Thanks everyone, and welcome. We will go through the presentation, which you should have. As the cover page states, it is May 2022, and we are reviewing our financial results for the year ended March 31, 2022. That's page 1. Page 2 is effectively the small print, which I assume you will all have read, and just take that as read. Thank you. Now page 3, to start to go into the details. This slide shows continued sales growth.
Basically, as you can see from that graph on the bottom right, we're growing at about 14.4% CAGR over the last 10 years, which would roughly double our sales every five years and that's really what's been happening. We grew from NZD 113.1 million last year to NZD 130.3 million this year, which is a reasonable result. I mean, the thing I really wanted to make a point, I think that some people seem to come back to us almost endlessly and say that, really, COVID must be benefiting AFT, I mean, it has to be, et cetera, et cetera. Really, to be frank, COVID has not benefited us.
It's caused many challenges, and this result has been achieved against that background, as opposed to really it being some sort of tailwind, which it really isn't. In terms of the rest of the world We've basically commercialized our products in 46 countries at the moment. we have licensing or distribution agreements in over 100 countries , so clearly we're working on improving this from the 46. Asia, we've made some reasonable progress this last year. Basically we have two licensees and distribution partners in Korea and in China, and then we also have our own operations in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. What we also did last year is we put in place a regional manager, Lorraine Corr-Poppleton, and she is based out of Hong Kong, and we see that as important.
Additionally as well, we formed a company in Europe, AFT Pharmaceuticals Europe, based out of Ireland, and we have our person up there, Ian Towse, who's our director. We also placed two staff into the European market as well, Thomas Gumbt, based out of London, and Tania Gonzaga, based out of Zurich. That's also been a couple of important sort of changes overall. In Australasia, being Australia, New Zealand, obviously. We continue to make good progress within those markets. What we've done is we've increased our resources further. We hired an additional direct sales force in the Australian market, which has literally just started on the first of April.
There's about 10 salespeople and a couple of sales managers as well to help to drive our business in the key Australian market. That concludes page 3 . Turning to page 4. Just the overall business. As you can see, we grew revenues by 15.2%, and all of the regions we managed to get double-digit growth. The operating profit improved, roughly in the middle of our guidance. As you remember, guidance then was NZD 18 million to NZD 23 million, so we're at NZD 20.4 million. That was up 90% year over year .
I think, as you may also pick up, those of you following it, we've always tended to have a stronger second half, and this year was no exception, this last year passed. Look, I think we'll see the same thing this year as well. The net profit after tax was up over 150% to NZD 19.8 million. The point just to reinforce, as I tried to say before, COVID has been a headwind . It's certainly not a tailwind, and we do not consider ourselves a COVID-driven stock. When you look at the regions, the graphs on the bottom, we can see the Asia market grew just over 24%.
Rest of world, including licensing income, about 32%. New Zealand grew by almost 15%. Certainly, we're actually really pleased with the New Zealand result. It was better than we've been expecting. And also, I mean, that's particularly strong considering we had significant lockdowns across our market, which made it very hard to operate in a lot of sectors, especially Auckland. And then Australia, we've got reasonable growth at 12.3%. We do see this accelerating as well. We've got a lot of launches coming, but we did have some delays, and we were pleased overall with the Australian market growing. You can see in that middle pie graph when it looks at a breakdown, it's not a lot different really in terms of percentages.
We're still predominantly an Australian business presently. New Zealand maintaining. International starting to grow a little bit more and spread out, and over time, as we roll out our international status, we do anticipate that part of the pie to start to spread out. But that's not because something like Australia's not growing. We said we see a lot of growth opportunities in the Australian market. You can see on the far right, look, that's our operating profit over time. You can see that , clearly, FY18, we had a loss. As you remember or may recall, we'd always talk about the reason we floated and raised money was so we could accelerate our R&D. That would involve some additional spend ahead of where we normally would have been able to do it.
Therefore, we did lose money, which probably the market was maybe slightly not 100% on at the time, but I think they can see that, we have done what we said. We've turned that loss around into a profit, and at the moment, we're now growing and expanding our profit, which is what we're planning to do. That's that page. Moving on to the next page 5, about Australia. Sales were up, as we mentioned, a bit over 12%. We got growth across all the prime channels, being OTC, prescription, and hospital.
As you can see too from those bottom pie graphs, we do have quite a lot of OTC sales, being at the moment about 61.5% of our business is OTC. We see this actually as quite useful. We've always said that this is part of our plan. You know, with things at the moment, as you'll be aware of inflation and some cost effects, certainly one has a lot more pricing flexibility and ability to react in the OTC market than maybe some of the other markets which tend to have a more lagged effect if you do need to have a price rise. That is still very much our plan to keep on with that OTC focus.
You can see, looking at the far left bottom, you can see that we're getting the sales growth. Look, we see that this should, if anything, pick up as we have this year, for example, we've got about 20 new product launches. Because there was a positive out of COVID for our business. In many ways, we did do, it forced us to really focus as well on our local channels, because we were somewhat restricted with travel, obviously. We did a lot of engagement work, and built a lot of partners as well using Zoom and things like that. Really now it is starting to show up or should show up over the next time period. With this year, for example, we've got 20 new product launches planned over the Australian market.
That's page number 5. Moving on to page number 6. New Zealand, we're actually really pleased, despite some pretty tough operating conditions with a lot of our pharmacies being locked down, customers literally blocked out. This doesn't help you when you're selling over-the-counter products when customers can't get near the shelves. We were really pleased to get growth of 15% to NZD 35 million. Basically over-the-counter products actually improved their sales a bit. Last year you can see they were 55% of sales, and they've now grown to 57% of sales. We had some strong results with things like some of our staple categories like allergy grew strongly. We made some really good improvements and progress in the allergy category.
Also we had some good sales with Maxigesic as well. It's just to stress again, we do have a broad portfolio of products, and that helps us, to navigate some challenges, like for example, when people can't go to doctors, for example. It's difficult. You tend to get a decrease in some of your acute medicines, and we do have a number of products in the acute medical treatment area. Certainly, those products are not helped by COVID restrictions at all. That was a really positive result as far as we're concerned for New Zealand market. Moving to the next page number 7. Asia, we were pleased to get almost 25% growth. We had some strong growth in actually the hospital area more.
We see over time, though, we do want to focus as well on the OTC channel, which didn't really grow last year. There were quite a few stock effects as well, where the year before we had some very large Maxigesic sales in Singapore. Effectively that soaked up a lot of the sales we would have made last year. Sales in Malaysia, they grew nicely and that helped to partly make up for it. I mean, over time, we do see that the OTC sales should also start to grow. No, I mean, really NZD 5 million is much smaller business than what we're looking at certainly over the next kind of four or five years. We've really got a lot of initiatives in the Asian market to further grow that.
You have to watch that space. Certainly making reasonable progress at this point in time. That's page 7. Moving on to page 8, the Maxigesic International rollout. That was quite difficult, to be frank. We've been stuck in New Zealand for literally 2 years, not able to get out. That really was quite restrictive, and I don't think it's helped us at all. Certainly, starting from this February, I know I had 5 weeks in Europe catching up with a lot of our licensees and partners and other members of the team. I've just come back from 2 weeks in the US and Central America. Our trial monitor has just been through about 10 sites in the US, and is on their way to Europe literally right now.
We've got a lot of travel that's going on at the moment, which is pretty important to catch up on things we were severely restricted by. We are making some progress. We did the deal with Hikma Pharmaceuticals, and that is underway in terms of the registration, the approval process with FDA. We're sort of getting requests for information from them with about a three or four day timeline, which is quite tough, but our team is pretty good. For instance, one of their ladies even got up at 4:00 A.M. in the morning to go in and sort something out that had to be filed with the FDA before 5:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, being the close of their business day.
The team certainly does pull behind these sort of projects, and we are making progress. I don't really think it has helped at all over the last couple of years, so we really are, having renewed efforts to push that forward. The hot drink sachet, we've just launched that in Australia, and then we're also working on further launches in Europe. At the moment, Maxigesic tablets, we've extended that a bit. We launched in Switzerland and Greece. Maxigesic IV, we've had launches in Germany and Austria. There's a whole pile of major European countries at the moment. We're finalizing the licenses and they've ordered stock and working on those launches presently. The US obviously is one to watch as we continue to work on making progress in the US market.
That's that page. Going to page number nine, you can see the white is places we've not yet licensed or got a distributor for Maxigesic. We're working on a few areas, being Brazil. We've filed there and we're still having ongoing discussions, which are making progress, a little bit slow. Same in China. We're making good progress there, but certainly with some of the lockdowns, that's really slowed down our regulator meeting, which is one of the key things that we have to complete before finalizing something for the China market. We are doing more launches. The yellow is slowly starting to increase.
Some of the markets this year, we've got France coming up, but we are actually waiting to get an ACC launch completed in a nearby country first, and then we'll roll France out after that. Korea, we launched as well, the IV, which has actually gone very well, and it was pleasing to see their forecast triple after their launch because of the good feedback that they received. Look, that's all basically progressing, and it's just a matter of ticking off a few more countries, such as Brazil and China, and then later Japan, and then several more launches, so the blues turn to yellow. That's page number 9. Page number 10. Yeah, this has been something we have been quietly working on pretty hard actually.
Personally, I think it's really important because strengthening our pipeline will assist going forward. We've added another five projects to our R&D pipeline. You'll see on that graph on the top left, we're certainly not pulling back from R&D expenditure. Last year, we did about NZD 10.4 million R&D expenditure. This financial year, we're at the moment looking to grow that to about NZD 12 million. What we're doing, though, is we're funding it out of existing profits and existing cash flows, which is a very strong kind of position. Actually, if anything, we're seeing positives in that some people we could work with as partners, they're really not able to raise capital easily in this sort of market.
It gives us the opportunity to say to them that, "Look, you know, we can partner with you on a shared basis. We're not gonna give you a whole lot of money up front, but we can pay for research and development over the next kind of three years, and then we'll share in the proceeds." If anything, the current financial conditions are actually positive for us. Like, people often ask us and say, "Look, why don't you go buy a whole other company?" Something like that. We really still have not been able to find value in that sort of approach, although we do look, but we do see value in the sort of approach where we partner with people, we then advance their R&D projects.
Because another important thing is we do have our own R&D department, and we can run clinical studies considerably cheaper than many of these companies in the United States. That's another major advantage for us. You know, look, that's important really, the R&D side, the Pascomer. We're finishing off that big study in the middle of this year, for the orphan drug indication. We do have larger non-orphan indications, which if anything, is the key part of Pascomer. We've got a study starting soon, the phase study, in Port Wine Stain. It's starting in Spain, in the next sort of month or two. NasoSURF, we're just working on that to crunch through our first entry into human study. That is underway. We've got another few projects, as you can see. We've code named them.
Look, the only reason is not to try to be awkward, but we really are conscious that it is a competitive industry, and really, we don't want to tell everything to our competitors. We'd rather just give them code names and then kind of execute them and then announce the details as we're doing that. We've got one called Project HS, which is, you know, a reasonable market, but quite targeted. It's well advanced. Another product is Project BT. We purchased the medicine actually for pretty modest amount, and it's a $200 million U.S. market, and we're just working on that at the moment on finalizing the dossier, and we'll be looking to start doing filings at the end of this calendar year. We've got another product, Project KW in the gastrointestinal area.
We're working on a couple of formulations there up in Italy. Then also we are looking at another more complex version, which would have a patent, but that's a better sized market as well and adds to one of our areas we're working on at the moment in gastrointestinal. Same with dermatology, Project SD. We also do some work with medicinal, we call it CBD, rather than cannabis, but effectively it's a CBD portion of cannabis, which is non-hallucinogenic. We're not working on the THC variant. We are working on this at the moment, so that is underway and advancing as well. That's a bit about our R&D portfolio. Then to flip to the next page, please, says building the Maxigesic addressable market through new dose forms.
We are getting close to finishing off a lot of our Maxigesic drug development, which is why we brought another part to the pipeline. There's the tablets, which we've talked about quite a lot. Maxigesic PE, we've launched that in New Zealand and the Middle East. That's a more limited product. It will only be in certain geographies. The Maxigesic IV, that has a number of patents going out till 2077, and the launches for that really just starting to roll out. Maxigesic Liquid, we have got our first approval in Europe, and we're working on launching that during this calendar year. Pediatric medicines, to be honest, are always very challenging from a regulatory perspective, so that one will always sort of have ups and downs.
Given we've got our first European approval, we'd be confident we'll add other approvals to it. Maxigesic hot drink, we've just finished our first launch in the Australian market, which actually gone extremely well. The pharmacists are very positive about it. It's actually gone so well that we've sold out despite what we believed was good forecast, and we sold out in one spurt very quickly. We're urgently manufacturing more stock right now, which we'll have to get over as quickly as possible. You know, that actually is looking to be a product that is well received by the market. Maxigesic Rapid is the product for the United States, but we will also be able to get approval in other countries as well.
We're looking to get our first approval for Maxigesic Rapid during this calendar year. Maxigesic Cold & Flu, we've filed that at the moment in the first couple of markets, and we would expect approval actually pretty quickly during this calendar year, and we'd look to launch in quarter one next calendar year, so in the quarter one of 2023. The dry stick sachet is a popular dose form in a number of countries like North Africa and France, and we're just doing some additional work on that, and we'd look to file a dossier sometime next year, all going well. That is our Maxigesic portfolio. We've certainly padded that out quite a lot since when we first started. Now moving on to page 12, which is financials.
I'll hand you over to our CFO, Malcolm Tubby.
Yeah, thanks, Hartley. Revenue up 15% to NZD 130 million. Gross profit up 26% to NZD 62 million, improving the margin to 47%. That does include the license income, which is at 100% profit of NZD 6.7 million. We put a little analysis at the bottom of that table to show you that the underlying from product sales and royalties, we've had an increase in margin there up to 44.5%. Operating expenses increased in dollar value, but declining as a percentage of revenue, to give us our operating profit of NZD 20 million.
If we look down to the bottom, profit after tax, we did have a little bit of unrealized taxable losses that we could put into the balance sheet, and they'll run out through this year. We'll have used all those tax losses up, but that's improving our profit after tax up to NZD 20 million as compared to NZD 7 million or NZD 2.8 million last year. If we turn to the next slide 13. The cash flow position on the net increase, could you take the brackets off the 4.6? That is an increase in cash, not a decrease. That's generated from the operating activities of NZD 14 million. As we've said earlier, we're still holding decently high levels of inventory.
We invested the NZD 5.5 million, put a bit of that into R&D, and then the financing costs. Surplus cash of NZD 4.6 million, increasing our cash balance in the balance sheet up to NZD 8 million at year-end compared to NZD 3 million last year.
We are pleased, weren't we, Malcolm, that we were able to make the extra investment and spend and yet still improve our cash balance, weren't we?
On slide 14, looking at the balance sheet, the net debt down into that target range we'd identified of NZD 25 million-NZD 30 million. We're down to NZD 29 million as compared to NZD 35 million last year. We will carry on holding those inventory levels. There is still disruption, more in the supply chain than anything, so getting a hold of containers and then getting places on a ship. We'll carry on with that level. Going forward, we'll be talking more about net debt as a percentage of our operating profit or EBITDAR. This is moving our total equity now up to NZD 57 million. I'll pass back to Hartley to talk about our dividend policy.
Yeah. No, thanks, Malcolm. Yeah, look, what we wanted to do is, we had said, I think, earlier on that we were wanting to have a dividend policy, and certainly, the results have reinforced that. Basically, the board expects the company to continue growing and provided we're hitting our results, then we would be looking to pay a dividend of between 20%-30% of our normalized net profit after tax. You know, removing things like any extraordinary one-off gains and losses, and looking to maintain, as Malcolm mentioned before, that debt at around about 1x operating profit. I mean, there are obviously different viewpoints on this. What I'd sort of like to stress is that, you know, we're not pulling back on growth.
We actually are still doing the, you know, both things, really. We are investing in sales and marketing and R&D to continue growing the business. However, we are generating cash, and therefore, you know, this is sort of more of a modest kind of dividend policy of between 20%-30%. So that's, we believe, a strong signal about the business. So that's certainly what we're looking at. All going well, we would look to declare a maiden dividend to shareholders during the FY 2023 year. That's page number 15. Page number 16. Look, just to quickly mention it, as clearly, it is a topic that we do get asked about the ESG side of the business. So there's the three bits, as I'm sure you're all aware of.
In terms of the environment side of it, we've done a lot of work on packaging. Some things we can't control that well, like pharmaceuticals is pretty rigid around the actual packaging that's in contact with the medicine. However, we were pleasantly surprised, really. There was a lot of work we've been able to do around the other packaging to really reduce waste and things like that. At the moment, too, we're also working on climate change side to look at our carbon footprint as that will be part of reporting requirements going forward. We are generally, though, to be frank, a fairly low, less carbon-intensive business than many because really, we don't have any significant footprint, really.
It's around shipping and things like that, and pretty much all our shipping is done by boats, as opposed to airplanes, which is more carbon effective anyway. In terms of social, that's sort of certainly one of our main things. Really, the reason we exist is to produce you know, medicines to improve people's health, and that's something we do feel strongly about. Has always been our kind of guiding principle. Even our business card, you know, over 10 years ago, we put on a tagline, working to improve health, you know, and that's so it's something that hasn't just happened, it's always been there. Then in terms of governance, obviously compliance, transparency, ethical, sustainable supply chains is another key area.
As our business has grown to over NZD 100 million, we are required legally to report on this in Australia, and we've had a big project. We've looked at our supply chain, and, you know, to make sure there's no slave labor or anything like that. We have looked through that all, and we've included that in our reporting as well. We certainly would not expect there to have been, and the data we've got back so far is certainly consistent with that. To page number 16. And then look, going on to page number 17, which is the last slide, the outlook. I mean, basically, we do continue to see considerable opportunities for growth. We've worked very hard on improving our in-licensing.
In fact, we've actually had to hire more people around that and we started out with a sort of business development manager, and then we've had to actually hire another probably couple of people on top of that. We now have a new launch manager because we are doing that many launches. We have a legal person who's doing a lot of the contracting in-house, which has been useful, and then we've also another person who does a lot of the business analysis as well. Certainly we've really grown that side, so we have improved our pipeline, and also we're using that to grow our R&D pipeline as well. Just another important angle. We do see things becoming more normal as the COVID you know tends to retreat.
I appreciate, especially in New Zealand, there seem to be a lot of people catching at the moment. We've certainly had that within our staff. Fortunately, no one has been more than kind of moderate effects. You know, like I spent five weeks in Europe in February and, you know, they were well and truly moving forward and kind of well ahead of us in terms of the curve. Then to come back to Australia for the big pharmacy conference that they hold in the Gold Coast. Literally, there were 7,000 attendees and, you know, things were really not much different from pre-COVID in terms of attendance and, you know, what people were doing in terms of engagement and things like that. We saw that as quite positive.
I certainly really do wanna once again emphasize, because we've had it commented a number of times, as though somehow we're a COVID stock, and we must have benefited from it. I can guarantee over the past couple of years, we you know COVID overall has not benefited AFT. We've managed to achieve what we've done under very difficult circumstances with a lot of multiple curve balls coming at us. The team has been able to work around that as well as we could. Really for us, it'll be much more positive, as we would anticipate the effects of COVID will recede, especially overseas, which we can clearly see they are. Look, it's really focusing on the new financial year and opportunities to accelerate our growth. We're not backing off investing in sales and marketing.
We do have a number of e-commerce initiatives underway, which probably not that obvious at this stage, but we have flagged them. We've launched our own website called Good Pharma Australia and New Zealand, and we're just working on that. In China, we have approval now for quite a significant number of our OTC drugs, being at least 15 or so, to be allowed to be sold cross-border. This is still quite an interesting scenario because basically, 28% of the Chinese population do purchase medicines online, and 28% of 1.4 billion is about 392 million. There is a good potential audience there, and we will be working on things.
Marree and I will also be preparing quite a lot of content as well for our launch platform, and we will be working with some local Chinese influencers. When I say local, I mean in China. Yeah, there's quite a lot of work going on into that project, which effectively is being run out of Hong Kong and out of mainland China. We've also a number of initiatives in Amazon, which will become more apparent, and we'll announce those as well as the year goes on, where we are doing a lot of work in that area and looking to have a launch in some significant markets with Amazon.
Look, on that basis, we're expecting profit all going to plan in the range of operating profit in the range of NZD 27 million-NZD 32 million. I mean, the other comment I know we do get is people say, "Look, you know, how come it's so wide? Do you not know what you're doing?" I mean, to be fair, our point we would make is there are still a number of moving parts to things. You know, we feel more comfortable with a wider profit range because we do have a significant amount of moving parts still, which do impact things like timelines, and that does make a difference to the overall result.
You know, still, I think as you could see this year, we came in around about the middle despite quite a lot of challenges and problems. We were pleased with our results, and look happy to take any questions to try and add to that. If I can hand it on to Noah to hand questions over to us. Thank you.
Hi, guys. Well done on a solid result. Maybe firstly, if I just start on the result itself, looks to be some pretty solid cost control through the second half. Just wondering if you could please make some comments on inflationary pressures that you're seeing in the business currently and how you've countered that in terms of product pricing recently.
Yeah, look, I think as everyone knows, there are some inflationary pressures. We have seen some price increases. What we see as important is, you know, still our business, a good 60% or so of it is OTC, which is always easier to change prices. There's, you know, a reasonable amount of pricing flexibility. So certainly we are able to pass on price increases in that area. With the other areas, it's really a matter over time of passing on any price increases. It kind of depends, in some areas there've been increases and actually in others there haven't been. Obviously things like freight and things like that have gone up quite a lot, with the price of a container, you know, probably going, say, from $6,000 to about $18,000.
You know, we have got a good logistics team, and they're working pretty hard on things like consolidating shipments. Because one of the challenges, for example, is the difference between a 20-foot container and a 40-footer are actually not that much. We're working on making sure we consolidate things to order enough that we have it in a 40-footer. You know, the difference, say, might be $18,000 for a 40-footer, and a 20-footer would be $15,000, you know. Certainly not proportional. Things like that and just working hard on all those angles have been important and continue to be.
Great. Thank you. Maybe secondly, looking ahead on guidance, clearly a wide range, which is understandable in the current backdrop. Just wondering if you could please give us a steer for what you're assuming in terms of licensing income and then, I guess, what you view are the key swing factors between the top and bottom ends of that guidance range.
Yeah. We tend not to break out the license income, and that is a fair factor in that, the swing factor there in the revenue. So we'd probably rather just leave that one if we can. We just really give guidance on the operating profit.
Okay then. Fair enough. I'll just leave it there for now.
Thank you.
Hi, guys. Well done on a good result. Just a few questions from me if I could. EBIT growth was underpinned by Australia, with the revenue uplift basically falling straight through. Does that reflect that the cost base there is largely fixed, in which we should expect any future incremental growth to basically fall through to EBIT as well?
Yeah, we are with launching new products, we are gonna increase our sales and marketing spend, aren't we, Malcolm? You know, there will be some increase around that. We've also got the additional sales force in terms of the doctor reps that you know that should be. It certainly won't cut our returns, but they won't get quite as much operating leverage at first, but that will play through over time. Malcolm, maybe you can comment more on that.
Yeah, that's right. We do see it. It'll be a bigger spend next year with the launches for Australia in particular, also New Zealand. Of course as international grows, that has a much lower overhead base on it. Asia, we are spending some money, which we did last year, and we will again this year, on marketing of the OTCs. There will be some increase in those overhead costs.
Okay, cool. Yeah, it's just quite good to know, I guess. Generally speaking, while there might be a bit more cost than this year from investment, generally speaking, though, we're starting to see decent operating leverage from that Australian business. I guess the interesting point there is that, you know, it's quite a stable, robust sort of segment of the wider group. It's just, I guess, quite good to know that, you know, the future guidance is sort of anchored to that business.
Oh, yeah. Look, long term there'll be some good leverage.
Yeah.
It'll slow down next year with the, because we've got so many launches that have been delayed.
Of course, as they establish themselves like our established brands, they do just have a, you can get to a fixed amount of dollar spend but still get the revenue growth on those established brands. Yeah.
We do see it being quite. There's some quite positive potential. Like, for instance, even with something like Maxigesic, like, even though it's the market leader, there's still a lot of potential to grow it. And then the more different line extensions we drop in, it makes the whole bundle of products stronger. Like, we've really seen that. Like, with the hot drink sachet has gone, is going well, and the point is having more than one product kinda really helps. We do see quite a lot of potential around things like that to get more leverage as well. You know, we can promote across the whole category with kinda more different line extensions of Maxigesic as well.
Yeah. That's cool. Just on Australia, 20 products planned, 2024, 2023. Does that mean we can basically expect even better growth in Australia this year compared to 2022?
Yeah. We're planning on better growth, yeah. I mean, we've always talked about, I mean, this is nothing new. We've talked about cracking NZD 100 million in Australia, and the question is just exactly when. You know, it's got a bit of kind of flexibility around it. Certainly, yeah, look, Australia, we would be aiming at growing it more this year than last year.
Great. Just on the international product sales revenue, excluding licensing revenue, that was flat, even though the number of countries sold in increased, and it was also across the included IV sales as well. Are you able to just sort of talk to sort of the flatness there?
Yeah. I mean, if you actually look as well that the licensing, the royalties, you can see the royalties, which is a better reflection in many ways of in-market sales, that actually grows a fair amount, like was up about 97% or almost 100%. With COVID having an impact in Europe, we got quite a few kind of major effects where people stocked up quite a lot the year before and then didn't buy that March last year. We saw quite a lot of impact, and then sales are recovering quite strongly at the moment. There were quite a lot of impacts around COVID with purchase to stock, and then lumpiness around that, which makes it harder to when you're comparing time period on time period.
I guess if you look at the royalty income, you can see that is improving, and that is consistent with the in-market sales. The licensing distributors' purchase of stock was real kind of lumpy, which skewed things.
Right. Okay. I guess that just kinda leads me into my final kind of wrap up question, just talking to the guidance. Basically just trying to understand what the main growth driver is there. I mean, we expect Australia to have some meaningful top line growth offset by a little bit more costs then. I guess, I mean, we'll have to assume a little bit from licensing revenue in the US this year as you sort of register the IV and tablets and later launch there. I mean, just in terms of breaking down what the kind of key drivers of the growth is. Is it? What's the sort of balance between ANZ versus Maxigesic?
Are we kind of expecting Maxigesic revenue to double or just trying to get a gauge on what kind of trajectory we should be expecting?
Yeah. We're looking for the strong growth in Australia, as you say. Good growth in New Zealand, but then bigger growth in the rest of the world. The main drivers will be Australia in the total overall picture and rest of the world. There is the element of the licensing coming in the rest of the world.
Yeah. Cool. Yeah, no worries. Thank you, guys.
Good morning, gentlemen. Just one very quick question. Now I know you've already said that we don't generally like to talk about some of the underlying profit assumptions. Just one very quick one. How much of it depends on a U.S. launch for Maxigesic? Or is it just will it be too early a stage for the launch of Maxigesic for it to matter in the context of already having an established market position in Australia and in other markets?
Yeah. The specific Maxigesic sales in the United States don't really contribute that much. They're not really in our forecast, particularly for this year. I mean, like, we've got a lot of launches in Europe that are underway kinda right now, and they almost have a bigger impact really. You know, we've got markets like France and Italy that are all underway, and stuff. They have more of an impact there. Malcolm, do you wanna say anything?
No, I think that's right. I mean, there is a bit of American there, but as Hartley said, it's not huge. That is, as you can understand, you know, the reason for the range of the guidance is the timing of these different things coming on stream, including the launches in Australia.
Okay. Thank you.