Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Jonathan Rubinsztein, and I'm the CEO of Nuix. I'm joined today by our Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Chad Barton. If we move to Slide 2, the agenda, today we'll be discussing Nuix's results for the half year ending 31 December 2022, along with an update on important strategic work that we've been undertaking. I'll make some opening comments before handing over to Chad to talk through the financial results in further detail. Following that, I'll provide some commentary on our strategic initiatives and make some concluding remarks. If we move to Slide 4, before I get to the results, just some brief comments on Nuix. We've been driving a business transformation at Nuix, underpinned by a cultural transformation.
We have passionate people at Nuix who are driven by a purpose of being a force for good by helping our customers find truth in their data. We have harnessed the passion to redefine our new values to which we want to be held accountable and are working hard to create a culture that is true to our values and our purpose. We are actively and intentionally working on aspects of our culture to foster greater belonging, engagement, and meaning to create a culture of innovation and excellence. We are signaling the change also in our new branding, which represents this great Australian tech brand. The new branding will be carried through our marketing, our website, and our products. The new energy that is possible within the business is now visible through our visual identity. Turning to Slide 5, to the H1 financial results.
There are some key messages that I'd like to emphasize today. Firstly, critical measures like ACV and NDR, net dollar retention, are showing good momentum, and our customer churn remains low. All three of these metrics have actually improved further since our recent update at the AGM in November. On statutory measures, revenue, EBITDA, and net profit after tax are all up. The strategic initiatives that we have been working on are progressing at a rapid pace and are beginning to yield tangible benefits. Our critical Horizon 2 project, the Nuix Unified Platform, is approaching launch, which will be a real game changer. We've commenced with the productization of our capabilities with the launch of the Nuix Data Privacy Solution, the first of our Horizon 3 initiatives. Turning now to our key financial metrics for the half on Slide 6.
ACV at the end of the half came in at AUD 170.2 million, in line with the expected range we provided last month. This outcome is up 3.4% on the same time last year. Importantly, we've made some good gains just in the last six months, in particular, with the ACV result up 5% from the outcome at 30 June and slightly higher than the ACV we highlighted at the time of the AGM. Our statutory revenue rose by 4.3% on the previous corresponding period, driven by a stronger trading performance in December and currency tailwind, as indicated in the January trading update. We have previously flagged that our non-operational legal costs were significantly lower during the half compared to the PCP.
This impact, along with revenue growth and general cost containment, meant statutory EBITDA was up 51.6% to AUD 20.9 million. Two key new numbers for the half to highlight today are customer churn and Net Dollar Retention or NDR. Customer churn for the half remains low at 4.8% compared to 4.1% in the previous period. Importantly, our churn numbers have improved since the full-year result and the AGM update, where the metrics were 5.4% and 5.5% respectively. Similarly, our NDR outcome, an indicator of how much we're selling to our existing customer base, rose to 103.1% for the half. Not only is this metric up from PCP, but also higher than both the financial year results and the AGM update.
I want to pause for a moment to reflect on NDR and churn. Progress in these two metrics are important. It means we are selling more to our existing customer base, and we are also losing fewer customers to churn. It is a useful reminder of the loyalty and stickiness of a customer base. Remember, this has occurred during a period of where we have begun implementing aspects of our new price book, which we'll have more to say about a little later on. Chad will also talk shortly about some of the interesting characteristics of our customer base. Lastly, we finished the half with over AUD 37 million in cash with no debt. I'll now hand over to Chad to talk through the financial results in a bit more detail.
Thanks, Jonathan. Good morning, everyone. Last month, we updated the market with our guidance for our key financial metrics for the half. Today's results are in line with those guidance ranges. There are some interesting trends worth highlighting. As Jonathan's pointed out, ACV and NDR are both higher and churn remains low. Subscription ACV continues to grow strongly. Consumption ACVs also growing strongly, including Discover SaaS. Statutory revenue is higher despite moderation of multi-year deals. Our R&D spend remained elevated in line with strategy. Generally costs have been well contained. Underlying EBITDA has shown good lift with statutory EBITDA and NPAT higher. In line with our stated aim, we were underlying free cash flow neutral for the half. Our customer base is diversified and sticky. Let me take you through these results in a little bit more detail. Starting with ACV.
Total ACV is up 3.4% on PCP compared to the ACV at the end of FY 2022, we're up 5%. Subscription ACV is up 7% on PCP, represented by the darker blue bars on the chart. Subscription ACV is important because it's a measure of recurring proportion of our ACV akin to ARR. ACV growth is primarily driven by stronger net upsells to our existing customer base in keeping with our near-term strategy. You can also see this illustrated through our growth in our NDR metric. Other ACV, which includes perpetual licenses and services, is lower in line with our strategic shift away from selling perpetual licenses. I won't talk to it here, but Slide 10 shows further evolution of our ACV by license type. Slide 11 illustrates growth in our consumption ACV. Overall consumption ACV growth is up 11.6% on PCP.
Keeping in mind that consumption ACV is a subset of subscription ACV. We continue to experience strong demand from law firms for our Nuix Discover SaaS product, which rose 14.2% on PCP. Non-SaaS consumption, via the light blue line, continues to be driven by the trend for a small number of large customers shifting to consumption-based licenses. Although the pace of this shift has slowed compared to prior periods, with many of our large advisory customers already having made this transition. Slide 12 shows ACV by region. North America, which makes up a little over half our ACV, rose on PCP on the strength of corporate and law firms. We saw good upsell to existing customers and Nuix Discover SaaS uplift, as well as a currency tailwind. We previously announced that Mike Smith had joined as Head of Americas, and his new leadership team is now in place.
EMEA saw good growth, up 5% on PCP, with important new business wins in corporate and government, along with upselling advisories and government. Asia Pacific was down marginally on PCP. Warren Brugger has joined the team late in the half to lead the region. The APAC result was characterized by growth from Australian government sector, offset by some weakness in Asia and some customer consolidation. Turning now to statutory revenue. As we've noted previously, our statutory revenue can be variable due to the impact of multi-year deals between periods. Statutory revenue rose by 4.3% on PCP for AUD 87.6 million for the half. Subscription revenue accounted for 93% of total revenue. New business was 18.3% lower on PCP, with our near-term strategic focus on our existing customer base during the period.
The proportion of multi-year deals in the half was 29% from a high level of 48% in the PCP. This moderation in multi-year deals is in line with our expectations. Despite the fall in the proportion of multi-year deals, average new order value actually rose by 12.9% to AUD 210,000. Turning to R&D. You can see during the half we've maintained our strong commitment to research and development with a total spend up 3% on PCP. During the half, we made important progress on our key R&D projects, including the achievement of the FedRAMP Ready status, a critical milestone for our R&D journey. We also made important progress on initiatives to drive our pipeline, including those around our NLP integration, our Nuix Unified Platform, and the Nuix Data Privacy Solution.
It's important to note here that our R&D spend is almost entirely covered by our operational cash flow, even at these higher levels of R&D spend. This is a conscious decision to lean forward into our key projects to drive future growth. On Slide 15, you can see our income statement. Underlying EBITDA rose 8.5% on PCP, driven by both revenue growth and general cost containment. We experienced an increase in cost of goods sold due to a lift in reseller volumes and a step-up in our hosting costs and capacity. I've mentioned the R&D spend. Overall costs have been well contained, partly as a result of our Fit for Growth program. As already flagged, non-operational legal costs were significantly lower than the PCP. It's worth noting that we expect to step up in our cost base in the second half compared to the first half.
Marketing costs, in particular, will be significantly higher, partly due to the Accelerate program, which Jonathan will talk about shortly. Although we secured important legal victory, it's likely that our non-operational legal costs will remain elevated into the second half as we focus our attention on other legal matters. Slide 16 highlights some of those things graphically, showing a walk from last year's statutory EBITDA to this year's outcome, including underlying EBITDA. Turning to Slide 17 and free cash flow. We've been clear in our commentary that we aim to be underlying cash flow neutral. That is cash flow excluding costs associated with the Topos acquisition and non-operational legal costs. You can see in the chart, we're essentially cash flow neutral for underlying cash flow during the half, a marked change from the same period last year.
The cash costs of our elevated levels of R&D, reflected here in software development costs, have been funded by operational cash flow. It's worth flagging at this point a payment made after the end of the period associated with Topos acquisition in the amount of $6.25 million. You can find this information further in the appendix. Lastly, I'd like to make some comments about the nature of Nuix's customer base. Advisories remain our largest industry group. Although we have seen good growth in government, in particular over the last six months. Nuix's customer base remains highly diversified, with no individual customer contributing more than 3% of ACV. Highlighting the degree of stickiness in the customer base, more than 40% of our customers have actually been with us for more than 10 years. Of course, our customer churn remains low.
Lastly, as a reminder of the truly global nature of our customer base, around 85% of our ACV is sourced from customers outside Australia. The diverse nature of our customer base is important. It provides us with a degree of stability across our ACV base and means that any individual contract is not by itself overly material. I'll now hand back to Jonathan.
Thanks, Chad. Now, if we move to Slide 20, our multi-horizon strategy. We've talked before about the three horizons of change that underpin Nuix's strategic refresh. Horizon 1 is the near-term focus, providing important momentum to restart growth and providing a solid foundation for our medium and long-term growth strategies. Horizon 2 incorporates work to build out our Unified Platform, and I'll have more to say on that shortly. Horizon 3 incorporates high-value, repeatable use cases. If we move to Slide 21, which is our Horizon 1 key initiatives. At the last results, we outlined critical Horizon 1 initiatives, and I'm pleased to provide a further update today. Our new price book was launched on 1 July , as we previously highlighted. This approach isn't simply about raising prices, but addressing what we saw as a fundamental disconnect in certain areas between pricing and value.
It's important to remember that price increases also occur as contracts are renewed with customers, not on a single date across the customer base. The impact of price rises take time to work its way through the customer base as contracts come up for renewal. We have also currently finalizing price book simplification for the U.S. government sector, which is the last major part of this initiative. As we've said all along, it's important for us to demonstrate value for our clients along with any price increases, and we've made sure our customers have access to a more streamlined, broader offering that incorporates R&D innovation to help demonstrate that value. On sales enablement optimization, really great gains have been made in relation to standardizing our sales processes.
This has been an intensive process, differentiating our account tiering, utilizing hunters and farmers concept more effectively, pivoting our sales metrics towards ACV, standardizing our pitch decks and other materials, and broadly shifting from design to execution. Our renewals process continues to be refined with a much greater focus now on critical metrics like ACV, NDR, and churn. The global approvals process is now much more standardized and structured. We've also got much greater clarity regarding accountability around closing quality renewals. You can see the benefits of these initiatives, in particular, flowing through into our ACV, NDR, and churn metrics that we've highlighted today. The next steps from here involve continuing to drive NDR uplift through upsell and cross-sell. On service offerings, we remain committed to offering a more holistic customer offering of product, services, and support so that customers can get the most out of their Nuix investment.
This is a longer-dated initiative which is going to take further time to implement. The early work here is promising and the potential benefits to our customers, partners, and Nuix are large. We are revamping Nuix Advantage offering to make it more meaningful and appropriate for our customer base. This is a cultural change for our customers, it's a longer-term project that has great potential for us. If we move to Slide 22, we've said right from the start of the strategic refresh that we need to have the right structural elements in place to support our strategic initiatives. Significant and ongoing changes occurred during the half around our leadership, culture, and value propositions. Last year, we rolled out new organizational structure, including a new leadership structure, the reorganization of the sales teams, and streamlining of the technology function.
In the past tasks, we've made important hires into critical leadership roles, with Jason Wilson appointed as our Chief Product Officer to own and drive our product roadmap. In addition, Warren Brugger joined as EVP of APAC and Global Alliances, responsible for driving our sales efforts in Asia Pacific, as well as taking ownership of our critical alliances and channel partner relationships globally. We've continued to invest in our capabilities across engineering, corporate services, and product development. Importantly, our cultural refresh program implementing new branding and company values to help define the type of company we are and want to be. We made important progress in building greater clarity around employee propositions, particularly in engineering, focusing on role clarity, articulation of career pathways, and fostering a greater sense of collaboration. There are a couple of other enablers which are absolutely critical projects that are also worth flagging.
You might have heard us talk about our license modernization project previously. This is a critical and transformational project targeting a simplified licensing framework built around solution and data consumption, with timelines linked to our new Nuix Unified Platform, which I'll come to shortly. Our R&D operational strategy has further evolved, meaning greater efficiency in our technology development and delivery, as well as an increased focus on project prioritization. Lastly, our Fit for Growth program has made terrific strides in terms of embedding operational efficiency discipline into the organization, giving us greater flexibility to pursue future investment requirements. If we move to Slide 23, the heat map, you might remember this schematic from our full year results, I wanted to revisit it today to put a bit more of a framework around the progress that we've achieved in the last half.
As I flagged, our new price book is almost fully implemented, driving incremental benefits across ACV and NDR. Sales optimization is one of the areas where we made really good gains in the half, arming our salespeople with the skills and materials to drive improved win rates, higher customer retention, and sales force efficiencies. I mentioned our renewals process is now much more focused around ACV and NDR outcomes, with better checks on addressing the price versus value proposition. Service and support offerings, as I mentioned, will take time, will have material impacts over the medium term, helping our customers use our products more effectively. On enablers, our recent hires into critical leadership positions give us a fantastic structure and the right individuals to drive growth. We'll continue to refine the structure at the margins, the near term goal here is almost complete.
We've pivoted the way our people are incentivized to more closely match our goals of our organization. The next steps here are involve further defining accountability and embedding our new company values into our culture. Lastly, we've made some great gains in building out our marketing function, which is critical for lead generation and our deal pipeline, and I'll have more to say about this shortly. If we move to Slide 24, this details how the initiatives from each of the three horizons fit together strategically, showing timing and expected benefits. As you can see, first half 2023 was all systems go for everything, all at once. It was a remarkably busy and fruitful time for our projects across Horizon 1, 2, and 3.
In the current half, more finalization work will occur on Horizon 1 foundations, while the Horizon 2 and 3 projects will continue with their current momentum. If we move to Slide 25, this is a nice lead in to some comments around Horizon 2. I'm super excited to announce that our new Nuix Unified Platform is on track to be released to customers in first half 2024. That is the second half of this calendar year. The Nuix Unified Platform is a step change in the way our customers use our product, vastly optimizing workflows and getting users from request to results far faster, smarter, and easier. This is partly achieved by augmenting Nuix's engine-based products with our natural language processing AI capabilities and by automating the most manual, repetitive user tasks so that data flows more easily through the Nuix platform.
Customers will be able to work smarter, yielding significant productivity benefits, better control of tech stack costs, and utilizing their own team experiences to work across new and diverse business lines. On launch, the Nuix Unified Platform becomes the foundation for solving challenges like Nuix Data Privacy Solution, early case assessment through our legal processing, and fraud. We'll have more to say about the Nuix Unified Platform closer to rollout, in short, we're super excited. Watch this space. We move to Slide 26, Nuix Data Privacy Solution. I mentioned Nuix Data Privacy Solution a moment ago when talking about the Nuix Unified Platform. Nuix Data Privacy Solution is a first Horizon 3 initiative that is building high value, repeatable use case solutions available to our customers. This is a great example of harnessing the power of the Nuix engine in managing the impact of expanding data regulation.
The offering allows customers to map privacy data, identify risks, meet retrieval obligations, defensively delete relevant data and optimize processing. Future productized offerings are in our development pipeline. These will be underpinned by the capabilities of the Nuix Unified Platform. We look forward to updating you on these further initiatives in due course. If you move to Slide 27, which is our Accelerate 23. Right from the start of our strategic refresh, we've said a greater focus on customer centricity is critical. We're increasing our engagement with customers through events like user groups. Further to that, we're very excited to showcase all of these innovations and more to our customers and our partners at a series of landmark customer events taking place in Sydney, London and Washington D.C. over March and April.
The events are named Nuix Accelerate and are positioned as an essential destination for global professionals who protect their organizations and communities by finding truth in complex data. These events are opportunity to excite our customers with the change and highlight some of the incredible and important work that our customers conduct aided by our technology. They are also an opportunity for us to connect with our customers in person, building relationships that build business in the long term. Separate to the results today, Nuix has also released an ASX announcement regarding a change of chairman from Jeff Bleich to Rob Mactier. I want to take a moment to express my sincere thanks to Jeff for his tireless efforts as chairman. A role is executed with integrity and the utmost commitment.
I know I speak for the entire board when I say we look forward to continuing to work with Jeff in his capacity as Deputy Chair. In closing today, I'd like to leave you with the following key points. One, o ur strategic initiatives are working. We are seeing the green shoots of momentum that we wanted to see in our critical metrics like ACV, NDR and churn. As we progress further on these initiatives and indeed finalize some of them, we expect these initiatives to provide further momentum and growth. Two, our pipeline is exciting. The launch of the new Nuix Unified Platform will be a step change in terms of our customers' experience and also for us as an organization. We have already seen and started our productization pathway with data privacy and with more solutions to follow.
Three, t he new Nuix is emerging and it's emerging now.
Our strategy is clear. We are acting on it. We are not distracted by erroneous chatter. We have had significant wins recently. Our team is motivated and getting on with the task at hand, making a meaningful difference in the world. We're excited about the future and ready to drive Nuix forward. I'll now hand back to the operator for QA.
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 then two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset to ask your question. We'll just pause briefly to allow any questioners to register. We are currently showing no questioners at this time. I'd like to hand the conference over to Mr. Rubinsztein for closing remarks.
Thank you very much for your time today. We look forward to meeting with investors in the coming days and weeks. Thank you.