All right. Hopefully that lets our new shareholders know a little bit about the company. All right, we're gonna move into the formal part of the meeting. From the information provided to me by the company secretary, I advise that we have a quorum present, and I declare the meeting officially open for business. Let me start by introducing my fellow directors to you. Firstly, we have Rick Anstey, who is the chair of the Nominations and Governance Committee. Mr. Ron McLean. Dr. Jane Andrews, who's the chair of the Remuneration Committee. Ms. Sharon Doyle. Cliff Rosenberg. Mr. Peter Ball, who is the chair of the Audit Committee. Pat O'Sullivan, who is our newest director, standing today for election. He is the deputy chair and our lead independent director.
Myself, Adrian Di Marco, the Chairman and Founder of TechOne. Let me also introduce Mr. Edward Chung, our CEO, who's at the front here. Mr. Paul Jobbins, our CFO. And our Company Secretary, Stephen Kennedy. We have apologies today. Unfortunately, John MacTaggart, one of our long-serving directors and whose family were the initial investors in TechOne many years ago, can't be here today for medical reasons. He would have been here if it had been at all possible. He passes on his apologies. We have our auditors here as well today. Ernst & Young, represented by Alison de Groot and Ms. Jen Barker. If we have any questions for them, they're here to answer those questions. I also want to acknowledge all the TechOne staff that are here today.
Thanks, guys, for helping out. If you need anything, they're the ones with the T-shirts. All right, before we get to the formal part of today, what I'd like to do is just take you through a recap of the company's performance, and then I'm gonna hand over to Ed to do a bit more of a deep dive. Let me start with that. All right, we had another great year, another year of record profits. Profit was close to what, AUD 98 million, up 19%, which was the top end of guidance, and that's our 12th consecutive year of record profits. Since we listed in 1999, we've pretty much had record profits every year except for maybe 1 or 2.
It has been a very strong performance once again by the company. Dividend is up 8%. If you look at the growth over the last 10 years, it's been compounding at about 12%. That's also been a good outcome for shareholders. All right, what's driving the business? Our success is coming from our global SaaS ERP system. That is what is underpinning our success today. If you look at the numbers on the SaaS business, our SaaS ARR is today AUD 192 million, and that is up 43%. That's all organic growth. Now, remember, we weren't a SaaS business.
If you go back, we were a traditional on-premise business selling perpetual licenses, and we've made that transition to build a very strong world-class leading SaaS business, which is just fueling our growth at the moment. We have 637 major enterprise customers. These customers don't have one or two users using our system. They have hundreds, they have thousands, they have tens of thousands of users using our system. These are big enterprise customers. People like La Trobe University or TAFE Queensland or Moreton Bay City Council, or the Australian Bureau of Statistics. I mean, these are big organizations that bet their business, that run their business using our global SaaS ERP solution with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of users from each of these organizations. They're big systems, and these companies bet their business on our solution.
What is the Technology One SaaS? I just want to spend a little bit of time on this because this is really the key to our success. What it is, it's a single global instance of our enterprise software, and it's run at massive scale for all of our customers. In its most simplest form, we are bringing the concept of mass production, which has changed the face of every industry to the software industry. We run a production line of servers just like any production line. What it does, it does one thing only, which is it delivers our software, our enterprise software, to our customers at massive scale, and it does it in real time. Every split second, a transaction comes in from any customer, we execute it, we deliver the result, and then the production line continues going.
The production line scales up and scales down based on the amount of usage. It is truly a revolutionary idea, this global SaaS ERP solution. The benefit for our customers is that they don't need to worry anymore about the complexity of hardware, operating systems, databases. We make it all happen. It's just a service. We take on that responsibility. When we add a new feature, a new piece of functionality, when we improve the security, it just happens automatically. They all get it instantaneously. We make life incredibly simple for them. For us, we get massive economies of scale because we're running this at massive scale, and that's reflected in the margins that are continuing to improve in the business. That's what our SaaS solution is. There are other SaaS companies out there. Why is our SaaS solution different to other SaaS companies?
Well, if you look at the other SaaS companies out there today, they provide just part of a solution. They're what we call best of breed. They might provide the HRP. They might provide the supply chain, the logistics. They might supply the financial accounting. They provide just part of the solution. What we do is we provide everything. We provide the total solution. It's called an ERP solution, and we do that as a SaaS offering. It's hard to provide a SaaS solution, very difficult. When you provide a SaaS solution of the scale that we have, it's a really huge engineering feat, and only a few companies in the world have been actually able to achieve that phenomenon. To me, the best analogy is flying. Flying used to be only for the jet setters.
When Boeing introduced the 747, the jumbo jet, it revolutionized flying, and that's what we have built. We have built the equivalent of a jumbo jet. That's what we have. We've given that flight, and that's what's driving our business, that people can actually come to one company to get a total solution to their business need and deliver it as a SaaS offering. They don't need to go to multiple SaaS companies and then try to bring it together as a solution. We do that for them. We have a suite of 15 products. Each of these products are massive on their own. You put them all together, then it's huge what we've done. We can provide that total single enterprise solution to our customers. The other thing that we do is we focus on just a small number of markets.
We're very big, for example, in local government and education or state and federal government. We provide really deep functionality for those markets. When we sell them our enterprise SaaS solution into local government, it does everything that a council needs. They don't need to worry about anything. It's a total, very deep solution for that council. That also differentiates our SaaS solution. Our global SaaS ERP solution is making life simple for our customers. That's the endpoint. They don't need to worry anymore about technology, features, functionality, upgrades, security. We do it all for them. The other part of the equation, and we've seen that through COVID, is that the world has moved to a mobile world. People no longer sit at a desk every day and work at a desk. They work sometimes in the office. They work sometimes at home.
Sometimes they work in a cafe. We actually anticipated this 10 years ago, and so when we built our software, when we built our SaaS solution, we built it so that it would enable that level of mobility. We call that our Ci Anywhere solution. Any device, anywhere, anytime. You can run our SaaS software on a iPhone, Android phone. You can run it on a iPad. You can run it on a traditional laptop or computer. It runs on all devices, and you can move seamlessly from one device to the next. I can start working on my iPhone. I can then move to an iPad, then I can move to a traditional desk.
The software just moves with you through the course of the day, and you can pick a transaction up from the iPhone and complete it on the iPad on your desk. Again, very revolutionary ideas, well ahead of its time. If you look at the company, we started off as a traditional on-premise business. That wasn't that long ago that we were selling traditional on-premises licenses. Today, we are a SaaS business. You know, that SaaS business is growing exceptionally fast, and we've now told our customers that we will no longer support on-premise. That is coming to an end. If you go back just a few years ago, our traditional perpetual licenses, our older business, was about AUD 80 million a year worth of licenses we sold. In 2024, it will be zero.
We will sell no more on-premise licenses. This is truly a watershed date for our customers and for us. We expect that all our customers, 99% of them, will move to the SaaS platform, and we're seeing that. We're seeing that huge move already. We have made a commitment, and that commitment is that we expect our annual recurring revenue, because that's the key measure as a SaaS business. It's the subscription revenue that happens every year. We are saying that by FY 2026, it will hit AUD 500 million. That's not that far away. It's already at AUD 257 million. The next few years, it's going to double that annual recurring revenue. We will hit that number, and Ed and I have a bit of a bet about how much we're going to exceed it by.
It's a very exciting time for the business. We have spectacular growth in the past, and we see that growth continuing for quite a number of years. I just wanna touch on one last thing. Our success comes because we have an absolute clarity of strategy, right? There is no confusion at TechOne what we do, and every decision we make is aligned to that clarity of strategy. That strategy is very simple. We are an ERP software vendor. We provide a total solution to our customers. We are not a best-of-breed vendor. Every time we do an acquisition or we build something, it is how do we extend our ERP solution so it can do more for our customers? We provide the deepest functionality for the markets we serve.
If we do an acquisition or if we build something, how does that go deeper for our customers in local government? How does it streamline their business? How does it add value? That is the question we ask, and that's the answer that we have to be able to answer. We are a SaaS business. Everything we do is built around the SaaS paradigm, which means it's one global code line, right? It's not a different code line for different countries or for different markets or for different states or regions. It is truly one global code line. That code line runs Australia, it runs New Zealand, Asia, the U.K., and will in time run in the U.S. It runs that global code line across industries. It's the same code line in local government and higher ed. It's one global code line.
There just happens to be additional features for each of those markets. That gives us huge economies of scale. Now, the engineering to do that is massive, right? It's not a simple thing to do. That's why people don't do it. But we have done that. We've been able to engineer this huge ERP system and this one global code line, and we're seeing those economies of scale coming through on the margins of the business. Our margins have gone from about 24% a few years ago, and it must be over 30%. Is that right, Ian? Yeah. The other part of our strategy is to support a truly mobile world, a hybrid world. You can use any device. You can use it anywhere at any time. Our software will run from an iPhone all the way to a desktop. There's no carve-outs.
Everything works on all devices all the time. The Power of One. We do not ever allow anyone else to interact with our customers but us. It is our customer. We take total sole responsibility. We call that the Power of One. We build it, we market, we sell, we implement, we support, we run it for them. If there's a problem, it is TechnologyOne's problem. We don't run, we don't hide. That means we are accountable, which means we either get better or we go out of business. To date, we've got better because we haven't gone out of business. I think that's a really powerful differentiator in the market. If you look at our competitors, Workday, for example, they have a fraction of the ERP system we have, right? It's a broken model. They don't implement their software.
They use Accenture to implement it. You know, who's responsible? They will never be able to achieve the outcomes that we achieve because of that accountability-driven model we have, the Power of One. Underpinning the whole business is the subscription model, the recurring revenues. When our customers sign up with us, they pay an annual fee. That fee they pay every year. That recurring revenue means that we are building on this growing base of income. Last but not least, we are an innovation-driven company. Innovation is the very core and the very soul of our business. We do big engineering jobs. We take huge technical risks. We innovate. We create amazing software. When we started this journey in the SaaS world 10 years ago, people said to us, "Is this really gonna work?
Is a university really going to run their university on your servers? They're gonna put their data in your data centers. Is a council gonna do that?" We believe they would because the compelling value proposition that it would deliver. We undertook a massive engineering exercise to build our SaaS platform. Today, that's now the standard. That's what people want. That's the very core, the heart of the business, this investment in R&D, being an innovation-driven company. We're positioned for good, strong, continuing growth. We have a very clear strategy. We are in the blue ocean. Our biggest risk is always execution, not competition. It's our ability to execute to the high standards that we set. In the end, it comes back to our people. We have to have the best, the brightest people working for us.
At the key to all that is obviously the executive team. As shareholders, executive remuneration is a very important issue these days. You wanna know about that. How have we gone with executive remuneration? Let's talk about that. Well, the results have been spectacular for the company. Profit up 19%. SaaS business up 43%. Consulting profit up 14%. The U.K. profit up 100%. Our margin's improved from 28%-31%. We expect it to go to at least 40% over the next few years. Dividend up 8%. As you know, return on equity is a very important measure. It shows you how efficient we are with capital. Our return on equity figure is 60+%, which is insanely good. I think on all those fronts, the company has delivered.
On the other side, what's the alignment with the executive team and their rem? Well, profit up 19, executive rem up 12. I think that's a good outcome. TSR for three years is 113% versus executive rem up 12%. TSR for FY 2021 was 45% versus the ASX TSR of 30%. Clear alignment between executive and shareholders. Our executives are paid a very low base, so they are driven to achieve, okay? They have to work very hard to get their STI and their LTI. If you look at the executive rem compared with our peers, we are in the sort of mid-range, so they're not overpaid. Again, I think all those things are in alignment. Board renewal.
We have gone through a process of renewing our board, bringing on new directors to get ready for the next stage of growth. We've appointed now five independent directors in recent years. We really welcome the addition of these new directors. You know, they have been just fantastic to work with over the last few years. We have appointed a Deputy Chair and Lead Independent Director, Mr. Pat O'Sullivan. I'll be talking a bit more about Pat later. Today, for the proxy advisors, we have a majority of independent directors. They are great directors. We've taken a long time to get there, but we've done it slowly, we've done it properly. We're in a good position. All right. I just wanna do a final word if I can.
That is that this will be my last AGM. I am retiring from Technology One. I wanted to share it with you all today. It has been an amazing journey. It started 35 years ago, in 1987 with funding from the McTaggart's family, who were very supportive of the business and have been fundamental to its continuing growth. We started at the front of a highest plant, and we were one of the first startups here in Australia before there was even the word of a startup. We would be one of the first tech companies to list on the ASX in 1999, and we would usher in the dotcom boom. We were at the very cutting edge of all those things.
We had an amazing idea, which was to build true software products here in Australia, products that did not need to be customized, that could be configured, and the configuration would sit outside the software, so everyone would run the same software. This is really the core concept that today is fueling our SaaS business. Everyone runs the same software. We invented that idea 35 years ago. Over 35 years, we have rebuilt our company and our products many times when relational database occurred, and we partnered with a company called SDL to build our first products. SDL became Oracle. When the PC turned up and we looked at it and we thought, "How can we use the PC as part of our enterprise software?" We partnered with a company called Microsoft to build one of the first client server applications.
We were early adopters of the Internet, working with Netscape. Subsequently, we became very passionate and early adopters of the cloud, working with a fulfillment delivery company called Amazon, which today is one of the biggest cloud companies in the world. The company has had the courage and the conviction to rebuild its products and to reimagine its business at each of those stages, and very few companies have been able to do that. When I look at our competitors over the years, many of them have disappeared because they haven't done that. Today was inevitable, and it has been a very well-planned transition. It started with the appointment of Edward as Chief Operating Officer 10 years ago. Ed learned the company inside out.
He was one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, and he was then appointed to the role of CEO five years ago. five years ago, we started the renewal of the board, and we brought on some very passionate and very committed new directors who understand the business now today, very, very well. It's that courage and conviction that is so important that you have at the board level. You know, if you don't have that, then you won't reinvent the business, you won't take advantage of those opportunities. I'm really confident that our new board has that courage and that conviction to do what's required. More recently, the appointment of a deputy chair, Pat O'Sullivan. Pat will be taking over the role of chair from me.
I just want to spend a few minutes to talk about Pat. Pat is a very important addition to the company. He has been an executive with very large companies such as Goodman Fielder, Optus, and Nine Entertainment. It's so important to have directors with that real-life operating experience. He also has a lot of experience running ASX companies. He is currently the Chairman of carsales.com and SiteMinder, and he's also been a Non-Executive Director of quite a few other public listed companies, including Afterpay. He brings enormous amount of ASX and executive experience and has built a very strong relationship with Ed over the last 12 months. My plan is I will be handing over on June thirtieth, just after the release of our half-year results.
Without doubt, we are in a great position. I'm sure there'll be more challenges ahead. There's no doubt about it. They don't stop. The company's DNA of continually evolving, changing, having the conviction, the courage to do the big things is what will keep this company in good stead. Having a board that understands that and that has that conviction as well is also very important. I see strong continuing growth for many years to come. Let me just finish off. We have a very experienced and a renewed board. We have a proven executive team led by Edward Chung, who has done an amazing job over the last five years as CEO. We have a very clear strategy we're executing against.
Our global SaaS ERP solution, our focus on specific markets, our expansion into U.K., and then also building the next generation of our products, which we are starting now, which is called our digital experience product range, which I've worked quite hard with the team over the last 12 months. I think we are positioned for very strong growth. All right. At this point, I'm gonna hand over to Ed, and Ed's gonna talk a little bit about our results in more detail.
Thanks, Adrian. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the AGM. I'll get into that more detail now. By all accounts, FY 2021 was a great year. You see there that we achieved a record profit, the 12 consecutive years of record profit with AUD 97.8 million in net profit before tax, up 19%, which was at the top end of the guidance that we set earlier that year. As Adrian said, SaaS drives our growth and will continue to drive our growth. SaaS ARR all organically grew up to AUD 192.3 million, up 43% on the prior year. It will continue to underpin our growth, and I'll talk more about the outlook in a few more slides.
Now, FY 2021 was a very strong result, and that's even including the continuation of our planned wind down of our traditional legacy license fee business. Our legacy license fees, we delivered AUD 16.8 million. That was down 38%, down AUD 10 million as planned, but that's an immediate hit to the P&L. That's immediate reduction of that AUD 10.8 million. To deliver 19% profit growth, including that, is quite a amazing feat from the team at TechOne. This slide here is showing our future state business. Our future state business is our SaaS and continuing business, and that will grow at 15%+ per annum when we wind down that legacy license fees. You can see here on the slide, today we've got two businesses.
We've got that legacy license fee business in orange, and it's coming down quite dramatically as planned. By the end of FY 2024, there'll be 0 license fees. Our SaaS and continuing business in that blue line is growing quite fast. Last year, we delivered 9% profit growth, and as that license fees comes right off, that will grow at 15%. That top line there, that black dotted line, is the total revenue of TechnologyOne. Last year, or FY 2021, it was AUD 311 million. Again, that's got that planned reduction in license fees by AUD 10 million. That license fees that was traditionally sold as AUD 10 million is now sold as SaaS or SaaS ARR. That's very high quality revenue, but it comes over many years.
It's not that one-off perpetual license fees that we used to get. The message here is that as that license fees comes down to zero, it's planned. It comes with that end of on-premise. As we continue to drive our SaaS and continuing business, you'll see top-line revenue growth coalesce and grow at about 15%+ per annum. There's no doubt Adrian gave a really good explanation of what makes our SaaS different. It's a hugely compelling proposition for our customers. It is that one global code line which allows us to continue to invest in new features, new functions, highest level of security, and make it faster for our customers. With our massive economies of scale, we can deliver this value proposition for our customers. We take care of all of it for them.
They get two releases a year. They're on eight active data centers. We're IRAP protected, certified, which is the highest level of cybersecurity certification of any SaaS ERP provider on the planet. Our customers are always on the latest release. We do two releases a year, which I'll talk about, and they're always on the latest technology. When they're on SaaS, all the products are available for them, and they can take up new products, new features, new functions to solve their business problems very quickly. The icing on the cake for them is they save 30%+ per annum. We released some research during the year. That 30%+ per annum was independently researched by IBRS and In-Sight Economics.
That equates to a potential of AUD 252 billion over the next 10 years that customers in our segments can invest in more nurses, more educators, better facilities in our local governments. It's quite outstanding. Now, as Adrian said, we've got about 640 customers on our SaaS platform at the end of FY 2021, and there's another 400+ customers to go. There's plenty of runway. There's about AUD 145 million of additional SaaS ARR as those customers from on-premise move to our SaaS platform. Now, if you look at SaaS, it's very high quality recurring revenue, as Adrian said.
If you mix that and combine it with our very low churn rate, 1%, that's 1% of churn every year, or on the other side of the coin, 99%+ retention, and we've done that for 35 years. That's unheard of in our industry, and it's because of our continued investment in R&D to keep our customers on the latest technology. It's because of our compelling customer experience and the Power of One, where we're 100% accountable, and we never lose a customer. It is almost a crime in Technology One to lose a customer. We'll do anything to make sure we give that customer a great experience, keep them happy, and keep them forever. Today, that recurring revenue, it's about 90% of our revenue.
We start a year knowing that we've got 90% revenue locked in, and that puts us, you know, in the driving seat for continuing strong growth every year after that. There's our target, AUD 500 million by 2026. Yes, Adrian, you're right. We do have a bet that we could deliver more than that and deliver it faster. When you combine that compelling value proposition of SaaS, what it does for our customers, combine it with announcing the end of on-premise by FY 2024, we are committed, we are confident we will deliver AUD 500 million worth of ARR by FY 2026. Adrian said, I think you said 40%, Adrian. We delivered margin improvement, and it came from our, from the massive economies of scale we're getting from the SaaS platform.
As we put more customers on it and continue to drive new technologies to reduce the cost for us, improve the security, and improve the performance for our customers, we'll continue to drive margin expansion. You've seen that over the years. Last year, we went from 28% - 31%. We will deliver that 35% profit margin expansion. When we get there, we just set the next target. We set it to 40, we set it higher, and we drive our business and drive our team to continue to deliver not only faster software, higher security software, but higher margin software as a service for TechnologyOne. When you add that growth in ARR and the margin expansion, we expect to continue to double in size every five years, as we have for the last 35 years.
Turning to our balance sheet, there's no doubt we have a strong balance sheet. We ended the year with cash and equivalents of AUD 142.9 million, up 14%, and that's even after making the acquisition of Scientia, which was about AUD 12 million. We have no debt, so we've got a very strong balance sheet. It also shows in our cash flow generation. Cash flow generation was AUD 63.9 million there, up 12%. That cash flow generation was 88% of net profit after tax, which beat our guidance of 80% of net profit after tax. It comes from selling well, implementing well, keeping our customers happy, collecting well. All parts of the business are firing, and so therefore it translates to happy customers and collecting cash flow. That's our strong and disciplined cash collection.
Now just a reminder, at the half, we have this phenomenon which will continue where most of our anniversary dates for our customer subscription is in the second half. At the last half last year, we had negative cash flow generation of -AUD 3 million, but you can see from the results that there was big cash inflows for that annual subscription in the second half to end the year as we did, and that will continue in the years to come. Our R&D investment is for the future, and it's significant. You can see there that our R&D investment was AUD 77 million, 24% of revenue, up 13%.
Now, that's significantly higher than our usual benchmark of 8% per annum, but we took the opportunity to invest in some exciting new technologies in our SaaS platform, features and functions for our customers and of course, DXP. I'm gonna talk about that next. We're fiscally responsible. We manage that extra investment in R&D within the total expense sort of budget for TechOne, and we also delivered that margin improvement that you saw. Over the last 10 years, we've invested AUD 500 million in R&D, and we've invested to keep abreast of the latest technologies and to keep our customers abreast of those latest technologies, and we'll continue to do that, invest in new concepts, new ideas, new technologies for our customers.
The R&D is focused on new features, new functions, things like DXP, new technologies, things like IRAP protective certification, all the investments to make it quicker, more secure for our customers, and deliver new features and functions to run their business. Going forward, we expect to return to that 8% per annum growth in R&D investment. I wanna spend a few moments on DXP and give you an update on it. It's very exciting, and it will change the game. TechOne will again make a pioneering move by delivering DXP. Before I get into the details, I just wanted to say it's not a short-term thing. It's not something we'll develop and sell straight away.
If you think back at the SaaS platform, it's taken us 10 years of hard work and investment to get to where we are today, and it's fueling our growth and continue to fuel our growth for many years to come. DXP is similar. In the SaaS platform, we invested because we knew it was the right strategy, made plenty of losses for the first few years, and now it's powering our growth. It will be similar in DXP. We're gonna make lots of investments. We'll make some mistakes, we'll learn a few lessons, we'll see what the market does, but it will fuel our growth going forward. Now, what is DXP? To understand DXP, I'll just recap a little bit on that global SaaS ERP that Adrian talked about.
Our global Ci SaaS ERP today is focused on the power users or the back office users in an organization. If you think about any organization, think about a local government. It can be the accountants doing the month-end processing, the payroll clerks running payrolls. It can be the town planners assessing pool applications or certifiers in a local government. That's the hundreds and thousands of users that Adrian talked about in a local government organization. Now, what DXP is is going further, extending the reach of our global SaaS ERP to you and me, the ratepayers in an organization. I think about Moreton Bay because they're one of our early adopters of DXP. They've got 200,000 ratepayers in their constituency.
We're not only servicing the thousands of employees in that organization, the potential is huge as we reach out to the hundreds of thousands of users in our local government. If I sort of now pivot to a university, again, there's thousands of users admitting students, paying staff, doing month-end, but one university can have 50,000 students, 100,000 students. Again, the DXP will reach further than the traditional DXP. It will set us apart again from Workday, SAP, and Oracle, the traditionals. It'll make us stickier in those organizations. Of course, we'll deliver excellent service and a compelling service for that organization. Turning to the U.K. Now, the U.K. is three, maybe even five times the size of the Australian market, so the addressable market is huge.
When you think about our journey, it's been a long journey in the U.K. We're completing that customer remediation phase. We're out of that now and we're doubling down for growth. When you look at the achievements for FY 2021, you can see there that the profit was AUD 1.6 million, up quite a lot on a small breakeven the year before. Our ARR, we ended with AUD 9 million. The baseline is set, the beachhead has been made. We've broken even. In the year, we closed eight new logos, mainly in local government, and we knew that heading into the year. The important note is that we closed two unitaries.
We found our sweet spot in local government, and they have been at the smaller end as we've got that beachhead and, you know, made sure our software was right, our business was scaled in the U.K., and we're moving up the value chain. Those two new unitaries are probably double the size of the deals we've been doing, and we've got to do that carefully before we move up again. They're quite nice wins for our organization. Looking forward, we've got a strong pipeline for FY 2022. We have finished the R&D effort for U.K. Student Management. We're in the last phases of implementation for our first customer in Student Management. We'll now be able to sell Student Management in a big way in the U.K.
Our HRP regionalization is just around the corner with five customers going live in a matter of months. We've appointed a new executive. Our new executive, Leo Hanna, who is focused on growth. I think Leo might be here in the room for the first time. Of course, we've acquired Scientia. I'm gonna talk about Scientia now. As Adrian said, we've got our focus on vertical markets. This is higher education. We've known Scientia for many years. We've known them for 20 years. They do mission-critical software for higher education. It's scheduling the rooms, the students, the teachers. It's quite a complex algorithm to get that right. Then you think there's many subjects, many degrees, many courses. It's quite complex in a university. We've integrated it with them in many universities in Australia.
It was quite exciting when the opportunity came to acquire Scientia. Scientia expands our broad software even further with mission-critical software for the higher education markets here at home and of course in the U.K. No one else has our footprint, and we've just made it even broader, sets us apart even more. The second exciting thing about it is they've got 150 U.K. higher education customers that we can sell our Student Management into our financials, our HR & Payroll. They've got existing relationships. It's quite an exciting acquisition, and it shows our commitment not only to the U.K., but to the higher education sector, globally as well. Determination to keep working hard to solve those complex problems. We compete against SAP, Oracle, Workday, who have got hundreds of thousands of staff. TechOne has 1,200.
They probably have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of developers. We've got 400, and we win. It's through their smarts, their creativity, innovation, and their grit and determination. Now, we all read about the market pressures with staff. TechnologyOne's had to respond like every other company, but we take a very holistic approach to our staff. Sure, we have to address remuneration, and we gave our leaders healthy budgets to address remuneration, but people join TechnologyOne for a career. We're focused very highly on career plans, career paths for individuals. You can start as a developer or start as a support consultant and move into pre-sales in a different part of the organization, into R&D, into consulting. It's very focused. We also invest in our culture, and we invest it in our people through our award-winning programs.
You see them there, our buddy events, grads, hack days. We're fortunate enough to run a CKO, a company kickoff in May last year, when sort of lockdowns sort of disappeared for a little bit. We brought as many staff, most staff, 800 staff here to Brisbane, here to the showgrounds to reconnect with each other, reconnect with our strategy, our vision, our purpose. We invest heavily, not only in remuneration, but in careers and culture. That combined is our focus for people. Of course, we've got the Technology One Foundation, which kicked off in about 2016, 2017. It's a really important driver of who we are as a company and is helping set our culture. To be honest, it also helps attract new generation, the young generation.
We focus on the youth in our foundation because we believe through the youth, we'll have the greatest impact on the future. It wouldn't be the TechOne way if we didn't set an ambitious goal. Our ambitious goal is to lift 500,000 kids and their families out of poverty by 2032. That's a massive feat. We focus on great Australians doing great things. Up here on the slide is the key charities that we support. Underpinning this also is this thing called the 1% Pledge, where we pledge 1% of our profit, 1% of our time, and 1% of our product to the charities we serve and the communities we serve. When you add all that up, that's a big investment of AUD 2 million+ per annum.
As TechnologyOne continues to grow, that investment will also grow for our TechnologyOne Foundation. Whichever way you look at it, TechnologyOne had a great year in FY 2021 by all metrics. I won't go through all of those, but we had record profit, record revenue, and record SaaS ARR. I want to spend a few moments now on the outlook for next year. Looking forward. The markets we serve are highly resilient. Think of them, local government, higher education, government, they're highly resilient. We provide significant value through our SaaS ERP, and it's mission-critical software. The software is running a local government, it's running a university. It's resonating with them.
By our customers moving to our SaaS ERP, we take away all the pain, so they can focus on educating, you know, the next stars or looking after the infrastructure in our local governments. We've got a strong pipeline, and we see continuing growth for FY 2022, and that's growth in ARR, SaaS ARR and in profit. Of course, we'll set more specific guidance at the half. Just spend a few moments on the long-term outlook now. We're positioned well for growth. Our SaaS continues to grow very strongly. We've got substantial opportunity in our customer base. Our customers have about five of our 15 products on average. When they come to the SaaS platform, it's almost 7. It's coming to SaaS and all the products available there. The product take-up is a lot higher in our existing customer base.
We've got continuing growth here in APAC. Of course, 3-5 times total addressable market in the U.K., which we're driving growth into, particularly in local government and higher education. With our global SaaS ERP, we'll continue to focus on margins and getting significant margin expansion in our business. Our SaaS and continuum business will grow to 15%+ per annum, and particularly when our license fees have come off totally as planned by FY 2024. I thought I'd now spend a few moments on our people. Adrian, speaking personally, I've known you for 15 years. It's been a fantastic journey. For the last 35 years, Adrian, you've been a great leader, a great teacher, a great mentor to all of us.
We've learned many things, and we can tell lots and lots of stories, perhaps over beers. For me, the most important lesson has been to make the impossible possible. We'll always succeed. We'll never give up, and we'll always succeed. Adrian, we wish you all the best for the future. We have a clear strategy. I believe I've got the strongest exec team in the history of TechOne. Many of them are here today. We're confident of strong continuing results. This success of this business comes from a clear strategy and of course, our people. We have amazing, talented, loyal, passionate people at TechOne. They're creative, they're innovative. They've got grit and determination and never-say-die attitude. We have a lot of fun along the way as well.
I'd like to leave you with a video reflecting on FY 2021. Thank you.
I know you hear me now. We are a different kind. We can do anything. We could be heroes. Me and you. We could be heroes. Ooh. We could be heroes. Me and you. We could be. We could be. All we're looking for is love in the little life. Love in the little life. We could be. All we're looking for is love in the little life. Love in the little life. We could be heroes. Ooh. We could be heroes. Me and you. We could be.
All right. Thanks, Ed, for that update. We will now move into the formal part of the meeting. The notice of meeting was issued to all registered members on the seventeenth of January. We'll take that notice as read. It'll be the agenda for the items that will come next. Everyone present here today will have registered at the front desk. This includes shareholders, proxy holders, and visitors. All the proxies that have been received have been inspected and those that have validly been lodged have been registered. We have about 246 million votes that have come in, which means we will have an indication. We will know actually the results of all the items today. The voting will be by poll. That's fine.
Shareholders and proxy holders intending to vote will have been given a yellow voting card on registration, which they can use for voting, as we go through the items. All right. We'll jump over some of the other housekeeping, and we'll just simply now go to the items. The first item that we have is to receive and consider the financial statements and reports of directors and auditors for the year ending the 30th of September 2021. The annual reports, including the financial statements, was distributed to the members and has been held by the members for the required statutory time. This is not an item that has to be voted on, but it's a good time to ask questions to do with the company's financial performance and the annual report.
If you have any questions, if you could direct them to me, and I will either answer it or pass it on to the most appropriate person. If you could just raise your hand if you've got a question, and we'll bring a microphone to you. If you could just identify yourself just for the record.
All right. I'm just trying to find where I am here. Yep. Can we start with that item there? Any questions on the financial statements? Thank you.
Hi, I'm Paul Donahue, representing the Australian Shareholders' Association. Just wanted to start off saying, congratulations on your accomplishments. Fantastic achievement you've had so far. My question is a bit more boring compared to that. You mentioned 91% of customers are likely to move over to SaaS. What about that 9%? Is there a plan to move them over somehow, or we'll have to keep supporting them in the future?
No, no. I mean, basically, if they don't move, then they'll be unsupported, and they will go somewhere else. We're pretty confident that it'll be probably closer to 99% will move across, you know. You just always have to allow for some slippage, you know, some people that will do something different. No, we will stop on-premise support totally, and it will only be the SaaS business and the SaaS customers we'll support. Any other questions? All right. We shall move on to the next part of the agenda. As we said, we're going to be doing a poll, and these are the items that need to be voted on. I declare the poll open. You may cast your votes at any time if you haven't already voted.
If you need any assistance, just put up your hand. The results of the poll will be published later today on the ASX, but we'll be able to give you a very clear indication about what the outcomes will be. All right, the first item we have. The meeting now needs to consider the election of a new director and the re-election of two existing directors in accordance with rule 16.1 of the constitution. It should be noted that under the rules of the constitution, directors retain office until the end of the meeting. This is just an ordinary resolution. It only requires 50% of the votes cast in favor by the members. Let me start by just acknowledging the substantial contribution by the board to support the executive team.
As I said, it takes a huge amount of courage and conviction to run a business like Tech One. You know, we invest a lot of money in R&D. We're making big bets, big calls, and you need the right sort of board to assist you to do that. We've had a great board, and the new directors we've added have added substantial value to the business. It's wonderful to have them on board. The very first resolution is the election of Pat O'Sullivan as a director. This is the resolution that Pat O'Sullivan, who having been appointed a director on the second of March last year, in accordance with rule 13.2 of the company's constitution, be elected as a director of the company. Pat has a very esteemed background.
I touched on it earlier, having been the executive for a number of very large organizations such as Goodman Fielder, Optus, and Nine Entertainment, and also is currently the chair of a number of large public listed companies, such as carsales.com and SiteMinder, plus a lot of experience on other ASX boards in the past. He brings a lot of experience into the table here. Are there any questions on that resolution? If there is, just please raise your hand and we'll send a mic across. Yeah.
Paul Donohue, Shareholders Association again. Pat, your resume is very impressive and your skills and experience aren't in question, but my question is about your workload. Given that you are serving on other boards as a chair now with Adrian's news that he'll be handing over at some point, it's a lot to juggle. How do you plan to do that?
Yes, go for it.
Thanks for the question, Paul. I mean, my mother calls me Patrick. I don't take on the role lightly, mate. I think most of the work I do, you know, on WBM, Global Energy. I work with smart vehicles with Mate academy. I'm looking at the team that's gonna replace. These are big shoes to fill, but I'm not gonna fill them. I've got other chair companies. In terms of workload, you've got nothing to worry about. I will give my full commitment to this board as I do to the other boards I'm involved with.
Thank you.
Any other questions on this resolution? All right. I'll ask those of you that haven't voted to complete your voting card on how you intend to vote. The proxies that we have received. Can we bring them up? As we can see, this resolution will clearly pass. All right. The next resolution is the re-election of Rick Anstey as a director, that Rick, who retires in accordance with rule 16.1 of the company constitution and being eligible to be re-elected in accordance with rule 16.2. Rick has a career that spans over 40 years. His first company was Tangent Group, established a strong reputation for the development of software products and strategic management consulting for the banking and finance sector.
With the sale of Tangent, he then co-founded the incubator and the IQ Funds in 2000, which was an early-stage investment group focused on the technology, telecoms, and life science sectors. One of the early incubators here before they became prominent, helping startups to realize their vision. Through IQ Funds and personally, Richard has co-invested in more than 30 companies with support of Commonwealth Government programs, the venture capital funds, and both corporate and personal investors.
While being an active non-executive director of his investments, Rick has added value, wherever appropriate to maximize shareholder value, and has been actively involved in trade sales of many companies to organizations in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. He has a lot of other credentials, but let me say that Rick understands the whole startup ecosystem and brings a very interesting and valuable insight to us about what is happening in that ecosystem. It's great to have him on board as a director. If there are any questions on this resolution, please raise your hand, and we'll send the mic across.
Thanks. Rick, my question is about your independence. Obviously, you've got great skills and experience, and your work in the startup sector is very relevant. You're listed as an independent director. You've been there for 16 years. Obviously, length of tenure doesn't automatically lead to a loss of independence, but just interested, what are you doing to maintain that independence?
This working? Yeah. All right. It's working. Hi. Can everyone hear me? Yeah. Well, it's a common question. It just happens that the years mount up, and suddenly you feel you've been here a long time, which is outside of the normal guidelines. You know, I've been chair of governance and nominations for, I don't know, 10 years or so, but we started that refresh five years ago. When we started the refresh, I still felt I was the new boy, and I still feel a bit like that now. You know, I accept the fact that I'm on this board, and I've been on there a long time, but I can't see the relationship between being here a long time and being not independent.
I have a whole number of other interests, very synergistic with what we do here, and I, you know, quite strongly believe I'm independent, and I certainly state what I believe and, you know, I'm you know a very small shareholder, but that's my only dependence on the company, my only conflict.
Thank you, Rick. Let me make an observation if I can. I am a little bit controversial, so apologies for that. Let me just say, there is another way to look at it. If you're a new director, you're not gonna rock the boat. If you're an old director, you know where all the bodies are buried, and you call bullshit when you see it. I really have a problem with just time being used as a way to dictate whether someone is independent or not. It is nothing to do with time in the least. There's more than enough research. For example, David Swan from University of New South Wales has shown unequivocally his research overseas that companies which have actually directors that are executive directors outperform those that don't.
There needs to be a fundamental rethink on this whole idea of what is independence and who should be on boards, you know? We work very hard to rebuild the board, and we put a lot of time and effort to build a very strong board. It doesn't come down to something as simple as length of tenure or whether you have been executive of a company or not. I think it really is time for a major rethink on this because we really are leaving some very talented people out of the equation. We have some great talented ex-executives who would be wonderful on our board, but we can't bring them on, you know. It's such a waste that those people, 'cause they know where the bodies are buried. They know where the mistakes are, and they call bullshit.
I think it's time for a rethink on this whole thing. Anyway, that's my two bob worth on it. Any other questions? All right. We'll now vote on this resolution. Those who haven't voted, if you could complete your voting card. We have substantial proxies, so we'll bring it up, and I think we'll see that this will clearly pass this reelection of Rick. All right. The next resolution is the reelection of Sharon Doyle as a director. That Sharon, who retires in accordance with rule 16.1 of the company's constitution and being eligible to be reelected in accordance with rule 16.2 of the company's constitution. Okay, Sharon. Sharon brings a lot to the table, just like all our directors.
She's a pleasure to work with, and she can ask some very difficult questions. Sharon is the Executive Chair and majority owner of the corporate advisory firm, InterFinancial, which is a very well-regarded firm here in Queensland. She has successfully navigated technology companies through the challenges of steep global growth curves with a strong understanding of Software as a Service. I think that's an understatement. They have just a tremendous reputation. Sharon's leadership of InterFinancial has seen her develop a core practice providing strategic advice for technology and other IP-rich, high-growth companies. She has extensive international experience managing mergers and acquisitions and private equity. Sharon has a very interesting background before that because she was actually Vice President at Mincom, which is one of Australia's really early great software companies.
She brings a lot of experience from Mincom, the things they did well and the things maybe they didn't do so well. She has a lot of other credentials, which I won't go through and read, but just say it's a very impressive background, and she is a very strong contributor to our board. Are there any questions on this resolution? Please put up your hand if there is. That's not fair. How come she gets a free ride? This is just not right. All right. We'll now ask you to complete the voting card if you haven't voted. From the proxies, if we can bring them up, I think it's pretty clear that this will now pass. All right, we come to the REM report.
This resolution is to consider, and if thought fit, to pass the following resolution that the REM report as contained in the annual report be adopted. Okay. After consultation with REM consultants, proxy advisors, and shareholders during the year, the company's REM framework was again enhanced to make it simple, as possible, and to continue to align it with best practice. They have become so complex REM reports, I don't know how people make heads or tails. I look at a REM report and I struggle. I look at other people's REM reports, they are so complicated. The company obviously has had strong results. We've gone through that. I'm not gonna reread those numbers, for people. Let me say that there is strong correlation between executive REM and performance and creation of shareholder wealth.
The most important metric to me is that the executive REM grew by 12%, while the company's profit grew by 19%. I think that's a nice way to have it, where the executive REM is growing less than the company's profit. Last year we did have a first strike, which was very disappointing for the company. Simply, I'd like to say that the board exercised discretion. It did the right thing last year. The company had a fantastic result, another record year through the midst of COVID. The executive team worked very hard to achieve that result, and they would have lost their LTI because of targets that had been set, number one, pre-COVID.
They were not valid targets and secondly, we changed strategy to stop selling perpetuals and to go SaaS, and that impacted their ability to meet that target and they would have lost the LTI. We had the courage and the conviction to exercise board discretion, so we did the right thing by the executives, and we were penalized for doing that with a strike. Very disappointing situation. The message that is being sent to boards is, "Don't execute board discretion even when it's valid." The only reason why is because it's the policy. It's a policy that proxy advisors have. They don't want board discretion under any circumstance, which is very disheartening, really. We got the first strike and we've had to live with that.
It does go to the core issue here, which is, you elect a board to run a business, to make the hard decisions, and you want boards to have the courage and conviction to do what is right. You have a situation like this, which is nothing more than just a straight policy. We don't want discretion under any circumstance being foisted upon us. Our executives are key to us. We wanna do the right thing. It's not as if they were overpaid. Hopefully that courage and conviction I talked to you guys earlier is something we will continue to have as a company. All right, we have this resolution to vote upon. Let me just read that.
Ladies and gentlemen, Section 250R of the Corporations Act requires that a company members vote on whether or not the REM should be adopted. This vote is advisory only, and the outcomes will not be binding on the board. Please note that directors and executives are excluded from voting on this resolution. I can confirm that any proxy votes submitted by directors and executives have been excluded. This is a good point to ask any questions on REM.
Adrian, your views on the first strike are clear, but has there been dialogue with those dissenters, and has anything positive come from that?
No, nothing's positive come from it, to be frankly honest. It still continues. You saw a statement that they issued, basically saying that we actually even issued discretion this year, which we didn't, which was clearly wrong. We issued an ASX statement to clarify that misstatement. It's just a very difficult situation. You know, there are a set of benchmark policies, and if you don't comply with those benchmark policies, then you get pinged. As simple as that. It makes it hard, you know, when you've got to make the tough decisions. Boards have to be empowered, you know. I can understand it. If, for example, we hadn't performed strongly last year, I understand that. Okay?
when the company delivered record revenues, record results, and the executive team pay is within the mid-range of our peers and was well below the TSR of the company, and we did the right thing because of change of strategy. I mean, that's what I struggle to understand, you know, how that happens in the first place. I think that the solution to this problem is very simple, and I don't know why it hasn't been fixed, which is if the REM resolution had a 50% threshold, like every other resolution, then it would be truly representative of the majority of our shareholders. I think then we would get a more balanced outcome, a more balanced dialogue. At 25%, unfortunately, it is not representative of the majority of shareholders. that's the problem. I'm sure tomorrow I'm gonna get pinged in the financial review.
Anyway, that's it. Any other questions on REM? All right. This is a resolution that I will ask you to complete your voting card if you haven't already voted, but we have the proxies through, and that's pretty clear that this resolution will pass. That's great. There's no need for resolution 5, which is the contingent resolution to spill the board. Okay, from a housekeeping point of view, we'll collect any voting cards. We'll be publishing the final results on the ASX later today. We will retain all the proxies and stuff for six months. But I'd just like to finish off by saying it's been an amazing 35 years. I've been very fortunate to work with such a talented bunch of people.
Very innovative, very creative, very passionate. It's been a pleasure to lead the company over that period of time. I do want to acknowledge again our board. It's a great board. Very hardworking and very courageous and committed people. I think the company is in great hands. Then obviously with Ed and the executive team, great executive team. You know, they just keep overcoming the challenges. I mean, COVID was a good example where we just absolutely pivoted on a dime to go from working on-premise to working remotely and having to sell remotely. These are big, difficult enterprise deals, and we still achieved our numbers. I mean, that's a credit to his exec team.
Thank you to Ed and to the board. I wanna also thank our shareholders for the support over many, many years. Let me now formally close the meeting, and I look forward to catching up with you guys over tea and coffee later. Thank you.