The bottom three charts represent the product segmentation in both Australian and U.S. dollars. Let's look at these charts from a Q&A perspective. Question one, why is Asia Pacific doing so well? Asia Pacific has been able to build from a much smaller base compared to the Americas. Sales leadership has been in place for over seven years, and the business is well-balanced across new and existing business as well as the product portfolio. Question two, why is there a decline in the Americas and Europe? There are three factors for the decline in pro forma revenue. Firstly, macroeconomic environmental factors, namely COVID. The sales and marketing efforts have adapted to living with the virus. Selling face-to-face and attending events has been difficult. Secondly, customer environmental changes, particularly in Collaborate. Examples of this has been movement of our customer environments from on-premise to either hybrid or cloud.
Thirdly, IR sales process and the methodology changes. Selling on-premises, hybrid and cloud solutions has required adaptive changes within the business. The increase in new business in the first half is encouraging and first signs of green shoots. Steps taken to improve performance will be covered more fully by John. In short, these improvement measures include demand generation initiatives, pipeline coverage, sales training, skills, and sales development. Question three, why are we not seeing growth in Collaborate? The results in Collaborate have been mixed and in part connected to the mixed regional results. The increase in customer cloud and hybrid collaboration environments was anticipated several years ago, although the pandemic has accelerated some of this change. Customers are still learning how best to manage their collaboration environments.
Many of our new solutions have only been in the market a short period, so it takes time to seed the market and educate customers on how we solve these problems. We are seeing a pickup in new business, which is encouraging, but there is more work to do. There are several marketing programs in flight to drive pipeline. Strategic alliances such as the one recently signed with Utelogy for the provision of collaboration space management is part of the journey toward returning to meaningful growth. Question four, what are the triggers for meaningful growth in Infrastructure and Transact? Prognosis for Infrastructure has been around since the inception of the company more than 30 years ago. It is not going away anytime soon. There are likely to be further customer retirements and consolidation of their HP NonStop platform.
However, we view strategic partnerships such as HP and ACI will provide stabilization and growth opportunities for both Infrastructure and Transact. There are more products to sell. These include payment analytics, real-time payments, and high-value payments, which adds to our card payments and other monitoring solutions. Moving to slide 11. IR has undergone significant change in the last 18 months. One method of understanding the business is assessing underlying EBITDA for the on-premises business and separately reviewing the cloud and hybrid investments. Underlying EBITDA has been derived using the revenue over time pro forma calculations and backing out abnormal items such as currency exchange gains. There is a high degree of judgment in assessing cloud versus on-premises costs. Normalized EBITDA for the on-premises business in the first half is AUD 15.6 million, with an EBITDA margin of 38%.
Our development spend into the cloud platform and new products over the last 18 months is AUD 12 million and has been self-funded from existing operations. Our expected return on investments from our cloud and hybrid solutions is 15%. The slide on operating leverage presents each of our key operating expense line items for the last five first half periods represented by the bars. The dotted lines represent these expenses as percentage of pro forma revenue. Our innovation agenda remains unchanged. The jump in R&D expenditure primarily reflects the amortization of new cloud platform and release of new products to market. Our sales and marketing spend has pulled back during COVID with less travel and trade shows. FY 2022 represents the first year where we have incentivized the sales team on TCV.
We believe that there is an opportunity for greater productivity through the sales process of renewals and the growing kit bag of new products to sell. Turning to slide 13. Investment in innovation as measured by capitalized development in the cash flow statement was AUD 6 million for the half. The spend was 95% attributed to innovation. 79% spent on cloud platform and cloud solutions. Ongoing investment in improving these solutions plus adding other capabilities is critical to the growth of the business. Turning to slide 14, headed Net Cash Flow Analysis. Cash flow from operations was AUD 8.7 million to the half with a cash conversion rate of 92%. We had a strong start to the new calendar year with cash collections for January up 57% to AUD 7.1 million. This cash generation continued to support ongoing development and fund future growth.
Our balance sheet shown on slide 15 remains in a net cash position of AUD 9.4 million. Trade receivables of AUD 74.8 million remains a strong source of future cash flow. We have AUD 14.4 million undrawn in our debt facility. I will now pass back to John.
Thanks, Peter. On slide 17, we're in a phased multi-year transition, innovation, execution and scale. In FY 2021, we delivered a number of new products on our SaaS platform. In FY 2022 and FY 2023, we will build on this and expand our value proposition with new products and the ongoing build out of our platforms. In the last week, we launched a brand new product, Collaboration Space Management. This is targeted at the high growth area of collaboration spaces or rooms driven by hybrid working. As we transition, we will move from upfront revenues to better quality SaaS subscription revenues with higher levels of ARR or annual recurring revenues. FY 2022 is focused on execution, particularly our go-to-market. The changes we have made are taking time to embed as we move to selling a much higher percentage of new business.
We are confident that the go-to-market design is right and investments in our demand generation capability will pay off. IR's target addressable market is AUD 1.2 billion and growing. Embedded in our strategy is a projected view of how our TCV mix will transition over time from on-premises to hybrid to cloud. As the slide shows, this will vary by product line, with Infrastructure expected to remain 100% on-premises for the foreseeable future. We expect that there will be a long tail to on-premises based on the large enterprise market that we serve. This view is backed up by our customer engagement and recent wins. Moving to slide 19. The future of the workforce and workplace is hybrid, increasing the relevance of the IR Collaborate product line. There is significant complexity and challenge in providing a reliable and rich hybrid working experience.
Part of this is flexible work patterns, where it is expected that hybrid workers will split their time between remote and then variations of anything from one to four days a week in the office. This is placing pressure on capacity planning, infrastructure, employee expectations of both the digital experience as well as the office experience. A key theme that emerges is that infrastructure to effectively support remote work must be enterprise-grade. We're also witnessing collaboration between HR, IT, and facilities as organizations try to earn the commute for employees to attend the office. Last week, we launched our newest product, Collaboration Space Management. Through a strategic OEM partnership, we are extending our value proposition to existing customers in increasing our competitive differentiation to win new ones. The target customer is large enterprises with a significant number of conferencing rooms or collaboration spaces, say greater than 500.
The solution is sold to the same buyer and addresses the problems of room readiness, space utilization, and health and safety. Partner sizes the unified communications market at 550 million users, of which 193 million are estimated to be the higher value, more sophisticated conferencing users. This segment saw 7% growth in 2021, and it is expected to continue at this rate for the next few years. We see growth in conferencing users, increased platform intelligence to support new services that will increase our ARPU with customers. On slide 20, we continue to see a massive shift in consumer buying behavior from credit cards to online. Mobile transactions are driving major advances in technology and connected devices. At the same time, government policies and regulations are mandating adoption of new payment standards.
We support our customers across a range of mission-critical use cases, from monitoring the availability and throughput of payment channels and partners to providing insights into payment flows to maximize business value. We also help in the rapid detection of blockages in high-value payment processing and provide actionable dashboards for new payment types. We see the growth opportunity in three areas. A, organic growth with our customers as payment volumes are increasing. B, expand our base to support new payment types like real-time payments and high value with the launch of new products in this area. C, extending the value proposition with greater business insights to existing customers. The market is significant with 1.073 trillion non-cash payment transactions globally in calendar year 2021.
Per the Capgemini World Payments Report, these volumes are growing at 18.6% CAGR and are split 586 billion to cards and 86 billion real time. I said in my opening remarks, we see TCV growth for the full year. We have started the second half ahead on a PCP basis and the pipeline supports our outlook, noting a dependence on higher levels of new business. We expect pro forma revenue to be comparable to the last year. We have a plan in place to rejuvenate in the Americas. We have bolstered our sales leadership with new business experience. There is solid new business pipeline cover and many of the changes we made at the start of the year are bedding in. With international travel opening up, I will be in the U.S. in March.
I expect to spend a portion of my time in the half in the Americas with customers, partners and of course our team. Supporting our expectation of TCV growth is a stronger renewals portfolio. The expanded customer success team has implemented new field processes focused on retention and renewal rates. The ongoing transition of our business is supported by a strong balance sheet and positive second half cash flow. Like many businesses, a risk we are facing is higher levels of staff turnover. New business growth should see ongoing traction for new products launched, including Collaboration Space Management. We expect to see growth in our SaaS TCV in the half. Finally, based on a stable currency assumption, we expect to see annual growth in net profit after tax. The high level takeaway is that we are building a stronger company with an expanded product set and a greater market opportunity.
Operator, that concludes the presentation. We can now open it up for questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question please press star then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request please press star then two. If you are on a speaker phone please pick up the handset to ask your question. Once again press star then one to ask your question. Our first question will come from Chris Savage of Bell Potter. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Morning, John. Morning, Peter. First one probably more so for you, John. The stronger renewals pipeline you've got in H2, can you break that down a bit by product and geography where it's, where that strength is coming from?
Chris, thanks for the question. It's pretty well balanced across the three regions. Certainly the Americas, their renewal portfolio is probably double what it was in the first half. Across the product lines, reasonably balanced but we've certainly got a stronger renewal portfolio in Transact and Infrastructure.
Can we just drill down on that weakness in the Americas in the first half a bit? Like what was it mainly attributable to?
I think, you know, I'd simplify it into probably three areas. As you've already noted, we had a lighter renewal portfolio. Secondly, it is taking time to bed in some of the new processes, particularly around orienting the go-to-market model to new business and bringing our new products to market. From a sales leadership standpoint, we've bolstered our new business experience in sales leadership. I think those are probably the three key areas that we're focused on.
With Cisco retiring its Cisco Prime product, have you seen much incremental benefit from that yet?
Yeah, we've got a campaign in place with Cisco. I think we previously communicated there, somewhere north of a thousand PCA customers. Not all of them are active with Cisco. Many of them are smaller. I think we've communicated previously that our sweet spot in the Collaborate space is larger enterprise. Our average users per customer is greater than 25,000. There's a segment of those thousand that are in our sweet spot and we've got a pipeline in place and we've closed a few of those conversion deals.
Okay. Maybe a couple of quick financial questions, probably more so for Peter. The tax benefit in the first half, what's the assumption around the full year given the guidance of an increase in impact year on year?
Yeah. The first thing is, in the first half, there was a credit for loan forgiveness that was not assessable, so that lowered the rate. We've got the usual R&D benefit coming through in the first half and that will certainly be there in the second. I guess the assumptions would be, you know, we the effective tax rate probably gonna be pretty low. It's probably gonna be about 20%.
For the second half?
Yep.
Okay. Picked up John saying the assumption around currency is a constant currency in the second half. What does that mean for other income, the assumption for the full year, given it was a couple of AUD million in the first half?
First of all, that currency exchange gain was driven by the change in the rate between the start of the reporting half and the closing rate at the end. We started the year at 75. It was pretty stable, as you'd appreciate, Chris, through most of the half and finished at 72. I guess the broad assumption is, and then the currency exchange gains for the second half will be negligible.
Similar amount to the first half for the full year.
Yeah.
All right.
Whether the first half will carry through the full year. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. All right. Great. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Chris.
Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then one. Our next question comes from Simon Conn of IML. Please go ahead.
Oh, hi, John. Hi, Peter. Can you just elaborate, John, on the product innovation? I mean, you've been investing quite a bit in new products the last some time. Can you just give us some examples of what's coming to market, and what the relevance is for the customers?
Yeah. I guess the first one we covered was we've brought Collaboration Space Management, which targets the area of collaboration environments or rooms. We've seen quite a bit of growth in the market around this as companies are making their decisions around hybrid working. The importance of being able to manage on-site people working remotely, et cetera, in a unified way has driven that. We chose to partner with an organization to do that. It extends our value proposition. The economic buyer is the same. By partnering to bring that solution to market, we decreased our time to market for that. Direct Routing. I think we've previously been Direct Routing and SBCs will come to market this half.
We have a number of ongoing enhancements to the platform. In the second half calendar, we'll also start to bring some of our third-party headset metrics capability to market. I think the first cab off the rank there will be Jabra to build that out. Just launched in market, so we're in the early alpha phase, if you want to call it that, with customers. We've brought our real-time and high-value products to market, and we've got a growing pipeline around those.
Okay. Thanks, John.
Thanks, Simon.
Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone keypad. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back the call to Mr. Ruthven for any closing remarks.
Thank you very much. In closing, I'd just like to reiterate some of the key messages that Peter and I have taken you through today. The transition that we are undertaking for the company is well underway, and that transition is expanding our products to capitalize on market opportunities and also increase our relevance and extend our value proposition to existing customers. There are some encouraging new signs with new wins, the growth in new business and the number of users coming across onto the SaaS platform. We look forward to keeping you updated on our progress as we move through. Thank you for joining today.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.