Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to Axway's H1 2021 Results Presentation. My name is Arthur Carli, and I'm in charge of Investor Relations for the company. I have two reminders to make today. First, I must alert on the fact that this event is live and is being recorded. A replay of the meeting will be available as soon as possible on Axway's investor website. I would like also to remind you that today's presentation contains forward-looking estimates that are naturally subject to risk and uncertainties. Future activities and results may differ from those described today. As a reminder, Axway's risk factors are described in the company's 2020 universal registration document. With that, I wish you a very good presentation, and I would like to hand over to our CEO, Patrick Donovan.
Thank you, Arthur. Let me first start with the agenda for this first half results. I'm going to give you some operational commentary on the first half and aligned with our strategy that we announced recently. Cecile will join me and cover the first half financial results in detail. I'll come back and share the targets ambitions for the year and for the three years. We'll open it up for Q&A. Thank you all for joining us here today. We were last with you about six weeks ago. I had myself, Roland Royer, who you're very familiar in seeing, and Cecile on stage with us here together. We also had connected with us several of the executive team. We dove deeply into our current strategy, our different offerings that make up the strategy, and what we're trying to do with them.
If you have not seen our capital markets meeting, I would invite you to go to www.axway.com, and on our investor website page, you will see the capital markets meeting replay. I'd like you to go and watch it because a lot of what we're going to cover here today was covered in detail six weeks ago. I'm just going to highlight on a few key things around the strategy, give you a few operational checkpoints to tell you how we're doing, and then let Cecile go into the financials in detail. I'll have Roland join us here at the end of the year as we'll cover and go into more detail again, a bit like the capital markets say, into the operational performance. Today's really around our first half financial results, as there's not much of an update over the last six weeks.
As we went into detail around at the capital markets meeting, we covered our vision and mission clearly. Axway's goal is to enable enterprises to securely open everything. Data is the new currency, and it's used by the enterprises to really run their business, and they're using it in many different ways. We believe in order to create the most value for our customers, partners, and employees, we need to open everything with them and provide the offerings that allow them to use this data as a currency to really run their business. In this complex world of old and new systems and reality, it is really hitting our enterprise level customers hard.
They have the legacy systems that they spent 20, 30 years investing in, many of them with Axway investments, and they have to modernize and go forward and start using the data in a whole new way to run their business and to gain insights and information that's critical to them. They can't quickly replace these 20 years of investment, and they have to move forward at speed. We are looking to meet our customers where they are in that journey and help them move forward at speed. By doing this, and by aligning our strategy with our customers with this dilemma, we are helping them through two approaches. We have our historic core offerings that we've been with our customers for 20 years.
We're really focusing on that 20 years of strength and taking advantage of what we've been doing and the value we've been delivering with these products into the market with some of our products like MFT or B2B or Accounting Integration Suite, as well as many others. We're working with our customers to leverage the value they put in these systems and to build the roadmap with them and to really listen to their needs because they're looking for this investment they've made many years ago to continue to pay dividends, and they continue to look to expand with us as they're trying to run their businesses. On the other side, we have the Amplify offerings, which include our API management offering as well as many others. This is really a growth vector for us, and this represents about 20% of our total revenue.
We're pushing hard, and this is more of an innovative startup-y type environment where we have to build a secure platform to drive quickly forward. This helps our customers really take advantage of the data they have in their systems and gives them some integration layer capabilities to really exploit and utilize this information in all different ways to run their business. We have to meet our customers with these two different approaches to where they are in their journey with the product that they've bought for us or the product they need from us in the future. This we will talk about, as we mentioned in the capital markets meeting, as Axway Core, which is about 80% of our base of revenues, and Axway Amplify, which is 20% in the API approach.
We look through these two angles to continue to deliver value to the three key stakeholders we have, the employees, shareholders, and our customer base. As we took this new strategy to market, segregating between Core and Amplify, we had to deploy it, and execution and specialization is really key here. As we have mentioned, we have one play, but really two games to meet these objectives over the next three years. We have the Core side of the business, which if you look at with the Core side of the business, these were market-leading technologies and still are market-leading technologies, but the market is saturated and full. We're looking to be with the customer for the long term, and we are looking at things like customer satisfaction, net retention rate, and opportunistically to win a new client or to expand with a current client.
On the other side, on the Amplify side, we are looking to expand our market leadership to continue to attack aggressively in the market. We're looking to obtain new logos on this side of the business as well. I'm pleased on the Amplify, we were able to attain over 50% in our new logos. We were able to roll out the strategy and really execute it in the first half, while on the Amplify side, we were able to protect not only in maintenance, but in the subscription renewals now, where we had 92% of the base renewing with us. We were able to achieve and build teams to help us organize to deliver on both sides of our strategy.
Then we have a global command here at the bottom, which are things like NPS, where we have to delight our customers on both sides. That's a given in our industry. We look at measurements like net promoter score and others. That's really at the heart, when you look at that horizontal bar on the last screen where I talked about net promoter score, there's several key factors that we're tracking to drive operational excellence, net promoter score being one of them. We reported at the end of last year, we had hit our objective for our last three-year strategy, which put us in the upper quartile of software companies. Now we've improved again in the first half, going from 25, which was our score at the end of last year, to now we're up to 31.
Which continues to march in moving forward and moving us closer to operational excellence that we're looking to achieve. As I mentioned, our renewal rate on both the subscriptions and maintenance was at 92%. If you remember, year after year, I've been talking to you about 8% attrition rates on maintenance. Now it's moving over and becoming the standard across our base, both with the subscription renewals as well. A question I'm often asked is, we do a lot of migrations, and a migration is taking a customer under a license and maintenance contract. When there's an event that they need more product for us, additional offerings surrounding the current offering they have from us, or they have bought a company and there's a consolidation.
This takes the maintenance and gives us the opportunity to talk to the customer about the value of moving to subscription, either on their premise or in the cloud. We have moved about 15% of our historic base since 2018 to the subscription model. There's still quite a long runway to go here to work with our customers, to meet their needs, to add value, and to be with them for the longer term. We believe that moving to the subscription model is a good opportunity for us to go in and get closer with the customer and then to keep that pattern for the long term. This is good progress, but we still have a nice runway to go. Not all 100% of our customers with the maintenance will convert.
There'll still be 20% or 30% that may choose to stay with the license and maintenance model. We will see as time marches on, there's three, four, five years left of work to do here. I was very pleased in the first half with our signature growth. We had 29% signature growth across the operation. It continues the excellence with our go-to-market team. I was very pleased that across the board in our horizontal activities, we continue to deliver and improve. Going back to the two-focus approach with the Core and with the Amplify, we're seeing some good measurements we're tracking there as well. We had a 20% signature growth in our Core, so in our MFT and B2B and other products in the portfolio.
The NPS remains strong and above our target there of our achievement for our first half with our Core solutions, because we have to be close with our customers. We also were pleased with getting 7% of our total signature metric was in new and cross-sell. New is obvious. It's a new customer. As this is a market where a new customer often means that we replace one of our competitors, we also measure cross-sells as new customers. This would be a big enterprise client that may have another product from our portfolio in the house. When we start the process to cross-sell one of our applications, so say MFT into a B2B client. This is a new selling motion, often with a new team within the customer. We measure this as a new sale as well.
On the other side, on the Amplify side, we had over 50% new customers. We had 51% signature growth, we continued to drive into the market our message. We're pleased to see the early indication of our focused approach on these two areas. Aligned with this, I wanted to maybe mention a couple of the largest deals we had in the first half. On the core side, we've been with this one bank in the U.S. for approximately 15 years, and it started with our MFT solution in a small part of the bank.
Over the years, we've proven our value and been with the customer and continued to grow through their utilization of our software till we reached the point where we've talked to the customer about really migrating, hopefully, all their MFT flows on our solution, as they have several MFT solutions in-house, both ones of ours and others. To move to a subscription model and take advantage of the value we're delivering with our future roadmap as well. This was a fantastic example of being with our customer for the long term, providing value year after year, being stable to run their business on, and allowing us to continually work with the customer and to win with them as they're achieving their goals with our technology. On the Amplify side, I'm really pleased to see that strategy works as well.
This is an example of a deal we closed in the first half, but this is really showing what we're trying to do for the long term. This customer was a large German bank that bought our API offering for a small, little project. As we showed the value and the strength of our Amplify offering, they continued to use it to bring together and bring back in-house some of their previously separated activities and really grow with us to where we were able to go and tell the full story of Amplify, where we're taking their offering, the investments we've made, and move them into a much larger situation where they're going to be taking more and more of their business traffic through Amplify and using it to its full breadth.
We're excited on both sides that being with the customer is critical, staying with them for the long term, showing our value, and it comes back to us in our ability to continue to sell and be with them for the long term in the future. These were great deals to see come in in the first half. From the marketing side, we had Paul French head marketing with us six weeks ago, but I'll mention a few things that we covered on lightly at the capital markets meeting as well. We had our summit, which is really focused on our core and our customers, and we talked about a message of leveling up. They have our core offerings at whatever state they're in and helping run their core business.
It's time to look at ways to leveling up, bringing it either into containerization in the cloud, opening it up with APIs or providing various other opportunities for them to continue to grow their usage, to leverage the valuable data they have flowing through the system, and really help them along their roadmap going forward. We had well over 900 customers and partners at the event. It was a digital event. We created some nice pipeline, and we had fantastic NPS coming out of the event, over 45 or greater. On the other side, we are pushing into the market heavily, and you heard us using it as the opening. You hear us in the vision and mission. You see it all over our website, and we use it internally and externally. We're looking to open everything.
That's really simply what we're trying to do and help our customers do. Whether it's on the core and the investments they made in the past and helping them open up and leverage the data they've already got or in their legacy systems through putting in an integration layer or our Amplify technologies and exposing this data to use it in new and innovative ways. This branding, this messaging, these taglines are helping us drive traffic to the website and improve our awareness in the market. Both of these marketing investments have been showing good initial returns in the first six months of the year. What it's really doing is setting us up for success for the longer term, and we're seeing some good proof points with the first half results.
We were able to finish at EUR 138 million of revenue, which was a growth of 5.2% organically over the first half of last year. We are able to bring back some of the profits I've talked about. We'd start returning to the shareholders after the three-year period of investment. We're able to start giving back some of that for the investment we made and drop some of the top-line growth to the profit on operating activities, which finished nicely at 7.6%, up quite a bit from last year. We had strong subscription growth of 45%, and that was driven by a strong growth in our ACV period-over-period, almost 41%. I touched on a few of the financial highlights, now I want to turn it over to Cecile to go deeper into all the financials that make up these great first half results. Cecile?
Thanks a lot, Patrick. Good day, everyone. Let me now walk you through the first half income statement. Total revenue, as you can see, were up 5.2% organic and 1.3% in total due to a continued weakness on the dollar. Cost of sales decreased around both services and subscription costs as planned. Our gross profit is 69.1% versus 65.4% in the prior first half. As part of our plan, we were also able to pull back some of the operating expenses, some naturally and some due to not being able to travel. As planned, our R&D decreased in the first half and was part of the strategy we had to improve margin. Sales and marketing and G&A remained relatively flat. We were able to generate a higher margin at EUR 10.5 million or 7.6% of our revenue.
Our operating profit is inclusive, as a reminder, of amortization on intangible assets, non-cash stock incentive expenses, as well as some restructuring costs we had due to the close of some offices. With that, our net profit finished at EUR 1.8 million or EUR 0.08 per share versus the EUR 0.28 per share in 2020. Overall, we can say we had a good first half to start 2021 in line with our new strategy cycle. Let me now go into details on the revenue by activity. During the first half of 2021, we continued to see the acceleration in the changing business model. The shift away from licenses still shows a decreasing situation of 7.5%, as Patrick Donovan just mentioned. This was offset by the continued growth we had in our subscription revenue with a 45% organic growth.
When added to maintenance revenue, this means we are reaching above 80% of our revenues under recurring contracts. Maintenance revenue dropped 12%, as expected with the drop in license revenue over the prior years and consistent with our expectations. Service revenue slightly missed the target, dropping 1.5%, but there are still regions like EMEA or APAC, where the impact of COVID is still present and slowing down our activity on these regions. Overall, our revenue finished at EUR 148.4 million, up from the EUR 136 million we had reported in the prior year. As we can see, the market continues to push towards subscription offering models, and we will, on our end, continue to push strong into this trend.
To focus on the license and maintenance activities, and as mentioned on the previous slide, we experienced, as you see on the chart, a 7.5% organic decrease in the license activity, mainly due to a weak Q2 with a double-digit drop of 13.7%, which is still less than the budgeted decrease of 9%. This confirms the general move to subscription. On the maintenance side, as anticipated and consistently with the license revenue decrease, but also with the migration to subscription, we have a 12% drop. As a reminder, our maintenance had a standard net attrition rate of around 8% for many years now, which is not compensated by new license signatures. This is really confirming the decreasing trend we were expecting on those revenue activities. If we move to subscription, as you can see, we have quite the opposite picture.
The revenue grew strongly in both Q1 and Q2 in almost every region. Customer managed on-premise subscription required us to book EUR 22.4 million of upfront revenue versus the EUR 11.8 million we had last year for the same period. Result, we have the 45% organic growth in the first half for our subscription revenue. On this chart, as Patrick mentioned, you will find the breakdown of the signature metric calculation which you are familiar with, as we have already been sharing this with you. It grew strongly at 28% in the first half of the year, driven by the new subscription ACV. Let's now take a look at the balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents finished at EUR 23.7 million as of end of June, up from the EUR 16.2 million at the end of the year.
Our DSO went up to 94 days, which is mainly due to the increase in the customer managed revenue, as I explained six weeks ago during the capital market meeting. Far, we didn't experience any material issues with our cash collection. Our current deferred revenues was up to EUR 74.4 million, up from the EUR 60.6 at the end of the year, which is partly due to timing of contract renewals. We don't have any concern on this topic. Our total assets and total equity remain quite stable with our end of year figures. Our cash flows for the first half of 2021 is aligned with the cash flow for 2020. Our free cash flow was EUR 16.1 million in the first half of 2021 versus the EUR 4.9 million for the first half 2020.
As we continue to grow, our free cash flow will continue to improve, as detailed previously during the capital market meeting. We also had the timing effect of some tax receivables received in the first semester this year, unlike previous year, where we received those in the second semester. This is coming as an offset to the cash decrease generated by the conversion to the subscription model. With regard to our banking covenants, they were fully met, and we still have the ability of our credit line to use if needed. Now, with that, I will turn over to Patrick for a review of 2021 targets and future ambitions. Patrick?
Thanks, Cecile. First, let me make the statement we've been making for almost a year and a half now, that although we continue to see good positive signs in moving forward to have our regions come out of the COVID crisis and being in lockdown, and we're seeing regions like the U.S. and Europe start to opening up and come back to some state of normalcy, we still are seeing some unfortunate signs in the marketplace. Like we've had our Sydney and our Singapore offices go through some lockdowns again. So we cannot say with certainty of what the next six months could hold.
Given this limited visibility on what will happen with the pandemic situation, we still have the ability to look out and from the pipeline, from the activity we have in front of us, and the actions we've taken in the first six months of the year, we're able to confirm our 2021 revenue guidance with organic revenue growth of between 2% and 4%, and to also confirm our profit on operating activities between 11% and 13% of our revenue. Clearly, with our first half results, we feel confident that we should achieve within the range we set forth for the beginning of the year. We are looking forward to driving towards actually the top end of our guidance.
This conference and today's event, we've really focused on the financials because, as I mentioned, six weeks ago, we were with you and went through a lot more detail on our strategy. A key point I'd like you to take away from this, and for me as a CEO, is that when we were planning for this conference, really the message is we are delivering what we expected. We've built the team to do this. We've built a budget to do it. This is what we expected for the first half. The visibility in front of us had us growing nicely in the first half, and the challenge comes in the back half, but we still see clearly the path to get to our guidance. We've taken all the necessary actions over the past three years to be in this position.
We've had now six quarters of consistent forecast ability of the quarter. As we go five, six weeks into the quarter, we have good visibility for how it's going to look. We have a good pipeline to look at for the coming quarter. We are now operating at a nice, strong, steady pace that we have the team to deliver, that we've done the right things over the past three years, and now we're working, how do we take these good results and really try to grow even more and to push up the margin and to now start looking at M&A and how it could help us accelerate in those activities. When we look forward to the 2023 and closing out our three-year strategy, I'd like to be up here telling you that we're going to be at EUR 500 million of revenue.
Obviously, that requires some M&A, and we're out looking, and we're getting engaged now. I'm not going to share any of our looks with you, as I'm sure a lot of you would like to hear. It's just too early in the cycles, but we're back looking and exploring and trying to be really focused on how M&A could serve our ambitions. It's either going to help us with the core consolidation or some new offerings that could help our customers in our Core, and we're listening to them there, or on our Amplify. How can we leverage what we're already doing in Amplify and accelerate that? We're back looking for these opportunities that help us push for the EUR 500 million revenue of top line.
We look forward to also continuing the tuning and the work around the expenses to allow that revenue to drop to our profit on operating activities to get back over 15% and really target closer to 20%, which is my expectation as we come out of this period. Just personally, I want to continue to deliver again over EUR 1 per share consistently year after year and push that higher and higher to give value back to you, our shareholders. With those comments over the first half and reminding you to go look at our capital markets meeting, if you haven't been exposed to our full strategy, I'll open it up for Q&A. Operator, could you open it up for questions?
Sure. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question or make a contribution on today's call, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star two. You'll be advised when to ask your question. On the web, click on the Ask a Question button in the bottom right-hand corner of the player. All right, we've got a question submitted in the queue.
Okay.
Our first question comes from the line of Antoine Lensel from Kepler Cheuvreux. Antoine, go ahead with your question.
Yes, good evening, everyone. I hope you hear me well. My first question is on the subscription division. It seems there is around EUR 7 million of upfront revenue recognized in Q2, or around 50% of the subscription revenues. I was just wondering if it's one important contract or more a bundle of many contracts. It's my first question. Secondly, it does have a significant impact on margin. The gross margin of subscription reached 74% in H1. Do you think you will be able to maintain this level of profitability over the full year? Thank you.
I'll make a first general comment and then hand it over to Cecile. We were pleased to see that we grew, across all contract types, actually, in both opportunity numbers and value. We didn't have that one big home run account that drove everything. We had both the large deals we had hoped to get in our forecast and a nice volume, increasing volume over the first half of transactions at the mid and small scale. Across the board, the team performed well, and that's what helped grow all the revenue, but inclusive of the upfront subscription. Cecile, don't know if you want to touch on anything there or on the margin.
On the margin part, I think that, if we expect the increase of our customer managed solution, we could expect to be able to maintain the level of margin you just mentioned. It should remain relatively stable through to the end of the year.
Okay. Thank you very much. Maybe a follow-up, if I may.
Yeah.
Can I go ahead?
Yes, please.
Yes.
Thank you. My second question is on France activity. You mentioned a difficult comparison basis, but the top line was flat in H1 2020. Could you give us more color on how was the commercial dynamic in H1, and how is the pipeline looking entering into H2? Thank you.
If I understood the question, it was around the comment in the press release about the tough comparison for France in the first half of 2020. We had some nice deals in France in 2020, the French business is a historic business for us. We've been present all our life. We were founded in France, we have some very large customers that have been with us for a long time that are on some older contract models that come back to us every three or four years. We had some of those come back to us in 2020, which makes the comparison hard. The dynamic nature of the first half of 2021, and then looking forward, we're seeing good performance really and hitting the target we set in front of them in three of our four regions.
We track North America, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC. Three of the four regions were either at their quotas or above for the first half. The one that wasn't was Brazil, which, as you can imagine, they're still hit with a lot of the COVID activity. We're seeing some really good activity locally and some of the new market penetration we're doing. We're trying a program in Brazil, which is really getting good traction, but they're not able to go on-site and sell in a way that is traditionally the Latin American culture and way to engage with the customers. We saw great performance in APAC, North America, EMEA, and we see the pipeline to do the same for the second half of the year. It's quite a good spread and quite dynamic activity in front of us as well.
Okay, thank you very much.
Operator, do we have any other questions?
There are no further questions in the queue, so I'll hand you back over for the written questions.
Patrick, can you hear me well?
We can.
Great. I've got a question from Jean-Antoine Grau at IDMidCaps. He's surprised that after the strong H1 result, we didn't revise the guidance for the year. He's asking, do you expect an increase in expenses? Or maybe it's because H1 results has lower expenses, still because of the COVID situation.
Really, it's how our budget was built. I'd said that we're doing good against our plans. In our plans, we had some nice deals that we expected to have in the first half. When we looked at the full-year pipeline and the opportunity and the comparisons to last year, this was just a bit the nature where we expected a strong first half, and we did actually a little better than that plan. We had to take a lot of tuning actions in the first half that will deliver us some improvement in the second half on the cost side. The combination of the two was all our plan and our budget. Based on having a little better first half than we planned, we're able to say we're looking towards the top end of the guidance.
As Q4 is always such a strong quarter for us, that we really don't have that visibility to change our guidance until around October, quite frankly. We're not going to change our guidance. We're just really happy with the first half and look forward to pushing towards the top end of our guidance.
Thank you. Next question is from [Alekson Plew] at CM-CIC.
Okay.
What would be the envelope you are willing to spend on M&A? Can we foresee EUR 100 million through M&A on the EUR 500 million revenue target?
The envelope is really on what makes sense, and for the offering and for what we're trying to do. Acquiring EUR 100 million of revenue, if it's just that, it's probably going to be an acquisition around our core, and more than likely a consolidation type acquisition around our MFT or B2B offerings. The multiples on those are strong. Everything in the market, well-priced, let's say, at the moment. It's not going to be the same as in Amplify, which has high multiples. Something in the core, if you were looking to buy EUR 100 million of revenue, the multiples there are anywhere from one and half, all the way to four or five. It just really depends on the target, and does it make financial sense for us to take that risk.
I wish I could give you better guidance, but it's going to be as opportunistic as it takes to find the right solution, because the market is very aggressive at the moment.
Thanks. Next question is from Derric Marcon at Societe Generale. What assumptions did you take for H2 in terms of marketing and communication spend and business travels?
On the marketing side, we're looking to spend a little heavier on the marketing side than we did in the first half. On the business travels I don't.
Yeah. Same for the business travel. We hope that the situation is going to be closer to a new normal, and that the teams will be able to start traveling again. Yes, we have budgeted a second half with more travel than the first.
In fact, if I recall, we've postponed our sales reward club for the top performing sales teams.
That's right.
We're looking forward to hopefully getting together with the last two years of top performers here in October. Fingers crossed we get to do that. Just in general, we'd like to see our sales teams and our pre-sales teams getting in front of customers if they're willing to have us, because that's really how we build these long-term relationships. It's not only by the phone and by video, but to get in front of them and work with them as a team and really hear their problems.
I actually just took a trip to Spain at the end of last week and met one of our large customers down there. It's so invaluable to just sit with the customer and listen to what they're trying to do and where they're trying to go so you fully understand and get your questions answered. You could build your roadmaps with them or hear where they want to see our technology go over the coming years. We expect it to go up. COVID could change things, clearly.
Next question is also from Derric Marcon at Societe Generale. Can you comment the trend by country for Q2 2021?
The trend by country as far as the revenue trends by country or the.
I guess he's talking about revenue, yeah.
Yeah. Let me open to the table so I don't make any mistakes and jog my memory a bit. Clearly, North America, the deal I referenced in my example was a Q2 deal, and it was a nice large deal we did with that long-term bank, which was part of, but not the only reason we really experienced good growth. Americas, we group Latin America. Although the U.S. region had really strong growth, Latin American, specifically Brazil, has been a bit challenged with the COVID, but it's not as large portion of the overall Americas revenue. France had the tough comparable, we're seeing France drop. France still did a decent Q2, and as expected, just not in line with the comparable of the prior year.
Our rest of Europe countries, which incorporate Italy, Spain, Benelux region, Germany, U.K., they did a really nice second quarter compared to the prior year, so we are pleased with their performance. APAC continues to vacillate. It goes up and down. You can have either right now, depending a bit with COVID, unfortunately, but often, the APAC region, one deal will make a difference if they grow or not. So if I remember right, Q1 grew, and yeah, Q1 grew quite nicely, 50%, but Q2 was a little drop. For the first half, we were very pleased with the APAC region and pleased with all they're doing down there.
Thanks. Last question from Derric.
Okay.
Why Q2 subscription, SaaS revenue, excluding upfront, were flat sequentially?
We didn't have so many new managed cloud customers in the first half, first quarter, which would roll into the first half. A lot of the subscription signatures were customer managed, and we had a few important attritions on some of that through the COVID period. I think I mentioned at either the last end of year or capital markets day, we lost a few customers through the COVID, like the U.S. Postal Service and some airline customers that just had budget crises, and that's coming through as those contracts were in renewals in the back half of the year. Now we're seeing the subscription revenue from that line of business drop a little bit.
Thank you. Next question is from Jérémie Couix, HC Capital.
Okay.
Do you expect NPS to improve further? What is your target and could be the economic benefits, lower maintenance churn, high win rates, lower costs?
Just to start, it's going to be a constant push to achieve the best we can in the net promoter score. The 31 result's not where we want to stop. We want to keep pushing towards 40 and hopefully above. The return from having a high net promoter score is multiple. One, your customer's engaged with you, which improves your retention rates and renewal rates. Two, in our business, especially around our core business, the new customers often come by word of mouth referrals. One CIO talking to another, or one user of your system to another user of your system.
For us, delivering value, so much so that they will promote us in their network to others is better than any marketing spend I could have, because that's somebody, a trusted advisor, telling their colleague or someone they know that Axway is a good company and you want to work with them to solve that problem. I think it will help us slowly grow our base of customers and get new customers as well as keep our attrition rates under control and allow us to upsell and cross-sell to these customers.
Thank you, Patrick. No more question on the chat.
If there's no further questions, we'll go ahead and end here with the first half results presentation. Thank you for being with us, not only here, but at the capital markets meeting and hearing what we're trying to do to attack the market over the next three years. I look forward to coming back to you with Roland Royer and Cecile for the full year presentation and going deeper in how we're executing and the success we're having in our new strategy. Thank you all. Bye-bye.