Good afternoon, and welcome to the Iofina plc investor p resentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question that you see during the meeting itself; however, the company can review all questions submitted today, and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll, and I'll now like to hand you over to Tom Becker, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Thank you very much, and welcome to everybody. I'm Tom Becker, CEO of Iofina, alongside Malcolm Lewin, our CFO, and on behalf of our board and our employees, we welcome everybody to this update in May 2025 on Iofina and its happenings. I want to give a brief indication of what we'll be covering in today's presentation, which includes a general company overview. Not everyone is totally familiar with Iofina and its workings that are on this particular presentation. So we'll give some background on the company, its history, what we do, and why we do it. We just announced our fiscal year 2024 results earlier this week.
We'll go through those a bit in detail and then really get into the meat of the presentation, and that is what we, our business units, what we do, a general idea of the iodine market and its health and growth, and the growth plans that we have as an organization that we've been executing over the last number of years are going to continue to execute here moving forward. Before I get too involved in the presentation, I'll remind everyone of the legal disclaimer and the forward-looking statement, so please review this policy at your discretion. To give everyone an idea of what Iofina is and what Iofina does, is that we are a specialty chemical company based in the United States with all operations.
We specialize in halogen-based chemistries with an emphasis on iodine-based chemistries, but we also deal with chloro and fluoro-based chemistries, other halogens that are in the same group as iodine with similar chemistry sets. We have two business units in the United States: Iofina Chemical and Iofina Resources. Iofina Resources is the iodine production part of our operations. It has iodine extraction plants using our unique technology in the state of Oklahoma, with seven operating plants currently commissioned. We utilize waste brine water from oil and gas fields, so when oil and gas comes up in their production, a lot of brine water also comes up in the production, and it's a waste product for these companies.
We've developed a geological model to identify where commercially available iodine is in these brine streams, and have built seven plants that are operating in the state of Oklahoma to gather iodine using our unique Iofina technology, and we have eight plants under construction right now. We generated over 630 metric tons of iodine last year, and we're the second largest producer in North America and the only one with growing iodine production. The iodine market's a unique growing niche market with some specific demands that continue to grow, and currently, demand for iodine is outpacing supply, so we're in a good position as an iodine producer. We also have vertical integration of our iodine specialty products, and that's where our Iofina Chemical business unit comes into play.
So the iodine that's created at Iofina Resources is pushed into Iofina Chemical, located in the state of Kentucky, produces value-added compounds from the iodine, as well as some chloro and fluoro-based derivatives, but also sells the group's iodine directly around the world. So these are our general business units. We're executing our growth strategy as we move forward, which we'll get into a little bit more in the presentation. And that resulted in another record revenue in fiscal year 2024 and off to a good start in 2025. Why is Iofina unique? We're an iodine producer. We have unique technology that allows us to, as I alluded to a little bit before, take a waste product from oil and gas operations. These brine waters that are co-produced from the hydrocarbons in the state of Oklahoma are separated out by our partners.
So we partner with oil and gas companies, which are currently disposing of the water at saltwater disposal sites. We partner with them to use our technology, build plants at sites where the water congregates, so we see large volumes of water. We borrow the water from our partners, put it through our unique technology, and isolate iodine before we give them back the iodine-extracted brine. We believe we have a unique business model. We're using a waste product. We're more environmentally friendly, in our opinion, than other producers of iodine around the world. And this technology allows us to take these, what I would say, dirtier kind of brine waters (they're not totally cleaned out) and still produce a high-quality iodine product using our Iofina technology. We're not new to this business. We've been creating commercially available iodine for over a decade now, and we have seven plants in operation.
We're an established, profitable company with well-defined technology, and we continue to grow our operations in the United States, and in order to do that, we have a unique geological model to allow for us to know where iodine in brines that are commercially concentrated, the concentration levels which allow us to commercially, economically extract the iodine from. We know where those are, and we are exploring for additional opportunities to build new plants, not only in our core areas of Oklahoma, but beyond those kind of current locations that we're at. We're able to build these plants quickly along our partners' saltwater disposal networks, and we vertically integrate those into that iodine that we produce into products that go into derivatives that we produce at Iofina Chemical, as well as around the world where we sell our iodine into different applications.
Just to review a little bit of where we've been in 2024, we're executing our plans. Another record year of revenue of $54.5 million, which is about 9% higher year over year. Pushing our iodine through the Iofina Chemical plant, where $46.7 million of our sales are through iodine and iodine derivatives, but there's also a component of non-iodine-based sales of almost $8 million last year. Record iodine production of over 634 metric tons, 13% higher year on year, and our balance sheet is strong. We have a strong cash position at the end of the year: $6.8 million in cash. Net cash, which subtracts the debt from the cash that we have on our books, is a net positive position of almost $3 million, and it's up year on year.
Some other accomplishments in 2024 include bringing online our Iofina plant IO number 10 in September of 2024, and also in the same month, agreeing to commercialize terms for IO number 11, which began construction before the end of the year and will be online here shortly in the first half of Q3 of 2025. So we continue to execute our growth plans to build new iodine plants and expand our iodine production. The iodine market is strong. Iodine spot prices surpassed $70 a kilo by year-end in 2024, and second half of 2024, our average iodine price sales were greater than the first half of 2024 and continue to be strong into 2025.
We do have a credit line, a loan facility of up to $10 million for investment opportunities for such projects like future Iofina plants, so we make sure that we are properly funded to be able to execute our growth plans. In 2024, we signed the new brine water agreements for two existing Iofina plants at the beginning of the year, which allows for some more normalized royalty agreements with that particular partner and some more long-term stability of water coming to those particular plants. Now, the other thing I want to emphasize is that we are a specialty chemical company. We handle hazardous materials. Our workforce is well-trained. They have a focus on safety. We're very proud to say that we've had no lost time incidents over the last four years, which is a proud accomplishment for us.
We don't sit on our hands based on that kind of accomplishment. We're always trying to continually improve our safety systems, and as a specialty chemical company, we are committed to the safety of our employees and our communities as we produce the products that we sell around the world. Just a brief financial highlight before I throw it over to our CFO, Malcolm. Year-over-year revenues are up. You can see in the chart that we continue to grow our revenues. EBITDA was slightly down in the year based on some additional royalty payments due to our agreements with brine supply partners and some end-of-the-year kind of delayed sales that weren't recognized in 2024 but will be recognized in 2025.
Net cash is in a good position, and I'll leave it to Malcolm here to go through a little bit more of the details of the financials that we just announced for 2024 earlier this week. Malcolm?
Okay. Thank you, Tom. So running through our profit and loss account, our sales were $54.5 million, Tom's already alluded to, and that was 9% up on $50 million for 2023. Within that $54.5 million, we showed $46.7 million as relating to sales of iodine and iodine-related products. And breaking that down further, we actually had $24.7 million, which was down to sales of raw iodine. That was 423 metric tons of our 634 metric tons of total iodine production. And that amount of sales was pretty much a mirror image of what we had in the previous year. And we also sold 423 metric tons of raw iodine, and the pricing was very similar between the two years. On a 100% basis, we averaged $68.60 per kilo for our 2024 sales as opposed to $69.19 for our 2023. So very similar results there between the two years.
The increase in sales was primarily driven by sales of iodine derivatives. So going back to that 46.7, we've accounted for 24.7 as being raw iodine. There's now 16.9 in addition, which is down to what we refer to as derivatives, so that is principally chemical compounds that are made by taking the iodine that we've produced, adding other chemicals, and performing various reactions. And out of that comes a stable of what we call iodine derivatives, and those increased very satisfactorily to $16.9 million of turnover for 2024, as opposed to $12.9 million for the previous year, so that was an increase of 31%, and in fact, two of our flagship products within that category pretty much doubled their sales over the previous year. Our non-iodine sales, you can see there, 7.8 compared to 8.1 for the previous year. They were down a bit.
We had about a 5% volume reduction in orders during the year for a key product there, but we believe that that's kind of stabilized and will be back to somewhat higher levels during the current year. Moving on down, gross profit, you can see, fell from $15.6 to $13.2, which is, to be frank, a not insignificant drop, and Tom's already referred to a key factor that was behind that, namely that we renegotiated the terms of our royalty agreements with a particular oil and gas supplier to us, and that supplier actually provides us with brine water for two of our plants, and that was quite a substantial adjustment, and that was the biggest reason why the gross profit number has come down. There are also some increases in production costs as regards payroll inflation and also chemical costs, which have risen not insignificantly over recent years.
So we believe at this point that they are much more stable going forward. Moving on down, we have administrative expenses of $5.7 million versus $4.8 million the previous year. Again, that's not an inconsiderable increase of $0.9 million, and that reflects some hires that we've made, a couple at quite senior levels, to cope with the expansion of our business. We've taken on an extra sales manager. We've also, in fact, rehired a project manager who was with us previously and has come back to us. And in addition to the personnel side of things, we've also invested money in upgrading quite significantly our web presence with a view to making our site more attractive and effective in terms of getting potential customers to engage with us. So the net of those numbers brings us down to an adjusted EBITDA of $7.6 million versus $10.8 million the previous year.
And then down below that, we have depreciation of $2.6 million, which is up from the previous year to $2.2 million. And the reason for that is, of course, very simply that we continue to build plants and invest in equipment and machinery. And in particular, we brought on our latest Iofina plant in October 2024, and we had brought on our Iofina plant in the middle of 2023. So we were taking a four-year depreciation rather than just six months on that plant. Going on down, we get to an operating profit of $5 million versus $8.6 million the previous year, profit before tax of $4.8 million. And then we have a current deferred tax number of $1.9 million, which is quite a sizable number in relation to our profit before tax.
But in point of fact, out of that $1.9 million, $700,000 is the amount of tax that we actually paid in respect of 2024. And $1.2 million is an adjustment for deferred tax, which is a non-cash item, and we don't expect that to recur going forward in the same fashion. I should also add that the $700,000 that we paid did include a reduction of about $800,000 because we have for several years now been taxed light by virtue of losses made in previous years, but those losses have now run out by a couple of hundred thousand going forward into 2025. So the amount of tax actually payable will increase over time. So profit after tax $2.9 million, earnings per share $0.015 versus $0.034 previous year. Okay. Can we move? Okay.
So moving to the balance sheet, property plant equipment up from $24.8- $31.8, and that's very simply the amount of capital expenditure that we incurred during the period, and we'll come back to that when we get to the cash flow led to depreciation. Nothing exceptional there. Going on down, inventories are very similar to the previous year. We think we have those under pretty steady control. Receivables at the end of 2023 were, shall we say, a bit abnormally high at $15.5, but those have come back to $11.9 at the end of 2024 in spite of the fact that the sales are up. And I think that that 2024 number is a kind of normalized one. Not much change in payables. Our bank debt, $3.9 from $5.3.
$3.9 is the residue from our $10 million loan that we took out when we did a refinancing back in September 2020. We're paying off at a rate of $1.4 million a year, so we have a little over two and a half years left before we're clear of that item. Cash $6.9, so our net cash $2.9, which is an improvement over $1.2 for the previous year. Deferred tax was generated by the adjustments I talked about just now, so net assets were $47.8 or $0.25 a share compared to $44.8 million of net assets for the previous year. Cash flow turned out pretty well for us in 2024.
If we start from EBITDA of 7.6, we've got a very positive effect there for working capital changes where, in fact, that relates not insignificantly to that reduction of receivables that we saw on the previous slide in the balance sheet. I would say that that is not an item that we'd expect to recur in that positive fashion going forward because the more sales we have and we shall as time goes by, the more we are likely to have tied up ultimately in inventory and receivables. And if that doesn't work positively, it's quite likely to work a little bit the other way. We paid $900,000 of tax, but I said earlier that we had a bill of $700,000. We're actually reclaiming. Our tax advisors are reclaiming a couple of hundred thousand for us for various reasons. Our operating cash [is] $11.5 million positive.
Our CapEx was $9.5 million. That $9.5 million breaks down as between $5.8 million on our U.S. Iofina plant that came into operation in October 2024. There was about $1.7 million on other iodine production plants because they need maintenance CapEx in some cases. And in other cases, also, there are improvements or upgrades that it makes sense to actually do looking at the sort of payback that we can get from doing those. Finally, there was $2 million that went into our Iofina Chemical plant. And not an insignificant proportion of that was related to the new animal feed product that Tom, I think, has talked about or is going to talk about already. Repayment of debt. I mentioned earlier that we're paying back $1.4 million a year on the bank loan. So our net cash inflow was $0.3 million.
It left us at the end of the period with 6.9, which we feel was a pretty good result.
All right. Thanks, Malcolm. I'm going to switch gears a little bit in the presentation now and just kind of go through what are the happenings at the individual business units of Iofina. Iofina Resources is namely the iodine production unit, and Iofina Chemical, the unit that sells the iodine and creates value-added derivatives. And you can see from the chart on this particular slide is that we're proud to continually grow our iodine production. We produced 634 metric tons of our crystalline iodine in 2024. That's a record for us as an organization. As Iofina became operational in the year, we had a full year of Iofina operation, and we have seven Iofina plants operating at the end of the year and currently today.
There is an eighth Iofina plant, Iofina number 11, which most of you are familiar with, that will be online now, we believe, in the first half of Q3 2025. This will be our third plant that we will have built in the last three years, so we are committed as an organization to continue to invest in growth of our iodine production operations. You can see our iodine production in 2022, 2023, and 2024 have steady growth with Iofina number 10 online for a full year in 2025, Iofina 11 coming online too. You're going to see growth in our iodine production in fiscal year 2025 as well, with an expectation of about 300 metric tons produced in the first half of 2025, which is a significant increase year on year from 2024 production.
As Malcolm mentioned, we have, for the Iofina Resources unit, spent about $7.5 million primarily for the new Iofina plant, Iofina number 10, and a little bit of a push at the end of the year for Iofina number 11. We are continually assessing our iodine-producing facilities and water chemistries for not only our current locations but for future locations. And as I mentioned earlier about the safety aspect of the group, the Iofina Resources division, which operates these plants 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day over the year, we're very proud of our safety record at these particular facilities. To get a little bit more in depth into the new plants that we have just put online and what's going to be happening here a little bit, Iofina number 10 opened up in September of 2024.
We now have what we call two core areas of our iodine production in the state of Oklahoma. One is our northwest Oklahoma core area, which contains five production facilities, which are our plants that have been in operation the longest, and we've built Iofina number 9, Iofina number 10, and are building Iofina number 11 in a new core area that is more in the central Oklahoma area, so Iofina 10 is in this particular area. It's about a four, sorry, a $5.4 million facility to build with a production of over 100 metric tons per year, and once it's come online, it's been operating well for us as a unit.
In order to facilitate our growth plans and talked about three plants in three years and future plans down the road, we've rehired a key employee, as Malcolm mentioned, to lead our construction unit and the development of these plants to ensure that these plants are built properly within budget and online as soon as possible. Iofina number 10 is also with a new brine supply partner. We have currently seven plants in operation right now, five different brine supply partners, so we have diversity in our locations. We have diversity in our brine supply partners, and it just shows that Iofina is moving in the right direction, that we are able to secure our iodine partnership agreements with multiple different oil and gas companies, which bodes well for our growth opportunities in the future. Our technology is established.
We have a positive reputation in the oil and gas community, and that's only a positive for future growth for Iofina moving forward. Iofina number 11, under construction, will be online in the first half of Q3. Commissioned in the fall of 2024. Same core area of nine and 10, expected to produce about 100 metric tons of our crystalline iodine per year. Spent a little bit of money in 2024, but the vast majority of the money will be spent in 2025. Should come in line similarly to the cost of the Iofina number 10 unit. This is actually with a current brine supplier for two of our plants in our Northwest Oklahoma region. This is a supplier that operates in the Central Oklahoma area, oil and gas operations.
Felt very good about working with Iofina, and we're able to come to a commercial agreement for a new plant in a new location. Turning to Iofina Chemical a bit, all the sales of Iofina, the company, are pushed through Iofina Chemical. So every bit of iodine that goes out of the Iofina Resources division comes through Iofina Chemical, and it's either used for iodine-based derivatives or sold as crystalline iodine to companies around the world. We are proud that we have continued to put an emphasis on the use of iodine in these specialty chemical derivatives. And in 2024, there's a significant increase in the amount of iodine that went through iodine derivatives, a 31% year-on-year increase. And in fact, if you look at our crystalline iodine sales, which Malcolm may have mentioned earlier, these crystalline iodine sales from 2023 to 2024 were essentially flat.
But our growth in our iodine production, most of that was pushed through Iofina Chemical. Two particular derivatives that we produce, hydriodic acid and a compound that we refer to as IPBC, performed particularly well in 2024, driven by strong demand in agricultural applications for hydriodic acid. Hydriodic acid also has some industrial catalysis uses. And IPBC is a biocide that is an additive to paints and coatings that also acts as a preservative for some other personal care products to prevent mold and mildew from growing in these types of fluids. Iofina Chemical continues to invest in R&D opportunities. Sales team and management team look for and meet with customers and potential customers to identify future iodine-based derivatives. And our R&D team works on commercial development of these derivatives. Early in 2025, we started producing a new compound for Iofina Chemical.
It's an animal feed additive that uses an iodine-based feed additive, like humans, which need a certain amount of iodide in their diet to control thyroid function and for children to grow healthy. Animals that have a certain amount of iodide intake grow bigger and better. And so we are now producing and using multiple metric tons of iodine per month into a new product that's an animal feed additive produced by Iofina Chemical. We also produce some non-iodine-based derivatives. And likely, the biggest component of that now and in the future will be a specialty chemical gas that goes into the semiconductor industry. We have invested in our sales team and our website, which we'll talk about here a little bit further. And likewise, with Iofina Resources, our safety and our customer satisfaction and our metrics for our internal thing, we're very proud that we are meeting our expectations.
Since Iofina Chemical was a sales unit for the business, the reputation of Iofina, the product that we have, meeting customer demands is an important component for us. We follow those kinds of trends in our business to make sure we are executing things properly, and I'm proud to say that we are continuing to improve in those particular areas and are meeting or exceeding customer demands. Moving on a little bit to what are we doing a little bit differently from a sales aspect. One of the reasons why we push all of our sales through Iofina Chemical is it's an established business. It's been in the iodine world since 1983, selling products worldwide of iodine and halogenated chlorofluoro-based derivatives.
In order to identify new products, I've already talked about our sales team and our management team being out there talking with other people and improving websites in order to identify new product opportunities for the group. We've invested in our website, as Malcolm has mentioned. We attend trade shows in a more traditional way to meet one-on-one with people. We've improved our education to the market via social media means. But I think the one thing I will emphasize is that our view of our website is that traditionally, trade shows meeting face-to-face provided business leaders opportunities to exchange ideas and create partnerships. We view our website as a daily trade show, an opportunity for us to sell our products, tell about what's unique about Iofina, how we can help other people, and provide that initial communication between us and potential customers down the road.
It's an important aspect for us to continue to expand our sales of our products to new customers and new regions. As we continue to grow our Iofina Resources iodine production, we will need to continually grow the avenues that we push our iodine or iodine derivatives into the market, and we've been successful in growing and expanding our sales into Europe and the U.K. over 2024. To that, we are not a large company, and we do not have international reach. We do not have operations internationally around the world. So we do rely on relationships with agents and distribution networks in certain areas of the world in order to get that reach into other areas that are more difficult for us to directly communicate with. If you've been with an Iofina presentation before, this slide is probably fairly familiar to everyone.
It gives a little bit of an overview into the iodine market, which is a pretty niche market. Availability of information is not readily available, but just an overview of the iodine market and the graph on the right. The graph on the right kind of shows two particular pieces of information: historic kind of production of world iodine production, which is essentially equal to kind of demand for iodine and iodine-based products, and the iodine price in a 100% basis per kilo as the yellow line on the chart and the y-axis on the right, and what you can see is there's been a steady growth in the iodine market over the course of time, generally at or near GDP kind of levels, but in particular, in 2024, the iodine market grew at a faster rate than that.
We estimate about a 7%-8% rate of global iodine market growth, and we're probably near a global iodine tonnage usage of about 39,000 metric tons of iodine use worldwide in 2024, really spurred on mainly by increases in use in human healthcare activities, especially contrast media agents that use iodine to enhance visibility on certain CT scans and X-rays. Most of the world's iodine is produced in Chile. They use a hard rock mining operation in the Atacama Desert. The rest of the world's iodine, about 30%-35%, are created in Japan, USA, and other countries from brine water. What's unique about Iofina is that, again, we're using brine streams that are already co-produced. It's a resource that's already coming up out of the ground, and without Iofina's technology, no one would be isolating that iodine. It would just simply be wasted.
The iodine market spot price over the last few years has been steady in a range which we believe is likely to be the new normal kind of range in the foreseeable future between the mid-60s and over $70 a kilo. And as I think we've mentioned earlier in the presentation, during fiscal year 2024, iodine prices in the second half of the year rose with compared to the first half of the year. And we've seen that trend of iodine prices over $70 a kilo early into 2025. We do expect these prices to remain at similar levels in 2025. The iodine market is expected to grow year on year. And there's no indication of any real significant additions to supply coming online in 2025. Moving on to the end of our presentation, we want to talk about where we're going here as an organization.
We've really focused on, as you can identify from the talk, about iodine production plants, and that's where most of our capital expenditures are going towards is building these new plants. We intend to double our iodine production from just over 500 tons at the end of 2021, which is about the same level we were in 2022, to double those in the near future. And how are we doing that? We're executing our growth plans. We're investing in the Iofina Resources division. Our Iofina Resources staff have done a great job of identifying opportunities for us to build these plants, and now we're building them with IO#10 operational last year, IO#11 coming online soon, and as we mentioned in our number of press releases here moving forward, negotiations for a new iodine plant, IO#12, are going well.
We do expect that plant to be under construction before year-end in 2025. Not only that, on our iodine production standpoint, we continue to invest in our Iofina Chemical division and the R&D efforts to create new compounds. As part of our growth strategy, IO#12 and beyond of our iodine production, we continue to evaluate opportunities in new areas, so we have two core areas in Oklahoma, the Northwest and Central Oklahoma. We have opportunities to continue to grow our iodine production there, but there's other opportunities in other areas in the United States that could provide a step change for our iodine growth here in the future. We add on to our sales and marketing aspect. We've hired personnel to help us with our sourcing of raw materials. We continue to develop new products at Iofina Chemical to diversify our product mix and our customers that we sell to.
We have facilities in place for future growth opportunities. Each of these iodine production plants, the last two plants are going to probably come in between $5-$5.5 million to build a plant. In order to keep building these plants, we want to ensure that we have the credit facilities in place to continue our expansion. We have, in 2024, extended and increased our CapEx loan facility. We have not gotten into this loan facility at this particular time. It's likely we will be slowly drawing on that facility as we build new plants in the future. Lastly, before we move to questions and answers, I just want to kind of give an outlook of how we view things in the near term and potentially in the long term. We are consistently growing our iodine production.
We're forecast to produce about 300 metric tons in the first half of this year. We continue to see strong demand in the iodine market from established customers, especially in U.S. and Asian base, but we're growing those sales opportunities in other regions around the world that we're kind of light in our sales compared to the global iodine market. IO#11 is on track to be operational in the second half of the year and is likely to produce about, on an annualized basis, about 100 metric tons per year of production. As I mentioned earlier, IO#12 discussions are progressing well. It's expected that that plant will be under construction before year-end, and we're looking at areas outside of our current core areas in Oklahoma for either IO#12 or an IO#13 plant as we look to build plants in the future.
We're in a market that is a strong-growing iodine market in which supply is fairly stable, but demand continues to increase, and that is only a positive for an iodine producer like Iofina. We aspire to be the largest iodine producer in North America in the coming years, and I think from just an overall view as a company, we've accomplished over the last five years a number of different things for the group. We continue to be a profitable organization. We have demonstrated that through the diversity of our plants and the agreements that we've made for new iodine plants, that we are a good partner for oil and gas companies, and we, as a management team and as a board, are committed to continuing to grow Iofina as a group and especially the Iofina Resources iodine production over the next number of years.
I appreciate and I want to thank everyone for attending this presentation. We'll move on to questions and answers soon. But I really wanted to say a big thank you to the investors in Iofina. We appreciate your investment. We're working hard to create value for you and expand the organization in a prudent manner. For that, I'll throw it back to our IMC team in order to get ready for the question and answer portion of this presentation.
Malcolm, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. If I just bring back up your camera. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions. Just by the Q&A tab situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via our investor dashboard. Malcolm, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. If I could just hand back to you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Yeah. So we'll go through the questions. I'll be reading them from my screen here a little bit and trying to answer them as best we can. If there's a question that hasn't been answered or we cannot answer, we'll indicate that as well. So just kind of getting into the questions. First question we have has to do with the falling exchange rate of the U.S. dollar. Is the U.S. dollar value exchange rate impacting profits? And have you made any good further long-term brine supply agreements? So the quick answer to the exchange rate is the only real effect that we have as an organization on exchange rate is the cost of us being public in the U.K., so the PLC-related expenses. So there's a minor impact on the costs for PLC because of the exchange rate.
Otherwise, all of our transactions, almost to maybe some small exceptions, but almost to a T, are done in U.S. dollars. So there's really no effect on the change in exchange rate from other currencies. With respect to any good further long-term brine supply agreements, there's really no other changes that have been made to the existing brine contracts other than what we've talked about with the renegotiation of the one brine supply partner or two of our plants. We have good relationships with our brine supply partners. We have developed new contracts for IO#10 and IO#11. And just to show how those relationships are, IO#11 contract is with a current supplier at two of our legacy plants under very similar terms. Second question is the decline in oil prices affecting the company and its agreements with the oil and gas companies?
Really, oil prices don't have any effect on the agreements that we have with the oil and gas companies. We've seen no immediate effect on supply. What a significantly lower oil or gas price could mean on our operations? If things move significantly lower, that could potentially slow down production in oil and gas, and if oil and gas production slows down, that could negatively affect us. In my opinion, it would take a pretty steep climb for us to see any kind of material changes there. Third question is, are you willing to look outside your established core area in Oklahoma to enhance opportunities to establish greater production from your plants? I think we've referred to that in the presentation already, but yes, we are looking at other opportunities outside of our Oklahoma core area. Maybe look in our annual report. We mentioned those kind of opportunities as well.
Number four, have the Trump tariff saga created any issues with your pricing model and your customers outside the U.S.? Are you confident this will not affect the company's ability to sustain a loyal customer base? Frankly, if I knew exactly what was going on with the U.S. tariff and the policy, I would be in a much better position. But everybody I've talked to seems to be a little bit unclear of the strategies of U.S. tariffs. That being said, there's no material effect currently that we've seen from U.S. tariffs one way or the other. There's been some minor changes in supply chains that we've had to try to implement.
We do a little bit of supplying from China, but we've tried to move away from China supply for a number of years because tariffs have already risen from supply, risen from China back in the first Trump administration and were carried on through the Biden administration as well, but we're not seeing any kind of material effect from tariffs. These things are ever-changing, and we are selling our materials globally. Currently, we are not having any kind of negative effects on our global sales due to any kind of retaliatory tariffs from other countries, so all in all, tariffs have been a minor factor for us, but nothing material. As you can imagine, everybody's looking at tariffs and the U.S. policy day to day, and things could change moving forward. Another question is, we see that there has been a shift to iodine derivative sales in latest results.
Can you explain how this occurred? And can we expect this trend to continue? Are you able to develop? Are you able to go into more detail about the products your Iofina Chemical is looking to develop? I guess what I can say is we've already talked about a 31% year-on-year growth, particularly hydriodic acid and IPBC being significant growth year- over- year. Demand for derivatives that we make can change year on year. We will continue to sell the products that we make at Iofina Chemical as long as demand increases and historical margins can be met. If we have opportunities for our particular products at historical margins, we will continue to expand those. And we're looking for other ways, like the animal feed additive, to push more iodine through Iofina Chemical.
As we view our business and our iodine production continues to grow, we are, as a company, striving to keep the percentage of iodine that goes through Iofina Chemical essentially at the same rate as we do now, so as our iodine production continues to grow, we're hopeful that we can continue to grow our iodine derivatives products at the same kind of percentage rate as our iodine production moving forward. Trying to get to a few more questions here before we run out of time. Are there any developments in your IOsorb technology since you last communicated to the market that will help expand production levels? Our technology is a pretty established technology. We've been commercial producers of iodine for over a decade now. We continue to adjust in small bits our process to become more efficient.
We continue to look at opportunities in order for our plants to be even bigger and better. As we look into future plants of IO#12 and IO#13 and beyond, we're looking at other avenues that will allow our technology to take on larger volumes of brine supply.
Can you provide a further breakdown of your CapEx levels between cash and debt? Are we expecting levels to rise again? Will your cash generation levels be able to cover your CapEx? I guess the answer to that is we have a $10 million debt facility in place. Depending on how fast we build our plants will depend on how much we can use cash to build new plants or whether or not we need to get into the debt facilities. We are building plants at a more rapid pace than we have in the past.
So it is a likely expectation that we will be drawing on a portion of the $10 million debt facility as we build plants in a more aggressive manner than we have earlier in the decade. Another question: as a growth perspective, cash-converting and generating company, share price is not reflective like it should be. Why do you think the market has not reflected the growth opportunity? Do you think the next step to getting share price moving upwards is the company's theme? What do you think the next step is to get the share price moving upward? The quick answer is yes, we feel we're undervalued. If you look at the profits that we're generating and the valuation that we have as an organization with our peers, we feel we're undervalued.
It's up to Malcolm and myself, our board of directors and our employees, to keep executing our business plans and keep growing the business, keep communicating the story of Iofina, why we're unique and why we, if you look at the next few years, it's a pretty exciting opportunity for us as we build new plants, to keep telling that story to new investors. We're bringing new investors into the shares, as you can see in some of the releases recently that there's been a new significant investor come on board. And it's up to us, our broker, our sales team, to continue to tell the unique story of Iofina and for us to keep executing on the growth plans like IO#12 and beyond to try to drive shareholder value.
As we finish up here, is there any intention to offer long-term holders and benefits in the form of a maiden dividend or share buyback? The quick answer is there's no immediate plans to offer a dividend or buyback, but we want to have the ability to do that. I would encourage investors, and the board is encouraging investors to vote yes on the resolutions of the AGM, which will allow us the opportunity to do buybacks or dividends in the future. That being said, the cash that we are generating as an organization currently is being reinvested into growth opportunities. We want to have the flexibility for when the right time for a dividend or buyback is warranted, the ability to do that. Just to finish up, are you happy with the iodine spot price at the moment? Is there a scenario that price is too high?
Or do you always have a demand for your product? And if the higher price, the better it is for profitability. I think the quick answer to that is we're happy that iodine prices are where they are. The industries that iodine goes into have now been normalized to these prices in the mid-$60s to mid-$70s per kilo. As an iodine producer, we benefit the higher the price benefits us. That being said, if there was a huge spike increase in the iodine price, it may not be good for the iodine market. While it may have some short-term benefits and profitability, it could generate some substitution of products in certain applications. So for us, a steady increase in iodine price over the longer-term period of time is probably more advantageous than any kind of spike in the market.
I think the iodine price currently in the marketplace is at a good level and is, with the demand increasing in the iodine world, likely to remain at these levels or higher moving forward. I know there were some questions that were posed during the presentation today, but I think we're running out of time here. We'd be happy to work with the IMC team to provide answ//ers to those questions that were submitted during the presentation. Again, I'd like to thank everyone for attending the presentation on behalf of Malcolm and myself, our board of directors, and our employees. We appreciate your time today. For those investors in Iofina, we appreciate your investment in Iofina as a group. I'll throw it back to the IMC team now.
From Malcolm, thank you for updating investors today.
Kindly ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that our management team can better understand your views and expectations. This may only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Iofina plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.