Hello all. Let's welcome today to talk about WALLIX, the results for 2022, and let's enter the presentation. WALLIX today. WALLIX is a Wall Under Linux. We have 2,300 customer contracts in 90 different countries. Our business is a channel sales model, so we sell through a channel of integrators and resellers phased in the whole different continents and countries in the world. We made EUR 25.2 million during the 2022 year. 60% of our revenues are recurring. We have 233 employees in average. We are based in 15 different countries with three R&D centers, two in France, one in Madrid.
The other localizations of the company are offices or subsidiaries based in the countries where we have a particular coordination, animation of our channels, and we develop our market and sales operations. Our solution, we are a cybersecurity specialist with a technology of PAM, Privileged Access Management. We have packaged this technology in a portfolio of solutions called PAM4ALL, which is used by organizations and business to manage their identities and digital access against the cyber attacks.
Our solutions allow to access, to manage the rights of the users, manage the whole passwords in an organizations and all digital access to servers, device, applications, database, many other services. We have a particular connectors to interconnect OT with IT resources. Our technology allows to visualize and to trace the connections of the users and to avoid the cyber attacks or to cancel the cyber attacks or the human failures into an information system. We have packaged our offer for IT environments, which is our historical positioning.
Recently, we also packaged the technology for OT environments with an offer called OT.security. This offering is particularly relevant to allow the interconnection between IT and OT without taking new risks, risk of failures, which would be critical for industrial networks or systems. What we call SCADA, ICS, and different other equipments. Our solutions are recognized by the main analysts in the world, particularly KuppingerCole, Frost & Sullivan, Gartner, of course, where we are recognized as a leader of the PAM. Our solution are also certified for the countries where certification is required in the companies that are working in particular sectors like industry, telecom, healthcare, and many others.
We are certified in France, soon in Germany, and we are a European solution, and we are going to make the same kind of process in the new countries where we are now developing the company. Our markets are the Privileged Access Management market. Historically, we are based in Europe, where the market is EUR 500 million globally. Well, EUR 500 million with a growth of 14% per year. Now that we have developed the company at a global level, we open new market with EUR 1.5 billion.
Our market is larger now. We have also developed new features and new components in the IAM sector, the Identity and Access Management sector, which opens us more and more larger and larger markets, fast-growing markets, which is important for the future growth of the company. In term of history and to try to focus on WALLIX, the company has grew by 12x since the last 10 years with 30% annual growth rate.
We have in 2022 realized a new record of revenues with EUR 25.2 million, which gives a picture on the profile of the company in the cybersecurity space. WALLIX is a fast-growing company and what we call a tech company with strong fundamentals. Let's look at the 2022 annual results. Perhaps we could summarize these 2022 results by telling you first that this year has opened a new strategic plan of growth, the Unicorn 25 plan from 2022- 2025. During 2022, the first year of this plan, we have accelerated our organic growth in the second semester after, I would say, medium first semester.
We have succeeded to accelerate in the second half with improving significantly our recurring revenues, which allows our business to be more and more solid, I would say. We also invested a lot at the beginning of the plan. The result of that is an increasing of the operating expenses in line with our investment plan of Unicorn 25. Our cash position is perfectly in line with our organic needs, and we are perfectly in line with our Unicorn 25 plan. I would say that we have built fundamentals, and the best is front of us. Let's enter in the figures with Amaury.
Thank you, Jean-Noël. Actually, as you mentioned it, there was a significant growth recovery in the second half to reach 19% growth excluding Russia, which is in line with the acceleration ambition we posted at the end of first half of the year. This represents a growth which is 2x more important in the second half of the year. The annual growth excluding Russia, which was 15% in 2022. These results have been reached despite the caution among key accounts amid an unstable geopolitical and macroeconomics environment.
Plus, we did this while developing a recurring business model. This is our newly and important KPI for the company, the monthly recurring revenue, which translates the growth of products, recurring revenues, and the visibility on our future. In the last year, this indicator was up 22%, which corresponds to an annual recurring revenue of nearly EUR 15 million, which is 59% of 2022 turnover and 6% up compared to 2021. As Jean-Noël mentioned it, we have more predictability and more visibility on our revenues.
We decided to be more transparent on this acceleration of operational expenses and explain where we invested, why we invested, and what will be the trends. As you can see, our main investments were sales and marketing to create and structure additional growth for 2023 and next years. We spent money in the U.S., which is a conquest territory for us, as well as on the channel to better leverage our distribution network. Customer success translates the launch of new offer and the need of more services to accompany our customers.
New offers PAM4ALL and in the OT Security requested more investments on innovation and R&D. Central functions of the company needed to be reinforced as well to absorb the acceleration of the organic growth, as well as to be able to integrate external growth. For 2023 and 2024, we aim at benefiting from these leverages we set up and progressively slowing down the slice of sales and marketing in our revenues. In the same idea, we should enjoy leverages on transversal functions, either in the customer success services than in our G&A operations. Let's now have a look at our P&L.
As Jean-Noël explained it, 2022 was a year devoted to making the necessary investments on the successful execution of our Unicorn 25 strategic plan, which is clearly stated in this P&L. If we step back a little, we can clearly see that the operating expenses grew by 17% in 2022, which is in line with our revenue growth in the second half of the year. That means that excluding geopolitical issues, we would have absorbed the growth of our operating expenses.
As soon as our revenue grow, we improve our results. The improvement of our semestrial results clearly shows that one additional euro of revenue has a direct impact on our results. This gives us a lot of trust about the improvement of our financial results in this year and the year to come. I should say that we produced an adjusted operating profit due to a change in French accountancy rules. Tax credit, which were before recognized as operating income, are now considered as a negative tax expense.
We also should report a non-recurring tax expense of EUR 500,000, due to 2012-2014 results, without which our operating loss would have been divided by two on the second half of 2022. Sorry. Another way to show our expenses are controlled in this investment plan of the strategic plan is to compare the ratio between operating expenses and revenues in our two previous strategic plans, which were Ambition 21 and the plan we started in the IPO in 2015. This clearly shows that our ratio is a little bit lower than in the previous plan, and that we have a control of operating expenses in this investment phase.
As for the cash flow statement, the gross cash flow is impacted by the operational investments made for the implementation of the plan, of course. The strict control in the change of working capital, which is still positive. CapEx are essentially due to the R&D capitalization for 90%. The cash and cash equivalents amount to more than EUR 13.5 million, which is in line with all organic growth requirements planned for the rest of Unicorn 25 plan.
If we now have a look at the balance sheet, we can say that on the liability and equity side, the two main position are the shareholders' equity, which amount to EUR 17.5 million, and our deferred revenues on income, which amount to EUR 15.5 million. That's quite important because this is a 28% increase year- on- year, which shows a good commercial dynamism and give us more predictability on future revenues. We should note as well that financial debts decreased by 26% to amount to nearly EUR 2 million.
On the asset side, we should mention the increase in the value of R&D assets, which comes from big investments that were made. We should as well mention an inclusion of goodwill of the final amounts of earn-outs on previous acquisitions. Today, it remains EUR 366,000 to be paid in the next three years. Let's have a look on the non-financial performance. WALLIX solidity is translated as well in our non-financial rating. in 2022, we increased by 11 points our Gaïa Rating to reach an overall rating of 70, which is 16 points higher than the industry benchmark.
We were therefore awarded a silver medal for this performance. We should mention that we increased our grades in all domains: social, governance, environment and so on. If we focus on social responsibility, we invest for today and for tomorrow. Today, we focus on the well-being of our employees and we focus on supporting their skills. We should mention that nearly eight out of 10 WALLIX employees took a training course in 2022. We got the Happy At Work label for the third consecutive work year, sorry. But we prepare the future as well, and I leave the mic to Jean-Noël to tell you about WE EDU, which is a very strong social commitment-
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WALLIX. Yes, we also are launching a new plan for education where WALLIX will educate the young students and the bachelors to become cybersecurity specialist certified with WALLIX solution once they get out of their school with a diploma. That way they could enter their professional experience with a strong background, with a professional background, a professional certification. It's a kind of mission of the company to bring them this capacity to be sensibilized, evangelized, to be teached on the reality of the digital and cybersecurity technologies.
We have a plan to partner with different schools, engineering, bachelor's, master's, and to train teachers who are, after being trained and certified, who are in a capacity to train their students and to allow these students to get the WALLIX certification. It's a very ambitious, I would say, WE EDU plan, global plan. We begin with France, but we have a project to deploy that in other countries like Germany, like in Spain, in Canada, or in the United States. Our objective, our, I would say, important value of building trusted digital space will go through these different actions and commitments.
We still are trying to differentiate through this message and through this objective to create a world where personal and industrial data are important for the autonomy of a company and organization or a state, and humans in general. Let's jump to 2023 and remind you the first, the main pillars of our Unicorn 25 plan. 2023 will be the second step and the second year of the Unicorn 25 plan. We have four main directions. The first is still to improve the quality of our technology, the quality, the innovations we bring through our solutions.
We will have a particular focus on the SaaS offerings this year with the first important launching this month, where we are about to launch the SaaS remote access solution, which will be an important step before proposing more and more services around our technologies. These new services, of course, will be upsell, will allow us to open new markets. It is important for us to still have an important investment in the technology. The second important step of Unicorn 25 this year will be to continue to consolidate our European leadership, to earn market shares, and to prioritize on particular markets.
I will come back to this point after. The third important pillar is still to open and to accelerate North American positions and to focus and to develop a particular expertise on the OT.security market. If we enter soon in the details, we could focus on a few points. First, we will continue to consolidate our leadership in Europe, to earn market shares in the country where we are positioned now, like of course, Germany, the DACH regions, Italy, where we opened a new activity, Spain, the U.K., Nordic countries.
We also have strong expectations this year in the Middle East, where OT Security projects are really more and more important. We have an important pipe of opportunities in these different regions, and it is also important for us to focus on our efficiency in this market where we are developing the company since several years. That will have a particular focus on our operational efficiency and our sales margins.
The strategy will be to be more and more efficient and to earn more and more market shares on our historical Europe, Middle East, and African regions, and to be more and more profitable on these different regions. Second important point, as I mentioned, will be our capacity to transform the investments we did in the U.S. into customers, market, and return on investment. We have now a team of 14 people in Montreal and in the United States. We are committed in three major regions of the United States, on the East Coast and the central region in the United States.
Our first objective now is to develop customer projects and to make our first important revenues in the first and the second semester of 2023. We made 3% of our orders in the United States in 2022. Our objective this year will be to go through 10% and to begin to develop our challenger position in the United States. I talked about the development of our PAM4ALL offer with new SaaS products and services this year. We are about to launch these new services. It is also important to point out how we are going to enter in a second phase of the development of WALLIX and our Unicorn 25 plan with making our new acquisitions.
These acquisitions will help our portfolio to develop more value, particularly in two directions. First, we project to make an acquisition to develop the value proposal of WALLIX, and with a direct impact on the upsells in our customer base. It will be a first direction. The second direction for our acquisitions will be to develop more capacities and expertise, to have more arms to deploy our OT.security solutions, as we feel great potential.
This potential comes from the capacity of the company to cover the different needs of the OT.security challenge. We have now developed different technology components packaged into the PAM4OT and OT.security offer of WALLIX which allows a company having industrial resources to become an IoT platform where cybersecurity is a key component to guarantee the quality of the business and the resilience of the organization. We have made a lot of customers, we have a lot of new reference in 2022 in this domain, and we see from the beginning of the year a very strong acceleration of the demand.
We saw during the second semester that the big projects on the OT Security side were sized and accelerated at the end of the year. We see this trend developing, accelerating from the beginning of the year. We also know that we have strong differentiators, strong average buckets. We see that the sales cycle are longer, but the projects give more visibility in term of deployment. It is a key domain where we could probably bring something new. We have met recently the Gartner and KuppingerCole which are really underlining the quality of the technology and our offer compared to the challenge faced by these companies.
That OT.security will open us a new ocean of opportunities. We are going to push our offers in every organizations using industrial systems in our main markets. It will probably allow us to develop more and more projects in the Middle East, in the United States, in the main industrial countries in Europe. We made 5% of our orders in 2022 with a strong acceleration in the second half of the year. We ambition to double this amount of orders in 2023 out of the acquisitions we could make in this domain.
We have also signed important alliance which position us in the ecosystem of the OT.security, I would say environment ecosystem, and we will probably have news coming from the analyst in the coming month. Let us perhaps conclude on our presentation to tell you that despite the level of the share on the stock market, we are really confident with the quality of what we do, the number of leverage we have put in place in the company.
We have a very strong customer base with more and more recurring revenues, which allow us to enter 2023 with a strong level of revenue since the beginning. With enhancing our offering and bringing new features, we have a very strong lead pipe creation. This pipe creation is coming from our marketing operations, but more than half of our opportunities today are coming from the partners. Next week, we have our Worldwide Partner Summit in Lisboa, and we have our 60 main partners coming from all over the world.
We are going to reinforce our relation with them to boost either the pipe creation or the different customer projects in every territories. We have also a lot of new business potential coming from the new countries where we are developing the company, which haven't contributed yet to our growth, like Italy, like Spain, like the United States. We are really confident with the level of the trend, the growth rate. We, of course, made a mitigated first half in 2022. We have been strongly impacted by the-- I would say, the Russian and Ukraine war during the first half.
But we see during the second half an acceleration, and we are confident with our capacity to accelerate again. I would say that now another important step for WALLIX will be to go to the breakeven in 2024. We have focused our whole company strengths on the growth, on the operational efficiency, and the execution of our marketing and sales operations. But we also focused everybody on coming back to profitability in the fourth quarter of the year before having a full 2024 profitable year, which is also, for us, very exciting. I would say that today we are confident and will, of course, take the all opportunities we could take to develop our Unicorn 25 plan in the coming years.