Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the EVS Broadcast Equipment full year 2022 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Serge Van Herck, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of you attending, this session here today. Before I start talking about the agenda and our results, I'll leave the floor to Veerle, who can talk about our forward-looking statements.
Good day, everyone. Welcome to the EVS 2022 full year results conference call. As mentioned, we'll first go through a presentation followed by Q&A. We start this presentation by mentioning that next to the performance of 2022, this presentation also contains some forward-looking statements. These statements are based on our current expectations and management's assessment of the environment we operate in. We do declare that these statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could lead to material different statements in the future. We will elaborate on some of those risks during this presentation, but there are also other risks that could affect our statements that we don't explicitly comment on. These risks contain potentially technology changes, market requirements, price pressure from competition, or any other macroeconomic elements.
Thank you, Veerle. Let's go to the agenda of today. We'll have first our business update. Afterwards, Veerle will give us the financial update. We'll talk about our outlook, and then we'll have our conclusions, and we'll end, of course, with questions and answers. Let me start here with a business update. All in all, we are quite happy with the results that we have been achieving in 2022 and which show the progress that we are realizing with our PLAYForward strategy. Remember that's a strategy that we have put on paper at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, just before the COVID hit us.
Looking at market and customers, we see definitely a growth of revenues and order intake that's clearly showing that we have a positive momentum and that our growth objectives are being achieved. A major achievement in 2022 was, of course, the signature of that Big Tech Contract 2022. Remember that's a contract for more than 10 years with the US customer. We have delivered several major big events, sport events in 2022. We have also implemented several price increases to be in line with inflation as you've seen that around the world. Last but not least, we've seen or we have received quite some awards from different or for different business dimensions in 2022. On the technology side, we've been pushing further our artificial intelligence solutions in different environments.
We've been introducing, as thought leadership our Balanced Computing approach, which is an answer to the question, what about the cloud? Last but not least, we've continued investing in technologies for enabling our future growth. On the corporate side, we have also been working quite hard on several topics. One of them was the implementation of our EVA project, which has now enabled us to activate a new ERP system. Since 2022, we've also been further focusing on ESG, with, for instance, also our first sustainability report. We have, of course, also seen quite some cost increase due to inflation on the remuneration side, but also on the component side. We've seen that our spending patterns are back to pre-COVID levels, and that this is again the new normal as we speak.
We also see in 22 the first important results coming from our channel strategy that we've set, we've been setting up over the last years. With the acquisition of Axon in May 2020, we see in 22 that is really starting to deliver the expected results. That's a very good thing to see, of course. We've been further working on the members of the leadership team. We'll come back on that later on to demonstrate who is in the leadership team and why we've done that. We've been further working on preparing the future growth by further increasing the team size around the world. Last but not least, on the shareholder side, we see that we have the growth of revenues and order intake.
We see that we have been recovering the dividend promises of 2020 by increasing the dividend over the last years. We are happy to say that we demonstrated that we are able to execute M&A transactions in a quite successful way. Last but not least, with the results of 2022, we see also that we've been delivering a strong earning per share. On the next slide, Veerle will give us a short update on the main financial highlights.
Yes. This is very really a short update on the highlights. We'll get into more details later on. Just as mentioned, as Serge was mentioning, we finished an order intake of EUR 218.8 million in the year 2022. That's a growth of 46.5%. Even excluding the Big Tech Contract, the growth is still around 13.5%, that remains a very strong number. As mentioned, revenue was also really strong, beating definitely 2021 with 7.7% increase to a total of EUR 148.2 million. Also our net profit is something that we wanna call out. It's a net profit of EUR 31.3 million, a 21% net profit margin.
It is a decline compared to 2021, but it is definitely in line with what we expected out of the year 2022. Finally, as Serge already mentioned, we have been growing our team members in 2022 to ensure that we have enough or the right resources in place for our future growth. We ended the year with a total FTE number of 613, which is an FTE increase compared to the end of 2021 with 662 FTE.
Thank you, Veerle. Going forward in our presentation here, a reference to our PLAYForward strategy, that we developed at the end of 2019, which is fully based, in fact, on a customer intimacy strategy with a big hairy audacious goal of becoming the number one solution provider in our live video industry. We see that something as a long-term target that we want to achieve, and that is indeed, meaning that we want to create realized growth year after year, of course. When we look on the next slide in the progress that we are making towards that objective and that PLAYForward strategy, on the different axes, we see the progress that we are making.
Going from a single company in 2015 to a group of companies in 25. We see that we did quite a good progress with Axon. On the other side, we are still seeing quite some opportunities for further doing acquisitions. While we did not do an additional acquisition in 21 and 22, we're now feeling quite confident that with the successful integration of Axon, we should be able to do more of those in the future. The second axis about going from product to solutions. There, we feel that we are going in the right direction. More and more customers appreciate the solutions that we bring to the market.
To demonstrate that, we have been winning quite some additional key references in our industry. Talking about the premium markets, and also being present in different market tiers, while premium markets remains really our strongholds, and we've seen that there with the introduction of solutions like XT-GO, and further we're leveraging on our channel partners. We're doing a good job in also better covering those other markets. Looking to the next axis, which is selling in CapEx mode only to selling in OpEx and CapEx together. We've seen quite some good progress. We definitely see that our SLA, our service level agreement, sales is going up.
We also see that with the Big Tech Contract 2022, we definitely demonstrated that we can do that over a long term of 10 years in this case. For on-demand services, we have also now a system available with EVS Credits. We are doing a good job in advancing on that axis. When we talk about technology going from SDI to an IP total cost of ownership optimized media solution, there we really feel that we are making a substantial progress, and that is also being demonstrated with some large deals like with Fox, but also an important agreement with RTBF, which is showing indeed that the new production methods of the future are being developed as we speak.
When we look at the next dimension going from EVS hardware only to software on commercial of the shelves in the cloud, and a combination on EVS hardware, there we feel that we're making really good progress, of course with XtraMotion, and that has been launched in the cloud. Also with the introduction of our Balanced Computing approach in 22, that is definitely a good progress. We have also integrated those solutions, those cloud solutions in some major events. That demonstrates that we are on the right path also on this dimension. Going from on-premise live production to live anywhere operation, there we feel we are, we're nearly there. All our customers are able to select if they do on-prem production or remote operations.
There are definitely a lot of work has been done over the last years, of course accelerated by COVID. In that respect, we feel that this dimension is nearly fully accomplished. Last but not least, being mainly in sport and also going more into news and entertainment, and there we also see that we are working more and more on modernization contracts which can, which are transverse in different environments. We have major contracts in different news environments as well. We see, for instance, at the RTBF with the flexible control room project, that this is a very nice example that we are further extending also into other domains next to sports.
Going to slide number nine, when we see the different problems that our customers are facing, this is an overview of the major trends as measured by Devoncroft. We see that we are merely working on all of them, and you can see in the dark blue and the light blue how we contribute or how hard we work on that. We feel very confident that we're working on the right topics. You see on the top, of course, the migration to IP networking and content delivery. That's definitely one of the most important trends that we see, and that is one that we fully embrace and fully support and help our customers to move forward.
In that respect, we feel that we're very well in sync with the major challenges that our customers are facing. Going to slide number 10. There, what we see differently is that our business is more linked to the volume of premium live productions than to the broadcaster's revenues, of course. In that respect, we see that, with the global value of media rights further increasing year after year, and with the number of production of Tier one productions happening, that is definitely something that is playing into our cards. That was also demonstrated in 2022 by that Big Tech Contract that we have signed in August of this year. Slide 11 indeed is an overview of that Big Tech Contract 2022.
I remember we'll be talking about the contract for many years as it is a quite big, contract for more than $50 million. It has a big impact, of course, on our order book for the future. It is indeed a contract that we have signed with one of our major U.S.-based Live Service Provider customers. That follows a major contract that they signed with one of the big tech players of our industry. We're quite happy that our customer was able to sign that contract as automatically they signed a contract with us to upgrade their network, their install base, and that for the future years, they know that they will be able to further rely upon our technologies and our service.
It's also an important step as for the first time in that LSP environment, we sign a quite large deal for service level agreements, that is indeed covering the next 10 years. We feel that it's definitely confirming our position as a trusted technology partner, and that it provides confidence in the capabilities to deliver the right solutions over the next decade. It definitely helps us to further increase our predictability for the next 10 years. Going to slide number 12, I'm happy to leave the floor to Benoit here.
Thank you, Serge. Good day, everyone. On this slide, 12, you can see a few of the iconic contracts that were signed during 2022. In fact, that confirms that the position of trusted partner is not reserved just for 1 contract with the Big Tech Contract, but it's also distributed in different regions of the world and as well for different solutions and for the different market pillars. You can see here that we have also gained some reference in the live audience business market pillar. Some of these contracts that you see referenced here and that are more detailed on our website, in fact, will not necessarily be achieved in one year.
They are spread over several years with, let's say, a revenue recognition that is spread all along the different subsequent years, depending on the contract. A lot of trust from our customers. We have actually also progressed a lot with our solution. In terms of LiveCeption, we have this big contract, but also, we have for all our customers, more and more LSM VR which are deployed. This LSM VR also enable our customers to activate other features as XtraMotion, which is now being active on more and more events. Of course, LiveCeption has been at the core of the 2022 major events, with new workflows that we introduced, not only XtraMotion, but also multi reviews and other set of features that are enabled by the LSM VR.
In the MediaCeption solution we have introduced, and this is also referenced on our website, VIA Create as a major milestone. VIA Create is a live editing solution. Where in fact, the editors can really update the content just a few minutes or even seconds in some cases before going live. We have seen as well the deployment of a new generation of solutions in the MediaCeption domain in Western Europe. In the previous year, it was mainly in NALA. Based on the references that we got in NALA, we are now also spreading in Western Europe. We observe globally a large market traction for these modernization contracts.
We also embed in our solutions more and more partners so that we can be more relevant and we can further help our customers to have the right solution. We also deployed MediaHub, not only in the big events, but also in the medium-sized events that help the host broadcasters to distribute the content to the right orders so that they can benefit from different content structured in different channels, and then provide the right content for the audience to highlight what is happening in all these events. In the media infrastructure domain. Which is, let's say, architectured around the previous Axon product. In fact, we have seen that Strada routing system is certainly the evolutive solution. We did win very large contracts in Nala.
We also deployed the contract that we won in the past. Cerebrum now is everywhere. It's really swapping a lot of competitors and is at the core of flexible control room solution co-designed with RTBF. If we move on the next slide, it's about the cloud and the Balanced Computing. In 2022, we launched the concept of Balanced Computing, which is really an hybrid way of operating between on-premise data center and cloud. That means that EVS is certainly active in the cloud, but just for doing the right things. In fact, that also creates an opportunity to increase slightly the SaaS and OpEx business model because it's always perceived that with cloud we can also help our customers to adopt new business model.
We also observed in 2022 a trend for some of our customers who really engaged a lot during COVID into the cloud. We see them taking a step back because, in fact, in the cloud, you have also some constraints in terms of connectivity, but also in terms of cost. This concept of Balanced Computing, when you have some part of the workflow operated on-premise and some part in the, in the cloud, like XtraMotion, for example, is really appealing and considered as the right choice by key customers. All these good things for our customers in terms of progress of our solution, in terms of thought leadership, have been recognized as well by several awards.
In fact, we received an award at SATIS, which is a trade show in France in 2022, which is named the Prix Diffusion et Distribution. We also won two awards linked to security and reliability, the Shield at IBC 22 and also Neuron Protect at NAB 22. Definitely security, reliability are at the core of EVS value. Not only the products have been recognized, but as well the company. In fact, we got two awards, this the Blue S Awards, because we received two award of innovation and people choice at Wallonia Business Awards, so regional awards. We also got award really for all our work that we are doing in terms of ESG, and one of these awards is the IABM Sustainability Award.
We were very proud to receive this from IABM. Last but not least, in Belgium, which is important for us because we want to keep the people that we recruited in 2022, we also got the award of Top Employer 2023. Which recognize the fact that EVS is actually a very nice place to work. 2022 also confirmed that Axon was a good acquisition, successfully integrated, and the two aspects are important. It was confirmed and materialized with higher revenues than when Axon was alone, higher contribution to EBITDA, multimillion contracts. Axon was definitely not used to have so many multimillion contracts in a year and certainly not in U.S. Axon was not active in the big events.
This year, we have proven that thanks to the EVS brand support, vision and quality of products, EVS can be a trusted partner to deploy also new categories of products and solutions within these big events. These successes would not happen if we would not have the new kinds of relationship with channel partners. We created in the last years this new channel partner program, where we want to move our channel partners from opportunistic to sustainable partners. This kind of evolution in terms of partnership is really bearing fruit, especially in U.S. and especially in with media infrastructure. We have now more and more partners which are certified typically to work with Cerebrum, and that means that our partners can help our customers to engage into their transformation based on the technology provided by EVS.
Based on this, in fact, we have a lot of, we had a lot of successes, and now I will hand over again the floor to Serge.
Thank you, Benoit. Looking on the next slide, we continue, of course, powering the world's biggest live sporting events. Remember with our event rental business every two years, when there are such big events, we have additional revenue coming from a rental of equipment and service provisioning. That was of course, also the case in 22 with Beijing, with the World Cup, but also with Roland-Garros and the European Championship in Munich. All quite successful events. Again, next to those events, we also empower any other major events, but that is being done through our customers like for instance, recently, the Super Bowl as well, of course. Those are definitely moments where we can demonstrate and show to the rest of our customers worldwide our latest technologies. Again, we've been very successful for doing that.
That will definitely also help us so to further sustain our growth in the future. When we look onto what happened in 22, well, that was also an important year post-COVID, where we started to go back to major trade shows. You know that two of our major trade shows are in April in Vegas and in September in Amsterdam at IBC. Here we've been showing a few pictures from IBC and the feedback that we got. We got a very positive feedback from our clients, to come back to our booth. Definitely also generating quite some enthusiastic feedback. In this case, it was mainly, of course, attended by EMEIA clients and channel partners, less by U.S. customers.
We really see that after COVID, there was some regionalization of those events. We see that the industry is quite positive, that there are loads of projects being discussed, and we see that our pipeline is growing nicely. We see also that the media infrastructure, the cloud regarding the capabilities and MediaHub solution that we presented were really the stars of the booth. Don't forget, this is in fact the first time that after the acquisition of Media Infrastructure in May 2020 that we really showed our integrated solutions at a trade show in Europe. Last but not least, we presented our Balanced Computing concepts, the one that Bernard just explained, and definitely a concept that a lot of clients appreciate very much.
When we look to the main risks that we are still facing, that scarcity of electronic components and that salary inflation, and component cost inflation, it's still there. In 2022, we've been fighting hard against those two issues. We've on a regular occasion pointed out that we might have problems with delivery of equipment to our customers. Fortunately, by the good work of a lot of colleagues, we've been able to keep on delivering our equipment, but we did extend our delivery period to 20 weeks. For the whole year, we've been able to ship within those 20 weeks, so we were quite happy to be able to do that.
On the inflation side, of course, we saw inflation on the costs and on the remunerations, of course, but we have tried to compensate that by additional price increases. We continue to monitor the situation to make sure that our prices also reflect the increased cost of components and the increased cost of remuneration. Going to slide number 21, it shows our leadership team, and you see seven faces here on this slide and three with blue around them. Veerle, who joined us in November of 2021, Xavier, who was promoted to EVP Operations Project, in January, and Alex Redfern, who was promoted to our CTO also in January of 2022.
You see here a quite strong team, I think, with quite some external but also internal experience, and which in my opinion is fully geared to enable us to future growth that we envision. In that respect, I'm quite happy with the team spirit and the complementarity of all the colleagues here and the leadership team. Going to slide number 22, talking about our engagement survey. We are a technology company with a customer intimacy strategy. The main assets of our company are, of course, our colleagues, our team members, and the way that they are working towards our customers and the way they are developing new technologies. For us, it is indeed critical that engagement is further increasing.
Here you can see the results of our engagement survey that we do on a yearly basis, and we measure several elements like the generic question about is EVS a great place to work, which you can see on the left. There you can see that since 2019 up to 2022, we've always increased that achievement or that result. In 2022, we ended at 91%, which is also higher than the comparison of other companies between 500 and 1,000 employees. We see on all those different dimensions, a nice increase, and that shows us, that tell us that we are doing the right thing and that our colleagues feel quite confident and quite engaged.
Talking about the team, in 2022, we have also further increased our team size quite rapidly, and we've been able to take benefit from a very strong brand reputation. So we're quite happy with the progress that we've been doing there. For 2023, we definitely expect that we will now stay at that team size and that we'll further work on optimizing our results that we get out of the team, of course. So we feel that the team is there, that we need to further align the magnets, as we call it, to increase efficiency, that we ensure the right business priorities, and that we create value, of course.
That's what our objective is for 2023 and for the years to come. On ESG, on the next slide, definitely this becomes more and more important for us, and we also see very good progress being done on that side. We have recently being able to do our first. We have now a good visibility on the results of what that means, and that will allow us in 23 to also accept the objectives for the years to come. We are definitely also making sure in our R&D environment term that we use more efficient technologies and software languages in that respect. We make sure that we responsibly source our components, our products and services.
We make sure, of course, that the well-being of our team members are at the center of our decisions, and we make sure that we implement the right optimal governance. 2022 was also the year that we made our first sustainability report for the year 2021. All those projects or all those efforts have been clearly recognized by different organizations. We received the Silver Medal of EcoVadis and also by IABM, we received an Environmental Sustainability Award. That definitely shows that also on this aspect, we are leading in our industry. We're quite proud and happy of those results.
Going on slide number 25, there you can see that we really focus on that, and we practice and demonstrate that commitment to our team members, to our communities, and to the environment every day through practical and engaging initiatives that truly make an impact. That is definitely something that we live more and more every day. We are also supporting external athletes like Marine Simonis, who is our ESG ambassador and who is a free diver, which is a Belgian free diver. That brings me to the next chapter, important chapter of our presentation here this afternoon. That's our financial update. I will give back the floor to Veerle.
Yes. Thank you, Serge. In terms of financial update, we'll first pause at our top line performance. Top line performance that in our opinion, is a very strong performance for the year 2022, and one that makes us very proud. First of all, obviously, we have the order intake, as I mentioned it already. A total number of EUR 218.8 million in contracts were signed actually in 2022. It's an increase of 46.5%. As I mentioned, even excluding the Big Tech Contract, that is still a growth of 13.1%. Which is comforting as well, is that we actually see a strong order intake in all the regions. It's not predominantly in one or two regions.
It's really across the world that we see this strong order intake. When we look at the revenue, as I mentioned, a revenue number of EUR 148.2, so a growth of 7.7%. You have to remember, this is a growth despite a reduced big event rental revenue and despite higher delivery terms. We increased our delivery terms, hinting to a slowdown of revenue. Obviously, with our big event rental being down, you know that the organic growth that we created is definitely there. That growth is primarily driven by North America. It's also primarily driven by MI, so the former Axon acquisition, and it's also driven by the price increases that we implemented in the year 2022. We calculated a normalized growth.
Would we exclude actually the impact of there? Would we exclude also the dollar impact, which obviously helped us in 2022 as well? That growth is still up 6.3%. Again, for us, a demonstration that our top line performance and our revenue performance is definitely demonstrating growth numbers, and it's demonstrating that we are actually growing from an organic point of view. Most of all, I think that revenue performance is exactly in line with market expectations. So this one is really well managed. We still have our order book in our top line performance, which is also a performance where we're very proud of. You see in the graph, the gray, the dark gray bar is the short-term order book, and the light gray bar is the long-term order book.
You see actually that for both short-term and long-term, we have a very significant growth. For instance, for 2023, the secured sales, we move up from EUR 61 million at the start of 2022 to now EUR 85.9 million at the start of 2023. That's a growth of 68.4%. Our visibility on the future years. The long-term secured sales is growing importantly, and it's beyond actually EUR 55.9 million, obviously influenced as well by the Big Tech Contracts. Even excluding the Big Tech Contracts, that long-term visibility is growing with 30%. For us, these are very nice figures demonstrating the strength of our top line performance.
If we look at slide 28, you see actually the evolution of the revenue by pillar and the geographical split. You see actually that, in 2022, there was an acceleration of our revenue in the LSP, the sort of Live Service Providers. Server performance, it grew from 38% to 45%, following upgrade cycles that we have seen in that area. If we look at the lab market, in percentage, we go down. In absolute value, it's more or less flat. As Benoit was already mentioning, this is an area where our revenue is much more project related and therefore much more spread over time.
We are confident that long term, we will also demonstrate growth here, and we're confident to say as well that we will start the year 2023 with a total secured sales of EUR 42.3 million already in that LAB market. If we look at the geographical split, the portion of EMEA has been exactly the same as last year. EMEA is growing along the same lines as EVS in total, keeping a 46% of our total revenue in EMEA. Obviously, you see the acceleration of our revenue in NALA, growing from 27% in 2021 to 35% in 2022.
We see that APAC is dropping a little, obviously in relative performance, going from 17% to 13% primarily because of a slowdown in China, which is obviously still linked to the COVID situation in 2022 in that region. As mentioned already, APAC also had a very nice order intake in 2022, so we're pretty confident that this situation will restore shortly as a region anyhow. In the end, you see the big event rentals. The relative performance dropped from 10% in 2021 to 7% in 2022. Slight drop there on the full year number in big event rentals, which is obviously linked to the underlying rentals that we do. That was it on top line performance.
We have a second slide on profitability, exactly the same concept. You see the evolution over the past four years. First of all, we look at our gross margin. Our gross margin for 2022 ends at 66.7%, dropping actually 2.9 points compared to 2021. There are a couple of elements that influence that gross margin. First of all, we made investments into resources or team members in our support and operations teams. This is to make sure that we fuel our growth, especially in regions like North America, and make sure that we continue to deliver the support that our customers deserve. It's explaining 1.4 points of the entire gap. There's a mix of solutions.
Media infra is taking a bigger portion overall in the solution, driving actually a reduction of the average margin, growth profit margin that is realized. It is explaining 1.1 points. Then there's an one-off impact that is actually a consequence of the implementation of the ERP system that we did in October of this year. That ERP system forced us to implement actually a much more granular follow-up of our inventory flows. Out of that more granular follow-up, it was decided that we wanted to write off a part of an impact in our P&L, which is also explaining 0.4 points.
All these elements together, we have a positive element or negative element, but we have a positive element there as well, which is obviously the profit improvement that we try to drive within our solutions. It only generated 0.1 points, and it's something that we will continuously focus on in the future because ideally, that number is a little bit higher. I think this is the way how we try to balance off, yeah, the price increases with the cost increases that we see, like inflation, like custom components increases, et cetera. Our gross margin is ending below, market expectations.
It is ending below market expectations with 2.2%. In my opinion, it's primarily linked to obviously the one-off impact in inventory processes and probably an underestimation of the mix of solutions. If we look at the operating expenses, those operating expenses include other revenue and other expenses and also ESOP bookings. They have been growing. They have been growing up to the level of EUR 67.1 million in 2022, a total growth of 14.3%. Which is in line with the guidance that we provided. It seems like an impressive increase, but it's mostly linked, first of all, to post-COVID spending patterns. We are back to a new normal on expenses like travel expenses linked to our marketing spend, et cetera, et cetera.
We engage, again, at a very high level with our customers, both on-site and both during events. It is an important element for us. A lot of those elements are explained by those post-COVID spending patterns. Obviously, there's also a part linked to the investment in additional team members that we did in 2022 to fuel our growth. There's a part linked to inflation, not only inflation of labor costs, but for instance, also inflation of our energy prices. We find it back in our fuel costs for our company cars, but we find it back as well in our, yeah, utility costs for maintaining the facilities. Again, that operating expense is fully in line with the market expectation. Going on to the EBITDA, we realized an EBITDA of EUR 31.7 million.
It is a drop of 14.5%. Obviously, the EBIT is the result of the growth margin performance and the OpEx expenses together with the revenue, and that EBITDA margin of 21.4%. This is where we ended below the market expectations by 5.3%. I think this is definitely something where the market had expected us a little bit higher. Looking at the financial structure. I think it is important to mention that in earnings per share, we actually beat the market expectations. We realized an earnings per share of EUR 2.29 per share. It is a decline compared to 2021. 2021, we still realized EUR 2.57 per share, a decline of 10.8%.
Again, it's in line with the market expectations, and it's even above market expectations. That is thanks to an important net profit that we were able to generate. Even if our EBITDA performance was perhaps a little bit deception, we were able to recover that in net profit. Basically, it's thanks to two things. First of all, proactive cash management and exchange rate management. We were able to generate EUR 600K additional financial income compared to 2021, just by ensuring that we proactively take care of our cash and our exchange rate. We also had a one-off benefit in taxes following excess taxes that we paid in 2021 that were worth EUR 0.9 million.
This has led to a nice net profit performance and a nice earnings per share performance as well. We do point out an evolution on our net working capital. You might see that our net working capital increased quite a lot comparing the balance sheet at the end of 2021 with the balance sheet at the end of 2022. We move up from a EUR 54.4 million to EUR 81.2 million. It seems impressive. It's a total increase of EUR 26.9 million, but it is easily explained by two events. First, the investment that we do in a proactive management of our inventories. That's to make sure that we respect our delivery terms towards our clients. That is a EUR 2.8 million increase.
The rest of the increase is linked actually to increased trade receivables. Why is that? Why is that so? It is actually because our trade in receivables, we increased them with more than EUR 50 million in December 2023. This is an expected impact after the implementation of our ERP system. With the implementation of our ERP system in October of this year, we had a block on invoicing for about six weeks, and this in a quarter where we have the highest volume. Obviously it generated a lot of invoices during the month of December that obviously are not due yet by our clients by the end of December. It's definitely a temporary impact.
We expect to recover on this in first quarter of 2023, but we thought it was important to point out anyhow. You also still see in the graph that overall the receivables do evolve in line with our overall sales volume. Also there, we're quite happy with the progress on receivables despite the fact that the ERP has forced us to delay some elements in the fourth quarter. We thought to give also an update on the intangible assets, so intangible assets that are categorized under IAS 38. We launched in 2022 for the first time an internal development of two important projects. They're quite stand-alone projects and are planned to considerably contribute to the growth of the company as of 2024.
You will see that, on those two projects, we spent in 2022, EUR seven and a half million, exactly in line with our expectations. You will see that for next year, we expect to spend on those two projects still EUR 6.2 million. Those developments, they're followed up internally on a very regular basis. That's to ensure progress and outcome are in line with the business plans that were designed. The costs are currently capitalized on the balance sheet. You see them under the intangible assets. In this area, you may expect a launch of a solution announcement, somewhere in second half of 2023. It might be at the IBC. We are still looking at that planning, but this is what you may expect in this area.
When we go to the outlook, I think this is still a very important section as well. First of all, the outlook and the guidance for 2023. As you might have realized already from our top-line performance, we start the year 2023 with the highest order book in the history of EVS. It's a total order book of EUR 141.8 million. Out of that EUR 1.8 million, EUR 85.9 million is to be recognized in revenue in 2023. That volume is going up with 68% year-over-year.
If you know that we have EUR 85.9 million somehow already secured for 2023, you might understand actually that we do set a revenue guidance for 2023 that is demonstrating a growth compared to 2022, and a growth without any big event rental income in 2023. Again, we're confident that we can demonstrate organic growth there, and so our revenue guidance for this year is going to be in the range of EUR 145 million-EUR 155 million. In terms of costs, 2023 will be the year where we stabilize our growth, so we have no further growth planned in team size, nor is there an expected increase of our CapEx envelope.
It is our ambition to demonstrate profitable growth, meaning that both revenue and cost control will be very important in 2023, especially also given the volatile macroeconomic environment. In terms of dividend proposal, EVS will propose to the ordinary general meeting of shareholders a dividend proposal of at EUR 1.6 per share for the year 2022. This proposal is in line with the dividend policy that we issued earlier in 2022, and it is consisting of a base growth dividend of EUR 1.1 per share, and an exceptional growth dividend of EUR 0.50 per share, as to recover the year 2020, the COVID year, obviously.
In November 2022, we already distributed an interim dividend of EUR 0.50, which makes that there's a remaining dividend to be paid subject to partner conditions and subject to the approval of the ordinary general meeting of EUR 1.1 per share in May of this year. That's it for the financial update.
Thank you, Veerle. Let me conclude here indeed with our conclusions. Six key learnings for the year, that is, what I would like to talk about here. First, is we see the industry further consolidating, and we definitely have an ambition also to participate further in that consolidation, of course. We see that the big tech providers are on the place, huh? They are both a partner, a technology partner, and a customer. We see that, we have quite some opportunities, that are being generated by those big tech providers in the live production environment. That is also, something we're happy to see.
We see that infrastructure is the cornerstone of big changes. We definitely see quite some opportunities to further grow our revenue and our profits in the future, thanks to our media infrastructure business. We see as a fourth topic that the business models are shifting from CapEx to OpEx or a combination of both. We feel that we are well-positioned to take benefit of that. We know that the cloud is just one of the enablers. With our Balanced Computing approach, we have the right solution and the right message that we bring to our customers. Overall, we feel that definitely we are on good track, and you can see that with the various indicators like the order intake and the order book for this year. We are quite positive about that.
We go to slide number 37, we look at the focus points for 2023, we see following topics. We will continue to deliver those large multi-year modernization projects that we have been winning over the last years. We'll continue helping our customers who are still using our previous versions of XT service to transit or to transition to our XT-VIA service before the end of support that will happen at the end of this year. We'll continue to leverage our new solutions to win more deals in 2023. We'll continue to expand our solutions, offering both organically and through acquisitions and strategic partnerships. We'll confirm contracts that are linked to future major events, that's also our plan in this year.
Last but not least, we'll also focus on and improve the cost control for the company. That brings me to my last slide number 38, with the conclusion. We feel that our PLAYForward strategy is definitely starting to generate the expected results, and we see that in our revenue growth and in the growth of our order intake, of course. As Veerle said, we plan no further investments in our cost structure, and we definitely want to make sure that in 2023 we have a good cost control and that we further benefit from the investments that we made over the last years.
You've heard Veerle say that our revenue guidance for 2023 is between EUR 145 million and EUR 155 million, which is quite a nice challenge, knowing that we are in an even year without big event rental revenue. Last but not least, that we target a dividend of EUR 1.6 for the year 2022, which is subject to the approval of the ordinary general meeting of shareholders, of course. All in all, we are quite happy with the progress that we made in 2022. We know we still have some challenges in front of us, but we feel that we are on the right way to achieve our ambition to over the next years to further grow our market share and eventually become that number one in our industry.
I think that we are done here and that we can take some questions from the audience.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To restore your question, please press star one one again. We will now take the first question. It comes from the line of Guy Sips from KBC Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Thank you. Are you hearing me?
Yes, we can hear you. Hey.
Thank you. Our first question is on the order book. Is it based on the order book and the information that you gave during the presentation to estimate that this will be one of the first years where LSP and LAB will be quite similar in size? That's the first question. Do you expect this growth to be front loaded or rather back-end loaded in the air?
Okay. Thank you, Guy, for those questions. In general, we expect that our growth will come from the LAB market. Still the LSP market will continue to stay a stronghold of ours. We'll definitely keep protecting that market, but we know that the future growth will mainly be fueled by our LAB business. To come back to your other question about front loaded or back loaded, I would say we expect an even distribution of that of our revenues and our order intake. We see no specific reason to think it would be more the one or the other one.
an additional question on the cost side. an awful lot of your costs are out of your hands, salary costs. Yeah. Veerle was also referred. how sure are you that you are able to keep your costs under control while most of these costs are out of your hands? giving that, yeah, I think the market is lagging a bit guidance. You're very good in giving the market some top line guidance, could it be helpful to give us some guidance on EBIT? Thank you.
Yeah. I think I'll answer this question. We're not mentioning that there will not be an increase in our cost side. True, you have a reality in terms of inflation. We have a reality as well in terms of flow through of team members that we hired in 2022 and 2023. Typically we don't give a cost guidance or an EBIT guidance yet in first quarter. We tend to do that after the results of Q1. I think the important indication that we can already provide, there's no further investment planned. Just a comment as well.
As per the guidance, I think historically we've given a guidance on revenue and on OpEx. We tend to change that. In second, well, after the first quarter results, we tend to give guidance on EBIT. We believe that that measure leads less to confusion. You may expect that from us after the results of Q1. At this point in time, it's just some indications of how this is evolving. We will refine that guidance in second quarter.
Okay. That would be very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take the next question. It comes from the line of Alexander Craeymeersch from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Congratulations on the nice results, the whole team. I was just wondering if you say no more CapEx than this year, does that then mean also that we're going back to the normal of zero capitalization of intangibles? Or do we take the new, EUR 8 million a year as somewhat the new normal? The second question related to that would be also if that related project is launched in 2024, I think, it was never disclosed what it was exactly, but, what would the depreciation rate be on those additional capitalizations? I'll start with those questions.
Yeah.
maybe have some follow-ups.
Yeah. Alexander, happy to answer those. In terms of intangibles, I think I mentioned in the slide on intangible assets. We don't expect any new projects to be added. We will stick to the two projects. We expect a slight reduction of the spend on those two intangible assets in 2023. We move from EUR 7.5 million to about EUR 6.2 million. It will slightly decrease. But no new elements will be added. No new projects are to be added. When it comes to depreciation rate, we expect that depreciation will start out as of 2024 and over a period of 5 years.
As from 2024, we can expect the capitalization to go back to zero.
Yes. Correct.
Unless we have other major-.
Unless, yeah.
would come. I think you're right. We would expect that to go back to a much lower level.
Okay. Yeah, I know you said you could not, you could not give any guidance on the cost side, but just wondering, maybe, basically, assuming that there is no big event in 2023, or at least less, so it's all going to come from LSP and LAB. Just wondering what, if you could give us some margin difference between the two elements, because obviously LAB is now going to grow faster, than LSP. I just wondering what the margins are or how do we look at that, and how much also on the top line is inflation of your price increases, and maybe when you see the timing of those price increases.
Then on the bottom line, how much cost inflation do we need to pencil in? I guess you already have a bit of a good view on that. All right, that's it from my side.
Okay. Well, regarding inflation and price increases, our aim is to do the same thing as in 2022. That is, implement 2 moments of price increases. We'll be looking at what is the real inflation of remuneration and cost components, of course, and then we'll try to be as close as possible to those numbers. We know that when we do a price increase, it takes a few months before it really gets into the market and it really influences the orders that we get from our customers. Our aim is to continue adapting our pricing to reflect the increases in inflation that we are going through.
I think in terms of cost inflation. Yes, we are a company operating on the Joint Industrial Committee 209, and that foresees an annual correction for inflation in July of every year. We have expectations that that correction in July for the Belgian employees will be around 7.5%. This is obviously still a guidance that we follow. We'll have to see how that evolves in the next few months, but that is what we take into account.
Just if because the price increases are lagging a bit, the cost inflations, obviously. I'm just wondering, do we then, because that would imply that the gross margin and also, the EBITDA margin would decline a bit? Is that a correct assumption then to make?
Our objective is to is to compensate to make sure that we compensate cost of components and inflation in our prices. We should improve from a growth margin point of view, the margin by solution. Now, will there be an effect of change in mix? Yes, we still expect an effect of change in mix in terms of growth profit because we still expect MediaInfra to take a bigger portion of the cake. It's pure mechanical, I would say, rather than losing price power or losing growth margin model.
Okay. correct that, we can expect a bit the gross margin to come down a bit. That's a correct assumption.
Marginally, yes.
Yeah. Okay. All right. That's, that's all from my side. Thank you. I will leave the floor to colleagues.
Thank you. We will now take the next question. It comes from the line of David Vagman from ING. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for taking my question. The first is on 2023 and the top line outlook. If I do a bit the math, and maybe this is fair or unfair, it's a question to say that the growth that you expect, excluding big events, is more on price increase than on volume. Then a second question that related also to top line, how do you view the mix evolving for looking at your order book for 2023, between LAB, LSP, media infra, and how this could impact the growth margin? You've alluded to that. These are my let's say two first question.
Yeah, last point on the also on the order book. How much state of the tailwind is the migration of the install base of XTserver to moving to XT-VIA still is? Where to expect, let's say at the end of 2023, the migration to be? Thank you.
Thank you, David, for those questions. To answer your question about the top line growth, is that mostly into price increase or volume driven. We think for the moment that will be a combination of both. That is expectation for this year. Indeed, this is an uneven year. No big event rental revenue, but the top line growth, as you can see it for the moment, is a mix of price increase and volume. Definitely price increase has an important impact in that. When we talk about our install base, we see for the moment that we have launched our current generation of the XT-VIA service in 2018. That's quite some years ago.
We see an acceleration last year. For the moment we are seeing that we are somewhere between 30%-40% of our install base that has been upgraded. That still gives us some room for doing further upgrades over the next years. We have at the end of this year, the end of support for our previous version of the XT server. That should normally also convince certain customers to take a decision and to move to the new version. We would expect to see that upgrade to continue also this year.
Thank you. We will now take next question. It comes from the line of Heinz Deweer from Investor AM. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Hello. Good afternoon, and thank you for organizing the conference call. You hear me?
Yes, we can.
Yes. Okay. Thank you. Hi. Firstly, you expect a bit similar revenue in 2023 as in 2022, but your order book for this year is already 68% higher. Even without big event rental, there is quite a big discrepancy compared to last year's outlook in connection with the order book. Where is that different exactly? Does it maybe mean that you look at the current guidance with a high confidence?
Well, let's not forget that in 2023 we will not have the big event rental. If you compare the numbers that we give in the guidance of EUR 145 million-EUR 155 million, you should compare that to a number of EUR 139 million in 2023. The EUR 139 million is a figure without the big event. You see definitely there is an increase in those in the revenues. It's not at the same level, but definitely we expect an increase. Do we feel confident about the guidance that we give? Yes, we feel confident about that guidance.
There is always a level of insecurity in our business, of course, and therefore, we still hope, of course, that we could do more potentially, but that will only be seen during the year, of course. We are still cautious about those projections, especially in the beginning of the year. Don't forget that this is also mainly in the project-based business, so the visibility or the certitude that we have to get that business in needs to build throughout the year. I can only say that we feel indeed quite confident about the revenue guidance that we give at this moment.
Thank you. Other question is it possible to share with us what % total payroll costs are as a part of the total operating expenses?
I think you'll probably get more information in the annual report at that point in time. I think I would refer to the annual report that will be published shortly.
Okay. Thank you. I think someone else asked a que-- but I had a bit problems with the line. Could you share with us the difference in margin between LAB and LSP?
No, that's indeed a KPI that we don't disclose. That is not what we plan to do.
We don't really follow it from that point of view either. We put all our solutions in LSP and in LAB. For us, that is something that is not really triggered separately.
Okay. Thank you. Last question. What is your tax rate guidance for the current year?
Yeah, I think, I think we will probably be in a range of max 10%, I think. With the current investments that we do in resource and development and innovation, I think if we correct our tax rate for 2022, with the one-off correction and with still some tax latency from the past, we are rather around the 10%.
Okay, that's clear. Thank you. Thank you for your answers. That's all from me.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Welcome. Thank you. Thanks.
We will now take the next question. It comes from the line of Guy Sips from KBC Securities.
Yes. Sorry. I have one additional question on the timing of price increases. I think in 2022, we saw price increases in February and in September. Is that, yeah, also the case in 2023? Do you see some, yeah, buying in anticipation of potential increases or people, yeah, already ordering because they expect price increases? What's the case of the reaction of your clients in that scope? Thank you.
Thank you, Yves, for those questions. The idea is indeed to apply the same timing as in 2022 when regarding those price increases. That is indeed our objective. Some customers indeed, when they see that the price increases are coming, are launching orders that they may be delivering in 6 months, for instance. They just take advantage of the lower price. To put orders that they might otherwise put later into the year. That is what we see sometimes happening.
Thank you. We will now take the next question. One moment, please. It comes from the line of Alexander Craeymeersch from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Hi. Just a small follow-up on the Axon and the Cerebrum, because I found it quite interesting how you deployed it in North America. I was just wondering how is the competition there reacting to you taking the market share, and what were the alternatives there? Thank you.
Yes. Thank you, Alexander, for that. Definitely, we come with innovative solutions when Benoit was referring to MediaInfra Strada, which is a routing solution that is a quite innovative solution and approach and quite different to what some of our competitors are providing and which is quite appealing to our customers. Our approach with MediaInfra Strada is that we take our technology like Neuron and like Cerebrum. We package that together with switches or routers from, for instance, Arista or Cisco, and that brings a quite innovative solution to the market. When we compare that with the, the incumbents in our industry and how they do that, is they have been building their own switches or own routers.
They have a quite completely different approach than what we have here. We bring in, I would say, the best of breed from the IT environment, and our own technology, and that brings quite some advantages compared to competition. That definitely is a major differentiator which helps us to build upon the capacity of some big players like Arista and like Cisco and bring that into the live video world. That is really definitely a major differentiation. We've seen quite some big American customers switching to this and indeed abandoning some of their previous suppliers that they, as far as we understand, are happy to leave behind them.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take the next question. It comes from the line of David Vagman. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes, sir. Thank you. One more question on the capitalization of R&D, you know, the spending on this project. How much costs that are allocated to the project should actually, moving into 2024, should be moving back, let's say with internal basically, staff affected to the project and should be moving back to the P&L. Is it really that from a cash point of view, you know, that we need to see a step down in expense, cash expense, be the CapEx or, you know, expense, really coming down EUR 6 million-EUR 7 million to EUR 0 or EUR 1 million, or actually you've got some flow back to the P&L, if you see what I mean. Thank you.
Yeah. I think we expect a flow back as of January 2024. Can that timeline still move a little? Yes, it can still move a little. In principle, we foresee it over five years as from January 2024. Yeah, it means one-fifth of the spend to be depreciated in 2024 then at least.
From a cash point of view, it's true. Definitely, at that point in time, given the fact that we're not talking about additional projects at this point in time, there will be no cash, additional cash flowing to these investment activities. Yes, absolutely, that is an operating cash that liberates itself.
Yeah, let me add to that some of those resources that we use on those CapEx plans this year and last year will be reduced, huh? Because some of that is also with external partners, huh? Which will indeed once those projects are finalized, will not be continued like that, huh? Definitely there will be an a capacity reduction, if I may say so, of our R&D department. External capacity will be reduced at that moment in time when those projects are ending.
No, very clear. So there is a small part, let's say, of internal staff, EVS staff, let's say, which was working on this project. From a P&L point of view, you will have the DNA, the depreciation on the capitalization. As well as some, I don't know, engineers being allocated to projects at EVS. It's always tiny, it's not much, let's say, the internal staff being reaffected, reallocated to, sorry, to projects which are expensed. It's a development which is expensed.
Yeah. Well, that's something that we will further investigate you throughout the year. Also for our R&D activities, we also have some external support. But you're right, by the end of the year, we'll have to decide or we'll have to have a plan clearly set out to see how do those internal engineers of EVS, how will they be allocated, huh? That is an impact for the year 2024, of course.
Okay. Right. Thank you. Thank you both.
Thank you. We will now take the next question. It comes from the line of Alexander Craeymeersch from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Alexander, your line is open.
Yes, apologies. Actually, I think my hand should been not have been up. Now that I have you on the line, just to follow up on the David question. David's question. If I recall from the last September call, it was 50% internal staffing and 50% external staffing. Just to confirm that. Thank you.
Yes, that is correct. Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would like hand back over to the speakers for final remarks.
I think, we still have one question Michaël Roeg from Degroof Petercam, who apparently cannot put him in the waiting line.
No problem. I will open his line.
I think I'll-
Michaël, line is open now.
Okay, good. Thank you. I've been very unsuccessful with star one one, but thank you for opening. Most of my questions were already asked by my colleagues, but I have two smaller ones left. Will you be generating that interest income now that interest rates have gone up? If so, how much will that be per year?
Yeah. Definitely, we will continue what we implemented in 2022. It is a proactive cash management. Where we can generate interest, we will generate interest. We look. We constantly monitor our position and in interest rates and in the, in dollar exposure. Yeah, that will continue. Should we expect similar results as in 2022? I think definitely so. Will it even be better with the current evolution of the interest rates? Possibly, honestly, I don't have really a forecast on that at this point in time.
Okay. I do still have a question on some of the things that were asked earlier. Of course, cost control is something that can be challenging with indexation of 7.5%. With respect to the workforce, it was 1,613 at year-end.
Yeah.
According to my calculations, if you keep that flat this year, then you'll have growth of 4% versus the average of last year. Is that a correct calculation?
I think more or less, yeah. That should be more or less right. Yeah.
Whatever the indexation, you have 4% more average employees, and then the indexation for the Belgium part of the workforce.
Correct.
That's it from my side. Thank you.
Thank you, Michael.
There are no further questions at this time. Please continue.
Well, then, I'll thank you for your participation. As you can see, we think that we are well on the way to deliver upon our promise of getting the company back into growth mode. We demonstrate now that that is definitely going in the right direction, especially on our top line. We know that our next challenge is also make sure that our bottom line is also showing that trend line. Getting also back into growth mode on our bottom line is something that we'll be focusing on more and more. Overall, we're quite happy with the progress and we're quite positive about the future. We think that all the indicators look positive. Feedback from our customers is quite positive.
We feel that we're also gaining market share compared to certain important competitors. All in all, we feel quite positive about our chances for supporting that further growth into the next years. Having said that, I'm thanking you for attending this session today.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.