Good morning and welcome to Altron's interim results for the 2025 financial year. My name is Duduzile Mwelase, and with me today are Altron CEO, Werner Kapp, and CFO, Carel Snyman. To our viewers watching online, you can ask a question by posting in this chat. As aligned to our values of inclusion, you will see that our presentation is being interpreted on behalf of the deaf community. As a reminder, we will be making forward-looking statements. Please look at our cautionary language regarding the risk and uncertainties with forward-looking statements. Unless otherwise noted, all growth comparisons relate to the corresponding period of last year. And with that, I would like to invite Werner Kapp to take you through the results.
Thanks, Diggy. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our results presentation. Thank you to our shareholders, analysts, our board, members of the leadership team, and of course, Altron employees who are dialing into this call. Our business at Altron is built on three principles. We're purpose-driven, we're customer-obsessed, and we're growth-focused. Since 1965, we've been harnessing the power of technology, data, and human ingenuity to solve everyday problems, and our purpose is to transform today into a simpler, safer, and smarter tomorrow. We're really privileged, and some of our case studies speak to service about 50% of the JSE-listed companies in South Africa, small and medium enterprises, helping them to grow their business, and also some big state-owned entities and key national government departments, and where there's change, we see opportunity, and we really service these customers in three ways. We operate their critical infrastructure.
We use this critical infrastructure, and you heard that in the Vodacom case study, to help them to optimize existing services, processes, and assets, and also in this ever-changing world, help them to transform their services, their products, or their business models, and I want to give you some practical examples of what we've did in the preceding six months in this regard. One of the things I'm probably the proudest of, you saw us launch a couple of months ago, Ascent, our new BEE trust. Not only does that maintain the BEE credentials that we need to remain competitive in the market, but most importantly, it helps us solve I think one of the biggest problems in South Africa, which is education. I'm exceptionally proud that we've already had five bursars go through this program. By the way, we give first dibs to Altron employees' family.
So all five of those bursars are actually related to folks that work at Altron. And as we speak, we're busy going through the intake for the new year, and we've had an unprecedented amount of applications. You saw the case study there from Elegant Fuel, where it really is amazing to see how our FinTech business continues to drive financial inclusion in our society and also creates opportunities for entrepreneurs that otherwise would not have existed. Netstar also had a seminal moment this year. I was fortunate to be there when we celebrated our 30-year anniversary. It really has been an incredible journey with this business. I mean, just to give you a little bit of sense of it, in the first year that we started in 1994, I'm under pressure now because Grant's got his beady eye on me. We installed 9,000 tracking units.
Last month, we've installed more than 50,000 tracking units in one month. In 2003, we recovered about ZAR 1 million worth of assets a day. Now, on average, we recover about ZAR 4 million worth of assets a day, and in the 2002-2003 period, we celebrated a key milestone of passing 100,000 subscribers. As you're going to see later, we're now on 1.9 million subscribers, and if we continue the momentum we've got in the business, hopefully, we'll be able to talk pretty soon about two million subscribers. We're fighting financial crime in South Africa with Altron Digital Business, something I'll talk to you about a little bit later, and our security business helps to secure data in the biggest 5G network in South Africa, and also all of your identity and biometrics through the Smart ID card.
Our healthcare business, through revolutionizing healthcare systems and data, is also helping to battle non-communicable diseases like cancer. Let me give you an example of how these things that we do for our customers and for our society leads into results. Just a reminder from our results perspective that the comparative period includes four months of our ATM business, which we sold. In July of this year, we made a decision to retain our ADS business, which we felt was in the best interest of our shareholders. This is included into our continued operations. Year-on-year growth was impacted by the prior year provision in the ADS business of ZAR 95 million. You'll see additional disclosures within this pack to provide a comparison of our continuing operations, excluding the ATM business and excluding Altron Document Solutions.
I just want to remind you of our new reporting segment, which came in place on the 1st of March 2024, where really we look at our platform businesses, which is Netstar, HealthTech, and FinTech, our IT services business, Altron Digital Business, which we merged on the 1st of March, Altron Security and Altron Document Solutions, and of course, our distribution segment within which our Arrow business sits. I am really, really pleased to see that disciplined strategy execution has led to a strong performance by our continuing operations, evidenced by a 4% increase in revenue, a 23% increase in EBITDA, and a 29% increase in operating profit at about 10% operating profit margin. This has led to a 50% increase in our headline earnings per share to ZAR 0.79 and an 84% increase in earnings per share of ZAR 0.75 per share.
Of course, as Carl will tell you, very importantly, cash generated from operations has increased by 28%. If you look at this from a group perspective, just to remind you, the reason why that revenue growth is flat, this now includes our Nexus business, which you will recall we lost about half the revenue in that business and had to take significant action because of that. Despite that, and of course, because of the provisions we took in the prior period, our EBITDA has grown by over 100% to ZAR 891 million and our operating profit by over 100% to ZAR 463 million, leading to a HEPS of 74% and an EPS of 70%. We are really pleased because of the healthy state that we believe our business is in.
Our balance sheet, we have been able to improve our interim dividend to ZAR 0.40 per share, and that is up by 60% on a year-on-year basis. I spoke about this strategy and the strategy execution that I believe drives this improved profit performance. I just want to take you through the next 10 minutes before we go into the deep dive into the different segments. I just want to take you through how we are executing on this strategy. I'm not going to spend too much time on this slide, but just to remind you of our strategy to be the leading platform and IT services player in our chosen markets, which is really driven by this obsession that we have with customers and solving their problems for them. Three growth levers enabled through three key enablers.
We've already executed on our short-term profit improvement strategy in Netstar and in Altron Systems Integration, and we're now focused on delivering on our medium and our long-term strategy. Now, strategy is fantastic. A lot of people have got a really lot of good strategies out there. The question is, how do you execute on this? And on this slide, I'm really just trying to give you a view of how we look at this. If you look at those four key areas, which are customer obsession, which is profitable revenue growth, operating leverage, and transformative growth, you can see here that the leading indicators that we look at to ensure that we are focused all the time really are related to our short-term management incentives, and we're also aligning our management from a long-term perspective to our shareholders.
Even within our short-term incentives, there are some key numerical ones, and then specific to every business, there are also incentives relating to specific things that that business is trying to achieve during that period of time. So the first thing I want to talk about really is something that we talk about as a business all the time, which is customer obsession. Now, you may recall that we took some significant savings in our business by consolidating our property, and we made the decision to reinvest these savings really in the front end of our business. In other words, servicing our customers better, selling better to those customers, and in the people that do that.
And one of the key things we did here is we've implemented a leading stack of marketing technologies to be able to understand our customers better, particularly across our different opcos, to identify those opportunities, and then to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. But most importantly, customer obsession is not just about selling more to your customers. It's about keeping the commitment that you've made to that customer. So closing the loop is something that is very, very important to us, and making sure that we measure those net promoter scores, those customer satisfaction scores. And as you can see there, we measure that we close the loop with unhappy customers within 28-48 hours. The reason I haven't given you statistics here yet is because we're fairly early in the deployment of these systems.
So I'm not comfortable that I think it's a representative sample yet. We'll do that in half a year. But just to tell you quickly, for example, about Lumoa. So this is an artificial intelligence-driven tool. It ingests all the information we get from our customer satisfaction surveys, etc. So probably one of my favorite things, and if you really want to drive customer obsession in your business, by the way, you open your laptop in a coffee shop in between meetings, and you can really ask the tool, "Who is our unhappiest customer right now?" It'll search for that information. It'll give you the details. You then ask who within Altron is accountable for solving this customer's problem. And it gives you the answer.
Let me tell you, nothing drives customer obsession in the business as much as getting a phone call from the CEO or one of the MDs saying, "Listen, there's an unhappy customer. The clock is ticking to get this resolved. What are you going to do about it?" This customer obsession for us really drives revenue growth. Now, my team, I see they're all delighted. They're sitting here this morning because this is one of the two mornings of Monday mornings of the year that we don't start Monday mornings with our 8:00 A.M. sales meeting with the entire leadership team. Every Monday morning at 8:00 A.M. for 30 minutes, the entire leadership team goes through our net new renewals, our net new sales for the week, and our annuity revenue.
I mentioned earlier, again, the savings that we were able to achieve in the business and how we've really invested this in our sales teams, optimizing our sales to market, improved segmentation, significant training and incentivization for our sales teams. We've revived our sales incentive trip, our sales conference, to really make sure that people are incentivized to go the extra mile to service our customers, and I'm really delighted to see that here, 12% annuity growth, 19% excluding ATM business, because, as you know, driving annuity business is a key strategic imperative for us, and that's how we're able to continue to drive our operating margins and drive profitable growth in our business. I'm a little bit worried about the fact that my leadership team seems a little too happy when I mention the fact that we didn't have the 8:00 A.M. call this morning.
Operating leverage, that's what I always call good old-fashioned elbow grease. This is the hard yards of management, making sure that you manage your gross margins. I'll talk a little bit later about how in some of our business, also specifically qualifying the type of business that you go after is really, really important, and then really reducing your operating expenses and making sure that you run a lean and mean shop, and here, again, really, really pleasing to see a significant growth in gross margin and a significant expansion, 4 percentage points expansion in gross margin. I always thought when I did my MBA that margin is the measure of management because every management decision that you make is reflected in the gross margin, so really happy to see that go up by 4 percentage points. That's about a 10% improvement in gross margin.
And very pleasing to see that we're able to deliver revenue growth and margin growth while keeping expenses practically flat. The reason why you'll see this big spike here is because of the ZAR 94 million provision that was taken in the ADS business at the time. So really pleasing to see that we're able to deliver that while practically keeping overhead expenses flat. If we then turn to transformative growth, we look at this through two lenses: organic growth and inorganic growth. So first and foremost, it's very important for us that we continue to execute and expand from the core of the businesses that we've got today, so continue to service our customers better, continue to invest in the platforms and systems. And Carel will tell you later about the amount of money that we spend on growth CapEx on an annual basis.
And very importantly, make sure that we continue to invest in our people to retain and to attract the best talent in the industry. On that note, I'm really pleased to say the results of our recent employee engagement survey came out. We've had the best participation in the history since we ran that survey, I think up from about 64% to 82-odd%. If I recall correctly. And our employee engagement score is up from 68% to 72%. And very importantly, in the technology industry, people churn is a big measurement because these skills are in high demand, and our churn rates within our people are down by 30% on a year-on-year basis. Then we go further, and we look to really differentiate and expand our platform ecosystem. And I'll touch on that a little bit more later.
This is where we bring some more of our services onto our platforms to service our customers, and we bring third-party systems onto those platforms. And when we bring those third-party providers and systems onto our platforms, the power of the data and the artificial intelligence that we can leverage, and I'll give you some practical examples of that, just becomes more and more powerful. Of course, that data is always anonymized, is always POPIA-compliant, and I'll explain to you a little bit later how we do this using a secure private marketplace that anonymizes this data. And then lastly, to look at strategic acquisitions. So are there acquisitions that we can make that further bolsters our capabilities in a certain space that enhances our differentiation in the market? And of course, are there opportunities where it makes sense for geographic expansion?
So let's go a little bit from our strategy into the operating performance per segment. So if we look at our platform segment, turning to Netstar, our 30-year birthday boy, I think this slide really illustrates for you the way we think about all of our businesses. You've heard me speak about foundational growth, accelerated growth, and transformative growth. So if you look at this deck, this part is really very much foundational growth and accelerated growth. And this is transformative growth, and you'll see how that feeds into accelerated growth.
From a foundational perspective, you might recall when we put the profit improvement strategy in place for Netstar. I think it was about 20 months ago now, if I recall correctly. There were some key operational stuff that was going wrong that was affecting our profitability significantly, most notably our pre-fit conversion ratios, which I think was down at about 30-33% at that point in time, and churn, which was exceptionally high at about 22-23%. Now, we continue to make significant progress there. We've managed to keep our pre-fit conversion ratios above 60%, our contact fulfillment ratios at about 90%, churn slightly up. We've managed to get that down to 16%, which was really good, slightly up. That is because of an out-of-contract cycle in our Malaysian business and also the Australian market. I was in Australia about three or four weeks ago.
It's had significant turmoil in the migration from 3G to 4G, which has led to a lot of churn in the industry in general. We were fortunate to only lose one customer in that churn, but it has impacted our churn numbers. However, delighted to see a 21% growth in subscribers, as I've said, now hitting that 1.9 million mark, 14% growth in our consumer business, and a 21% growth in our enterprise business, which is a specifically important focus area for us. From an operational excellence perspective, we've made a lot of investments in this area, a lot of investments in our systems, and we really integrate into our customers to make sure that this improves our customers' experience of our services.
For example, with We Buy Cars, we're now integrating to their systems to the extent that a customer is able to have their tracking device fitted as they buy the car as soon as the sale is reflected, and lastly, we've been building out our Big Data as a Service offering. This is not just to future-proof the Netstar business, but also to really differentiate us, to move into managed services out of just the traditional stolen vehicle recovery business and really into that enterprise segment. We launched our Fleet Bureau in January of this year and most recently our Enterprise Fleet AI solution, and I'm delighted to say that we've got over 30,000 assets already tracked through this Fleet Bureau.
And this is a really good case study of a deal that we've landed with Orica, which is one of the world's largest mining and infrastructure companies, and we're partnering with them across Africa and in Europe in full managed solutions for AI cameras, for asset management, also driver safety and efficiency. So this is the type of managed services business that we're also transforming Netstar into. So really, really pleased to see positive momentum continuing in this business. We continue to expand our network. As you can see there, 17 new insurance partnerships, 16 new motor dealers. Our strategic OEM partnership with Toyota continues, and we've also concluded strategic partnerships with other OEM manufacturers like Hino and Kinto. And our growth levers in this business are to continue to gain market share in South Africa.
We believe that there is still market share to be gained here, grow that enterprise and managed fleet business, expand our platform ecosystem, and to have focused international expansion. This has led to a very pleasing 11% growth in revenue and a 34% growth in our EBITDA. And as you can see here through some of the operational excellence initiatives coupled with this growth, there's also a significant improvement, a 10 percentage point. That's a 33% improvement in our EBITDA margins over a two-year period. And of course, very important to us, annuity revenue is now 90% of this business, up from 87% in the previous year. Apologies, it's hard work telling you all of this. I just need to have a. I'll leave some for you, Carel.
FinTech has had an absolute blowout performance in H1.
Another good example for me of a business that has really focused on executing and transforming that business by investing in its platform to make sure that we can diversify the business outside of the hardware business that can be more lumpy in nature. And as you can see, that has led to a 10% growth in our revenue business, and our revenue and our annuity business is now a staggering 82% of the overall business. What that does really has led to a significant improvement, 54% growth in EBITDA and an 11 percentage point improvement in the EBITDA margins in this business. And we're also making increased investments in our terminal business. That business is our personal card issuance business. It remains important to us, but we're making investments in that, which we believe will further grow our annuity revenue business.
In our HealthTech business, we also continue to invest in this. Last year, we showed you the discommunicology case study as an example, and what this is really doing for us is it helps us get into new corporate markets, and it allows us to also get into different types of business as we continue to use the data that we gather from these partnerships to be able to grow revenue in this business, and as you can see, that is related to a 6% growth in revenue. Again, very pleasingly, 92% growth in annuity, 92% contribution from annuity business. EBITDA grown by 4% versus a 6% growth in revenue, but that's really because we made a decision to expense about ZAR 15 million worth of investment that we've made in our platform. Highly stable business generating 92% of its revenue through annuity.
And as you can see there, 28%, 27% EBITDA margins. This is a really good slide, which I think demonstrates this kind of flywheel effect that you get in the business. What we've done here really is made significant investments in our platform businesses, the clinical care business, expanding that from our core practice management application. So what that happens is that you can identify value to third parties within the ecosystem. More customers, you get more data, and you get more accurate models. It grows the partner ecosystem that we have. And then what it does is you start getting this positive network effect.
As you bring more partners on, as the ecosystem starts to grow, the richness of that data starts to add more value to customers, and then you can start to grow your customer base even more over time, as I spoke about that growth in our corporate base as an example. So let's now turn to IT services. When we delivered our results last year, particularly the ASI business, you may recall we spoke about the profit improvement strategy in that business, that we made a strategic decision to integrate the Karabina business, the systems integration business, and the managed solutions business because we felt as well as we were doing from a profit improvement strategy perspective, we weren't capitalizing fully on the growth opportunities in this business. We wanted to make sure, and our customers were asking for a simplified engagement.
We wanted to make sure that we can really focus on bringing the power of all of our solutions to these customers, and we wanted to be able to make sure that we can increase our revenue and upsell and cross-sell into these customers. It's always easier to do more business with a customer of today. In fact, I think the cost is 10% less than it is to go and acquire new customers. This does take time. I mean, this is where I've kind of spent 25 years of my career. Typically, the opportunities through sales pipeline, through closure and delivering to the customer cycle takes about 12-18 months. But I'm really comfortable that the leading indicators in this business are starting to head in the right direction.
As you can see there, a 15% increase in upsell revenue to our top 10 customers, a 150% increase in cross-selling into our top 30 customers. That very, very important annuity pipeline. I mean, you'll hear the word annuity a lot when we talk to you. So an 87% increase in net new opportunities with customers, and that has resulted already in a 6% increase in annuity contracts. Although, as I said, particularly that annuity business commercially is complex because they are long-term contracts and you need to account for risk and delivery. It takes time, but really pleasing to see that come through. Having said all of that, the short-term performance of the Altron Digital Business was disappointing. The reason why is we've had three significant impacts in H1.
One of them is business that we actually were awarded that customers, because of their constraints, have decided to move out. The second one was we had about ZAR 16 million worth of legacy non-recurring costs in the business, and we had two large customers that unfortunately decided to reduce their spend because of their own CapEx constraints. Pleasing though to see that we are starting to see that revenue growth in the business, about 5%. You may recall before the integration, we were struggling to get to those kind of revenue growth, and this is only six months into the process. Annuity revenue slightly inching up from 49% to 50%, but there's no hiding behind the fact that because of those one-off factors, it was a disappointing EBITDA performance for us.
I mean, having said that, if you look at that focus and integrated sales model and the fact that we put quality gates in place when we qualify deals to make sure that we protect margin, I am very, very positive about the prospects of this business going forward, and it's a key part of our growth strategy. Altron Security, oh, sorry, I wanted to tell you this is a big reason why I'm so positive about this business. Before I get to the Altron Security business, I mean, this is a business that uses really complex technology from key global partners to solve really, really difficult problems for our customers. You saw the Vodacom case study. This is another one where we are helping to combat a problem that is impacting everybody in this room, which is South Africa's grey listing.
Working with a customer, we use some really advanced artificial intelligence technology here using a well-renowned hyperscaler that we're partnering with. The challenge that the customer has here is the manual reconciliation of bank statements. Complex bank statements can take up to 10 days. We have turned that instantaneous. It happens instantaneous now through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And by the way, as you would expect, with no human intervention, particularly as the model becomes more advanced, the error rates are significantly lower. So now I get to go to our security business. You'll recall that this business had a disappointing performance in the previous year, and we took three corrective actions to address that. The first one was, again, an enhanced focus on our sales, the way we segment the deals that we take to market. The second one was really protecting our gross margins.
We had some issues, particularly in our project business last year, and then, of course, the last one was tied to expense management. We did have a setback in that our largest customer consciously decided to hold back on some CapEx this year, again, because of CapEx constraints, and then there are some accounting issues in terms of the way we account for agency and revenue, but I'm delighted to say that what those actions have done is, despite a 12% decline in revenue because of the reasons that I've mentioned, we have managed to keep our EBITDA in this business flat at 80% and get a significant improvement, a 4 percentage point improvement in our EBITDA margins in that business, and again, very importantly for us, our annuity revenue is up from a 69% contribution to an 85% contribution. Let's turn to our Altron Document Solutions business.
I really want to give a shout-out to the leadership team and the people in this business. They've operated now for about three years, not just in a tough industry, but really kind of with this sword of the business being held for sale, hanging over them. We obviously made that decision in July, and I think this team has worked tirelessly. It's very, very early days. I have to stress that we're in very, very early days. But I think this team has really, really done a great job to be able to turn this picture around significantly and deliver a ZAR 30 million margin EBITDA contribution towards the business and grow revenue by 11% and also get our annuity revenues to about 43% of the business, and I really, really look forward to continuing to work with them in the ADS business.
Last, but certainly not least, we turn to our distribution segment and our Arrow business. You might recall that we guided when we did, I think, our full year results, that we are starting to see demand in this global electronic component section normalize. There was a big surge post-COVID, as you can imagine, but we felt that through the differentiation that we have, the way we manage the business, our margins, and our cost base, that we can keep our EBITDA margins flat, which is exactly what we've been able to do here. So as you can see there, we were able to grow market share by 3 percentage points despite an overall market contraction of 5.7%. And the way we do that is really by having innovative solutions. We've launched a couple of innovative solutions for our customers, the CEO dashboard, our inventory management as a service.
This is not just a simple distribution business. It's a business that adds significant value through our engineering capabilities that helps put together innovative customer solutions. So as you can see there, with some cost-to-sale savings, which has helped us expand our gross margins by one percentage point, we've managed to keep our operating expenses under control. So really, really pleasing to see that despite an expected 11% decline in revenue, we've only had about a 7% decline in EBITDA and delivered ZAR 35 million EBITDA at 9% EBITDA margins. With that, I think I'm going to turn you over to Carel to dive into a little bit more detail around our numbers.
Thanks, Werner.
Do you want to keep my water?
No, it's all right.
This thing on. Morning, everybody. Thanks, Werner. Okay, so let's look at the numbers in a bit more detail. Before we get into this, just once again, I just want to remind everybody about the anomalies. So last year, we had ATM still in the numbers for four months. ADS previously was discontinued. We've included it now, as Werner has explained to you, from July. So what we've done here, we've actually just given you the numbers excluding ADS and ATM so that you can have a look at what used to be continuing, what the results were of those operations as well, because it gets a bit difficult to get through it. But for us, that's important to understand because that is the core of the business with ADS obviously now included. So if we look at it excluding the numbers, 4% growth at the top line.
But on this slide, the most important thing for me is the growth in EBITDA and margins. EBITDA margins up, operating profit margins up. I mean, this talks to the robustness of the revenue coming into the business and the controls that we have over costs. So for me, that is a very pleasing metric to look at. Our interest expense down, we'll talk about that later. But what all of this has resulted in is headline earnings, ZAR 105 million in the previous period to ZAR 300 million, and net profit after tax from ZAR 70 million to ZAR 300 million plus minus. And if you look at our headline earnings per share and earnings per share growth, and once again, I'm going to focus on ADS and ATM excluded, that's 50% and 84% up.
And then lastly on this slide, because of the cash-generating ability of the business and the shape that the balance sheet is in, we have proposed an increase in the interim dividend of 60% from ZAR 0.25 to ZAR 0.40 a share. Werner has spoken to you about revenue in the business. What's very important for us on revenue is the quality of revenue together with annuity revenue. And we've spent a lot of time focusing on building that out. So what you will see here is that overall revenue, 5% up. And then if you focus on the services part, which is the top light green block, that's mainly annuity revenue. And that's 13% up from the prior period. And then even more promising for me is the fact that that now makes out 67% of our total revenue.
So the focus on driving towards annuity revenue is continued throughout the businesses. The only anomaly here, once again, being the ATM business, but this will also be the last time that we do this in this financial year, then it will be out of our system. Hardware revenue is now 26% of total revenue. That was down 4%, and that's mainly on the back of lower hardware sales in both Netstar and FinTech. And then software revenue is mainly related to our digital business, where we've had these two customers who reduced their spend during the period and then some of it coming out of the security business. On this slide, I actually just want to spend a bit of time going through this in some detail because it's important to understand what happened with our operating profit.
So just starting from the left, ZAR 362 million is what we reported to you the last time we saw you at the half year. With ADS coming into the business, that had a negative effect of ZAR 129, and that's mainly because of the provisions taken in that business in the prior period. So when you look at our statutory prior year operating profit, prior period, that's ZAR 233. And then what you see here is the increased contribution of the different segments to that operating profit that we recorded of ZAR 477, ZAR 117 million coming out of IT services and ZAR 132 million out of the platform business. But if I'll just look at IT services in a bit more detail. So I've spoken to you about the ZAR 95 million provision in the prior period.
ADB, and Werner has mentioned to you ADB as well, that profit was down to ZAR 34 million, 46%. And that was the impact of those non-recurring project expenses, the project delays that shifted to the second half. So that's not lost, it's only timing. And then the two customers that reduced their spending. He's also mentioned to you security. Security is revenue. And maybe just for me to focus on the revenue, the difference between agency revenue and normal revenue. In agency revenue, we only book the margin. We don't book the gross revenue and the cost. So even though revenue looks flat, the business has still managed to increase their operating profit to ZAR 66 million with a margin expanding 4 percentage points. Very pleasing for us, ADS performance.
They delivered a ZAR 20 million operating profit in the period compared to the loss booked in the prior year.
If I shift to the platform businesses, total operating profit for the platform businesses was ZAR 415 million for the period. That's up 47% on the prior period. Very strong Altron FinTech results, 63% up to ZAR 215 million and 11 percentage points margin expansion. Just on health tech again, operating profit ZAR 54 million, but bear in mind that we expensed ZAR 15 million of R&D compared to ZAR 5 million in the prior period. So that's included in that number, then on Netstar, 45% operating profit growth. But the most pleasing part of that is the fact that the margin has expanded from 10% in the prior period to 13% now. So we're on track to get to the 16% margin as per the guidance that we've provided. Yeah, I just want to call out once again the depreciation issue.
So just to bear in mind, we depreciate over three years.
Most of our competitors depreciate over five to eight years. It doesn't have an impact on EBITDA numbers, which you have seen has increased to 43%, but it does have an impact on the operating profit numbers, and then finally, for Arrow, Arrow's revenue declined 11%, but we expected that to happen. It's a cyclical business. It is currently in a down cycle if you look at Arrow internationally as well, but still, operating profit then only down 5%. And that's because of the very strict cost controls and savings in that business. Renato and his team have got a very strict hand on managing their costs, so that's it on the operating profit slide. This is also very important to us. We've spoken about capital allocation in the business. This is where we are allocating capital to.
Out of the total ZAR 359 million CapEx, 92% of this, or ZAR 330 million, is invested behind growth. And this goes mainly into the capital rental devices, Netstar and FinTech. And then we have to spend money on systems and platforms to support this growth and to enhance the customer experience. Werner spoke to you about how important customer experience is to us. We have to invest behind this. So for us, this is pleasing because this means that our markets are growing and there's opportunity for us. And we feel that putting this money behind that growth is a high priority for us from a capital allocation perspective. We invest in organic growth because we see that there is opportunity there. If we then flip forward to our group cash flows, so just starting from the left, we ended last year on ZAR 627 million.
The operations delivered ZAR 712 million of operating cash flows. After paying the bills and everything that we have to, we had ZAR 1.1 billion available for capital investment. And this is how we show you what we do with the money. So growth CapEx, I've spoken about it, ZAR 330 million. Once again, that's behind our organic growth in our businesses. Our dividend is based on the 50% payout of headline earnings from continuing operations. So that you'll recall we changed in the prior period. And because of the balance sheet, the robustness, and the cash flow that the business generates, we can continue to maintain that for the moment. So for me, pleasingly, we ended the year there or thereabouts on the same net cash as what we started.
So currently, if you look at this picture, the business is funding growth and day-to-day running out of operating cash flows.
No increase in debt and no decrease in cash. For us, this is, we're fortunate to be in this position. If I look at working capital, in the previous period, I spent quite a bit of time on this. We had to go through an exercise where we cleaned up working capital in the group. That took a lot of our time in the previous period. We feel that where we are now, this is a sustainable working capital base. Just once again to remind you, ADS is now back in these numbers, and they will have an impact on working capital. It is traditionally more working capital intensive than the platform businesses. If you look at this, the ZAR 60 million and the ZAR 79 million IT services and platforms, this is directly related to the growth that we're seeing there.
So for me, if working capital is supportive and the numbers talk to the growth in the business, I'm very happy with that. Even more pleasing for us on the Nexus business, you'll recall that's the only business that's now left in discontinued operations. They actually managed to release 33 million of working capital during the period. So a lot of focus in that business also on working capital. It talks to the point that while the business is in discontinued operations, we run it as any other operation. We don't leave it to drift off. So the 144 million change in working capital for the period is really behind growth. And that's where the number ended up for the year or for the half year. I think this is my last slide. Just on this, so we've spoken about this.
The cash generating ability in the group has resulted in our interest expense coming down. We've had higher cash balances during the period, 36% down on the prior period. Net debt is flat on the year-end. We are back to the point where we use our organic cash flows to invest behind our businesses. When we calculate covenants, we are actually in a net cash position of 0.06. The business balance sheet is there to give us the flexibility to execute on a strategy and to invest behind the growth. That's my story, Werner. Back to you.
Thanks, Carel. If I were to review sort of the period, I mean, firstly, I'm now blessed to be just over two years in the business. I think you always use Altron to reflect. I mean, as a team, we got together. We, as you saw, reviewed our strategy.
We take the board through that. There's really three kind of things that come to mind. I think the first thing is really delighted to have a strong performance to see that strategy execution lead to continued profit momentum in the business. The second one are the levels of profitability. So that focus on profitable revenue growth, high margin business, annuity, really pleasing to see that drive significant EBITDA and operating profit growth for us and operating margin expansion. And the third one is a scaling up effect that we're starting to see in our platform businesses. As you get more volume on a largely fixed cost base and you start to be able to bring those other ecosystem partners in place. Particularly pleasing for me, as we reflected on this, I did a bit of homework.
In the last time we owned Bytes in 2020, we delivered on revenues, if I recall correctly, of about ZAR 8.5 billion. We delivered profit of ZAR 450 million at an operating margin of 5%. In the results now past, on a portfolio where that now is 60% of that revenue, we delivered ZAR 25 million more profit at double the operating profit margin of 10%, which I think is a really, really pleasing result of what we're trying to do in the business. And of course, exceptionally pleasing to see how that is leading to increasing returns to our shareholders and to be in the fortunate cash position that we are in. I just wanted to really just remind you of this. Carel spoke about it.
When we set our strategy in place about 18 months ago, we said we wanted to have a 19% operating margin or 19, north of 19 in our platform businesses. In Netstar specifically, where we put a profit improvement strategy in place, we wanted to go from 10%-16%. In our IT services businesses, which were hardly making any margin at all at that point in time, if you recall, we wanted to make north of 7% and we wanted to get between 6%-8% in our Altron digital business. And overall, we targeted achieving about ZAR 1.1 billion worth of operating profit by the end of 2026. We maintain all of these targets and we're really happy to see that the discipline strategy execution has given us the confidence to upgrade our operating profit target for FY26 to ZAR 1.15 billion.
I really strongly believe that we've got the right solutions, we've got the right strategy, we've got the right leadership team, and we've got the right people to be able to execute on this, and I really would like to take this opportunity to thank my family for their support, the board of Altron. I'm blessed to have an incredible leadership team, and of course, most importantly, the 4,000-odd people who work for Altron. It's really not difficult to deliver these results. It's difficult to service our customers day in and day out to take 1,500-odd calls on a daily basis to get those closer loop calls from the CEO to be able to make sure that our customers are delighted and to be able to deliver these performances. I'd really like to thank all of those people. Thank you very much.
I think, Diggy, it's back to you, I think.
Thank you very much, Werner. You talk about our culture and our people, and it really brings me to pause at this moment and reflect in my personal journey. I guess we will say it's transformative growth in a personal context. In 2009, when I joined Altron, I would never have imagined that I would stand before this audience today and help deliver the results. It speaks to the great organizational culture that we have as a company, and our people are appreciated, and largely thanks to the leadership, Werner and Co. Thank you so much. The next session that we are going to talk about privileges. I'm about to invite on stage Bronwyn Nielsen to take us through the Q&A session.