Good morning and welcome to the ITM Power plc Investor Presentation. Throughout this recording meeting, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated in 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 it receives 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. I'd now like to hand you over to the team at ITM Power plc.
This year, ITM has turned 25, and I'm proud that we can present you a strong set of results reflecting continued growth, commercial momentum, and disciplined capital management. Over the past 25 years, we have evolved into a leader in electrolyser technology. We are known for high-performing and reliable solutions, with our stack technology at the very core of our success. In March this year, the Financial Times has confirmed us as the fastest-growing manufacturing company in the U.K. Simon Bourne, Amy Grey, and I will give you a comprehensive update today, with special emphasis on real-world projects and actual in-field product performance data, a level of transparency you will rarely see in our industry. We will also dedicate time to Kronos, our next stack generation, and Hydropulse, our recently launched business model. Before going into more detail, let me provide you an overview. First, on the market and competition.
Our pipeline of project opportunities is healthy and growing, and we are securing more than just our fair share in the market. Whether in REFHYNEries transitioning to green hydrogen or energy companies optimizing excess renewable power generation, we are positioned as a key player. With customers' FIDs taking time to mature, competitive pressure has increased and market consolidation is underway. This is a phase we expected, and we are well prepared for. Governments continue to play an important role, and regulatory frameworks remain favorable. Unchanged, Germany is the single most active market, with significant funding already flowing into projects, pipeline and storage infrastructure, and wider decarbonization. Net zero by 2045 is now enshrined in the German Constitution, and the release of the country's debt brake has unlocked EUR 500 billion of planned infrastructure investments. In contrast to the U.S., which has unsurprisingly slowed down significantly, the U.K. is finally gaining traction.
With first FIDs now in sight, the Hydrogen Allocation Round 1 selected projects are coming to life. HAR 2 has shortlisted 27 projects, together seven times the capacity of HAR 1. The only large HAR 2 project which announced supplier selection so far is Uniper's 120 MW Humburp project, and it came our way. We are excited to support our customers to make their projects in our home market a special success. I don't want to go into too much region detail here, but Europe will continue to be the most important region for our products for the time being. The implementation of RED III is destined to stimulate demand even further. Operational excellence is fundamental to our strategy, be it for highest competitiveness in the current market environment, for customer confidence, or for our path to profitability.
Our focused and disciplined approach is best explained by the improvement of our factory acceptance test pass rate, which we were able to improve from below 50% to now 99% over the last 200 stacks produced. This reflects strong processes, efficiency, product reliability, and our capability to execute effectively. Underpinned by continuous technological innovation, we are agile and responsive to the evolving needs of our customers in a dynamic global environment. Evidence for that are the launches of our products Poseidon and Neptune V, which have landed particularly well with customers and which are generating commercial traction and success. Having retained full ownership of our core science and manufacturing processes, we do not only keep the technological edge, we maximize value add and ensure supply chain resilience. This plays to our own advantage even in times of global tariff uncertainty and supply chain disturbances, as recently seen in the market.
With our comprehensive product portfolio, proven track record of delivery, and especially with our growing number of reference plants, ITM is well positioned. In particular, reference plants and in-field product performance data have become a key differentiator and are conducive to customer confidence. Thanks to the successful delivery and operation of flagship projects, we offer customers proven technology, underscoring our credibility with efficiency and reliability data from real commercial plants. Simon Bourne will talk more about this point later. Now, I don't want to take the full financial part away, but it's worth summarizing that our strong set of results has confirmed our robust financial position. With revenue up 50% year- on- year or 400% over two years, and with £207 million of cash in the bank as of April, our financial performance and balance sheet are seen as clear competitive advantages by our customers.
This also helps the bankability of projects. Our contract backlog has grown even quicker than revenue, which I will talk about in more detail on the next slide. The outlook for green hydrogen remains strong. The energy transition is no longer just about decarbonization, but also about energy security and economic resilience. While early excitement led to unrealistic expectations, a course correction was inevitable. Rather than signaling failure, these market adjustments reflect a healthy maturation process. The customer landscape, technologies, and supply chains are evolving, weeding out weaker projects and paving the way for a more resilient, commercially viable hydrogen market. In this environment, operational agility and financial discipline are key to remain strategically positioned to capitalize on emerging opportunities. One of these opportunities is Hydropulse, our newly launched build-on-operate business model, which I will shed more light on later in the presentation. Our strategic priorities have remained valid.
We will continue to innovate and deliver best-in-class electrolyzers, scale our operations profitably to meet the growing demand, and consciously expand our global presence to grow market reach, pursuing an asset-light approach. If order intake grows quicker than revenue, then the contract backlog is increasing. In turn, a growing contract backlog is therefore an important leading indicator of a sustainable business model. Over the past two years, ITM 's sales have grown by a staggering 400%, and still, our contract backlog has easily outpaced that and almost doubled during the year. Due to record order intake from the REFHYNE II 100 MW project, 40 MW of Neptune V contracts, feed study, and after-sales contracts, at the end of April this year, our backlog stood at £145 million. Also, post-financial year end, this momentum did continue.
Since then, we signed another Neptune V contract with Westnetz in Germany, a Neptune II contract with a Spanish cement producer, a 120 MW feed contract with Uniper, and more. We expect our contract backlog to grow further during this financial year. One part of our contract backlog is this great project in Norway for our customer, La Française de l'Énergie, short FDE, with whom we signed the contract in this calendar year. Located directly at the coast, the H2 Hub ACTA project is consisting of two phases. Phase I comprises 20 MW, for which we are proud that FDE chose our Neptune V electrolyzers. The planned second phase aims to add another 40 MW of capacity at a later stage. Phase I is already in execution, currently in the so-called detail engineering phase.
For ITM, this is the first time we are integrating four Neptune V containers into one overall plant, thereby demonstrating high flexibility to configure the plant to site-specific requirements. Given the harsh marine environment, we need special corrosion protection and opted for water instead of air cooling. The Neptune V containers for this project will be manufactured in our new adjacent manufacturing workshop in Sheffield, no longer following a static build methodology, but one where the containers are moving through different build stations for higher throughput, something you would normally expect in a car manufacturing environment. We are working very closely with our customer FDE to enable our joint ambitious timeline. Commissioning is planned for the end of 2026, after which FDE will supply green fuels for the shipping industry. Another very important project we are currently delivering is the RWE Lingen 2x100MW plant.
This time, I'm letting our customers and partners speak for themselves with their own LinkedIn posts. The world's biggest PEM plant in execution is well on track, with now already 81 out of 150 stacks installed. The first 100MW are planned to go live still this calendar year. The Lingen plant will supply green hydrogen via a pipeline to the Total REFINEry in Loina. I have to say that I'm particularly proud about Sopna's positive confirmation that we are a steady and reliable partner for RWE. This is the kind of credible customer validation which goes a long way with prospective other customers. Of course, we couldn't be more proud and excited to be entrusted to deliver this XXL project together with our strategic partner, Linde. The many real-world learnings we are gathering together here are positioning us strongly for future joint projects.
Thank you, Dennis. I've previously discussed the performance of our TRIDENT stack platform in this forum before and claimed it to be the most advanced on the market. ITM has extensive testing facilities and many years of lab data, but it's real-world field data that customers want to hear about. This is because customers need to have confidence that the performance claimed by the OEM is representative of what they'll actually deliver. They also need to know that the rate of performance degradation is slow and working with the business model. If stacks need more energy to produce a given quantity of hydrogen, the cost of generation increases. Efficiency degradation is an important concern of customers, and many competitors are struggling with this, not least because there are few large-scale PEM plants in operation using current stack technology, even fewer that have been operating for several years.
ITM has stacks deployed at numerous sites across Europe, Australia, and Asia. The current TRIDENT stack platform has acquired over 125,000 cumulative hours of operation in the field, and this data is being routinely used to monitor performance and performance degradation rates. Today, I want to buck the trend of the industry and share some of this analysis with you. I'll use stack data from the 10 MW Shell REFHYNE I project, a refining application. This is a plant that has seen variable and intermittent operation, a very challenging profile, and one only possible with PEM technology. The graph on the top right shows the recorded profile for one of the five modules that make up the plant, operating between 30% and 100% load. To assess performance degradation, I've looked at full load efficiency during the months of May 2024 and May 2025.
Between those two periods, the plant accumulated approximately 30,000 stack operating hours and an average of 1,200 pressure cycles and 400 power cycles for each stack in the plant. Efficiency is measured in kWh/ kg. The fewer kWh required to generate a kilogram of hydrogen, the higher the efficiency. Degradation is described in percent per 1,000 operating hours. During the 12-month period, the stacks achieved an average performance over the variable load profile of less than 49 kWh/ kg . This is real-world market-beating efficiency, and the performance degradation rate was 0.09% per 1,000 operating hours. To provide some benchmarking, the EU 2030 target for degradation is 0.12% per 1,000 hours for PEM and 0.1% per 1,000 hours for alkaline technologies. This field data from ITM's TRIDENT stack beats both of these targets. This is highlighted in the graph on the bottom right.
It must be said that this should still be considered early data. However, it's being added to rapidly and becoming tremendously valuable in strengthening customer confidence. I'd also like to express my thanks to Shell for continuing to allow partners and prospective customers to view the plant in Wesseling. This takes us to another example deployment of TRIDENT stacks, this time in partnership with Linde Engineering, who designed and supplied the balance of plant. This plant is located at a Yara facility in Porsgrunn, Norway. It has a capacity of 24 MW and is used to generate hydrogen for the production of green ammonia as fertilizer. To date, this plant has accumulated over 70,000 stack operating hours and has produced over 500 tons of green hydrogen already. Another example of a plant that's being operated commercially in a real-world industrial setting.
This, together with field data from several other plants, is contributing valuable performance data that is starting to differentiate ITM . A rapidly growing number of industrial-scale commercial reference plants is a tangible competitive advantage. My final slide is a brief update on our next-generation stack platform, Kronos, which is currently in development. In short, Kronos will have a larger capacity, lower cost, and higher performance. It'll support large-scale projects while also providing a route to refresh the full product range. Kronos builds on the technology that we've proven via TRIDENT. It applies all of the lessons learned from manufacture, project execution, and field operations. The design squeezes much more electrolysis into a smaller footprint, dramatically increasing power density. It's also future-proofed to not only take advantage of the best technology today, but also the improvements that are coming through our rich technology pipeline.
We've progressed through validation of new features and processes and are well on track with testing. While not publishing a specification until validation is completed, I can tell you that part count is reduced by approximately 50%, sealing components have been reduced by approximately 70%, and power density has more than doubled to over 2.5 MW per sq m. We're genuinely excited about what's to come. The validation process continues at pace, and I look forward to updating the market on progress in the near future.
Thank you, Simon. In June, we launched Hydropulse, which was greeted with excitement by industrial customers. Under the slogan "Zero CapEx Zero Risk," Hydropulse opens a new chapter for ITM and for the green hydrogen industry. The Hydropulse premise is easily explained. While the industry needs green hydrogen to decarbonize the operations, in the current market environment, project developers are faced with challenges around CapEx, financing, and technology risk. This has opened a gap in the market, which in turn proves to be an opportunity for ITM. Hydropulse is tailored for exactly that: a simple, bankable, and scalable solution to overcome the most pressing real-world hurdles that are holding back exponential industry growth. Designed for industrial users with dependable hydrogen demand, Hydropulse will build, own, and operate decentralized green hydrogen production plants. Each project will be built around a guaranteed long-term offtake agreement with the customer.
Hydropulse therefore provides an additional, more direct route to market for ITM, targeting small to mid-sized plants in Europe. Each invested asset will utilize ITM's Neptune product range and will provide a high-quality, predictable revenue stream, expanding our addressable market, improving factory utilization, and accelerating profitability for the ITM group. We will not pursue speculative infrastructure investments. By taking unnecessary intermediaries out of the equation and offering all out of one hand, Hydropulse will be able to produce hydrogen at a cost others can only dream of. Operationally and strategically, we are in an exceptional position. We pair agility with scale, and we are staying ahead of the evolving market dynamics. With this, over to you, Amy.
Thank you, Dennis. Good morning to everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll take you through a strong set of results for the financial year ended 30 April 2025 and share our guidance for the current year ending 30 April 2026. We are pleased to report revenue of £26 million, a 50% year-on-year increase, and significantly ahead of our original guidance of £18 million- £22 million. This growth was driven primarily by equipment sales of £22.5 million, complemented by income from front-end engineering design studies, maintenance, spare parts, and equipment upgrades. While the majority of equipment sales revenue this year came from legacy contracts, which, while fully provided for, were not contributing to profits, these deliveries reflect our commitment to fulfilling past obligations, positioning for a far stronger, higher margin future.
As a reminder, most of our equipment revenue is recognized at a point in time, typically upon delivery or site acceptance testing, which means revenue lags long behind factory activities. Our gross loss has increased this year, but importantly, this reflects strategic actions from our previous plan: expanding capacity, improving manufacturing efficiency, and shifting to build to order rather than build to capacity. These changes are already delivering results, with our factory acceptance test pass rates soaring from under 50%- 99%, a transformational improvement in product quality and reliability. We have continued to uphold strong discipline around cash and cost control and have achieved an overall cost reduction in overheads while we continue to improve the level of capabilities and competencies of our employees. These steps strengthen our operational foundation and set us on a clear trajectory towards even greater efficiency, scalability, and profitability.
Our contract order backlog now stands at £145.1 million, double that of FY 2024. Since Dennis joined ITM Power, we committed that every contract we win must be profitable in its own right. This focus is paying off. 60% of the current order backlog represents future revenue that will contribute positively to margin, and the share continues to grow. We are not only building profitable contracts; we are also creating valuable reference plants, building lasting relationships, and increasing the proportion of profitable projects in our backlog. This disciplined approach is taking us step by step towards sustained profitability. We ended the year with a cash position of £207 million, significantly ahead of our original guidance, and notably, the second half of the year was cash generative. The table shows the major cash movements in the year contributing to the £23.3 million change.
This includes an exceptional item of £13.1 million in a commercial settlement as previously disclosed. Excluding this, the cash movement was £10.2 million, a major improvement compared with the £52.4 million movement in the prior year. The graphs on the right show that while reducing overall inventory balances as products are dispatched, we have maintained a healthy ratio of raw materials to finished goods, which was established in the prior year. Our CapEx has also decreased in line with our cash discipline, while we've increased the proportion of spend on research and development, particularly in advancing Kronos, our next-generation stack, which has already been highlighted in this presentation. Now onto our guidance for the year ended April 30, 2026.
We are expecting revenue to grow by a further 50% to between £35 million and £40 million, including recognizing revenue on the Lingen One project, which was reported on earlier in this presentation. As a reminder, we recognize revenue on contract completion, and we expect the majority of this revenue to be recorded in the second half of the year, aligned with deliveries and site acceptance tests. We focus our adjusted EBITDA loss to improve to £27 million- £29 million as we continue to work through the remaining legacy contracts. The losses are now primarily linked to factory loading and fixed cost absorption, while we maintain rigorous control over production, project, and overhead costs. We expect year-end cash to be between £170 million and £175 million, reflecting tight costs and capital discipline, alongside an expected working capital increase of £10 million- £15 million.
CapEx is expected to be £15 million- £20 million, with a focus on further developing Kronos, continuing to carefully advance manufacturing automation, and scaling the efficient production of our Neptune units. This will be conducive to our competitiveness. Finally, I'm delighted to extend a special invitation to our retail investors. To mark our 25th anniversary, we are opening the doors of our Sheffield factory to 25 retail investors. Guests will see our manufacturing process firsthand, meet our talented team, and experience the heart of our business. Details will be shared on social media in the coming weeks, and we look forward to welcoming you. That concludes our presentation. Thank you for your attention and continued support.
Thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated in the top right-hand corner of your screen. While the company takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you the recording of the presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. I'd now like to hand you over to Justin Scarborough, Head of Investor Relations, to host the Q&A. Justin, as you can see, we've received a number of questions. Can I therefore please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Thank you very much, Paul, and welcome to everybody to today's FY 2025 results call. We've got a number of questions that have come through, and the first one is aimed towards Simon, which is how excited are you about Kronos?
I'm very excited about Kronos. I think we're starting from a tremendous place. We have industrialized and supplied some great technology in the form of TRIDENT, and it is delivering market-leading performance, and I've shown you some evidence of that today. Kronos has really been an opportunity to incorporate all of our lessons learned, and that has meant that we've been able to make steady improvements to manufacturing processes to make it more straightforward, quicker, and easier to assemble. We have also been able to simplify the logistics of shifting stacks around to site during project execution. I think the part of Kronos that I'm most excited about is the design and technology changes that will be delivering some significant cost down and performance improvements. We have also managed to squeeze a lot more electrolysis in a smaller footprint. That means that the whole system will be much smaller.
That helps us to reduce the footprint of a site, and that in turn helps reduce the cost of construction in project realization. We've also future-proofed the stack so that not only can it take advantage of market-leading technology today, but the technologies that are in the process of coming through our design and validation process can also be utilized once they're ready, and that means that we can adopt those into the stack without having to make any stack redesigns on the way. I'm very excited.
Thank you, Simon. Question number two is for Amy. The FAT improvement is impressive. Can you help us understand how this helps to improve costs within the business?
Of course. Yes, I think it's a particularly impressive statistic that we've managed to transform our operations by. Essentially, efficient and quality production processes will ultimately give us less wastage, less write-offs, reducing costs, and giving us, in turn, a really good, strong competitive advantage. That, in the round, opens up the possibility of different factory testing regimes, different manufacturing processes, and the ability to make our production even more efficient than it is today.
Maybe if you allow me to add a bit to that. When you talk about testing regimes, I think it's fair to say that today we test each and every stack we deploy. The more confidence we have in the recurring quality, and as I said earlier in my presentation, we had one failure out of 200 stacks produced. This will allow us soon to go to batch testing instead of testing every stack, which will increase throughput, but will also take down energy costs and all related costs when it comes to testing.
Thank you very much. Question number three is another one for Amy. Could you remind us about your revenue recognition and cash flow profile through the life of a contract?
Yeah, absolutely. Revenue recognition we assess under the accounting standards. It's a contract-by-contract basis to assess which accounting treatment you use in each particular case. It leads to different accounting treatments based on the specifics of the contracts, but the majority of ours are on a completed contract basis. That's typically where we recognize revenue in a lump sum towards the end of a contract. That will be either on SAT or delivery, and that lags behind any factory activity. You don't see the revenue until after we've produced everything. There are occasions where we have contracts that are based over time, but they are limited, and in those cases, you recognize revenue as the contract progresses.
There are no hard and fast rules for each product type because each contract and each sale is bespoke, but some of our products lend more easily to over time, such as Poseidon, and some of them lend to more of a completed contract basis, such as just the TRIDENT's Neptune. That's where we'd recognize revenue at the end. All that differs very much from our cash profile, where we set all our contracts up to be at a minimum cash neutral throughout the life. We're collecting cash as we are producing whatever goods that we're making. The timescales of that cash collection can be different. A Neptune is a much shorter timeframe than, say, 200 MW plants, which could be over a couple of years.
True. When it comes to cash profiles, maybe it's still worth adding that usually we would execute cash neutral or cash positive, which means that usually the cash in should be pretty well aligned to cash out in projects or slightly above.
Thank you. I think it's probably a question for Dennis. Beyond Lingen One, what is the next biggest project you expect to recognize revenue on in the current financial year?
In FY 2026? That would be Porsgrunn, our 24 MW project, which we are executing together with and for Linde . The plant is currently in installation, and we would expect commissioning before calendar year end.
Thank you. A question for Amy. Your order backlog was £145.1 million at the year end. What is it today?
Okay, we don't give guidance on the order backlog beyond the end of the year, so beyond the end of FY 2025. I think you'll be able to see from recent R&Ss that we have kept increasing our order intake. We've won several contracts. There was a Neptune V with Westnetz, Neptune II with a Spanish customer, and we've very recently announced our first Poseidon contracts with Morgen. It's safe to say that the number has grown, but we won't give actual numbers beyond the year end.
Thank you. The next question, I think, probably for Simon first of all. Do you think it is correct that some believe that alkaline is cheaper than PEM technology?
Okay, so I've always said that each of the technologies have their advantages and disadvantages, but do I believe that alkaline is cheaper than PEM? No. I mean, on the one hand, alkaline stacks do use lower cost materials, but because the current density in alkaline stacks is so low, the stacks are so much bigger. Lower cost materials, but much, much more material doesn't really give you a net advantage. I think when you then start to look at the costs of project execution, because the stacks are so much bigger, the systems are so much bigger, the building costs get really quite significant and will be more expensive than PEM. In Europe today, there's no cost advantage for alkaline at the full scale plant size. We've had that feedback from a number of reference points both in the U.K. and in Europe.
Perhaps while I'm on the topic, if I can, there's normally a second part of that question, which is, do I believe that alkaline stacks are more efficient than PEM? The answer to that would also be no. I wouldn't just take my word for it. You can look up the EU 2030 targets, which are there for both PEM technology and alkaline. It's quite interesting to know that those targets are identical in terms of performance for both alkaline and PEM. The difference, though, is the target for PEM is at 3 A per sq cm, and the target for alkaline is at 1 A per sq cm. I think that says quite a lot about the difference in efficiency of the two technologies.
Yes, maybe adding to that. I mean, from real-life deployments or real-life tender processes, if you take a 100 MW PEM and a 100 MW alkaline plant, full EPC, total installed cost, in Europe, as Simon said, that's more or less the same today. There wouldn't be a significant advantage. Probably worth mentioning again that with Kronos, that would shift significantly. As you explained, Kronos, we're not only leaping ahead in terms of efficiency and performance, but it will also be significantly cheaper than the current TRIDENT solution, which means that with Kronos, we are effectively cheaper than alkaline, even if you, for example, take a 100 MW comparison in Europe.
Thank you very much. A question for Dennis. Just over a year ago, ITM announced the 500 MW capacity reservation. Is it possible to provide an update on this?
Yeah, of course. We cannot disclose it to the customer due to NDA requirements or confidentiality requirements. What we can say, I think we're allowed to say that, is that there has been a first call-off in the financial year 2025. In the last financial year, there's been a call-off against that 500 MW capacity reservation, and we are working very closely with our customer towards more projects as call-offs from the capacity reservation.
Thank you. The next question is for Amy. Within the FY 2026 CapEx guidance, how much is allocated to Hydropulse?
Okay, so the simple answer is we haven't allocated any CapEx to Hydropulse within that guidance at the moment. How Hydropulse will work is each individual contract will be judged on its own merits with a full business case behind it, and any investment decision will be made on that specific individual case. If there are any significant investments that we need to make into Hydropulse that would materially alter the cash guidance, we would, of course, reissue guidance at that point. At the moment, the CapEx doesn't include any Hydropulse projects. In our overall cash numbers, we have a small amount of overheads allocated to Hydropulse this year.
Thank you. Almost like a follow-up for Hydropulse, could you explain how project financing will work with Hydropulse?
Of course. Project financing, again, is going to be on an individual project-by-project basis. There is no one kind of clear rule. It will be based on the individual requirements of that project and the specifics of it. To give some examples, we could, for example, look at funding it through debt financing, which is asset-backed or based on future customer receipts. I think what's important in the Hydropulse business model is that it makes the chance for individual projects to be very cash positive quickly, and also that they would be profitable from day one. They would be revenue generating and profitable from day one of operation.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say Hydropulse is, by its business model, not designed to drain cash from ITM, but to deliver cash.
Thank you. Next question. Over the past year, we have announced several FEED contracts. Could you explain the FEED process and timelines associated?
Sure. Want to go first?
Sure.
FEED stands for Front-End Engineering Design, and it is there to really specify everything to do with a particular project. Everything that is project specific. There's quite a lot to do. There's some genuine heavy lifting. You're defining the site layout, getting the piping system all organized, doing some safety documentation, and so on and so forth. They would typically run for six to nine months. They could go a bit longer, nine to 12 months if the project is particularly big. The reason that feeds are so important is that that is the place where you get enough definition so that you can start to engage with suppliers and get some quotes back. That means that you can get much crisper on the cost. That process is really important to feed into the final investment decision.
Thank you.
Yes. Usually, you would see, after FEED completion, you would expect a three to four month delay to FAD under normal circumstances if there's no other factors which would delay a decision. As Simon rightfully explained, FEED processes come into play, especially for larger projects which are more complex, where you try to integrate a specific plant component either into a brownfield already existing installation, or where you need to have a highly bespoke customized product plant design, where you need a proper design basis before you can engage with suppliers regarding firm prices in order to get to a full firm price towards the end of the FEED process for the customer to have a proper basis for the FAD.
Does the situation in the U.S. regarding the development of the green hydrogen market have any impact on ITM?
I'll start. ITM has got an ASME compliant stack in TRIDENT today, so we are able to engage now in projects in the U.S. We did see the risk of slowdown in green projects in the U.S., and we didn't invest in the U.S. to any significant degree. That means there's a certain insulation that we have from that slowdown that doesn't cost us particularly. There may be other OEMs out there that perhaps have put more money into the U.S. We chose not to do that. We are able to pick up business there when it fits, but the slowdown isn't really hurting us.
Yeah, I still remember, I think it was a year ago, one and a half years ago, when I was asked the same question in the other direction. When are we over? Are we doing more when it comes to the U.S.? At that time, I said I would always want to see more anchor demand, sustainable anchor demand in a certain world region before committing capital into that region to build a factory. I think that strategy has proven to be right. We shied away from early investments, also because we were a bit skeptical about the hype of the U.S. market. Now we have seen a reversal, basically, which was also a bit unexpected. I think it proved to be the right strategy to be very careful with capital allocation, especially given that that's all shareholder capital. I think we have now made ourselves a name to be very careful how we spend money, as you also see in the cash burn numbers of FY 2025.
Thank you. A couple of finance questions coming your way, Amy. The first one is, what proportion of your work in progress relates to the FY 2026 guidance?
Okay, so we state in our accounts that of the contracted order backlog, we're going to recognize roughly 25% of that, as it's about a quarter, in this next year, in FY 2026. Work in progress is really quite closely aligned with that. While we wouldn't give specific numbers, you would expect a similar level of work in progress to be related to that revenue.
Thank you. A second financial question. Could you help us understand your gross loss line, what it's made up of, and what the near-term drivers of it are?
Of course. First of all, let me just say that I think we've done some really great work over the last couple of years controlling costs, making sure we've got an efficient and quality production line, controlling costs on projects, winning profitable projects, and also controlling overheads. We'll maintain that discipline and accelerate it where we can, but keep an absolute focus on that. We're now at that point where our losses are really made up of under-absorption of the factory, and that speaks to both the improvements that we've made in our production processes and quality over the last few years, but also we did shift from building to capacity, essentially filling the factory and filling work in progress and stock to build into order. There are under-absorptions in the factory at the moment. They will lessen as the volumes go up.
As we win more projects, as we gain significant orders, as we have been doing, we will completely fill the factory and reduce some of those under-absorptions. The other thing that contributes towards gross loss, which is talked about, is the legacy projects that we're still working through. We're still recognizing revenue on those legacy projects that are fully provided for if they are loss-making, but they don't contribute towards gross margin at the moment.
Thank you very much. The next question. When do you expect to deploy the first Neptune V, given that the Gartroff contract was announced last November?
I assume that's to me, right? The customer name is Gutroff in Germany, a smaller gas company. We indeed signed the contract in November last year. The engineering has been completed. Procurement has been mostly completed. Almost all of the parts, all the key parts have arrived. The Neptune V unit is currently in build on our shop floor. Actually, if we were just looking out of the window here, which you can't see, you would see it being built as we speak. We are on track towards factory acceptance testing still this calendar year, and shipment is planned for Q1 2026.
Thank you. Question for Amy. I believe in the R&S and during the presentation, you talk about the path to profitability. Could you help us understand what that path looks like?
Yep. Just to reiterate, we can't guide beyond the current year, but I can talk about the kind of the elements that will make up that profitability. We can confidently say that we think we've got a strong enough balance sheet to see us to that point of profitability. We need to absolutely maintain the cost discipline that I've talked about: overheads, projects, and production. We need to continue growing the order backlog, and particularly the percentage of that order backlog that is new contracts where it is outweighing the legacy contracts now. That will continue to grow and contribute towards it. Profitability is a question of time now. It's filling the factory and time. We're doing lots of development work to make that an accelerated timeline, and in particular, Kronos should give the ability to reduce costs and give us more of a competitive advantage in terms of filling the factory.
Thank you. In terms of time, that's all we've got for questions today. There is one thing that's come in as a note, and it's not a question. It's someone who wanted to say congratulations on the Morgen contract that was announced yesterday morning.
Thank you very much.
Many thanks everybody for your interest in ITM . Questions that were submitted prior or during the meeting but that weren't answered will be responded to the normal way via the IMC platform over coming days. Thank you for your attention. Thank you.
Justin, thank you and thank you to the ITM management team for updating attendees today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session? You should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that management could better understand your views and expectations. This will 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 ITM Power plc, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.