Good morning, welcome to ikeGPS's first half of financial year 2023 financial results and performance update, as released on the NZX and ASX yesterday. From the company today we have the CEO, Glenn Milnes, who will go through the presentation up on the screen. Before I hand over to Glenn, I'll just remind you that we will take questions at the end of the presentation, which you can do so via the Q&A panel at the bottom of the screen. Glenn, I'll pass it over to you to get started. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Simon. Thanks everyone for taking the time to join this call. What I'll try to do is pulse through these slides, which have been released to the market already, just to provide some more color and, but work through them pretty quickly so we can get to Q&A and discussion quickly. It's been another really strong period for ike overall. From a P&L perspective, we delivered net profit of NZD 1.1 million versus a loss in the prior calendar period of NZD 6.2 million. We've got positive operating cash flow and just a lot of momentum in the business if we look at revenue growth, gross margin growth. Our expense base increased modestly relative to sort of our high revenue and customer acquisition performance.
Keeping in mind also that our most of our operating costs are in USD. While we get a benefit at the top line for a weakening NZD, it also flows through to heightened OpEx. Our balance sheet has continued to stay very strong and it's strengthened in the period. You know, more than NZD 25 million of cash on the balance sheet and close to NZD 4 million of trade and other receivables. We're in a really strong spot and a very healthy position both in terms of our operating structure, also in terms of our ability to look at acquisitions as they become better priced. From a revenue perspective, this was pre-announced.
Revenue grew to NZD 15, 500,000 , so 170% higher than PCP. Keep in mind that our prior calendar period was also a strong growth period as well. I think the key thing for our shareholders and investors is that, you know, close to 90% of our revenue mix now is coming from recurring subscription or reoccurring transaction sources. That's a product of building software tools and capability that customers are prepared to pay for. This slide just kind of is a bit of a look in the rearview mirror, in terms of FY22 to March of this year was a really strong period for us.
If you take out the COVID blip, you can kinda see the way our revenue model and revenue mix has evolved positively over these last three or four years. Again, it's a consequence of the strategy to build more software products that customers are prepared to pay for. We've kept increasing pricing, and we've kept adding to the product portfolio. The blue and the green bar represent subscription, software subscription and software transaction revenue. The other chart that we've been reporting consistently is around the contract backlog and how it translates to revenue. Our contract backlog here is shown in orange each quarter, and recognized revenue is in blue. There's some nuance to the way our signed contract backlog is now being reported.
We've got some of our larger customers now are just layering on transactions month-over-month-over-month, so it doesn't necessarily flow through to this quarterly reporting item. You can see the momentum and that's what gives us a lot of confidence in our view for the next half and the next 12 to 18 months. In transactions, a lot of the industry that we serve, so we're based here in North America, serving the communications and utility market. A lot of this industry does business on a transaction basis. What that means is that every time an asset gets engineered through our software platform, we charge a transaction fee. You know, it's the way that the industry operates in many cases.
It's a great indicator of utilization of our software as we move forward. You see, you know, a really strong uptick in terms of transaction revenue growth, up more than 300% against PCP. In the table here, again, this is what we consistently report each quarter in terms of the economic engine of IKE and just strong growth across all of these items. We're working really hard at the moment in terms of introducing more technology internally to drive gross margin percent over time.
We're excited about some new capability that will continue to improve our gross margin profile from a percentage basis. From here, I'm going to go really fast through these slides because I think a lot of the audience is familiar with many of these metrics. We're in the right place at the right time in terms of the North American electric utility and communications market. It's a very definable, but it's a really large target customer base that we sell to, and just some enormous macro market tailwinds driving our target customers to be more efficient and use technology in terms of building their distribution networks and maintaining the distribution networks. This chart here shows, these are billions of dollars.
It shows the growing investment that's happening across distribution networks in terms of CapEx. We help utilities deploy their networks at a much higher quality standard and more efficiently. This need is growing, and it's gonna continue to grow in terms of, you know, aging infrastructure, aging workforce, et cetera. More demands on the power grid coming particularly with electric vehicles and some of those requirements. Ditto on the fiber communications side of the North American marketplace. Just an enormous amount of network development spend happening. We help these communications companies deploy their networks faster they can get to market quicker and win underlying customers faster.
Yeah, just a huge tailwind, probably right through to 2030 in terms of fiber and 5G network development. Some more detail here on the three customer groups that we sell to. They're all important in their own way. The electric utilities are the big prize if you take a 10-year view of our business. We sell the same products to each of these groups. We just have a different sales playbook and value proposition to each of them. There's an image here. This is a distribution power pole that's failed in a storm. This is a good visual view of what can go wrong if you don't design your network correctly.
You can see the power assets at the top of this pole, and further down you can see all of the communications and fiber and cable TV, et cetera, connections. Just a lot of load and a lot of engineering required to maintain these assets. This is another visual cue of these are 5G antennas. A lot of 5G and fiber is going onto power poles, onto distribution power poles. Again, we help this design process be a lot more efficient. But you can sort of see visually here what it looks like in terms of our design process and our maintenance process. We speed this up quite dramatically versus historical work practices.
It takes some patience and something of a sense of humor to be a new entrant and growth company in this space. We're making really good progress now. We're winning about one new logo a week, and we've got some of the very biggest network groups in North America now on our platform. The exciting thing is that they're growing. A lot of our revenue growth is from existing customers. It's not from new customer acquisition. These customers start small, and if, you know, if you serve them well, they can grow to be very large. We've got lots of examples now of customers that have grown from, you know, NZD 10,000 a year, to, you know, NZD 1 million plus. That's part of the long-term opportunity.
It does take time, but these are really large infrastructure businesses, and we aim to build a, you know, a decades long relationship with all of these groups. The growth opportunity is still significant. We've got less than 5% market share in terms of logos here in North America, so a huge amount of the market still to penetrate. We talked a bit about the opportunity to grow these big businesses over time in terms of account development. M&A is part of our strategy, so we've got an organic growth objective. Ultimately, although it's not in the near term, we've ultimately got quite a large international market expansion opportunity. I'll speed up even further as we go through team.
The team's the most important part of who we are and what we do. I think the really key people at IKE is the mid-level group of, w e've just got a whole range of emerging superstars that are expert in network development, network deployment, and technology tied to this item. These folks are really the face to the customer for IKE. We're really proud of the people that are growing and building capability within the business. Today, we've got a team of about 90, 92 or 93 people today. Revenue per employee of about $350,000 per employee, which is, you know, trending to be top decile type metrics.
But these folks really matter in terms of how we're building the company. We're in market in Colorado, headquarters in Colorado. Again, we've got a team of a leadership team that are really experienced in terms of the electric utility market and helping our customers be successful. Ditto with our board. We're very fortunate as a relatively small company to have a fabulous board of with public company experience, but also with industry experience here in the United States. I think most people on the call are familiar with the folk from a director perspective. From a technology and solutions perspective, this is obviously where the rubber meets the road.
We've invested, and we're continuing to invest on an outsized basis in technology and product development, because we've got a pretty incredible customer council now that are helping us build products and features that we know this market will buy and will continue to pay for. We've got our 4 solutions, which we'll go into some detail. In all cases, a customer's paying a backbone subscription fee to access any of our solutions, and then they're paying a usage-based accelerator. It's either transactions or it might be subscription licenses for back office software use. That's the model that we're driving customers towards as quickly as we can. As we release new products and new features, we continue to increase pricing.
Bit of detail there on our, on our history. I think importantly, again, a recap, we've got three strategic swim lanes. As we're building IKE, we've got to lean into the next 12 quarters and some important milestones across each of these three swim lanes. The first is being the very best at applying field data collection technologies to distribution assets and asset decision making. The second is around analysis and insights. Again, very specific to distribution assets and technology. The third is around customer experience and, you know, becoming a partner that our customers can't imagine living without.
That can encompass not just UX and CX of our products, but also our business models, M&A and those types of items. That's really the summary of how we're building the company. I'll post through this super quick because I think again, many of you are familiar with this. IKE Office Pro, this is the core revenue and profit generator for the business today. Digitizes and standardizes the way that our customers can go and collect and analyze distribution pole information. Cloud software to do a lot of this analysis and we're driving more and more automation and efficiency into this product. Just a view here is, you know, what a customer sees.
It's very detailed, spec-specific to a utility or a communications company's network. And some really interesting intelligence now in terms of dashboards, so that, you know, if you're AT&T or Crown Castle or someone with a big national network footprint, you can start to understand, you know, how are we going in terms of network engineering efficiency across the country. We can drill right into, you know, how efficient is a specific engineer in the field on Tuesday, et cetera. There's some really interesting intelligence coming to the platform through dashboards. We can put our hand on our heart and sell this solution based on productivity benefits for our customers.
We just deliver dramatic outcomes for our customer base, and this is what we sell to. IKE Structural is really important. It's taking, if you look at the photograph on the left, it's taking those IKE Office Pro digitized records, turning them into 3D models for pole loading analysis and design of networks. We're one of the 4 standards in North America for pole loading analysis. It's a very privileged position to access customers to go straight into their standards groups and to be able to cross-sell our other products and services. Some examples here of what the products looks like in practice.
We're excited about our next generation IKE PoleForeman solution which has come to market early next year. The great part of this is we've built this platform with a customer council that, you know, includes these groups, which are some of the very biggest network owners in the United States. IKE Insight gives us the ability, it's another product that integrates into the former two, but that can be acquired by a customer standalone. It gives us the ability to process data from any source and apply insights to distribution assets and distribution poles. Can drive some dramatic productivity improvements and automation capability into a lot of these distribution pole projects.
We're excited about where IKE Insight sits today, there's some examples here of how it looks in practice. IKE Analyze is our fourth product offering. It's where customers use our technology. They send ikeGPS back their network information into the cloud, then we use software and we use people to process that information and send them back an engineering output depending on what they require. It gives, i n a marketplace where there's just an acute shortage of engineering talent and engineering resourcing, we can start to use technology to give our customers a lot more capacity. The demand for IKE Analyze we think will just continue to grow and grow as we look forward.
Analyze has been a key part of our revenue growth over this past 12-18 months. I will pause there. I know I went through a lot quite quickly, Simon, if there are questions, I'll be happy to chat through those.
Perfect. Thanks, Glenn. Just a reminder for those on the line, if you did wanna ask a question, you can do so via the Q&A panel at the bottom of the screen. First question, Glenn. Can you just talk to us about how many new customers do you believe there may be in the U.S.?
There's about 6,000 participants in this market. If you look across the electric utilities, there's about 3,200. There's probably 200 communications groups deploying fiber and building 5G networks. There are about 2,500 or 3,000 engineering companies that do work on behalf of those infrastructure owners. We've got 365 customers today. Our retention rate's really strong. We're obviously still very early in terms of, you know, the addressable market. There's 5,500 that we haven't yet closed.
The seductive part of this industry is we know exactly who these customers are, and we know the roles of, or the titles of the people that we need to be speaking to, and we've got quite a good value proposition. You know, that's the way we run our sales playbook.
Thanks, Glenn. How have you seen the M&A environment evolve over the past six months in terms of opportunity and multiples?
I think that the, in the private markets, valuation multiples haven't come back to the same extent that we've seen in the public markets. I think since November last year, technology multiples have been, you know, hammered in the public markets. You know, our view we're gonna be exactly wrong, but our sort of approximate view is there's gonna be a lot of pressure in the private markets, for loss-making technology companies. Probably in 6 months time, I think it's gonna be very difficult for them to raise capital. We hope that will present some good opportunities, price-wise for M&A.
In terms of either number of transactions or revenue across the platform, how much more will you need? Will the next gen pole operating system product be able to process?
Well, we're building capability where we don't see volume being a constraint. You know, fingers crossed if we get some of this automation technology right, and that's what we're working very hard on at the moment. We've got a really great software development group working on this. You know, you can run very high volume through technology. We don't necessarily see that being a constraint.
Glenn, can you talk through the competitive software. Are others offering similar solutions or looking to mirror your functionality?
It's a mix. I spent a bit of time talking about the swim lane slide, and that's very important in terms of how Ike differentiates or how we intend to differentiate from what anyone else is doing in this landscape. If you look at our four products today, we've got different competitors across the, you know, those different product offerings. If you look at IKE Structural, you have Power Line Systems, PLS and SPIDAcalc. They've both been acquired by Bentley over the last 12-18 months, so they sit under the Bentley umbrella. There's another group called O-Calc Pro, which is owned by Osmose, which is a big national engineering group. There's essentially four players in that space, including ourselves.
We think there's an opportunity to, through the next generation platform to differentiate from those groups. It kinda goes on from there. There are, you know. The main thing that we compete against is incumbent engineering work practices. Our customers, they're so good at what they do, and they've been running power networks, you know, for a long period of time. They're very smart people, they do use quite manual work practices. I think the exciting thing is particularly because of aging workforce and a real choke point around engineering talent to keep doing work the way that they have been doing it. You know, a lot of our customers are being forced to look at technology and efficiency and some of these items that we focus on.
Perfect. Thanks, Glenn. That concludes the Q&A segment. I might just hand it back to you for closing remarks.
Thanks, Simon. It was a, yeah, a briefer session than planned, but, again, I appreciate everyone's time and engagement. Yeah, be happy to pick up, you know, any further direct questions either through Simon or myself. Our emails are attached to the, the recent releases. Thank you.
Thanks, Glenn. Thanks all for joining.