Welcome to the DATAGROUP SE conference call on full year figures for the financial year 2021/2022. At the moment, all participants are on mute. The floor will be open for questions after the presentation. If you would like to ask a question, please press the hand symbol or type your question into the question box. We will then call the questioners according to the order in which they raise their hands. Please unmute yourself to ask your question and then mute yourself again to prevent acoustic disturbances for the other participants. The presentation is also available for download in the Investor Relations section on DATAGROUP's website.
Ladies and gentlemen, DATAGROUP, the analyst call for the presentation of the full year figures 2021/2022. As you have already seen, we can confirm the, in November, presented preliminary accounts and results which we have provided to you. Come on with my colleague, Andreas Baresel. We can confirm that the success story of DATAGROUP still remains. We just received, we had recurred results in revenue stream. Our record revenue with more than EUR 0.5 billion , we could develop with more than 12%, nearly 13% to the previous year. We exceeded our guidance in the revenue. We exceeded our guidance in the EBITDA. Our EBITDA, we just can bring up to EUR 76.5 million.
That means that we increased it instead of the previous fiscal year with nearly 14%. More impressive is the success story when you have a quite look on the EBIT situation and the development of this. With meanwhile, more than EUR 40 million in absolutely EUR 41.5 million, we were able to increase the EBIT instead of the previous year with nearly 45%. The EPS, we could develop as well and reached a result with EUR 2.64 by share. The EBIT margin, and this is very impressive for us, we could reach with the percentage of 8.3%, and this beside 6.4% in the previous year. What have been the key drivers of this outstanding performance?
Therefore, maybe two main pillars, why we increase our business, why we increase especially our CORBOX business. When you look at the situation of our customers, and our customers have mainly two pain points. The pain point number one is the lack of the experts. They are not able to cover the experts to hire them and to get them to run their own IT. On the other side, they are afraid of being hacked, so the need for cyber defense, cybersecurity service still remains, and we expect this will be a good market for us to stabilize and to develop our CORBOX business. That means that the strong sale results were able to be driven by our CORBOX services.
This is the result with about 18 additional contracts. That means 20 new contracts and only two customers didn't renew their contracts. Besides this, we were able to expand 20 contracts with cross and upselling and 34 contracts have been renewed. What we can see in the past fiscal year is no negative impact from the war in Ukraine, Russia. Beside this, we do not recognize relevant impacts from the inflation as well as the supply chain bottlenecks caused by COVID, meanwhile, since two years. To give you an overview how we did make our business and how broad our business is spread in our verticals, you can see, this is a quite very good result to get a new customer in the exhibition phase and exhibition market.
We had full outsourcing, a long-time contract with five years and about EUR 3.5 million by year. This customer with full outsourcing use all our services at CORBOX. Besides this, we just realized CORBOX services and contracts in the financial industry. You can see as well in the industrial industry, in the service, in the retail, in the industrial bakery. One of the biggest industrial bakeries in Germany is now our customer, as well as a toy manufacturer. Many more not shown on this slide, shows you that we do not have cluster risks, that we do not have sector risks or market risks. Let us now have a quick look for some selected P&L ratios for the fiscal year 2021/2022.
At first, what I've just shown is that we reach revenue with more than EUR 0.5 billion , EUR 501.4 million in the past fiscal year, and the service level remains extremely high with more than 80%. Beside this, very impressive is to see that we were able to increase the revenue with nearly 13%, but our personal expenses only rose by 9.6%. This is the over proportional result in the increasing our EBIT and the EBT. In the selected balance sheet ratios for the past fiscal year, you can see a prolongation. Prolongation was caused by first time consolidation of new companies.
For us, very important is that it has been possible, that we still achieved the reduction in our net debt, this despite EUR 35 million in investments and acquisitions. With a net debt EBITDA ratio of 1.4, we are in a very good mood. We have enough firepower for further growth, organic like inorganic growth, we are so stable that we are rated as investment grade with our financial partners.
In our cash flow statement, you can see that we were able to increase our operating cash flow to 70 or more than EUR 70 million . That means a change of 40.5%. That shows the financial strength of the DATAGROUP. That shows the strength of our business model CORBOX and the resilience of our business in the market that we have now had. Beside this, what did we have done with the cash we just earned? We invested it. We invested it, especially in the outflow of acquisitions of EUR 35.8 million . Beside this, we were able to reduce our CapEx costs to lower than EUR 9 million .
On the long-term view, of the past 10 years, you can see the total increase of the revenue stream, which we were able to develop from a little bit more of EUR 150 million to meanwhile more than EUR 0.5 billion . The most impressive thing is that we were able to make this development with the expanse of the recurring revenues. The recurring revenues in the past fiscal year reach out for approximate 80% of our gross margin we earn with our recurring revenue stream. You can see as well our EBITDA development and the operative EBITDA we now stabilized with more than 15%, and we developed it from a little bit more than EUR 10 million 10 years ago now to EUR 76.5 million.
This without any one-off effect of acquisitions. The reduction of the CapEx costs is impressively shown in the development of our EBIT. With the EUR 41.5 million, as I've just explained some slides before, we reached 8.3%. Without one-off effects, that is not only absolutely a record result, this is in percentage a record result as well. There we are very proud to realize this in the past fiscal year. Where do we want to go into the future? What's our dual growth strategy? About 50% we can realize, and we can growth through our new CORBOX customer acquisition. That means we see a potential of about 5,000 customers in Germany in our Mittelstand segment.
That means that their turnover, their revenue stream is between EUR 100 million and EUR 5 billion. There we expect a potential of about EUR 10 million by year increasing our CORBOX business. Beside this, the growing from cross and upselling at existing CORBOX customers in the same amount of about EUR 10 million is realistic. Beside this, the transformation of M&A targets and the transformation of low margin revenue gives us the potential for our organic growth.
Beside this, we are very active on the M&A side, as you know, and growing with two or three new acquisitions by year on average is our goal to reach our midterm guidance. Our midterm ambition still remains, and we see and we have a revenue midterm ambition of EUR 750 million in the year 2025, 2026. This with an EBITDA margin with more than 15% and an EBIT margin with more than 9%. It just works. I thank you very much and I'm at the end of the presentation and we can now open the stage for your questions.
The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press the hand symbol. You will then be called and be able to ask your question. Alternatively, you can type your question into the question box. Mr. Frey, you can ask your question if you unmute yourself. Mr. Frey, if you try again.
Can you hear me now?
Yes.
Okay. The unmuting didn't work. Thank you for taking my question. You already gave us a quick insight about your midterm guidance. Can you maybe give us a more specific targets for the current year coming up and maybe also a quick impression of how your current Q1 started?
For sure. We start from the last question. The Q1 started quite solid. You know, the presentation of the Q1 accounts will be presented in nearly one month, I think it's a quite good and solid start in the new year. What are the targets? The targets, I think, they are quite the same. Like we have I've just presented in our growth strategy. We are still very busy in our M&A and to make local or technological additions to our business. As well as we see that especially new customers for CORBOX business and the cross and upselling activities are very strong.
We are in a very good mood for coming with the coming up for the actual fiscal year, 2022/ 2023.
Next question comes from Mr. Wolf.
I guess it's my turn now. Andreas Wolf, Research.
Hi, Mr. Wolf.
Thank you. Hi, good morning. Congratulations on a successful year.
Thank you.
I would have the following questions. The first one would be on future CapEx levels. Should we expect basically DATAGROUP to maintain more or less current levels compared to revenues going forward as well? Maybe you could also speak a bit about client behavior. Obviously everyone is expecting a recession. In general, I think the IT service space is less impacted and your business even to a lesser extent than that of other IT service companies. Maybe you could give us some insights on current customer behavior and whether you see any areas where customers are somewhat hesitant, maybe. The third would be on M&A.
Do you already see a multiple decline in the pipeline for potential M&A, as obviously the capital markets have reflected higher interest rates in the valuation of stocks? Do you already see better opportunities going forward for M&A? Thank you.
Okay. Mr. Wolf, thank you very much for your questions. The CapEx cost we expect in a normal rate is about 3% of our revenue. We are a little bit lower in the actual year. When you look in the normal depreciation we have in our accounts in the past fiscal year, in total, about EUR 35 million, less purchase price allocation depreciation. We have normal depreciation of nearly EUR 28, EUR 25 million. We expect positive effect for us with the long-term future CapEx. The CapEx costs we just had in the past year with EUR 9 million are a little bit lower than we normally expect.
We do not expect a CapEx cost like we did have two, three years ago when we started the new CORBOX service for our banking and insurance sector. The second question you had, Mr. Wolf, very good question, is the client behavior. My recognition in this part is that in the IT sector, in total, the budgets are not declining. In our business, we are no system integrator. What we are doing is IT operations. We are not able to decline anything because you have to run your IT, and this is our CORBOX business.
My recognition and my point and my view on the market is that companies, especially in the actual situation, and this is a possibility for us, are looking for compensations, when the costs are higher, when they have inflation and material expenses and personal expenses. They have to optimize their business, and optimizing the business is especially driven by digitalization, and this gives us new space and new possibilities. My expectation for the future is expanding business for us. We are looking very positive into the future, especially in our business. The last question you had is to recognize and to see declining multiples. We cannot see. What we see is that the multiples, they stop a little bit.
As we have just shown in the, in the, further, presentations, especially since the private equities started with buy and build strategies in the German Mittelstand and the IT sectors. They rose the EBIT multiples, but now you can see that, it will be covered. What we see is that companies which have been sold to a PE, now try to come back to their own and to sell to a company, which has more behavior and more, identity and similarity to their own business. They have a very good view and close look to us. To answer your question, multiple declining, we cannot see yet.
Okay. I do not see more hands symbols raised, so I would guess we have no further questions. Maybe we wait a little bit if there are still some questions. If not, the call will also be made available on DATAGROUP's website. With this information, I would hand over again to Mr. Thome.
Thank you very much for joining us, for joining the expedition DATAGROUP. I would say we'll see you out the next time. Next time will be in about one month in the presentation of the Q1 figures of DATAGROUP. Thank you very much.