Welcome to our Webcast of the Genus Preliminary Results for our 2022 Fiscal Year. Thank you for joining Alison Henriksen and me today. As well as our recorded webcast, there will be a live Q&A held later today, and details are in our results release. After the usual disclaimer on chart two, I'm gonna be covering our business and strategic progress, and Alison will outline the financial performance. First, let me start with some headlines for Genus for fiscal year 2022. We continue to make good strategic progress, and we invested for the future while navigating a challenging macro environment with the war in Ukraine, dramatic increases in input costs for protein producers. As anticipated, when we announced our half-year results, the porcine market in China continued to be challenging in the 2nd half, exacerbated by COVID lockdowns there.
As you can see from the headline numbers, this had a significant impact on our performance in the year, resulting in lower adjusted profit and earnings per share against the very strong prior year comparison. However, outside PIC China, Genus has performed strongly with revenue up 9% and adjusted profit up 28% despite the challenging external environment. Encouragingly, since June, we've seen an improvement in pig prices in China, and I will talk more about that shortly. I'd say our progress was really underpinned by market share gains with key customers globally, who are recognizing the strength of our genetics and the great services our Genus colleagues provide. I'll illustrate some examples of that in the presentation. We've also been investing significantly in our supply chain and systems to support future growth, and I'm really pleased with the progress we've made.
Our R&D programs also continue to make good progress. We have a growing pipeline of initiatives across different discovery and development stages, and our PRRSV resistance program is on track. Through the great commitment and contributions of Genus colleagues in pursuing our consistent strategy, we've continued to make progress through the year, and we're recommending a final dividend unchanged from last year, taking the total dividend for the year to 32 pence. Now let's understand a bit more about what is happening in our customers' markets and the challenges they're facing. Looking around the world and North America is perhaps in the best shape for protein producers. While they are experiencing high input costs of grain, fuel, and labor, output prices have also risen, creating profitable conditions for producers.
However, they are generally cautious on expansion due to factors such as the high cost of construction, shortage of labor, or drought conditions in many beef raising areas. In Latin America, tough trading conditions in the 2nd half of FY 22 were driven in part by lower exports to China of both pork and beef. Currently, we're seeing somewhat better signs around exports and an improved balance between input and output prices, though concerns remain about the strength of domestic demand. Conditions for our customers in Europe across all categories are really very tough, which I'm sure is not surprising to you given the well-known issues with the Ukraine war, cost inflation, African swine fever spreading across Europe, and to cap it all, the scorching summer drought that we experienced.
Finally, in Asia, I'll deal more with the China porcine market on the next chart, but here, I'd comment that China dairy has been a favorable expansionary market environment but is now turning to a more cautious neutral phase. To summarize, while the global picture is always complex, this has been a uniquely challenging environment for many of our customers. Let's look in more detail at China porcine. I think those of you who follow Genus will be well aware that pig producers there have been heavily loss-making in FY22. The chart on the left shows the ratio of pig price to corn price, which can be used as a rough rule of thumb on the profitability of production. A ratio 6x is typically seen as a benchmark of break-even.
What you'll observe is that since June, the ratio has moved above this level. Although corn prices rose, they've been more than covered by the increase in the pig price above RMB 20 per kg. Actually, this last week it was at RMB 23 per kg. Industry observers expect prices to hold above RMB 20, at least for the remainder of this calendar year. The move upwards is clearly encouraging. However, it typically takes some months of good prices before demand for porcine genetics improves. In managing our business in China, we continue to take the long view, and we're building our capacity to supply both through 3rd-party multiplication and owned and joint venture farms in what is the world's biggest pig market. In addition, our team truly is incomparable to any others in the market, and our genetics are performing very well in customer systems.
We remain confident that we're very well placed to benefit from improving demand as and when it materializes. Let's now turn to see how we're winning with strategic customers around the world, and I'd like to start with PIC in North America. We're clearly gaining market share in both the sow line and dam line based on the strength of our product performance, backed up by outstanding technical service. The PIC 800, which we introduced following the Møllevang acquisition, is now used by 17 of the top 20 U.S. producers, and is gaining share within these systems as they see its performance. Our overall market share gain in the sow line was an impressive five percentage points in the year.
The Camborough sow continues to lead the market and has been at the forefront in capturing share from internal programs in North America, most recently at Olymel, where our integration of their AlphaGene program got off to a very good start in the 2nd half of FY22. The result of these gains are now clearly showing through in accelerating North America volumes and our fastest rate of royalty growth there at 7% for many years. Spain is the largest porcine market in Europe with a strong focus on technified production. We've been focused on growing our presence in this important market for several years, and the fruit of that is also now clearly coming through. Our volume growth is accelerating, and it's being driven by growth in royalties.
Our strategy to win has focused on demonstrating performance at key customers, such as those highlighted on the chart, while growing our capacity to supply the market. Most recently, we've been particularly focused on creating more boar stud capacity with strong partnerships with Semen Cardona, a leading boar stud operator, and the Sergal acquisition, which performed well in its 1st year. All of this gives us confidence that there's considerable opportunity to continue to grow. Let's now switch our focus to ABS, where our strategy of driving growth in sexed and beef continue to show progress with sexed and beef semen volumes exceeding 50% of global semen sales for the 1st time. The case study on the right is a great example of how we use our total ABS portfolio to drive value for strategic customers.
Our relationship with this customer started about four to five years ago through providing genetic advice and embryos to improve their herd quality. Next, we introduced Sexcel. Then we conducted a trial with them of our NuEra beef-on-dairy genetics against Angus bulls. The result of that trial was so compelling, the customer decided to not only switch fully to NuEra, but to retain and grow out the resulting calves to capture the beef value. We then wrap great technical and reproductive service around the genetics, and that's further added to the customer's performance, with the result that we now have essentially all of the customer's business. I mentioned earlier that China's dairy market has been growing. As you can see on the bottom left of the chart, with large-scale producers driving consolidation and modernization of the industry.
ABS has achieved significant success there through our engagement with key accounts and supply chain partners. This has enabled us to rapidly gain share and importantly, to also start to drive the growth of sexed semen, as you can see from the graph at the top left of the chart. Through examples such as the case studies shown here, we've been able to move beyond the previously typical transactional buying behavior of Chinese dairies into more strategic genetics relationships. In the case of this Inner Mongolia key account, we created a genetic index focused on the customer's objectives, and that's enabling us to drive and measure progress with the customer, leading them to increase the share of the business that we have in that account. In the 2nd example, we're partnering with a leading global producer of dairy products to access a network of smaller farmers.
These examples, I think, illustrate how we're achieving strong progress in our presence in the China dairy market. This year has been a year of significant investment in the business, investment we've been making based on our confidence in the future growth opportunities for Genus. I've touched earlier on some of our M&A deals, so here I'll focus on facilities and systems. You can see here in the middle, our new porcine elite farm in Saskatchewan called Atlas. This is now stocked and operational, and I was fortunate to be able to visit it along with other board members in June. It's a great facility, and we're using the opportunity of the greenfield site there to achieve even higher health status of our genetics.
I was also able to visit our new Leeds facility in Wisconsin, which 1st opened in 2021, and where further barns were added this year. It's a truly wonderful environment for our bulls to live in and be productive. At the same time as facilities, we've also invested in our systems. In ABS, we've introduced new approaches to digitally interacting with our customers, enhancing customer experience. Our Genus One rollout continues, with the U.K. successfully going live last month, meaning that now over 60% of Genus is live on the system. As well as these capital investments, we also invest significantly in R&D, knowing that in our long cycle business, it is important to consistently pursue the next opportunities for innovation that can drive future progress.
PRRSV gene-edited pigs are an example many of you will be familiar with, and I'll comment on that on the next chart. Here, what I really want to highlight is that our pipeline of projects has grown significantly over the last two years as we've built out our R&D capabilities. That pipeline now contains a broadly balanced set of opportunities over time and across discovery and development stages. Of course, scientific discovery and technical developments face many challenges on the way to eventual realization, and some projects, frankly, may not succeed, so we manage this very much as a portfolio of opportunities. Our PRRSV project continues to make steady progress in line with its plan. We're expanding our E2 generation animal numbers, and we'll be giving birth to E3 generation animals towards the end of this calendar year.
We're commissioning an additional farm this autumn to house the growing number of animals, which will add to our gene editing expense in FY23. Meanwhile, our productive relationship with the FDA continues, and we're expanding our regulatory engagement in other key countries. In addition, our engagement with supply chain participants, including producers and packers, is stepping up, and the interest we see is encouraging. Finally, I'd like to wrap up this segment of the presentation by commenting on sustainability. The most important contribution we make to sustainability is the genetic improvement we deliver to our customers' systems, enabling them to produce protein with fewer resources, like less land, less water, and fewer emissions. I'm pleased to report that across pork, dairy, and beef, our teams again made strong progress in driving genetic improvement.
This drives our results in making our products the best choice for customers, and it benefits the environment. Sustainability really is at the heart of what we at Genus do. However, we do also want to reduce the carbon emissions we're directly responsible for as a business through our own operations. We've set out some clear goals, and we're making strong progress. Our primary intensity ratio measures carbon emissions versus the weight of animals under our control, and that reduced further, and we've now achieved a 25% cumulative reduction in carbon intensity since FY19. Many factors drove this, including, our animals' diet composition, manure management, more sustainable energy sourcing, and land management. We have many actions in place to drive further gains over the coming years to meet our commitments. With that, I'd now like to hand over to Alison to take you through the financials.
Thank you, Stephen. This year, Genus had some particularly challenging market conditions, and I'm proud of the performance of the business, and especially our colleagues in meeting these challenges while keeping one eye on future growth. Millie, who features on this page, symbolizes this. PIC don't normally name their pigs, but Millie is the 1 millionth piglet that was born at PIC's Apex nucleus farm last year, and she gave birth to her 1st litter of 22 piglets. She's a special sow. Let's get on to the numbers. As you heard from Stephen, our full year results have been impacted by PIC China's performance, but there were robust performance across the rest of the group. In actual currency, adjusted profit before tax of GBP 71.5 million was down 16%. The graph to the right very clearly shows the decrease in trend of profit and operating profit margin.
However, what you can also see is that despite the downturn in PIC China, our results were still higher than the profit and margin achieved in FY21. I'll talk more about the different regional performances in a moment. This year, there was a GBP 1.8 million exchange rate benefit on the translation of overseas profits, primarily from sterling weakening against other currencies. This was particularly pronounced in the 2nd half, and at today's spot rates, we estimate that the benefit for FY23 will be over GBP 6 million. The work of our R&D team is incredibly important, as you heard from Stephen, and they're making great progress with the PRRS program and other opportunities. Thus we invested GBP 67 million, which is up 7% in prior year. I'll share some more of the specifics of this later.
Central costs were 16% lower than prior year, reflecting prudent cost management, given the challenges for PIC China. We had lower performance-related employee rewards. Adjusted operating profit excluded gene editing costs was down GBP 11.8 million or 14% in constant currency. I have talked previously about our target being 10% CAGR growth over the medium term, and I'll share more on this later. For the rest of the presentation, I'll refer to constant currency growth, as I believe this is a better indicator of our underlying trading performance. Turning to volumes. China had significant impact on our porcine volumes, which meant they were flat overall, but strong at 8% growth excluding China. In bovine, we achieved record growth last year, and there have been more headwinds this year with the challenging macroeconomics in many markets.
Against this tough compare, it was a robust performance, achieving 3% growth in the year. Consistent with the 1st half, this was led by beef and sexed genetics, and from a regional perspective, Asia led the way in growth. Now, what I wanna do here is pull the numbers apart to show you what happened in PIC China versus the rest of the group. In the graph on the left, you can see the adjusted operating profit trend of Genus excluding China, PIC China, and gene editing costs. 25% growth was achieved in the year, which is higher than 17% growth achieved in FY21. At the same time, there's been growth in profitability, with margin improving over 150 basis points in each of the past two years.
On the right-hand side of this slide, you can see what's happened to PIC China's performance. The graph on the top shows the causes of year-on-year decline in PIC China's profit from circa GBP 33 million to under GBP 6 million in the year. Similar to the 1st half, there was a loss of profits from the reduction in upfront sales and royalty contracts. Higher supply chain costs were incurred due to the closure of an aging facility in the 1st half and expansion of another in the year. Also byproduct sales were over GBP 4 million lower, with the average peak price down 50% to below RMB 15 per kilo, compared to a peak of RMB 35 per kilo back in December 2020, which really provided unusually high profits for FY21.
PIC China's profits were also impacted by a charge of GBP 4 million, which was a one-off refund to a customer that we talked about in the 1st half when it was concluded. The graph in the bottom right shows the volume trends, where you can see in the 2nd half, volume remained low compared to prior year, down by 42%. However, volumes improved 19% in the 2nd half in comparison to the 1st half, reflecting higher sales under royalty contracts to customers that commenced populating their farms. It's still very early days in the recovery of the porcine market, but as you can see, we now have a much larger business than in FY19, when African swine fever 1st occurred in China. Most importantly, the PIC China team have done a great job the past year positioning the business for the recovery.
The last of the supply chain changes is the new farm in Huanggang that will be stocked in November. As you can see, PIC's profit declined 13%, but increased 11% if China is excluded. Royalty revenue is up 1% for the year, but up 8% if China is excluded. The loss of profits in China meant PIC lost some leverage of its cost base, and its adjusted operating profit margin dropped to 36.6%. You heard from Stephen how North America has continued to achieve strong growth in the 2nd half, taking market share, which led to very good growth in operating profit, up 7% on prior year, the highest rate of growth they have achieved for more than five years. Royalty revenue growth was also strong at 7%, and we expect more growth to come.
Latin America also performed well, with profit up 5%. As I warned in February, Brazil had a tougher 2nd half as customers were cautious given the drop in exports to China. Our joint venture with Agroceres saw profit drop 7% for the year. Europe's profit was slightly up on prior year, and we've continued to operate in Russia, but profit was down 27% on prior year when there was a large expansion with a key account in Russia. As you heard from Stephen, Spain has continued to be the growth driver for the region, up 40%. This underpins Europe's royalty revenue growth of 7%, which is very encouraging.
Lastly, as you've heard, China overshadowed Asia's results. The rest of the region achieved strong growth of 25%, with the Philippines being a key contributor, achieving 67% growth as the country recovers from ASF. Now, ABS's revenue growth was 7% and adjusted operating profit growth was 9%. Performance was softer in the 2nd half, and this is due to the challenging market conditions, particularly following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There was an impact of an IT security incident in June, which had an impact on Latin America. North America's Sexcel volumes grew 10%, and NuEra beef volumes were very strong at 33%. Embryo volumes also recovered in the 2nd half. Revenue grew 4%, and this reflects the volume growth and also growth in IntelliGen 3rd-party business.
The mix effect of revenues, combined with sound management of pricing to offset some cost inflation, meant North America's profit was up 4%. Latin America continued to grow, delivering a 5% increase in revenue and 2% increase in operating profit. It was certainly a tougher year for our team, and this is due to a temporary ban on beef exports to China in the 1st half. In the 2nd half, June trading was significantly impacted in Brazil due to a cyberattack that hampered the team's ability to dispatch product in that month. We estimate the impact on trading was just shy of GBP 1 million, which means that if that hadn't happened, LatAm would have achieved operating profit growth of 11% for the year. I do want to mention that the cyberattack affected some legacy systems only.
Our GenusOne ERP was secure, and the impact was only in the month of June. It's just unfortunate, and this is a common occurrence for companies these days. I want to acknowledge that the situation was extremely well managed by our IT team, and we further bolstered our IT security. EMEA's revenue was up 5%, even though total volumes were down 2%, and that's because there's been sound management of pricing to offset inflation and good growth in our IntelliGen 3rd-party business. Sexcel continued to grow at 8% and beef volumes were up 9%. The market uncertainties, particularly triggered in the 2nd half by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, meant overall volumes and profit were impacted in the U.K. and in our distributor markets. Consequently, operating profit was down 4% for the region for the year.
ABS continues to operate in Russia and the Ukraine, and I just think it's quite remarkable that despite facing enormous challenges, our colleagues in the Ukraine beat their budget for the year. Asia continued to achieve high growth in operating profit, up 24%. You heard from Stephen, ABS is doing very well in China with profit up 40%. Now, overall, R&D increased as planned to GBP 67 million, and that's despite the challenging year we've had. We've stuck to our strategy, investing in R&D, and as Stephen illustrated, the increase in spend in the past three years has really translated into a growing pipeline of opportunities. Porcine product development was stable, as was our spending on gene editing.
However, we do expect that gene editing costs will increase by GBP 5 million-GBP 6 million in constant currency in FY23 as we increase the numbers of edited animals and get closer to completing our FDA submissions. We also expect porcine product development costs to increase in FY23 by around GBP 6 million, which reflects the expansion of PIC supply chain with the opening of the Atlas nucleus farm. Bovine product development spend was up 13%, and that reflects the continued investment in our IntelliGen production capacity and our dairy and beef development programs, particularly NuEra, with it now accounting for a 3rd of beef volumes. Moving on to statutory income. We consistently measure and report our adjusted results as we do think these give a better understanding of the business's underlying performance.
Our statutory results are affected by a number of non-cash items, and I'll walk you through these. Statutory profit before tax decreased to GBP 48.4 million, and profit after tax on a statutory basis was GBP 36.7 million. The adjusted tax rate was 24.3%, and that's up 180 basis points on last year, which is due to the reduced share of group profits arising from China, where we have a benefit from the availability of tax relief on certain agricultural-related activities. The effective statutory tax rate was also higher at 28%, again, due to the mix of China profits. There was a one-off charge reflecting higher deferred tax rates on the porcine biological assets in China.
Those of you that are familiar with our accounts will know that we are required in our statutory accounts to apply IAS 41 accounting for biological assets. The effect was a GBP 5.4 million decrease, which is due to the reduction in the fair value of bovine assets due to certain fair value estimate changes. As those of you who follow the company know, these fair value calculations can fluctuate and are non-cash movements. Exceptional items are lower, with income of GBP 3.6 million from a legacy legal claim in Brazil, which we had in the 1st half, and that offset legal costs of GBP 1.4 million in relation to the ongoing litigation with STg enetics. ABS had supply chain restructuring costs of GBP 2.8 million.
With the expansion of Leeds in Wisconsin, ABS was able to consolidate and close its barns in Canada. Lastly, the share of post-tax profits of the JVs was GBP 5.2 million, and that is GBP 8 million down on prior year, reflecting the weaker performance of our JVs in China and Brazil, and also biological asset movements in the JVs. FY22 was a big year of investment for us. It was a peak year for capital expenditure of almost GBP 51 million, which meant we had a cash outflow of GBP 13.5 million, and we spent GBP 19.5 million on investments that included the Olymel transaction, which we completed in February.
You can see on this chart, we ended the year with net debt of GBP 185 million, which compares with almost GBP 106 million at the beginning of the financial year. Our leverage has increased to 1.7x EBITDA, but remains within our targeted range of 1x-2x . Cash generated by operations of GBP 59.7 million reflected cash conversion of 82%. This is an improvement on the 1st half, although a little below our annual target of 90%. At the 30th of June, the headroom of our credit facilities was almost GBP 78 million. Subsequently in August, we exercised the accordion in our facilities and drew down the equivalent of GBP 60 million and extended the term a further year to August 2025. This gives us headroom more in keeping with historic levels.
The 1st half of our financial year is less cash generative, and with the recent weakening of sterling against the U.S. dollar also impacting our U.S. borrowings, I would expect our net debt to EBITDA to increase to above 2x by the middle of the financial year before returning at the full year to around the current level. With the increased debt and higher interest rates, I expect we will also have higher finance costs in FY23, up by around GBP 4 million. Given our solid financial performance, we are pleased to propose our final dividend remains flat compared with prior year, which is 2.6x adjusted earnings cover, and that's within our targeted range of 2.5x-3x.
While 2022 has been a challenging year, we need to put it in context of Genus's medium term financial objectives. When referring to our five profit CAGR performances, you can see we've delivered against our target of 10%. There are a few ups and downs in annual cash conversion, but our five year average is over 100%. Despite the various macroeconomic challenges in various parts of the world, our stated financial objectives remain the same, and we've continued to manage the company with our focus on the medium and long-term growth opportunities. Thank you for listening, and I'll now hand over to Stephen to conclude our presentation.
Thank you, Alison, for taking us through the financials. We've covered a lot in this presentation, so I'll try and summarize briefly. As we've seen, our performance in FY22 was heavily impacted by the porcine market in China, but has been strong excluding it. We've been making continued good strategic progress and have invested for growth. I think we're all aware that the macro landscape that companies are navigating has many challenges, both economic and political. More positively, we've seen recent improvement in the China porcine market, and we're well positioned to benefit as and when demand for genetics improves. You've seen from Alison our performance against our stated medium-term growth expectations. Looking forward, those expectations remain unchanged, which reflects our confidence in Genus' strategy and the many opportunities we have for growth. Let me just thank you for your time today.