Good afternoon, and welcome to the Iofina plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would submit the following poll. We do apologize for the slight delay in starting today. I'd now like to hand you over to Tom Becker, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Thank you very much. Hope everybody's doing well today. Happy to present an update on Iofina, especially focusing on the first half year results, which came out earlier this week, and really an outlook for the future, which we're very excited about. Go through what we're going to be looking at from a presentation standpoint here as a general agenda. Just talk about the company in quick terms. I think most of the people that are listening to this call are familiar with Iofina, but there may be some that are not. So we'll give a quick overview of what Iofina is and what we do, and the market that we're mainly in, and that is the iodine market.
We'll give a little bit of history of the supply and demand and pricing of iodine, and also what kind of markets that iodine is going into and how those markets are growing. Then we'll get into what we did in the first half of this year, both from a business standpoint and a financial standpoint. Those first half of the year numbers, I think we're very excited about and proud of what we were able to accomplish in the first half of the year.
Then we'll get into what I think is even the more exciting aspect of it, and that's our pathway to 2000, our growth of our iodine production that we were planning to roll out and why, as a successful iodine company with growing business, why the investment case for Iofina, in my opinion, has a real upside potential and where we think we're going to be moving here down the road. To jump right in and talk about the company a little bit itself and just talk about our operations. We are a specialty chemical company with an expertise in halogen-based chemistry, so iodo-chloro-fluoro-based chemistries with a real focus on iodine and iodine production. To do this, we've developed technology over the course of the last 20 years in order to build the business that we have today.
All of our operations for Iofina are in the U.S. So two divisions, Iofina Chemical and Iofina Resources. Iofina Resources is the arm of the business that has basically two goals, two functions. One is to explore for and develop potential for where we can produce iodine from waste brine water in the U.S. Then once those opportunities are identified, the second portion is to build and produce iodine from these particular sites. So very focused operation. Where is the iodine? Where can we economically produce iodine? How can we use a resource that is already being produced from oil and gas in order to extract a valuable resource from a waste stream? Then build and operate these plants on a very low-cost basis. All those kind of things are done in the core areas that are shown in the map here.
There are two core areas in the state of Oklahoma, one in the northwest core area, which we have five plants in operation currently. One core area in the central Oklahoma area, where we have our latest three plants in operation. We are very excited about the new third core area in the Permian Basin, which IO#12 is currently being built and should be up online here, pushing water through the plant in the next few weeks. To support the Iofina Resources division, we do have an office in Denver, Colorado, to support those kind of activities. The Iofina Chemical side is also a very major portion, a functional unit of our organization. It is located in Covington, Kentucky, just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio.
What Iofina Chemical does is it takes all the iodine that Iofina Resources creates, either takes that iodine and creates value-added derivatives that go into various applications, or is our total sales arm of the organization and sells that crystalline iodine that is produced at Iofina Resources throughout the world into various markets that need iodine. To jump into those markets that need iodine, let us talk about the iodine market a little bit, how we view the iodine market, its current pricing and demand situation, and where iodine goes. So a little bit of a history of where iodine comes from, who manufactures it. About 60% of the world's iodine, maybe a little bit more than that, comes from Chile. They mine iodine from ores in the Atacama Desert.
This is a pretty labor and rock-moving intensive process, energy-intensive process to extract iodates from ores and then refine it in order to get iodine. There are four major manufacturers in Chile, SQM being the largest, which produces about a little over a third of the world's iodine. The rest of the world's iodine comes from brines, but what makes Iofina unique from the rest of the world is we are the only one that is using oily or produced brines from third parties. We go to where these brines are already coming up with oil and gas operations, so we are not drilling our own wells, our own disposal wells for this brine. We partner with oil and gas companies, extract the iodine from them, give it back the water, and everybody benefits from the iodine that Iofina manufactures, and without Iofina would never be realized.
The market itself continues to grow. In 2026, we expect the iodine market to be at or around 40,000 metric tons of production on an annualized basis. This chart also gives you an idea of how pricing has been. Pricing over the last four years has been fairly stable, generally over $70 a kilo on 100% basis of sale price of iodine. We believe this firm pricing is a more normalized price that we are going to see here moving forward. Can never predict the future, but right now, from what we are seeing in the market, from the demand from customers that we associate with, the information that is in the market about supply, we do believe that the supply and demand for iodine is fairly well in equilibrium.
What this also means is that, as you can see from the chart, the iodine market continues to grow. We will talk about the applications in particular that are looking to grow. If this iodine market, which has on average over the last number of years grows at about 3%, that means there is an additional 1,200 metric tons of capacity or thereabouts that needs to come into the market in order to meet demand. Iofina's ambition to continue to accelerate our iodine production and just meet a fraction of that ongoing demand, we believe is the right action in a growing market, which also wouldn't disrupt the supply and demand equilibrium. Just from a demand standpoint, demand in Asia is especially growing compared to the rest of the world. In particular, some of these are the major applications that iodine goes into.
The one I will really focus on a little bit is X-ray contrast media, although you can see there is a number of different areas that iodine is used for around the world. X-ray contrast media, these are injectable drugs that go to help create more of an image in CT scans especially. It goes to focus on soft materials in your body. If in certain application, contrast media drugs are injected into the body, that way these images pop and these X-rays and CT scans can be much more easily interpreted by the doctors and the technicians. That is a very much growing application for a few different reasons.
One is that the aging population around the world need seeing more of these X-rays and CT scans. The other major aspect is that global populations are getting more access to what I will call Western medicine or modern medicine techniques.
Especially in Asia, where some of these medical techniques weren't available or haven't been available in the past, are becoming more and more readily available to their populations. X-ray contrast is only a portion of that. There is a number of other applications which do have some human health tie-ins, including iodide compounds are used to manufacture certain pharmaceuticals. Everybody needs a little iodide in their diet in order to control thyroid function. There are also some other industrial and other applications. Iofina Chemical produces a biocide that goes into paints and coatings to prevent mold and mildew in the can itself and on the wall. We manufacture things that can catalyze citric acid manufacturing, animal health additives as a micronutrient in animal health applications to help cows and other farm animals grow bigger and fatter and provide more value to the farmer when sold.
But there's other industrial applications as well, such as heat stabilizers in certain automotive applications. So I guess the message is Iofina is an iodine manufacturer with a focus on some iodine derivatives, and we believe we're in a nice growing market with expanding applications. Just to jump into the first half of 2026, which we're very proud of the results that came out earlier this week. You can see a number of bullet points here, especially at the top, which on the next slide are kind of reiterated, and I'll allow Malcolm to review some of those. But I just want to focus on the second half of our operations that we have done year to date in 2026. So in the first half of the years and then between the end of June and currently.
Some big operational accomplishes that we've done is we announced in 2026 an agreement with a new brine supplier to add additional brine supply to our IO#11 facility, and we'll talk about that here a little bit of what that really means, which is likely to increase production at that particular plant by about 50%. We've been building IO#12 throughout the first half of this year and into the third quarter of this year as well. It should be online here in the next few weeks. Earlier this week, we very excited to announce the next rollout of plants, the agreements for what we're going to be doing next after IO#12, and we'll talk about that here in a second.
But right now, I think what I'll do is throw it to Malcolm and change it to the next slide, and he can go through some of the key performance indicators that we had in the first half of 2026 and the I think pretty outstanding numbers that our business was able to achieve.
Okay. Thanks, Tom. Working from the top, the most important driver for our business, unsurprisingly, is iodine production. That increased by 29%, 2026 versus 2025. That 29% increase represented 88 metric tons additional in 2026 compared to the first half of 2025. Of that 88 additional metric tons, 50 metric tons came from plant number IO#11, which only came online after HY 2025 was finished, but before HY 2026 started. So that was 50 out of that 88. There was another specific plant that actually kind of surprised us by producing significantly more than we'd anticipated due to the way that the oil and gas partner chose to bring on new wells and results of some fresh drilling. That gave us an extra 18 metric tons over and above what we'd thought. So those two things together add to about 68 out of the total 88.
In addition, our usual expectation is that the first half numbers production will not be as good as the second half because the first half includes the winter period, especially January and February, which in Oklahoma can be pretty cold and cause issues. In fact, HY 2025 did have that type of winter in Oklahoma, in fact, quite a severe version of it. The consequence is that the cold means our chemical reactions don't work as well as they do when it's warmer. It also can mean that our oil and gas partners' pumps down their wells, for example, start to ice up and they have to take some of our water supply offline while they repair and that type of thing. Whereas for HY 2026, the weather was surprisingly clement and, to be frank, everything went very well.
The amount of production from the legacy plants, never mind the couple I mentioned already, was by and large better than we'd expected. The pricing, sorry, beg your pardon. Move down to revenue. We've got $31.3 million for 2026 against $29.2 million for 2025, 7% up. If you look down at the bottom line, you'll see that the average iodine price frankly barely moved. It shifted up just a little bit. 2025, $74.27. 2026, $74.69. That revenue number, to the extent it includes iodine sales, which is mainly what it does, is a reflection of additional volume rather than any pricing effects. The gross profit came in at $10.2 million against $6.3 million for 2025. That's a big increase, and it's a reflection really of, well, a couple of things.
One, the amount of production, which was, one could say, perhaps about as high as it reasonably could have been, and also the fact that our direct production costs were held pretty low, and the numbers came in on budget, if not slightly better. We were able to make some savings with the cost of chemicals through some new negotiations with suppliers. The overall effect was that our total direct costs of iodine production went up by 10%, whereas the volume produced went up by 29%, and therefore the average cost per kilo of our iodine fell by 15%. That generated a significantly lower cost of sales. That in turn resulted in a larger gross profit and fed down to a larger EBITDA number.
In fact, with EBITDA, we wind up with $6.6 million, which is double the 2025 number of $3.3 million, and we're very pleased with that. Post-tax earnings, well, what's said about that? The $2.5 million for 2025 is kind of flattered because it includes a government grant, not a trading item, but we'll come to that in a later slide. Net cash we're also happy with in the sense that it's $7.2 million positive. Last year, it was $1.8 million negative, although I would mention that we still have $3.5 million or $4 million of CapEx costs still to feed through from the construction of the latest plant, IO#12. That money's getting spent, or some of it's been spent by now, and I think the rest of it will be out in the next month or two. Okay, Tom.
Okay, great. I will just point one other thing before we get off this slide is that there is a reason why this chart is on this slide. We are very proud of the growth trend that we have had over the last three years, and it is mainly driven by the execution on the Iofina Resources side by increasing the production year over year, building new plants. With IO#12 coming online here in the next few weeks, that will be our fourth plant in four years, and we are really proud of the execution that our teams have done. Just to get into a little bit more detail about the first half of the years on either side of the business. A lot of this we have covered already. As Malcolm mentioned, our H1 2026 production even exceeded our revised upward target.
We had things really work our way in the first half of the year. Malcolm mentioned this in the last slide, but I think it is pretty important to point out the third bullet on this slide is that our average production cost is 15% lower. Some of it was luck from the weather, but really some of it was things that we have done to improve water volumes, work with our suppliers to try to increase the amount of water. Really, our sourcing department did a really great job in chemical sourcing.
One of the things we did note in the result commentary that we just put out earlier this week is that while we saw improved chemical costs in the first half of the year, we have seen a little bit of creep of these chemical costs moving into the second half of the year, and that is mainly due to increased raw material costs, mainly influenced by fuel cost increases and some other things that are manufactured in the Middle East. There is a little bit shortage of supply around the world, and of course, you would imagine that is going to creep chemical costs up. We do a really good job at trying to contract these major chemicals that we use, especially on the Iofina Resources side, to try to minimize any kind of cost changes that we see here in the future.
We did spend $5.8 million in CapEx in the first half of the year. As Malcolm mentioned, we have not fully paid for IO#12 or the IO#11 project that we started in 2026. There is a little more than half of the IO#11 project was paid in this $5.8 million, and I think, what, around $4 million of IO#12 costs were spent in the first half of the year.
As we have already mentioned, we are in the final stages of our new biggest plant to date in the Permian Basin. It is up to the Iofina Resources business development team to have a pipeline of future plants after this in order to meet our pathway to 2000 kind of goals. Very proud that we announced the next plants in our line of increases of our iodine production capacity here announced earlier this week or last week for IO#13 and IO#14. To summarize a little bit on the Iofina Chemical side as well. Again, all the iodine funnels through Iofina Chemical, and it is important and imperative as the Iofina Resources side grows that the sales team on the Iofina Chemical side continues to expand our customer base in order to ensure sales of our iodine-based products.
We have long-term customers, good customers that are looking to grow with Iofina's growth as well. So excited about the work our sales team has done. We basically have sales in hand for all of the projected production of Iofina Resources crystalline iodine that we plan to sell into the open market throughout the rest of the year. So, the demand for Iofina iodine is strong. Our customer base is solid, and we will be start selling our iodine or taking purchase orders for iodine into 2027 here shortly. Some other things about Iofina Chemical, again, we make iodine and non-iodine derivatives besides selling the crystalline iodine itself. Last year, we announced that we were adding a new product to our line of iodine derivatives, and that is a feed additive, so a micronutrient to help specifically cattle, but some other aspects as well.
It was our largest revenue derivative in the first half of 2026. We continue to have about 10% of our sales into non-iodine derivatives, and those are focused on some specialty gases. One other application that goes into the Great Lakes, which did not have realized sales in the first half of the year, but will have realized sales in the second half of the year. We continue to focus on research and development for new derivatives for Iofina Chemical, especially for those applications that may be growing in the future. If you remember back in our annual report, we mentioned some potential new applications for iodine in the solar cell industry and the refrigerant gas industry, and we are working hard at Iofina Chemical to be a player in those areas if those applications end up taking off. So we do have some summaries of the financial reviews.
Malcolm covered a lot of this, but he's going to point out a few more things on the next few slides that we feel are important to mention.
Okay, so here we are with the income statement. As Tom's just mentioned, the non-iodine figure on the second line of $2.9 million for 2026 is kind of, we would suggest, understated because we were expecting to make a delivery to Great Lakes Fishery Commission for a particular product before 30 June, but they decided to delay it, and it's gone into the second half of the year. So that $2.9 million could well have been at least $3.5 million, probably more, in fact. We've talked about cost of sales and EBITDA and what led to the significant improvement there. Going down a bit, you can see Tom's highlighting it. There's government grants, ERTC. ERTC stands for Employee Retention Tax Credits.
This is a U.S. government COVID era scheme for support and relief where people have kept, or I should say, did keep employees on even though their businesses were adversely affected by COVID and they had less coming in to finance their payroll. It's taken a heck of a long time to come through, but that's just the way this scheme has kind of played out because there were a great number of claims made under it, and it took the U.S. government a while to kind of decide what approach it was taking to validate them. Apart from that, I think we could move on to the next slide. Okay. Balance sheet Property, plant equipment, $41.7 million. It's up, whatever it is, $6.2 million, and that's a reflection of the additional capital expenditure less depreciation. That $5.8 million you've just seen, I think.
Working capital $13 million net versus $13.8 million in HY 2025. Not a lot of change there. We do get some fluctuations in the overall number, depending, I think above all, on when particular sales are invoiced. We can have and frequently do pretty large amounts on individual invoices, possibly as much as, let's say, $1.2 million for a full 18 metric ton container load of iodine. If two or three of those invoices get slightly out of sync or into a different period, that can swing the net, the movement in working capital. But this is a pretty consistent set of numbers, one period versus the other. Down below we've got bank debt of $5.7 million. Of that, $4 million relates to a drawdown on a CapEx facility that we made last year to support the capital expenditure that we were laying out on IO#11 plant.
The other $1.7 million making up the $5.7 million is the remainder of a term loan of $10 billion that we took out in September 2020 when we did a pretty thorough refinancing with our bank. That $1.7 million will all be paid off by the middle to late next year. So net cash wound up at $7.2 million versus a negative net debt position of $0.8 million previous year. Lease liabilities are up at $0.7 million from $0.2 million. The reason for that is that the lease we had on the office in Denver where our Iofina Resources, which runs the iodine production, where they are headquartered, their lease ran out.
The way the lease is accounted for under IFRS, International Financial Reporting Standards 16, is that the total outlay on the lease over the whole period is capitalized and then it is depreciated, and last year we were down to very little time remaining. We have now got a new lease and a bigger figure that will in turn get depreciated down over the next two to three years. Finally, on this slide we have got deferred tax of $5 million. That reflects tax that we have, if you like, saved because we have been able to claim a lot of capital expenditure against what would otherwise be taxable profit.
That was considerably assisted by the arrival of the OBBBA bill in the U.S. under President Trump that was signed into law last July, and that has made it significantly more possible to effectively have a 100% write-off of capital expenditure subject to certain limits against tax. That has assisted our cash flow. Okay, you want me to move on, Tom?
Yeah.
Here is the cash flow itself. Kicks off with an EBITDA. Working capital in our favor for this period as a not particularly significant matter to us for reasons I have already mentioned. So we generated $7.8 million from operations. We spent $5.8 million on CapEx. Demonstrates that the capital expenditure that was in the books for the first half was entirely funded out of operating cash flow. That left us with $2 million, then we have bank repayments, and we wind up with $12.9 million of cash as opposed to $6.4 million half last year. Just as a little addendum, we are currently still at about $12 million cash level as of the last week or two. We are pleased with that.
Great. Thanks for that review. I am going to switch gears here a little bit. We have talked about where we have kind of been and what our plans are, and now we are going to detail a little bit about how we are putting that into action. So give a little bit more detail on IO #12, which we provided this information to the market, but maybe a little bit more detail here. Again, it is a bigger plant than we have ever built. Most of our plants in Oklahoma have the capacity to take in about 25,000 bbl of water per day. This particular plant is being built in order to be able to take in about 50,000 bpd of water. It is in the Permian Basin, where it is the largest producing hydrocarbon basin in the world.
It is hard for me to even imagine there is 20 MMb of brine water produced in the Permian Basin every day. Our partner that we are partnering with here is handling over 2.5 MMb of water per day. Not all of that water, in our view, has economic amounts of iodine in the water to be able to extract iodine economically. But our exploration team has done a really good job in identifying areas in the Permian Basin such as where we are putting IO #12 and for future sites that we believe are going to be a real opportunity for expansion for the organization. Again, the timing of this in the next few weeks, we expect IO #12 to be moving water through the facility and ramp up in production shortly thereafter.
The plant capital costs when we first started this plan we thought it would be between $8 million and $9 million and it looks like it is going to come in right around $8.8 million. So within the budget of what we expected in this area. Again, we have a strong partner who is working with us to try to get this thing online as soon as possible, and we are very confident they are going to try to maximize this 50,000 bbl of water to our site as soon as possible. So excited about this plant, excited about possible expansion opportunities in this particular area as well, not only with our current partner, Western Midstream, but we have other people that handle large amounts of barrels of water that have good iodine concentrations discussing future sites with Iofina also.
Additionally, the other exciting thing that has come recently announced, I believe it was last week, was the agreements that we put in place for IO #13 and #14, and also the iodine pipeline project that we completed in August 26. So let me go back to a project that we completed in 2026. You all remember IO #11 came online in 2025. It was expected to be about 100 metric tons capacity plant in an area of Central Oklahoma. It is a plant that has lower brine volumes, but higher concentrations. A good plant by itself in all respects. What we were able to do is partner with another brine operator in the area, and working with our existing partner, came to agreements to allow for an additional water supply coming into IO #11.
Once we got those agreements arranged, our new partner built a pipeline from their water source to our plant and back. We funded that project, and what that's going to do is be able to get another about 50% capacity to the particular plant. A 100 metric ton plant now is going to be somewhere between 145 and 160 metric tons of production at that site. We're working hard to try to maximize the amount of water to every one of these sites. These kind of projects aren't easy to do. The more likely things that we do to our existing plants is work with our existing operator to try to maximize the amount of water that they can provide to our individual plants without over-pressurizing their system.
I think the real important news that we announced is an agreement last week to build IO#13 and IO#14. Again, this will be in the Central Oklahoma area, an area that we're very familiar with, familiar with the water, familiar with contractors and builders to build these operations that we've done on IO#9, IO#10, and IO#11. Signed a few weeks ago. We can provide more details a little bit later, but overall, the iodine plants in Oklahoma are somewhere between 100 and 150 metric ton of plants on average. We anticipate that the total volume from these two new plants is likely to be higher than the average amounts of plants in Oklahoma. On average, a bigger plant in Oklahoma.
Looking forward to provide more details when those are available and final details are worked up with our partner to give a little bit more insight in the production and timeline of this. We're very ambitious that we believe we're going to get these plants online in the first half of next year, and we'll be updating the market on that progress. What does this all mean? Malcolm reviewed a lot of our financials in the first half of the year. If you look back at our financials from 2025, we're very proud of the continued growth that Iofina has done. In 2025's annual report, the management and the board of Iofina laid out our route to 2000, the pathway to 2000.
We went from 500 metric tons of production to once IO#12 is opened up, we'll be at about 1,000 metric ton run rate of our iodine production. We feel with the growing iodine market, our expertise in this area, the opportunities that we have in not only the Permian Basin, but as you can see with IO#13 and IO#14 in Oklahoma, that we have the right opportunities to continue to increase the capacity of our iodine production. We worked hard on our balance sheet. We net cashed, as Malcolm pointed out, at $7.2 million in June 30. We worked hard and maybe Malcolm, can you mention the debt facilities that we have-
Oh, I'm sorry. I still haven't done that.
That we have in place in order to help fund these future sites as well?
Yeah. Okay. We've got a $10 million facility with our bank which is to be used on, well, not 12, but in fact probably IO#13 and IO#14. In addition to that facility, which takes the form of a term loan with a drawdown period up to the end of next year, and then after the drawdown's finished then it's repayable over seven years, and the interest rate is SOFR, Secured Overnight Financing Rate, + 2%, which we think is a rate that applies to various other arrangements we have with the bank. We also have a $6 million revolving line of credit, which is effectively a kind of overdraft. We've had that in place ever since the refinancing back in September 2020.
We've never used any of it, and going forward, it may be something that we will bring into action if needed, depending on how the spend on new sites goes versus money that comes in all the time from normal trading operations.
Yeah. Thanks for that update. I guess the point I think we're trying to make is that in order to obtain this goal of the pathway to 2000 in the next few years, not only do we have to have the projects and opportunities to do that, but we have to be smart and have a healthy balance sheet, good banking partners to help fund these kind of operations. Once these kind of plants get up and going and start generating cash, our projections look very enticing here in future once we start getting plants like IO#12, IO#13, IO#14, and the next generation of likely larger plants, IO #15 and IO #16 online. The last couple bullet points, we expect to exceed the production capacity of 1,000 metric tons once IO#12 comes online.
This pathway to 2000 with IO#13, IO#14, and the pipeline of ongoing sites with multiple brine suppliers that we're in negotiations with is really exciting for Iofina and its growth story. Just to summarize a few things of why we think basically Iofina is a great place to invest in. Personally, I think we're not getting enough credit for what we've not only done, but the prospects that we have in the future, the opportunities to build plants with rapid payback, and what that's going to mean down the road not only from cash generation, but actually profits of the organization. We continue to expand our output, especially the capacity for iodine by building new plants with IO#12 coming online. That's four plants in four years with IO#13 and IO#14 coming online in 2025. Just so those plants, that'll be six plants in five years.
With this excess capacity and the strong financial discipline that we've had, we really have a balance sheet that supports this growth. With an iodine market that is expanding, Malcolm and I personally, and our board really think it's the right time to increase that growth that we've seen over the last number of years and put our technology into action in new core areas like the Permian Basin. We invest into these plants that have rapid paybacks, and this will eventually cause this tremendous amount of cash generation in the future. We do our very best due diligence to ensure as best we can that these new plants, we estimate the cost and the long-term capabilities of having supply at these particular plants. There hasn't been any kind of shutdown of any plants that we've built over the last 10 years of Iofina's growth.
We're very proud of the due diligence that we have in putting plants where these water really congregates. We're executing this pathway to 2000, both optimizing existing plants, but really building the new larger facilities to maximize our production is really gonna get us to that 2,000 metric ton goal that we have in mind. What are we looking at here in the near future where we've covered a lot of this? As we continue to expand our iodine production, we expect to achieve record results like we did in the first half of the year. We expect increases in iodine production all the time. The increases in iodine production as long as we can control costs and the iodine market continues to expand, profitability should increase at the same time as well.
We are executing these new plants, the IO#11 pipeline project, the Permian Basin IO#12 project, and the new plants at IO#13 and 14 which were agreed to in terms a few months ago, or sorry, a few weeks ago. Once they are online, will be our sixth plant in five years. As I mentioned in a previous slide, we do have a lot of opportunities for additional plants, even these bigger Permian Basin plants, which should really accelerate our growth here moving forward. With good iodine market economics, steady prices, we are on track to meet market expectations in fiscal year 2026, and really excited about what 2027, 2028, and 2029 looks like. We continue to develop chemical derivatives and our customer bases in order to support this expansion on the Iofina Resources side.
We are really just excited about the future of Iofina and the growth that we expect to achieve. With that, it has been a pleasure presenting to all of you, and I will throw it back to IMC.
Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Thank you very much indeed for the presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, do please continue to submit your questions just using the Q&A tab on the right-hand corner of the screen. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of the presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via our investor dashboard. As you can see, guys, we have had a number of questions throughout today's presentation. If I may just ask you to click on that Q&A tab where appropriate to do so. Just read out the question and give your response. I will just bring your cameras back up as well, if I may.
Yeah.
There we go. Cameras back up. Yeah, if you could just read out the questions where appropriate, and I will pick up from you at the end. Thank you.
Yeah. We will go through the questions. Not sure we can give answers to all of these questions, but we will pick and choose some. These other questions that we can answer outside of this presentation time, we will try to provide written answers where appropriate. The first two questions you have seen already and can talk about those a little bit. The first one is, "At what point in the journey do you feel that a maiden dividend will be paid?" The quick answer to that is, we keep reinvesting the cash generation into new plants and other CapEx things within the organization at existing plants and at Iofina Chemical. Right now, with the pipeline of opportunities and our growth ambitions, we feel like that is the best use of cash.
Now, if and, well, when the company gets to a point where we are generating a tremendous amount of cash, I think at that particular time, while the board always talks about dividends and buybacks and things like that, I think that would be a more appropriate time to talk about dividends at that point. Secondly, a few months ago at the AGM, I said building two plants would cause sales issues, coping with the increase of production. What has changed? I think the opportunity that we have in Oklahoma here for these two particular plants is an important opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of. We met with our sales team and challenged them to be able to continue to expand our customer base for iodine sales around the world.
After surveying the market a bit, we are comfortable that maybe this is a little bit more of acceleration of growth would be available to be able to sell into the marketplace. So we are comfortable that we will have the sales avenue for the iodine that we are producing by building two plants at once. The other thing I will say with respect to building two plants at once, and I am not sure if there is another question about it, but we are working hard. Our construction team is making sure that we have the resources in place to be able to do two plants at once, which is a little out of the ordinary for us.
Since we are moving back to Oklahoma for these particular sites, we have a good set of contractors, similar kind of engineering drawings, and we understand the regulatory environment to build these plants.
The next question, "Can you give some more guidance on the likely annualized tonnage at IO#13 and 14? As so far, it has been a little bit vague." Yes, it has been a little bit vague. We are working out the fine details with our new partner for IO#13 and 14. We hope to be able to give some more direct numbers here in the near future, and we will get that into the market as appropriate when we have those numbers finalized. Let me look at some other things. Malcolm, this is something I think you addressed, or you may be a little bit more apt to talk about it, and it has to do with a little bit of year-over-year differences.
The question is, "Hi, Tom. Nice interim. Crystalline iodine sales were up 31%, derivative sales were up 17%, iodine prices were marginally up, but revenue was up only 7%. Has something been deferred? I wouldn't say, and Malcolm can help me with this, I wouldn't say anything's been deferred. But 2025 had some carryover sales from 2024 that enhanced the sales in 2025. So when you look on a year-over-year comparison, the 2025 sales were enhanced. Is that an accurate thing to say?
That's correct. Yep. That's entirely accurate.
Okay. That's the main driver for why revenue increase year-on-year was a little bit less than you would expect, basically because there were carryover sales into the early part of 2025. IO#12, pushing water through in the next few weeks. Please expand on this delay. The next question is very similar to that. We are within weeks of where we thought this would be. So we're pretty pleased by how this build has gone through. One of the things that we didn't anticipate in building in a new area is increased regulatory requirements. Having inspectors coming through and approving certain of the build applications has caused some delays. Building the buildings that are occupied by people, the area in which we're building in now is a little bit more strict than where we were in Oklahoma.
The major components of what we're building in the Permian Basin of Volcon is planned. Some of these fine little things have caused a little bit of delay, a little bit of lesson learned, so that when we build our next plant in this particular area, we should be more apt to be able to handle those kind of different construction criteria in that area. I'll take a few more questions as I go through this. This one is, Which potential new customer uses of iodine do you see most likely to be successfully developed in the next few years? We mentioned a few things. I can't remember if we did in the annual report, but I know we did in the interim report, and I know we did in the annual report. That's the potential new iodine applications in solar cells, refrigerants, and potentially even semiconductor use.
For me, from what we understand in the market, the most likely application that could cause significant increases or significant use of iodine, not significant increases, is likely refrigerant gases for use in electric vehicles. We do not think it is going to be a significant new use in the next 18- 24 months, but we could see some significant quantities start moving into that particular area soon thereafter. Let me pick out a question or two more. I think we have covered most of these, and some of the other ones, I cannot really do this. I think maybe we will leave it there and try to answer some of the other questions as best we can through written answers. Again, I appreciate everybody's time today, and I will throw it back to IMC.
Fantastic. Thanks indeed for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session? You should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and is greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Iofina plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session, and good afternoon to you all.