Hi, and welcome to the Technology One full year results roadshow. For this presentation, Edward Chung, Chief Executive Officer, Stuart MacDonald, Chief Operating Officer, and Paul Jobbins, Chief Financial Officer, are on the call in Sydney. There'll be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. Participants on the phone who wish to queue for questions will need to press star followed by one on your telephone.
If you would like to submit a question online via the webcast, please type your question in the Ask a question box and click Submit. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mr. Edward Chung. Thank you, sir. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Sari. Welcome to everyone in the room here in Sydney, and welcome to those watching online. This is our, the Technology One full year 2022 results presentation. These were lodged today with the ASX. You're gonna see some strong results today, some results that we're very proud of, and it's a culmination of the 1,200 people that make up Tech One and many, many years of hard work. I'm jumping into the presentation now.
Y ou can see that we've delivered consistently strong results since listing in 1999, and it's due to Tech One's clear strategy, our clear vision, our purpose, and our significant investment in R&D. Just to remind people, we've got the first slide up there with the six parts of our strategy. The first is we're an ERP software provider.
We're not best-in-breed. We've got a very, very broad product base. You see there in 2008, we had 11 products. Through our R&D investment, we now have 16 products and over 400 modules available to all of our customers. The second is we have the deepest functionality for the markets we serve. We're not all things to all people. We only focus on six vertical markets, and importantly provide mission-critical software, and it powers those markets we serve.
It powers local governments, powers universities, governments, and large infrastructure providers. The third is that we've got our global SaaS ERP, and for Tech One, it's highly efficient, but for our customers it unlocks significant value for them.
Majority of our customers are now on SaaS, and Stuart will get into it in a lot more detail, but our SaaS customers are on two releases every year, which provides significant new additional features and functions every year. We have defense-in-depth security, with the highest level of cybersecurity certification of any ERP provider on the planet. Our customers are always on the latest technology and on SaaS.
All products, all modules, they're available for all customers to see. They can see it, they can use it. It's frictionless for customers to adopt our products and modules on TechnologyOne SaaS. Particularly important in today's environment, our SaaS customers report savings of up to 30+ %, by moving to our global SaaS ERP.
The fourth part there is that we've delivered our fourth generation CiA available any device, anywhere, anytime. All features, all functions, no carve-outs, all available, and it was totally validated by the pandemic where our customers could simply go home, log on, and continue working without missing a beat. We're the Power of One where we build, market, sell, implement, run and support our own software.
It's a very unique value proposition and that underpins and allows us to deliver a game changer called Solution as a Service. I'm gonna get into that in a bit more detail a bit later. All of that is underpinned by Tech One being an innovation driven company.
With our fourth generation, with each generation, we leverage new and emerging tech for the benefit of our customers. Now, jumping into the results. With this consistent strategy, you can see that we delivered record SaaS ARR growth up 43% to AUD 274.2 million. In addition, that brings our total ARR growth to the highest in our history, up 25% to AUD 320.7 million. Even excluding the impact of Scientia, we recorded our highest total ARR growth up 20%. Turning to slide seven.
We now have over 800 large-scale enterprise customers on the Tech One SaaS platform, that's up 27%. I just gotta reiterate that they're very large customers, running mission-critical software, powering their organizations.
When we combine all of those customers, we have millions of users every day logging into Tech One ERP. In the SaaS world, we've learned a couple of new sayings. One of them is land and expand, where you land with a small number of products and modules and grow over many years for customers to take up a lot more of our products and modules. The second we learned from Adobe, and that is cloud is war.
When you've got a customer on your cloud or on your SaaS platform, and they can see all the other products and modules, it's almost a no-brainer for them to take up your products and modules compared to other third parties.
With this, we delivered strong net profit after tax up 22% to AUD 88.8 million. Now, that's at the top end of guidance that we set, and our 13th consecutive year of record profits. We had a target, and that target was AUD 500 million ARR by FY 2026, and with AUD 320.7 million ARR, I'm sure you'll all do the math. We're gonna beat that target. We'll surpass that target. You know, sometimes Technology One gets criticized for putting these big, ambitious goals out there.
But, you know, there's two sides to the coin, and we believe that we put it out there, and we've got something to anchor our conversations on, 'cause if we don't, then the market will make it up and we'll have to respond anyway.
In any respect, we said it, we're committed to it, and we will deliver it. Next slide, to slide 10, please. If we're gonna surpass AUD 500 million by ARR by FY26, the next obvious question is, what's your next big ambitious goal? As you expect, in Technology One, our strategies don't end in FY26, and our strategies don't end in AUD 500 million ARR. Our plans are very long-term. They're 10 years. We have long-term strategies for all parts of our business, including R&D, and R&D is where we build our future platforms for growth.
With our 4th generation ERP complete, our CiA, we've now showcased to our customers in our recent showcase the new products and solutions that will enable us to continue to double in size every five years.
Our focus is to maintain the momentum well beyond 500 mil ARR, I'm gonna get into that in a lot more detail later. Turning to FY23, if you narrow down to this financial year, the outlook is also strong, I'll get into that in a bit more detail. Can we go to the next slide, the dividend slide, please? By all measures, we're doing very well. We provide mission-critical apps which powers business. We've got strong recurring revenue, 99+% customer retention over the last 35 years.
This results in consistently strong cash flows. You can see over the last few years, we've built up large cash reserves. As a result, we've declared a special dividend, and you can see there on the slide, it's AUD 0.02 per share.
That's in addition to the final dividend or the normal dividend of AUD 0.1082 per share. It follows, to be honest, a similar approach that we undertook in FY14 by introducing a special dividend. To sum it all up, we're very confident in the outlook. We retain significant firepower to invest in growth, and the full-year dividend has been increased by 22% in line with NPAT. We'll hand over to Paul now to take us through the financial results.
Thanks, Ed. By exceeding our ARR targets and driving the highest quality revenue, we have been able to end the legacy license business earlier than planned. At the bottom of the slide, we show our key metrics. SaaS ARR was up 43% to AUD 274.2 million. Total ARR was up 25% to AUD 320.7 million. As Ed said, both setting new records for growth. We made a decision to reduce legacy license fees faster, as we know it's lower quality revenue. We had provided guidance with the half year result that legacy license fees were likely to be AUD 12 million, down from AUD 17.7 million last year.
We were able to reduce this further to AUD 9.5 Million dollars for the year, a reduction of AUD 8.2 million year-on-year without impacting profit. Moving back to the top of the slide, we show that revenue from SaaS and continuing business grew 22% to AUD 358.7 million. To the middle of the slide, total expenses grew 20% to AUD 257 million. Within that, variable costs of AUD 63.1 million have grown in line with revenue, that's before capitalization, and it includes customer SaaS costs, third-party costs, and variable or performance-based remuneration.
Operating costs of AUD 226.3 million before the impact of capitalization and amortization of R&D stepped up with increased investments for growth, we'll provide some more detail on that throughout the presentation.
We also saw the inclusion of additional operating costs from Scientia of AUD 14 million, which we acquired at the end of last financial year. There's more information from the impact of Scientia in the appendices. Synergies delivered in FY22 will reduce the impact of Scientia expenses in FY23. We had another headwind from the increasing amortization expense for our software development of AUD 23.4 million, a headwind or increase of AUD 10 million year-on-year. The net expense from R&D in the P&L increased 35%.
We note that, as in prior years, the amount capitalized is in our normal range of, at 54% of R&D investment. There's more information on the impact of R&D in the appendix as well. Profit before tax was 15%, as Ed said, at the top end of guidance. Net profit after tax was up 22%.
This reflects a reduction in our effective tax rate to 21%, down from 25.7% last year due to the new higher R&D tax incentives and benefits from bringing Scientia to account. From next year and ongoing, we expect the effective tax rate to be between 22% and 24%. Our organic margin without Scientia grew from 31% to 32%. Reported profit before tax margin remained high at 30%. The temporary decrease was expected and caused by Scientia's lower margin.
As I said, synergies delivered in FY22 will reduce Scientia's expenses in FY23, and we expect margin growth to return in FY23. As I said, organic margin without Scientia grew from 31% last year to 32%. The profit margin trend that we have seen historically will continue now that we have absorbed Scientia.
We see group margins continuing to improve to 35%+ in the coming years, driven by the significant economies of scale from our single-instance, multi-tenanted global SaaS ERP solution. When we get to 35% margin, we'll set a new target. We continue to have a strong balance sheet. Cash at year-end was AUD 175.9 million, up 22% and equivalent to AUD 0.54 per share. I'll talk to our cash flow performance shortly. Net assets grew AUD 49.6 million or 26% year-over-year. We have no debt.
As you would expect, deferred revenue continues to increase, up 9% year-over-year to AUD 184 million. This balance represents amounts received in advance from customers for SaaS fees and on-prem annual license fees, which will be recognized as revenue in future periods.
Our cash flow generation of AUD 77.2 million grew 21% or AUD 13.3 million on last year, a very strong result. It represents an increasing proportion of profit after tax and will progressively grow to match NPAT from FY 2024 onwards. We feel cash flow generation is a better metric than operating cash flow as it also reflects payments for capitalized development costs and commission costs, as well as lease payments. As a SaaS company, we manage our business in three operating segments.
The profit from the software segment is driven by our strong growth in our SaaS recurring revenue. We are refining the strategy and focus for our consulting segment with a focus on efficiency of projects with customers. The corporate segments benefits from growth in our operational segments.
Looking at this geographically, our business in APAC continues to grow strongly, and our UK segment profit has grown 52% year-on-year. We'll talk more about the UK later in the presentation. This slide shows a slightly different lens on the result. Call-outs include our EBITDA margin has improved from 40% to 41% last year, and EPS, or earnings per share, has increased 22% year-on-year in line with profit after tax. Our full-year return on equity is a world-class 37%. I'll hand over to Stuart to discuss significant achievements.
Thanks, Paul. During the year, we launched our fourth generation global SaaS ERP, CIA. Having reengineered the complete ERP code base leveraging SaaS technology is the fourth time we have successfully reengineered our entire code base, enabling customers to always stay on the latest technology.
CIA not only underpins our significant growth in SaaS sales, both new logos and product penetration within our large customer base, but they all receive the benefits of defense-in-depth security, 400 modules, twice yearly upgrades with over 400 new features each time and new modules in those releases, a UX design for the next generation of user, as well as Migration Central, which enables currently over 100 customers to move from Ci to CIA frictionlessly. It also is the platform for our new products, such as LG DXP, App Builder, and Student Management DXP currently in research.
All of our verticals had double-digit growth, again validating our strategy of hyper-focus, providing mission-critical solutions for the markets we serve. If we focus on our two core verticals, local government grew by 20%, and education grew by 45%, confirming that extending the product footprint of mission-critical software in our regions of Australia, New Zealand, and the UK continues to be successful.
If I highlight a few of the impressive wins in the period. Mornington Peninsula Shire, we lost this deal to Oracle in 2018. Oracle was unable to deliver the project, and thus the council went back to market in late 2021. When the council reviewed our complete OneCouncil solution, they took the opportunity to leverage our full SaaS ERP solution.
This resulted in a much bigger win for us than their original footprint of products they went to market for in 2018. BMD is a significant win for us 'cause it provides and validates the importance of our App Builder solution, which allows customers to extend the functionality of our solution to meet their specific requirements while at the same time leveraging the Ci benefits, again, twice yearly upgrades, defense-in-depth security, just to name a few.
Highlands is the largest council in the UK, our Solution as a Service offering was the key differentiator for us. It should be noted, this is also the largest ARR deal we've ever done in the UK in the local government sector. Western Downs Regional Council was a significant win for us again, as it validates our position in the market.
Our brand is so strong in local government that this significant win closed with zero tender, no EOI, or not even a single product presentation. If I look at our 99% customer retention, I'm very proud of the results as it once again confirms our value that customers are our true north, and that with the Power of One philosophy, customers stay for us for a very long period of time. It should be noted we could not find another SaaS ERP provider with a metric that's even close to us.
The only thing we could find would be a best-in-breed with a churn. Again, our churn is 0.5%. Their churn is on average 13%. If I look at NRR, our 16 products and over 400 modules is the power of the SaaS ERP.
It has always been our strategy to acquire an account with a primary focus on financials, core financials, and then support the account over a long period of time and sell them products within our OneCouncil, our one education, our one government, our one asset, or one health solution. I provided you an example of this in the half-year result. In our industry, the best in-class metric for this number, for NRR, is between 115 and 120.
With an NRR of 116, it is a testament to our strategy as it confirms we're building, selling, and delivering mission-critical products that our customers expect. It should be noted that in FY 2022, we had the benefit of CPI of about 2%-3%, but this was offset by the Forex impact.
If I focus on the UK, as I've mentioned in previous results, approximately four years ago, we began a customer-first program to focus on current customers, the in-flight projects, to make sure that they were completed successfully, and as a result of all this hard work, we'd have a strong referenceable customer base to build from. This was completed a year ago, and I'm proud to confirm we have over 150 customers now in the UK.
We have strategically phased the localization into the UK of our products that TechnologyOne is famous for, as well as they are the key differentiator in our solutions because they provide mission-critical features and functions that provide the verticals what they require. I'm once again proud to confirm that with Lincoln University live with our student management solution, we've completed the localization of student management in the UK.
It should be noted that we have a strong portfolio of customers now live with our HRP solution, once again differentiating against competitors such as Workday that don't do payroll. In a short space of a year, we have brought all the Scientia customers to TechnologyOne, introduced the first ever SaaS timetabling scheduling solution, and have already signed 16 universities for contracts of this next generation of technology.
It should be highlighted that with student management now fully localized in the UK, the white space value of student management alone for our current customers in the UK is over AUD 220 million annual recurring revenue. With all the foundational work complete and the strong team of over 120 people in the UK, we are excited to see the benefits of all this hard work.
As we start FY 2023, we have significantly increased the size of the sales team as well as the marketing budget to take advantage of these opportunities. TechnologyOne invested AUD 92.2 million in R&D this year, up 19.6%. We completed our global SaaS ERP, CiA. We had the first year of ownership of Scientia. We locked in key R&D talent with numeration and long-term incentives. We took the opportunity to accelerate R&D investments in a number of new and exciting areas.
As is our history, the R&D team is focused on extending the functionality and the capability of our global SaaS ERP, CiA. Our R&D program continues to be the leading edge in the industry as we embrace new technologies, new concepts, and new paradigms.
We continue to invest in new exciting ideas, innovations such as Solution as a Service, App Builder, the Digital Experience Platform, DXP, for local government and higher education. Our 16th product, DXP LG, was released for general release in June of this year. Our value of making impossible possible has resulted in extremely broad, deep, complex, and rich functionality, providing mission-critical applications to run local governments, higher education institutes, governments, and large-scale infrastructure providers.
As you can see from these results, we are poised for our next stage of growth. With the strategies of DXP, Solution as a Service, and App Builder now being complete, we need to reinvigorate our values, our purpose, and our mission to support the communities we live in. We also needed to significantly invest in our leadership program to develop careers and succession planning.
If I focus on the leadership summit as an example, in July, we kicked off a six-part program with over 130 of our leaders worldwide flying into Brisbane for a two-day conference talking about our values, alignment, and supporting the organizational growth. Over the next five sessions, we'll be focusing on all aspects, such as our compelling customer experience, commercial acumen, and strategic planning. I'll now hand over to Ed.
Thanks, Stuey. Well, ladies and gents, you can see we've had some strong results for FY 2022, I'll just sum them up now. We had record full-year profit, revenue, and SaaS ARR, SaaS ARR being up 43%. Total ARR also seeing a record up 25%. This led to net profit after tax being up 22%, we had very strong cash flow generation up 21%, as forecast. That ambitious target, we will surpass that target of AUD 500 million ARR by FY 2026.
Now, before I get into the next section, I just wanna you know, iterate and go through slowly our approach to strategy in Technology One. As I said in the opening, we're very transparent with our strategies.
We say it and we do it, and it creates huge alignment in our own business. You can see that we started our transition to SaaS about 10 years ago. In 2018, we came to market with a detailed strategy to transition from on-premise legacy license fee business to SaaS. We set a really ambitious plan.
That was to go from a high of AUD 70 million, circa AUD 70 million, in that legacy license fees to zero over five years whilst we were aggressively growing our SaaS business without impacting profit and without impacting our customers. What this graph shows you here is in the blue line, you can see that's our SaaS ARR growing very fast.
In the bars, you can see that's our profit before tax growing consistently at 15% per annum. In the red line, that's our old legacy license fees, touching AUD 70 million in FY 2018 and coming down carefully over time. We've now delivered this strategy, exceeding our ARR target in FY 2022, which allows us now to bring an end to legacy license fee business. Looking back, this transition has been extremely complex.
We, as Stuart said, re-engineered our product. We re-engineered all parts of our business, including our structures, our policies, our processes, our disciplines, absolutely everything. We did it without missing a beat, without impacting our profit growth, and without impacting our customers.
If you take a big step back, I can't think of any other ERP company in the world who's successfully made the transition without impacting its customers or its profit. I'll now jump into the next session. Building the future. You can see good momentum in the business. The customer feedback is good, and we're gonna beat the target of AUD 500 mil ARR by FY 2026.
What's next? Our focus is to continue the momentum well beyond the AUD 500 million and to continue to double in size every five years. We grow in a number of ways in Techone. Traditionally, people have viewed us and our growth through the lens of new logos and new customer wins and, more recently, the potential and the growth in the UK.
We're excited about new logos, and we're excited about UK because it'll provide significant upside for us in TechnologyOne. What we're particularly excited about is the growth in our existing customer base as we sell more products and more modules to those customers. We've always said that we are no more than 15% penetrated into every one of the vertical markets we serve, particularly here in APAC. Contrary to what many people think, APAC has so much more growth potential.
It's so much more immediate runway in our existing customer base, and that it will underpin our growth for many, many, many years. Net Revenue Retention is a new metric that we introduced a couple of reporting periods ago, and it's a really important metric because it shows the growth in your existing customer base.
As Stuart said, world's best in ERP is between 115%-120%. You can see Techone delivered 116% this year. Now, we can double in size every five years just by continuing that metric. Why? Stuart said it. We're enterprise, we provide mission-critical products and modules, and today we've got 16 products, 400 modules. It's extremely rich, extremely complex, we only focus on six vertical markets. The products we provide to local government runs local governments.
The products we provide to student management runs universities. They are mission-critical products. On the SaaS platform, it's all available to everyone. You can see it all. You can use it. If you fall in love with it, then we might sell it to you.
It's frictionless, and we'll continue to increase that functionality in the markets we serve. I wanna go to slide 34 now. This is a new slide, and I wanna take you through carefully and slowly. If you remember at the half, Stuart took us through a customer journey and how over time, that customer at the half took more products and more modules. He also showed that as CPI comes in, that increased ARR, and as that local government, and we license local government on rateable properties, as that local government grew, that increased our ARR.
That single customer that Stuart showed started with AUD 360,000 worth of ARR per annum and grew over time to AUD 3 million ARR and still had significant runway, around AUD 2.5 million-AUD 3 million to go.
You gotta remember, these are very large customers taking our products. This is why we're particularly excited about the growth in our existing customer base. As we sell more products and more modules, we're gonna show you now the ARR opportunity in our existing customer base. Just remember, land and expand, cloud is war. Once we have a customer on our SaaS platform with only a small number of products, we've got plenty of opportunity, and we've demonstrated that it's frictionless, and they'll take many more products over time.
In this new graph, you can see there the black line. The black line is the average products per customer. You can see it was 4.3 in 2012. In 2022, it's now 6.2 products on average per customer.
You can see the blue line there is the total products available for sale to our entire customer base. It was 11 products in 2012, and as Stuart said, we've built more products, more modules, made a few acquisitions. You can see we now have 16 products for sale into the customer base. The bars there, that shows the ARR value of those products and modules that our customers currently do not have of Technology One.
And today, you can see that's over AUD 2 billion of ARR white space in our APAC customer base. It's quite significant. That compares to our total ARR of AUD 320.7 million. You can see that we've got a lot of runway.
What the graph also shows you is that ARR whitespace grows over time as we build or buy new products or modules. As CPI grows, our whitespace grows. Because we license by user, so if you're in local government, we license by rateable properties, if you're in higher education, we license by students. As a council grows, rateable properties grows, if whitespace grows. As the university or university sector grows, students grow, our whitespace grows.
Of course, as users generally grow, our whitespace grows. That's how we see and prove that we are no more than 15% penetrated into each one of the markets we serve. Go on the next slide, please.
At Technology One, we always stay true to our core beliefs and true to us, and one of those is we invest strongly in R&D for the future to build future platforms for growth. What's exciting for us is that we'll continue our trajectory, our momentum as we invest in R&D and continue to double in size every five years. This graph here shows that we've got a track record. Our track record is that we invest through R&D, and over the last 35 years, we've invested over AUD 800 million to build out that extremely broad, extremely deep ERP that we've talked about.
We've rewritten or reengineered the entire codebase four times now over the last 35 years, in each generation, we take advantage of new emerging tech for our customers, we also reengineer our entire business, our process systems and disciplines along the way. As Stuart said, we've now completed the fourth generation. That's our global SaaS ERP, that's CiA. We're now exposing the strategies that we've been working on for many years to the market. So we had a customer showcase, we've done four of them.
We've done them in Brisbane, Sydney, ACT and Melbourne, where we showcase some of these new products, these new modules, and new approaches going forward. We'll do the same again in New Zealand, Perth, and two in the UK early in the calendar year of FY 2023.
Can we turn next slide, please? Thank you. This is also a new slide, which I'll take you through slowly. You hear me say all the time, in TechOne, we create long-term strategies that create platforms for growth. If we take a step back and look at our SaaS strategy, which we set many years ago, that was a very long-term strategy. We made significant investments. The SaaS platform made losses for the first three or four years, but now it's a huge contributor to TechOne.
It's the same for these new products, these new strategies that we've just announced. The first is DXP. If you think about TechOne ERP, it's very strong and well known for what we call the back office. They're the power users.
Think of them as the payroll clerks doing payroll in the back office, the accountants doing the month-end, the rating clerks in a local government preparing our rates notices, or the student administrators admitting students, giving you grades. That's the back office, and TechnologyOne's renowned for that.
Now with DXP, we're extending our reach of ERP into the front office. In a council, that's you and I. That's the residents in a council. In a university, that's the students. That opens up millions of additional users that are paid for by the university or the council. LG DXP has been released, the first phase. The feedback's excellent and it's significant value to the customer and also to TechnologyOne.
If you think about property and rating, the current, our ERP product that runs local governments, DXP LG, is about the same price, same value. It's gonna be quite valuable to us, as it will be for our customers. You can see that provides significant additional or new whitespace in our customer base. The same can be said for student management, which is in the research phase.
We also announced at our showcase App Builder, this is a long-term strategy. App Builder allows our customers or third parties to extend our software, or develop apps with no code and little training, you don't get any of the nasties of customization that you would with an SAP and Oracle.
If you look at an organization like Salesforce.com, their equivalent of App Builder is about 30% of their total revenue. You can see the significant runway that can come from this long-term strategy, App Builder. Of course, we've mentioned it a couple of times, there's Solution as a Service. If you think about Salesforce.com, they changed the world. They changed it from on-premise to SaaS. They said the old way of running license fees on-premise on your own servers was wrong, and they would take away all that pain from you, and in one single fee, they would run it all on SaaS.
They had the vision, the conviction to change the world, right? Like Salesforce.com, TechnologyOne is gonna change the world. Solution as a Service, it's a game changer.
It's the next logical evolution in ERP, where TechOne delivers the entire outcome faster with little risk in one single fee for the customer. We'll continue to dramatically drive the time to value down, removing the need for traditional, risky, long, drawn-out implementations. It's a thing of the past. It can only happen through the Power of One.
TechOne's Power of One because we are the only SaaS ERP provider in the world that has the deep mission-critical product, you know, extreme focus on six vertical markets only, with IP and the products that run those vertical markets, and of course, our highly skilled and trained consulting team built up over the last 35 years.
When you put all three together, you can see that we're the only provider that will be able to deliver this game-changing approach Solution as a Service. If we move to the next slide, Solution as a Service creates an additional 40% ARR white space to the markets we serve. So, you can see we continue to double in size every five years. We've got strong Net Revenue Retention, world's best practice between 115%-120%.
Today we've demonstrated that there's $2 billion of ARR white space in the APAC customer base alone. With our significant investments in R&D over the next five years, that white space doubles from $2 billion to $4 billion ARR. Add on top of that Solution as a Service, a game changer, increase that again by 40%. Of course, we'll continue to look at strategic acquisitions carefully.
Scientia was the latest one, gave us that mission-critical timetabling and scheduling product. We'll continue to grow our new logos in APAC, continue to grow in the UK. With our profit margins, continue to grow to 35+%, through the significant economies of scale through our SaaS platform. You can see we're positioned well for the future. I'll end on the guidance and the outlook for FY23. You can see we're clearly on a high.
The economy, there's some difficult times out there, but just like in the past, TechOne has seen many difficult times. We've navigated them, and we've continued to grow very strongly. The reason for that is the markets we serve are resilient. Whether in local government, higher education or government, these are resilient markets. TechOne provides mission-critical products and modules that runs those organizations.
In times like this, those organizations look to Technology One to streamline their business, but also save 30%+ in their total cost of ownership. I've said it before, we pass on CPI through our subscription contracts. So you can see that our outlook is strong for FY23, we will surpass 500 million ARR by FY26.
Just to wrap up, none of these results you see today would be possible without the talented people that make up Technology One, the 1,200 people behind us that have grit and determination that make the impossible possible. We thank them for their continued efforts. FY22 has been an amazing year. To the shareholders in the room and down the camera, we'd also like to thank you for your continuing support.
Sari, I'd now like to hand over to you for questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to queue for a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star followed by two. If you would like to submit a question online via the webcast, please type your question in the ask a question box and click submit. We will take questions from the room first, followed by webcast, and lastly from the phone.
If you are in the room in Sydney and wish to ask a question, please speak into the microphone, state your name, followed by your question. Edward, over to you to take questions from the room in Sydney.
Thanks, Sari. We've got some questions ready. Chris, over to you.
Thanks, Ed. It's Chris Savage from Bell Potter. Three questions if I can. The first one, the AUD 500 ARR target.
Yeah.
You set that a few years ago, and the original target was FY25. COVID hit.
Uh-huh
A nd you pushed it out a year. Now you've changed the wording, so you'll say you'll surpass it in FY26. Is the thinking though now that you could well achieve that in FY25, the original target?
I'll say this a little bit cheekily, Chris. You can do the math.
Yeah.
It will either happen earlier, the AUD 500 million, or in FY26 it will be a higher number.
Sure. the NRR of 116-
Mm-hmm
... if you maintain that this year...
Yeah
Your PBT by definition has to be greater than 15%, does it not?
I think, there's some investments we'll make this year, Chris, with solution and service and things like that. Also I think, we will get back to margin growth, but it won't be 35% this year at all. If we go back to what it was pre the Scientia acquisition, we'll be close. We'll be close to moving past the 15%. 15% right now, that's our normal heartbeat. It's what we're comfortable with. It's how we're successful, we don't bugger up customers along the way. We'll put out more specific guidance, Chris, later on in the financial year.
Just last question, more of a clarification. You've said you're going to end the legacy licenses.
Yeah
...sooner than anticipated.
Yeah.
It sounds like you're ending them now. Like, should we still expect some amount in FY23 or is it gonna be negligible?
If there is something in FY23, it'll be so negligible, it won't swing the numbers one way or the other.
Okay.
Josh?
Josh Kannourakis, Barrenjoey. Guys, just a follow-up question on the Net Revenue Retention, obviously a very strong result in this period. Would you be able to give us a little bit more color of the makeup of the 16%, both in terms of CPI, SaaS flips, upsells? Maybe if we could sort of do the same...
Yeah
... for on the 15% on the go forward, because I imagine CPI won't be as big, so it'll be more and SaaS flips will be lower, so it'll be the organic profile on the go forward.
Do you want to answer the first part of the question, Paul?
Yeah. Stuart mentioned the composition in part. It did include-
Yeah
... 2%-3% from CPI, but that was offset largely by FX went against us for our GBP and New Zealand dollar ARR. I mean, we don't disclose obviously the amount of NRR from flips or from new product, but they were. You can basically back solve a lot of that yourself. We won't get into too much more detail. We've got real confidence in our ability to continue to sell more and more into our existing customer base. That's why we've got confidence in saying that the NRR will be maintained between 115%-120% over time.
Josh, when you do your back solve, you see that there was quite a lot of additional product and module sales this year.
Yeah, that's right. obviously the product growth was a lot higher-
Yeah
... I think, than what people were expecting.
Exactly. Yeah.
Okay. No, that's great. Just a final question just with regard to the UK, obviously some really good momentum.
Mm
in that business in the period. How should we be thinking about, you know, you've obviously scaling up investment, looking at Stuart with a grin on his face here. He's obviously pretty excited about the growth profile. Maybe just to give us a bit of a flavor for how we should think about over the medium term period the profile of the UK.
We're pretty excited about where the UK is and all the hard work everybody's put in over the years. I think the key message to take away is we don't need it to hit the numbers you're looking at.
Mm.
We're excited about it and we love the work that we've done, and we're poised for some really exciting stuff. It's not necessary to hit the 500 or the next stage of our growth as well. We, the phrase we use inside the company is, "We deserve to be there. Our team deserves to be there." We're excited about the work we've done, but we'll achieve fantastic results with the UK, but not needing the UK.
Any more questions from the room before we hand back to Ari? Ross?
Great. Thank you. Ross Barrows from Wilsons.
G'day, Ross.
Good morning, good afternoon. Almost afternoon. just two questions from me. One's, just to firstly say thanks for the increased disclosure. I think it's gonna.
Yeah
... us understand the business a bit better. Just looking at the products per customer, going from 4.3 to 6.2 over 10 years.
Yeah.
Looks like 6.2-8.9 over a similar period.
Yeah
nine years. It's great to have that indication of growth over a longer period. Sitting here today, what do you think the primary drivers of that will be? Do you feel like it feels like a somewhat of a conservative number given, I guess, the expansion-
Yeah
... in the, in the market that you have spoken about or alluded to today already.
Yeah. I might start and hand over to you. I think it's an interesting number because it tells you the products per customer, Ross. What it doesn't show you is that we create many, many more modules, and it doesn't give you that module penetration, which is quite significant in that ARR white space. Stuart, can I hand over to you to elaborate a bit more?
Again, if you get granular, we've got 16 products today, but over 400 modules, and each time we come out with a release, we're adding new modules as well. Our TAM increases with each release. While at the same time, we've let you in to understand when App Builder is coming out, when the DXPs are coming out.
Those are new products that are coming online. Even inside our LG DXP, there's multiple modules inside that. You're seeing massive growth of modules and products we can sell to the customer. There's a phrase that Ed used, which is, "Cloud is war." You can see that when customers are on the cloud, their ability to take up new products is just so much easier because of the frictionless experience of it.
Great. Thanks. Just a second question, not trying to get over our skis, I guess, in terms of the UK, you know, improving and going well. Would you consider other geographies now that you are starting to see that geography starting to get traction and looking ahead...
We laugh-
any color in that would be great.
We laugh about this, Ross, because pre-COVID, you know, we might have been a little bit more excited about the US, to be honest. To be really honest, we've come to the realization that there's so much runway in the UK that we should put our focus into that area and really double down for growth, which is what we're doing. We've spent all this time and effort and, you know, grit and hard work to get student management live.
As Stuart said, if you looked at just the 100 or so customers we acquired through the Scientia acquisition, just using timetabling and scheduling, if you just look at those alone, there's AUD 220 million of ARR white space of just selling student management into those customers.
We haven't brought all the products over yet, you know, products like property and rating in the UK, which will come over time, but there's just so much runway. For us, we sit here going, "That's where we'll put our focus before considering another region," Ross.
Okay.
Sari, there's no more questions from the room. Can we hand over to you for the webcast and phone, please?
Thank you. There are no questions on the webcast at the moment, Edward. We will now start with questions from the phone. Your first question comes from Nick Harris from Morgans. Please ask your question.
Thanks very much. Hey, congratulations on seeing that revenue growth, of 18%, which is obviously ahead of PBT growth for the first time, in quite a while. It's a great sign. I was just trying to get a bit of a feel, I guess, for what that might look... I know you're not providing guidance.
Mm.
Into FY 2023 with the CPI, kind of pass-throughs coming, is it possible that revenue growth holds above 15%, or is it just it'll kind of normalize a little bit just given how far the mix of SaaS versus traditional stuff?
It's probably too early for us to tell, Nick. We'll put out more specific guidance, you know, in our traditional way later on in the financial year. We have said that 15% is our target for that SaaS and continuing business, and we're comfortable with that target.
Thanks, Ed. Just a slightly random one, but obviously, interest rates, rising interest rates has been a problem for a lot of companies, exception of Technology One with AUD 170 million of net cash on balance sheet. I'm just wondering, you know, do you get a bit of a kicker? Obviously, cash rates go up. You know, do you have any kind of long-term hedges that would mean that your interest income doesn't sort of jump materially going forward?
No. No, no.
No
... as you know us, Nick, we're very conservative. We keep our cash in the bank. We put it on term deposit with very safe Australian banks. We don't have any hedging instruments in place for-
From an interest point of view, if, we keep it simple.
Yeah, 'cause you'll obviously get a free kind of kicker there that'll allow you to keep investing in the business.
Yeah. That's right.
Thank you.
Thanks, Nick. Any more questions from the floor? Did you have another one, Chris? Yeah. Let's come back to Chris Savage.
Thanks. Just the increase in R&D was, like, quite notable this year, up 20%.
Mm.
Historically, it's been more like high single digit.
Yep.
Are we gonna get back to that sort of 8% growth going forward, do you think?
I think, the way we look at it, Chris, is that we will deliver that profit margin growth first and foremost. That's our biggest goal. If we can extract synergies in, you know, sales and marketing, consulting, corporate services, then it allows us to invest for future growth in R&D. That's the approach we take. You see the bump in there this year basically for two main reasons. One is we acquired Scientia, so there's a bump there. The second is, as Stuart said, we went and locked in our key talent. We didn't add a lot of heads in R&D during the year, but we locked in our key talent with remuneration and long-term incentives.
Maybe a long way to answer your question is we'll maintain that profit growth, and if we can invest in R&D through getting synergies and others, we will.
Forgive the slightly negative question, but you did miss one of your guidance targets. You suggested the full year ROE would be 40%. Is there a reason perhaps that you fell below that mark?
Think it's just when you capitalize R&D and build your net asset position. It's as simple as that. Yeah.
It's slightly granular. Again, forgive me, but, you did a series of showcase events-
Yeah
...that you highlighted
Yeah
around year-end.
Yeah.
Did the costs for those showcase events fall in the FY 22 results or will it be in the 23?
There's a little bit in both.
Okay.
You won't see any big bumps as a result of that.
Okay.
Thanks, Chris. If there's no more questions from the floor here, Sari might hand over to you to end the conference call.
With there are no further questions at this time on the webcast or on the phone, I would now like to hand back to you. Please continue.
Thanks, Sari. I'd just like to once again thank the staff for all the hard work, and thank our shareholders for your continued loyalty. That ends the FY 22 full year results announcement. Thanks, everyone.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our conference for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.