accesso Technology Group plc (ACSO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our 2023 full year results presentation. I am joined today by Fern MacDonald, our Chief Financial Officer. And I'm Steve Brown, CEO. Fern and I are both calling in today from Florida, so we're waking up right in early to speak to you all on the morning U.K. time. And if you're in the U.S. for some reason, then you're waking up very early with us as well. So today, we're going to walk through our results, share some operational highlights, review the financial details and then chat a bit about next year. So starting off, just on Page 3, as I said, we're going to do an overview, hit the operational performance through the financial results, and then we'll cover a summary and an outlook. On Page 5, you can see our sort of headline statement. A lot of people ask me what do we do, what is accesso. And in one snapshot, we help operators to optimize their revenue, and we have a range of solutions that we use to empower that process. If you take a quick look, though, at 2023 overall, Page 6 is 2023 by the numbers, which is just a really quick snapshot to show overview of what's to come on the next few slides. So $149 million, almost $150 million, in revenue. We were up 7% on 2022. But effectively, that was really 9% because we had some adjustments for removing some low-margin revenue from our business that really doesn't affect our bottom line profit but shows up in our revenue. So when you take that into consideration, we were up 9%. We had $23.6 million in cash EBITDA, which actually exceeded our own expectations. We're really pleased with our year-end results. We wrapped up 2023 with $31.5 million in net cash. Again, we have just an incredible balance sheet. We did take out some debt last year, but we're paying that down rather rapidly. And Fern will talk about that a bit more in the finance section. One important thing, though, accesso LoQueue really is the foundation of the company. The company, accesso, actually was used to be named LoQueue until about 2012, 2013. And sometimes you have a product that's been around for that long, you sort of get into the maturity stage. But we're really excited that our LoQueue business continues to thrive and continues to grow. Last year, our transactional revenue, meaning how many customers or how much customers pay to utilize the service across all of our venues that we serve, was actually up 13%, a relatively double-digit increase for us in what is a really important product and the cornerstone of the company. accesso Passport, a leading e-commerce platform that operators like Cedar Fair and Merlin and Six Flags utilize, along with many others, actually processed almost $4 billion in sales. And when you think about the scale of that, it's 107 million tickets that were issued and sold to consumers around the world, and that is a new record for us on that product. Importantly, and we'll talk a lot more about this, we completed 3 strategic acquisitions. And we started off '23 with the goal of 3 companies. We had our eyes set on 3 businesses that we thought would really be important to our long-term growth, and that was a core objective at the beginning of the year, and we completed those by midyear 2023. And we'll unpack those a bit more in a couple of slides. We have 28 new venues that we won through our organic commercial process. But we brought in 273 new venues through these 3 acquisitions. And we also signed up 10 customers, new customers to leverage more than one of our solutions, which is always an important factor for us. Moving to Page 7. We have an overview slide that explains what we do in three simple categories. We operate ticketing solutions. We operate queuing solutions, virtual queuing solutions. And we have a restaurant and retail platform. And these are 3 very distinct areas of our business. We have a range of products that service those different sectors. Those are the products we've really built up through the acquisitions over the years and our own organic development. But our ticketing business is really end-to-end ticketing, everything you need when you're going to visit a venue in terms of entrance and entitlements. Queuing is virtual queuing, how do you reduce the weight. It's a premium service you pay for. But it's really a digital queue that waits in line for you rather than you physically standing in the queue. And we're really excited about our new restaurant and retail platform that we just launched in 2023, and we'll talk more about that as well. What's important there is it's restaurant and retail. And you see a lot of restaurant systems, and there are certainly a lot of retail systems, but systems that can do both are relatively unique. And if you think about a venue operator, theme park, a water park, a museum, a stadium, any kind of venue like that, they have both restaurants and retail operations, and having one solution that can handle both is really much more efficient for them than needing 2 technology platforms to operate those 2 lines of business. So the ability to have a product that's that robust, that can handle both, is really a unique differentiator in that solution. You can see in the sort of blue boxes all the different sectors that we serve, from theme parks, water parks, ski resorts, live entertainment. We even have some business in casinos, fairs and festivals, and of course, we have some important business with a key cruise line operator. So we cover the full spectrum on the leisure sector. And I'm not going to go through each one of those boxes, but you could sort of see within each of those what we do, what are the key factors or the key elements of our service delivery for each one of those different sectors. You'll see commonality of ticketing across all of these, more or less. You'll also see restaurant and retail. And when you think about the new restaurant and retail platform, that's what's really exciting, if you step back and just consider the overall venue operation, every single venue has restaurants and they have retail. And that's why we think it's a really sort of ubiquitous offering for us across our customer set and across the marketplace from a cross-sell perspective. On Page 8, we have some highlights of our customer base. All the dark blue areas in the map are places where we have customers, venues that we're operating in some form or another. You'll see, going from left to right, in the U.S. we have a range of big venues, Cedar Fair, Merlin, Six Flags. You can see a castle there, which is the world's largest theme park destination here in Florida. But our North American revenue is about 70% of our business. Looking over to the right, you'll see U.K. and Europe at 23% of our revenue. Again, lots of venues, from Merlin, Legoland, Thor Park, the London Eye. And then we have an important client across Spain with multiple theme parks as well as many others like Walibi Holland and Battersea Power Station, as an example. A couple of growing markets across APAC is now standing at 6% of our revenue. Some key theme park operators there with Village Roadshow, with Ardent Leisure, which owns Dreamworld. And as part of our acquisition, we now have the Australia Zoo and other customers across the APAC region that are quite interesting. We have 3 large theme parks that we're servicing across Asia for a renowned operator: Beijing, Osaka and one in Singapore. And then the Middle East and Africa, Middle East primarily is really an emerging market for us. It's only 1% of our revenue today. But as you'll learn, we just signed a signature new contract there in Saudi Arabia, which we expect that market to be a significant growth area for us in the coming years. We now have over 1,200 venues that we're serving in 34 countries, so a really unique footprint. A couple of things to call out when you think about our business every day, we're running everything from the happiest place on earth all the way to the pyramids in Egypt, to zoos in Australia, theme parks in Asia, just a really diverse set of opportunities across our solution set with different technologies, whether it be ticketing, whether it be food and beverage or whether it be our virtual queuing product. Moving on to Page 10 and talking about our operational performance. First and foremost, I want to spend a moment on our acquisitions. As I mentioned in the opener, we set out at the beginning of 2023 with 3 target companies that we felt would be really important additions to our business from a growth perspective. And that was after we had done quite a lot of analysis on our technology road map, our own development plans as well as the market opportunity. And there are a lot of companies that we received e-mails. In fact, I got one last night for a company that was for sale in the Middle East, actually. And there are always companies for sale. But what we were looking for was the companies that we really needed, what was really going to fit our longer-term plans and what was going to be the most efficient use of our capital. And those 3 companies were Paradocs Mountain Software, VGS and Digisoft. And going from left to right across those, Paradocs Mountain Software is all about ski, in particular, North American ski. And we already have a relatively large presence, about 100 ski venues, but our technology that we serve those venues with is not a hosted platform. It's not a SaaS model. And what we see emerging in the ski market is a strong demand for a SaaS product. And after evaluating the technology road map and the development opportunities, we determined that a faster route to market for both our customers and for our business would be to acquire an external company that had a hosted platform, and we identified Paradocs as that company. It's a powerful software platform for the ski industry. And you think, well, ski ticketing, how different is that from theme park ticketing. That part isn't that different except in a ski resort, everyone's using RFID. What's really different is that in that overall solution, you need to handle equipment rentals, ski rental, snowboard rental, and you need to handle lessons, two very important factors in a ski operation. So you need ticketing, rentals and lessons. That is the trifecta of being successful in ski. And so you need to have a targeted solution that really covers those bases. And with the addition of accesso Paradox, which is based in Quebec City, in Canada, we now have 150 ski venues as customers. They brought in about another 50 to our portfolio. And we are the largest technology provider for ski in North America now with the combination of Paradocs into our business. We added 10 new resorts for 2024, and I'm really excited about our sales pipeline. And I can tell you the market reception to us buying and acquiring Paradocs has been outstanding. They're very excited to have this new product as an option for them in the longer term, if they're an existing customer. And for customers that are not using accesso products, they're really happy to have accesso Paradox as part of our offering. Moving to VGS. VGS is a company I've known for a very long time and have admired for, I would say, more than a decade. VGS is a large-scale entitlement platform, so not just tickets, but entitlements, anything and everything you might need when you're visiting a venue. So you have your ticket, you may have a food entitlement, you may have a special access privilege of some kind or you may have purchased a special event, it's really all the different entitlements that you would buy in that sort of package or during your day. And VGS, which we've now rebranded as accesso Horizon, is one of those platforms that can cover everything end-to-end. And that is why it is the platform of choice for the world's largest theme park operation here in Florida as well as a range of others around the world. It is extremely powerful, it's extremely flexible and it has an incredible reputation in the marketplace. And I often tell people that whenever we announce this acquisition across the leisure sector, the ground shook a little bit because this was very monumental. Because this product, the VGS product, which is now Horizon, is really a signature solution in the marketplace. And it's one that we've had our eye on and we're just really pleased to have brought it into our portfolio. It extends our market leadership by significant amounts. It also gives us a much stronger position globally. Interesting, of the customers utilizing the product, only one of them is in North America. The other customers are across the Asia Pacific region, across the Middle East, with Dubai Parks and Resorts. And we just announced a new win, a significant win, for a new customer, SEVEN, in Saudi Arabia, which will be installing across a number of venues in the coming years and really will give us a significant footprint in a new region for us, which is Saudi Arabia. Horizon also has extensive language capabilities. Some of our solutions are a little more English-centric where Horizon, like our Passport product and our LoQueue product, is very adaptable around the globe. And as we were thinking about our growth opportunities, expansion around the world is a huge priority for us. And you need to make sure the products you're selling are globally compatible, both in currency and language, in the way they operate from a technology perspective. And the Horizon product is fit-for-purpose from a global expansion perspective. It also brought us scale and presence, offices in Milan, Dubai and Singapore. And it's one thing to be selling and servicing a client from a central location. But when you're in the region, it really makes a big difference. It's a big factor for our commercial team and it's a big reference point to us to have somewhat in your relative region to help you with your selling or support or service and relationships. So it's not sort of a post-office box in those countries. We actually have a proper office with team members, 10 or 12 team members in each of those office. The Milan office is actually a bit larger than that. And so really, it was a significant shift for us in terms of our global presence and our global opportunity with Horizon. And third, we acquired a company called Digisoft, which has been a long-term augmentation partner for us, someone we've turned to help us when we had sort of overflow work, particularly in the mobile space, work beyond the capacity we had in our own development teams. And so we turned to Digisoft now for many years. And as we were looking more closely at our mobile app business, in particular, one of the things we realized was we needed to move a little faster. And we needed to segment that work into a group that is specific to that space. It also can be a bit more nimble than we can be in our overall product process because the mobile app space is moving very quickly and customers have high expectations. So by bringing Digisoft to it, it really just elevated our ability to move quickly and also expand our capabilities. And mobile apps as a product themselves, they're a carrier for us. It's how people buy tickets. It's how people leverage virtual queuing. It's how they store their tickets and their season passes. It's how they do mobile food ordering. So it's really a central place for a visitor to a venue to leverage all the different technologies we offer, which are typically provided on a transaction basis. And so we see that really as a pathway for us and it's a big differentiator for us as a supplier that we can help the customers bring all those together into the mobile app product. Rather than them going and trying to find someone that can glue all that together, we have the expertise and we have the team to help them do that. The Digisoft team also can support us on a broader range of professional services. So for example, they've already jumped in and are helping us with some professional services needs for the accesso Horizon product. So it's really a bit smaller acquisition, it's a team size of about 15 to 20 employees and it really did accelerate and amplify our presence in the space and improve our agility. That's probably the best word to use. Turning to Page 11. I gave it its own page because we are very excited about this, and it's a relatively big deal. If you look at our financials and you read our financial statement in detail, you'll see we spent just over $3 million last year on accesso Freedom. And this is a product that we acquired the assets to a business in 2022. And the reason we acquired those were because we realized they were building this new product that was almost finished, but the business went into liquidation. And the product is really compelling, and it's based upon a solution that's been around for more than two decades that is well respected and well installed. And so this is a modern version of a product that has very wide range in functionality and essentially has a strong reputation in the marketplace. We're just relaunching it as accesso Freedom, and we're bringing it out importantly as a fully SaaS-based solution where the legacy product is sort of old-age way of installing and running servers in your environment. This is a SaaS product, multilingual, global, scalable, very, very contemporary. And you also may be thinking, well, there are a lot of food systems out there and retail systems out there. But honestly, in that space, things are getting pretty old. And to have a fresh product that is built on modern architecture, that is focused not on sort of these big, lumpy tills where you have someone working and taking money at a register, but thinking about mobile ordering, thinking about self-service kiosks, offering a full integration with your ticketing system, so you can leverage discounts and meal plans, that is a modern product that is very focused on our space, on our sectors, across the leisure industry. It also is a SaaS platform with a fully open API. So if an operator has an idea to build something that they need to leverage their food and retail system for, they have access to that API to enable that. Maybe they want to integrate something into one of their other systems, maybe they want to integrate into their digital signage or to a mobile product they have or their own kiosk product, whatever it may be, that API gives them that flexibility to do so. We launched this product in the fall of last year, launched it for sale. Out of the gate, we had 5 new wins post periods. So really January until now, we have 5 wins, and we have quite a few others that are actually in the works. But sort of period to date, we already have 5, and we're in the process of installing. A couple of those are now live. The ski sector is a notably interesting area where you have a mountain, you have a resort, you have your ticketing, you have your rentals, you have your equipment and lessons, but you also have food and retail. And the ability for us as a supplier to offer that entire package, and b, their centralized resource across all those technology stacks, is a really big differentiator and is something that has a significant need in the market that I believe we are going to do a great job of addressing. And this product is very robust. It is not a start-up product. It has a very, very wide-ranging functionality that is capable of serving all sizes of venues, all the way up to the biggest ones that there are, all the way from quick service, let's say, a cart selling pretzels, to fine-dining restaurants where you have table service. So it is a very wide-ranging and very robust platform. We're really excited about accesso Freedom. You can see on the left-hand side in our presentation, I included a visual of our launch advertising, which really is reach for the cloud. It's a play on words to the SaaS product, but it's also about moving to new levels, elevating your restaurant and retail operations with this more contemporary product. So we're very excited about that and more to come, I'm sure, as we go through the year in terms of our success with the product. Moving to Slide 13, kind of the commercial overview. With the 3 acquisitions, we've had a step-function increase in opportunity. We have new products and we have new geographies. And in order to be successful across what is now a much bigger company, we've realigned our sales structure to incorporate these acquisitions, leveraging their sales processes but also leveraging our existing team and our existing knowledge of the marketplace. We've joined forces with those groups seamlessly. And we now have a senior level commercial leader in each of our 4 geographies, helping us make sure we take advantage of those new opportunities in those new areas. We are focused on cross-selling, of course. We talk a lot about that. But with this range of solutions and the complementary nature of those products, cross-selling is at the core of how we think about every engagement going forward. Ticketing, food and beverage, what might you need, a mobile app, can we help you with queuing, we sort of can unpack that entire toolbox of solutions for you, really depending upon the customers' needs. And we're also focused a lot on sort of, I call it, ancillary revenue, complementary revenue, through partnerships. Things like ticket insurance in a transaction process, things like leveraging our different payment opportunities on the commercial agreements with payment processors as well as even post-purchase advertising. So once you process your transaction, what else might someone want to advertise to you to purchase. Maybe you want to send flowers to your mom or maybe you want to take advantage of another special offer aside from the ticketing process or the ski rental process you just completed. You can see in the middle our sales pipeline. This is really a visual that puts numbers behind that headline. If you look at our sales pipeline at the end of Q1 2023, we had about $54 million of customers or leads that our sales team was working on. These are qualified leads, customers that have raised their hand, that we've spoken to. They may be warm, they may be hot, but they're qualified leads that are currently in our pipeline, that are under review, and engaged with our sales team at some level. These are not just people we received an e-mail from or ones we made a list of and thought we should go talk to them, these are actually qualified leads that we capture and track in our lead management system. If you fast forward to Q1 of 2024, that sales pipeline is now $87 million. So you can see the significant increase in that sales pipeline with the addition of Paradocs, with the addition of VGS and with the addition of Digisoft. Having done those products gives us new capabilities and, importantly, new geographies. And also, those are larger sales. Installing a ski resort platform or installing a new system in a large theme park, those are higher-ticket averages than some of our other products may be. And so that really helps us amplify the sales pipeline. On the right-hand side box, addressable market, our TAM. A lot of you have asked about this over the last couple of years, and it's a bit of a complex exercise. And I've shared before that I was very focused on making sure what we put forward was a validated number. I'll give you an example, museums. Everyone says, well, you could sell tickets and museums. Well, honestly, if you look at museums, most of them are free. Actually, about 40% of them are free. And so you have to go through each of these different sectors and say, all right, I know there are a lot of aquariums, a lot of zoos, a lot of theme parks. There's theme parks in Russia. There's theme parks in China. You've got to go through and qualify which ones of those are really in our markets that we're going to address. And so it's a rather complex exercise to go through and do that across our range of products and across our range of geographies that we serve. And so we have done that work now. And we think about that as our core and our core plus. Our core is the main things you would think about: theme parks, destination attractions like maybe the Jameson Distillery tour, ski resorts, performing art centers and then zoos and aquariums. Our core plus adds in some things that we service but they're not probably our main focus. Things like casinos, I think we have 18 casinos as customers, but they're not as big as theme parks are, for example. As well as fairs and festivals, again, important, great customer wins, but not a big part of our revenue and perhaps not where we see a primary opportunity. So we have core and core plus. If you look at our core market sectors and you look at our current geographies where we already have a footprint, our addressable market is just over $1 billion in technology revenue opportunity. If you look at our current geographies and you add the core plus in, it goes to $1.2 billion. That kind of illustrates my point around you've got to really go through these venues and decide which ones are going to be accessible to you or even make sense to go after in terms of counting them in the numbers. But if you expand to a global basis, which includes regions where we don't currently have service being provided to a venue but we see as an opportunity, our core addressable market increases from just over $1 billion to $2 billion. And that really echoes my point about the importance of acquisitions and our product road map in terms of addressing the opportunities in places like Saudi Arabia, across the broader APAC region, and focusing on the opportunities and the growing leisure sector in those particular areas and their demand for technology, advanced technology. So our core increases to $2 billion. And as you add in the core plus, that sort adding in additional sectors, our addressable market increases to $2.3 billion. And like I said, we have excluded China and Russia. We've done a lot of qualification around the types of venues that should be included, the ones we should exclude. Just selling a museum ticket for $3 or GBP 3 is probably not going to be a target customer for us. But if they're a large-scale museum, one we might know top of mind, those that operate a bit more like a commercial enterprise versus a nonprofit, those are the ones that need the type of technology that we can offer them across the different solutions. So we're really pleased to share that with you. We have actually a bit more detail around the addressable market work that we've done, and we'll be sharing that in upcoming presentations as well. Commercially, we signed 28 new venues. Like I said, we had 273 new venues via acquisition, and we had 10 new combination wins. So our commercial team, needless to say, has been very, very busy with existing opportunities as well as beginning to target all the new range of opportunities that had been brought in via the acquisitions. Page 14, are people, very important. Obviously, it all begins with our people. And our technology is there, but our people make it run. And we have added 82 new staff numbers through the acquisitions. Those companies obviously had employees. And at the end of the year, our global employee base was about 672 employees on average across 12 different geographies, which gives us regional support. I think it's a really important differentiator for us. The fact that we have employees somewhere near you, if you're one of our customers, that really helps in terms of serviceability. And overall, our scale is a significant differentiator in terms of our capabilities across all different kinds of technologies, across security, across support. And adding in these additional team members with their significant expertise has even furthered our strength from a team perspective. We go through this and we turn the PowerPoint pages, and we have sort of become accustomed to the fact that we completed 3 acquisitions while we also exceeded expectations on our financial results. And I just can't give enough credit to our team, the cooperation, the collaboration and just the commitment to get through what was a lot of work in 2023, doing all that, moving us forward for the future, but also delivering really strong within the year as well. For our team, we continue just focusing on our training and development. And obviously, our culture is very important to us as an accesso business. And the best way to see that is in our employee engagement survey. Our 2023 results are in. We do this survey each year with an independent company. And again, we are at benchmark levels, actually slightly higher than last year, which puts us in the 75th percentile of all the similar-sized companies that are benchmarked alongside us. And another way to measure that is our turnover. How many people said, you know what, this place isn't for me, to paraphrase. And our organic turnover, people who've raised their hand and said, look, I'm going to take a different opportunity, was only 7%. And I know you all talked to a lot of companies. I would encourage you to ask that question of what was their organic turnover because we're really pleased and really proud of the commitment of our team and our brand as an employer and our staff commitment and engagement to our business. I would say, overall, we have a very, very healthy team in a very healthy culture which, to me, is the most important factor in producing healthy results and focusing on longer-term growth. Last, but not least, just rounding out on Page 12, some operational highlights, a couple to call out. accesso Passport, I already mentioned the record revenue that was processed and the record volume. But we also completed a major upgrade across the entire system of what is now version 6.0 of accesso Passport. And it's not just e-commerce, it's point of sale, it's customer support, it's all the back-end technology. And we just completed and rolled out version 6 across our customer base, including an updated user interface for e-commerce, which is currently in rollout. And so far, that has shown very positive results from an online conversion perspective. And given we operate on a transactional basis, that's great for our customers, increasing their revenue, but it's also great for us, if we can convert more users into buyers when they're on the ticketing websites looking to purchase something. 70% of our online sales are on a mobile device. Very important that mobile is first, going back into our acquisition of Digisoft, a very mobile-centric business as well, just making sure we continue to excel in the mobile space. accesso LoQueue, up 13%. On a product that's been around a long time, I have to say we continue to sort of defy gravity with innovation. We applied for, over the last few years, a range of new patents. And actually, in the recent period, largely in 2023, 5 new patents were granted to us, adding to our arsenal of patents that we have across our technology set but also around virtual queuing and our innovation in that space. There are a lot of ways to do queuing, mostly manual, some form of manual, but our product is absolutely superior. And these unique differentiators are what continue to drive our growth and continue to drive the demand for our product. From a revenue efficiency standpoint, we had just over 76% gross margin, which was up 2.2 points over 2022. This is a significant focus for us. Looking across our business, looking at where we can improve our margin, whenever you acquire companies, you often get the gift with purchase elements of the business that may or may not be the right strategic fit for us, looking at how some of those things are operating, how we can operate them more efficiently, and that has been a very important factor, in addition to just managing our own cost base. And you'll see in our outlook, we've put our target at approximately 80% margin for this current year, 2024. And I believe the efforts we're making around that will absolutely deliver on that. We've moved away from some pass-through revenue related to operational staffing at one of our customers, which was quite a bit of pass-through revenue, $6 million or $7 million, that essentially was no profit. And we've announced today that we're actually exiting the B2C part of our distribution business this year, which will further reduce the amount of low-margin or, I might say, no-margin revenue that comes through that part of our business. We still have some really important and very valuable elements in our distribution business, but those are more on the B2B front. The B2C part, we don't really do the C part in accesso. We are a software provider. We're a B2B company. But we had this B2C element in our business. And after a long and thoughtful strategic review, we've decided to move that out of our business, and we'll have more details on how we're planning to do that as we go forward. I think what's important to say is I don't believe we will lose the good parts of it, we'll just lose the revenue and the margin impact that we have from that revenue coming through our business without a lot of margin when we consider our own overheads. We're also focusing on how partnership agreements are structured, how we think about things like hardware, do we sell hardware ourselves and just take a margin or do we work with partners and just take a commission, which is 100% margin. So looking across all those different components and also bringing alignment across these different businesses and how each of those types of things are done within those groups and within those operations. And last, but not least, operational agility. Sort of walking [ into government ] at the same time or spinning 5 plates on a stick, a lot going on in our business. Record revenue, record ticket sales in our Passport products, 3 big acquisitions, installed in 62 new customers, brought in nearly 300 new customers through the acquisitions. And I think it just demonstrates our ability as a company and our maturity of our leadership team in managing this much complexity and still keeping our eye on the ball for operational delivery of our results while having a very clear vision for the future and executing on that vision with acquisitions and with development in our product road map. So overall, I could probably write 10 more slides and keep going, but we only have so much time. And I'm just really pleased with the progress we've made in 2023 and the position that places us in as we move forward, with global growth, with profitability and with our position in the marketplace. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Fern who has been patiently waiting to walk everybody through the numbers.

Thanks, Steve. Good morning, everybody. So let's start with the highlights on Slide 16. So we've ended the year with revenues of $149.5 million, so that's up 7% from the prior year. So this revenue growth has been driven partly by our 3 acquisitions, and it is also combined with a healthy increase in our gross margin. So we've gone from 74.4% last year to 76.4% this year. Another trend that we expect to continue in 2024, so in 2024, we're going to have a full year of operational park staff out of our numbers as well as that exit from our B2C distribution business that we announced earlier today. So we've previously talked about that 2021 was a very difficult year for us from a staffing perspective, and it started to improve in 2022, but we didn't have a full year impact on our 2022 numbers. So when we combine this with the addition of 82 new head count from our acquisitions this year, our admin expenses have understandably increased, but we still ended the year with a cash EBITDA number of $23.6 million, which is a beat to our expectations. We also managed to spend some cash this year. So net $50 million on 3 acquisitions and still ending the period with net cash. We have $31.5 million in net cash, and that's after $21.25 million, which is drawn on our facility with HSBC. Moving on to Slide 17, so we can look at our revenue in a little bit more detail. Our transaction revenue, which is the core of our business, was up 5.6%. Consistent with the presentation change we made at half year, we've split virtual queuing into two parts. We're highlighting the seasonal staff cost reimbursement separately, and that's driven by a change in the contract with a key customer that we announced with our interim results. We're transitioning the seasonal SASB employees of the customer, not accesso. So this has a significant impact in our revenue, but the impact on our bottom line is significantly less. So this is essentially pass-through revenue. So in 2024, there'll be zero revenue from staffing with this customer. So excluding the reduction in staffing, our virtual queuing business is up 13.3%, so good growth over the prior year. With the addition of VGS, so VGS follows a traditional license and support model. The trend in our maintenance and support, which has been going down for us over the last several periods, has changed. So we now show an increase in maintenance and support for the year, so that's up over 30%. VGS and Paradocs also have a meaningful amount of recurring license fee revenue. We've historically just disclosed license fee revenue as non-repeatable revenue, but we've now made the decision to separate recurring and onetime license fee revenue. And we've gone back and restated the prior year allocation in this presentation just to be consistent. So moving on to Slide 18, our income statement. We continue to tightly control our admin expenses. But as we previously mentioned, the new head count from acquisition, the filling of open positions as well as the pressure on salaries globally over the last several years, have resulted in an expected increase. So we're ending the year with profit before tax of $8.8 million. However, that is after acquisition-related costs during the period of $2.7 million, so a one-off expense there. On to Slide 19, so cash EBITDA, our key APM. The acquisition expenses of $2.7 million both relate to the 3 acquisitions that we've spoken in-depth about, the rest of our adjustments, relatively routine and standard for us. Amortization and depreciation continue to fall in line with our capitalization strategy. Amortization on acquired intangibles have gone up with the amortization from our 3 new acquisitions. And we have capitalized development costs that continue to be at a relatively normal level and growth reflecting a full year of Freedom and the overall cost of our development staff. So all of these adjustments, bringing us to a cash EBITDA number of $23.6 million. So planned reduction over 2022, but definitely a beat to our expectations that we're excited about. So finally, on to the cash flow on Slide 20, a little bit more activity on this than we usually see. We're ending the period with $31.5 million in net cash, a significant drop from the prior year, so we executed on our acquisition strategy. We've spent a net $50 million across the 3 acquisitions. And then a few other things then to call out, we have a gain on FX of $1.6 million. We spent $3.7 million purchasing accesso shares for our EBT and then we spent $2.2 million on a buyback and cancellation of our own shares. That buyback could continue post year-end, so we ended with a total of $4 million GPP and our own shares that we bought back and canceled. So we partly funded the acquisition with a drawdown of $35 million of our $40 million HSBC facility. So that is a new facility that we entered into in June. It runs through 2027. It also includes a $20 million accordion option. So that previous facility that we had with Investec has now been fully canceled. And post year-end, we have continued to make payments on our line of credit as we work to bring those borrowings down. So on that note, I'll hand you back to Steve.

Thank you, Fern. Just to recap, we were very pleased with the year. We exceeded expectations, strong profitability. We've invested a lot in our future growth, focused on our global growth, our margin, our operational efficiency and the quality of the revenue streams that we're bringing in, both existing customers, existing business as well as expanding with new business. We continue to innovate, lots of innovation across the business, way too much to cover in an hour here today, but just so much innovation happening across our business, as I mentioned, with LoQueue and our Passport product and really within all of our products, there are elements of forward-thinking innovation and, of course, the acquisitions. And for 2024, revenue of not less than $160 million is what we're looking at as our objective. We're planning to keep our costs relatively stable at the 8% to 10%. Of course, this year, we had the impact of the acquisitions coming into our cost base. Looking forward on a steady basis, we expect that to be 8% to 10%, with a gross margin of approximately 80% and a cash EBITDA margin of not less than 17%. So that kind of wraps it up in terms of the presentation, and we look forward to talking to you again. Have a great day.