Microlise Group plc (2DI.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Microlise Group plc Half Year Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] And I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Microlise Group plc, Nadeem.

Thank you, and thank you to everybody joining us this afternoon. A couple of quick introductions. My name is Nadeem Raza. I'm the CEO for Microlise Group. And with me, I've got Nick, if you want to introduce yourself, Nick.

Thank you, Nadeem. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Nick Wightman. I'm CFO of Microlise. I've been with the business just over 12 years now, I've been CFO since April 2023.

Thanks, Nick. Just a reminder of who we are. We are a leading provider of transport management solutions to large enterprise customers. And when we talk about enterprise, we're talking about companies that have fleets of over 500 vehicles. That's our sweet spot. We sell to hundreds of companies of that scale. We also sell to smaller companies, particularly the mid-market, which we classify as 100 to 500 vehicles, and we have thousands of customers in that space as well. Just to give you a flavor for some of our numbers. So we've been around a while. We've been around since 1982. We have about 800 staff, about 450 of those large enterprise customers. We are truly global. We operate in 197 countries around the world that we supply systems to. We have offices in 4, and we'll come on to that shortly. And the subscriptions in terms of active subscriptions is over 800,000. We have a very low churn rate. So we are very sticky with our customer base with a churn rate of 0.5%. And some of the numbers there in terms of our 2023 financial year results of GBP 72 million. And we've been lots of awards. We've won historically 3 Queen's awards for enterprise as well. How we help customers is by providing them with better planning and optimization tools that helps them reduce the mileage of the vehicles are traveling. We also help them improve the skills of the drivers. Again, we look at a number of different characteristics of drivers and the way that they drive, looking at how they can improve their skill sets. And that generally means that they use less fuel typically between 4% and 12% improvements in fuel once our implemented is -- once our systems are implemented and utilized, obviously, reducing fuel helps to reduce emissions, so it helps with our carbon footprint. And also driving vehicles better helps to reduce the vehicle wear and tear and the number of accidents. Number of accidents being reduced also leads to reduced insurance premiums, again, not unusual for our customers to see a 25% reduction in second year insurance premiums. But the key thing and the thing that really -- the reason why customers buy our products and services is to improve fleet efficiency utilization, that ability to do more with the same number of vehicles and same number of drivers. Of course, we eliminate all the paperwork. So everything is done in real time, and we give that real-time visibility across the entire operation. And that real-time visibility just doesn't extend internally within the organization, but it extends down to our customers, customer and partners, et cetera. And that then means that they're able to provide an enhanced level of customer service to their end customers. As I mentioned, we operate in 197 countries around the world. We have systems and assets deployed pretty much everywhere other than North Korea. But we have several offices around the globe. So we're headquartered in the U.K. We have offices in France and in Australia. Those are predominantly sales offices and local implementation support offices. And then we have a large office in Pune in India, just outside of Mumbai. And that's where roughly half of our development software and hardware activities take place. The other half of our development activities are in the U.K. Some highlights. Again, you will have seen these probably from the RNS from this morning. We have our revenue increasing for -- this is for H1 in comparison to H1 2023. Revenues at GBP 39.1 million recurring revenue of GBP 26.6 million. Adjusted EBITDA of GBP 5.2 million. Annual recurring revenue run rate is at GBP 54 million. And our subscriptions, active subscriptions has gone up to from 827,000. We're still maintaining that very low churn rate of 0.5% and still growing cash. We're still cash generative even with the acquisitions and with the recent full year 2023 dividend payout that we did in May earlier this year. Talking about dividends, we we're also declaring an interim dividend for 2024. So following the usual pattern of having two dividends a year an interim one and a full year dividend, which will be paid for next year for [ 2024 ]. So -- moving on to some highlights. So we completed our ESS acquisition in January this year that brought in a new TMS solution for us to upsell and cross-sell, and we've done very well in selling that across our existing customer base with several new contracts but particularly one contract where that was sold for a 10-year period, again, a long-standing customer who's been with us for a while and wanting to implement that TMS solution now and continue our relationship for a 10-year period. We've also continued to grow in Australia, New Zealand and France, particularly in Australia. You have seen our RNS for the contract wins with Woolies more recently, Foodstuffs South Island, which is the largest retailer in the southern part of New Zealand and as well as STAF in France not necessarily a well-known brand name in the U.K., but STAF is as a brand in France as well-known as Stobart are in the U.K. So very pleased to have won some major brand names in those regions, which will obviously help us market to other customers in those regions as well. We'll continue to grow in the U.K., so over 200 new customers, mainly in that mid-market segment of 100 to 500 vehicles as well as lots of contract renewals. So again, a lot of our large enterprise customers renewing with us for multiyear renewals, the likes of Bidfood, Pall-Ex, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Cemex. Hopefully, you'll also have noticed the RNS yesterday announcing our fifth contract extension with JCB that extends the agreement that we have with them through to September 2029, which means that machines that they manufacture in September '29, we will continue to see revenue from those through till September 2034. So again, very long-term visibility of future contracted revenue there. We've also launched some new products with JCB, including JCB Proximity Beacons, which we launched a few months ago. And we're working on over 60 new model implementations. As the new machines that JCB are looking to bring to market over the next 12 months with a similar number planned for next year as well. Just an overview of the platform that we sell. So again, starting from the left-hand side, transport management systems. This is predominantly the products that we acquired through the enterprise and Vita acquisitions earlier this year and last year, it really controls all of the aspects of managing orders and the relationship with customers and subcontractors and really is the beginning of the supply chain journey. Data from that then flows into our planning and optimization product, which manages how vehicles are used, what orders go on to, what vehicles, what deliveries they make, the routes that they take, again, to try and optimize and deliver the maximum number of goods using the least number of drivers and vehicles and traveling the least distances, particularly useful when you've got thousands of vehicles and thousands of drivers. We then have our journey management solution, which manages real-time activity as it happens, so where you have failed deliveries or damaged goods at the point of delivery. We can automate a lot of those processes. And make sure that you are delivering a great level of customer service to end customers and end delivery points. Of course, in order to be able to do that, you need to be able to communicate with drivers. And so we have a driver connected mobility set of modules, including hardware that sits in the cab and manages everything that the driver does, whether it's at the start of his journey, his vehicle checks, his compliance paperwork, his satellite navigation, his traffic updates, et cetera. Moving on, we then have our fleet compliance products, which allowing you to collect all of the information that you need to be able to demonstrate to the DVSA that you are running a compliant fleet and that you're not using any driving hours regulations. Again, everyone that has a truck has to have some form of compliance tools to be able to report that you are observing all of the legislation, both in the U.K. and in Europe. We then have our fleet performance products, and this is essentially the part of the portfolio that is telematics. People often think that we're a telematics company, but this is just to highlight that actually, that's less than a seventh of our product set. And essentially, this using hardware on vehicles determines where the vehicle is as well as all the information about engine performance, temperature, if you're monitoring temperature controlled goods, door opening, door closing, weight sensors, et cetera. So a lot of information being collected about the driver of the trailer the actual vehicle and the assets and inventory onboard. And then lastly, we have fleet safety where we have a number of safety products, including low bridge detection and proximity warning systems as well as camera systems as well as accident incident data recorders and so on. So a variety of products really aimed at the logistics and transport space. The color coding does have significance. The lighter shades on the right-hand side are products that are fairly commoditized in the markets, and therefore, are lower value and lower margins, whereas as the shading gets darker, particularly to the left-hand side, those are much higher value products in the market that drive a lot more margin. And it's important to say that, that's really where we've been investing a lot of our R&D efforts over the last few years and particularly also our acquisition targets in the last few years because we believe those will generate our margin going forward. In terms of product investments, we continue to invest in security and growing the moat in terms of our product set compared to a lot of the competitors out there. We are also integrating all of our acquired products into a brand called MicroliseOne that will be there to provide a seamless experience for customers and that allow easy upgrade paths -- not all of our customers buy everything on day 1. In fact, hardly anybody buys everything on day 1. People generally tend to buy 1 or 2 products initially. And then we expand that footprint within the organization by upselling additional products. And the aim of MicroliseOne is to make that easier for customers to transact with us and take onboard those additional products and also to drive more value for those combined products rather than people having products point solutions from different suppliers. We continue to innovate. We have a number of new products launched already this year and more planned later this year, particularly in terms of cost reduced hardware, which again, we believe will provide an increase in margins going forward. As well as our own hardware, we are increasing support for third-party hardware. So we are already providing support for third-party camera solutions. We intend to extend that support further with more compatibility with more camera providers. And we're also providing solutions whereby we integrate with other hardware telematics units, particularly for refrigeration and temperature-controlled goods. And what this means is that we will be able to more easily sell our software solutions into customers that have other people's hardware because they won't have to replace the hardware in order to use our software, again, reducing barriers to entry for us going into other people's existing customer base. This slide gives you a range of the industry sectors that we operate in and some of the well-known brands that use our products in those spaces. And again, we're very, very dominant in the haulage in retail and grocery sectors and very -- and becoming more dominant in food manufacturing and food services, but a whole range of different sectors that we operate in. If you'd like to learn anything more about any of those customers and what we do for them, then there is a link at the bottom of that slide that takes you to numerous case studies that we have on our website. I'm going to hand across to Nick now just to go through more detail on the financial numbers.

Thanks, Nadeem. Hi, everybody. So what this slide is showing is a revenue split. So we consider ourselves a software company, but we do have other revenue streams. So if you just focus on the graph on the right-hand side, the revenue streams are represented by the different colored chunks within the bar. So the largest bar at the bottom is our software subscription revenue. The orange bar is the hardware aspect of the portfolio and the top bar represented in black is the services revenue. Services tends to be split into a couple of main areas, one of which is engineering and installation. So this is normally associated with direct customers because we generally retrofit with direct customers whereas with our OEM customers, they tend to be either part of the production build, fitted line side or part of the predelivery inspection process. The other aspect within the services is professional services. So this can split into a few different areas. So as customers success. There is professional -- project management and there's also integration services, which will which we'll touch on a little bit more in a short while. Overall, as Nadeem stated, we've increased our revenue by 15.4% to GBP 39.1 million. That is driven by really strong recurring revenue. So that's increased 21% in the period up to GBP 26.6 million. So 11% of that 21.5% is organic growth. So that has seen our organic growth has increased year-on-year as well. So our ARR has increased from around 11% last year to 21%. So that's GBP 54 million as it stands at the end of June. Hardware revenue has decreased by around 11% to GBP 8.5 million. And that is really as a result of the anticipated reduction in OEM shipments. And that's really as a result of high stock levels at one of our major customers, JCB in the back end of last year. So whilst we've seen a reduction in hardware revenue and hardware units shipped. We haven't seen any reduction in the number of software subscription services that are associated with those hardware units. So that is actually up year-on-year marginally compared to where we were at this time last year. Services revenues increased quite significantly up to GBP 4.1 million and that really is a direct result of a number of things. So we're seeing more hardware shipments into our direct customers. And we've also seen an increase in the level of professional services. So that will be services around the implementation of new products, but it's also a reflection of the increased integration work that we do with both direct customers and OEM customers. So as Nadeem mentioned previously, the number of different development programs that we're on with JCB has increased by threefold. So we are seeing that drop through. I think the important bit to point out here as well is that we'll see when we move on to the next slide is around the impact that the mix of revenue can have on the business. So if you just move on to the next slide for me, please, Nadeem. So what we've seen is gross margin has increased from -- has increased about 25% year-on-year. So of that, the organic growth is around 14%. So that compares to around 12% previous years. So both on an organic and inorganic perspective, obviously, we've grown fairly significantly. We have seen increases in gross margins from both recurring services and the nonrecurring services, particularly around hardware, the mix around the hardware is obviously more bias towards direct customers, which attracts a high gross margin when you can pay that to the OEM customers because from a volume perspective, we tend to charge lower prices, but also the professional services revenue tends to attract a much higher margin. So we can see that's dropping through into the gross margin, which the nonrecurring margins have increased about 9% across the period. Recurring margins hasn't increased as much we've seen about 1 percentage point increase there. That has been impacted by the acquisition of ESS, the provision of their hosting services done quite differently to how we do it at Microlise. We have a shared infrastructure, that is easy to -- a lot more easy to scale up when we have new customers in. The ESS method has been very much an individual hosting provision per customer, which will include a whole host of individual licenses, a whole host of individual hardware. So that's very -- it's a complicated and expensive way to deliver hosting services. So as those contracts expire, we will be transitioning those onto the Microlise platform, which will drive significant margin increases on the recurring revenue side. Overall, gross margins have improved from 61% to 65% of that 65% to 64% of that is organic. Operating expenses have increased to 26%, 15% of that -- or 15.5% is organic. So obviously, the impact of transition in all the overheads and the people over from ESS as well as Vita and K-safe to a lesser degree, it has obviously impacted that number. Outside of employment costs, have seen increased investment in our marketing. So we spent an additional around GBP 400,000 this year in -- also in the half year at the end of June on marketing. So that is very much targeted at the overseas geographies. So we're really focusing on increasing lead generation and presence generally in the market in France and Australia as well as continuing to invest in the U.K. We've also incurred additional costs in relation to third-party licenses. So we've seen a fairly significant increase in the cost of Microsoft licenses. So that obviously impacted from running our back-office systems. And obviously, everybody aware of word and Excel and so on and so forth. So those licenses have carried quite a cost increase this year. But in addition to that, we've continued to invest in our cybersecurity posture. So we've invested in a number of third-party services to help that will include things like network infrastructure improvements, vulnerability simulations, phishing simulations, those types of things to make sure that we are positioned as best we can to protect the business from any cybersecurity threats. Adjusted EBITDA has increased 16.9% to GBP 5.2 million. So we're continuing to see the EBITDA margin percentage growth. So that's growing to 13.4% from 13.2% year-on-year and I've got another slide up in a couple of slides just to talk about margin enhancement in a little bit more detail. We've seen increase in depreciation and amortization across the 3 main elements, which is really as a consequence of increased investment in previous periods in plant and machinery. So it's effectively IT, hardware infrastructure. We've also seen the amortization charge in relation to the development -- capitalized development costs. So internally generated software has increased. And obviously, the impact of the acquisitions that we've made is starting to drop through to into amortization as well. There are a few classifications of exceptional costs that we've classified this year and pulled out separately. So that is really in relation to the acquisitions that we've made and the restructuring and the integration of those acquisitions into the business. So just move on to the next slide, please, Nadeem. So from a cash flow perspective, as you saw previously, we continue to be cash generative. So our cash flow generated from operations is up 6% to GBP 3.8 million. That has been impacted negatively by an increased inventory level that we've had to carry as a result of some of the localized delays that we've seen in project rollouts. So it's approximately GBP 0.5 million of additional inventory that we're sitting on at the moment. That will unwind over the next 6 to 8 months. Adjusting for that, our cash conversion rate would have been in excess of 80%. Investment-wise, we continue to invest in plant property and equipment. And that is mainly into the IT infrastructure. So that will be -- we have an ongoing program within our data centers to make sure that we are utilizing the most energy-efficient and license efficient hardware as well as the hardware that's going to give us the best security posture. So that's an ongoing rolling program that we have where we replace all the hardware over a set period of time. We've also increased the investment and the number of solar panels that we have at HQ. And also we've got in a number of additional electric vehicle charging points at HQ as well. From an intangible perspective, as I mentioned previously, we are -- we do it -- we capitalize some of our development costs. So the internally generated software, which is GBP 1.4 million, so marginally above where we were last year. So that's obviously in relation to the points that Nadeem mentioned earlier. So the unification of the platform, integration of the acquisitions as well as ongoing work regarding our security posture. M&A, as you're aware, we recently bought enterprise software systems that completed in January this year. So that's GBP 6.2 million of the investment in M&A there. So that's the net cash consideration that we paid. And there's also a GBP 0.2 million deferred consideration payment in relation to Vita, the acquisition that we made in March 2023. Also the other point to call out is the dividend. So we paid our maiden dividend just before the half year. So that's GBP 2 million. And as Nadeem mentioned earlier, we are intended to pay an interim dividend that will be paid in November that will be approximately 700,000 representing around about 1/3 of the payment that we made relating to the financial year for 2023. And the final point on the cash flow side is really just to point out that we are cash generative. We have around -- at the half year, we have around GBP 9 million in cash, GBP 8.9 million. But we also have access to an RCF of GBP 10 million and an additional classifications of GBP 20 million. So this was a facility that we renewed with HSBC shortly before our full year reports this year. So in essence, we have access to around a GBP 40 million of investment funds there to help us grow, whether that's organically or through acquisition. Let's just move on to the final slide, please, Nadeem. So margin enhancement is something that we are putting a lot of time and effort into. So the graph on the right-hand side just show how our gross margin and EBITDA margins have increased over the 5 years. So these are the H1 numbers for each of the -- sorry, the H1 is -- the far right-hand bar is the H1 for 2024 and then the remaining 4 bars are for the full year performance, the previous full-year performance. So we can see that both EBITDA and gross margins are increasing consistently. So we've obviously seen EBITDA grow to 13.4% from 13.2%. So relatively modest but still consistent. We do think that there is significant opportunity for us to increase those margins. So there are a number of initiatives that we're working through currently. And I'll just touch on some of those now. So it's a natural consequence of increasing our sales to direct customers. Generally, they carry higher margins just due to the nature of -- the nature of the goods and services we sell, they're normally much more in-depth than wide product range that we sell to direct customers. So we have seen some of that and evidence of that in H1 2024. So that will naturally drop through to increased margins. And we do feel as though there is a significant opportunity to cross-sell and upsell into the existing customer base and also new logos that we think that we can win, both in the enterprise space and also in the mid-market space. We have designed a number of new hardware solutions. So they are lower cost. So effectively, we've design cost out of them, they will still be functionally rich. So that will mean that we can effectively charge the same or increased charges for those hardware and obviously drive increased margin. I've referenced the cross-sell and upsell opportunity. One of the areas that we have invested in over the last few years is integration into third-party products. So we saw success of this with the AI camera that we deployed into the Woolworths project. So that was a piece that we utilize a third-party AI camera from a company called Lytx that has been very, very successful. We're also finishing off on completing work that is being launched now that will integrate into temperature-controlled units. So what this effectively means is that we can rather than having to when we engage with the customer having to sell them additional hardware, which can often be a barrier to entry, we can just integrate directly into those. So there's not that issue that a particular project team or operational team will have and having to get CapEx sign off that removes in some part of the need to do that. Furthermore, obviously, part of the acquisition strategy that we've got is to buy companies that sell higher-margin services. So as we've demonstrated with the acquisition of both Vita and ESS. So in their own right, they will just drop through into higher margin because they -- when we charge for these subscriptions, they tend to be more in the region of GBP 50 to GBP 100, whereas some of the services that we offer on the right-hand side of the product suite that Nadeem was showing earlier for all fleet performance or tracking and telematics, that's more like between GBP 15 and GBP 20 per subscription per month. So it's a lot of great contribution to the bottom line. In addition to that, there are -- I referenced the hosting environment that there's significant opportunity to rationalize that moving forward. But we are also looking at a number of initiatives internally to make our business processes more efficient and more effective. So that will be through the elimination of manual tasks, the increase in utilization of automation that we have available to us within our business systems. So that will effectively help us grow and scale more efficiently and more effectively without having to add that human beings to do what we consider to not be value-added tasks. Thank you, Nadeem.

So I'll just cover some of the things that's going on within our customers' market initially. So what we're seeing is that there's a significant consolidation going on there with larger players trying to gain cost advantage through scale and a lot of smaller players in the sort of 10 to 50 vehicle space actually going out of business has typically been about one company going into administration every week over the last few months and really just not having recovered their sort of cash balances from the COVID years. In terms of net zero, again, we're seeing a slight pullback from that, where by customers -- our customers are attending to focus more on profitability in the short-term rather than some of their net zero investments. We're seeing that there's a continual stream of compliance regulations coming along and we're in a good place as far as that's concerned in that we already support quite a lot of future legislation and regulation that's coming along. So we're able to help our customers meet those new compliance regulations. And in terms of zero emissions vehicles and obviously, there has been a certainty around what type of fuel to go for. But at the moment, we're seeing people buying more diesel vehicles as opposed to continuing with EV replacement programs. So people are still buying EVs, but not at the same level as they were last year. There's a bit of a slowdown there. But the sales of new vehicles in general is still okay. However, it's more in traditional diesel fuel technologies rather than EVs. In terms of our operational environment, again, things are looking very good. Vehicle availability is back to normal in the U.K., Europe, et cetera. We are seeing some headwinds in Australia, where particularly temperature-controlled vehicles seem to have long lead times, and that's slowing down some implementations in Australia. However, we are expecting that to get back to normal in Q4 this year based on conversations that we've been having with our customers and their suppliers. We're seeing great demand for our products, particularly our recent acquisitions in TMS space. And I think we can demonstrate some good execution of that cross-sell and upselling to our existing customer base with those recent acquisitions and those products. And we're doing really well with AI cameras had significant wins in Australia with those, and we're also seeing good growth with them here in the U.K. as well. Our growth strategy remains the same, and we continue to execute on that. We're growing with our existing customers who continue to consolidate and expand. We're growing with our OEMs, particularly with JCB, hence the announcement yesterday. We're continuing to add new customers to our portfolio with some great wins in Australia and New Zealand, particularly in the retail sector, and that's also continuing in the U.K. with the addition of One Stop, which is owned by Tesco, where we've had nearly a 20-year relationship with. And that's played on top with M&A activity. And although we've done a number of acquisitions recently, that's by no means the end of our M&A ambitions. We are still actively looking and evaluating further targets. So there will be more M&A to come. And then just a reminder of the investment case. So we have long-term contracts. Most of our contracts are 5 years but we're now starting to see more 10-year contracts. So again, lots of visibility of future contracted revenue. That combined with a low churn rate, 0.5% just shows how sticky we are with our customer base. We are still actively selling and upselling more products into our customer base. Not many of our customers have the whole product set. And so there's still lots of white space to go at within our existing customer base. As well as that, we've got margin enhancement activities going on to grow that margin, which is something that Nick outlined in his slide. And there's still significant opportunity for us to grow internationally. We are fairly dominant in the U.K. but outside of the U.K., we still have lots and lots of room and market to grow. And that combined with a great track record. You can see from the slide and the graph on the right-hand side, that we've had consistent growth in our annual recurring revenue, and we're confident that we can continue that trend in 2024 and beyond. So just to summarize, we are very confident of meeting our full year forecast for 2024. We have an order backlog from H1 that goes into 2024, H2 and also into 2025. So again, we've got the orders to deliver to cover those forecasts. We've added 200 new customers. Obviously, the recurring revenues for those will come in H2 and into 2025. And we've just signed a 5-year extension with our largest OEM. So we are very confident and very pleased with our performance. And looking at continuing that going forward. I think we can go on to answering any Q&A at this point.

Perfect. Nadeem, if I may just jump back in there. [Operator Instructions] But guys, at this point, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. And if I pick up from you at the end, that would be great.

So the first question is from Michael. To what extent is AI an opportunity or a risk? Well, we see AI as an opportunity for a number of our products. So we already use AI in several products. So in our fleet performance product we're using AI and machine learning in monitoring the breaks. Also for monitoring the batteries and giving advanced warning of any kind of battery failure. We're using AI tools and vision in some of our vision systems. So cameras, in particular, using AI to detect internally, whether the driver is fatigued, whether they're wearing a seatbelt, whether they're focusing on the road, externally, looking at whether they are keeping within lanes, looking at what they're tailgating, monitoring for pedestrians and other obstacles around the vehicle. So AI is very much already in play in several of our products. And we believe that we'll continue to enhance that and also incorporate that into several other products as well. The next question is also from Michael. What percentage of your sales relate to JCB. So Nick, I don't know whether you were able to answer that question?

Yes, it's at the half year, it's 30%. So that's dropped from 36% in the same period last year. So -- we've seen -- we have seen an increase in JCB recurring revenues still. So I think that's an indication, obviously, that the sales to direct customers and the proportion is increasing.

Okay. Next question, I think, is also one that you probably want to answer, Nick from John, cash and cash equivalents has dropped by 36.4% largely due to acquisitions and the dividend payout. How do you balance growth investments, we are maintaining a healthy cash reserve? Is there a potential for further dividend increase or would funds be more focused on strategic acquisitions?

So around dividends, we are intending to continue to pay a dividend. So it will be -- it is a progressive policy. So there will be probably a modest increase on that moving forward. In terms of the -- sorry, bear with me one second as I read the rest of the question. See, all growth investments are analyzed and assessed on their own merits. So obviously, the key things that we're really kind of focusing on moving forward is will be additional M&A, which is very much in -- and on the radar, we recruited a strategy in M&A director last year. We have an ongoing pipeline that we are constantly reviewing. So we've assessed significantly more than 100 opportunities. Obviously, completed 4 in recent years. So the capital allocation that we're looking at moving forward, we expect that we will be continuing on the same level of capital expenditure. Obviously, investment in development resource will continue at a similar level. But in terms of -- the reason why we've got facility with HSBC is to actually fund that growth should we need it. But obviously, we are cash generative. So over the last couple of years, cash flow from operations has been between GBP 9 million and GBP 10 million.

And I think just to add to that, I think there's a balance between both dividend payments so that we attract IHT investors as well as holding on to cash for strategic acquisitions. It's a say, we have about GBP 40 million available to us to do acquisitions. So I think we're in a good place with capabilities in terms of acquisitions as well as doing modest dividends as well. The next question is from Hugh. Have overheads grown in anticipation of future growth? Or is some trimming required i.e., a number of U.K. locations? I think that both of those things have happened. There are areas within the business, particularly in sales and marketing and some development areas where we are growing overheads in anticipation of future growth and in some cases, to drive future growth. There is some trimming that we have already done towards the tail end of H1. And obviously, there's further work that we're doing as we are doing precious improvements internally within the business to make ourselves more efficient. So a bit of both going on. Next question is also from Hugh. I know that Samsara is valued at 20x ARR. While U.K. valuations are unlikely to align with those of the U.S., your shares would appear to be significantly undervalued. I think we would agree with that. I think that we've shown a consistent track record of growth. And I think there's more of that to come as well as growing top line. We're also looking at growing our EBITDA and profit numbers as well with some of the margin enhancement activities that Nick mentioned. So hopefully that will be reflected in the market share price. But obviously, there's lots of external factors that drive U.K. market valuations as well. Next question is from Andrew. Services revenue at June 24 was 10% of total revenues. What does management think this can be going forward, say, 5 years? So my view on this is that services revenue is -- as Nick mentioned, it's a combination of installation activities installing hardware as well as project management training and other consultancy services. We expect that our installation services will continue to grow as we supply more hardware. But of course, we are growing our software business, which doesn't require hardware installation. So we expect there to be modest growth in installation services. We are doing more work in terms of consultancy and project management training with our customers. So we expect that to grow further and a little bit faster than installation services. But also, we are trying hard to make our products very, very self-service such that we can deploy them much more quickly and scale up the SaaS revenue for those products. So we expect service revenue to grow, but we don't necessarily expect them to grow as fast as some of our other metrics. Nick, is there anything you want to add well?

Yes. I was just going to say, obviously, in addition to that, what we are trying to do is drive cost out of any services that we provide. So the margin contribution that we get from those services will increase over time as well.

Yes. Next question was from Rosita. I hope I pronounced that correctly. I think you said you had 827,000 contracts in 187 countries. Yet the company is only worth GBP 153 million. I'm wondering whether you are spread too thinly whether your changes are too low and how you see the way forward for real growth? So I think it's fair to say that a large proportion of that 827,000 is through OEMs, which will be lower value and because they only take a subset of that entire portfolio, particularly around fleet performance. So again, that drives the average down quite a lot, whereas our more recent acquisitions and internal developments like [indiscernible] TMS, we believe will drive much higher revenues and therefore, you'll see increases in top line, that will be disproportionate to the number of subscriptions increasing. So yes, we do expect the average to go up as we do -- as we drive more direct sales as well as direct sales of those particular high-value products. Neville gives us a one-word question, which is competition. So I'll try and answer that based on what I think you're asking for, which is, so yes, there is lots of competitors out there, but it's fair to say that those competitors are in each of those 7 product categories. What we don't have is a competitor that actually covers all of the things that we do. And that is how we sell and how we compete is that we provide that story to customers, whereby they can have an all-encompassing product set that covers all of their operational needs and is integrated and just works out of the box. Rather than them having to buy individual products from different suppliers and then trying to get them to work together. And that's generally how we win against our competition. Darren asks, how many customers do you have in North America? And is this an area you are looking to target with M&A and organic growth? We don't have many customers in North America. It's fair to say. We have a lot of customers through OEMs, but not many direct customers in North America. We -- it is a huge market. However, it is a complicated market, and it has lots of failed U.K. businesses there. We were in the U.S. in the period sort of 2002 to 2010 and what we learned from that experience was that you really need to go in big and go in and scale up very, very quickly with a lot of investment to try and create a sustainable operation over there. So we are not likely to do that from the ground up, and it's more likely that we will attack North America with an acquisition, has the foundation to build from. So watch this space on that one. Next question also from Darren, do you normally see a significant increase in costs from M&A or was H1 an outlier? I think that in terms of increasing costs, it's essentially bringing in the people and then it takes a bit of time to introduce efficiencies, integrate those people, integrate processes, et cetera. So I think that's generally true of most acquisitions. So I think we will see improvements and accretive results coming through from those activities going forward. And we'll obviously see that accelerating over time as we have done with the acquisition of TruTac that we saw in 2020. It takes a bit of time to integrate it and get those efficiencies in, but then it tends to accelerate quite well in sort of in later years. William asks, is JCB your largest client as well as your largest OEM? Yes, that is correct. They are our largest customer and also our largest OEM. Our next largest OEM is MAN trucks. Next question from Andrew. Does the company disclose the size of the order book and how this has grown recently? No, we don't report that externally. But it is fair to say that our order book has been consistently growing over the last few years and has grown this year as well and more even more future-looking than that, our pipeline are also growing and have also grown this year, particularly in France and Australia, which have significantly larger pipelines than they have previously. And I think that's the end of the questions.

Absolutely, Nadeem, Nick. If I may just jump back in there. And thank you very much indeed for being said in us for your time and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this afternoon. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended, and just for you to review them any additional responses, of course, where it's appropriate to do so. And we'll publish all those responses now on the platform. But Nadeem, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.

Great. Yes. So I think I'd probably just like to leave you with the slide on the investment case, which is essentially I think to state that we have some very long-term contracts with our customers, 5 to 10 years, very low churn. Lots of white space to go out, lots of opportunities with international growth and lots of continued margin expansion. And a great track record, and we're looking to continue that going forward. And in many cases, those metrics, accelerating that growth and accelerating those margins as well. Thank you very much for your time, everyone.

Perfect. That's great. Nadeem, Nick, thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. [Operator Instructions] On behalf of the management team of Microlise Group plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.