Good morning and welcome to today's investor call on the release of our first-half results from July 1 until December 31st. As always, here is a legal mandatory disclaimer. We'll pass that. So today from Loyal Solutions, I'm Peter Kisbye, the founder and CEO, and with me today I have Nicolai, who will be the Q&A moderator. So please feel free to, during the presentation or when we get to the Q&A, ask any questions in the chat. And Nicolai will read them out and we will address them. First we will look at the business milestones for the first half of the year. We got a very large client in Australia, which is called Myer, that has a loyalty program called MYER one. And Myer has 52 department stores across Australia, and MYER one is a top five loyalty program in Australia.
So now we have two clients in Australia, being that we have Virgin Australia, as well, so it's an interesting market for us that's dominated by five, six, seven very large programs of which we now are operating with two of them. We in November became the first and only platform to integrate to a local payment scheme in Qatar, which is called Himyan. This is similar to other domestic schemes such as the Dankort in Denmark or eftpos in Australia. This is in cooperation with our close partner, Qatar Airways. So every Himyan card in Qatar is now linked into our platform on behalf of Qatar Airways. Virgin Velocity, our client in Australia, won a design award for the user experience, using the Loyal Solutions technology. This is quite a prestigious award. Then we launched the oldest loyalty program in the world, I think.
It was actually founded in 1886. It's not a typo. And it's a Danish program for members of Danish trade unions called Forbrugsforeningen. It is the largest program in Denmark and the members are highly active. Forbrugsforeningen introduced our card-linking technology very successfully in October to the full program in Denmark. We continuously, obviously, work on platform upgrades for our clients, including new payment scheme integrations such as the Himyan card, which has been publicized. Our platform is very flexible on integrating payment schemes, which is quite a unique selling point in the market. If you look at the financials, revenue growth was very good. It was 56%, which, of course, is something we're quite happy with.
At the same time, due to a lot of efficiencies and, you know, just working on processes, etc., the OpEx was actually reduced by 12%, compared to last year, even with the substantial revenue growth. EBITDA went from -3.9 last year to 2.3. Becoming EBITDA positive was, of course, one of our key targets for the year, so it's quite satisfying to have achieved that. The other key parameter for us was to become cash flow positive, which we have also accomplished during the last six months. So these two KPIs, of course, is very nice for us to have achieved. Our annual recurring revenue, sorry, grew 13%.
The reason it is lagging behind revenue is that some of the contracting we had expected to take place in the first half year are delayed and will in all likelihood happen in the second part of the fiscal year. Compliance becomes more and more important for our customers, and we have all the, you know, big ticket compliance items that we need, and we have completed all the certifications during the six months. We are working on a lot of new modules, pardon my throat, we're working on a lot of new modules for Loyal Solutions, some AI-based. In the sales and pipeline part of our world, we continue to build our pipeline both in direct sales with partner sales and with the corporation we have together with Visa, where we are white labeling our platform as the Visa VMLS products.
If we look at the financial results, the revenue was DKK 28.5 million, which is an increase of 10 or 56. The estimate for the year is unchanged from the initial budget, so we are looking at a very significant growth rate in revenue, for this fiscal year. If we look at the ARR, by December 25, it was DKK 45.1 million, which is an increase of DKK 5.1 million, which is a 13% increase in the recurring annual recurring revenue. If we look at the summary, compared to our budget for the year, revenue came in at DKK 28.5 million and the revenue budget was DKK 25.9 million, so we are still ahead there. The OpEx, as mentioned, was actually lower, significantly lower than last year, but also lower than the budget. EBITDA was more or less on target.
The reason for EBITDA lagging a little bit is we had a few more direct costs than we had budgeted, causing this minor difference in EBITDA. On the bottom line, after financials, we're also profitable with DKK 427,000 versus a budget of DKK 757,000. On cash management, the cash balance at 31 December was DKK 6.5, up from DKK 2.9 last year. Net cash flows for the period was positive with DKK 2.5, versus negative last year of -DKK 3.1, both excluding any loans. Cash receipts were up to DKK 28.5 from DKK 19.3. The budget, obviously, now that we're cash flow positive, we have sufficient funding for the coming calendar year. The development over the last quarters is shown on the graph. So having achieved the cash flow positive state is, of course, a big check on the KPI list for us.
If we look at how we see things going forward, there's still a really significant market interest in payment and card-linked solutions. This is driven by the consumer's preference for the solution, where they do an action once, where they link their card, and then everything is automated after that. So there's a very high demand from members in programs to have this ease, which is one thing driving demand. The other part, the other flip side of the coin is the merchant partners for whom this is also super easy. They do not have to do any integration software or hardware. So there's a lot of demand for card-linked and payment-linked solutions. Our position, even though we are still a small company, our position continues to get stronger. We are still perceived as having the best platform, the best technology.
The compliance level is obviously a natural for us, but it is becoming a moat or a barrier because any entrance into this market would have had an easier time five years ago. The requirements from clients on compliance now are very high, and there are not very many companies who can deliver that compliance level. The last strong card in our hands is our reference clients, obviously, especially in the airline space, but also in the malls and telco. So we see our market position as being very strong in this part of the loyalty space.
Being scheme agnostic, which means that we can link up any payment card, is something that is in high demand, and it is our estimation that this demand will continue to increase, both because of geopolitical developments and also because a lot of countries simply have been working on this. Being scheme agnostic means that we would have to integrate to several different payment suppliers in a given country in order to run the program at the highest level. An example could be Australia, where if you have Visa, Mastercard, Amex, you do not cover all potential members of a program because of the local scheme called eftpos. It would be the same in Denmark, for example, where we have a domestic scheme.
So integrating and having the capability to integrate to these other payment schemes is a big USP, and doing it globally, there are not very many competitors to us on that. Our pipeline is super strong, and it's very large clients. The one thing we keep having challenges with, as you may recall from previous presentations, is that lead times are still very long. This is strategic decisions for large companies, so lead times continue to be long, and that is just part of the market we're in. The flip side of that is the stickiness of the solution is extremely high.
Our hybrid SaaS model, where the vast majority of our revenue is software as a service, but we have surrounding elements of other modules, is very popular with clients, and the modular build of our platform is also something that's appreciated. We see continued growth in all our clients' programs, which is very, very rewarding for us, obviously, and that goes for programs that have been running for a year or two or the programs we've been running for 5, 6, 7 years. We strongly believe that the reason for this continued growth is the ease of use for members. So, this is something that's maybe self-propelling is a bit of a large term, but it there's an inertia in the system that is really attractive. If we look at the financial goals, they are for all intents and purposes unchanged.
So for the full year, we still guide at the same as we did the budget initially before we started this financial year. We expect to hit a revenue of DKK 55.6 million. We also expect to catch up on ARR. As you may recall, we were only at a 13% growth in the first year, but we expect to catch up and reach the target that we set in the initial budget. Even that, due to these a bit higher direct costs, we have adjusted a little bit, so it's positive with DKK 5.3 million, but going from a -10 to a +3 is still very positive, even though it's a little less than the initial estimate of DKK 6.8 million. That was what we had in the presentation today. Please feel free to ask any questions.
Any questions or anything you want to share? Going once, going twice. All right, then thank you so much for attending today, and do have a pleasant.