Bytes Technology Group PLC

LSE:BYIT

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Good morning. I'd like to thank you for joining us for Bytes' full year results presentation for the year ending February 2023. We're delighted to present another very positive set of results with strong double-digit growth, driven by contributions from all areas of the business. As we enter our 41st year of trading, I'm pleased to say that demand for IT across our entire customer base remains high and more on that shortly.

Before we turn to the highlights, I just want to take a moment to reflect on what has been a cracking 12 months for the business. This success is built on the solid foundations we've laid over many years, is built on long-term investments we've made in our systems, our relationships with customers and our partnerships with the world's most successful IT vendors. And importantly, it's down to our people. Each and every member of the team who works in the business has played a crucial role. And without them, these results simply would not be possible. And I would just like to pay tribute to their passion, their commitment and their hard work.

Turning first to the headline results. As I said a moment ago, we've delivered another strong year of sales and profit growth, extending our track record of progress. Gross invoiced income is up almost 20% at GBP 1.44 billion, which is double the level of sales we reported this time 3 years ago. Looking at our other core metrics, gross profits are up by 20.7% to nearly GBP 130 million and adjusted operating profit is up 21.8% to GBP 56.4 million. This reflects strong demand for software, services and hardware from both our public and private sector clients. These results are also further evidence that we're continuing to grow our market share.

Now in terms of other headline figures, our AOP to GP conversion rate remains industry-leading and ended up a little higher than the previous year at 43.5%. Going forward, we think maintaining this ratio in the low 40s is sustainable. As far as cash conversion is concerned, after a very strong second half, we finished the year at 84.3%. Looking ahead, we are comfortable with delivering normalized cash conversion of above 100%.

Now for the benefit of those new to the company, I'd like to spend a few brief moments and turn to our track record of performance over the past 10 years and since IPO in December 2020. It's only when you look back and review the journey we've taken that you see the scale of the progress we have made and the consistency of our performance. The results you see today are the consequence of decades of investment in people, in systems and in culture, layer upon layer of experience, skills, relationships, customers, contracts, projects and knowledge. We have a tried and tested business model that has stood the test of time. And our plan is to stay true to that strategy. It's well understood by management, and it's well understood by our teams. The 10-year picture shows a CAGR that's even higher than the last 3 years, and this reflects the accretive benefit of our acquisition of Phoenix in late 2017.

Now turning to a key part of our business model, let's briefly look at the vendor partnerships we have. Our role as a multi-vendor reseller provides our customers with a leading selection of technology solutions to meet their specific needs. Our longstanding partnerships with vendors, means we're also able to help our customers access those solutions on the best commercial terms.

This makes us a trusted partner. And together with our increasing range of value-added services, these client relationships stick. In turn, this supports a level of familiarity with clients that vendors cannot cultivate themselves. So we connect vendors with thousands of clients that they would otherwise find it challenging to reach. We've had long-term relationships with most of the vendors on this slide. We also have newer vendor partnerships that we hope to convert into key relationships over time, such as that with AWS.

In addition, we will grow our business with the likes of Cisco, with IBM and with Oracle and other global success stories to offer our clients more choice. Winning awards from vendors is an important measure of success and a stamp of approval, which our customers demand. This builds our brand, not just with customers, but also with the sales and marketing functions at the vendors. That's crucial as those teams are often a rich source of lead generation and new business activity. They can be and are an extension to our own new business efforts.

Now let's turn to our most important partnership and spend a few moments on Microsoft. While continuing to diversify through adding new vendors, there is no doubting the continued importance and benefit of a strong relationship with Microsoft, I think by most people's measure, the world's most successful software company and the go-to vendor for digital transformation. We first partnered with Microsoft in the 1990s and just over half of our gross profit comes from the relationship with Microsoft and continues to grow at consistently healthy growth rates.

Reflecting our focus, our work with Microsoft is firmly with their fastest-growing segments, namely public cloud, cybersecurity and productivity and data, all of which are growing in double digits. After almost 3 decades, there is a deeply embedded relationship and a mutual respect for one another's achievements in that time.

Bytes was their first partner of the U.K. to pass GBP 1 billion in Microsoft sales back in 2021. And we continue to be a key partner for them in the U.K. and Ireland. We also help to manage some of their very largest U.K. contracts. The success of this partnership was underscored by Bytes winning a global award last year for operational excellence. This was all the more remarkable as we were selected from over 3,900 partners globally. We continue to invest in the relationship by expanding our services portfolio and by achieving the very highest technical accreditations. This further strengthens and cements our relationship with Microsoft and a whole host of satellite vendors, and it also makes us even stickier to our customer base as they come to rely on us more for value-added services. Looking ahead, we are well placed to further expand this relationship.

Turning now to customers. They're at the heart of what we do. Our commitment here remains crystal clear: To develop and maintain close trusted partnerships over the long term. There are customers I remember dealing with as a sales director back in 1997, and they remain customers of ours to this day. As they grow, so does the scale and sophistication of their IT requirements and so does the level of repeat or annuity business.

Last year's performance illustrates the strength of these sticky customer relationships with a renewal rate of 116% of our gross profit coming from existing customers. This strong level of repeat business allows us to more accurately forecast our trajectory. The growth of our own IP in the form of License Dashboard, Quantum for Azure and 365 and a whole host of cloud and security services has helped drive sticky customer relationships and an array of annuity-based software and services. This gives our business strong revenue visibility as we estimate between 60% and 70% of our business is now sold as Software as a Service or of an annuity type.

In terms of historic growth in our customer base, you can see here the last 10 years growth in the group's number of customers and the growth in gross profit per customer. Last year alone, we added 600 net new customers, taking the total to nearly 6,000 and growing gross profit from existing customers by 8.5% to nearly GBP 22,000 per customer.

And that's down to the fantastic work of our sales teams. We estimate that, on average, we still have less than 20% to 25% of the available share of wallet in our client base, meaning there's a significant runway for further growth from these existing relationships. For some years now, we've run a program we used to call Seven Steps to a Million. It's a framework, which guides new salespeople to optimal performance, laying out a 7-year path to delivering more than GBP 1 million of gross profit for the business. We've now renamed it Five Steps to a Million because we're finding that this level of achievement is being reached by newly qualified sales heads within just 5 years.

And finally, we know our customer relationships are strong and meaningful because we validate them with customer satisfaction surveys to help guide us and to ensure we are supporting our clients appropriately. I'm pleased to report that our customer NPS score remains outstanding at 77, underlining our reputation as a trusted partner with a strong focus on the customer.

I'll now hand over to Andrew to talk through the financials in a bit more detail.

[Andrew Holden, executive]

Good morning. Neil has talked you through the headlines. In a moment, I'll take you through the financial results for the full year 2023. But first, a few words around our accounting policy in regard to revenue recognition. As announced at half year, we've aligned our judgment to our peer group across the U.K. and Europe. We now record all our software sales and externally delivered services as agent. So here, we record only the gross profit from those sales as revenue. We have also restated the prior year in line with this change.

So turning now to the income statement. We saw strong growth across all our key indicators. Our gross invoiced income is up GBP 231 million to just over GBP 1.4 billion, which equates to a growth rate of 19.1% due to the accounting policy change, revenue growth as a percentage is now better aligned to our growth recorded in the GII figure. The difference in percentage reflects a higher growth in hardware and services than what we achieved in software sales.

Our gross profit, which for us is one of the best measures of the company's performance, is up 20.7% to GBP 129.7 million. This in turn gives us a GP to GII ratio of 9.0% for the full year. FY '22, this ratio was 8.9%, and the improvement reflects good work at both operations to add richer margin solutions and services to all of our customers. Adjusted operating profits, which excludes amortization of acquired intangibles and share-based payments is up 21.8% to GBP 56.4 million. The efficiency ratio of adjusted operating profit divided by gross profit is at 43.5% up from the 43.1% in the prior period. This improvement is mostly due to the enhanced productivity arising from increased economies of scale.

One of this gives me real confidence for the future. And appending our strong performance is a real diversity in our market segmentation, our customer base and our vendor partnerships. Software solutions sales continues to make up most of our sales at 93.5%, hardware and services coming at 2.7% and 3.8%, respectively.

Although hardware and services make up a small percentage of our total sales, the combined contribution to our GII is in excess of GBP 90 million. That's a 29% growth year-on-year. Real progress has been made in creating value-added services surrounding our software solutions that assist our customers in getting the best value from their software estates. We continue our dual focus on both the small, medium enterprise segments in the corporate market as well as growing our public sector business.

Our public sector business grew by 18% from GBP 727 million to GBP 857 million. This equates to 6% of our total GII with a balance of 40% or GBP 583 million coming out of the corporate sector, which grew 21%. We partner with over 100 vendors and take these solutions to our extensive customer base. As in the prior years, Microsoft and their products and solutions remain at the very core of our value proposition, representing 64% of our GII and just over 50% of our gross profit.

We are seeing major areas of growth in both the transition and the consumption of cloud-based technologies, modern workplace and our cybersecurity offerings. Cybersecurity pervades all that we do, so it's difficult to pinpoint cybersecurity's exact contribution to our gross profit. But when we look at the contribution of our cybersecurity-focused vendors and the nature of our Microsoft sales, we can confidently say that cybersecurity contributes in excess of 20% to our gross profits.

So this all gives you a flavor of our diversity of our income streams across our market, our customer base and from our vendors. Now in the interactions with various stakeholders over the last year, the conversation has often turned to the current inflationary environment. It's true that in the last 12 months, we've seen various vendors increase their prices. But if anything, this has been a benefit to us as we've been able to generally pass these increases through to our customers. And so our margins have been unaffected.

Historically in terms of cost, the bulk is in salary, commissions and other employee-related plans, making up over 80% of our administrative expenses. As you can see from the graph, over half of our employees are in sales and sales support. They benefit from a variable income linked directly to the gross profit they're responsible for. So as we grow, so do they.

We continue our practice of promoting from within, continuing to train and develop our people to ensure that we have the right skills on hand when the opportunity arises. As we grow and people rise in seniority, vacancies are created at a more junior level, which we fill, focusing our selection criteria on a cultural fit, continuing our investment for the current requirements as well as investing for future growth, as seen with our headcount growing 20% from 773 to 930 people.

With our continued investment in our people, we feel like we are well placed to win new customers and to continue to grow well -- with the existing customers for many years to come. Our cash conversion has followed similar cycles for most of the last 5 years, a cycle where we have low cash conversion in the first half, followed by an excellent cash conversion in the second.

After reporting a negative cash conversion for the first 6 months of FY '23, the full year position reflects a very strong conversion in the second 6 months of 180%, moving the full year figure to 84.3%, which is back towards the group's target of 100%. Our average debtor's days for the year has moved out to 39 days. However, the focus over the last 6 months has meant that we've ended the year at 37 days and this we see as a new normal.

As you know, we have a capital light business, so it comes no surprise to see a relatively small spend of GBP 1.3 million on CapEx. After tax and returning GBP 30.7 million to our shareholders, we are left with a cash balance of GBP 73 million for the year. We have never drawn down on our revolving credit facility of GBP 30 million, but we thought it prudent to renew this facility for a further 3 years, which was completed earlier in May.

We have reviewed how much cash we need to keep on the balance sheet and are comfortable with around GBP 40 million level. Holding this amount of cash will enable us to navigate our monthly movements in working capital, and it ensures that we comfortably remain in a position to pay our liabilities as they fall due.

Our dividend policy is to return 40% of the post-tax adjusted operation profits back to our shareholders via ordinary dividends. So I'm pleased to announce that the Board is proposing a final dividend of 5.1p per share in addition to the 2.4p per share that was paid as an interim dividend in December '22. After the year-end, we spent GBP 3 million in acquiring 25.1% stake in an AWS services business coverage.

This enhances our multicloud capability whilst ensuring that the internal teams continue to focus on our core capabilities. We have stated that we will return excess cash to our shareholders, therefore, the Board also considers it appropriate to propose a special dividend of 7.5p per share, up 21% on the special dividend paid last year.

As a responsible business, we recognize that we have a duty not only to those who work for us, but also to those who work around us and with us. We are committed to protecting the planet by reducing our carbon emissions and helping our customers do the same. Our goal is to achieve net zero by 2040 at the latest. This year, we have appointed our first group sustainability manager, reduced our Scope 2 emissions by moving to renewable electricity, expanded our data collection in additional Scope 3 categories in which we have progresses significantly in the past year.

Our people believe passionately in making a difference and giving back to our local communities. During the year, over 170 of our staff used their fully paid volunteer days to work for charities and other causes close to their hearts or causes that are much needed and highly valued in our communities. Strong corporate governance remains at the key focus for us, both at the Board level and throughout the company. This year, we further strengthened our risk management processes and internal controls, and we'll continue to build on our engagements with both the internal and external auditors. So from where I sit, the key messages from this past financial year are clear. We are seeing strong, consistent growth across all metrics, continued investment for our long-term future, significant business opportunities and attractive returns to our shareholders. Neil?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Thank you, Andrew. Now let's turn to our strategy for growth. Many of you will be familiar with our strategy, but for those of you that are new to our story, I want to stress how firmly the customer is at the center of everything we do. Our focus is to achieve consistent profit growth while maintaining our focus on providing high-quality services to our customers and maintaining a positive and dynamic work-based culture.

We know that this works. To grow our business, we must carry on doing what we've done for years, increasing our scale along the way. So we've increased our sales headcount and we'll do so again this year. We've opened a new London office to focus on new business opportunities in insurance, banking and professional services. And also we've opened the office to attract more sales talent into the organization.

We've also grown our head count in Manchester, in York and Reading. We've also expanded our Irish sales team as well. And we will continue to look at new regions for further growth, including a new Scottish office. We've shown over the years our ability to grow our market share, and we will continue to see further gains as we invest in our business. A key part of this will be to work strategically with high-growth software companies, especially in cloud and cyber so that we're in the best possible position when it comes to helping customers with product selection.

Increasing our share of wallet is the second key pillar of our strategy. IT is no longer a discretionary item for organizations, it's an absolute must. IT has been and will continue to be the most critical element in enabling the success of business strategy for all organizations. The push towards digitalization, cloud and hybrid infrastructure, multi-cloud, AI and cybersecurity, all represent tailwinds that we are well positioned to take advantage of.

To give you an idea of the structural growth we're expecting, Microsoft expects technology spend as a percentage of GDP to double from 5% to 10% by 2030. With a market share of less than 4%, we see ample headroom for many more years of growth. Whilst we are delighted with our organic growth in recent years, we continue to monitor M&A opportunities. And if and when anything appropriate is identified, we'll take a look. But we see our organic growth as our biggest strategic opportunity, and that's where we're going to focus our energies.

Now let's turn to one of our key differentiators and talk briefly about our staff and our culture. We all know that our strategy is worthless without the right kind of culture. I've been working for Bytes for more than 25 years. I've seen remarkable change and growth in that time. But our culture has been and remains absolutely fundamental. Yes, we're proud of the headlines, of the awards and of the results, but at the end of the day, culture is about much more than that and bleeds into what we are and how we operate every day with our customers, with our vendors and with each other. It's is about innovating, collaborating, being open and empowering others. And very importantly, is about keeping it fun.

It's the energy and expertise of our people that drive this business forward. We don't want our people just to have a job. We want them to build a career with us. And just take a look at our management team. In the main, this group is made up of people who have grown up with the business. We strive wherever possible to promote from within, providing valuable worthwhile careers. To this point, we recently announced that Sam Mudd, having successfully led our Phoenix operation, is stepping up onto our PLC board at our AGM in July. This is hugely deserved. It's recognition for her achievements and those of the team around her.

Our regular company meetings and Star Forums allow management to test whether we're staying true to our guiding principles. We're proud of the fact that we support staff in times of difficulty as we behave like one of a big corporate family with staff at the center. We like to go the extra mile for our staff because they do so for the company. We know our staff recognize this. It's reflected in our strong employee NPS score of 70.

So in summary, we've once again delivered excellent results with growth year-on-year of over 20% across our core metrics. We've seen broad-based growth across all vertical markets and all of our business segments. Our business is built on firm foundations with a track record of over 40 years, a strong culture, superb relationships with the world's most successful vendors and a powerful array of services and subscription-based products that our customers depend upon.

At the heart of all of this is a company culture that drives high customer and staff satisfaction, which accelerates growth in gross profit and customer numbers. Underpinning our aspirations and expectations is the demand we see continuing across all of our markets. As a result, we expect to continue to deliver double-digit gross profit growth and an increase in our market share.

I am pleased to say demand has remained strong since the beginning of our new financial year in March, and we have seen the same momentum continue through our quarter 1. As much as we are proud of our achievements over the years, we are just as excited about our growth prospects moving forward. And we feel energized by the enormous potential of the markets that we operate in.

I like thank you for listening today, and we now look forward to answering your questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Damindu Jayaweera of Peel Hunt.

[Damindu Jayaweera, analyst]

Well done on a great result. And I have 3 questions, maybe I'll ask one at the time. The first one is obviously, as you described in your strategies like there is a focus on software and obviously [ you're growing with ] software and the annuity that is around 60% of revenue is a huge deal into the resilience for the business model. However, I also noted that you did mention that you started to do more Cisco and, obviously, you have a wallet share gain opportunity. Does that mean that we will see you do more -- some more of hardware type revenues in the 20 -- coming 12, 24 months as we saw in the prior period?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Damindu, Neil here. So our fundamental strategy will remain unchanged. I think when you see the growth that you've seen in our hardware products, it's ostensibly a byproduct of our success selling to our broad-based customer base. What you'll see is increasing hardware by virtue of the appliances that we're selling with some of our security solutions, workplace solutions, remote working solutions and so on. But it's not a change in strategy.

I think if you look at the additional work we're doing with Cisco, for example, a lot of the work there is actually with their software-defined networks, which we sell as software solutions, enterprise agreements, for example. So you won't see any notable change. You will see potentially higher growth in hardware, but that's purely because we're starting from a relatively low base, if you look at it as a percentage of our overall revenues and GII.

So you'll see an increase in wallet share, as you've seen in the past few years, purely because we're expanding the number of vendors we're working with. And our sales force are highly objectivized to expand the wallet share we have with our clients as well. I hope that answer your question.

[Damindu Jayaweera, analyst]

Yes. Very clear. I suppose it's sort of this blurring of the boundary as well between hardware and software. The other question I had was, obviously, if you look at FY '21 and FY '22, you add around 250 to 300 new customers in each of those years, and then you have a big jump to 600 net new customers in FY '23. Is there much to read into that? And how should we kind of think about it? Just going back to the point that you just made earlier about taking more wallet share, but at the same time you seem to be growing the net new customers at a fast rate as well.

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Yes. I think that's very much a by-product of the expansion you've seen in our sales teams over the last 2 to 3 or 4 years, in fact. And so it would be normal for me, certainly, to expect a sort of step change in the increase of clients we have. But also that's driven by the additional demand we're seeing in the market. And I suppose as well by the fact that we've gained, certainly in the last few years since we've listed, the great PR as a listed company has helped us attract new clients as well.

So I think it's a number of things, but certainly, we've seen an uptick in new clients by virtue of the expansion of our sales force.

[Damindu Jayaweera, analyst]

And then the last one for me is, obviously, what's really been impressive for me in this sort of result is the renewal rate at 115%. And we do know Microsoft is increasing U.K. pricing by around 9% given you do have your GP with Microsoft. That's a material single-digit contributor -- I guess, mostly single-digit contributor to your overall GP growth rate.

Just -- and then you got this exit growth rate on GP which is in the very high teens [ which is a kind of second half ] growth rate. So -- and triangulating that with market expectations for kind of mid-teens gross profit growth for this year, so far, I guess you've only had a few months, I guess, of trading to the background. Just -- is it unfair to say that you seem to be tracking -- at least in this few couple of weeks, tracking ahead of market expectations? I'm not -- sorry, I'm not trying to put words into your mouth, but just kind of trying to triangulate the theme around, and it just feels like you're actually -- you're trading it stronger than what the market is anticipating.

[Neil Murphy, executive]

No, I wouldn't read too much into that. I would suggest that those price increases would result in sort of low single-digit impact on our gross profit growth last year and probably this year. We'll see how that all plays out over the course of the next period. But certainly, I think it's fair to say we've been an economic beneficiary of that. And we would expect to be so in sort of low single-digit gross profit growth terms moving forward as well, Damindu.

[Damindu Jayaweera, analyst]

Well done on a good set of results.

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Thank you.

[Operator]

We'll now go to Mr. Patrick O'Donnell calling from Goodbody.

[Patrick O'Donnell, analyst]

Just a couple of questions from me. Just in terms of the overall sort of market opportunity. You mentioned you're 4% of the TAM. You can see kind of -- you mentioned the higher sales force that is sort of building market share. Just curious what can really drive that and accelerate that adoption even further given the scale of your relationships with some of the key players in the space like Microsoft, et cetera?

And the second question was just in terms of the AWS acquisition, 25.1%, any reason for why you wouldn't have taken a majority stake in that business? And what's the...

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Thanks, Patrick. I'll ask the -- answer the second one first. That was a very good tactical opportunity for us to take a stake in an AWS-focused business, which gives us access to over 80 technical resources that ordinarily we wouldn't necessarily get to have access to. So a good tactical opportunity with a partner, in fact, we've been working with for many years now. And it essentially enables our legacy business, for want of a better word, to concentrate on our Microsoft-centric services whilst we turn to Cloud Bridge to provide those AWS services.

And that, now having a stake in the business, it gives us insight into how best to monetize that relationship moving forward. And we see a continued long-term relationship with that business. We weren't seeking to make an acquisition of that company, but it was an opportunity that we -- would look like a very good investment for us at a good multiple.

Going to your first question, how do we accelerate that growth? I was pretty happy to -- it was roughly 20% growth, but now you've said that, I think I better set my bar a bit higher. But what could accelerate that further? I'd think that we have to be very careful and measured about how we progress the business. And we think we're doing the right thing in terms of the number of heads we're introducing to the business to attract a greater market share than 4%. And we have to be pretty measured about the number of people we take on and how we integrate them into the organization as well, and to make sure that the cultural fit is right and they get the right level of training.

And so we're pretty happy with the anticipated growth we see going forward to try and secure a greater percentage of that market share that you referred to in your question. Patrick, is that okay?

[Patrick O'Donnell, analyst]

Yes. And just the last piece on that. I mean, like are you finding the market dynamics still competitive in spite of your sort of rising, I suppose, your rising position with a broader degree of suppliers that you're working with, the growth rate you're achieving? Would you say that you're currently gaining share relative to where you have been this time last year in terms of the overall ecosystem?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Yes. I mean the statistics we look at show us that we are taking market share. I think the market is still very dynamic, and it's still very competitive, but it has been for the 20, 30 years that I can recall being in this industry. So those dynamics are still in place today. I think we need to make sure that we continue to have a sort of bleeding edge sales engine and sales proposition and customer service in order to maintain that position going forward.

[Patrick O'Donnell, analyst]

And sorry to say, that most of that growth is going to continue from an organic means rather than an accretive?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Yes, absolutely. I mean we've demonstrated this past year that we can add hundreds of millions of pounds to our organization in terms of sales without having to make an acquisition. And definitely, that's the focus and our -- the focus of our energies moving forward.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Alex Nguyen calling from Jefferies.

[Hoa Nguyen, analyst]

It's nice to see another positive update from you. I have 3 questions. Number one, if I could be a little bit critical on the numbers. So gross profit per customer was up 8% for the full year. But if I try to split out the number for the second half, I think it implies a decline year-over-year. Does that sound right to you? And is there anything that we should be aware of?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

I'll defer to my learned gentleman friend, the CFO, Andrew, on this one.

[Andrew Holden, executive]

Thanks. I think at half year, what we didn't show was the absolute net customer space because we measure our customer numbers on an annual basis. So what you might see is a higher gross profit per customer at half year, and that's just because we didn't account for the absolute customer numbers. So I think the fairer comparison would be a year-on-year and that does show the 8% growth. And bear in mind that a lot of customers are transacting annually. So some of those customers might be in the second half, some of those customers might be in the first half. So I think, as I said, fairer comparison year-on-year, rather.

[Hoa Nguyen, analyst]

Yes. Okay. That makes sense. And then my next question will be around the headcount. It's up 20% this year and I think it's a bit more than the -- around the mid-teens percentage point that we have seen in the past few years. Is that you guys are like front loading the recruitment. So does that mean in the first half of '24, we would see a slightly more muted headcount growth?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

No. It's not a straight line for us in terms of headcount growth. What we saw certainly last year, there was continued recruitment of sales, but an increased recruitment on the technical side of our business, so we can provide our customers with an ever-increasing level of technical services and support services.

So we would not expect that level of recruitment to be the case in the coming year. That would be -- it is higher than average, but mainly because the desire to high more technical people last year. So we're building a business really that's going to be supporting our customers for the next 3 to 5 years. So hopefully that answers your question, Alex.

[Hoa Nguyen, analyst]

Yes, yes. It did. And then I think the last one would be about share-based payment charge. I note in the statement that you did say, if my employees participate in the scheme, the charge would increase. But can we get a sense of how much of that will be on a sustainable basis? Like right now, I think it's around 7% of the adjusted profit line.

[Andrew Holden, executive]

So Alex, what we are rolling out is obviously, we've been listed for just over 2 years with our first broad-based participation in our share plans happening in 2021, the second round in 2022 and the third round would be now in 2023. So what I would say is that after the full year of taking the third issue of the share plans, we would reach what is sort of call it maturity and that would stop growing at that space, and then be more equal year-on-year as we take out, we put back in sort of thing.

[Operator]

We'll now go to James Zaremba calling from Barclays.

[James Zaremba, analyst]

Three questions, please. Firstly, your NPS, which was up quite a lot at 77, are there any changes you made this year you can call out that support this improvement? Secondly, just on headcount. You started the year in quite a tight labor market. I was just wondering how retention progressed for the year and how that was versus your expectations? And then lastly, on operational leverage, again, quite impressive. Can you elaborate on the investments you're making in systems to improve user experience and drive those efficiencies?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Thanks, James. Just on the NPS side, no real fundamental changes. But as you know, both MDs of both operations have put a high degree of focus on not just our satisfaction but customer satisfaction and customer service. And we both know, James, that with our customers, we can't employ anybody. So we recognize that they're at the center of our business. So -- but no fundamental changes, fine-tuning our offerings and improving step-by-step as we go.

As far as retention is concerned, we're very happy with the level of attrition that we have in the business. It's remained quite constant, actually, even throughout the sort COVID and post-COVID period and is averaging about 15 -- the attrition rate is currently running at about 15%. And we're certainly managing to hold on to our key staff. You'll recall the metric that I often churn out about our top performers, and it's fair to say that we still have only lost 1 of our top 50 sales performers in the last 7 years now. So we're very happy with that. And I'll just defer to Andrew on the question about the AOP to GP metric.

[Andrew Holden, executive]

So I think the last question was more around the investments into IT. And so the investments into IT spread across our own IP. So License Dashboard, Quantum for Azure and Quantum for M365, those Neil already mentioned. And then at half year, we did mention sort of an investment both in people and in IT into the CSP billing environment, which we completed. And that's very much to do with our growth in the CSP side and the transaction volume that we see.

And then the last bit is towards the end of the calendar year last year when we started a project to create our consolidation and reporting platform at group level. And that's gone well. That goes live later on in May, hopefully, towards the end of May and then we'll be using it at half year for our reporting and consolidation.

[James Zaremba, analyst]

Actually, I just have one follow-up, Andrew. In your statement, you noted about moving new customers to direct billing on CSP. Is that something of kind of a 2-year view, you would have moved all customers over to? And all that kind of resolves the challenges you faced in the last year or so?

[Andrew Holden, executive]

James, that would more be the, call it, the smaller customers, and that would help us just from a transaction volume inquiry space. The larger customers that are consuming sort of big invoicing on a monthly basis would probably not move to direct debit because they would want some sort of governance and the control of elements.

[Operator]

And now we'll go to Julian Yates calling from Investec.

[Julian Yates, analyst]

Just got a couple. You talked about the 20% to 25% sort of addressable market within your customer base. Could you just talk a little bit about, I guess, what proportion of your customers do you think are there and the dynamics of pushing that higher in some instances? I appreciate you've got a very [indiscernible] would be truly interesting in terms of what you actually see is realistic in that sort of sense. And secondly, cybersecurity has been sort of pockets of weakness in terms of a bit overstocked in some areas. Clearly from your comments, you're not seeing that at all.

And are you having to sort of navigate a little bit in terms of your portfolio across different vendors? Or you're basically seeing strength across the board within cyber. And just the last one on -- just on the numbers, really, in terms of OpEx and investment into your, I guess, sales force and marketing et cetera, what should we think about that in terms of sort of [ going to a more ] percentage increases as you go into the year? And can you, I guess, be a little bit of [ the flex ], up or down as we go through the year?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Thanks, Julian. So on the first question then about wallet share. And you know, we estimated wallet share of between 20% and 25% on average. And you're absolutely right. With some of our clients, that will be 80%, 90-odd percent. And with others, it might be 1% or 2%. And we see a huge opportunity for growth just trying to expand that wallet share with existing customers. And we would hope that we can push up the proportion of customers moving beyond the 20%, 25% quite considerably over the next few years. And that is a very big focus for our sales management team.

I think as far as cybersecurity is concerned, we've seen a broad increase in opportunity and sales across all of our vendors. And I'm trying to think of one where we haven't seen growth. So we've navigated it pretty well. We're seeing sort of multilayered approach for cybersecurity in our client base with sort of multiple technologies being introduced in order to provide additional defense and security for corporates and public sector.

And I suppose by the nature of what we're doing, which is pretty much Software-as-a-Service annuity-based software, these contracts tend to be renewed annually. So we're not seeing sort of peaks and troughs of demand as such. So I think we're seeing broad-based strength in that area. Certainly, that's been supported again by what we've seen so far this year. And then Andrew, would you cover off the third one?

[Julian Yates, analyst]

Mind if I ask a follow-up [indiscernible] one on your comments on the 20%, 25% and pushing it beyond that in like a strong [ Turkish ] area. Who are you displacing in that sort -- or who would you be displacing in that sort of aspiration to get beyond that in many of your accounts?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Yes. It's a real mixture here because as we widen the portfolio of vendors that we're taking on and promoting we're not necessarily displacing other competitors. We're just adding to our portfolio and selling more to our clients who would otherwise not be looking at some of these solutions.

So it's a mixture of that. Undoubtedly, there's a bit of share shift. Share shifts going on between us and some of the other big resellers is -- that happens every year.

And then I think if you look at the long tail of small resellers that exist out in the market, some of them are unable to provide some of the services and products we sell because they don't have the technical capability, particularly if you look at AWS or Azure. And so I think most of the big resellers will be taking a bit of market share from the hundreds of very small resellers that exist up and down the U.K. and Ireland.

[Andrew Holden, executive]

And then Julian, your last question was sort of the guidance on the headcount growth, what we've seen over the last...

[Julian Yates, analyst]

Yes. It was sort of bring that in together in terms of overall OpEx sort of numbers and how flexible that is and your thoughts on how you're going to manage that.

[Andrew Holden, executive]

Yes. So Neil mentioned the sort of the growth in the headcount, some of it going into cost of sales and that we don't do ahead of the curve. We really do it on the back of customer demand and growing in line. So there's no real risk there. And then on the headcount growth within our administrative cost, because we've got such a large portion of our increase based on variable income, so those are the sales and the sales-support environment, those would track sort of equal to the GP growth because people earn a percentage of what they're responsible for.

And then because we've backfilling in the lower environment -- lower junior staff as people progress through the organization, we think we've got a sort of leverage there if we need to. We simply just stop hiring for a while, but we are investing sort of 2 to 3 years ahead of the curve on the sell side. So I think in general terms, what we are about is to keep that sort of AOP to GP in line with the conversion rate. So that means we won't be spending more than what our GP growth is.

[Operator]

We'll now go to Tintin Stormont of Numis.

[Maria Stormont, analyst]

Most of my questions have been answered. But in terms of Cloud Bridge Technologies, could you just give us a bit of background in terms of their customer base, who they typically serve, and in situations where somebody is looking at a cloud solution, how do you sort of kind of foresee balancing sort of kind of that AWS practice with obviously the Azure sort of side of the business?

And then just of -- a bit of a different flavor to the 20%, 25% share of wallet question, is that essentially overlaid with the existing vendor exposure you already have? Or do you feel that to really push that on the 20%, 25%, there's particular vendors that you may have some sort of relationship with, but you need to kind of invest more to get it up the curve to sort of kind of rightfully take the share of spend in that particular vendor?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Tintin, so as far as the Cloud Bridge investment is concerned, yes, they're entirely AWS focused, and we've been partnering with them actually for about 4 -- more than 4 years now. And so the business is already used to dealing with them. Their client base is actually our client base and where they get incremental clients, it's by direct reference from AWS.

And so where we have an international client, for example, who is looking for an AWS solution, because Cloud Bridge have offices in the UAE and Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, they become the go-to partner for anything that we have from an AWS perspective. So a tried and tested relationship and...

[Maria Stormont, analyst]

Is it more corporate or public sector?

[Neil Murphy, executive]

It's mostly corporate, although there are some high-profile public sector customers in there, but it is mostly corporate. And then the balance with the Azure business, it's pretty easy for us because if you think about it, anything to do with Microsoft is dealt with internally at Bytes. When we have AWS technical opportunities, we will use Cloud Bridge to provide those services and the technical expertise. So there's a very clear demarcation for us there. And Azure and Microsoft Cloud is by far and away, the most strategic of the 2 for us. We see AWS clearly as a potential growth area, we've doubled our gross profit with AWS in the past year and we see considerable growth going forward, but it is from a much smaller base.

And then if you look at the 20% to 25% wallet share, yes, I think what you will see for us to increase that considerably over time, we would need to sell other vendors' products, and we've mentioned some of them on the call and during the presentation, certainly, if you look at say Cisco and IBM, but also we're doing more with some of the hardware vendors this past year with Dell, for example.

So our sales force will be broadening out the portfolio of products they're selling on the hardware side, and that will be a sort of a natural progression in terms of how we manage our customers and our clients. So I would expect that to grow organically through the expansion of our existing vendor partnerships, but also with the addition of some of those newer, more embryonic relationships that we have going forward.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a follow-up question now from Damindu Jayaweera of Peel Hunt.

[Damindu Jayaweera, analyst]

Just 2 clarification questions on Microsoft. When Andrew mentioned the exposure of 20%, is that including Microsoft cybersecurity business, which is, I realize, is now enormous at GBP 20 billion run rate.

[Andrew Holden, executive]

Yes. Damindu, it's very difficult to split out the Microsoft security space. So what I looked at -- you mentioned the GBP 20 billion. The GBP 20 billion on Microsoft's turnover is roughly 10%. So I've taken that 10% and applied that to our Microsoft sales. So that's why I mentioned the nature of our Microsoft sales. And then including then all the -- the security-focused vendors, I get to that sort of estimate of north of the 20% contribution to our GP.

[Damindu Jayaweera, analyst]

Right. The -- actually, related to Microsoft, what I noted in the last 6 months, there was a case study in the U.K. about how 3 of the group went from 10 security events and just dealing with Microsoft [indiscernible] sort of you see around the U.K. including at Peel Hunt with our teams [ seem to be replacing ]. Among those vendors, is Microsoft still relatively fast growing? Not in -- obviously, not in percentage terms, sorry for that, but in terms of the amount of gross profit at [indiscernible]. It's fair to say Microsoft continues to grow relatively fast across all your vendors? Or are others like, for example, AWS in fact is relatively newer relationship over the last 4 years [ joined faster ]. Or perhaps you might -- I just wanted to ask the question.

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Thanks, Damindu. It's a pretty poor line. But from what I caught there. Yes, you're going to get some customers like the one you referenced there, where they've migrated from 10 different cyber vendors to 1 vendor. And for every one of those, you'll probably get a customer going the other way as well. But it's fair to say that Microsoft's security stack has expanded quite considerably over the last few years, and I would expect that to continue to do so.

But in terms of its growth compared to some of the other cyber vendors' growth, I think they all seem to be growing in double digits in that regard. And so you're going to get sort of broad-based growth and different customers will apply different strategies to their security stance. You referenced one and indeed yourselves there. So that's 2. But given that there are 45,000 organizations out there in the U.K., I guess they all have slightly different strategies and plans when it comes to cyber defenses. But the one thing is for certain that we're seeing certainly is the strong growth, whether it's Microsoft or most of the cyber vendors that we see and we work with.

[Operator]

As we have no further questions, I'll turn the call back over to Mr. Neil Murphy for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you.

[Neil Murphy, executive]

Thanks, everybody, for joining the call today. We look forward to catching up with some of you individually in the next few weeks. You know where we are if you have some further questions or you can deal though our PR company, Headland, and thank you very much for attending the call today.