For joining us this morning for our full year results to 31st of May. We've got quite a lot to cover. We'll try and go through it as quickly as possible, but obviously there's quite a lot of detail to give you today. In terms of agenda, we'll give you a few of the executive highlights, then I'll hand over to Guy to give you more of the detail around the sort of the financial performance. I think really importantly, I'm quite keen to talk about our strategy and the actions we've taken around that and the progress we've made. And finally, just finish on a summary and of course conclude with some questions, both from the floor and obviously online as well.
In terms of just a few bullets from summary to give you the context. We're making really good progress around our next chapter strategy. Clearly, in the context of the market, I think that underlined the rationale for our strategy and the actions we're taking. The market was a little difficult at the beginning of the year, and that impacted on our revenue, particularly with our North American clients, and also a trickle effect across into the U.K. as well. We've taken a number of actions as a result, as a result of that, obviously focusing both on the market, but also actions in terms of realizing cost efficiencies, and operational efficiencies within the business.
The good news is, and I think this is really important, we have seen a stabilization compared to early on in the calendar year. Very positive. All of our major clients that we've seen in the previous year and this year, we've retained. Clearly, spending patterns have changed. There is a caution in the market that maybe was a little bit different, but we've retained those really important clients. We've seen revenue growth in Europe, and I think really importantly is the continued growth in our managed services business for the year, which as everybody will be aware, that is a really key element of our strategy going forward. From the perspective of software resilience, we brought in new management this year, and we're really starting to see the benefits from that perspective.
We've had the first full year of our IPM contracts, which have contributed to an overall growth picture for the business. While there was a softer Q1, the software resilience business returned to growth through H2. And we'll talk a little bit about how we're continuing that growth story and the rebranding and repositioning of the escrow software resilience business going forward. From a trading perspective, we're in line with expectations. Revenue and EBIT for FY 2024 remain the same, and we're maintaining the dividend. Just before I hand over to Guy, there are just a few points I really wanted to emphasize, just, and again, bring it back to some of the things I said earlier on this year when we talked about the strategy and perceptions of the business.
I think this sets the context for some of the strategic actions we're taking. Firstly, I think it's really important just to emphasize, we're looking at this as two distinct businesses. We've got the cyber business on one hand and the software escrow, software resilience business on the other. This business has a phenomenal track record. It's really well-recognized, and it's really well respected. And I'll just use a quote, actually, from one of our clients, recently, just maybe just to position that and where we see NCC Group. "The client actually said they look for two factors when choosing a third party to support them. They wanted reputation and a European footprint. NCC Group is the best they could possibly find.
We're highly respected, plus highly trusted by national cybersecurity experts." I think that just underlines the essence of what is about NCC Group that really is so impressive. We're obviously operating in a very dynamic market, both in terms of buying patterns, but also in terms of the cyber threats, digital transformation that we're seeing, which continues to drive some real fascinating projects and buyer requirements, which requires the right sorts of capabilities to deliver. That really comes back to the quality of our people and the DNA which sits under our business, which is around that insight, intelligence and innovation. I wanted to try and bring that to life a little bit as we sort of then talk about strategy and where we're investing.
I think we all talk, and we actually were chatting about the AI hype cycle. We all know where we sit in that currently. But when people want to know about artificial intelligence, it's NCC they look at. So we've recently had our chief scientist, a member of a select committee at Parliament, talking about the risks of artificial intelligence and the security implications of it. We're launching a white paper on artificial intelligence at Gartner today. So we are the place that people go to, and we have AI already embedded in a number of our solutions, so it just shows the depth and strength of our capabilities. So I'll hand over to Guy now just to give you a little bit more detail on the financial performance.
Thank you very much indeed, Mike. Good morning, everyone. So, I'd like to spend a few minutes talking through a summary of our actual performance for FY 2023, and give some data points and outlook for the Q1 so far this year. It's worth pointing out that our numbers for FY 2023 have been confirmed, but it is not uncommon our auditors have not yet finalized all of their paperwork, which they will do in the next 24 hours or so. So we'll be complete by the end of tomorrow. We obviously work in close cooperation with them on that. So I'm gonna talk through in the next few minutes our key financial highlights, a breakdown of our revenue growth at group level, and see what the big drivers were there.
Then do a bit more of a dive into the two individual business units, cyber and then software resilience, and finish off with a walk on our net debt, and I'll give some highlights on our current performance and what some of our measures of success are going to be going forward, which we'll then talk to you about. So first of all, in terms of our grouping, sort of our sort of financial highlights for last year, I'm pleased to say our EBIT finished at EUR 28.8 million, which was slightly ahead of the guidance of EUR 28.5 million, which we gave back in June. Our group income finished at EUR 335.1 million, excuse me, up 6.4%.
I'll give a breakdown of the drivers of that in a minute, but essentially it was broadly flat on a truly underlying basis for both businesses. Our gross margins dropped by 27 basis points. That was largely as a consequence of the North American and U.K. cyber demand falling away in the second half of the period, the second half of the year, that falling through to the bottom line, and our EBIT ended up at EUR 28.8 million, as I talked about, as a result of that revenue rec-- that revenue reduction falling through to the bottom half. Very pleased to say cash conversion remained really strong, in fact slightly up on 101.9 last year to 102.9%, and our net debt reduced by EUR 2.8 million to EUR 49.6 million on the year.
I move forward to the group adjusted income statement first. As you can see from the income statement here, the reduction in revenue and demand in the second half resulted in cash gross profit finishing up EUR 132 million, so broadly flat year on year in spite of the revenue going up. Our overheads increased by EUR 17.2 million. That's, there's no kind of new news in that, but those are as a result of a combination of pay inflation on our investment into XDR, which we did strategically last year of EUR 6.5 million. An increase in our non-client travel and training as things return to normal post-COVID is, of EUR 5 million.
The strategic investments of EUR 2.5 million, which we signposted back in February, is potentially up to EUR 5 million, but we confirmed around EUR 2.5 million in June, and then some other movements on FX and depreciation and amortization. Our finance costs increased by EUR 2.5 million to EUR 6.2 million. That's in part due to interest rates as rising in general, and also in part down to the increased borrowings as a result of the IPM acquisition. Our tax charge is reduced by EUR 7.2 million, so that our tax rate dropped from 24.5% in the prior year to 16.4%. This is a combination of provision release against the benefit of some U.S. R&D tax claims and a prior year credit in relation to the treatment of the IPM acquisition.
So overall, this resulted in adjusted profit after tax of EUR 18.9 million and an adjusted EPS of 6.1. It's worth noting that you will have seen in the accounts today that we've taken a EUR 9.75 million impairment on our North American professional services business. So as is normal, we assess all of our businesses, and we've reduced it so at the thirty-first of May, at our actual year end, so just after our profits downgrade and the deterioration in revenues in that business and before we took corrective action over the summer. So while this is an appropriate and prudent action to take for accounting purposes, our, our outlook of North America and our, our belief in the strength of that business remains wholly unchanged, okay?
But that did result in a group statutory loss before tax of EUR 4.3 million as a result of that accounting movement. So if I now just move forward to the group revenue bridge, I just want to explain how well the main five component moving parts between the EUR 314.8 million we posted in our statutory accounts in FY 2022 moved forward to EUR 335 million that we've confirmed overnight. So the first adjustment there is relates to a fair value adjustment of deferred income in the IPM acquisition that results through. So to get to a kind of an underlying basis, we should be comparing with EUR 319.2 million.
And then you can see on the remainder of the charts we had tailwinds largely resulting to U.S. dollar, which averages at a rate of 1.20 for us last year, compared to 1.34 the year before, at EUR 15.9 million, and the two businesses were broadly flat on a truly underlying basis. I'm gonna come and talk through both the moving parts and the story by half by half for both of those businesses in a minute. Okay, so let's look at cyber first. So very much a tale of two halves, as previously spoken about. So just to explain what's on these slides, and you'll see a very consistent slide for software and resilience in a minute as well.
The left-hand side of the bar chart show the cash constant currency revenue for each, for our cyber business is split between our geographies, and the right-hand side splits it between the historic divisions in which we trade our capabilities. You can clearly see a few things by this. So firstly, and I'll point some of the positives first, so our managed services business continues to really drive its momentum on half-on-half growth. I'm really pleased to say that delivered 12% constant currency growth in the full year and 15% in the second half, and we've seen that continue through the Q1 of this year in terms of momentum.
The other very obvious point is that clearly our professional services business dropped away in half two, and you can see here this is very much concentrated around North America, dropping from 59 to 40.1 from half one to half two, and to a less extent in the U.K. business. The consequence of that very sharp correction in buying behavior and revenues in the second half is what led to overall gross profit in cyber dropping by 67 basis points. Then after accounting for the overheads, which we spoke through a couple of minutes ago, overall, EBIT dropped from EUR 31.9 million to EUR 6.9 million in the cyber division. It is worth mentioning that our management reporting will adapt now to catch up with the structural changes that Mike has made in the business.
So in future, the half year, we'll talk through our reporting, not by Professional Services, Managed Services, and product sales, but by Consulting and Implementation, Managed Services, Technical Assurance Services, and Incident Response. We'll walk you through that in some detail and within detail and transparency when we get to the half year. Okay, let's look at Software Resilience. So a really strong set of results in Software Resilience, and it's very pleasing to be able to say that's a result of both top-line improvement and efficiencies within the business that we talked about and signposted 12 months ago. So the team delivered revenue growth year-on-year for the final three quarters of the year, which was excellent after a softer Q1.
We also saw really very encouragingly, we have spoken about the fact that we've always seen, in the last few years, improvements in our verifications, that's people testing their code. But we also saw from half one to half two last year, an improvement in the actual contract revenue as well. So that's the actual revenue received from our customers on a base basis. That signals a very good improving trend, which we've seen continue again through Q1 so far this year. Allied to savings in overheads as a result of the operational review that we undertook 12 months ago, that resulted in our EBIT jumping from EUR 26.4 million in Software Resilience to EUR 30.6 million.
So obviously, as a CFO, it's always very pleasing to see part of the business growing its bottom line, growing its top line, but growing its bottom line faster than the top line. I'd like to talk about net debt for a minute. You can see here that we gained inflows of EUR 42.6 million as a result of our operating performance and improvements in working capital. Our CapEx spend was EUR 6.3 million. That was a combination of EUR 7.3 million in operational spend and a net inflow of EUR 1 million on acquisitions and disposals. The dividend of EUR 14.5 million, that is a result of the EUR 0.0465 per share announcements that we've previously made. Our interest at EUR 4 million rose by EUR 1.9 million.
That's as a result of the base rate increases, plus the IPM acquisition borrowings, and our operating lease payments of EUR 7.2 million was flat year-on-year broadly. So those are the key components of our net debt walk. Now, in a minute, I'd like to introduce you to some of the strategic KPIs, which we're going to measure the business on as we move forward, and we'll talk about the half year. But, I also want to kind of set out the financial framework that as CFO of the finance team and with Mike and the ExCom we're working on, and making sure that we have our operational and financial performance of the business absolutely tied into delivering what we're looking for strategically as well. So there's four components of that financial framework that we're driving the business on.
The first is our sustainable revenue growth. So returning cybersecurity to positive growth on the revenue perspective in the second half of the year, once we annualize against the deterioration we had in the second half last year. Accelerating our growth in Managed Services and keeping up the momentum that we've got, and Mike spoke earlier on around that, and then clearly maintaining that positive quarter-on-quarter growth in Software Resilience with the team there have established. In terms of Gross Margin, our two areas of focus are improving our utilization. I'm very pleased to say that I've seen some real improvements in utilization through the Q1 of this year after last year's downturn, and we're back to the areas of utilization use that we'd expect to see in the business on an ongoing basis. And leveraging our technical resource footprint.
What does that mean? That, that means using our colleagues, and using their skills for our client use wherever those colleagues happen to be in the, in the world, rather than just going to our local territory first, and it backs into the organizational changes that Mike and the team have made in terms of globalizing our capabilities. That will really, again, help us improve our utilization moving forward, but gain more efficiency and be more flexible for our clients. In terms of our cost base, we, articulated, 12 months ago that we would deliver savings in Software Resilience. I'm really pleased that we have done that, and we will continue to hold on to those savings and also drive for further efficiencies in that business.
We signposted back in June that we would target to the minimum of EUR 5 million of savings operationally in the cyber business this year, annualizing into EUR 10 million, and that's very much one of the things we're working on a day-to-day basis. I'm very pleased to say we've made a number of changes over the summer period and taken a number of actions which will secure the delivery of that for this year. And then finally, clearly, maintaining our balance sheet resilience is crucial. So retaining a very strong level of cash conversion, reducing our debt, and maintaining our dividend. So those are the four key kind of financial pieces of framework, which we're working on a day-to-day basis. Moving into our strategy then.
We have refocused our strategic KPIs, and when we get to the half year, again, we'll be reporting against these, but between our geographies and our capabilities in each of the businesses. So you can see that, I won't walk through the measures one by one here, you can read them for yourselves. But the purpose of these is twofold: it's to help us provide more visibility to you and our investor base on how we're performing and give us some more comparability against other people in the market. And bluntly, it's also how we'll measure our performance of the business internally as well. That's how we will drive the business forward, so there's total consistency with those two things. Okay, so that is it from me.
I think it's, you know, in summary, really pleased that the year-end finished as we expected it to finish, so no surprise, which is great. It's very, reassuring to see the performance of Software Resilience and Managed Services continue through the Q1. The stabilization of cyber has maintained, has stayed the same as Mike talked about from June. It would be unrealistic to, or it would be wrong to say that those markets are in the were in the condition that they were 12 months ago, but the pipeline remains strong, and we but we will not be relying on a rebound. We've taken action within our efficiencies as a business to make sure that we deliver on our commitments and the like for this year, which we remain confident in. Just before I hand back over to Mike, I'd kind of like to extend my thanks to everybody at NCC for delivering through a very challenging period last year and getting through an awful lot of work and an awful lot of effective work, particularly over the summer period. Thank you. Mike?
Thank you very much. So what I'd like to do is just give you a little bit more detail around some of the activities that we've been undertaking since we talked about our strategy in February. Just to give you a bit of a recap, how we're thinking about this and our view of the future. So again, two businesses very much focusing our investment and attention between cyber, cybersecurity, and our software resilience business. There are four key pillars to our strategy, very simple. We want to focus on our clients, an absolutely client-centric organization, deep client engagement with a breadth of capabilities delivered to them. We need to build those capabilities to ensure that we remain relevant to the market, addressing the full cybersecurity life cycle.
Global delivery, so that we actually not only have the tools and the capabilities to be able to deliver services using the breadth of our colleagues globally, but actually that's also a mindset and a, and a change in, in our way of thinking. And finally, investing in our brands to make sure that we have a clear distinction between our cybersecurity story and also our software escrow. Our medium-term goals remain very much the same. Mid-teen revenue growth for cybersecurity with a mid-teen adjusted EBIT. And within software resilience, that continued low double-digit growth, but really importantly, to maintain that global leadership position that software resilience currently has.
That's the context, and what I want to do is just take you through each of the four pillars, really just to sort of say what we said we would do and frankly, what we've done. So from a client perspective, we said we would focus on the fastest-growing sectors, with a really clear story to those and how they differentiate. We would look at our property portfolio and property footprint, not only to make sure that it was right for colleagues, it's a great place to work, but also actually that it was aligned to our client needs, and our client footprint, and diversify our routes to market so that actually we were able to work within an ecosystem of alliance partners.
In terms of progress, since we talked earlier on in the year, we've aligned our U.K. business as probably the largest, most complex of our geographies to a truly vertical set of teams. We have therefore started to really show the investment, and we've got some, hopefully some good news coming up very soon to announce in terms of investment in people in the likes of financial services, industrials, et cetera. We have expanded our Cheltenham office because of obviously the footprint in that area and invested in colleagues in that domain.
We've also rationalized some of our property in North America to focus in on New York with a new great office space, which is great for colleagues, getting them back to the office there. Really positively, we've continued our investment with Microsoft and aligned with them, and we've gone up an extra tier in terms of the verified managed extended detection and response proposition. You'll remember the XDR; we've now further enhanced that, and our solution status gets into a quite, quite an elite position with that, which is, which is phenomenal.
Really good, really positively as well, we've been able to build a global alliance with Splunk rather than sort of the regional model we've always historically had, which will enable a far better pricing and competitive pricing model for our clients, but equally enable us to accelerate our go-to-market with them as well. And clearly, you'll have heard some of the announcements about Splunk and the Cisco acquisition, which again, a really great sort of step in confidence for, I think, the market around cybersecurity, so it's great to be partnering with them. On the capabilities front, as I mentioned, really importantly, to be able to deliver the breadth of what our clients require and the changing requirements in the market. So we said we would focus around our core technical assurance proposition.
That's, that's actually our core business and what we're famous for, and it gives us the license to operate, so incredibly important. But also being able to take that and extend it into our incident response services, build further around our recurring revenue with managed services, and also build an additional consulting and implementation services. And I just want to touch on why this is important, and again, it's, it's really sort of in this very simpler, simplified way. When I talk about the full cyber life cycle, it's quite simple. We want to be able to respond to breaches, we want to be able to fix the problems that cause the breach, we want to be able to manage the environment to help prevent breaches in the future, and we can test anything.
I would rather flippantly say we are outstanding global leaders. We can test everything from a door lock to a nuclear reactor, so it-- that's sort of the quality, that's the life cycle that we plan to address. So what have we done? Well, I think we've invested in some absolutely outstanding cyber leadership. Very pleased to say we've hired Kevin Brown on the far left h e'd be delighted to have his photograph up there. Kevin was the head of BT's cyber business globally, so brings a wealth of talent and experience in client relationships. So he's joined to run and bring together all of our global capabilities together. And we've also hired Siân John who is very well known in the industry, very well respected, as our Chief Technology Officer.
She's joined from Microsoft, so has a wealth of experience in terms of working with such a strategic partner. And she's incredibly well known and, as I say, has quite eminent. So, for example, Gartner has their EMEA Cybersecurity Summit on currently, and she's providing a keynote around artificial intelligence today, I believe it is. And we've also made great progress working with a key partner in the U.K. So we're one of the first providers of incident response, one of the approved incident response providers for the National Cyber Security Centre here in the U.K. So some really great progress, I think, around that. And we've talked about global delivery.
Again, I sort of emphasize that it's about really changing a mindset and bringing together the very best of the talent in front of clients, irrespective of geographical location. So we said we would implement global scheduling and resourcing. We'd start to build that sort of teams to think and act globally. And we'd also focus on building a delivery center, an overseas delivery center, to give us the flexibility and scalability around some of our capabilities. We've made great progress on the scheduling side, so we've implemented Kantata, which is a global scheduling tool. We've rolled that out in the U.S. currently, as the precursor to the pilot for the further rollout globally. That will. The next is actually to our global delivery center.
We've restructured our global business around those four service areas, so incident response, technical assurance, managed services, and consulting and implementation services. Sorry, it's been a very long day. And really importantly, we have, ahead of schedule, been able to build our delivery center in Manila. That was the chosen location. So really great news. The Manila center, this is the actual building. It's about 25,000 sq ft, so it's a very large facility. It's in a brand-new, the first net zero facility in the Philippines. So it's really in line with our sustainability agenda.
We have appointed the leadership, and it's great to see we've been able to create that interlock between our existing business, and the sort of cultural aspects of building in the Philippines. With the leader, Saira Acuna, has been with us for a number of years. She run our sales operations. She's the leader. She's from the Philippines, so again, we can build that sort of knowledge of the business to actually our new colleagues as we bring them on board. It's a state-of-the-art building. We've made some great connections within the local community. We are actually working very closely with the local university, so we're actually contributing to their cybersecurity training agenda, or their curriculum now.
Actually getting a real wealth of talent come through, which I think has impressed everybody that has been involved in the build-out of this. And great news, as I say, we're ahead of schedule. We've brought our first colleagues on board, so we're actually starting to ramp this up. And as a sort of a proof point of the way we're looking at this contributing to the future, we've been able to win the first clients using this integrated global delivery model. And it's work that we would not have been able to bid for historically, both in terms of scale and also global reach, and the hybrid execution model.
The great example is a critical national infrastructure project that we have won as a result of being able to now talk about and showcase this facility. Great news on that, and very positive progress. The final area is around the differentiated brands. Again, I talked about how we make sure that we have a clean and clear story about our two businesses: cybersecurity and Software Resilience, software escrow services. We have a new distinct brand for our Software Resilience, which has been launched internally to our colleagues, and this will be rolled out over the coming months as part of that growth agenda, really focusing on the trajectory that Guy has talked about for Software Resilience.
And I will now show you a short video to reveal the brand from colleagues across the Escode business. And again, it plays to this, as I mentioned, the sort of enabling that Escrow, we're the market leaders in Escrow, enabling that growth story that we've seen some such positive steps already through the last few quarters. A few points. We said we would return the Escrow business to single-digit growth. We said we would reduce the operational costs and drive greater efficiencies, and we said we would also undertake a strategic review of Escode. So in terms of actions we've taken, we have enacted a number of price uplifts, which has again contributed to the positive financial situation Guy talked about.
There's been significant progress in harmonizing the internal systems between the legacy businesses in IPM and Escrow, which again has driven a number of efficiencies. And we have now, as part of the ongoing investment in the growth of the business, focusing on the sales penetration in the U.S., Australia, and also additional sectors such as critical national infrastructure, where we perceive it quite a significant opportunity. Now, clearly, we mentioned the strategic review. We stopped the strategic review in light of the market conditions, and we will revisit that in light of the market later on in the year. So summary and outlook very briefly.
I think it's fair to say, and I hope you'd recognize, that we have delivered some of the foundational components of the strategic change with more to come. There's been great progress, and I would echo Guy's point around our thanks to colleagues for the resilience in progressing through that. Our ambition, our trading remains in line with expectations, with FY 2024 revenue and EBIT in line with expectations as per previously. And our ambition remains the same for the business, that medium-term revenue growth and medium-term EBIT for cybersecurity and Escode, the new business, Escode, consistent single-digit revenue growth and maintaining global market leadership. With that, I think we can take any questions, perhaps any questions from the floor? Could you please say your name, I've been instructed, just so we can capture it. Thank you.
Sure. Morning.
Morning.
From Numis. Three questions from me. First, on the cyber business, when you talk about some stability in North America, and obviously it's annualizing into year-on-year declines in North America, are we if we look at that slide on cybersecurity revenue and adjusted EBIT, are we looking at that EUR 40.3 million as sort of the run rate on a half-year basis, as kind of where it's bobbing along? Can you remind us of kind of seasonality?
Yeah. So, I'll probably have to get back to you on the direct seasonality for that market in terms of the half one and half two, Tintin. In terms of, you know, that's, that is very much kind of the, broadly the run rate we'd expect to carry on to the second half of the year. We will start, and I do expect to see year-on-year growth in North America, actually, because on an underlying basis, we are kind of delivering that by the time you strip out the big tech businesses which, which stalled their work earlier on this year.
Okay. And then secondly, in terms of the global delivery and Manila, and Mike, you talked about some earlier contracts that you're winning, and without that, you wouldn't have won them. Just interested in the flavour of kind of what's the scale-up that's being required, for example, by that infrastructure company? Because at the moment, I think there's 15 people in the Manila office, and I think it's scaling up to maybe 80 by the year end. What's the kind of the blend of the contracts that, that sort of, kind of you're bidding for, and how much sort of outsource, offshoring, are they wanting to see in those contracts? And maybe just thirdly, just so as I have the mic, in terms of Escode, are there any incentives for the actual management team there, or could you just remind us if there are any incentives in terms of sort of kind of being able to complete the strategic review for that business?
Yeah, okay, let me try and do the Manila one. So this is quite often net new work. It's things that... And it's because of the blended nature of the delivery that we're able to compete at a price point that allows us to win work that is net new. It's very difficult to give absolute scale because it is about a blended requirement. Clearly, we want to continue to win work and go after larger and larger pieces. But we intend to scale that business quite significantly to be able to go after that diversity of project that we just wouldn't have been able to deliver before, because they either through price points or because of certain capability we want to build in the future.
It's very early days, but I think we've started to really start to see that forward pricing point. There's another project where we have currently won for or, or in negotiation with a global conglomerate, and actually that global footprint, the time zone piece, is actually one of the key differentiators that allows us to bid for it. So there's a lot of dimensions to play for in that. Do you want to try and cover off the-
Yeah.
Incentives?
We obviously announced earlier in the year we're doing a strategic review of Software Resilience, and then in June announced that we've stopped that, and we'll revisit that position at the end of the year. None of the management team are on any kind of incentive based around the strategic review. It's stopped, and we'll review that position in due course, as we said before.
Thank you. Harvey Robinson from Panmure Gordon. Just a couple of questions. First question, really just looking at sort of guidance, and I noted your comments about utilization. So pricked my interest. You talk about some revenue growth, you talk about normalizing utilization, I think is what you said, and then obviously there's some cost savings. I'm slightly surprised in that context that your profit growth isn't a little bit more optimistic. Does that sort of draw the obvious conclusion that have you lowered the day rate? Is that the missing part of that guidance? Just to sort of quieten in my head, my little model. And the second question is following up on Tintin' s question on strategic review.
I mean, back in February, you got everyone's interest, Mike, when you said there's no cross-selling opportunity and there's no sale, R&D synergy. It sounds to me on that basis is you've made your mind up. What's missing? What do we need to see? Is it purely a function of market conditions for a sale, or I mean, what can you tell us on that? 'Cause it, I'm pretty clear, I thought you were pretty clear. Thank you.
Shall I? I'll do the day rates and margin one first. So, yeah, it's really pleasing to see that, you know, I think we talked in the past about want to see utilization in the seventies. Seeing it climb back towards those levels over the Q1 of the year. There, you know, we in terms of what's happening on day rates, not seeing any material deterioration. I think what we're very focused on is gross margin rather than day rates, and that becomes particularly important as when we start bidding for work, which is in our more globalized resource base, we should be very focused around what are clients getting and what's the margin, you know, what the overall margin for us rather than the day rate is. I think in terms of outlook, look, it's early in the year. This is the quietest quarter of our year. Pleased with all the indicators that we have at the moment in terms of what the direction that we're heading. There is inevitably uncertainty in the marketplace.
In terms of the strategic review, I think we're again absolutely clear we don't see the synergies and actually, really importantly, we're not trying now to invest and create synergies. And that's a really important sort of differentiation for colleagues internally as well, just in terms of that, that message. So having that separation, and I think we have gone a long way down the route of ensuring that the operational clarity between the two businesses is now there. We've now also got, if you like, the market clarity in terms of the clear brand and the story. So we have got that separation, which gives us optionality. And so we will look in the context of that and ensure that we can keep that under review. We will revisit with a strategic review, is that what the right outcome of that would be later on in the year. It just-- we now have clear optionality.
Yeah, morning. It's Andrew Ripper from Liberum. I've got a couple of questions on cyber. Just wondering, you don't say a lot about client mix. And just in terms of what happened in tech last year, obviously, it's almost like a heart attack moment in the second half in terms of the dropoff. Can you give us a flavor of, say, for example, what proportion of cyber was tech in FY 2023 versus FY 2022? Give us a sense of what sort of materially changed in such a short space of time. And then thinking about the go forward, is there any way that you can sort of bring the pipeline of sort of new work to life in terms of a sort of precursor to give us some confidence of improving revenue trajectory in the second half and into FY 2025?
Yeah, the portion of this. Yeah, so in terms of the U.K., so we're not—so U.K., so tech makes up around about 12% of our mix. And we're not really seeing any kind of material change in there. I think what we have seen in North America is the concentration of our, you know, the deterioration was in our larger clients, and they were all in, they were in tech. So that—clearly, we have seen a decline there. I think, as Mike said before, we haven't lost those clients. They haven't moved the work somewhere else. They have just paused their programs, and it's part of a probably a, you know, a wider trend, which is inevitable in the current economic environment of clients are being more disciplined and considered about their procurement generally.
You know, that while that can be, you know, obviously frustrating for us, it does offer us opportunities because we're structurally positioned to be able to provide a whole host of cyber services to our clients, which boutiques and many of our competitors can't offer the whole range of types of services which we now offer.
I would just add just a couple of points to Andrew. I would say the concentration in North America was clearly in some of the largest companies in the world. And I think focus generally in the market is a good thing. You know, it's simpler to generate revenues in existing clients. So I don't think any of us would have said, "You shouldn't have pursued the opportunities in those clients." That's, it's the really great clients, and nobody said at that point in time, that was a bad thing to do. But there is a natural result of if you've concentrate all your efforts in that area to pursue those opportunities, you're probably neglecting other areas.
What we have done as a result of seeing maybe that maturing, shall we say, of the North American tech, we'll probably look historically and say there was a bit of a bubble post-COVID. And there was a different way of buying. There is, there is now a maturity and a prudence and a, a, and procurement are involved in, in the, in the processes are much more measured in that North American sort of client base. But because we're now, we're actually seeing that, it gives us the opportunity, as far as we're concerned, is really now to open up and go after other sectors where perhaps we wouldn't have had the capacity and bandwidth to go after. So to give you a really sort of tangible example.
There's increasing regulation and legislation in North America around the OT environment, and we have launched a very quick campaign to talk about that regulation in the North American utilities market, which is hugely fragmented. And in a very short space of time, we've seen traction in 20 new logos, in conversations in the pipeline, in those logos that we would just have never talked to before. So I think it's those sorts of things where we're pivoting, and again, I talked about verticalization, how important that is. In the U.K., we've obviously made those steps already. North America is the next space. That's where we're moving to. Hopefully, that helps.
A second question [crosstalk]
Oh.
Just in terms of pipeline and sort of go-forward revenue trajectory.
Well, so pipeline, I think, is looking, obviously don't want to give too many numbers away, but it's looking very positive. We're not seeing, I think, the deterioration we saw in the early part of this calendar year. That has definitely stabilized. We're seeing a return to a strong pipeline in all of our geographies. The buying process is probably still elongated with more measured, as I mentioned, the procurement process, for example, more challenged, particularly for the larger deals, but we're starting to see that come back. There's probably a change in revenue mix in terms of we are seeing multi-year managed services deals really start to come through, and we've seen some really positive steps, and some of which has been made public recently.
We're starting to see that come through. So that, the revenue mix, the pipeline mix is probably a little bit different, but the scale of those deals is really something to be hopeful about. But again, we're very measured, obviously understanding that there is a, you know, there's a broader context at the moment. But certainly we've seen that at the moment, it looks pretty good.
Just finally, how many consultants do you have in cyber today?
Total, it's about 2,000, I think, off the top of my head.
Thanks.
Hey, guys, Ollie from Peel Hunt. So two questions from me. The first is on IPM: How is that performing? Obviously, it's North America weighted. Did that perform okay, or was it also hit by the mega tech drop off? Did that provide stability there? And second one, you mentioned a strong pipeline in all geographies. Which region do you think offers your best chances of growth, or are you looking at sort of a client-by-client basis and global contracts for those clients? Thank you.
Just on, to try and answer the IPM question, and in terms of demand there, so we, we don't measure IPM separately now from the rest of the North American business. I think as per the charts we showed earlier, the growth, there's further growth opportunities, probably fair to say, in North America compared to the UK, and that's an area we want to capitalize on. And in fact, some of the, kind of this, some of the Salesforce efficiencies we're looking for from a systems point of view this year will help us capitalize on that market more.
In terms of concentration risk and tech drop-off, the base of our client base in Software Resilience is not influenced by that at all, and we're not seeing that have any kind of drive down trend on software resiliency in any of our markets.
Yeah, and in terms of opportunity, the answer is probably a little bit of both, both in terms of segmentation by client, so they're really focusing on those key clients and key client segments, some of which will be global, recognizing that there's white space that we can go after. And again, that's really important from a verticalization perspective. But in terms of specific geographies, clearly North America is one where now we, you know, see a significant opportunity still, being able to try and swing that from a concentration in our tech clients into some of the other verticals.
Just one more. From memory, in terms of the capabilities you really wanted to build, was really that core consulting skill rather than sort of responding to problems, as it were. What metric can you give us to say that kind of, that sort of, kind of upskilling or reskilling or the mix, and how successful are you in convincing very good consultants that work somewhere else that this is a real opportunity, and they should go work for NCC?
Can I answer the first part of that [crosstalk]
Yeah
You can take the second part? So in terms of the metrics, when we talk in the second half of the year, some of the strategic KPIs will help with that. So we'll pull out how many capabilities we're selling on average per to each client within cyber. So that will give an indication of kind of the breadth of their basket, and also the clients over EUR 250,000 a year, kind of, so and such. That will give a sense of the, I guess, the stickiness of those clients, the breadth of things I'll take. So we'll come up with those data points. I agree, they're really important. That's what will tell us whether we're succeeding.
Absolutely, and, and I think I would also highlight Guy's point when we talked about the historic, the three service or the, the service domains before. Professional services are, was a large amorphous group. We'll break those out, so we'll have a much clearer, revenue-
Yeah
Attribution for each of the sort of service or capability areas that we're looking at. So we'll have that as a set of metrics. In terms of attracting talent, I would point to two of the U.K. sort of heavy hitters, like Kevin and Siân joining, and there are a couple of others who will be joining and we'll be announcing in very short order. The really great thing about NCC is its reputation in the cyber space, the cybersecurity market, and there are not many organizations like it... cyber professionals want to be able to be part of something that is actually really focused around that as a domain.
We are absolutely seeing the ability to attract really excellent talent, and attracting really excellent talent like Kevin, like Siân, has a knock-on effect because people chat about it in the industry. They'll be chatting about it at Gartner right now. So that is definitely starting to spread the word. And particularly in this current market, getting people out is something that we are very, very focused on. We're actually trying to make sure that we're very selective, which is the other piece.
Just a follow-up question on the direction of travel of Managed Services, it's obviously done a great year relative to PS this last year, but you seem to be suggesting that will be a bigger part going forward. Does that make any changes to your cash flow in terms of capital intensity? I mean, it's obviously not evident this year, but didn't it [crosstalk].
No, not materially, no. I'm kind of looking at it, there's no, there's no great—we're not on, you know, there is an element of the terms are staged through the period rather than there being suddenly no payment at the end. There's no adverse impact there. It's something we look at every time we're signing off any deal.
If no more questions, perhaps we could open up to the online webcast.
Thank you. Participants can submit questions in written format via the webcast page by clicking the Ask a Question button. If you are dialed into the call and would like to ask a question, please press Star and then One on your touchtone phone or on the keypad on your screen. If, however, you wish to withdraw the question, you may press star and then two. The first question we have is from Alex Nguyen of Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions and the detailed presentation. I have one question first. You obviously have a lot of initiatives at the moment, whether it's the Manila delivery center to stepping into more sectors, increase your service offerings, and then new branding. Where do you think the biggest risks in terms of executing these initiatives, and how do you balance it out between investing back into the business, but then also driving cost efficiency to achieve your guidance for profit growth?
I think that's a great, great question. In terms of risks, there is clearly a number of, there's the macro risks, which are just very difficult to foresee. I'm sure everybody recognizes that. Unknown geopolitical impacts, et cetera. So I think that those external risks, we're very aware of. From an internal execution perspective, we have been very clear. We brought in new talent around our strategy, our transformation office and project management of some of those initiatives, so we've got a far better internal controls process to ensure that we are very focused. We continue to review it, so actually, if we need to dial down, dial up elements of it, we clearly can. The other risks are obviously ensuring that we increase that interconnectivity between all the various geographies and markets to make sure that we optimize what we've got. But we continue to keep it under constant review, and a member of the ExCom and the boards are all very closely involved in them.
In terms of, I guess, some of the questions on sustainability of earnings and kind of capital management, look, we remain, sort of the board and ourselves, remain committed to kind of financial discipline, and our shareholders value the financial discipline we have around having the dividend and making sure that's serviceable on an underlying basis through improvements in our profitability. So they will remain sort of some of our guiding principles, which we stand for.
Thank you.
There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand over to management to address the questions submitted via the webcast page.
Thank you very much. Andrew, would you like to?
Yeah. Jump off the line. So just wanted to go back to sort of high-level technical assurance. Just give us your take, Mike, on how mature, stroke, penetrated you think that market is. So I assume all enterprises are doing testing. What about SMBs? How can you give us a sense of how penetrated it is? And then, can you talk to sort of labor-based solutions for testing versus software, and whether there's a sort of change in balance between the two?
In terms of penetration, I think it's one of those areas that, obviously, the enterprise clients are very mature in. They have. They tend to have a panel of experts that they're able to call upon. For the SMB market, it is probably continues to grow. And I think I would highlight the focus it now gets as we digitalize, as people become aware of cybersecurity, it continues to grow, but it's a very competitive marketplace, and obviously, that's where price point does actually come in. I'd say there's also a spectrum in terms of some of that technical testing. So, there are w ays of doing relatively easy testing: press a button, click, give you a relatively low level of assurance, which, again, is automated, and we clearly use all of the tools you can probably use, and we've got those incredibly well embedded in our processes.
There's then a very high-end level, and that requires incredibly skilled colleagues, and particularly when you get into some of what I'd call, what we describe as red team testing. So acting like an attacker to penetrate an organization, that is incredibly skilled work, and that will, I think, still, whilst the tools involved still remains quite manual, because actually you need to think and be quite innovative and respond to the circumstances of a client. So it's not a sort of a click and collect.
I think the other context in that very high-end element is around the regulatory space, so everybody will be aware of CBEST testing, so that's the U.K. regulatory one for banking. There's TIBER, et cetera. That is an increasingly common approach that is now being applied. So we are seeing that in more and more jurisdictions where that high-end, very complex, very skilled testing is required, and that's an area that we frankly excel at.
Okay, we have a couple of questions submitted via the webcast page, and the first two come from Julian Yates of Investec. The first question is fairly long, and it goes as follows: Do you feel the investment pot you have set aside will be enough to drive and scale your strategic initiatives? The business has tried before in building out a consulting and implementation business. What will make it successful this time, considering the big brands already in this space? And on a three-year view, what broad headcount aspiration should we envisage?
Excellent. Right. I'll start with why I think we'll be successful this time, and then maybe try and follow on to some of the others. I think the first thing is, we're not trying to do it as part of an embedded business within some of the other divisions. I think as we laid out, we're separating these out as very distinct capability areas within the business, with clear individual ownership and plans to grow and invest. I think that separation is very different to the approach we've taken before. The second part of that is obviously the way we've globalized our businesses. Having global capability areas rather than by individual geographies. Again, they became quite penny packeted as a result.
I think that is quite a fundamentally different approach. Why I think it will be different, and we have the opportunity to be successful compared to, if you like, in the context of other brands, et cetera, is one, I'd come back to that, we're actually really trusted by our clients. And if we're doing some of that very high-end regulatory testing, as we've seen, there's a great conversation to be had with clients about other things you can do as a result of those findings. So, again, I think we're very well positioned to have those conversations. They're not easy, and there is a sort of next piece to go.
The other thing is the areas we would focus on within that consulting construct would be naturally adjacent to the very technical areas with which we already operate. So again, I think we have a license to operate in that. In terms of the investment in those areas, we clearly have an incremental investment approach. We are prudent in the context of that we're operating, because again, I think there is always the risk that if you go too far, too fast ahead of the curve, then clearly that creates some difficulty. So I think we're confident that we're doing it in a prudent, measured, and sustainable growth around that. In terms of headcount.
Yeah, so just to, I think I've given Mike a slight bum steer earlier on, but technical headcount at the moment is around about 1,250, 1,300. And you'd expect that to broadly grow in line with the revenue growth over the next couple of years.
Yeah.
There's no kind of, you know, it's all about driving our margins. It will inevitably tend to depend on sort of how some of the mix comes through. But that's kind of, you know, you'd be talking around, just kind of believing in sort of high single-digit growth, getting up to about 1,350, 1,400, which, you know, gives great opportunities for our people to develop and grow, which is really important from an employer branding and proposition point of view, but is also a kind of manageable in terms of attaining that level of headcount, given the norms of attrition that we'd expect to suffer from, as every tech business does.
Great, thank you. And Julian's second question is: You mentioned a reclassification of the business divisions aligned to the strategic direction of the business will be given at the next results. Should we expect a reclassification of allocated costs between Assurance and Escode, or are you comfortable in the current divisional cost allocation setup?
I'd like to take a little bit of time, being new into the role, just to consider that. So inevitably, the kind of classification of the costs at the moment has followed the historic norms, and we haven't wanted to change out in the timescales right now. If we do make any changes, and it would make a lot of sense to make sure we're exceptionally clear about what is attributable from a central point of view to Software Resilience and what's attributable to the cyber business, you know, yes, we will be seeking to do that, but I won't make any commitments right now.
Thank you. And the next question comes from Benji Dawes, from Premier Miton, and he has two questions. The first question is: What is cyber utilization currently? When do you hope it'll reach mid-seventies?
Okay, so, it's not a number I want to give out right now, but as I said before, we are hitting the broad levels that we'd expect to be as we come into Q2 now, right now. Yeah. So I, I'd say we've been on an improving trend since May, June time.
Great, thank you. The second question is: Assuming the utilization quoted is on headcount basis, can you comment on utilization by revenue, i.e., what's the impact of mix of senior versus junior consultants currently and last year?
We don't have... You know, I don't have the utilization and the day rate broken down by headcount structure. That becomes quite difficult to get out and quite, probably quite subjective on a case-by-case basis. It is something we'll have better visibility of in future as Kantata, which Mike mentioned earlier on, which we've now rolled out into North America. As that goes global over the next 12 months, we'll start being able to get into a much better level of kind of project-by-project profitability. But we'll clearly need to make sure we've got the right data, and I'm able to give some meaningful comparisons on that information as and when we've got it.
Great, thank you. There are no further questions. I'll now hand back to Mike for closing remarks.
Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody, for joining us this morning, and hopefully you can see the solid progress we've made, particularly against the strategy and the granular level of detail that we've been able to provide around the financial results. Thank you very much, and look forward to seeing you in February.