Good morning and welcome to Altron's results for the financial year ended February 2023. My name is Thabiso Hermanus. With me today are Altron CEO, Werner Kapp, CFO, Nicholas Bofilatos, and Netstar's MD, Grant Fraser. Today's call is being webcast live and recorded. You can ask a question by posting it in the chat box. You can replay the call and view the transcript on the Altron Investor Relations website. As a reminder, during the call, we'll be making forward-looking statements, and I'll ask you to look at the cautionary language contained in our presentation regarding the risks and uncertainties associated with forward-looking statements. Unless otherwise noted, all growth comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year. With that, I will hand over to Werner Kapp to take you through the results.
Thanks, Thabiso. Jumping straight into our headline numbers for 2023. As a group, revenue grew 14% with EBITDA declining 4%. Group HEPS is down 22% with EPS improving 96%. Our continuing operations delivered revenue growth of 19% and EBITDA growth of 2%. Continuing HEPS was down 8% with EPS up 80%. Just a reminder to everyone that continuing operations now include a full 12 months of Law Trust, but it excludes Altron Document Solutions and our former Rest of Africa business. As announced, our results were negatively impacted by three large non-cash adjustments. First, a provision of ZAR 134 million relating to our exposure to the City of Tshwane, which I will now refer to as COT going forward.
Despite significant progress on our claim, we have followed a conservative approach and raised a provision following reports released in January 2023 that the Auditor-General identified material uncertainties in COT's 2022 financial statements. Secondly, we raised a ZAR 31 million provision for inventory held for the Gauteng Broadband Network project, which I will refer to going forward as GBN, which was not renewed. Lastly, we announced the termination of the sale of the Altron Document Solutions. An assessment of our assets held for sale resulted in a provision on inventory held of ZAR 74 million and an impairment of ZAR 30 million on an outstanding receivable. Altron Document Solutions is reported in our discontinued operations, and therefore, this adjustment will not affect continuing operations.
Whilst we cannot ignore the impact on our results and we take accountability for the situations that have led to these non-cash adjustments, it is important to discuss our results before these adjustments to give you a good feel for the core performance of our operation. Reversing the impact of the non-cash adjustments relating to COT and GBN, our continuing operations delivered 11% EBITDA growth, 14% operating income growth, 19% HEPS growth, and 79% EPS growth, evidencing the resilient and defensive nature of our high annuity base income. In line with our policy of paying out a minimum of 40% continuing HEPS, we have declared a final dividend of ZAR 0.19 a share, bringing the total dividend for the year to ZAR 0.35. This represents an increase of 17% over last year.
This was calculated based on continuing adjusted HEPS to reverse the impact of the non-cash adjustments. Before I hand over to Grant, I want to spend the next 20 minutes unpacking our strategy and discussing the operational performance of our business. The proliferation of billions of mobile devices running business applications connected through high-speed networks to cloud computing centers has fundamentally disrupted business and the way it operates. This digital transformation is changing the way businesses interacts with its clients, employees, and its operations. These devices have led to a massive surge in big data. Edge computing, along with the developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, has fundamentally enabled our ability to convert data into actionable insights for competitive advantage. In this rapidly evolving technological landscape, customers are seeking reliable partners to navigate their digital journey while safeguarding against increasing cybersecurity risks.
At Altron, we have a proud 58-year history of developing real-world technology solutions. We were born with South African ingenuity out of the necessity to use global technology to solve South African-specific challenges. Where this technology did not exist, we created it. Using our IT services businesses, we assist our customers to manage and modernize their legacy systems. With our award-winning analytics capabilities, we can turn their data into actionable insights that can be rapidly deployed through our platform businesses. This unique combination of platform and IT services businesses positions us to be the trusted partner for our clients on their digital journey. I am thrilled to be part of this exciting journey and to contribute towards driving innovation and growth for our customers, our partners in South Africa and beyond.
To become a leading platform in IT services business, we will focus on embedding customer obsession at every level of our organization. We will execute on three key growth levers. One, growing revenue by partnering with our customers to get the most value out of their digital spend. Two, driving operating leverage through improving our gross profit margin and disciplined cost management. Three, investing in Data as a Service and in scaling our Altron Security, FinTech, and Netstar businesses. Now, I'm fully aware that Netstar has not performed to its full potential. However, with the right investment and leadership, which I believe is now in place, we will reset its path to growth. For the past three years, Altron has focused on restructuring and divesting from non-core assets. Now, as a leadership team, our focus is on growth.
Lastly, everything we do will be done responsibly for our environment and our communities while ensuring the strongest levels of governance. On our ESG pillar, we have some exciting initiatives which I will tell you about at half year. For now, I would like to highlight one initiative which demonstrates Altron's social impact. Within Netstar, we have partnered with eDeaf, we've employed a number of deaf individuals to add further value to Netstar's big data fleet capabilities by reading body language and picking up on certain user behaviors, which also allows for preventative intervention. Aligned with our values of inclusion, you will see that our results are transcribed at the bottom of the screen, our Q&A will be interpreted on behalf of the deaf community. Our strategy will be enabled by efficiently allocating our capital, differentiating our client offerings through collaboration, and accelerating our high-performance culture.
To achieve our strategic goals, we have realigned management incentives towards our new levers. Our focus is on targeting specific objectives to drive growth and profitability. In the short term, we are executing the profit improvement strategies in place for Netstar and Altron Systems Integration. In the medium term, we remain committed to targeting our previous guidance of tripling 2021 continued operating income by 2026. Our long-term goal is to deliver sustainable value to our shareholders by becoming a leading platform and IT services business in our chosen markets. Now let's focus on customer obsession and our first growth lever of growing revenue. Our customers are asking for a holistic solution from a partner who understands their business and then can provide innovative technology solutions at a competitive price point. Delivering into this need will drive revenue growth through collaboration and differentiation.
We have segmented our customer base. We've identified our top 40 customers across which to focus on cross-selling. Our digital transformation and managed services sales team have been consolidated under one head of sales to further enable this in their business. We are investing in incentivizing and training our sales teams to sell multiple solutions. Initiatives have been implemented to reduce churn and to grow our annuity base. We have reestablished metrics to measure ongoing customer engagement throughout the customer life cycle. We are differentiating ourselves through innovation. One example, Altron Security has hired a chief technology officer to drive innovation and new product development within their team and already have two patents registered. Altron HealthTech's team of skilled engineers launched four new products in FY23 and registered a new patent.
Netstar has 23 patents registered and launched two new products with another exciting one on the horizon. Turning to the next growth lever of improving operating leverage through growing gross margin and addressing operating cost inefficiencies. Although we have grown gross margin from our continuing operations by around 9%, gross margin ratio has decreased to 34%. We aim to improve our gross margin ratio through an improved margin mix and by removing duplication in our cost to sell. Examples of some of the sales efficiencies in our cost to sell that we have already started to implement within our divisions include product value reengineering, using automation and artificial intelligence to improve efficiencies, as well as improving how we leverage economies of scale throughout our business. Operating costs increased in line with inflation, driven by pressures from rand weakness, load shedding, and an increase in fuel cost.
In addition, operating costs now include a full 12 months of Lawtrust and the COT provision. Positively, our operating cost margin contracted to 29%. We are currently looking at cost optimization across our business to ensure we eliminate any cost duplication, and we can deliver efficiencies in shared services. We are busy finalizing the savings these initiatives will deliver and will give guidance on our targeted annualized cost savings at half year. Our last growth lever is transformative growth. We generate data across all of our platforms and services, which provides us with valuable insights for creating better solutions both internally and for our customers. While we currently utilize this data within strict governance guidelines, we see potential for even greater opportunities.
To expand our revenue streams and develop even better solutions for our customers, we are establishing a new team with a focus on innovation and Data as a Service. To conclude, our strategy focuses on embedding customer obsession at every level of the organization and executing on our three growth levers whilst ensuring everything we do is done responsibly. Our strategy is enabled by efficient capital allocation, collaboration, and embedding a high-performance culture. Our focus is on improving our cash conversion ratio and allocating capital to projects that enhance our return on invested capital. We divide capital allocation into three categories. One, CapEx required to maintain our earnings power. Our goal is to keep maintenance CapEx below 65% of our annualized depreciation charge. Two, CapEx required to grow our earnings power. We reinvest organically to achieve a return on invested capital higher than our group's weighted average cost of capital.
For acquisitions, we will look at bolt-on acquisitions, not large transformative deals, specifically in FinTech, security and Netstar. Three, returning capital to capital providers. We aim to maintain a Net Debt to EBITDA ratio of less than one and to pay out at least 40% of continuing EPS as dividends to shareholders. During the year, we invested ZAR 472 million in CapEx, of which roughly 88% was growth CapEx. We are targeting to maintain largely a similar ratio in FY24. I'll now hand you over to Netstar's new MD, Grant Fraser, to take you through Netstar's strategy and operational performance.
Thank you, Werner. Warm welcome. When Altron approached me to run Netstar, I wasn't in the job market, and having successfully operated in the telematics business, my family and I were planning a new chapter which involved immigration to Australia. When I was presented with the Altron opportunity, I turned everything upside down as the opportunity to run Netstar was not something I could walk away from. Netstar is a household name as the first company to launch stolen vehicle recovery technology into South Africa 27 years ago. We were led by our customers into Southeast Asia and Australia, where the market is growing and penetration remains low, with legislation driving the adoption of telematics. With our cutting-edge technology, we are firmly set to grow in these markets. Today, we sit with over 1.6 million connected devices and over 1.3 million subscribers.
Netstar has outstanding research and development capabilities across the Netstar group with over 91 highly skilled engineers and a high software-as-a-service annuity base of 83%. Netstar lost focus on both our customers and our business, which has resulted in lost market share and margin erosion. We have an opportunity to claw back our market share by refocusing on the basics, making sure we put the customers at the center of our operations and extracting efficiencies across Netstar's business. I engaged Netstar's top clients and partners in all three key geographies to understand their pain points and how we can transform ourselves to become a partner of choice. This engagement has led me to implementing the following changes so far, which are already starting to show a benefit.
We now approach the market with two offerings, a stolen vehicle recovery solution and a telematics solution, depending on the customer's needs. We segmented our customers into OEMs, consumer, light, and commercial fleet at a sales and operational level with a new head of sales for our commercial fleet business. These customers have different needs, and our segmentation approach has allowed us to improve our speed of service and expanding our technicians through various partnerships. We consolidated the customer's onboarding and fitment planning process. The benefits of this approach are already evident. In January, we were fitting around 700 devices a day. Now we are fitting around 1,100 devices a day.
In our OEM segment, the partnership we launched with WiTaxi has the potential to reach 48,000 connected taxis on which we make a revenue on the ads and also when we fit the device. For our consumer segment, we launched a wireless active recovery device, enhancing the monitoring of their assets. To grow our market share in light fleet, we launched a full telematics offering at a unique price point with the opportunity to upsell. This has been well received in the market, with 810 new subscribers signing up in the first two months of FY24. In the commercial sector, our market leading collision avoidance solution is assisting customers in the mining space to meet the changing legislation requirements. A solution we developed for the South African market, which we are taking into Australia.
In commercial, we have onboarded 433 new subscribers post year-end. I'm extremely impressed by Netstar's engineering talent. We launched two new products and have an exciting one planned for FY24. To retain our customers, we've established an in-house call center to proactively focus on churn and retentions. We are targeting to reduce our current churn of 22%- 17% over the short term, and our customer retention rate is at 95%. Turning to our results, revenue grew 11% with ARPU excluding our OEMs and distributors, increasing from ZAR 150- ZAR 154. EBITDA was more or less flat, but operating income was down 27% to ZAR 192 million. Earnings were negatively impacted by the increased activity in prefits, with a low conversion rate compounded by the increase in component costs.
This increased our hardware cost for devices prefitted to the vehicles on the dealer floor, a process which began in March 2022. We have launched several initiatives to improve the speed at which we can convert these prefitted devices into revenue contracts and also renegotiated the unit economics of these prefitted devices. In FY23, our conversion rate was 32%. These initiatives have already increased it to 47%, and we are targeting to get to 60% in the short term. In comparison to our peers, our gross profit is negatively impacted by the cost of devices expensed over three years versus our peers who expense them over five-eight years. Actuaries have been engaged to assess the useful life to ensure the right period is applied.
70% of our customers only have one solution with us, creating a multi-product opportunity to upsell into our existing base. We have interrogated our cost base to drive our cost optimization in FY24, already achieving some early wins through renegotiating our pricing in fast-moving lines and enhancements in product value reengineering. Everything that I've highlighted to this point is immediately doable. The refocusing of Netstar into an efficient, customer-obsessed organization is well underway. The real opportunity lies in Big Data as a Service, and it's not every day that you are presented with an opportunity to run an organization that has a platform, the technology, and the skills to quickly capitalize on one of the biggest trends of our time. In FY23, we invested ZAR 57 million in research and development.
Part of this initiative was used to establish a fleet bureau to grow our market share in fleet by offering a managed service to our customers in a cloud platform to enable us to deliver Big Data as a Service. Netstar processes over 181 billion data messages a month. The more customers we add onto our platform, the more assets we can digitalize, the more data we can analyze, the more accurate the models we can build to generate better solutions for our customers, generating greater return on investment for our shareholders. I'm excited by the discussions we are having on this with our partners across industries, from insurance to retail, to explore opportunities in the data space. With that, I'll hand back to Werner to take you through another exciting business, our Altron FinTech.
Thank you, Grant. I'm very excited to partner with you as we reset Netstar on its path to growth. Our commerce enablement platform and our fintech processing platform provide customers with solutions to enable them to do business in store, online, and through mobile channels. We service over 20,200 merchants, 180 enterprises with 90 million consumer touchpoints per annum. We process, store, and protect highly regulated financial data, which gives us unique data insights, enabling us to develop better solutions for our customers, drive revenue, and solve their pain points. Our Altron FinTech business delivered a 22% growth in revenue, with operating income and EBITDA growing by 21% and 22% respectively. This was despite a 12% growth in operating expenses, largely aimed at expanding our sales capacity.
We saw a 7% revenue growth in our card issuance and personalization division due to regulatory and compliance-driven refreshes. A 85% revenue increase in our integrated transaction solutions due to higher terminal hardware sales and increased volumes and value processed through our financial switch. Our credit management solutions also improved revenue by 11%. Payments and collections expanded by 12%. We believe that strong demand will continue into FY24, but hardware sales should normalize by a ZAR 25 million-ZAR 30 million adjustment. Our Altron HealthTech platform saw strong performance with 8% revenue growth, 2% EBITDA, and 5% operating income growth. Earnings was impacted by CapEx expense of ZAR 11.7 million relating to our new cloud-based platform. Reversing the impact of this, EBITDA grew 12% and operating income grew 16%.
Revenue growth was driven by a 23% increase in the corporate segment, with nine new clients added and a 7% increase in transaction value processed. Value collected on behalf of our clients was up 17%. We launched four new products in FY23, including an innovative clinical care health solution for practitioners, a data-driven corporate tool providing valuable insights to employers on employee productivity and wellness, and a digital platform for medical practitioners. In FY24, we are targeting growth in our occupational health offering, particularly in the mining and automotive industry, whilst launching new solutions based on our data analysis on our platform. We have soft launched a service with a retail pharmacy company where we are using the data on our platform to see how we can improve their performance or analyze burden of disease using geospatial data.
This is a very, very exciting space to be in. Into FY24, we will continue to see how we can utilize the powerful information we have to drive better solutions and new revenue streams while adhering to strict governance guidelines. Now for our digital transformation segment. Altron Systems Integration's performance over the past four years has been disappointing with EBITDA and OI consistently in decline. This is the world I come from and where my core expertise lies. Collin Govender, who was successful in turning the Altron Karabina business around, is the new Managing Director of Altron Systems Integration. As I said at half year, I've also rolled up my sleeves and got involved. We have closed loss-making businesses and right-sized the cost base, resulting in an estimated ZAR 50 million per year cost saving to return this business to profitability and to now reset its growth path.
To grow the business into FY24, we will focus on providing our customers with the best service by solving their business needs. Secondly, a more focused sales approach. We have identified that 25% of our top 20 customers only contact one service with us. This presents an opportunity to upsell to our existing client base. Thirdly, to expand gross margin over time, we will drive to scale our business in infrastructure, workforce management and outsourcing. A new head of sales has been appointed to focus on our outsourcing business. For FY24, early leading indicators in this space are promising. Our pipeline is up about 60% and in the last six months we have secured, amongst others, the largest workforce management deal on the continent. Moving on to Altron Karabina's results. Changes in Microsoft incentives put pressure on revenue.
Despite this, Altron Karabina managed to grow revenue by 10% due to increased demand in data and analytics, business applications and software services. A continued focus on cost savings achieved a 7% reduction in operating costs. EBITDA expanded 19% and operating income by 44%. Altron Karabina has demonstrated impressive growth in a market where demand for specialized skills is high, but the supply is limited due to a skills shortage. As we look ahead to FY24, this challenge of skills shortages persist and continues to restrict our market capacity. While we are investing in programs like our graduate program to improve our skills, we recognize the need to realign our revenue base to match our current capacity to enable us to maintain our commitment to delivering excellent customer service. Turning to Altron Security.
Our company is well-positioned to take advantage of the fast-growing market in the security space, which is being fueled by increased regulations, supply chain governance and digital transformation across all areas. Our end-to-end offering in this space has been further enhanced by our acquisition of Lawtrust. Our results include a full 12 months of Lawtrust. Excluding the Lawtrust performance, Security grew revenue by 9%, EBITDA by 26% and operating income by 57%, evidencing good fiscal discipline in controlling costs to drive improved operating leverage. Lawtrust continues to outperformance business case. Despite the team being focused on integrating two businesses over the past year, they have delivered solid results with a 93% return on invested capital.
Moving forward to FY24, we expect to continue to see strong demand in the public sector, enterprise space and in the new mid-tier level customers, which now accounts for 25% of our base. With 56% of our customers currently only contacting one service with us, we have a significant opportunity to upsell to our existing base and expand our offering to new clients. Now let's look at our managed services segment. Regarding Altron Nexus, I have already highlighted the two non-cash adjustments which negatively impacted performance. In parallel with the Section 116 of the Municipal Finance Management Act process, which the COT's Municipal Council approved for the undisputed portion of our claim. The arbitration process with COT regarding the disputed portion of our claim commenced in April, with the first hearing set for June 2023.
The arbitrator indicated that he would make an award shortly thereafter and then provide further direction. Based on legal opinions we have received, our case remains strong, with the arbitration process set to determine the quantum of the disputed claim, as the contract has already been determined as valid and binding by the Constitutional Court ruling on the 19th of May, 2021. Although these adjustments negatively impact performance for the year, I would like to focus for a moment on how Altron Nexus performed excluding these non-cash adjustments. Altron Nexus delivered 29% revenue growth, driven largely by growth outside of GBN, including key customers in the private sector, which de-risks our reliance on public sector, as well as growing our critical communications business. A focus on cost optimization delivered over 100% EBITDA growth.
In FY24, we will continue our focus on sales and on cost optimization to realign our cost base due to the loss of GBN. Within Altron Managed Solutions, growing gross margin, tight expense management together with 7% revenue growth provided sufficient operating leverage to drive a 34% increase in EBITDA and a 118% increase in operating income. Into FY24, we will finalize the sale of the banking business, and we will continue to focus on building our annuity revenue in the remaining business. Altron Arrow experienced another strong year of performance with 34% revenue growth and over 100% EBITDA growth, supported by improved operating leverage. Looking into FY24, we expect the trend for higher product demand to reduce slightly as electronic components become easier to procure.
Altron Arrow will continue to diversify its offering into enterprise computing solutions with a core focus on software sales for cybersecurity and AI cameras. With that, I will ask Nick to please join me. Sadly, this is the last set of results that Nick will be doing as CFO for the group. Having been with the group for four years, the last two as CFO and having done an outstanding job for us, Nick has decided to permanently relocate to the Netherlands, where his wife got a fantastic job opportunity about 12 months ago. I think he's a bit tired of the inside of an airplane.
Nick, thank you so much for the incredible work you've done for us over the last four years and for having worked closely with you and really helping my transition into the role over the last seven months, and I really wish you and the family the best of luck. Thank you, Van. We've appointed Carel Snyman as the new Chief Financial Officer for the Altron Group. Carel has a cumulative 23 years' experience in finance, having recently operated as the CFO and COO of a multinational media company. As a CA as well as a certified public accountant, we believe that Carel has the right experience, skills, and high-performance culture required to drive Altron's growth strategy. Nick has agreed to a six-month handover process to ensure business continuity and to get Carel up to speed with Altron Group. With that, over to you, Nick.
Thank you, Werner, and thank you for the kind words. It's been a privilege to work for the Altron Group and also to work alongside you over the last eight months. I'll be watching the headlines from the Netherlands as the Altron Group grows from strength to strength in this new growth stage and its exciting journey. Before we work through the detail of the continuing operations summarized income statement, I'd like to highlight that in our results presentation last year, we adjusted for some one-off items pertaining to the write-down of the AIMS vendor financing loan, the additional IFRS 2 costs resulting from the modification on share-based payments, and severance costs incurred at that time. These adjustments have been catered for in the prior year's adjusted column.
In addition, as Werner mentioned, our results this year were negatively impacted by the non-cash adjustments in the second half relating to COT and GBN. Whilst we can't ignore the impact this had on the company and take accountability for the situations that led to these, I believe it's important to present and discuss the results on an adjusted basis to present a good feel for the outlook of our operations. This is reflected in the adjusted FY23 column. Looking at our continuing operations, I am pleased to report strong revenue growth of 19% for the period, supported by revenue growth in all our businesses. Performance in statutory EBITDA and operating income was disappointing given the strong revenue performance of the business. Adjusted EBITDA was up 11% and operating income 14%, reflecting the stronger performance in Altron Managed Solutions, Altron Security, Altron FinTech, and Altron Arrow.
Our interest charges were unfortunately up 25%, reflecting the elevated interest rate environment which the SARB has implemented to curb rising inflation. On an adjusted basis, we saw very pleasing increases in headline earnings and HEPS by 21 and 19% respectively, reflecting a stronger underlying performance of the business. On a statutory basis, we retracted just under 10% on these metrics. The total dividend for the year is ZAR 0.35, an increase of 17% over the last year. Revenue for continuing operations grew 19% with all divisions delivering growth. Given the challenging business environment, this is a pleasing result. Evidence of our operations' high annuity, diversified, and defensive nature. Digital transformation revenue was up 26%, supported by security performing well, including Lawtrust for the full 12 months. Own platforms revenue was up 14%, supported by excellent 22% growth in FinTech.
Managed services revenue was also up 14%, primarily due to a 29% increase in Altron Nexus's revenue, supported by a 7% increase in managed solutions. Within other, Altron Arrow delivered an excellent performance with a 34% revenue increase. In terms of sales mix, Altron delivers its revenue primarily from services, with a large portion of this being annuity-based. Services revenue was up 9%, supported by strong services revenue in managed services. Hardware revenue was up 35%, driven by stronger hardware sales in Altron FinTech and Altron Arrow. However, we anticipate Altron FinTech's hardware sales to normalize in FY24 with about ZAR 25 million-ZAR 30 million retraction. Software revenue was up 65%, supported by stronger software sales in the digital transformation segment.
In order to give you a view of earnings at both EBITDA and an operating income level, in our operational overview, we focused on EBITDA performance. In this slide, I'll focus on operating income. Managed services was heavily impacted by the non-cash adjustments in Altron Nexus, which contracted over 100% compared to the prior period. Before these adjustments, managed services operating income would have increased by ZAR 97 million. In our own platforms, as addressed earlier, Netstar's operating income was negatively impacted by the increased activity of prefitments with a low conversion rate compounded by the increasing component costs. This offsets the excellent 21% growth in Altron FinTech's operating income of ZAR 233 million and Altron HealthTech's 5% improvement to ZAR 96 million. Other includes Altron Arrow, which increased its operating income by ZAR 27 million, or 117%.
As with EBITDA, a very encouraging adjusted growth of 14% was achieved, statutory growth was set back by non-cash adjustments raised for COT and GBN. As described in the operational performance review, we are implementing our profit improvement strategies in Netstar and Altron Systems Integration and working hard to get all businesses firing on all cylinders and profitability levels up across the board. We continue to focus on improving working capital after the impact of the elevated levels of stock held to mitigate the risk of supply chain disruption and the impact of the floods in KZN, which resulted in Toyota's production plants being shut for several months, impacting Altron Arrow and Netstar's inventory holdings. In the owned platform segment, working capital was reduced by ZAR 54 million assisted by the return of full production of the Toyota operations, which allowed for us to work down inventories.
Net working capital was impacted by the non-cash adjustments relating to COT, GBN, and the Altron Document Solutions, which we have separately disclosed on our slide. Excluding these would result in a working capital decrease of ZAR 108 million for the year. The net reduction in working capital investment is ZAR 321 million. The group generated cash from operations of ZAR 974 million post-adjustments. As discussed on the previous slide, working capital management across our businesses resulted in a ZAR 108 million benefit to the cash flow. We sold a large portion of the conservative stock levels we held as part of the global supply chain concerns in recent times. Altron Arrow and Netstar's holdings remain higher than normal. We invested ZAR 561 million during the year to support our growth.
Key investing activities during the year largely comprised of the following items: the deferred purchase consideration of ZAR 54 million, which was paid for the Ubusha business, and ZAR 30 million was paid for the Lawtrust acquisition. PPE to the sum of ZAR 96 million and intangible assets of ZAR 118 million, of which ZAR 101 million relates to Netstar. Lastly, an increase in capital rental devices of ZAR 259 million driven by our Netstar business. With a net financing outflow of ZAR 357 million leaving us with an improved cash balance at year-end of ZAR 681 million. Free cash flow generated for the year was ZAR 412 million. Our net debt position is now ZAR 563 million, down from ZAR 767 million at half year.
This leaves the Net Debt to attributable EBITDA ratio at 0.22x , an improvement from the 0.35x reported at our interim period. Our covenant ratios are well within terms despite the increased interest costs this year, leaving headroom to execute our strategy. We continue to maintain a strong and healthy balance sheet. As Werner mentioned upfront, stringent capital allocation disciplines will be applied to ensure we deploy capital into value accretive investments, maximizing Return on Investment. We are well-positioned and placed to act on potential investments which arise that meet our investment hurdles and fit within our capital allocation structure. With that, I'd like to hand you back to Werner, who will take you through his outlook.
To deliver into these high growth markets and realize our target of tripling 2021 operating income by 2026, for the year ahead, we will focus on exiting from our non-core assets, continuing to execute on Netstar and Altron Systems Integration's profit improvement strategy, and executing on the strategy I presented to you today, which I will report progress on at every reporting period. Now it's time for the Q&A. Please feel free to put your questions in the chat box.