Good morning and welcome to the investor results for the first half of FY23. Also welcome to our very first webcast. Hopefully this is a great medium for you to have an update from us about what Objective's been doing and what the future outlook how it works for you. I'm gonna speak for probably about I would say about 25, 30 minutes, and then give you the opportunity to also ask questions. We'll come back to that at the end of the presentation and talk about how you get the opportunity to ask questions either on the line verbally or via the chat bar. We'll come back on that one.
First of all, always good to start with, you know, what we're all about here at Objective, and that is delivering outstanding digital government software which drives stronger communities and nations. I think regardless of, you know, what form of stakeholder you are, I think remaining true to the mission is always important and something that we should always remind ourselves of. If we talk about the agenda today, I'm gonna cover off a little bit of the financial summary for the first half. Hopefully you've had an opportunity to either download my letter to shareholders, the Appendix 4D, the highlights of the financial results announcement. There, they should all be available on the ASX now and hopefully you've had the chance to digest some of those.
We'll cover off what are the highlights for the first half, and then we'll have a business line review and then just remind everybody about what we're focused on from a strategic point of view during FY23. First of all, let's talk about the highlights. Revenue of AUD 55 million. Annual recurring revenue of AUD 89 million. Our EBITDA of AUD 13 million, obviously down slightly for reasons that I go through in the shareholder letter, which I'll touch on again. Net profit in fact was up slightly to AUD 11 million. R&D persistent, we'll talk about that at AUD 13 million and 24% of revenue. And cash up strongly up 24% on where we were a year from now.
On balance, all of those results were in line with what our expectations were. Again, you know, I've highlighted some of these things in the update that we did at the end of November. Just in terms of some of the stronger results, strong recurring revenue for ECM as a service up 84%. I should probably also call out with that I think a lot of organizations when they go through the transition show the upside but not the downside as it rolls off on on-prem solutions or older ways to sort of contract the service. In our case, in fact, we're still growing on the revenue from on-prem solutions as well.
There, you know, we're certainly eclipsing that in terms of what we're doing in terms of growth on the cloud model for Objective ECM. We'll talk some more about that. RegWorks up strongly 46%. Trapeze 18% and Connect 12%. I would say these are the year-end ARR numbers or the period-end ARR numbers. This is booked revenue. If we look at, if you've been to one of the presentations before, you'll be familiar with this graph. This is sort of the updated version of our transition to subscription. I think the call out here for us is in the first half, we actually moved to a new high of 78% recurring.
For those of you that are great students of the Objective story, you'll know that for the full year in FY22 we were at 72%. We're very confident that this is gonna continue to grow as a, as a total percentage of, sorry, percentage of total revenue. A good step up and I guess in keeping with the things that we've been speaking about in terms of we're really being focused on the ARR growth, moderating or becoming more efficient in the service delivery, for customers and we're clearly at bit, a hit an all-time high in terms of this recurring revenue. A new chart which I thought was also worthwhile, for all stakeholders was really this consistent growth, in year end ARR.
I appreciate we're only at a half year end, in terms of where we are in FY23. Everyone, everyone loves a new acronym, so we thought this was a one that was useful for everybody. This is a sort of a key metric that we look at as an organization. It doesn't always fit beautifully into accounting periods, but is a good proxy over, you know, a 24-month timeframe. You can see here, since we really committed to annual recurring revenue back in FY17, this has been a very strong story. We've achieved 20% compound annual growth rate in that number, over that period of time. Again, if you're an ardent student of these numbers, you'll appreciate that new chart.
R&D, which has obviously been at the core of our business since the sort of beginning of time. The story's continued. We're well above that 20% rate. 24%, AUD 13.4 million spent in the half. Well on track to be sort of in that same zone in the second half. I guess very different to almost all other companies here in Australia, we do not capitalize any of our R&D expenditure, so it rolls straight through and has obviously that impact on our net profit after tax. Clearly another strong story around investment in R&D. I think where this really shines through for me, though, is where we are with respect to our compounding R&D investment.
I think if you've been a long-term shareholder, I think this has been a great message to shareholders in terms of how we generate future value. Also from a customer's perspective, when I travel and talk to customers, this often comes up and is often raised by customers. I think you can see here off this chart that in fact, you know, although we've been listed for 23 years now, or coming up for our 23 year anniversary, in the last two years, 20% of the total R&D investment has been made in the last two years. A really significant number. We'll break through a quarter of a billion dollars somewhere during the calendar year this year.
Again, as I always say, look, not every dollar spent on R&D delivers the payload that we'd like, but there is a very, very high conversion of investment in R&D to products in future periods. I think again, you know, this bodes well for future periods as well. If we talk about a couple of the highlights, I think first of all, it's always good to remind ourselves of how the economic model works. For us, everything starts with great R&D or as we often say, you know, nothing good happens until someone invents a great product. If we are committed to our R&D investment and also committed in terms of the outcomes that we want from that, it delivers outstanding software. Clearly, that's not enough.
In this day and age, there's far more to it than just outstanding software. There's everything from, you know, the way we deploy solutions to the way we conduct support for all of our cloud solutions, what is the uptime, all these things that we've sort of come to know as breathing with respect to delivering these solutions. Delivering that outstanding customer experience end-to-end is very, very key to the organization today. If we do a good job of that and get our pricing model right, that'll give us the sort of financial vitality to allow us to start all over again and increase that R&D investment. I think if you've been to any of our presentations, you obviously can read that in the other charts.
You can see this has been at the heart of the organization for a long period of time. I think if we look at the current, the current period in terms of products, at the end of last year, the end of FY22, just we were talking about this some seven months ago. We'd had a very strong period during 22 of introducing new products, particularly Nexus. Objective Build got launched. Objective 3Sixty got acquired and then launched. We've really had a strong period of launching new products. What generally follows that is a period of making sure the new products are bedding in properly for customers, making sure that we're getting good feedback. That's really been a story of the last six months.
We've really been focused on hardening up what we've been delivering, as opposed to necessarily rushing new products and new capabilities out the door. We are getting great feedback on all the new products, and we're certainly working with customers to make sure that any issues that they've had have been well exercised through the product stack. We're really the second half of the year will be a little bit different. Certainly, we are working on all of the products currently. Every product has a roadmap at Objective, and every product has new features and capabilities for customers.
One of the things I also, I guess, wanted to call out, just to give for those of you that aren't sort of that familiar with our target market, is really the, a couple of the, I guess, macro themes that have been happening in government. Like, first of all, if you look at the, the table on the left from Gartner, you can see there that government continues to spend a lot on software versus anything else. Whilst there was a device pickup in 21, which we know is from sort of working from home or working remotely, the one that is persistent is software, which is obviously the industry that we're in. The other chart on the right-hand side is something that we really experienced during the calendar year 22.
I'm sure that in your lives you saw something similar. There were an increasing level of vacancies that were occurring in the public sector. It really, whilst it's started to moderate now, it really did impact the start of new projects. I think existing projects were continued to run and continued to get rolled out. In terms of new initiatives, it was really, you know, one of those years where people were getting, you know, back engaged with their, with their departments and agencies, and certainly towards the latter part of the year, you know, finally coming back to the office, and meeting together in teams. I meant physical teams, not Microsoft Teams.
If you can closely inspect the charts here, you'll see in fact that some of that pressure's coming off. We've seen that in our own activities as well. We thought it was a relevant point to point out both those, just the strength of how government's investing in digital systems, digital transformation, as much as, you know, the public sector has suffered from staff shortages like everybody else. I think it's also worthwhile pointing out there's been a lot said about security. Clearly, you know, we had the situation with Optus here in Australia. We also had the situation with Medicare. I think, you know, that they were just, I guess, more public situations than what had really been trending anyway.
I think at Objective we've been committed to security, for a very long period of time. We have a team dedicated to making sure all of our products are highly secure as well as our operating environment. You can see some of the things that we do on the left-hand side. All of our data is encrypted, both in transit and at rest. When we say in transit, when it's on the network as well as at rest in databases. We certainly vet all of our employees before they join the organization. We've really got a deep set of experience. On the right-hand side of this chart is just some of the accreditations that we have.
The two big ones, the ISO standards, 27001 and 9001 across all products and locations. Equally for things like Connect, we've been IRAP certified for quite a number of years now. In fact, we've got a, you know, one of the companies that we work with in the cybersecurity space has in fact adopted Connect for their own uses. Further than that, the DISP program with defense, we are accredited on. I guess two more local standards. The CSA STAR program out of North America and the Cyber Essentials in the U.K. . We've really been very attentive and our team's been very attentive to security. I mean, we've seen countless breaches that have occurred in the cloud.
I'm sure that you're seeing those still on a daily basis. The information we store is obviously very, very highly sensitive. I guess one of the other things that I've called out in the letter to shareholders has really been, you know, getting people back together. I wouldn't necessarily call it, you know, getting people back in the office. That's probably more of an issue for Dexus. Our big thing is really, you know, how do we bring our teams together? While, you know, virtual teams and video conference-based teams have been an absolute godsend during COVID, I think equally it's fairly well documented that this has sort of come at the expense of perhaps company culture and other things.
I know there's been a lot of restrictions on travel in some other companies. I think from our perspective, we're hugely invested in our people. We're hugely invested in the power of teams. You can see here just some examples of where we've gotten together just as a company over the last six months. With that, you can't save your way to success. It's pretty clear that, you know, our travel costs have reverted to what they were pre-COVID. We're now probably 10x what we were a year ago in terms of travel costs. Really, it's a one-time rebalance, and I think it's just more important that we focus on bringing people together now.
Customers in the same way, we did a seven-city roadshow particularly for our content solutions customers earlier earlier in the last half. It was just so good to get out there amongst customers. We had a sort of north of a 50% attendance rate at those events. Again, connections that can't really be fostered when you're on Teams calls and webinars. Finally, I'll probably, you know, I'm a slide behind, but the people, the people infographic is much stronger than a bunch of logos. Behind all those logos are people. I often say the most important meetings, you know, happen between the meeting room and the lift as opposed to being in the meeting room.
I think when we're all online with cameras, you know, we miss a lot of the, you know, the softer nuances that have in terms of meeting with people, and that's why we've really gone back to that way of working. I'll take you through each of the three business lines, and we'll have a bit of a chat about how they're performing and what's coming up next. First of all, I'm sure many of you are quite aware of our three business lines, the content and process business, the RegTech business and planning and building. We'll start off, and we'll talk about where we are with content and process. You can see the headlines there in terms of the numbers in the half.
I think, again, you know, I've spoken at length about our drive to ARR. We really did impact the top line revenue. Perpetual right to use is already winding off materially in the last half, and I would expect again materially in the second half as we reach, you know, what is the retirement of perpetual right to use license. For those of you, without sort of talking in a bunch of jargon, you know, ARR is really, or recurring revenue, is really what gives us the financial firepower to keep investing at the rate that we wish to invest and really sustain the business. We wanted to make the final shift for, you know, a number of years now. Customers haven't been quite comfortable with that shift.
There's probably still a couple of customers that aren't completely comfortable with that shift. It is the right thing to do for all stakeholders. It really is. We've pushed ahead with that and said that the end's coming at June 30th this year. We had a go live of our new Objective Nexus product at SAFECOM, as well as Objective GOV365 at the City of Gold Coast. I mentioned the Collaborate road show. We've been doing a lot of work on the new Objective 3Sixty product, particularly with our customers, our new customers in North America.
It's fair to say that we've stood up a significant development team across North America and Australia to really bring out the best in the solution that we've acquired there and really shape ourselves up for the next couple of years. I've mentioned about the cybersecurity company that's been using Connect. I think that's always a great sign when someone that you've brought in to actually doing a security accreditation says, as it'll be like a Victor Kiam moment. They love what they saw. So they bought the solution. So great, a great confidence booster. Finally, Objective Keystone. We're on the cusp of actually moving Keystone into two streams.
We're retaining the Keystone brand for all the work that we're doing within financial services around product disclosure statements, key fact statements and the like. We're launching a new brand in the second half called Keyplan, which will really talk to the needs of local government, the heritage of the Keystone product in terms of doing strategic planning, which feeds into things like Build and Trapeze. You'll hear more about that during the next half, there's been a lot going on in this space. Coming back to it was pretty clear from my perspective, with I guess the engagement with government in the first half, that getting new projects going in the first half was a little bit challenging.
Really since before Christmas, it has really accelerated and the second half, in terms of new business growth in content and process solutions looks particularly strong. I guess that'll be something for us to talk about in July. We'll move along to RegTech. Again, in terms of you saw me talk about earlier that RegTech, in terms of the product revenue had grown by 46% in the half. Yet we're only seeing a 5% change here in terms of revenue. That's really around the other thing that I touch on in the shareholder letter is just how do we drive down the cost of deployment?
Which is obviously then reflected in the ARR % that comes through in the other chart that you saw. For us, this sort of underpins that. We've been really busy in the last half, particularly with New Zealand Police and the new, the new arms information system. It's been a great success so far. It's gone live on time. We've got a second delivery date at the end of June. It really is a great community outcome and one that we're very proud of. Equally, we published a government regulatory technology report, and that really established Objective as the thought leader in this space. We also had a lot of our regulators come together in Australia to talk about the outcomes of that particular report.
Successful was it, in fact, that we've run the same thing now in the U.K. Ben Hobby, who leads our RegTech business, will be in the U.K. for an event there early next week, which brings a lot of the U.K. regulators together. We've got, I think it's almost standing room only at Australia House next week for that event. In addition to that, a couple of other things that happened was we completed the BARS migration for the New South Wales Department of Transport. All those safety cameras that you see up and down the eastern seaboard have all got software that we're working on with the team from Transport.
Some of that responsibility has now moved to the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator. You know, still producing, you know, fantastic outcomes. You know, I think people here often feel a little bit if they get caught by a mobile phone camera, feel a little bit aggrieved, we certainly can't white label out anyone's registration for anyone that asks that question. Further than that, it's been an ongoing huge investment in R&D, particularly in RegWorks. As I mentioned earlier, it's all about how do we deploy more RegWorks, given the demand? How do we deploy more RegWorks, more efficiently for customers? This is particularly important to us when we go to other jurisdictions.
We're already talking to partners in both the U.K. and the U.S. . I'm very convinced that you will see us sign up our first U.K. regulator in this current half. Finally, in terms of the business lines, looking at planning and building, we've talked about the number of councils signed up to Build previously. We've had a very strong interest in Build. We've got quite a number of councils deployed now. We'll see, you know, I would expect, you know, north of 50% of the councils that we currently have as customers and some new ones migrating to Build in the second half of this year. The response in terms of Build has been fantastic, probably stronger than I originally expected.
To be fair, we've slowed down the rate of deployment, because I wanted to make sure that the customers, as we bring them onto the new platform, are getting a great experience, so that, you know, over time, each and every customer that moves onto the platform is getting that great experience. We're probably taking a little bit more time than what we originally planned, but I think that's essential, to delivering the outcomes that we wanna do for customers. Equally, Trapeze has been a fantastic product for us. Probably personally one of my favorites, just in terms of the fact that it's become, a de facto standard across the industry, both here in Australia as well as New Zealand.
We've now got quite a number of international deployments outside of Australia and New Zealand as well. It is the de facto standard here. We have, you know, 3,000 planning professionals using Trapeze Professional each day. Yeah, more than 50% of the customer base or potential customer base here in Australia and well north of that number in New Zealand as well. Trapeze continues to punch above its weight, and the team does a great job. I do wanna call out, though, that when we acquired MBS with the GoGet solution, we also brought along with it a couple of outsourced contracts. At the time, we did wanna really separate out those two businesses, but they become as a as a bundled set.
Those IT services contracts with Tararua and Manawatu, one's already rolled off last Christmas and the other one's kind of roll off this financial year. I think we've outlined in the other commentary in the Appendix 4D what the commercial impact of that is. You know, it's not that material, but it does skew these numbers. You can see the top line here. We had a down of 3% in terms of revenue, but if we looked at the revenue increase or the booked revenue increase, it was really a 4% growth in terms of planning and building, excluding those IT services contracts. I should state that Manawatu and Tararua remain as customers for other products.
It's just that those IT services contracts, which were non-core to us are concluding. Finally, I guess just a bit of a restatement of strategically where we're headed. We always look at the business in terms of these four pillars. First of all, engineering outstanding solutions, delivering more opportunities for customers, growing our family through acquisitions, attracting new fans through digital marketing. I think those things stay absolutely core to everything that we're doing today. We did state at the beginning of the financial year that we're really focused on these four areas. ARR, which I've already spoken about, market leadership, making sure that the new products that we were delivering were either the market leaders or the potential to be the market leaders in the jurisdictions that we're in.
Our geographic expansion RegTech's already showing that it's going to be a big contributor in the U.K. in time to come. The work that we're doing in North America. We've now got a number of employees on the ground there, and we're looking to leverage the existing partnership network that we've got in North America. Finally, invest to grow. It's probably been, you know, the slowest period in terms of M&A for us for the last five years. We've continued to look at opportunities over time. We continue to look for those opportunities, but I think everyone's aware of what's happening in capital markets.
Whilst we're very keen to make sure that we make the right investments, we're also keen to make sure that we invest an appropriate amount of shareholder money in pursuing that objective. That's still firmly part of our sort of our execution as we sit here today. It's quite, in fact, quite likely that you won't see any actual M&A activity in terms of transactions till later on in the calendar year. With that, I'm going to hand over to Ben, who will talk about how you can connect if you've got a question. Ben's gonna talk to us.
Yeah. I will. Sorry, I've just got my camera sort itself out. If you could ask a question, in the chat, I will invite you to the stage, and you'll have the opportunity to ask the question, on the webcast. The first question we have is from Josh Kannourakis, who I will invite to the stage now. For clarity, I'll just ask the question, and Tony, if you could address it. In regard to research and development, should we continue to see research and development hold at 24% of revenue into the coming years? When might it return to the 20% target?
Yeah, look, I think we can see it hold. I'm not sure that 20% is necessarily the long-term target. I've got into trouble by once before by saying it might go to 28%. I think you know, we will start to actually look at R&D. As I've sent you different numbers as well. I think that you would expect to see, you know, the run rate continue at about where it is. At this point in time, you know, I can't see a day when it would drop below 20%.
Great. Hey, Tony and Ben, can you hear me okay now?
Yes.
Looks like it's finally got me on there. Perfect. Do you mind if I jump through a few questions?
Sure.
Perfect. Just on revenue, can you sort of talk through the expectations on the first half, second half SKU? Can you also confirm that the perpetual right to use looks like it was about AUD 1 million in the first half, so based on your previous commentary, that means there's maybe AUD 2 million for the second half. Just to talk through the SKU and the perpetual right to use profile again.
Yeah. You were very close. AUD 1,000,027. Yeah. Look, I think this year, more than any, I think it's fair to say that there'll be a second half SKU, particularly with particularly with ARR. We just know that, you know, first half was, you know, always gonna be challenging, just because what we saw happening with, you know, initiatives not getting started. As I said, we probably had the most intense Christmas that we've had in many years, responding to tenders and other things that were coming along. Yeah, I think this year you will see that SKU. I think nothing's changed.
I think sometimes people think, oh, cloud computing, therefore, you know, it changes the SKU. The decisions are made in exactly the same time as they always were. Just because we changed our pricing model and I guess our revenue recognition profile hasn't changed anything. The only thing that has changed is we get delayed gratification. In the past, if we'd sold a deal AUD 1 million, then that AUD 1 million would fall into this year. Whereas now if we sell AUD 1 million on June 30, you know, we don't see any of it this year. I think largely we've worked through that over the last few years.
I don't think that, you know, that the roll-off of the end of perpetual right to use is affecting this year, as we've already addressed. I just really feel with all the other things that we've got going on, it was a good time to roll these things through the P&L.
Got it. Thanks, Tony. Just to clarify on that, 'cause ARR is obviously the most important thing which we're all focused on, but in terms of the, just the actual reported revenue because of those things, is there like, is the second half sort of similar-ish to the first in terms of the reported sort of revenue component? Or how does that, how does that sort of look?
It improves. It improves because what you sell in the first half, you know, gets into your second half numbers or the, you know, the prorated amount. Clearly, you know, if you're second half weighted, then you're really weighted to first half the following year, if you know what I mean. If you are, you know, in our case, we're rolling off, we're clearly rolling off the last of the perpetual right to use hard, that has an impact this year. As I keep reminding the team, the P&L starts working wonderfully again, from the first of July, which is, you know, four and a half months away.
Got it. That's great. Just my other question was on OpEx. Following the R&D question, just in terms of the OpEx, obviously a bit of a step up in the period. You've talked to getting back on the road, travel, getting out there and some of the headcount. How should we sort of think about that in terms of annualizing that sort of cost base into the second half and maybe into FY24 as well? What sort of step up we should include maybe to the, you know, the OpEx potentially ex the R&D side of things anyway?
We've largely stepped up the cost base now. I mean, I think every company, whilst we, you know, every company wants to get the efficiency of the technology and not have people travel, and I get that, and we're the same. But equally, you know, there's no substitute for meeting in person as I think we all know. We took the decision not to shackle everyone with ridiculous approval levels to travel. You know, we have a bit of a culture of do what makes sense and spend the money as if it were your own. Look, we're getting the outcomes that we would expect from that. I think we've had a big step up, you know, a huge step up in fact, in cost of travel.
It's a one-time step. You know, everyone's gotta take it sometime. We've just said, "Hey, we're gonna take it now, rather than trickle it back in over time." I know without naming names, even some of the largest companies in our space basically had no travel last year. Was like leading right up to the year and even during January, and it's only started to sort of come alive now. I don't think you're gonna see a big step up in that. I think the other big one where there's a step up, or two areas where there's a step up, first of all, payroll, which is obviously the one that impacts us the most in terms of EBITDA.
I think we're gonna continue to see whilst the salaries have stopped going up, they've plateaued, and in some cases, probably in the non-dev space, they've actually come down a little bit in terms of the market. There is a still flat and remaining, or neutral in terms of growth, but remaining at that higher rate. I think there's a little bit of a trickle-on effect that then continues to happen into next year, as this plays out. I mean, we had a, you know, substantial lift in total cost of payroll during the year, as opposed to total number of people. A bit of that will come through into next year, but it'll start moderating.
Got it. That's great. Well, I've got a few more questions, but I'll give someone else a go. I'll jump back into the line.
Thanks, Josh.
Thanks, guys.
The next question we've got from Ricky Leung. Hi, Ricky. Are you able to speak now? Well, I might just read his via. Oh, wait, he's out. He's in relation to, well, the pathway or plan was to roll out Objective Building Australia in other jurisdictions.
Okay. Look, I think it's probably too early to talk about Australia. I think we're engaged with discussions with a number of states, but It's just too early to be talking about those. Same with other parts of the world. Look, our focus is to make sure that New Zealand has a great experience, and then we'll roll out from there.
We're probably doing more than I'm saying, but I don't wanna get, you know, people ahead of where we currently are.
Ricky's other follow-up question was, or his other question was in relation to the transition from perpetual right or terminating the perpetual right to use license offering. Would that lead to a loss of customers?
We'd... Look, we'd never let that happen. We would make sure that wherever a customer had a concern, we'd find a way around it. I have anecdotally heard of a couple of concerns, not in any particular customer, but I don't think that subscription revenues are well-liked in South Australia. I'll be there next week and I'll have a better feel for it. So.
There's multiple ways to meet customers' desires as well as keep moving the agenda along. You find other jurisdictions, other states go, "No, it must be subscription." Everyone's paying subscription for Microsoft 365. You know, if they're using Force.com, if they're using, you know, Microsoft Dynamics, I mean, you name it. I'm not sure who's actually selling perpetual right to use anymore. We're just really staying in lockstep with what everyone else is doing. We wouldn't let it get into a situation where we were jeopardizing a customer relationship.
The next questions are from Christian Angelis at CCZ. I'll. The first one is talking through the dynamic that resulted in the reduced tax rate in the half, which Christian and I can just take on. The first half, there's a few dynamics at play. The tax rate is impacted by the contributions to the employee share trust, which has resulted in a tax deduction during the period that commenced last financial year and will continue at least through FY24 and potentially through FY25.
That has been compounded by an adjustment for an overprovisioning of tax, I guess, in FY22, where we've been able to claim a greater amount in the R&D tax credits, which were changed after the balance date, at 30 June 2022. In our tax return, which is now filed, we've been able to claim a larger deduction there. That's a catch up for last period, which is why it's, you know, the tax rate is effectively down at 0. Christian's second question was in relation to the share buyback and what any plans were around that, what current plans were around the share buyback.
Look, we clearly have that facility in place. We've had it in place now, you know, largely right through the last five years. It really just is a facility to give us optionality. I know we get caned by everybody when we take free float out of the market, and we try to avoid that. At the same time, if we get to points where people, you know, don't want our stock, we're more than happy to have it back. As you can see, our cash, free cash flow generation is very strong. We lifted 24%, 24% in the half, if that's the right number, to AUD 54 million.
You know, we're really keeping our capital safe for what we think is gonna be some pretty interesting times in terms of M&A coming up. At the same time, you know, we've got the option to exercise that buyback if anything silly were to happen.
This is a follow-on question just from Josh, and it follows on from Tony, from your comment just then about regarding the movement in operating cash for the half and how that normalizes into year-end. I'll take that one. The important point is, you'll see in the operating cash flow section of the financial statements, that there is the fine settlement, sorry. The settlement sum paid to the NZCC, at AUD 1.4 million, which is reducing the operating cash flow. There's also an impact in this half from a significant number of people taking annual leave, which was built up through previous periods.
As you can see, you know, as we've discussed, the increase in operating costs, offset by the revenue growth. As we would expect, the full year cash flow number is gonna be particularly weighted to the second half. That's when we collect the majority of our cash for the year. There's nothing in this half's profile whilst it is down on the operating cash flow recognized in the first half FY22. There's nothing in this half that would be taken as a trend that would expect us that the full year number is not in line with prior year. The next question was from Claude Walker. The question is does the company lose sales opportunities? If so, why does it lose?
Wow. That's a pretty open question. Thanks, Claude. Of course, we lose opportunities. I mean, that's the way that the game is played. I think, you know, look, the answer is probably complicated because it's on a product by product, probably region by region basis. But, you know, so much of what you do today is having your go-to-market people really engaged with customers and be helping customers build up essentially a business case inside their organizations to go and acquire some software. That's really what our team does today. If you're sitting around, you know, waiting for tenders to come in and you're not the one shaping those tenders, then that's what we call ambulance chasing.
Whereas, which is the old sort of tow truck operator, way of doing things. You know, it's, this is really about going in and influencing. Look, sometimes we still bid on opportunities where we haven't influenced or we haven't educated the customer on what we can do. So often, you know, something comes out, we'll get a sniff that it's really someone else has been in there educating the customer. Typically, the ones that you're at higher risk of is where you haven't had any prior engagement with the customer. If we go back and look at the statistics, I mean, that would, that would prove that to be the case.
It's more a case of, you know, to make sure that we win the majority or lose the least, is making sure our teams are well engaged with customer prospects before they come out to market. That's probably the best way I can answer that question for you know, in the broadest context without going into individual products.
That concludes questions that we've had online.
All right. Well, look, thanks everyone for joining us today. We probably could have slightly got the tech to bring the question, the faces of the questions to light. I think you can work out that Ben's sitting to my left here and is able to answer the other more technical financial questions for you. We really appreciate your attendance and, I know some of you that we'll catch up during the next couple of days on the institutional side. Hopefully it was a success. We won't send you an email asking for feedback, you know, one of those things that happens on everything these days.
Feel free to drop us a note and tell us if there's things you liked or didn't like. You can email us at investorrelations@objective.com. Thanks again, and we look forward to catching up with you at the full year.