Firstly, welcome and good morning to everyone joining EROAD's Half- Year results announcement for 30 September 2022. I want to acknowledge Margaret's appointment as our permanent CFO. I've been working with Margaret closely in her role as acting CFO since April, and then of course, in her role as the group financial controller since September 2020. She brings a huge amount of professionalism and drive to the role. She's been instrumental in the work we've been doing on the strategic review at the moment, and also along our drive to profitable growth. It's great to see her being appointed. I have to acknowledge, I did get a lot of feedback from analysts and investors who reached out to me to talk about how great Margaret was in her acting capacity, so I'm really happy.
Who recommended her for the role as well. I'm really happy that we brought, you know, her into that role. We did go through a process where we looked at candidates in New Zealand, the U.S., and Australia. Margaret certainly was the standout candidate as part of that process. In terms of the format today, well, Margaret and I will go through the presentation. We'll certainly leave time for questions at the end. Please either put up your hand or type a question in the comments box. We'll make sure we get to that as part of today. Just kicking off. It's fair to say we've recognized it's been a tough year, both for our shareholders and also for EROADers generally. We know the world has changed when it's come to technology stocks.
Given this, we have been decisive when it's come about looking at our cost base as a company and what we need to do for next steps going forward. We are focused on profitable growth. For us, that means we need to look and address our cost base to make sure that that's appropriate for the company that we are. Also appropriate for the growth that we're gonna seek to achieve going forward. Today, we've been looking at our product suites and been rationalizing where it makes sense around what products do we develop and what products we bring to the market. We've been focusing on that. As you have a more rationalized product set, you do increase the velocity of your engineering team, and it also decreases the spend that you have to put into and invest into your R&D platform.
We've also, for the last number of months, had a cost program underway. We saw headwinds emerging for technology stocks. We knew that we needed to take steps on there. We will be seeing those steps materialize in the second half-year and beyond. Tangibly, what we've been looking at there is reducing our headcount. Around circa 40 headcount reduction in the teams. That takes into account cuts across the teams that we have, but also increasing additional resources into R&D. We've been consolidating our footprint when it comes to leasing as well, and just making sure as we sort of transition to hybrid leasing, we've got the right sort of office set up to support our staff.
We've also been looking into our SaaS costs and our data costs and discretionary spend as well, just to make sure that we are really targeted and focused on what our spend is going forward. We do anticipate that's gonna flow into improving our operating cash flow. Obviously, over time, we've been progressing our integration work and had about NZD 6 million spent in this half-year on integration. Over time, that's gonna reduce. We expect that to also help improve our operating cash flow. It's fair to say we've also had a really strong year when it comes to growth. New Zealand continues to perform really strongly, and we'll touch on that a bit later in today's presentation around ongoing growth we're seeing from new and existing customers.
We're also really excited to announce a couple weeks ago the Cisco opportunity, which does prove the product market fit that we have with the Coretex products in North America. We won that account against very strong competition from the incumbent supplier, as well as some of the strongest telematics companies operating in the North American market. We've got a really robust pipeline ahead of us of over 22 pilots underway, which represents 32,000 of potential contracted units as well. We are progressing well our strategic review, which is focused on profitable growth. We're gonna look at a broader range of commercial models that have been unlocked with the Coretex merger as well. Turning to the operational update. What I'd like to focus on here is our growth in our annualized monthly recurring revenue. This is how we measure ourselves as a company.
What we're seeing over the half-year is we've grown by about 18% in AMRR, up to $158 million. When you net out the growth from due to the USD FX rates conversion, so $13.6 million there, we've still grown at around 8% when it comes to AMRR. That's consistent of what we're seeing in North America generally around growth. North American growth is around 8%-10% in that market. This does not include the Cisco opportunity that we've recently signed up as we've not yet commenced rolling out units for that opportunity, but we anticipate to do so shortly and before sort of May of next year. We're also focusing on adding products and services to our customers' plans.
We had about 1,000 customers who upgraded and added products and services for around 7,000 during the half-year. Almost 500 customers upgraded their plan as well, seeing greater value out of the investment we've put in, into our product set. That's accounted for about 3,000 units of additional upgraded there. When we look at our contracted units, we continue to see good growth there. We had around almost 9,000 growth in our total contracted units for the half-year. We're seeing, you know, strong growth re-emerging in that market there. If we look at North America in particular, our net growth was around almost 3,000. When we look at our gross sales in that market, that's about 7,500.
We're seeing strong growth occurring in the market, but some churn being caused by the SMB segment there. In New Zealand, we continue to grow strong with 5,000 contracted units growth in the half-year alone. It's up 5%. In Australia, our growth is more we're looking at there as around supporting our enterprise customers that we sort of brought on as part of the merger and focusing on getting the right customer support structure in place, in emulation to what we're doing with EROAD and other markets, and building good engagement with those customers. I'd like to talk about our asset retention rate. We continue to see really strong asset retention rate in the markets that we operate. If we look at the EROAD standalone, that's about 94.2%.
'Cause we measure this on an annual basis, we still break these out. For Coretex, which has more of a bent towards some of the larger enterprise fleets, that asset retention rate is about 95%. What we see is once we're in with a customer, it's very hard for us to be removed, and that's for a few reasons. Our strong product market fit that we have with a number of our customers, and the fact that we can continue to upsell them onto new value-adding products is really important, and our customers see that journey with us. We also have a really good customer support model as well. We get really engaged with our customers, who see us as a strong partner to their business. Indeed, we actually win customers back.
We're seeing in certain markets now, customers have gone over to other vendors and now come back to us off the strength of our customer service model that we have in those markets. During the course of the half-year, we renewed around 918 customers for about circa 21,000 connected units. That includes ABC Supply, which is one of the leading North American customers for 6,000 subscriptions in that market. On this slide, I just wanna talk through how we sort of grow with our customers through account expansion. You'll see on the left-hand side of the slide how we have our core units in the market. Ehubo, we supply that in New Zealand, Australia, and in North America. We saw continued growth with Ehubos in the markets we operate in.
Our CoreHub, we see growth there, particularly in North America. Australia, we also brought that product to as well, over time, we're gonna be adding additional functionality and services to CoreHub in Australia to sort of build momentum for that product there as well. It includes Clarity Solo, which is the all-in-one telematics device and camera solution. That's sort of a core part of our offering too, we saw growth there. We have added value products or services that we supply as well. You know we've talked about our Clarity Connect Dashcam in the past. That connects in with our Ehubo product and soon it's gonna connect in with our CoreHub solution as well. What that does is it provides the camera in the vehicle for our customers to sort of look through from a health and safety or a consideration angle.
We saw that grow by about 1,500 units during the half-year. We also have our Phillips Connect trailer product, which connects with our customers in North America for their trailer solution too. We're seeing growth in that market as well. We have our SaaS product. We enjoy continued growth in Logbook and Inspect, that's primarily in the New Zealand markets, as well as our Enterprise Data Connector. That's quite a high-value solution that we provide to our customers. It gives them control of the data for what we collect on their behalf, and that makes us more sticky as they can then process and utilize that data with other data sources that they have to get greater granularity and visibility and insights of what our solutions are doing for their businesses.
When we look at those SaaS solutions, we get a higher margin of those versus the hardware. We're looking at continuing to invest in those SaaS solutions going forward. If I look at and go through for the next three slides, our each of the segments we're in in market. In North America, what we're seeing is we continue to see growth across a range of product solutions that we have there. Our CoreHub and Ehubo, we grew from a growth perspective of 7,500 units in that market. We need to net out some churn, and as I mentioned before, principally driven by SMB customer base. That's for the reasons that they're still facing headwinds when it comes to the economy in North America.
Whether that's due to high inflation or consolidation that they're seeing in the industry as well as driver shortages, when we're talking to those customers, they're renewing still for fewer units. On a positive note, we are growing with the enterprise accounts, and we're seeing our sales engine really start to convert opportunities up in that market. We're continuing to see growth around our dash cam products as well. We added about 500 dash cams in North America over the half-year. 150 seats of which was for Clarity Solos. That's the all-in-one telematics solution. As well as around 380 connected dash cams as well. We're seeing the trailer tracking product in that Phillips Connect still being a strong offering in the market that sold around about 700 there. Come on. There we go. If we move into...
You good? Yeah, there we go. If we move into the New Zealand result for the half-year, we grew by 5,000 units in that market. It just demonstrates the continual strength of the offering that we have here in New Zealand. That growth was about three-quarters driven by existing customers, so that's them seeing the value of the Ehubo solution, principally for the heavy vehicles, and they want to roll out in lighter, more medium-duty vehicles they might have in their fleets as well to give them a total fleet perspective of how they're performing. We also see growth around our camera solution in New Zealand too. We added over 1,000 connected dashcams, and they're not counted as part of those 5,000 connected vehicles because they are connected to an Ehubo unit.
We're starting to push more the all-in-one Clarity Solo solution. We expect to see greater growth being driven from New Zealand as we up in our campaigns for the Clarity Solo. In terms of our SaaS products, as I mentioned before, we've seen good performance in those. We're selling over 1,000 Logbook subscriptions and Asset subscriptions during the half-year. We also continue to see growth around our Enterprise Data Connector in that market. We are sort of getting into converting some of our customers from 3G units to 4G units, but we're still maintaining high asset retention rate in market there of about 96% when you look at EROAD on a standalone basis. Looking at our Australia performance for the half-year.
We've had a slight amount of growth, that's been a bit of a mix in terms of some account expansion for enterprise accounts and also into SMB space. Our focus very much in Australia has really been in our support structure around the enterprise vehicle fleets that we brought over from the Coretex merger. We also are focusing on our Dashcam product in the market and trying to build up some greater momentum there, we expect to see that picking up over the next wee while. Finally, you know, we've brought our CoreHub solution to Australia, but we're gonna start building out the features and functionality there into the 2023 calendar year, then we'll see greater momentum come off the back of that. I might hand over to Margaret now to talk through the financial results.
Hi, everyone. I'm going to head over and do some of the more detailed financial results. Before we start, I just wanted to acknowledge that it's a tricky result in terms of comparability. We've had a lot of change in EROAD Group over the last 18 months. What you're seeing as part of this is H1 in FY 2022 had no Coretex. H2 in FY 2022 had four months of Coretex. Now with H1 FY 2023, we've got six months of Coretex. Comparability is difficult for some of the metrics. Alongside that, we've got some technical accounting adjustments and one-off costs. We've tried to indicate wherever they are and give you some more information through the slide deck. I'll try and highlight those where we need to.
In terms of revenue's grown 28% at a gross level. One of those accounting adjustments though, is a NZD 7 million revenue one, so if we normalize for that, you see revenue growing 17% in the half. That's partly to do with the extra two months of Coretex, but also the underlying growth that Mark has just referred to. In terms of EBIT for the six-month period was a profit of NZD 1 million. Again, those one-off items, if we normalize for those, we end up with a loss of NZD 3.4 million. We need to focus on profitable growth. We need to respond to market conditions. We've been taking costs out early. We've been focusing on our cash burn, and we're enabling profitable growth in the markets. What you're seeing here is a picture of transition.
In the numbers, we're at the beginning of taking out our costs, and we've got some one-off impacts. Free cash flow is NZD -23.4 million. It's an improvement of NZD 8.7 million on H2 last year. I've got another slide we come to on that one, so I'll talk some more about that at that point. EBITDA has grown in all of the regions, which is really pleasing. In terms of the North American growth, which you can see on this slide is the largest at $6.2 million, is a combination of three factors sitting in there. There's the underlying growth in our units, there's the extra two months of Coretex, and there's also the strong U.S. dollar that supported growth in that market at a New Zealand dollar level.
Normalized EBITDA margin is sitting at 19%, which is consistent over the two periods since we acquired Coretex. It's to do with the mix of the selling models we're using and also final sales of a legacy product that will wind off over time. Alongside our growth in recurring revenue, we've seen a 13% growth in our future contracted income, which is now at NZD 215.7 million. R&D spending is in line with what we signaled to the market. It includes one-off spending on integration of NZD 4.6 million, that's the work we're doing to combine our products and platforms ready for our customers. We've realigned the R&D team, given the market conditions, we're focusing on improving efficiency in that area, increasing our speed to market and targeting investments that give us the greatest return. Got there.
As mentioned at the full year, we were expecting ARPU to decrease as we have the full six months of Coretex in the metrics. Coretex has a different selling model, we had quite different ARPUs as separate groups. Bringing that together, we have actually seen it grow slightly, that's been underpinned by the strong U.S. dollar, which has driven that growth along with our selling to our customers. During the period, we had almost 1,500 customers do upgrades or increase their mix of products that they take from EROAD. Mark's covered asset retention, I won't worry about that one. Carry on. We'll do this now and get it over and done with. Cost to acquire. This is a lumpy metric for us. There's a lag time when you look at cost to acquire.
What you're seeing in here is increased investment in the North American selling and marketing alongside a situation where the units haven't yet rolled in. What I'd be expecting to see in cost to acquire is that'll come down as we roll out units and go live with units in the vehicles, particularly for those large enterprise wins that we're doing. Cost to serve. Our main focus in the area of cost to serve is trying to move the low value engagement with customers online and move it to lower cost mechanisms. It has come down. We're hoping to keep working on those and keep driving that through into different channels. The operating bridge. This gives you some details on what the changes in the cost base between H2 FY 2022 and H1 FY 2023.
We've used H2 for this bridge because we felt that was more comparable in terms of six months and six months. What is really pleasing in this is what it shows is even given the extra two months of Coretex into the cost profile, we're still showing we're holding costs flat in many situations and in many instances, we're growing the business. As with most businesses, we're seeing inflationary pressure, particularly in the labor market area, we are pressured to attract people and price pressure as all our staff feel the impacts of inflation in their own worlds. We also have in the personnel costs, the impact of a strong FX rate for U.S. dollar, which is about, we see it in the woods there, about $1.2 million.
SaaS costs primarily reflect the inclusion of Coretex for the extra two months. Now that we're a larger group, working with our suppliers to make sure that we get efficiencies and economies of scale in there as much as we can. In terms of this slide, it provides you with details of the assets we've added during the period. Probably the key point to note in here is the elevated levels of inventory. I think at full year, we indicated that we're expecting to continue to see pressure in inventory and have inventory build. It's to do with global supply chain pressures, ensuring up our supply and making sure we've got product for our customers.
During this period, we had growth in inventory of NZD 3.6 million. We've got a further NZD 3.1 million in our prepayments that relate to inventory as well. With the market conditions looking like they're gonna deteriorate, we're hoping, no, I shouldn't say hoping. We're expecting to see global supply chain pressure ease over the next six-12 months. It'll take a little bit of time to wind back into EROAD's results. Clearly, we have to make forward commitments around inventory. We are expecting that we'll be able to shorten the cycle of inventory. R&D. I've already talked about this a bit. There's NZD 20.5 million spend in R&D. As I mentioned, NZD 4.6 million of this related to integration.
In the second half, we expect to complete most of the integration activity that relates to our customer platforms, and we remain on track for the $58 million that we indicated. Oops. Now I've gone too far. Free cash flow. The highlight for me on this slide is for the first time, we've got each of the regions either cash flow positive or neutral, which is great. In terms of the half-year, as I've just mentioned, our free cash flow is impacted by our inventory growth, the additional $3.6 million and the $3.1 million in prepayments. We've also had the integration investment, which as a total business is more like $6 odd million, as Mark mentioned, and there are a few one-off costs that have hit this period as well.
As a business, we need to continue to focus on revenue growth, but we need to do that in a way that helps us reduce our cash burn. The debt and cash facilities are about NZD 47 million, and we believe that provides us with enough time to make the changes we need to make. This slide just provides some more detail, but really talks to what I've just described previously, so I'm gonna skip through to the next one. This slide gives you some examples of where we are taking cost out and what we have done already. Our focus is on cost reductions in areas that won't jeopardize our future growth, and our target is to have profitable growth and reduce cash burn. With that, I'm gonna pass to Mark.
Thanks, Margaret. In this section, we're gonna look at the growth opportunities and outlooks for the next half-year. You may recall the full year, there's sort of three key areas of focus that EROAD had in terms of this half-year. First was around delivering progress on the product and platform integration, the merger of EROAD and Coretex. Secondly, was very much around the revenue growth momentum that we're building in North America and New Zealand. Finally, around our maintaining an engaged culture as we bring the two teams together. I'll speak to each of those points during this section of the investor presentation. First, looking at our product and platform, we're really excited that during the course of this month, we will be rolling out our integrated platform.
That's a huge achievement from the team on that front. With that platform going live, we're now gonna be moving towards getting the right products and features being built on top of that platform. That involves migration of products that we've been building either historically on the MyEROAD platform or historically on the 360 platform, which was what Coretex was running prior to the merger. During the course of this month, we should also be rolling out our Clarity Dashcam, which will be integrated and be able to sell to Coretex customers, and they'll be able to view those on the legacy 360 platform they are used to using. That's a major achievement.
Again, it helps back up the dashcam strategy that we have, which we're seeing great momentum on in all the markets that customers want a dashcam, whether it's from an exoneration perspective, to sort of show that they weren't the cause of the accident, or to manage just more generally health and safety responsibilities. That's the key driver that we're seeing in ANZ. We'll be rolling out the EROAD North American tax features into the Coretex platform in the first quarter of next calendar year, so before April. Again, it's a very exciting development. As many of you know, EROAD has always prided itself on having a market-leading tax product in the North American market.
To be able to extend that across into the Coretex platform is a great win. We continue to work on certification of the CoreHub device and bring that into New Zealand market too, which is hugely exciting. I mean, that was the key reason for why we won the Cisco engagement, was very much around the strength of that CoreHub technology and hardware. To be able to sort of roll that down to New Zealand with a bit of work being done to make it RUC compliant, so Road User Charger compliant in New Zealand, to enable our enterprise customers will be a really exciting development during the course of next year. We also continue to work on other parts of integration too.
The key one there is making sure from a customer-facing perspective, they're getting one single driving platform, and that's the big focus for next half of the year. Also continue to enable our sales teams to cross-sell products into customers in North America is a major focus of the team. Looking at building revenue growth momentum in North America, I just wanna talk to some of the graphs in this slide. First, if you look at the revenue perspective, we've grown around 30% in terms of revenue in North America over the half-year. When you look at the unit growth, which is the middle slide, as I touched on earlier, about 7,500 units sold in the half-year.
Which is a little bit ahead of what we did in the second half of FY 2022, but it was a significant step up from what we were doing previously, in the markets, in the North American market. We still do see some underlying churn happening there, but we expect that to reduce over time. That's still principally driven from the SMB segment of the market, who are still going through the last parts of the switching campaign from 3G to 4G. All those smaller customers who are more exposed to the economic challenges that we're seeing in that market. It's great to see the customer team, as the sales team, sorry, really driving growth and sales in that market.
If we look at our pipeline compared to what we talked about at full year, as you may recall, at full year, we had eight pilots in motion for about 26,000 units. Since then, we've converted three of those pilots, one of which was the one for Cisco, which was above 9,000, and we still see a potential upside with that customer as well. We've had a couple of pilots stall during the half-year. The reason for that is customers just decided further on their buying decisions and just want to think things through a bit more before progressing with pilots. We've also added another 10 pilots in the markets as well for an additional 14,000 units. We are still seeing opportunity there to grow. The question will be very much around the timing of landing those pilots, depending on the size.
Some can take quite some time. As we've mentioned previously, Cisco took about 18 months, given its size, to land. Some of the more smaller pilots take a shorter duration of time. We are certainly seeing strong growth in the pipelines in the market as our product market fit continues to grow there. If we then look at our revenue growth momentum in ANZ. In New Zealand, as we know, we've got a very strong performance, particularly enterprise accounts in the New Zealand market. As such, there's not a huge number of enterprise accounts out there that we don't have already. Notwithstanding that, there are five enterprise pilots underway for over 5,000 units. We also continue to expect that we'll be able to get growth from other segments of the market.
We have been performing quite strong in the light commercial vehicles and seeing a lot of traction with our ESG and our health and safety offerings in those areas. We're seeing good traction there. We still believe we'll be growing by over 9,000 vehicles in New Zealand again for this year. Australia, we have been looking at some growth in pilot opportunities there. We've got 4 ongoing enterprise custom pilots of around 2,000 units. And also around our EROAD Clarity Solar cameras and our EROAD Where Mini tags. We've also seen some pilots sort of come off and sort of stall in that market as well, and not sort of go ahead. And that's been due to sort of customer buying decisions and wanting to sort of look at different opportunities out there in the market.
What we have also been focused on is with our existing customers in that space, making sure we've got the right customer support model, and then looking at further opportunities to grow them going forward as well. If we sort of touch on ESG for a bit, 'cause this is getting far more momentum in the markets as we sort of talk more and more with customers. Initially, we saw New Zealand as being the key area to focus on ESG, but I've been up in North America, four times now during the course of the year, talking to our customers up there, and ESG is at the tip of their tongue in all conversations. We are focusing on how do we bring our ESG product offering to the market quicker. There's various offerings that we've been working on.
One of which is very much focused on heavy vehicle fleets and around how they can understand the fuel consumption and what their vehicles are doing there, and now how they can sort of transition those vehicles from being internal combustion engines to EVs. We're also looking at rolling out a product over the course of next year, focusing on carbon emissions and how customers can measure those. More and more of them have been asked to understand what their footprints are. As we understand fuel burn of vehicles and how we can help reduce customers around the burn, as well as asset utilization and productivity for their staff, we can give a good wraparound around what their carbon footprint's gonna be for their vehicles. Earlier this past year, I was also down in Christchurch, where we launched our trial with EECA.
EECA is New Zealand Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. They are working with us and others to help customers who may have range anxiety around being on EV trucks to understand what needs they have and how EVs can help solve solution for them. EROAD's playing a key part to play there. What we hope to do is help measure what is a typical day looking like for a vehicle and how those jobs can be done by an EV. We've got a number of customers down there trialing that in Christchurch, and we've also rolled one out in Auckland too.
It's a really exciting development and it's helping from a customer's perspective, see that they can actually transition from internal combustion engines into EVs and they can still maintain the productivity that they need to complete their contracts and jobs for their customers. We've also been really focused on building a shared culture, and working around merging the two entities during the half-year as well. Our focus on that front is that as we return people back to the office, we do see a strong focus around hybrid working. It's getting the right mix of people in the office working with teams, as well as working at home and can that work well. We've been focusing on that during the last six months, as many companies have. Our workforce is highly motivated in that regard.
I mean, they certainly see how they can drive growth and productivity, and we've been working with different teams on how that looks. We've also been faced into quite a competitive labor market, so we had a focus on our employee value proposition as well, and rolling out things such as healthcare to all teams across all markets we're in, unlimited sick leave have been key there. Also around how we can help our staff around parental leave policies and flexible work as well. We've been focusing on building that engagement with our team too, as the labor market gets more and more competitive. We've also seen a really shared culture being built between the teams.
Coretex had a very much a focus as a startup mentality, and we've been bringing that thinking and approach back into EROAD to help drive more efficiency and velocity in the teams. We rolled out a new structure around our product design and engineering team. The focus there is, as Margaret talked about before, is how to get more efficiency out of the team and drive more velocity. We rolled out a new structure back in June. On that front, and we've seen some good wins around teams being more productive with the new structures we've been putting into place, which is great because that means we can get product to market quicker for our customer at a lower cost.
If I turn to our outlook for the rest of the half- year, we reconfirm the guidance both at a revenue level and at EBIT, as we updated market a couple weeks ago when we announced Cisco. Between NZD 154 million-NZD 164 million on the top line revenue. That's obviously subject to FX movements as we see the U.S. dollar and the changes there on that front. We also remain on track in terms of our normalized EBIT of between - 5% and breakeven. That's even despite the inflation pressures we're seeing across the company. The focus on cash and profitable growth has helped enable us to reconfirm that guidance. We do have a strong pipeline ahead of us of 22 enterprise accounts, which are at the pilot stage of around 32,000 contracted units there.
Of that, we've seen in North America, as I touched on before, about 25,000 units there in the pipeline as well, which we're working to convert to. During the second half-year, we're also focused on retaining some of our larger North American and Australia enterprise customers. We look forward to continuing engagement with those customers. I've been up in North America meeting with customers around how EROAD can continue to support their journey and building strong relationships with customers there and equally in Australia as well. We also see the benefit of cost-cut initiatives in H2 coming through from what we talked about earlier. Finally, the last slide I just wanna talk to is about the strategic review that we've talked to the market about.
We're very much focused working with third party on how we can enable profitable growth in the markets that we're in. As Margaret and I talked about earlier, we did start looking at our cost base earlier this year to make sure that we are really focused on our spend, and we're gonna continue to do so. What we are seeing is in the current economic climate, the timing of our NZD 250 million revenue target for FY 2025, we expect that to push out to be a bit longer. We still see a good pipeline of opportunity out there, particularly in North America and as well as the New Zealand market too. It's just taking longer to convert. We are seeing the improved benefits of the product market fit by teaming up with the Coretex team.
We've seen high gross sales in North America, and we are converting our opportunities, and Cisco is a key proof point for that. Equally, renewing ABC, which is continuing to be on our Ehubo platform, shows that we're still able to support enterprise customers both with CoreHub and Ehubo technology in those markets. In talking to customers, we're seeing an increase in demand for solutions, focusing on sustainability, on data, and managing the assets. When we look at the strategic review, we're gonna look to build on our cost cut initiatives, how we can drive more efficiency in the company. We'll also take a more disciplined approach around North America, too, to see where can we see greater growth sooner and how we can bring that forward.
We're gonna focus continually on rationalizing our product set, as I talked about earlier, that helps us in our velocity around product development, but also as a more cost-effective way of doing R&D as well. We're forecasting higher revenue and continued cash return as we still do have some outright sale for customers, particularly for those who come through from the Coretex model. We look forward to talking with our investors around our current strategic review before the end of FY 2023 and provide more information to the market then. We might now turn to questions. I'll open up both the chat and also see who's got their hands up. I believe, Guy, you've a hand up. I've got to find you and then take you off mute. Please bear with me. Hi, Guy. You should be off mute now, so please ask your questions.
Thanks. Good morning, Mark and Margaret. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe first I could just start, actually, just if I could start on integration costs, NZD 5.5 Million in the first half. I think you've previously talked about a range for the full year of NZD 5 million-NZD 10 million. Given there's still, I guess, ongoing integration projects, do you now expect to be at the top end of that, or is that range still relevant?
Yes, that range is still relevant. We will be within that range at year-end. I think we signaled at full year, we had deferred the integration of some of our back office systems. That integration is primarily focused on our customers and our, the tools we need to look after our customers from an internal business system perspective. The internal business system stuff is almost complete in terms of that part of it. I think we've signaled, help me out, Mark, kinda late this year, early next calendar year, that we will have the platform stood up for the integration to enable us to integrate the products across.
Yes. In fact, from a product perspective, customer facing that platform comes live during December.
Okay. There you go.
Clarity Dashcam is the first one we're gonna put over to that platform, and tax will then come in, first three months of next year.
Great. Thank you. Just on, I guess, on the increasing debt load. I know, I think you previously talked to, I guess, an expected peak in debt of first half 2024. I mean, given the change in operating environment and, I guess pushing out of some of those medium-term targets, is that still relevant? At what point do you expect to be kinda cash flow positive?
I think, to your point, in terms of we talked at the time about what would happen with our large enterprise profile and what funding we'd require for units and how we'd do that, you see that proof point in Cisco. Some of our inventory build was around that. Really what will determine ultimately will be what we can do about managing that inventory level down. It's about NZD 30 million at the moment between the prepayments and the inventory. When we expect to be cash flow positive, it would be beyond FY 2024, but I'd certainly expect to see a large reduction in our cash burn through into FY 2024.
Great. Thanks. That's helpful. Yes, just a little bit further on that. In terms of the, can you just remind us what your banking covenants are?
We've got three covenants. We've got a debt to EBITDA leverage covenant, we've got an interest coverage cover ratio, and we've got an asset cover. We're forecasting we'll be well compliant with those, all three of them, for the foreseeable future.
Great. Are you able to tell us what, exactly what those levels are?
We generally don't disclose the target levels as part of our banking covenants.
Yep. Okay. I guess, on broader customer discussions, what sort of product pricing, discussion conversations are you having with customers? Are you able to get increased prices, you know, just given the inflation or are customers looking to try and find areas to cut costs, particularly... as you go into this high renewal phase?
Yeah. We look at the products there, Guy. It's sort of different conversations with customers. Certainly, at a high end, they see the value that we bring. Not only do we look from a rental model of obviously ongoing revenue from them, but we're also looking at new ways of getting revenue from them as well around integration, particularly the larger customers. There's almost a professional service model that's been developed there. They kind of see us from a value perspective, actually bringing real value to the business. We're seeing positive discussions when it comes to what we're charging for solutions there.
We've got an ability to, in certain contracts when we come to renewal, to increase what we charge, and we're having conversations with customers with the inflation environment that we're in, that we can increase those. At the SMB end of the market, they are cash constrained, and we've seen that particularly in North America. That's where we lose potential customers there who are looking at it from more of a cost perspective and going to a lower cost, lower feature solutions. That does add to a bit of churn on that side. We're very much focused on the enterprise level and larger customers who do see the value in how we do take costs out of their business, and they're willing to pay for it.
If you remember, particularly the rental model, there's a very small upfront cost, which in monetary takes the cost out of their business. They understand that, and we have good discussions on that front.
Guy, we have changed some of our pricing around stuff where we've been able to. As an example, the transaction cost on Road User Charges in New Zealand or, we have customers that roll off a contract term, we're rolling it back now to re-recommended retail and our installation review. Where we can, we have. I just wanted to add too, to your other question about cash burn. I should have added that the strategic review clearly will have an impact on where we land with our cash burn. What I'm talking to you about is kind of the current model. When we finish the strategic review, we'll be reviewing and working through what that means for the business.
Great. Thank you. I might just pause there and let anyone else ask some questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Guy. Josh, I might open it over to you now, Josh. You should be off mute now for any questions you might have.
Brilliant. Thanks, Mark. Can you hear me okay?
I can. Thank you.
Great. Just first question is on contingent consideration for Coretex. Can you help us understand what you expect the cash portion to be? Am I right in thinking that will be paid next week?
Well, just I'll touch on the second point. Mark can talk through the accounting on the first point. The way that it works is, we measure from a merger perspective at the end of November, how that looks. Over the next wee while, there's quite a few different elements around the technology platform and so forth that we've got to work our way through. It's certainly not something that's going to be paid within the next week or so. There's a couple month process we go through with the Coretex vendors around measuring against those outcomes for the sale and purchase agreement.
In terms of what we've put in the accounts, you should treat it as an accounting estimate as you would with anything else like that. We ultimately have to meet the standards and what they require us to do, and that requires us to make some assumptions and revalue the shares ultimately. I'd treat that as it's articulated as an accounting estimate.
Okay, thanks. Do you have an estimate of the cash portion, just ignoring the shares for now?
As we sort of work our way through, Josh, the deliveries against that, we'll be able to be better informed and might be updated in due course.
Thanks. Just on the cost-cutting net reduction of 40 roles, you know, has it been concentrated in a certain division?
No. We've sort of looked across the business around where we can drive greater efficiencies, so we've been removing headcount where it makes sense to do so while still enabling growth. We've also at the same time. If you look, that's sort of net, that's a net number. If you look across the board, it's around 10% fewer staff than what they were back when I joined as CEO back in April. We have reduced some headcount, but then also in certain areas, particularly around R&D and some of our specialist engineers who need to sort of accelerate some product development, we've also recruited some as well. That's a net number, but it's been across the business. From an R&D perspective, we're very much focused on enabling faster velocity there, so we're getting the right engineers supporting that.
Thanks. Just turning to sort of churn and retention, I noticed your Coretex retention rate was sort of subdued in New Zealand. Just sort of interested to know You know, whether customers are reducing their asset bases or you're actually losing customers to a competitor or perhaps even losing to EROAD?
Yeah. Josh, you're on the money there.
Yeah.
A lot of them are converting to EROAD. The way the metric is measured. Currently is that you'll see it go down in one. It won't come into the other one until the next reporting period. Once we hit full year, we'll be able to merge that metric. You won't get that noise in it.
Just to pick up that point. We were talking about the product rationalization before, is we're moving legacy Coretex customers from their old hardware onto the newer platform that EROAD has as part of a switching campaign, 3G to 4G. Just, you know, they're having better technology, as we sort of said, that they're getting now as well. That's having a bit of an impact on those numbers too.
Got it. Last question, just on hiring an external consultant for the strategy review. Obviously that's, you know, a process to work through. Can you just sort of help us understand what expertise you think they will bring that you don't necessarily have internally?
Whenever you sort of team up with an external firm, and we're working with McKinsey in this instance, about helping to drive velocity around change as well. We've got obviously a lot of good knowledge in the markets we operate in. They're providing also really good knowledge, particularly in the North American market around telematics. Just helping to supplement that to make sure we get the right rigor and challenge around where we can believe and grow there. Equally, from a cost perspective too, they help sort of give us an an additional angle and viewpoint around how we can be more efficient too. We're also looking at how from a customer perspective, we can better service the customers too, so to help provide us insights on that level. They've been a great partner working with us, and helping to supplement the talent that we have internally, Josh.
That's all from me. Thanks very much for the insight.
Thank you. Thank you for your questions. I might move on to Clyde. I'll unmute you. Can you just-
Hearing that. Great.
Great. There we go. Clyde.
One question. One of the outcomes of the strategic review, could it be that you'll see impairments on costs that have been capitalized for IT development in the past?
It, it could, Clyde. I wouldn't expect it to. We generally try and make sure we align the useful life of those assets with what we expect them to have. The reason I say it could would be if we decided to stop using a particular product or a platform and there was still a value sitting in the books, yes, we'd see an impairment. At this stage, I think they're lined up with our expectations.
No, I was thinking more development because if you are looking to shorten your payback period on product or development expectations, you might discontinue lines that you previously invested in and capitalized.
Yep. Look, I'm agreeing with you, Clyde, yes.
Yeah.
Until we work through the strategic review, we think the useful life reflected them and most of the stuff will continue to be used. That is a test we have to do when we finish that strategic review and work out what products and platforms we're using moving forward. There is a potential there, but we haven't yet finished that work to determine whether it's gonna happen or not.
Okay. Thank you.
Any other questions, Clyde?
No.
Okay. Thank you. I think the next question is from Sean Church. You should be unmuted now, Sean, if you've got a question.
Is he on mute?
Sean, are?
He's still on mute. He might not be unmuted. I don't know. Let's try now.
Sean, are you off mute? You need to take yourself off mute as well. I think you've taken a hand down, Sean, maybe in accident. We've also got the chat. There's no questions so far on the chat that I can see. Guy and Josh, I still see your hand up. I don't know if that's new questions or you're just, Haven't taken a hand down yet. Guy, do you have a follow-up question?
Oh, sorry. Yeah, just I guess one quick one.
That's right.
Just on headcount reduction. I'm just wondering if you could put it in context, with, I guess, a aim to drive sales growth and also, the comments made of the full year, around expecting to increase the engineering headcount?
Yep.
Just as a part of that, could you give us an idea or a steer on what proportion of engineering costs are third-party contract labor?
I'll touch on the first few parts, and I'll pass to Margaret on the contracting side and proportion. From an engineering perspective, and also from a sales perspective, we've been very much focused on getting the right talent in the organization to drive the velocity, whether it's from engineering into development or also from sales. From a sales perspective, they haven't really been touched from any cost down when it comes to headcount reduction. It's only on the margins, and that's very much around getting the right sales talent into the team to enable that.
From an engineering perspective, we've reviewed roles, and what we've done is reduced some skill sets that we've had, which we had, more talent in and are more expertise in, and we've gone out there to hire, the skill set that we need to help support our platform going forward. It's a bit of a readjustment there. It's not incongruent with what we're trying to do in terms of sales, 'cause we're trying to get the right sales people in. Equally from engineering, having the right mix of engineers across different skill sets because we have developers who write code in different languages. You need to make sure you've got the right mix to actually get that velocity. It's consistent with that. In terms of the contractor point, I might pass over to Margaret on that.
Sorry, Guy, was your contractor point about the proportions of the 40?
Yeah. Oh, no, more on the existing, cost base.
Ask me that question again, Guy.
Yeah. I guess I was just trying to understand the flexibility in some of the engineering costs .
Oh, I see.
You know, how much of the engineering cost base is third-party contract labor.
Yeah. There is a little bit of flexibility. There was more at the beginning of the year than there is now, 'cause obviously part of that cost out program has been to reduce contractors where we felt we could. We are still supported in some specific areas. Where we have a shortage in skills and we're out in the market trying to recruit, but it's taking time, 'cause sometimes it is, we often supplement with contractors. That kinda gives a sense. There's a little bit, but not a huge amount in terms of the contractor space in engineering.
Great. That's all from me. Thanks.
We're still on track to run the investment R&D of NZD 38 million this year, including integration. That's still on track, Guy. Are there any further questions for today? Thank you so much for taking the time to go through the investor presentation with us. Look forward to having follow-up conversations with anyone as well and look forward to, in the new year, sitting down with all our investors to talk about our strategic review and the outcomes for the business. Thank you so much.
Thank you.