Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our FY 2021 financial year results briefing. To kick off our presentation today, there are a few financial and strategic highlights I'd like to cover before handing over to Andrew, who will take you through the financials in more detail. We announced today that we delivered FY 2021 total revenue of $ 507.5 million, representing an 18% increase on FY 2020, at the top of our guidance. Excluding FX impacts, total revenue was up 24%, with 90% recurring revenue, providing us a stable and predictable long-term revenue stream. Importantly, in FY 2021, our CargoWise revenue grew by 31%, excluding FX movements. Strategically, this growth is significant. First and foremost, it is indicative of the growing revenue contribution that our large global freight forwarder rollouts deliver, which will accelerate over time as rollouts progress and as we secure new global customers.
Secondly, it is indicative of the fact that as we have expanded the CargoWise ecosystem, adding new capabilities, modules and geographies, our existing customers have increased their usage and we have secured new customer wins. The remainder of our revenue growth was generated by our acquired businesses, which delivered 12% revenue growth excluding FX movements. This brings us to EBITDA, which was up 63% in FY 2021 at $ 206.7 million, exceeding our guidance and evidencing the step change in operating leverage we are achieving through top-line revenue growth and increased efficiencies. We are implementing organization-wide efficiencies and extracting synergies from our acquired businesses, and I'm pleased to report that in FY 2021, we delivered $ 13.8 million of net cost reduction, exceeding our $10 million target.
Our underlying NPAT for the year was up 101% on FY 2020 at $ 105.8 million, and our free cash flow of $ 139.2 million was up 149% on the prior year, a testament to our high-quality earnings. In recognition of the continued strength of WiseTech's business, the Board has declared a fully franked final dividend of $ 0.0385 per share, up 141% on FY 2020, taking our total dividend for the year to $ 0.0655 per share, representing a payout ratio of 20% of underlying NPAT. Our performance in FY 2021 should be looked at in the context of the broader market conditions we are operating in. As noted in our first half results, consumer demand is shifting from services to goods as a result of COVID restrictions and various country-specific fiscal stimulus packages.
Whilst this has boosted demand for global trade during the year, there have also been disruptions, including reduced air freight belly hold capacity as a result of COVID passenger restrictions, limited sea freight capacity, port access, and container availability challenges. This has resulted in constrained capacity and congestion across both sea and air freight, driving higher freight rates. These higher rates do not translate into immediate revenue growth for WiseTech. However, we are benefiting from the acceleration in longer-term structural changes that these conditions create. Constrained capacity and congestion mean that logistics providers are investing in fast-tracking their digital transformation by replacing in-house legacy systems with integrated global software that deliver efficiency, enhanced productivity, transparency and visibility, mitigate risk, and facilitate planning and control of their global operations. Exactly what CargoWise delivers.
These conditions are also driving an increased consolidation within the sector, which you can see with the recently announced acquisition of J.F. Hillebrand by DHL and Greencarrier by JAS, as well as DSV's public announced interest in acquiring DB Schenker. Typically, consolidation is driven by the larger global logistics providers, and we benefit to the extent that our customers are the acquirers or our platform is in place in the acquired business and adopted by the acquirer. 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 target customers, which is a good entrée into our strategic highlights for the year. Our strategy is designed to leverage the opportunity that current market conditions and structural change provide.
We're a product-led business and have reached an inflection point in our growth trajectory, which you can see in our financial performance. Our focus on the top 25 global freight forwarders and top 200 global logistics providers is gaining traction. I'm proud to report that we recently signed FedEx for a global rollout on CargoWise, which is in addition to the six global rollouts we secured in FY 2021, and the existing 30 global rollouts by large freight forwarders already in place. Importantly, we have a strong pipeline of potential new global customers, which we are actively pursuing, a number of which are likely to be near-term wins. Later, I will spend time talking about the strategic importance of these global customer rollouts, not only in terms of market penetration, but also from a future revenue growth perspective.
If there is one thing you take away from our results announcement today, it should be the significance for our business of this ramp-up in global customer wins. Our ability to secure new global customers is driven by the appeal of our CargoWise offering and our ongoing product development and enhancement. In FY 2021, we expanded our CargoWise native customs functionality to cover approximately 45% of global manufactured trade flows, up from 35% in FY 2020. We also completed the product integration of global rates functionalities secured by our CargoSphere and CargoGuide acquisitions. These are now in production with major customers, and we have commenced the rewrite of this functionality into CargoWise as a native module.
Also of strategic note in FY 2021 was the addition of sea freight to our e-commerce capabilities. The addition of 1,096 new CargoWise product features and enhancements, and the deployment of the beta version of Neo to a select group of customers. Our product development and increasing market penetration drive our top-line revenue growth. Which, coupled with the delivery of our organization-wide efficiencies and acquisition synergies, enable us to achieve a step change in operating leverage, enhancing our profitability, not just in FY 2021, but also setting us up to deliver ongoing attractive returns for shareholders in the years ahead. I will now hand over to Andrew, who will take you through our financial performance before reverting back to me to talk in greater detail about our strategic progress and outlook
Thank you, Richard, and good morning, everybody. Starting with an overview of our income statement. As Richard noted, our FY 2021 total revenue was $507.5 million, representing growth of 18% on FY 2020, including $23.4 million of foreign exchange headwind in the year, versus a $12.1 million foreign exchange benefit in FY 2020. Excluding the FX impacts, FY 2021 total revenue increased by $101.4 million, representing 24% growth. Our CargoWise revenue continued its strong growth, delivering FY 2021 revenue of $331.6 million, up 31% on FY 2020. Excluding FX impacts and up 26% if you include FX movements. Revenue from acquisitions of $175.9 million was up 12% in FY 2021 ex FX, and up 6% including FX, mainly driven by the full year impact of the 5 acquisitions completed in FY 2020. Gross profit for the year were up 22% on FY 2020, reflecting a 3 percentage point improvement in our gross profit margin in FY 2021 to 85%.
I'll pause here to make the point that our acquired businesses generally have lower gross profit margins than CargoWise, reflecting their size and commercial license models, which typically lead to higher products and service support costs and lower leverage, resulting in a dilutive impact on our overall gross profit margin. EBITDA in FY 2021 was $206.7 million, up 63% on FY 2020. A strong performance, exceeding guidance and reflecting our continued revenue growth and the cost reduction benefits of our organization-wide efficiency and acquisition synergies program. This program delivered a net cost reduction of $13.8 million for the year, well ahead of our $10 million target. Richard will provide more color on our efficiency program shortly. I'd make the point that our FY 2021 EBITDA includes $8.2 million of restructuring costs incurred as part of the implementation of this program, and $10.6 million of FX headwind.
EBITDA margin for the year of 41% was up 11 percentage points on FY 2020. It was particularly pleasing to see our CargoWise EBITDA margin increase by 7 percentage points to 55%, driven by revenue growth and cost reductions, including reduced travel, entertainment, and trade show costs in response to the prevailing COVID pandemic business conditions. Moving down the table, you can see that our EBIT was up 86%, reflecting our strong operating performance. Our depreciation and amortization charges increased by 23%, driven by our continued investment in R&D to propel future growth, including investment in commercialized products, as well as our investment in data centers.
This brings us to our statutory net profit after tax for the year, which was down 33% on FY 2020 at $108.1 million, reflecting a lower fair value gain in FY 2021 compared to settlements of acquisition earn-outs in FY 2020, and the corresponding fair value adjustments made to contingent consideration. Excluding these earn-out adjustments, our FY 2021 underlying NPAT increased by 101% to $105.8 million. Underlying earnings per share increased by 99% to $ 0.326 per share. In looking at our total revenue growth, it's important to distinguish between recurring and non-recurring revenue. As you know, recurring revenue is the backbone of SaaS and subscription-based companies such as WiseTech. It's indicative of customers using our product on a consistent basis, giving us the ability to project future revenue more accurately. Non-recurring revenue, on the other hand, grows less quickly and can include one-off license revenue.
You can see on this slide that if you exclude the $23.4 million FX headwinds, we delivered $101.4 million of total revenue growth. Of this, $97.3 million was recurring revenue growth, representing 25% growth on the $382 million of recurring revenue we generated in FY 2020. If we dive deeper into the recurring revenue composition, you will see that 97% of our CargoWise revenue was recurring in line with FY 2020 levels. Our non-recurring revenue contributed $4.2 million to total revenue growth in FY 2021. This represents 9% growth on the $47.4 million of non-recurring revenue we reported in FY 2020. Our non-recurring revenue growth in FY 2021 was comprised of non-recurring revenue generated by our acquisition businesses, primarily driven by our five acquisitions in FY 2020 and contraction in our FY 2019 and prior acquisitions as expected. Let's now take a closer look at our CargoWise and acquisitions revenue growth for the year.
You can see on this slide that CargoWise revenue generated $68.6 million, with the $78.1 million total revenue growth we achieved in FY 2021. Of this revenue growth, $52.2 million was attributable to existing CargoWise customers, up from $31 million in FY 2020, reflecting increased usage through the addition of transactions, seats, and new sites, the utilization of additional products and modules, and growth from industry consolidation. Importantly, all existing CargoWise customer cohorts from FY 2006 and prior through to FY 2021 delivered revenue growth and CargoWise customer attrition continued to be extremely low at less than 1%, in line with our track records and starting to measure this metric nine years ago.
Demonstrating the stickiness of our CargoWise customers. $16.4 million of CargoWise revenue growth in FY 2021 was attributable to new customers and is indicative of the strong opportunity pipeline we have, in particular with larger global freight forwarders as they roll out on our platform. Included in our FY 2021 CargoWise revenue growth is the benefit of a $22 million price change implemented in the first half of the year across existing and new customers to offset increased investment in product R&D, data center hardware, and cybersecurity. Revenue from acquisitions grew by 6% in FY 2021. This was comprised of $10.5 million of revenue growth from the five acquisitions completed in FY 2020, and $400,000 of revenue from our small foothold acquisition in Japan completed in FY 2021. Our acquisition revenue growth was partially offset by a $1.4 million reduction in revenue from acquisitions completed in FY 2019 and prior years, as expected.
I'd like to pause here and talk a little bit about revenue growth drivers and how you should think of our CargoWise revenue growth trajectory going forward. On a constant currency basis over the past five years, our CargoWise recurring revenue has almost quadrupled from $84.5 million in FY 2016 to $321.9 million in FY 2021, equating to a 31% compound annual growth rate over the five years. On this slide, to help illustrate the relative contribution to our CargoWise recurring revenue growth from each of our revenue drivers, we split out the relative contribution to growth based on the averages over a five-year period, recognizing that the contribution to growth of each of these may vary year -on -year.
The biggest driver of CargoWise recurring revenue over the past five years has been large global freight forwarder rollouts, which have contributed to over 1/3 of our revenue growth, or 12 percentage points to the 31% CAGR. This is why, as Richard mentioned, the six new global rollouts secured in FY 2021 and the signing of FedEx post 30th of June are significant when you think about our future revenue growth pipeline. These large customers take multiple years to roll out the CargoWise platform across their sites globally. This means their usage and transaction revenues continue to grow over time. Richard will talk in more detail shortly about the revenue contribution of these large rollouts and how you should think about the year-on-year accretion in revenue that they deliver.
The next biggest contributor to CargoWise revenue growth over the past five years has been new customer wins across the FY 2017 to FY 2021 cohorts, which contributed 6 percentage points of growth. Next are over 4,300 new product features and enhancements reflected in price, which contributed 4 percentage points to our growth. Increased usage by existing customers contributed 3 percentage points to growth, with major new product launches and underlying supply chain market growth each contributing 3 percentage points to growth. What's important to note is that of the 31% CargoWise compound annual growth rate, 28 percentage points of this growth relate to WiseTech specific factors, primarily our increased market penetration and the appeal of the CargoWise customer value proposition, enabling us to significantly outpace the overall market growth.
As I mentioned earlier, our CargoWise non-recurring revenue growth over the past five years has been driven by customer paid product enhancements, which in themselves are important future growth enablers. Looking ahead, we anticipate our future CargoWise recurring revenue growth will reflect our historical experience, driven primarily by the acceleration of large global freight forwarder rollouts and further new contract wins, as well as the launch and expansion of new products such as customs and rates and longer-term new product developments such as Neo. We also remain open to strategically significant acquisition opportunities, although in the near term, we have slowed our acquisition activity to focus on expanding the CargoWise ecosystem and driving scale and operating leverage through the extraction of synergies from existing acquisitions. Going forward, we intend to provide updates on the relative contribution to our revenue growth drivers at our full year results each year.
This brings us to our operating expenses. You can see on this slide three graphs charting our operating expenses year -on -year since FY 2017 across three areas, product design and development, sales and marketing, and general and administration expenses. Overall, our operating expenses as a percentage of revenue were down nine percentage points, reflecting leverage from revenue growth and the benefits of cost reductions across the business as part of our organizational wide efficiencies program. In terms of product design and development expenses, you can see our continued commitment year -on -year in R&D to drive innovation and the development of new CargoWise product features and enhancements. Our FY 2021 product design and development expense increased by $3.9 million -$ 88.8 million for the year, compared to $84.9 million in FY 2020.
This represents an increase of approximately 5% on FY 2020, but equates to a decline in terms of percentage of revenue from 20% in FY 2020 to 17% in FY 2021, a good outcome reflecting our revenue growth and cost reductions for the year. To provide some context on product design and development expense, approximately 55% of this expense is related to supporting the maintenance of acquired legacy products. There is opportunity for us to continue to reduce this cost as we transition the IP from these legacy products onto our efficient CargoWise platform. Our sales and marketing expenses were down four percentage points as a percentage of revenue from 13%, or $57 million in FY 2020, to 9%, or $45 million in FY 2021.
This reflects cost reductions in sales and marketing headcount across our acquired businesses and a deliberate, more targeted sales and marketing focus on the top 25 global freight forwarders and the top 200 global logistics providers, as well as a reduction in travel and trade show costs due to COVID. Importantly, our success in growing our new customer revenue and securing additional large global rollouts in FY 2021 demonstrates the effectiveness of our targeted sales and marketing focus. Our general and administration costs increased from $84.1 million in FY 2020 to $89.1 million in FY 2021. This increase was predominantly the result of the $8.2 million in restructuring costs as part of our organization-wide efficiency program that I spoke about earlier. Excluding the $8.2 million restructuring costs, G&A expense in FY 2021 as a percentage of revenue was 16%, a four percentage point improvement on FY 2020. Let's take a closer look at our R&D investment.
You've heard us say on many occasions that we are a product-led technology company, and the asset we build is software. Our commercial model is designed to support streamlined, low-maintenance marketing and sales costs with strong ongoing investment in product design and development that continues to enhance our competitive positioning and growth by developing technology solutions for pain points in the constantly evolving global logistics sector. Accordingly, by continuing to increase R&D investment, our new products will continue to deliver long-term recurring revenue growth. You can see on this slide, our investment in R&D has increased each year over the past five years with a total of more than $560 million invested over the period. In FY 2021, we invested $167.1 million in R&D, up 5% on $159.1 million invested in FY 2020.
This represents a reinvestment of 33% of our revenue in R&D, which is at the top end of other SaaS peer investment levels. We capitalize our investment in new internally developed software components in line with the applicable Australian accounting and International Financial Reporting Standards. For example, our investments in R&D related to building out our global customs capability, international logistics, and international e-commerce capabilities are capitalized. As previously communicated, between 40% and 50% of our total R&D investment is capitalized each year, and the remainder, which relates to bug fixes, maintenance, and research, is expensed. In FY 2021, $78.3 million of our R&D investment was capitalized, up from $74.2 million in FY 2020, and reflecting acceleration of our global native customs and compliance capability builds on the CargoWise platform. Turning now to our balance sheet.
You can see on this slide the strength of our balance sheet and our solid financial foundation to fund future growth. At 30th of June 2021, we had $315 million in cash, and post-30th of June, we successfully completed a refinancing of our debt facility. We now have in place a new unsecured four-year, $225 million bilateral facility supported by six banks, which is undrawn, providing ample financial flexibility and headroom. The 24% increase in receivables you can see on the slide is in line with our revenue growth, and the $19.5 million increase in our intangible asset to $904.5 million relates primarily to investment in new capitalized product development offset by amortization and FX.
In share capital, you can see a $48 million increase in FY 2021, reflecting new shares issued to our employee share trust for future vesting of employee compensation, which is a key retention tool and new shares issued for acquisition earn-out consideration. Before I hand back to Richard, I'd like to talk briefly about our highly cash-generative operating model. In FY 2021, our operating cash flow was up 57% on FY 2020 at $229.9 million. Since listing in FY 2016, our business has delivered $681 million of operating cash flow and $605 million of EBITDA, demonstrating the strength of our underlying operating model and our solid track record of cash generation.
A significant portion of our FY 2021 operating cash flows, $9.8 million, was reinvested into long-term growth initiatives such as R&D to develop and expand the CargoWise product offering and in building out our global footprint, including data centers and IT infrastructure that enhance scalability, reliability, and security of the CargoWise platform and provide capacity for future growth. Before I move on to free cash flows, I draw your attention to the changes in our working capital, which mainly reflects the increase in trade payables and customer deposits, partially offset by an increase in receivables related to revenue growth. I also note that the non-cash items in EBITDA were consistent year-on-year. In FY 2021, we increased our use of equity to improve employee retention through share-based payments, which was offset by a reduction in employee provisions. Our free cash flow performance in FY 2021 was exceedingly strong.
At $139.2 million, it was up 149% on FY 2020, and our free cash flow conversion rate of 67% was up 23 percentage points on the prior year. In addition, our free cash flow margin was up 14 percentage points on FY 2020, reflecting our improved operating cash flow. All in all, you can see that we have a highly cash-generative business model, providing us with strong free cash flow for ongoing investment in our growth. I'll now hand back to Richard, who will provide you with an update on our strategic progress and the outlook for the business.
Thank you, Andrew. You've heard me say many times that WiseTech's strategic vision is to be the operating system for global logistics. Our mission is to create breakthrough products that enable and empower those that own and operate the global supply chains of the world. To achieve this, our strategy is driven by our people and centered around the three Ps: product, penetration, and profitability, with a focus on accelerating our global growth by leveraging the structural changes that are currently taking place in the global logistics and supply chain sectors. In particular, our strategy is focused on capitalizing on the growing demand for integrated global software solutions as industry consolidation drives large logistics providers to replace their legacy in-house systems with integrated software solutions that deliver increased visibility, productivity, and control. Our customers operate in a highly complex, dynamic, ultra-competitive environment.
CargoWise's competitive advantage is its ability to continue to rapidly enhance productivity and capability, drawing away from regional and local competitors, delivering advantages to customers and potential customers still on aging legacy systems. This is what enables us to retain customers, increase their CargoWise usage, and attract new customers. Let's now take a look at each of our strategic three Ps in more detail and how they come together to enable us to be the operating system for global logistics. Our product development capability is fundamental to our business. This slide is intended to provide context in terms of how we envision the evolution of the CargoWise ecosystem. You can see we have a strong track record of innovation and constantly evolving the CargoWise ecosystem.
For instance, over the years, we have evolved from a traditional licensing model to an on-demand licensing model in 2008, to a cloud-based solution in 2012, through to the launch of CargoWise One in 2014 as an integrated global offering. As part of the CargoWise One launch, we transitioned to a seats plus transaction licensing model. From 2018 to 2020, our focus was on establishing domain leadership in global logistics execution technology and fast-tracking our development pipeline with multiple acquisitions that delivered new geographies, adjacencies, intellectual property, and development teams. During this time, we signed another seven global rollouts and nearly doubled our revenue. In FY 2021 and over the next two years, our focus is on expanding our CargoWise footprint and functionalities across customs, rates, and e-commerce, as well as broadening CargoWise's enterprise-wide capabilities and securing additional large global customers.
To this end, in FY 2021, we invested $ 167.1 million in product development, delivered 1,096 new product features and enhancements, recommenced recruitment of technology and industry talent globally in our major centers, and established another international center of excellence in Bangalore, India. We also continued to align our acquisition development teams to our WiseTech development priorities. With 53% of our people now focused on product development, up from 51% in FY 2020. Looking to FY 2024 and beyond, our focus will be on completing the integration of acquired intellectual property into CargoWise, including expanding functionalities to cover landside logistics and transport management, as well as accessing a larger total addressable market driven by the rollout of Neo. Our number one development priority and opportunity in FY 2021 was to enhance our technology lead in global customs and cross-border compliance.
Our objective is to deliver one globally unified system that manages import and export customs procedures for jurisdictions covering approximately 90% of global manufactured trade flows. At the first half results, I explained that achieving this without the benefit of acquired in-country expertise and relationships with government and customers in each jurisdiction is time-consuming, complex, risky, and expensive. In foreign language jurisdictions, would prove almost impossible. To accelerate and de-risk this process and avoid costly and unsuccessful customs development, we invested in strategic foothold acquisitions. These provide us with feet on the ground to build our capability, significant local industry knowledge and technology domain expertise, as well as a platform for localization and integration with major ports in that jurisdiction. In non-English-speaking jurisdictions, they also provide language localization for CargoWise modules and documents such as delivery instructions and invoices that cannot be presented in English.
Our acquisitions enable us to accelerate the delivery of customs compliance requirements. Once we have achieved this, we enter the commercialization phase, which is a staged process that takes time. Typically, starting with five to 10 smaller early adopters to stress test CargoWise native components and government messaging interfaces, and then progressively roll out to larger customers. As I mentioned at the start of the presentation, in FY 2021, we expanded CargoWise's customs functionality to include France, Italy, Spain, and Puerto Rico, adding to our established coverage in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., mainland China, Taiwan, and South Africa. All up in FY 2021, we increased the geographic coverage of our customs functionality to cover approximately 45% of global manufactured trade flows, up from 35% in FY 2020. Our development work is continuing with further jurisdictions to be added in FY 2022 and beyond.
Noting that our progress is often subject to factors outside of our control, such as country-specific regulatory changes and availability of government testing facilities, which can sometimes accelerate the process and other times result in delays. An example of this is Germany, where despite our custom development being complete, the authorities have deferred all new certifications due to COVID and other local issues. In addition to our development of global customs and compliance functionalities, we also have a program of work focused on further extending the CargoWise ecosystem. This includes building a native global rates engine that streamlines the carrier booking to payment processes. As a transitional measure, we have released the integration of CargoSphere and CargoGuide rates functionalities into CargoWise. These are in production with major customers. Another area of focus is developing e-commerce as a single platform for the international e-commerce fulfillment market.
Our offering is live in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. We have a strong pipeline of sales. In FY 2021, we added sea freight to our existing e-commerce air freight functionalities to address the move of e-commerce freight from air to sea, given the significant reduction in belly freight capacity on passenger flights. We also integrated Pierbridge and SmartFreight into our e-commerce solution. We are continuing to implement enhancements to this offering. Longer term, our development pipeline includes incorporating our land transport solution into our core CargoWise architecture with landside logistics the first step in that process.
We have now released our new highly functional CargoWise transit warehouse module, which is in production with a number of customers and have recently entered into a transit warehouse global rollout agreement with a major customer. We are also focused on expanding our total addressable market with the development of CargoWise Neo, which will provide a web-based global integrated platform enabling beneficial cargo owners, such as large manufacturers, importers, and exporters, to link directly with their logistics provider to plan, price, book, track, trace, and manage their freight. As I have previously explained, the development of Neo will progress over a number of years. It is still in its early stages and will leverage a number of existing CargoWise modules and future developments. It will take time before it delivers a significant revenue.
However, it is already in front of a number of customers and creating a stronger CargoWise customer value proposition. I am pleased to report that the feedback we have received has been very positive, and we are now working to develop further Neo capabilities. That brings us to our next strategic P, penetration. With fully digital and highly automated global logistics solutions still in the very early stages, we have considerable scope for growth. Our approach is to target global rollouts by the top 25 global freight forwarders and the top 200 global logistics providers because they can fully leverage our global capabilities and therefore provide the greatest revenue growth potential. On this slide, you can see the progress we have made in securing global rollouts.
We have grown our global rollouts in two ways, through CargoWise customer contract commitments and by existing customers who are not on formal rollout agreements but are growing organically, adding new geographies and users as they go. Andrew explained earlier that more than half of the 31% CAGR of our CargoWise recurring revenue over the past five years has been driven by large global freight forwarder rollouts and new customers. What is of note over the past 12 months is the significant momentum we are seeing in global rollouts and new customer wins. As I mentioned at the start of the presentation, we secured six new global rollouts in FY 2021, and we signed FedEx post our end of financial year. These wins are in addition to the existing 30 global rollouts that we already had in place, such as DHL Global Forwarding, DSV Panalpina, and Bolloré.
Importantly, we have a strong pipeline of potential new global customers which we are actively pursuing, a number of which are likely to be near-term wins. I'd like to spend some time now on how you should think of the revenue growth trajectory of these global rollouts. As you know, our large global customers take multiple years to roll out the CargoWise platform across their business units. As the rollout progresses, they add new countries, adopt new modules, and implement our productivity tools. DHL is a good example. We signed a global rollout contract with them in FY 2016, and over this period, they have completed the rollout of CargoWise across their entire ocean freight business and most of their airfreight business, with the remainder of their airfreight rollout planned for completion by the end of this calendar year.
This has been a five-year process, and as noted by DHL, it is one of the fastest rollouts by a freight forwarder of this size. Of the 36 global rollouts in place at the end of FY 2021, 29 are in production, which means they are operationally live on CargoWise, having rolled out to 10 or more countries and 400 or more registered users. The remaining seven are contracted and in progress, which means they are at an earlier stage of their global rollout. From a revenue-generating perspective, you can see that these 29 global rollouts in production have delivered compound annual growth of 37% over the past five years. This has been driven by the progression of rollouts by customers such as DSV, DHL, Toll, Yusen, and Geodis.
The adoption by these 25 customers of additional CargoWise modules, products, and features, as well as customer expansion through M&A activity such as DSV Panalpina and the recently announced acquisition by DHL and JAS that I mentioned earlier. Importantly, eight of the 29 customers in production are top 25 global freight forwarders. These eight have generated a much higher compound annual growth rate of 46% over the past five years. You can understand why our focus is on securing global rollouts by these big players. Looking ahead, given the significant runway of new customers available to us in both the top 25 global freight forwarders and the top 200 logistics providers, which we are actively pursuing, we expect to see future revenue growth driven by additional large global customer wins.
We also anticipate significant growth from the global rollouts that are contracted and in progress, two of which are top 25 global freight forwarders. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this opportunity, if you look at the seven rollouts that were contracted and in progress in FY 2021, collectively, they have less than 10% of their expected users currently live on CargoWise. They have delivered 158% of compound annual revenue growth over the two-year period from FY 2019 to FY 2021. There is significant additional revenue to come. Our existing 29 customers with global rollouts in production will also continue to drive revenue growth as they add new products, features, and geographies, in particular, as we increase our customers' coverage from approximately 45% of global manufactured trade flows to our target of 90%.
Last but not least, we anticipate continuing industry consolidation will also support our future revenue growth with our large global freight forwarder customers well-positioned to leverage future consolidations to grow. Both our product development and penetration progress drive revenue growth, leading us to our third 'P', profitability. In FY 2021, we implemented organization-wide efficiency program that involved reducing costs, extracting acquisition synergies, and streamlining our processes and teams to enhance our operating leverage and ensure appropriate allocation of resources to support scalability and delivery of our longer-term strategic vision. As Andrew explained, this program of work delivered a $13.8 million net benefit in FY 2021, which exceeded our previously announced $10 million target. Initiatives we implemented to achieve this include centralizing physical operations and product development hubs, consolidating data centers, migrating data from acquired businesses, as well as streamlining facility and office support as we progressed our acquisition integrations.
These cost reductions partially offset our increased investment in FY 2021 to support ongoing revenue growth through product development and recruitment of technology specialists. Looking ahead, we expect to achieve a cost reduction run rate of approximately $ 40 million for FY 2022, exceeding our previous $ 20 million-$30 million target. This brings us to our FY 2022 guidance. You will see in today's presentation a set of underlying assumptions upon which we have based our FY 2022 guidance. We are providing guidance today on the basis that market conditions do not materially change, noting in particular that changes in industrial production and/or international goods flows may impact our guidance. Assuming there are no material changes to these assumptions and no unforeseen events that arise over the next 12 months, we expect our FY 2022 total revenue to grow between 18%-25%, representing $ 600 million-$ 635 million.
Of this total revenue growth, we expect CargoWise revenue to grow by approximately 30%-40%, with the first and second half year splits broadly similar to FY 2021. In terms of EBITDA, we expect this to be in the range of $ 260 million-$ 285 million in FY 2022, equating to a growth of 26%-38%. To wrap up today, I'd reiterate my comments at the start of today's presentation. We have reached an inflection point in WiseTech's growth trajectory. We are ideally positioned to continue to benefit from the acceleration in structural shifts towards consolidation, integration, and digitization of global logistics and supply chains. These structural changes, coupled with our unique CargoWise offering and ongoing commitment to product development, are enabling us to gain market penetration momentum.
We are seeing a significant ramp-up in global roll-outs, both in terms of new sign-ups and ongoing revenue growth from those already in place. You can see our strong track record of year-on-year revenue growth over the past five years. A track record of delivering on what we promised. A track record that has delivered long-term sustainable growth. A track record we are well-positioned to continue as our global roll-outs progress. You can also see our strong track record of EBITDA and EBITDA margin growth, demonstrating the strength of our business model and our increasing operating leverage, which we will continue to enhance. We are ideally positioned for ongoing growth and increased market penetration with our healthy balance sheet and strong cash generation, providing us with significant financial firepower to fund our future growth. We're excited about our future.
Our product pipeline will ensure we have a competitive edge. We already have plenty of penetration opportunity from large global roll-outs, as well as an ongoing momentum in new customer wins. All of which will enable us to capitalize on prevailing industry structural changes and to continue delivering sustainable revenue, profit and earnings per share growth, as well as an increasing value for shareholders. Let's now open to 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 are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Quinn Pierson from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for the time. Maybe just firstly, is there anything further you can share with us, please, regarding the FedEx contract? I guess in particular, what the scope of that contract is in terms of maybe modes covered or regions. If there's anything you can share with regards to, I guess the slope of that rollout and potential size from a revenue perspective. Thanks.
I'll have a go at that. FedEx, it's their global forwarding division, which is a large global according to our definitions. Their rollout is relatively quick. Certainly, you should think of FedEx, though, as just one of the substantial number of wins that we've had in the past 12 months or so. It's indicative of the flow of large globals. I've clearly indicated that there's this history of these wins have been picking up and we've also got a pretty decent opportunity pipeline as well. FedEx was great because it's a well-known brand. People understand it. We're very happy with FedEx. We actually have really worked well with them. They will start fairly quickly.
I think the material issue is the number of these running in parallel and our hope to bring those forward as quickly as possible and to get everybody moving very fast. You've seen from the Aramex rollout that the customers have been able to do things very quickly at times. That's a good improvement for the future.
Understood. Thank you for that. Maybe secondly, on page 12, you have an interesting disclosure showing some revenue growth, kind of broken out by contributors. Where large global freight forwarder rollouts were the largest, et cetera. I guess as we look to FY 2022 and onwards, can you give us some indication if that's kind of a similar, I guess, shape of growth? Or if there's any particular ins and outs that we should be cognizant of? Maybe as a sub-question on that, does customs become a revenue growth line item in and of itself? Or am I getting ahead of myself on that? Thanks.
Andrew, you want to take that one?
Yeah, sure, Richard. Thanks, Quinn. Yeah, obviously, the 31% CAGR there over the five years is the average for each of those. Each individual item will grow differently in any particular year. The shape overall, we sort of expect to continue, and I think we've put that on the page there with the future revenue growth drivers. When customs starts to grow, it will show up in each of those categories. We'll see large global freight forwarders start to use the customs application more. We'll see new customers that come onto the platform in future start to use it, and we'll see existing customers also use it as well. It'll be part of that growth profile going forward.
On top of the other things that we've listed there with the new large global freight forwarder wins and also growth from the other products that we're building out in CargoWise from the acquisitions like rates, for example.
Yeah. Just to add on to that, when you think about something like customs or Neo or Transit Warehouse or the rating, it much more helps to think of them as part of an ecosystem. Even though they have their own revenue line, what is really going on is the entire platform becomes more attractive and it becomes much more efficient and effective. It is really just a question of making the whole system more attractive and more valuable. Yes, each one of those things are individual revenue lines. If you break them out, you lose the fundamental idea that the platform, the ecosystem, is actually what's driving the revenue.
That's helpful clarification. Thank you for that. Just lastly from me, at the end of FY 2022, once the, I guess, full cost out run rate and acknowledging that that cost out number has been increased, will the legacy cost, particularly from the acquired businesses, effectively have been cleaned out? Will this cost out program effectively be done and we're now down to the more, I guess, sustainable base? What I'm getting at here is as we look kind of think of FY 2023 and onwards, I'm just trying to understand what a more sustainable level of cost growth might be after this cost out program finishes. Thanks.
Yeah, Quinn, I'll take that one. The $40 million run rate target for FY 2022 is an increase on the $ 20 million-$ 30 million that we'd previously targeted. We're very pleased with that. I think what we'll see going forward, and we've sort of indicated it a little bit on slide 13, is that there is some cost still in the business that will continue to run out over time. It won't come out immediately, as we transition some of those legacy products off of their existing structures and technology and hardware and bring them over to the more efficient CargoWise platform. I think the main point to keep in mind here is that we're going to keep investing in the business to fund future growth opportunities. We'll keep adding cost to support that activity as we go forward.
You will have seen, over the past couple of years, we've taken our cost as a percentage of revenue down from 70%. It was 70% in FY 2019, to just over 55% this year. That's a significant reduction in the cost base for the business, driven by not only the cost actions that we've taken, but also the leverage that we've received from the volume increase in revenue.
Helpful color. Thank you for your time.
Your next question comes from Paul Mason from E&P. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Just a few from me. The first one, I just wonder if you can make some comments on your remark about more significant strategic M&A. I think historically you flagged that you were interested in potentially acquiring some customs assets in Southeast Asia. Is this sort of still what you're referring to? Are you thinking sort of broader than that, in terms of that remark?
There's really a couple of things going on there. We continue to do little, very small, non-material acquisitions that are really kind of acqui-hires in order to flesh out these foothold capabilities and to expand the product capability totally. That's fundamentally about building the ecosystem. All that we're really saying is that we have the firepower to do more than that should we wish to do so. We have made no plans to that effect. I think that what you've seen here in the last 12 months and you'll see going forward for the next 12 months, is a business really focused on just two really important things. Obviously, the three Ps, but organic growth through CargoWise product leadership and increased efficiency across the business.
As we grow in scale, we have always been very efficient managers and there was a period of time when we were buying a lot of companies when that had to take a slight back seat to the fundamentals of growing that piece of the strategy. We are very efficient managers, and we continue to look at the efficiency of all those businesses, and we're really working on the structure of how WiseTech builds its model and gets into that everything leaning into the CargoWise product capability set. Really talking about big M&A when we don't really have a plan for that, what we're really saying is we've got plenty of firepower should we choose to do those things. Our real focus is on organic growth and on increasing efficiency.
Okay, great. Next one is just on your CargoWise One guidance. For FY 2022, 30%-40% revenue growth. You guys used to include, in some of your results presentation, sort of a longer-term guide of 20%-30% sort of through the cycle. I was just wondering if you could sort of make some comments about, given you're going above that sort of historical guidance this year, how you're viewing that as to do with the current environment and more like an impulse from sort of what's going on in supply chains versus whether there's any sort of more permanent step up in your view on long-term growth rates from your strategy around focusing on larger customers.
Yeah, Paul, thanks. Good question. Look, we are guiding here to FY 2022. We have taken revenue up to $ 600 million-$635 million, which is 18%-25% growth overall. As you rightly mentioned, it is 30%-40%, excluding FX for CargoWise. We are not really sort of guiding past FY 2022 at this point. What we try to do is lay out the framework in terms of how the business has grown historically, and that was the 31% CAGR that we showed earlier in the presentation today. A lot of things that are going to drive growth in FY 2022, like large global freight forwarder roll-outs, like our investment in new products, like just an indicative amount of market growth, et cetera, are all part of that 30%-40% that we see coming through. We are not guiding any further out than FY 2022 at this point.
Yeah, look, what I would add to that is, we're obviously working very hard on the CargoWise ecosystem. I keep referring to this rather than thinking about any one thing. Making sure that our core focus in the business and every staff member, every acquired business, and every strategy that we have is to build that ecosystem. That's really what's going on here. The fact is that CargoWise is a powerhouse, and we're getting lots of customer wins, and we're getting lots of opportunity. There's lots of efficiency leverageable both in the sales processes, which you've seen actually incredibly big step up in sales, even though our sales and marketing spend is down as a percentage. We really become very efficient at targeting this big end of town major deals and using those to drive the company. All right, thanks.
I've just got two quick sort of accounting-related ones. The first one, I just wonder if you can make some comments on what's driving the difference between your statutory tax and your cash tax paid, and whether that's going to be sort of a permanent difference or a temporary one. Then second, if you could give us a little bit of a steer on what total R&D as a percentage of sales is going to look like for FY 2022. That'd be great. Thanks.
Yeah. Paul, I think we always run a slightly lower cash tax rate than the statutory tax rate. Couple of things that drive that. We get tax deduction on quite a bit of the amount that we spend on capitalized development, which obviously goes into the balance sheet. That comes through the cash tax rate. You'll also see from the note in the stat accounts today that we picked up a little bit of a refund on last year's return, which is also helping give a little bit of tailwind to the cash tax rate in FY 2021. From an R&D perspective as a percentage of sales, really in line with what we've previously guided there in terms of the performance that we had in FY 2021 as well, which was around 33% of sales. Obviously, we'll continue to grow our revenue base here.
We're going to continue to invest in our product and our product development activity. We think that'll be somewhere in that sort of similar range as it has been in FY 2021.
Great. Thanks a lot.
No worries.
Your next question comes from Lucy Huang from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Richard, and good morning, Andrew. Thanks for taking the question. I have three. Firstly, in your development pipeline, I noticed that land transport has been flagged as an area for FY 2024 onwards. Just wondering if you can give us some color as to whether WiseTech has enough capability currently to build out land transport organically over time or whether there could be some further incremental acquisitions in that space over the next few years. Secondly, if you can give us some color and your thought about using price increase as an increasing lever for organic growth over time. Could we see that as a more recurring feature in the business? Thirdly, just how should we be thinking about when freight capacity investment starts to increase within the system? Obviously last year, lots of supply chain disruptions.
When these start to fall away, could we actually see more positive impacts to volume coming through CargoWise? Just wondering, yeah, how you think about that kind of dynamic moving forward?
Land transport, from the beginning of this, we've been building land transport as a capability set, and we have a number of assets in that space, and we're building the core transport architecture into CargoWise. I would never exclude additional acqui-hires or adjacencies, M&A adjacencies in that space because that would be unreasonable. I don't think we necessarily need them. Remember that this is really about focusing on something that you're doing very well and having a lot of success at.
I'm very concerned about not getting distracted by shiny objects and running off and chasing something when the core business is really growing so well. The second part of the question was price increases. I've always viewed price increases as a very blunt instrument and not a particularly helpful one. Now, we do obviously price strongly compared to our competitors. What we really try to do here is to add a lot of value in the product. You've seen that from slide 12. If I could just have that slide 12 up. You can see actually that none of our real growth is coming particularly from price increases. Even when there are price increases, they tend to be reflective of the fact that we've pushed into the application enormous amounts of additional capability, value, automation, and sophistication.
The actual value for the system, you can see that on slide 12 now showing. The thing that's driving the sales of the product is its deep and deepening value. I don't think pricing is where we would use an aggressive approach. This is a very costly industry. It's got a lot of labor costs, which we're helping with. There's a lot of cost security and architecture related to hosting and cloud and so forth. These are all important things to focus on. Price is not the blunt instrument. Finally, freight capacity. That's a great question. You can see that the top 20 -odd ocean carriers as a group, have about another 20% increase in order book capacity for ocean freight. That's going to all go very well in the medium to long term in terms of lifting the constraints in the industry.
You've also got to understand that whilst air freight is not a major part of international trade, it is a balancing item. Freight belly hold capacity is starting to improve now that COVID has largely passed in most economies, and international air travel has started to get back on track. We're expecting a lift in air freight capacity, which will take some of the cap off. We're expecting a more gradual lift in sea freight capacity, which will lift these highly constrained supply chain problems. Both those lifts actually affect our revenue in a positive way. Thank you.
Great. Thank you.
Folks, we're just at the end of our market briefing today. We've still got a few questions to go. We'll extend for a few more minutes for those that would like to stay on. If you can't, we thank you for your attendance today, and please feel free to send us any additional questions that you've got after the call at the end if you have to leave now. Could we have the next question, please?
Your next question comes from Siraj Ahmed from Citi. Please go ahead.
Thanks. I'll make it quick. I have three questions. First thing, Andrew, you sort of alluded to this in slide 13. It's interesting that 55% of your R&D spend is on maintenance products of acquired products, right? How do you think that trends over time in the medium term? If you could just talk to that.
Shall I answer that, Andrew?
Yeah, you go, Richard. Sure.
That maintenance is not just on acquired products. All software products have an amount of maintenance required in them in the core architecture to ensure that you dispose of technical debt quickly, that when defects do come up, that you're able to grab them. When there is a need to enhance the system from a scale performance, then you can actually invest in that. Some of that maintenance is definitely on our acquired products, but that is falling as a percent of the total maintenance revenue as we effectively right-size those products.
Yeah, that's right, Siraj. I'll just sort of add to that. 55% of that $88 million in FY 2021 just relate to the acquired products. Not all of those we're exiting. Obviously, the adjacent businesses over time will slowly transition to CargoWise and the foothold businesses and customs as we rewrite the native product and then start to transition customers over. It's over time here, as we've indicated on the slide. It's not going to happen at any great speed, but it will be an effect that we see over time.
Thanks. Secondly, just on your gross profit margins. It looks like it actually declined half on half in the second half. It's a bit of a surprise given you've actually consolidated infrastructure and given the price ratio have dropped through straight. Can you just talk to the outlook for gross profit margins?
Yeah. Look, we've been investing in a number of areas as well. We see some external inflation from software license providers as well, Siraj. There's a couple of things going off in there, but not something that we're concerned about. I think we'll see gross profit margins maintained at the current level or slightly above going forward.
Great. Last one, just for Richard. Richard, you mentioned ecosystem a few times, right? Completely get that. Just keen to understand if you think about opening up your ecosystem. You're sort of closed now. Do you think you will sort of like an app store, add other vendors in there? Is that a possibility that you're thinking about?
I think the ecosystem does have quite a bit of openness around it, but it's through APIs. As to whether we would put an app store in place or some other form of extension licensing, that's an ongoing internal discussion. Again, remember that we have to be very conscious of the fact that we've got a tiger by the tail here, and I'm making sure that all of my teams and all of the strategy is focused on where we are making the most value. Getting stuck on shiny objects can often cause a distraction from the real job of growing the system. There is an opportunity to do what you're proposing to do. Just like Neo is a huge opportunity. Just like land transport is a huge opportunity. We're actually beset with opportunities.
What we have to do is to take the best opportunities, the ones that we have already got running hard, and use that leverage to keep growing the company. There is time, there is space, and there is ability to make those things move over time.
Very clear. Thanks, Richard.
Thanks, Ryan.
Your final question comes from Elise Kennedy from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Hi, Andrew. Hi, Richard. Two quick questions from me. Just one around the acquisitions. You forecasted some flat growth there. I'm just curious for further looking out, do you expect those acquisitions to move onto the more efficient CargoWise platform, so that if we effectively looked at, say, five, 10 years, and you didn't make any acquisitions, that you would have just 100% CargoWise? My second quick question is just around the margins in that core business. You've achieved about 55% on those. Is there more room to grow as a whole on those organic margins? Or is it more about getting those acquisitions to those levels? Thanks, guys.
Yeah. Elise, thanks for the question there. On the acquisitions, yes, we indicated that they'd be about flat into FY 2022. We see a couple of things there. Obviously, the adjacent businesses are growing slightly within that, and we'll see that in our recurring revenues ahead of their volumes transitioning over to CargoWise. I think we've indicated in the past that we would see some reduction in the non-recurring revenues that we have in the acquired businesses, predominantly related to things that we don't support in the CargoWise business model, like implementations and customizations and software services, et cetera. Those will sort of fall away. I think your conclusion, though, is broadly right. Over time, we'd expect all of that to move broadly to the more efficient CargoWise platform.
Look, I think-
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry. In terms of what we're doing with the acquisitions, I think that they'll increasingly look similar to and be part of the CargoWise infrastructure and ecosystem. We're obviously in that move to efficiency, but which also involves a move to very strong alignment between the acquired businesses and the core business. Elise, if you think about how this fits together, we're really trying to build a single strategy, an ecosystem that has broad appeal across this international logistics segment. Again, it's just a piece of work to make those acquired businesses a part of the core. It's not so much that the businesses are going to become more efficient. They'll become a part of a more efficient core. That is actually happening. That's one of the reasons we got the efficiencies out of FY 2021 numbers. Obviously, we're going to continue to do that.
We've got many programs at work inside the company. This is quite a big product with quite a lot of very large customers. The big focus, as I keep repeating, is to stick to the knitting, not get distracted by shiny objects, and to keep doing what we've been doing so well and do more of it.
Yep. Elise, I'll just follow up on the second part of that question. Thanks. Yeah, EBITDA margin was 41% reported for the year, up 11 percentage points, and CargoWise at 55% up 7 percentage points. We've definitely seen some leverage there on the CargoWise side with the margin improvement of 7 percentage points. Look, our guidance next year for FY 2022, we've got our EBITDA margin growing between 2 and 4 percentage points, between 43% and 45% EBITDA. There'll be some accretion in CargoWise there, as well as the effect of the cost savings that run through across the business. I think we'll see that across the business.
Great. Thank you.
I think that sort of brings us to the end of our call, and I'd like to thank everybody for attending. If there's any further questions that we can answer, just please get in touch with investor relations and we look to see you on the rounds. Thank you, everybody, for attending.
Thank you.