Good morning, everyone. Thank you for your time this morning to listen in to our first half 2021 results briefing. We appreciate your interest and support on this very busy reporting day. Earlier this morning, we lodged with the ASX our Appendix 4D containing statutory accounts, our results release, and our investor presentation. Each of these documents are also available from our investor center at wisetechglobal.com. Joining me today is our Founder and CEO, Richard White, and our CFO, Andrew Cartledge. They'll both talk through the results highlights, financial and strategic performance, as well as the outlook for the full year. Following this, we'll be available for questions before wrapping up the webcast presentation. I'll now hand over to Richard. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our first half 2021 results briefing. Ahead of Andrew taking you through the financials, there are a few highlights I'd like to call out. I'm pleased to report that WiseTech delivered total revenue of AUD 238.7 million in the first half of FY 2021, representing a growth of 16% on the first half 2020. What is particularly pleasing about this growth is the strong performance of our flagship CargoWise offering, which delivered revenue of AUD 150 million, up 19% on the first half 2020.
Revenue from our strategic acquisitions was also up by 12% on the first half 2020 at AUD 88.7 million, driven predominantly by the full year impact of the five acquisitions we completed in FY 2020. Our EBITDA of AUD 89.2 million was up 43% on the first half of 2020, fueled by our robust CargoWise EBITDA margin of 54%.
Our underlying NPAT of AUD 43.6 million represents a growth of 61% on first half 2020. This strong financial performance reflects our top-line revenue growth as we continued our expansion of the CargoWise ecosystem and increased our market penetration. It also reflects our improving profitability, the result of our disciplined financial management, in particular, cost reductions through the extraction of acquisition synergies and organization-wide efficiencies. I am pleased to report that we are delivering a significant change in our operating leverage, which in turn is driving strong cash generation with our operating cash flow up 32% at AUD 92.1 million and our free cash flow up 74% at AUD 48.7 million.
We also made good strategic progress during the half, delivering 456 product enhancements and completing the product integration of our global rates functionality, as well as accelerating our native customs and cross-border compliance builds in Europe, Asia, and South America, and progressing the development and rollout of our e-commerce offering. As noted at our investor day late last year, we also deployed the beta version of CargoWise Neo to a select group of customers, which I will talk to a little later. Importantly, we are gaining momentum in global customer rollouts of CargoWise, with eight new sign-ups since the 1st of January 2020, a significant step up on our historical run rate. In recognition of the continued strength of WiseTech's business, the board has declared a fully franked interim dividend of AUD 0.027 per share. It goes without saying that the pandemic resulted in a challenging 12 months globally.
Looking specifically at the international logistics sector, whilst we saw volatility during the early stages of the pandemic, by mid-2020 signs of a recovery were evident, with momentum improving month on month, resulting in our first half 2021 shipping transaction numbers being up 19% on first half 2020 levels. Mobility restrictions introduced in response to COVID across all major markets resulted in consumer spending switching from services to physical goods, boosting demand for manufactured goods and increasing global trade volumes. Capacity constraints across all major global shipping routes in both air and sea and their related landside logistics have seen a solid increase in both volumes moved and value provided by major logistics customers. As a result, we are seeing acceleration in the long-term industry trends of consolidation and the replacement of legacy systems with global digital technology solutions.
From an industry consolidation perspective, you may have noted the recently announced proposed takeover of Kerry Logistics by SF Holding, the JAS acquisition of Tigers, and DSV's public comments about its increased appetite for M&A following its successful UTi and Panalpina acquisitions. Consolidation is usually driven by larger global logistics providers, and we are a beneficiary to the extent that our customers are the acquirers or our platform is in place in the acquired business and adopted by the acquiring party. The market buzz around other potential acquisitions shows an acceleration in appetite, size, and speed for consolidation among the top 200 global logistics providers that we regard as our delta target opportunity set. The replacement of legacy systems is also a very important trend for our business. We are seeing logistics providers often struggle with replacing legacy systems from within.
The drive for greater control and visibility, increased productivity, risk reduction, and remote working capability is evidenced by our recent contract wins and expanded CargoWise pipelines. With market penetration of globally integrated automated logistics solutions still in the early stages, our immediate goal is to leverage the increased demand for efficient, real-time digital solutions such as CargoWise by concentrating on our three P strategy: product, penetration, and profitability, and leveraging our most valuable asset, our people. I will talk shortly about the progress we are making in delivering on our long-term strategy, but I will now hand over to Andrew, who will take you through our financial performance.
Thank you, Richard, and good morning, everybody. Starting with an overview of our income statement. As Richard mentioned, total revenue grew by 16% in first half 2021 to AUD 238.7 million. This includes a AUD 3.6 million foreign exchange headwind for the first half of 2021 compared to a AUD 4.6 million foreign exchange benefit in the first half of 2020 versus first half 2019. Without the FX impact, total revenue grew 18%.
Our CargoWise offering continued to achieve strong growth, delivering first half 2021 revenue of AUD 150 million, up 19% on first half 2020. Excluding a AUD 1.4 million FX headwind, CargoWise revenue grew 20% on first half 2020. Revenue attributable to acquisitions was up 12% in first half 2021 at AUD 88.7 million, mainly driven by the full period impact of five FY 2020 acquisitions. Acquisition revenue included a AUD 2.3 million FX headwind in first half 2021. Gross profit for the year was up 20% on first half 2020, reflecting a 3 p ercentage point improvement in our gross profit margin this half to 85%, and our strong CargoWise gross profit margin of 94%, representing a 2 percentage point improvement on first half 2020. I'll pause here to note that our acquired businesses generally have lower gross profit margins than CargoWise.
This means they have a dilutive impact on our overall gross profit margin, which reflects their size and commercial license model, and typically leads to higher product and service support costs and lower leverage. I am, however, pleased to report that we've started to see an increase in acquisition gross profit margins as these businesses evolve to our more efficient commercial model, and as we integrate them with or convert them onto the CargoWise platform. EBITDA in first half 2021 was AUD 89.2 million, an increase of 43% on first half 2020. A strong performance that reflects continued revenue growth and the benefits of our organization-wide efficiency initiatives and the extraction of acquisition synergies. Richard will provide more color on these initiatives shortly. I would make the point that our first half 2021 EBITDA includes AUD 5.1 million of restructuring costs incurred as part of the implementation of these efficiencies.
EBITDA margin for the half of 37% was up 7 percentage points on first half 2020, supported by cost savings from actions taken in response to the pandemic, including a hiring freeze, postponement of pay reviews, and lower travel and trade show costs. It was particularly pleasing to see our CargoWise EBITDA margin increase 5 percentage points to 54%, driven by revenue growth from existing customers and reduced sales and marketing expenditure. Moving down the table, you can see that our depreciation and amortization charges increased by 36% due to increased R&D investment, including newly commercialized products such as global and investments in data centers, global expansion, and cybersecurity.
This brings us to our statutory net profit after tax for the half, which was down 26% on the prior corresponding period of AUD 44.4 million, reflecting the AUD 32.7 million fair value gain related to acquisition contingent consideration in first half 2020. Excluding fair value adjustments, our first half 2021 underlying NPAT increased by 61% to AUD 43.6 million, and earnings per share was up 58% at AUD 0.134 per share. This strong performance is a testament to the strength of our commercial business model, the operating leverage that we're achieving, and the appeal of the CargoWise customer value proposition. Moving on now to a more detailed look at the composition of our revenue growth during the half year. You can see on this slide that CargoWise generated AUD 23.5 million of revenue growth in 1H 2021.
Of this, AUD 17.5 million was attributable to existing CargoWise customers, reflecting increased usage through the addition of transactions, seats, and new sites, the utilization of additional products and modules, and growth from industry consolidation. AUD 6 million of CargoWise revenue growth was attributable to new customers, demonstrating the strong opportunity pipeline, in particular with larger global freight forwarders as they roll out on our platform. I'd make the point here that included in our 1H 2021 CargoWise revenue growth is the benefit of a AUD 5.7 million price increase, which was implemented across existing and new customers during the half to offset increased product investment in R&D, data center hardware, and cybersecurity. Revenue from acquisitions in 1H 2021 grew by AUD 9.4 million.
This was comprised of AUD 10.4 million of revenue growth from the five acquisitions completed in FY 2020, which was partially offset by an AUD 1.2 million reduction in revenue from acquisitions completed in FY 2019 and prior. The revenue contraction experienced by the older acquisitions was in part the result of delays in non-recurring services revenue due to COVID-19. I note that we completed a small foothold acquisition in Japan in 1H 2021, which delivered AUD 0.1 million in revenue. Turning now to our operating expenses. You can see on this slide three graphs charting our operating expenses by half since 1H 2019 across three areas: product design and development, sales and marketing, and general administration. Overall, our operating expenses as a percentage of revenue were down 4 percentage points, reflecting revenue growth and the benefit of our organization-wide efficiencies program.
In terms of product design and development expenses, you can see our continued commitment year-over-year in R&D to drive development of product features and enhancements. Our 1H 20 21 product design and development expenses increased by 17% compared to 1H 2020 and equated to 19% of revenue, reflecting our previously announced significant investment pre-pandemic, which is now part of WiseTech's cost structure. Our sales and marketing expenses were down from AUD 28.8 million in 1H 2020 to AUD 24.3 million in 1H 2021. This reflects a reduction in travel and trade show costs during the pandemic, and also a reduction in sales and marketing staff. Our general and administration costs increased from AUD 39.8 million in 1H 2020 to AUD 45.1 million in 1H 2021, representing 19% of revenue.
This increase was predominantly the result of the AUD 5.1 million in restructuring costs that I spoke about earlier, and increased corporate governance costs, including sharp rises in D&O insurance premiums. Excluding the AUD 5.1 million restructuring costs, G&A expense in 1H21 as a percentage of revenue was 17%, a 2 percentage point improvement on 1H20. Let's take a closer look at our R&D investment. Whilst our commercial model is designed to enable low maintenance, marketing, and sales cost, there is strong ongoing investment in product design and development. We are a technology company, and the asset we build is software. Our competitive positioning and growth are heavily reliant on our ability to continue to innovate and provide technology solutions for the pain points in the constantly evolving global logistics and supply chain sectors.
You can see on this slide that our R&D investment is high because it's the key driver of our long-term recurring revenue growth. In 1H 2021, 35% of our revenue was reinvested in R&D, which is at the top end of other SaaS peer investment levels. Our commercial model is based on the premise that by continuing to increase R&D investment, our operating leverage will deliver long-term recurring revenue growth. Over the past five years, we've invested AUD 500 million in R&D. In accordance with the requirements of the applicable Australian Accounting and International Financial Reporting Standards, we capitalize our investment in new internally developed software components. For example, our investment in R&D related to building out our global customs capability, international logistics, and international e-commerce capabilities are capitalized. As previously communicated, capitalized R&D accounts for between 40% and 50% of our total R&D investment each year.
The remainder, which relates to bug fixes, maintenance, and research, is expensed. In 1H 2021, we increased our R&D investment by 13%, from AUD 73.3 million in 1H 2020 to AUD 83 million. This investment enabled us to deliver 456 CargoWise product enhancements and to progress our longer lead development projects within the CargoWise ecosystem. You'll note that AUD 38.3 million or 46% of our R&D spend this half was capitalized, reflecting the acceleration of our global customs and compliance capability builds, including native customs builds in Asia, Europe, and South America. Turning now to our balance sheet strength. Our liquidity is strong, with AUD 251.4 million in cash, AUD 190 million undrawn debt facility, and an additional AUD 200 million accordion facility providing ample financial flexibility and headroom.
Our FX derivative fair values increased by AUD 7.5 million to AUD 12.1 million as of 31st December 2020, reflecting additional foreign exchange coverage on euro and US dollar revenue through to first half 2023 to protect against a strengthening Australian dollar. A AUD 2 million increase in our intangible assets to AUD 887 million relates to the sole acquisition undertaken in first half 2021 of EXA in Japan and the impact of capitalized development minus amortization and foreign exchange. In equity, you can see that our share capital increased by AUD 10.5 million between June and December 2020 as a result of new share capital issued primarily for acquisition consideration.
Before I hand back to Richard, I'd like to talk briefly about our highly cash generative operating model. You can see on this slide that our 1H 2021 operating cash flows were up 32% on 1H 2020 at AUD 92.1 million.
Over the past five years, from 2H 2016 to 1H 2021, our business has delivered AUD 530 million of operating cash flow as well as AUD 473 million of EBITDA, so we have a solid track record of cash generation. A significant portion of our 1H 2021 operating cash flows, AUD 48.1 million, was reinvested into long-term growth initiatives. This includes AUD 36.5 million invested in R&D to develop and expand technology that we can commercialize. AUD 6.9 million invested in building our global footprint, including data centers and IT infrastructure to enhance scalability, reliability, and security of the CargoWise platform and provide capacity for future growth. As well as AUD 5.5 million invested into new technology acquisitions and earn-out payments for prior year acquisitions.
Before I move on to our free cash flows, I would draw your attention to the changes in our working capital, which reflect the timing on deferred revenue and an increase in receivables related to revenue growth. I also note that the increase in non-cash items in EBITDA that you can see reflects greater usage of equity to improve employee retention. Our free cash flow performance this half was incredibly pleasing. At AUD 48.7 million, it was up 74% on first half 2020, and our free cash flow conversion of 55% was up 10 percentage points on the prior corresponding period. This excellent result was driven by the lower growth in capitalized development costs and a reduction in capital expenditure in areas such as office facilities. I'll now hand you back to Richard, who'll provide you with an update on our strategic progress and the outlook for the business.
Thank you, Andrew. You have heard me say many times that WiseTech's strategic vision is to build the operating system for global logistics that drives efficiencies and digital transformation. To achieve this, our strategy is centered around the 3 Ps: product, penetration, and profitability. With our investment designed to build high-value capabilities within WiseTech, and our strategic acquisitions enabling us to fast-track the extension of CargoWise functionalities and our geographical footprint. It is important to look at our strategic investments holistically rather than in isolation. They are interconnected and designed to drive improved product capability, greater market penetration, and sustained profit growth. Having completed 39 acquisitions since listing, we have now assembled extensive product development skills, local market knowledge, important customer and government relationships, and on-the-ground presence to fuel our CargoWise product expansion. As a result, are slowing future acquisition activity in order to focus on leveraging these assets.
Let's take a look now at the interplay of our strategic investments and how they are delivering growth. We are a product-led organization. You can see on this slide how the combination of our investments in R&D and strategic acquisitions come together to enable us to become the operating system for global logistics. Our product development capability is fundamental to our business. Our customers operate in a highly complex, rapidly changing, ultra-competitive environment. The key to our competitiveness is expanding our product capability faster, drawing away from regional and local competitors, and providing advantages to those potential customers on aging legacy systems. This is what enables us to retain existing customers and to attract new ones. There are five high-value product areas on the CargoWise platform that we are currently focused on.
These are global native customs, including cross-border and domestic compliance, global rates, international e-commerce logistics, landside logistics, and enterprise-wide capabilities such as tracking, automation, and productivity. Clearly, this is a broad spectrum, so we have established development priorities, which I will take you through. Let's start with our CargoWise global customs solution, including cross-border and domestic compliance, which is our number one product development priority. Our objective is to deliver one globally unified system that manages import and export customs procedures for countries covering approximately 90% of manufactured trade flows. Achieving this without the benefit of in-country expertise and relationships with government and customers in market is time-consuming, complex, risky, and expensive. Most foreign language jurisdictions would prove almost impossible. To accelerate and de-risk this process and avoid costly and unsuccessful customs developments, we have invested in strategic foothold acquisitions.
There are a number of key areas that our foothold acquisitions facilitate within a country. First and foremost, they provide knowledge of local import and export-related customs procedures, including many undocumented requirements, as well as reference customers and existing relationships with border agencies. Secondly, they deliver feet on the ground to build our capability in local tax compliance, electronic invoicing, accounting and reporting compliance, and the ability to interact with tax or revenue authorities in the time zone and language of that country. Thirdly, they provide a platform for building port integration with government and major port authorities, as well as local air cargo and other freight security capabilities such as container packing, known shipper, and verified gross mass compliance.
Last but not least, in non-English speaking countries, they provide localization of language for the CargoWise modules and documents that cannot be presented in English, such as customer notices, delivery instructions, invoicing, and tax documentation. Once these compliance requirements are delivered, we enter the commercialization phase. We typically start with 5-10 smaller early adopter customers who are incentivized to move from their legacy systems onto our natively built CargoWise customs and local compliance platform. We utilize these early adopters to stress-test CargoWise native components and government messaging interfaces by fixing gaps and removing bugs, and to build confidence and create reference sites for future larger customers. Another group of 5-10 somewhat larger customers are then onboarded whilst we simultaneously promote the commercialized system to major global customers already running CargoWise in that country.
During this phase, automated conversion tools are completed, making upgrade and customer conversions fast, reliable, and low cost. The next stage involves us delivering on our commitments to contracted large global customers in rollout who have been waiting for this country's native compliance release. It also enables other large global customers already rolled out to add the newly enabled country to their rollout plans. Successful go-lives of major customers in a new jurisdiction are marketed in various forums, including trade press, industry associations, trade shows, local media, and social platforms. The country is also added to our global capability matrix and made automatically available to existing and new customers. In terms of acquired local customers adopting CargoWise, we think of this in three stages. First up are the early adopters looking for commercial advantage through the productivity of CargoWise.
Next are mid-to-term adopters who wait for the successful use of CargoWise by early adopters. The last conversions are the late adopters who wait until a technical licensing or government program change occurs before converting. Once a substantial change to the local customer requirement occurs, we offer remaining acquired customers an easy data conversion and implementation path to the native CargoWise solution. One point to note, however, is that we don't expect all acquired local customers to convert to CargoWise. We gain substantially more in both revenue and reputation from global customers and larger local customers who adopt CargoWise than from a large number of smaller acquired customers. On this slide, you can see how we're tracking and what we have in our development pipeline.
As at 31st December 2020, the CargoWise customs functionality was live and well established in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the U.S., the U.K., South Africa, Canada, China, and Taiwan. In the second half of FY 2021, we are working towards CargoWise's customs functionality being delivered in France, Italy, and Spain. With development work continuing on further countries in FY 2022, FY 2023, and beyond. It is worth noting that our software developments for Germany is production-ready. However, the German authorities have deferred all new certifications until November due to COVID and other local issues. Our second development priority is the CargoWise Global Rates functionality. We are building a native global rate solution that includes and enhances the capabilities of CargoSphere and the CargoGuide, streamlines the booking to payment process, and provides a multimodal rates and contract management engine with a live spot rates capability.
As a transitional measure, we have released the integration of CargoSphere and CargoGuide rate functionality into CargoWise and are piloting these features with customers. Our current global rates solution provides real-time automated rates with direct electronic feeds with major air and ocean carriers, auto-costing and auto-rating, which allows instant search and applies buy/sell rates to shipments without user data entry, customizable pricing rules to calculate profit margins and build accurate quotes, integration with the native CargoWise rates engine, and therefore all logistics modules ensuring accurate and timely cost and sell rates that feed customer invoicing and carrier settlement.
In terms of next steps, we are currently redeploying the CargoGuide and CargoSphere product teams to focus on enhancing the CargoWise native Global Rates Engine with our immediate priority being the development of spot rates and instant bookings with ocean and air carriers, block space agreements and allocation management with ocean and air carriers, and guided carrier selection processes and job profit simulation. Our third product development priority is to further build out our e-commerce solution as a single platform for the international e-commerce fulfillment market. We launched our e-commerce offering in the first half of the 2020 financial year in Australia, followed by expansion in New Zealand with customers live and in production. In the first half 2021, we expanded our e-commerce capability in the U.S. for ocean and road consignments, and I'm pleased to report that the U.S. is showing a strong sales pipeline.
We have completed the product integration of Pierbridge and SmartFreight into our e-commerce solution. Our current e-commerce offering is compliant with customs declaration rules in Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S., and provides automated orders, consignment, and shipping manifests, including importer security filings and advanced manifest screening for the U.S., as well as bulk processing and customs submission. The system manages the small number of customs holds and formal procedures by exception, efficiently handling the huge volumes found in major import markets like the U.S. Going forward, our focus will be on further development in the area of bulk shipping integration, e-commerce customs procedures, including U.S. air advanced manifest filing, final mile delivery, full track and trace, and portals for shippers, origin depots, and e-commerce parcel recipients. Our longer-term development pipeline involves building out our CargoWise Neo platform.
You will recall that at our recent investor day, we explained that Neo is a web application that provides a global integrated platform enabling beneficial cargo owners such as large manufacturers, importers, and exporters, to link directly with their logistics providers to manage their freight. This allows our existing CargoWise customers, such as freight forwarders and 3PLs, to better serve their customers. To date, our CargoWise offering has catered principally to the needs of 3PLs, who are focused on consolidating and moving goods internationally by road, rail, air, and sea as a full-service offering. These 3PLs operate in the supply chain execution market, which Gartner valued at approximately $4.7 billion in 2019. Neo has the potential to expand our total addressable market to the broader supply chain management segment, which Gartner valued in 2019 at approximately $15.2 billion.
The development of Neo will progress over a number of years. It is still in its very early stages, and it will take time before it delivers significant revenue. However, it is creating a stronger value proposition for existing and potential CargoWise customers. Of strategic note in the first half 2021 was our deployment of the beta version of Neo via a select group of CargoWise customers. We are also working with two existing CargoWise customers, a major retailer and a major global forwarder, to develop Neo extensions. These early adopters are testing the deployment and functionality of Neo, and we are using their feedback to enhance and further develop the platform. I'd like to spend some time now on the opportunity that is available to us. With penetration of fully digital and highly automated global logistics solutions still in its early stages, we have considerable scope for growth.
As I've explained in our full year 2020 results, our approach to market penetration is to target the top 25 freight forwarders and the top 200 global logistics providers. You can see on this slide a graph that tracks the progress we have made since 2006 in securing global customers. We have grown our global customer base in two ways, through global rollout signings and by existing customers not on rollout agreements growing organically on the CargoWise platform and adding new geographies and users as they go. What is of note is that over the past five years, and in particular over the past 12 months, we have experienced significant momentum in new large global contracted rollouts and organic rollouts of the CargoWise platform by existing customers.
As I mentioned earlier, since the 1st of January 2020, we have signed eight new global rollout contracts with Aramex, A. hartrodt, cargo-partner, CEVA Logistics, Dachser, Hellmann, Hankyu Hanshin Express, and Seafrigo Group. These signings are in addition to the existing global rollouts for 26 global customers that we have in place, which includes the world's largest logistics organizations such as DHL Global Forwarding, DSV Panalpina, and Bolloré. Currently, 11 of the top 25 global freight forwarders have either rolled out or are currently in the process of global rollouts on the CargoWise platform.
New large customers can take multiple years to roll out CargoWise across their global business. As the rollout progresses, however, customers add new countries, adopt new modules, implement our productivity tools. This is evident with our large logistics customers, DHL Global Forwarding and DSV Panalpina, both expanding their global rollouts on CargoWise. In the past, when we talked about global rollouts, it was largely driven by our powerful freight forwarding product capability.
Now, however, CargoWise also includes an increasing number of native customs modules, border and country compliance technical libraries, global rates, and e-commerce functionalities. There is a significant runway of new customers available in both the top 25 freight forwarders and the top 200 global logistics providers, which we are actively pursuing by continuing to develop and grow our channel partners, creating a significant footprint across 47 countries. Our partners are focused on referring, promoting, and supporting our market expansion activities. Last but not least, our third P relates to profitability, and I'm pleased to report that in the first half of FY 2021, we commenced work on an organization-wide efficiency program that includes reducing costs, delivering greater operational synergies from our acquired businesses, and streamlining our own processes to enhance our operating leverage.
This program of work is designed to deliver a AUD 10 million benefit in FY 2021 after the impact of restructuring costs and a cost reduction run rate for FY 2022 of AUD 20 million-AUD 30 million. In the first half of FY 2021, we delivered AUD 6.1 million in gross cost reductions, equating to a net benefit of AUD 1 million after the AUD 5.1 million in restructuring costs.
Efficiency initiatives implemented to date include a gross reduction of 269 employees and contractors relating predominantly to sales, marketing, technical, and other staff in acquired teams. Office lease space and data center consolidation and streamlining support functions. This brings us to the integral factor that brings our three Ps together and is the critical component of delivering on our strategy, our people. I spoke earlier of the importance of having the right team of technology and industry experts in our core business and across geographic markets.
This is a competitive advantage that can differentiate us from our peers. We have been building our product development teams over many years through investments in recruitment and via strategic acquisitions. You can see on this slide that over the past two years, we have added 250 product and development experts in our teams in net terms. This equates to a 32% increase in P&D talent and reflects significant investment pre-COVID to accelerate long-term revenue growth. In the second half of FY 2020, during the first peak of the pandemic, we temporarily slowed down our recruitment, but I'm pleased to report that we recommenced our product development recruitment in the first half of FY 2021.
I'm also pleased to report that we are continuing to realign our teams with the formal transfer of acquisition product and development talent into CargoWise teams focused on the product development priorities that I have just spoken about. Bringing this all together, as I mentioned earlier, it is important to look at our strategic investments holistically rather than piecemeal, as they complement each other and drive a bigger picture return on investment. If you look at our strategic investments since listing on the ASX in 2016, you can see that they have enabled us to deliver shareholder value in terms of significant product development, greater market penetration, and revenue and profit growth. From a product perspective, we have delivered over 4,000 CargoWise product enhancements.
We have expanded our CargoWise offerings into global native customs and local compliance, global rates, and international e-commerce, as well as developing and commencing the beta launch of Neo. From a penetration perspective, we have more than doubled our global customer numbers and achieved 54% growth in the number of CargoWise registered users from the first half of 2017 to the first half of FY 2021. We have also expanded CargoWise's geographic footprint from 136 countries to 167 countries.
In terms of profitability, we have delivered 207% growth in CargoWise revenue from AUD 85.8 million in FY 2016 to AUD 263 million in FY 2020 and improved CargoWise's EBITDA margins from 30% in FY 2016 to 54% in the first half of FY 2021. We have a strong track record of delivering on our strategic commitments and are focused on continuing this, which brings us to management priorities for FY 2021.
In order to continue to extend our product lead, we will focus our resources on the geographic expansion of CargoWise Native Customs and cross-border compliance to include France, Italy, and Spain, as well as progressing the global rates functionality within the CargoWise platform and expanding our e-commerce offering. We will also be progressing the development and early implementation of Neo, including accelerating and integrating direct data connections with major carriers for air, sea, rail, and road, and driving automation accuracy and visibility within CargoWise whilst removing the manual data entry that has characterized the industry. From a penetration perspective, our marketing activities are focused on CargoWise, in particular, delivering on recently signed global rollouts, broadening large customers' usage of CargoWise capabilities, winning new large global customers, and helping our large and mid-tier global customers better perform their core mission.
We will continue to target the top 25 freight forwarders and the top 200 global logistics providers by enhancing our delta team through the addition of further focused programs, sales talent, product expansion, and marketing support. In order to drive profitability, we will continue to improve our organization-wide efficiency, including extracting further acquisition synergies and core business performance. These initiatives include automating high volume, manual customer-facing and internal functions via self-service portals and establishing a regional center in Hamburg post-Brexit as our EU headquarters. We will also continue to progress the construction of a global network operations and development center in Bangalore, and importantly, we will continue to align all geographical product teams with existing key development resources in our Sydney headquarters. Turning now to our financial outlook for the year.
We announced today that we are increasing the FY 2021 EBITDA guidance we provided to market at our FY 2020 results and reaffirmed at our AGM in November. This increase reflects the benefits we expect from operational leverage as we continue to extract acquisition synergies and implement our organization-wide efficiency initiatives. You will see in today's presentation a set of underlying assumptions upon which we have based our FY 2021 guidance.
Assuming no material changes to these assumptions and no unforeseen events, we reaffirm our expectation that our FY 2021 revenue will be between AUD 470 million and AUD 510 million, representing a growth of 9%-19%. We expect our FY 2021 EBITDA to be in the range of AUD 165 million to AUD 190 million, an AUD 10 million increase on both the top and bottom end of our previously disclosed range of AUD 155 million to AUD 180 million, representing a growth of 30%-50%.
In order to wrap up today, I would reiterate the comments I made earlier, that the pandemic has provided the impetus for an acceleration in the longer-term structural shift towards consolidation, integration, and digitization of global logistics and supply chains. We are seeing increasing demand amongst large global logistics service providers for our CargoWise offering. With the momentum in CargoWise global rollouts accelerating. Our CargoWise revenue growth is a testament to our unique customer value proposition. Our strong EBITDA and underlying NPAT growth demonstrates the strength of our business model. Our strategic focus on the 3 Ps is gaining traction and delivering tangible benefits. We are ideally positioned for continued growth and market penetration. With our healthy balance sheet, robust cash flows, and ample liquidity providing significant financial firepower to fund our future growth.
Importantly, we have a product pipeline and R&D program that will ensure we have a competitive edge. We have significant market penetration and long-term upside opportunities from recent large global contract signings. This will enable us to improve margins and profitability as we continue to focus on delivering revenue and earnings growth for shareholders. Now, let's open for questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Lucy Huang with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Richard and Andrew. Thanks for taking questions. I have three. Firstly, I'm just very interested in the customs clearance rollout. It looks like you have several geographies that are now live in CargoWise. I'm just wondering what the take-up more recently has been like from your customers and whether it's starting to contribute to revenues coming out of the CargoWise platform. Then just secondly, with the guidance upgrade, just wondering what rate of R&D capitalization you're using implied within that guidance. Then thirdly, just how should we think about sales and marketing intensity moving forward? It stepped down quite a bit this half, but with travel potentially coming back, should we expect to see those costs tick up over time? Thanks.
Look, I'll just have Andrew do the financial stuff, and then I'll give you a technical, strategic view of the customs piece.
Yeah, Lucy. From a cap dev perspective, you would've seen that our cap dev as a percentage of revenue reduced to 16% in the first half, down from 17% in the first half last year. We're assuming that to continue into the second half of this year. With sales and marketing, it's dropped down to 10% of revenue. That's a pretty good rate to use for the second half of the year. As you said, we might see it pick up a little bit, we don't actually anticipate that we'll see a lot of travel pickup in the second half, nor a pickup in trade shows and exhibitions. Richard.
Look, to understand how these four product priorities feed our revenue, it's very important to understand that these are interconnected pieces. Any customer of ours that has rolled out in a country, the forwarding system and the core platform, is highly attractive once we release the customs product. You would've heard today from my talk that it's not just the customs clearance or the customs procedures that we release in that country. We do the tax compliance, the electronic invoicing, all of the supply chain security documents, and all of the localizations required for ports and for language. We make the product as a whole much more attractive, particularly in foreign language jurisdictions where there are high costs and risks of compliance. We don't specifically split out the customs revenue versus the total revenue.
I can assure you that the way that our customers perceive both those foothold acquisitions and the development of the customs product, which is substantial now. You can see that it's running quite fast. They perceive that as an extremely valuable improvement to business efficiency and to risk reduction and manageability of their businesses.
Wonderful. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Quinn Pierson with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for your time. I guess firstly, on the revenue guidance, you've reiterated that for FY 2021. I guess if you could talk us through relative to when you set that in August. If, I guess, revenue and sales are tracking above or below your internal expectations back when you set that. Kind of noting that there was an FX headwind. I guess if you could give us any direction in terms of if we should be thinking more towards the higher or lower end of that range, that would be helpful as a first question. Thank you.
Yeah, Quinn. I think we're seeing everything track broadly in line with where we anticipated to be. CargoWise revenue increased 19% in the first half versus the same period last year. As we indicated in the initial guidance that we gave, we expected somewhere between 15%-30% market share growth, which is what we've included in the full year guidance here. As you said, we've seen a slight change in the FX with AUD 20 million of headwind earlier in the year. Obviously, the Aussie has appreciated a little bit. We've updated that to AUD 25 million now.
Understood. Thanks. Secondly.
I think we're in line with our prior expectations in terms of where volumes are landing for the full year.
Understood. Thanks. Secondly and lastly, I guess back to customs. It was a helpful answer just a moment ago, but I guess over the next couple years, particularly as we now have line of sight on the majority of global trade volumes being able to be covered by your customs offer, how do we think about the, I guess, the monetization and benefits to CargoWise? Is it somewhat linear as new locations and new trade flows are covered? Does this at some point create some sort of step change from a share ability or monetization ability once, call it, the vast majority of trade flows are covered? I guess the slope of benefits in the coming years would be appreciated. Thanks.
I think what you're really implying in that question is this often discussed idea of a tipping point. I just want to give a bit of color around the customs strategy and I'll talk about tipping points and how we might discover them and leverage them. This customs strategy is very mature. We have got solid understanding of what happens within borders of countries in our home market and in the U.S. and in New Zealand, where we've got relatively good dominance or at least substantial market share. It is quite important that it builds a fundamental value set that makes the entire product suite very valuable to acquire.
Because if you ask our customers, their single biggest pain point, almost to a person, is the customs complexity, the risk on that compliance piece, because there are fines, penalties and sanctions that occur, and all of the manageability of that and the difficulties that are accrued if you don't have an integrated system. When this product goes live in any country, as it has in all the countries you can see in the live part of the deck, it is completely coupled and integrated in a data set sense with all of the other product components. That makes it very easy to use, very easy to implement and extremely efficient. Now, we're not going to rest on that laurel. We are going to be building into the customs product, not just those six capabilities, but as much efficiency and automation as we can.
We talked in previous years about machine learning. That is a significant part of what we're building into the customs piece. We've talked about BorderWise and the technical libraries and the research tools that help you reduce risk and correctly comply. That, of course, is part of the customs piece. This is a very big project. It's quite substantial and we've done quite a lot, but there is much more to do in terms of particularly the foreign language jurisdictions, which is where the rest of the world is really covering volume. You can see that we've done almost all of the English-speaking world. You can see that we're aiming now at the big economies, France, Spain, Italy, Germany. Germany is actually finished, but the problem with Germany is that the government there has deferred the certification of software until after the pandemic has abated some more.
That key issue is we're following the money, we're following the volume, we're following the value, but we're not just implementing a customs system. This is an integrated part of a fundamentally holistic system that we can add a lot of value to that is not just the customs procedure, but all of the things that you have to do around that. The research capabilities, the automation of the classification, the collection of the data that comes in being much more electronic rather than paper-based or key. There's a lot to do. I would say to you that the focus on customs and all the ancillary things that go with it, all those six pieces of compliance, is a very substantial part of our total development. It is certainly the number one priority. Number two is the Global Rates Engine. That's very critical.
Number three is the international commerce. Number four, because it feeds off the other ones, is Neo. Just to add some dimension to that, because I'm sure someone's going to ask a question about Neo, so I'll get ahead of it. Neo is in beta. It is with a number of customers, and we are working with a number of people, including a large retailer and a large global forwarder, on how Neo will service their needs. It's very encouraging feedback. Neo needs the global customs capability to be a first-rank product. Neo needs the Global Rates Engine to be a first-rank product. It needs the ability to track the parcel right to the door of the customer. Everything we're doing in CargoWise One really applies to CargoWise Neo as well.
Whilst people talk about Neo and think about it as a separate product, and it is, and it stands in a different marketplace, and it has a different addressable market, it is fundamentally linked to the functional underpinnings of CargoWise One. That's why we've started to call everything CargoWise, because there is one underlying capability set that is architected to be usable in both environments.
That's helpful color. I appreciate your background.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Richard for closing remarks.
Well, thank you, everybody. I hope we gave you some color. I'm sure we'll be meeting some of you and doing the rounds digitally these days. I'd like to thank everybody for the time that you've spent listening to us, and I hope we've given you that additional color that makes things a bit more real for you. Thank you everybody for attending, and we'll see you in the market.