Micro Focus Intl PLC (MFGP) Q2 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Image source: The Motley Fool.

Micro Focus Intl PLC (MFGP)
Q2 2021 Earnings Call
Jul 1, 2021, 7:30 a.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Ben Donnelly -- Head of Investor Relations

Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. This earnings call covers the six month period to the 30th of April 2021. I'm joined today by Stephen Murdoch, our Chief Executive Officer; and Matt Ashley, our new Chief Financial Officer.

In a moment, Stephen will provide a short presentation about our performance in the period. The slides for the presentation will be presented as part of the webcast facility accompanying this call. For those participating by phone, the webcast and the slides can be accessed through the front page of the Investor Relations section of the Micro Focus website. After the short presentation, we look forward to covering as many of your questions as we have time for. A recording of this call and the slides will be available shortly after this call finishes.

I would now like to hand over to Stephen to provide an overview of our performance in the last six months.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Ben. As today is Matt's first day as CFO, I will be covering both the financial and operational elements of today's call. The first six months of FY '21 have been another period of solid progress as we deliver on the recovery plan we shared with you all 18 months ago. I will provide more detail in the coming slides. But in summary, we generated revenues of $1.4 billion in the first half, which represents a constant currency decline of 4.6% year-over-year. This compares to a consensus view of approximately 7% decline. This combined with a cost and efficiency actions resulted in an adjusted EBITDA of 36.4% compared to 35.7% consensus. Our cash performance in the period was in line with our expectations with free cash flow totaling $139.5 million in the first six months. Free cash flow this year is being impacted materially by a number of one-time events, and I will therefore provide additional detail later in the presentation.

We've had a very positive period in terms of building collaborative partnerships with other key players in the industry. Notably, the strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services and exciting new agreements with Microsoft Azure, Dell EMC and Snowflake. These partnerships demonstrate the value our technology brings in complementing the offerings of some of the largest technology companies in the world, such that together we deliver more complete solutions for customers as well as representing additional growth opportunities for the Company. I am delighted to confirm that we've now transitioned the business onto a single unified IT platform as planned. We moved the first group of employees in January and transitioned the remaining 60% of our people to the new systems in June. This is a critical step for the Company and another significant proof point in the execution of our plan.

And finally, we confirm that we will pay an interim dividend of $0.088 per share, consistent with our policy of paying a dividend which is covered by approximately 5 times adjusted earnings. To summarize, we're pleased with another period of solid progress in most areas of our business. The product investments and operational changes we are making are beginning to deliver performance improvements and our value propositions are increasingly resonating with customers and partners.

I now want to spend some time providing more detail on our financial performance, firstly, focusing on revenue. To do this, I thought it would be most useful to look both by stream and product portfolio. So on the left hand side of the slide, you will see revenue performance by product group and then on the right, we have provided analysis by stream. Clearly, the timing of the onset of COVID-19 last year had an impact on seasonality. But despite this, underlying progress was good. We're very pleased to return to growth in license with revenue growing almost double-digit in the period. Clearly an initial step, but significant and encouraging. Sales execution was strong with key metrics such as sales conversion rate being 3 percentage points to 4 percentage points higher than previous periods with improvements being broad based and a number of key customer transactions closing earlier than expected through better customer engagement. Maintenance revenue declined by 8%. This was below our expectations, and what we believe is attainable. This remains a critical priority for the Company. But we have been consistent that this will take multiple periods to fix.

We've a comprehensive action plan in place to deliver this. It is broad-based, but also prioritized on the four sub portfolios that are most impacted. I will spend more time discussing the action plans for improving performance here and specifically customer retention later in the presentation. SaaS revenue declined by 5.4%, but the trajectory continues to improve and we're now starting to see an improvement in the underlying metrics we use to run our SaaS business. This gives us confidence that revenue performance will continue to improve. Consulting revenue is now trending flat on a sequential basis versus H2 FY '20. More importantly, this part of our business is now well positioned to deliver the type of projects which add value to customers through supporting faster, more effective deployment of our software.

Now turning to product group performance. In EMC, the big change is the new strategic partnership with AWS. This agreement and the mainframe modernization opportunity more broadly give us confidence that our EMC product group can deliver sustainable revenue growth well into the future. This particular agreement will not generate product revenues until the back end of FY '22 and we'll ramp each year thereafter. At this stage, we're limited in what we can discuss, but we look forward to providing more detail later this calendar year.

Looking beyond the AWS agreement, the mainframe modernization market is increasing in size and maturity. We already maintain a thought leadership position and we believe the opportunity here is significant. Secondly, security. In aggregate, we are pleased with the progress made in the period. We delivered growth across the majority of the portfolio, but there remains one key area which is providing a headwind, particularly in terms of maintenance renewal performance. This is a primary focal point for the actions I will cover later. In the last 12 months, we've made extensive changes to the product and added new SaaS capabilities. We now have a comprehensive and competitive portfolio and are increasingly confident in our ability to drive growth here, which we are seeking to accelerate into FY '22.

Our IM&G portfolio is made up of three distinct parts, including our Big Data solutions. So, focusing on Big Data, we have begun the shift to subscription based revenue models and have launched our as-a-Service solution, which again strengthens the competitiveness of our product. We are encouraged by progress, but now need to accelerate.

In ADM, we have made progress, but are still performing below our expectations. Improving performance in maintenance and returning SaaS to growth are the key priorities in this portfolio. We've made progress in SaaS in terms of product development and in modernizing our delivery infrastructure to improve scalability, security and reduce total cost of ownership. This has enabled us to begin to transition the delivery of the solution to be public cloud-based with all new bookings being on this new infrastructure. Leadership changes, improvements to the product portfolio and our SaaS offerings give us a foundation from which to drive improved performance.

Finally, ITOM, where we have seen a material improvement in the rate of decline year-on-year. Encouragingly, we delivered growth in new license sales across the majority of the portfolio, but remain focused on improving maintenance performance as the critical imperative. We've made a number of leadership changes in the first quarter. And while still early days, we are seeing improvements in operational effectiveness and overall product positioning. We are cognizant that the compare here is weak, but the customer wins and associated feedback that underpin the stronger performance demonstrates that when we execute well, the products remain central to our customers' IT infrastructure. Overall, we feel more positive about the portfolio now than we did 12 months ago.

In summary, we have increasing levels of conviction that at a group level we can deliver on our revenue growth ambitions. This will be underpinned by growth in our AMC, IM&G and security portfolios, combined with a continued focus on moderating decline rates in ADM at ITOM.

Turning now to Slide 8. Alongside the improved revenue trajectory, we reduced our cost base by 2.6% net, while also funding the increased investments in product previously communicated. The focus here was simplification and removal of inefficient structure and as a result, on a gross basis, we've removed approximately $70 million of cost. We have further opportunity here that we will pursue at pace once we can leverage the new systems. The combination of revenue and cost actions delivered an adjusted EBITDA performance of $519 million, which represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 36.4%. Exceptional costs within the income statement totaled $143 million, within which the two largest components are the IT spend on the new systems of $29 million and $75 million provision in respect of the Wapp patent infringement dispute. The remaining exceptional spend relates to our integration programs and the restructuring of the Group as previously communicated.

Turning now to cash. Micro Focus continues to be a highly cash generative business. However, in FY '21, this is being suppressed by a number of one-off cash outflows and some timing differences within working capital. To demonstrate the impact, I want to provide a bridge from our free cash flow in the first half of FY '20 to the amount we generated in this period. In addition, there is further detail included as an appendix to this presentation. In H1 '20, we generated $305 million of free cash flow and $140 million in H1 '21. There are two key factors impacting this change. Firstly, we had a $63 million swing in our working capital, excluding the impact of exceptional items in the period. In the previous financial year, we focused on the collection of aged receivables and there was an element of catch up here, which totaled approximately $28 million, which obviously does not repeat.

Secondly, we have made some material cash payments, which are not expected to repeat, specifically a $33 million payment for U.S. payroll taxes which related to previous periods and a further $44 million in respect of the EU stated tax ruling in the U.K. Together with a number of other U.K. companies, this is subject to appeal and our current expectation is that this will reverse once the appeal process is complete. Finally, we have the remaining exceptional spend. In H1 '21, in cash terms, this reduced by $27 million when compared to the first half of last year and will reduce further as the integration programs come to an end. In total, our cash cost for exceptional spend in the period was $63 million after adjusting for the tax benefit of these items. On the right hand side of this graph, we have presented an adjusted free cash flow number of $247 million, which takes the impact of exceptional items and EU state aid into account and we believe provides a more accurate representation of the underlying free cash flows of the business.

Further, this number does not include the payroll tax payments I mentioned previously, which are also not expected to repeat in future periods. In the second half of FY '21, we expect to continue to face headwinds in free cash flow as we conclude the remaining aged issues that are one-off relating to tax, deal with any potential developments in the Wapp patent dispute and manage through potential operational impacts as we ramp the new systems. I would like to finish this slide by reiterating that the delivery of sustainable levels of free cash flow is a key strength of the business. The current year's cash performance includes the settling of a number of historical one-off items. Going forward, our expectation is that we will remain a highly cash-generative business.

The final financial slide covers the Group's gross debt and leverage profile. Since October 2019, we've reduced our net debt in absolute terms by approximately $500 million. Our leverage on the 30th of April 2021 was 3.6 times. A reduction in leverage over the medium term remains a key target, but this will increase in the short term due to the impact of the one-off cash flow items I have referenced earlier. As a reminder, the next tranche of our debt is not due for repayment until June 2024.

In this next section, I will cover the key operational priorities for the next several periods as we continue the execution of our plans. In February 2020, we provided a summary of our turnaround plan. Since then, we've made significant progress against this plan and have multiple proof points to demonstrate this. Last year, we successfully delivered the first stage of our Go-To-Market transformation and made significant investments in certain areas of our portfolio. In addition, we invested in our SaaS infrastructure to ensure that we had an appropriate platform from which to build. In the first six months of FY '21, we've continued to deliver against our overall plan, accelerating wherever possible. The investments made to reposition certain portfolios for growth are delivering encouraging proof points, albeit with challenges remaining. In addition, we've continued our Go-To-Market transformation plans with a restructured approach to customer coverage. As we begin to look forward to 2022, our digital transformation program will complete. This will provide the platform for delivering significant efficiencies and productivity improvements. By the time we exit FY '22, we intend for this progress to lead to an end-to-end customer engagement model that ensures we deploy resources effectively to maximize customer impact and hence, business performance.

Turning to Slide 13, I have four key operational priorities for the business. Firstly, improving the overall effectiveness in Go-To-Market. In the first half, both the overall level and the consistency of our sales execution continued to improve. There remains a great deal of opportunity for further improvement. But the changes we have made in leadership, the realignment of our organization to sharpen focus on specialization at the product level, and the development of a consistent approach globally are beginning to have positive impacts on performance. We now need to build on this with continued focus on delivering consistently high levels of execution, improvements in sales productivity and further increases in sales specialism by product portfolio.

Secondly, optimizing the IT platform and simplifying business operations to deliver efficiencies. As I said earlier, we have now transition to our new IT platform. This is a really important milestone for the business and fundamental to our long-term plans. We're in the early days of go live and projects of this scope and scale typically take between six months to nine months to ramp to full operational effectiveness at which point, we will be able to begin removing the duplicative costs within the business. We have robust plans in place to manage through the unavoidable disruption to our business in the near term and are fully focused on delivering what we expect to be an excellent operational foundation from which to build improved business agility and provide greater strategic flexibility.

I want to spend more time on the next two priorities; recurring revenue, which is where I will focus on actions to improve maintenance renewals, and finally on delivering product innovation. So turning to Slide 14. What are we doing to improved levels of recurring revenue in the business? Firstly, there will be a natural moderation, driven by revenue mix as we grow in key areas and arrest declines in others. Looking beyond that to the proactive actions we are taking, then there are three key focus areas. Firstly, our license revenue helps support maintenance performance over the long term. We have just delivered growth here and need to sustain this. Similarly with SaaS, we are concluding the repositioning work and are focused on delivering growth next year.

Finally, improving customer retention rates. This is an area where we need to deliver progress and I now want to take you through the actions in more detail. On Slide 15, you can see the key actions and longer-term initiatives we are executing to deliver improvements in customer retention rates as a key driver of overall maintenance performance. I want to start by reiterating that while this program is being executed across each portfolio, it is also being targeted and actions prioritized to specific hotspots at the sub portfolio level and again targeted to the specific reasons why customers are choosing not to renew. The actions you see on this page are a combination of transformational change and more specific targeted execution improvements.

Starting at the base, as part of our Go-To-Market transformation, we have made comprehensive changes in leadership and in organization and recruiting new talent dedicated to this area. We have also changed compensation structures, so that a broader base of sales leadership and the account managers dedicated to our major customers are also now remunerated in par based on improvement in retention rates. These changes combined with our new customer success organization are designed to ensure we are consistently delivering the highest levels of customer service.

More specifically, we have two priorities; helping customers upgrade to the latest version of our products and ensuring we have deeper levels of specialist skill deployed to the right customer situations. Getting customers onto the latest versions of our product or version currency for short hand is particularly important, given the changes we have made to the products over the last 18 months. For example, a customer who is multiple versions back will not benefit from the extensive improvements made to the products ranging, for example, in terms of cloud deployment options or all of the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities we've introduced. Put bluntly, this means these customers are at risk when comparing their existing but outdated versions of the product to competitive alternatives. Upgrading to the latest versions can provide all of these new capabilities at a fraction of the cost and risk of a replacement strategy.

This program is in its infancy, but we've seen good examples where this focus supported by small investments of professional services have led to material incremental new business as customers see and appreciate the new products and look to take advantage of what are often an extensive range of new capabilities. Product specialism is about ensuring our renewals team can position the product and the benefits effectively for customers. This means that customers are better informed on up and coming releases and our longer term product roadmaps, both of which are key in their decision making process when they're considering making a change. It is also a really important enabler of the version currency program I talked about a moment ago.

The final two are more transformational to the way we operate and will deliver benefits over the longer term. Maintenance modernization means ensuring we're using the latest technology innovation to improve customer retention. This can be summarized as making it easier for customers to renew through the provision of auto renew or click to renew capabilities and we're looking to build these into our offerings and ultimately allow for this to be automated within our new systems.

Finally, SaaS. In FY '21, we've continued to invest in SaaS infrastructure to improve service delivery and hence renewal rates. Additionally, we've begun to lead with SaaS in certain parts of the portfolio and in FY '22, intend to go SaaS-only in a number of areas. This will allow us to offer alternative paths for customers as they evaluate their future strategies.

In summary, the issues are understood. We have comprehensive action plans in place and expect a moderation in the rate of maintenance revenue decline to be delivered as a result, but top line improvements will take time to come through. The goal is now to accelerate this.

Before I finish on outlook, I would like to talk about our customers. When we execute well, our approach to digital transformation resonate strongly with customers. We are seen as a trusted partner, committed to helping them deal with the challenge of simultaneously both running and transforming the business. This means reducing running costs, while improving levels of cyber resilience and investing in the latest innovation to exploit new opportunities or new business models. Our product development prioritizes enabling customers to build on their existing investments, while exploiting the innovation we're delivering through expanded capabilities in cloud and artificial intelligence, which you can see across all of our portfolios from the AWS partnership and application modernization through to the launch of Vertica as a service. In cyber resilience, we delivered new SaaS capabilities and key partnerships on data security and privacy solutions as well as new partnerships in Big Data analytics.

Some of the world's largest organizations rely on our products to run and transform the business. For them, we're focused on, accelerating the delivery of new business applications, simplifying operations to reduce cost and improve flexibility, turning analytics into insight and action, and in this increasingly complex online world, helping customers build comprehensive cyber resilience. When we execute well, our approach to digital transformation resonates strongly with both customers and partners and we need to ensure that this is more broadly and consistently understood.

Turning now to outlook. Revenue stabilization remains our most important business objective. In this financial year, we remain on track for material improvements in revenue trajectory year-on-year and in line with current consensus. We remain committed to achieving our objective of revenue stabilization as we exit financial year 2023. To deliver against this goal, we are targeting incremental improvements in revenue trajectory annually and our confidence in being able to deliver this continues to improve.

With that, I will now hand over to the operator to open up for questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from the line of Gautam Pillai from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Gautam Pillai -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst

Okay. Thanks so much for taking my question. Two if I may. I think the first one on the strategic partnerships and when we have seen a bunch of them in the last six months, including AWS, Snowflake and you also call out Azure and Dell partnerships in the release. You did mention in your prepared remarks that the AWS partnership is going to ramp up from the back half of 2022. Can you talk about the other partnerships and how significant those are and also how important is it to kind of be in these partnerships for Micro Focus in the -- going forward? And if you could just kind of give us some color on the pipeline along those would be great.

My second question is on the free cash flow. Clearly, you have pretty strong underlying cash generation, which is significantly impacted by some of the exceptional charges, working capital items. When we think about and look forward into 2022 and beyond, is it a fair comment to make that 2021 will see the trough in terms of free cash flow, especially from an exception standpoint and from next year onwards, we should start to see fade off -- significant fade off in the exceptional costs?

A related question to that would be the $70 million charge you talk about the dropped patent suit. Is that -- kind of give a color if that's going to be booked from a cash standpoint in FY '21 or is it going to happen next year? Thank you.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Hi, Gautam. Let's do the cash one first. The Wapp settlement, this Wapp provision is a provision. It's not a settlement. It will -- if we settle, it will turn to cash at that point, but obviously, I can't comment beyond that. In terms of the exceptional unwind, yes, we expect that to occur during the next 15 months, 16 months as we talked about. So we do expect to see '22 and '23 cash flows benefit from that unwind.

In terms of partnerships, the range from really strategic collaborative go-to-market, which is the AWS end of the spectrum through to really interesting technology complementary partnerships, if you want to think about it that way, so with Snowflake for example, it's data encryption, data security portfolio that Snowflake are putting around their offering to enhance their levels of data security and data privacy as they go to market with their product. With Dell EMC, similar to previous agreements with people like Pure Storage, it's about the Big Data analytics power of separate and compute and storage. And what that basically means non-technically is that you can deliver cloud-scale economics on premise with Dell EMC arrays or some of the other storage already in the marketplace. So that just gives customers a real total cost of ownership opportunity under real flexibility in terms of where they deploy. And we have extensive partnerships across the board with Microsoft. The one I referenced here is to do with, again, data privacy and collaborations there. So really important piece of the puzzle, very significant endorsement of our innovation and our ability to collaborate and partner, and we think an important element of our go-forward plans and strategies.

Gautam Pillai -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst

Great. Thank you so much.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Gautam.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Briest from UBS. Please go ahead.

Michael Briest -- UBS -- Analyst

Yeah. Thanks and afternoon, Stephen and Ben. Just on the margin progression, I mean, I think previously there wasn't a hope to get to mid-40s margin by 2023 or exiting 2023. Can you give a sense of -- I appreciate it's a while away, but whether the consensus of sub-40% is too conservative in your view or given the investments and the time it takes to fix some of these issues around maintenance for instance, the consensus is sort of on track? And then related -- well not related to that, but leadership changes you mentioned a few times, can you give any quantum of the magnitude of departures at a particular rank or within particular divisions. And then finally just on those four problem product areas, could you maybe give a sense of how significant they are within the revenues today either within just maintenance or within the total revenue pool? Thanks.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Hi, Michael. We're not backing off a tall margin progression over the Midtown [Phonetic]. Clearly, when we talked about that last year and there's not been a change here, we require the stability of the revenues first and then the delivery of the operational efficiencies so we get leverage across both of them. So we need to put -- I would say, we need to put a few more of those proof points on the board before we should be talking out in '23 about any changes and we're still committed to getting that done. So, I would say, no change at the moment to any of that, Michael.

In terms of leadership, basically, we have new leadership across two of the key portfolios in the business. We've made extensive additions in the maintenance renewals, customer success area to get more senior and fresh perspective and talent over those. We've brought in industry skills and leadership into our security business at the sub-portfolio level and now have dedicated people there. We've obviously got a new CFO, which I'm delighted to have on board. And more broadly within the sales organization, we'll replace country leadership in a number of countries and a number of other quite significant roles, a level underneath my direct reports if you want to think about it that way.

Michael Briest -- UBS -- Analyst

And on the product portfolio?

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Yes. On the product portfolios, the -- basically, you can see when they place [Phonetic] out when you look at the overall maintenance performance. Yeah, I'm not going to be drawn into specifics on which portfolios because it's very commercially sensitive. What I can say to you is that the actions I talked about earlier, a broadened application in a number of areas, but also very specifically targeted on to those four sub-portfolios, each of which has a slightly different -- something significantly different set of challenges and dynamics to fix and hence the execution's precise. Those challenges range from use case driven, so how the product's being used through to what I referenced on the call -- my prepared remarks earlier rather in terms of version currency. So, I would encourage you to look at the overall the progress and traction against the issues rather than go down into the sub-portfolios.

Michael Briest -- UBS -- Analyst

Can you say how much of maintenance they represent or...

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Well, you can see from the performance. It's clearly a significant proportion of the maintenance base is reflected in those portfolios. So correcting it will have a material impact.

Michael Briest -- UBS -- Analyst

All right, thank you.

Operator

There are currently no questions in the queue. [Operator Instructions] And the next question comes from the line of Julian Serafini from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Julian Serafini -- Jefferies -- Analyst

Thank you. So I have two questions for you. One is just on the revenue guidance that you mentioned, right, that the guidance for revenue was -- for this year was somewhere around the consensus numbers today. I mean, that would imply a bit of deceleration I think in your license revenue for the second half of the year. Can you help us reconcile that a little bit given the, I guess, rebound we saw in the first half of the year? Is that a bit of conservatism or is there something else going on?

And then number two is just on the SaaS portfolio, I mean, can you discuss a little bit what are the underlying metrics you said that you see are improving and what parts of the portfolio are you -- think it will be really primarily SaaS-only in the future? Thank you.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, on the revenue trajectory, Julian, all I would say is look at the year as a whole. Yeah, last year was such an odd year, but seasonality is not necessarily relevant and we've also been pretty clear that either side of the lane in a financial period with a few transactions moving one way or the other, SKUs one period at the expense of another period. So I would underscore we feel absolutely fine about consensus for the year. And I wouldn't get over-indexed on one period versus the other.

In terms of SaaS, the key metrics are pretty, pretty standard. So it's bookings, renewal rates, and customer satisfaction -- kind of three big things, the big things I would count. Alongside that, we have more project-oriented metrics because we're repositioning quite a number of the portfolio, we're rearchitecting the public cloud. So got a series of metrics of progress against that, that obviously, once the work is complete, those will fall away. And I would say the second half of what I've just said there in terms of repositioning were broadly complete in quite a number of areas and it's really about then execution, enhancement, sales coverage where -- well, we have SaaS or subscription capabilities in every single portfolio. We have in our mainframe solutions capabilities in EMC that are subscription-based. We have very strong SaaS capability in our ADM portfolio. We've launched new offerings and security, which we're getting really good traction with early over the box, if you want to think about it that way. And in the Big Data solutions we're transitioning to a subscription-led model and a SaaS-led model there. So, in terms of portfolio, where we see most of it? Big Data, ADM and then pieces [Phonetic] of each of the other portfolios.

Julian Serafini -- Jefferies -- Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks. Thanks, Julian.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of George O'Connor from Stifel. Please go ahead.

George O'Connor -- Stifel -- Analyst

Well, hi there, good afternoon and thank you for taking my questions. If you don't mind, three very quick ones for me. Stephen, you mentioned back level users. Any idea in terms of how much technical debt there is there? So what is the license potentially if you could get a certain number of the back level users on to current levels? And then secondly, you mentioned retention rates as a -- to do area. Just wondered if you can give us any clarity in terms of what the average maintenance renewal rate looks like at the moment? And then thirdly, nice to see SaaS on your to-do list. Is this not an excellent time to move customers from license to SaaS? And if not, from a sort of an apps delivery standpoint, then at least from a financial standpoint to build better annuity into the business? Thank you very much.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, SaaS. There is no question that building a proper SaaS revenue stream here was a really significant part of our plans to improve overall levels of recurring revenue. We're being very targeted in how we do that, George, for a couple of reasons. One, we're evolving our product strategy and we're driving our execution alongside the evolution of that product strategy. And secondly, we have a customer base that typically operates in a hybrid world and doesn't one size fits all or one answer only. They don't want a cloud-only answer. They might want a cloud-first answer, but they don't want a cloud-only answer. And we're just being targeted and working our way through that and providing flexibility to have either, both, or a blend.

In terms of retention rates, what I'd say, George, is they're not good enough in too many places across the portfolio and we believe we've got a very significant opportunity to improve those. We've pockets of real strength in terms of renewal rates, but we've got significant opportunities in other areas and we've got some areas outperforming exactly how we expect them to. So that blend of opportunity that is significant and fundamental to our plans to return the business back to growth.

In terms of the technical debt, probably not the right term. There isn't technical debt in the product, no. What we have is a backlog of people who are not taking advantage of that new capability and functionality. It's almost impossible to quantify other nine [Phonetic], very significant if we could move a reasonable proportion of people to current versions. And one of the big advantages of the Company is we'll protect customers for the long-term. So we don't force them off of products to suit us. So it's a kind of double-edged sword here as we move them to take advantage of the new innovation and technology, but move them at a pace that's appropriate for their business and that's the balance we're trying to find. Both prioritized to those people that would consider an alternative strategy if we don't get them to the latest fashion of the product, either because they need some functionality that isn't in the new product -- isn't in the old product and we don't know we can get it in an upgraded version. So it's really an amalgam of all of those things, George.

George O'Connor -- Stifel -- Analyst

Great stuff. Thank you very much.

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Marion Rosenberg from Barings. Please go ahead.

Marion Rosenberg -- Barings -- Analyst

Hello. And I just had a question on the working capital point that you raised in your free cash flow pitch. I was wondering if in H2, we should also expect some non kind of the fact that there was a catch-up effect in H2 last year that wouldn't recur here as well.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Hi, Marion. Yes, you're exactly right. So last year, in general, when it comes to the trade receivables balance throughout the year, we collected a lot of aged receivables and there's an element of catch-up there. And so, you would expect that not to repeat in the second half. If you think about working capital in general in the business, it clearly has an element to seasonality to anyway. So typically, we do most of our billings in Q4. So you see strong cash conversion in the first half of the year and then in the second half of the year is slightly lower. So you need to factor in both of those then into your consideration when you're building out your models.

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Will Wallis from Numis. Please go ahead.

Will Wallis -- Numis -- Analyst

Afternoon. Two for me please. Firstly on maintenance. Obviously, this takes quite a while to turn around, but I was wondering if you might give us some idea as to what you think good might look like. What sort of effects can you have on that maintenance trajectory in the second half of the year and then 2022 for example, if things go well with your improving the retention rates? And my second question was to what extent -- in terms of the move to subscription and then SaaS generally, to what extent should we worry about cannibalization or is this really new product areas that doesn't -- you're not switching existing perpetual licenses over?

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

I'll do the second one first. The vast majority of where we're focused on our prioritization is on if you want to think about it net-new opportunity, that doesn't necessarily mean net new customer, but it might mean net new use cases and net new opportunity projects within our existing customer base. So to that extent, we don't expect it to be in any way cannibalistic. There are, of course, areas where customer wants to convey proactively because they have a policy to do that or they're on a strategic path. And there, it's about how do we help them -- how do we help them get that done and make sure we protect both the customer and our long-term revenues and the transition. And there's also some element of potentially defensive play where we may want to proactively move someone because it allows us more certainty of longer-term revenue streams. So, the vast majorities in category one, the minorities in the last category and there's some in the middle.

In terms of maintenance, you're quite right, it takes time to turnaround. This is a complex area with a mix of issues that range from the very specific to broader based and it's tough to actually get headlights at a granular level. So really all the focus we have at the moment is on the actions and our ability to direct traction in the actions if you want to think about it that way. So as I said, comprehensive set of actions, mix of broad application, and much more specific issue focus. We got significantly increased weight over this area now in terms of resources, leadership, the focus of the management system, the amount of incentive that we put out there in people. So we're confident we understand the issues at a pretty detailed level, and that we're taking the right actions. We just need to -- we need to focus now on accelerating traction from them, well, is really the most I can say on it.

Will Wallis -- Numis -- Analyst

Okay, thank you.

Operator

There are currently no questions in the queue. [Operator Instructions] We have no further questions in the queue. So I will hand the call back to your host for any closing remarks.

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, operator. Firstly, thank you to everyone for your engagement on the call and your engagement in some of the conversations we had over the course of this morning. We're really committed to delivering in H2 and continuing the proof points and the execution that we've delivered to date. As I said, we feel very confident about the opportunity for efficiencies and effectiveness that exist in the business and we're going to pursue those at pace just as soon as it's prudent to do so, yeah? And we are increasingly encouraged about the opportunity in the marketplace as our propositions begin to resonate. Obviously, lots of work still in front of us, but equally, a great deal of work behind us, good proof points and a clear plan going forward. Look forward to giving you an update more fully when we report on the full year later this calendar year. Thanks everyone.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]

Duration: 49 minutes

Call participants:

Ben Donnelly -- Head of Investor Relations

Stephen Murdoch -- Chief Executive Officer

Gautam Pillai -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst

Michael Briest -- UBS -- Analyst

Julian Serafini -- Jefferies -- Analyst

George O'Connor -- Stifel -- Analyst

Marion Rosenberg -- Barings -- Analyst

Will Wallis -- Numis -- Analyst

More MFGP analysis

All earnings call transcripts