I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. James Fitter, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much, and good morning, everyone in Australia. Good afternoon to those here in the United States. I'm calling today from St. Louis office, and to those in Dublin this evening, I'm joined by Helena D'Arcy, our Chief Financial Officer, who'll be talking through the numbers fairly shortly. Let's get started. We're obviously talking about our half year results. Just a reminder, we are a calendar year-end company. I would just draw your attention to the legal disclaimer at the start of the presentation. Just a reminder that our vision is to power personalized, exemplary care experiences, and I think it's fair to say that challenge has never been greater in light of the very obvious challenges coming out of the pandemic. The first half of this year was the busiest half in the company's history.
We'll talk through a number of the key highlights. Firstly, we're gonna talk a little bit about product innovation. Helena will go through the financial results. We'll talk a bit about the outlook and obviously leave plenty of time for questions if anyone has any. So let's start with the operational performance. So you, those of you who follow the company will recall that last year's number was somewhat positively impacted by the settlement of the Regal legal case. So adjusting for that, the loss from continuing operations this year is reduced by 30%, which we think is a very incredible performance. We're seeing very strong post-pandemic sales momentum continue to build across the business.
As I mentioned, this half year represents the largest volume of net new contract signings in the company's history, and perhaps most importantly, all new customer signings this year are for our cloud products, which I think reinforces the decision we made back in 2019 to lift and shift the product to a pure SaaS offering. And that, in turn, has allowed, again, the development of the BYOD product, which is scheduled for delivery in the Q4 of this year. This product is expected to materially improve serviceable market and take a huge amount of friction out of the sales cycle. So delighted to report in the early stages that project is on schedule.
We'll talk a little bit about the Baxter reselling agreement, which has obviously got the potential to really significantly change the company's growth profile. We really think of this as a bit of a rebirth for the company. Thank you to everyone who supported the recent capital raise. As I think you know, we completed a AUD 20 million placement last month, and then yesterday, announced to the market that the two million dollar share purchase plan was significantly oversubscribed. We received applications for AUD 5.6 million of new shares. We're very grateful for that support, but we're also cognizant that we don't want to be diluting those that were participating in the placement, and were expecting a AUD 2 million raise.
So we have exercised the discretion under the SPP and scaled the SP back by 50%. For those of you who subscribed through the share purchase plan, you will be receiving exactly half of your allocation. It's a blanket scaleback across all of those who applied for the subscription. I'm not gonna talk too much about the financial highlights, because I don't want to steal Helena's thunder, but all indicate green, which I think is a good sign, and I'll let her talk to those in more detail as we get into the financial analysis. Let's talk a bit about the operational highlights, though.
As I mentioned, five new customers for our cloud products, including the recently announced Children's Health Ireland, which is a very high-profile new hospital being built, obviously, in our backyard in Dublin, Ireland. Thrilled to have won that piece of business. I think it's gonna prove a great launchpad as we think about European expansion in the future. Significantly, we grew our contracted beds by 16% year-over-year. That excludes the further 645 beds that have been contracted in August for the Children's Hospital. We completed the value-added reseller agreement with Baxter, as we announced, earlier in the year. That was a very competitive process. We're obviously thrilled with the outcome there. We'll talk a bit about how that's progressing when we talk about the outlook.
We've also seen significant growth in live beds. Obviously, live beds are what pay the salaries. We are still recovering from some of the challenges that some of our customers experienced during the pandemic, so we haven't. We are continuing to be laser focused on how we can get these remaining beds live as fast as practically possible, and we have a very aggressive schedule from 2023 on- from the second half of this year onwards into 2024. The hypothesis we've had around the pandemic revalidating the business case of bedside technology is continuing to be reinforced by independent research.
So Gartner, most recently in their Hype Cycle for interactive healthcare systems, have identified that our category has now reached the Plateau of Productivity, which represents the point at which technology reaches maturity and widespread adoption, and we are seeing that across our sales pipeline here in the United States. As we mentioned in the business update last month, we've been selected as vendor of choice for two further very important customers, representing nearly 2,300 beds. We also have been shortlisted as finalists for two other very high-profile opportunities here in the United States. We're not yet in contracting phase with those, but we believe we're extremely well positioned. As I mentioned earlier, BYOD development is commenced and ahead of schedule. We've done a lot of work around enhancing our value framework to define and measure customer value.
The best evidence of that, of course, is when our customers are renewing and expanding with us, and we have seen our largest U.S. customers continue to do that with both BJC and NYU, deploying us across their entire enterprise. As I mentioned earlier, we completed the capital raise. We've raised AUD 22.8 million, with the SPP being oversubscribed by at nearly 180%, which I think is a great testament. In terms of the new customer wins, here in North America, Catholic Health on Long Island, where we're currently deploying across five customer sites for them, the University of Miami Health System in Florida. In Australia, we have projects afoot with ADH Private Hospital and Avive.
As I mentioned, in Europe, we have the new Children's Hospital, which is a great flagship for us. Collectively, they represent nearly EUR 10 million in total contract value, and that is the minimum case because the contract with CHI is a minimum seven-year contract with a three-year option to extend, which obviously we hope to ensure that we can do that with them. We're also continuing to see some important expansions and upgrades. I think as many of you know, who follow the company, we are end-of-lifing our Gen 2 product in December of this year. We've reached terms to upgrade Bumrungrad in Thailand to the new Gen 3 platform, and extended that contract for a further three years, flagship facility in Southeast Asia.
In NYU Langone, we've now substantially completed the 1,045-bed expansion that we announced back at the end of last year. At BJC, we are really only a very small way. We're only about 10% of the way through the expansion, not because they're not keen to move faster, but they wanted to start with a couple of co-ax sites. I think, again, for those that follow the company well, you'll know that having a compute device that could handle co-ax was a really important part of the value proposition.
We've now proven that with the deployments of the first two co-ax sites for BJC, and are now looking forward to getting into a much larger expansion program for them, which is gonna see us turn on another best part of 2,500 beds for them throughout the course of 2024 and the remainder of this year. We continue to focus on our security framework. We have retained our ISO certifications during the half year, which is something we're incredibly proud of. We are also currently considering a further U.S. security certification, which we think will add further weight to our security credentials here in the United States.
That is being customer-led, and we think it's something that will really help our. We've seen some significant cost savings in our office space globally. We have thankfully been in a position where we've been able to downsize our office footprint in both Chicago and Dublin in very meaningful ways. We've also closed our Sydney office and centered our Australian presence around the team in Melbourne. So, big thanks to Helena for the work she's done there, which has been very impressive. We've seen supply chain stabilize, which is gonna allow us to see installation rates increase beginning in the second half of this year and continuing into 2024. As I mentioned, we've almost completed the expansion for Langone. We are very early days in the expansion for BJC.
Importantly, we've seen a 30% reduction in our average sales cycle duration with the move to cloud and SaaS contracts. Perhaps the thing that our leadership group are most proud of is that we, as a group, have been together. Average tenure of our leadership group now is over 4.5 years, but we had a staff retention rate last year of 91%, which is something we are all incredibly proud of, and I think that really speaks to the work we're doing and the importance of the mission. In terms of product innovation, I think we've detailed at some length in the past how the pandemic has shaped a changing demand for technology in patient rooms. We now have the Digital Door Sign live at Kingman in Arizona.
We're seeing a lot of interest in that product for all the reasons we've talked about previously around providing real-time, contextualized information, allows the care team to be able to rely on that information. And we're seeing a lot of debate and discussion around the digital whiteboard or what we call My Stay Overview. Again, this is something that could be a standalone device separate to the television in the patient room, but increasingly could also be a contextualized dashboard that appears as a pop-up on the television, which again, if we go for that second option, it's lessening the hardware burden for our customers, and we think it's a better experience both for patients and for care team.
The major product innovation, of course, is the push to bring your own device, and as I've mentioned on numerous occasions, this is something that the market has been crying out for pretty much for as long as I can remember. It's something that was dependent on us getting our product into the cloud. Now that we have that foundation in place, we are very excited about the delivery of this product in the Q4. When we went out to do the market research,...
For this product, we had two of the top three hospitals in the United States volunteer to be co-design partners on this product, and we have chosen to go with our friends at NYU Langone, and they are sending a delegation to Dublin next month, where we'll be doing some workshops around the final list of their requirements. But we think this is something that really could change the momentum of the business in a very significant way. Scheduling this for general release in the Q1 of 2024, and very comfortable with those timelines.
I know we've talked a bit about, you know, the benefits, for patients and for hospitals, which we've documented here, and it really is around reducing hardware costs, reducing complexity, and embracing the mobile-first world that we know consumers are living with. So we see this as entirely complementary to our existing product offering. The current market research we've done with existing customers all see this as an additional modality rather than an alternative modality, but we think it will dramatically expand the serviceable market and lead to a lot less friction in the sales cycle. So I'm very excited to get this product to market in the Q4 of this year. So let me hand it across to Helena, who is going to talk through the financial results in a bit more detail.
Great. Thank you, James. So looking at our income statement for the first half of the year, total revenue for the first six months of 2023 was EUR 4.4 million, up 11% on the prior year comparative period. Revenue from U.S. customers now accounts for 70% of our total revenue, up from 58% last year. The company is looking forward to a material increase in revenue growth in the second half of this year, as we expect projects that were signed last year to go live, and we expect to see installation work start on new logos, which we signed earlier this year. Gross profit has increased by 14%, and this is driven by higher revenues, and the gross margin percentage has increased by two percentage points.
Operating expenses decreased by 19%, mainly arising from a cost reduction program implemented in the last quarter of 2022, which incorporated headcount reductions and also office footprint downsizings. The rent cost for the group is now down by 30% year-on-year, and we continue to tightly control our costs where possible. Excluding EUR 1.3 million of one-off net income from the settlement of the Regis legal case last year, so as to compare like with like, the loss after tax for the group reduced by 30% half year compared to half year. So moving on to the balance sheet. The company had cash balances of EUR 2.6 million euro at the end of June.
These cash balances have been further increased since then, with the placement at the end of July, which raised AUD 20 million before costs, and the cash balance will increase further this week when the proceeds from our oversubscribed SPP of AUD 2.8 million are banked. This will provide cash runway to us to capitalize on growth opportunities. Other notable movements in the balance sheet are under the headings of property, plant, and equipment, and also lease liabilities, which both increased correspondingly due to the new lease on our lower-cost Dublin premises. Under IFRS accounting rules, total payments on new leases are capitalized over the life of the lease. Moving on to the cash flow statement. As I mentioned, the closing cash balance of EUR 2.6 million is now higher post-balance sheet, with the placement in SPP proceeds.
Total operating cash outflow of EUR 3.4 million for the half year is EUR 1.7 million lower than the prior corresponding half year due to higher receipts from customers and also lower costs arising from the cost reduction program. If we exclude the one-off Regis legal settlement proceeds last year, operating cash flows are EUR 3 million lower than the same period last year. So that concludes the financial results part of the presentation, and I'll hand back to you, James, to go through the outlook.
Thanks, Helena, and suffice to say, since it's only a full week since we provided the business update, nothing material has changed, so we're still comfortable with the guidance that's been provided to the market. We have some pretty important macro drivers and micro drivers that I think are fairly well documented around the staffing challenges and the increasing desire for virtual nursing. So almost all of the customer conversations we're having in the United States are embracing this concept of using the Oneview platform at the bedside to enable virtual nursing. We know there's a global nursing shortage. It's extremely well documented at this stage, but it would be very difficult to underestimate how big an impact that is having on demand for our business.
We're just seeing continued trends around digital transformation as hospitals realize that they need to find a different way of moving things going forward. Standardization is another key driver, and part of the motivation for the likes of BJC and NYU to deploy across their enterprise is to ensure consistency of, consistency of experience, which is incredibly important in a highly competitive market here in the United States. Just a reminder that our existing revenue stream is focused almost exclusively on our, our core platform, which is the, the patient TV and tablet at the bedside. However, we are now seeing the development of these two new revenue-generating opportunities for My Stay Overview and the Digital Door Sign.
As mentioned, from the Q1 of next year, we will have the patient's own device as a new alternate revenue stream for the business. So we see significant upsell opportunity in the installed base. I don't think there's been an RFP that has landed this year, which hasn't asked for either the Digital Door Sign or a digital whiteboard in addition to the core platform. So we're very enthusiastic about the change in demand for these new products. In terms of the Baxter partnership, it's well and truly underway. We've collectively identified several different work streams that are in progress. There are a series of weekly touchpoints with the folks at Baxter. We've been through the first phase of identifying high-prospect opportunities with them.
They've asked us to deploy our technology in their customer experience centers, of which there are 3 of them across the country. One in Irvine, in California, one in Indiana, and one in North Carolina. That work is currently scheduled, all working towards a joint market launch in the Q4 of 2023. We are expecting that to happen in mid-October. We have had some early customer engagement, which has been very, very positive. We had a couple of folks out in California last week meeting with some of their customers, and similarly a couple of guys down in Florida. So, although we haven't had the formal launch yet, there has been some pre-market sales where they have specific needs for specific customers who are keen to engage.
As we mentioned, as part of the cap raise, the important part of the use of proceeds was to make sure that we have the right people and the right resources in place to ensure we can scale to their needs. So that process is well and truly underway. In fact, a number of our North American leadership team are meeting here in St. Louis this week to make sure we're ready for what could be a real step change in our business in October going forward. And we'll continue to monitor what commercial and support resources we need to support the partnership going forward. We'll make a determination on that in early in 2024. So this is a slide that we included in the business update last year.
I just think it's an important visual of giving a sense of, you know, where we are as a business. We've obviously increased that contracted book of business by a further 600-odd beds with the Children's Hospital in Ireland. Hoping to conclude negotiations on these other two opportunities by the end of this quarter, which will get us to that 18,000-bed number we talked about. As we've mentioned previously, we think the Baxter partnership has the ability to deliver between 3,000 and 5,000 beds in year one, and we see BYOD as something that's gonna accelerate our own organic growth.
We've grown our book of business by 42% since the pandemic concluded, and about 20% per annum, and we think that's a sustainable growth rate going forward based on where we are in the industry. So that concludes my formal comments, and we would be delighted to take any questions if anyone has any.