Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our capital market update. In today's presentation, we want to cover four topics: our 12-month plan, ITM's new vision and value statement, an update on the market and on our strategic priorities, our half-year one- financial results, and our improved full year guidance. Exactly one year ago today, we started our 12-month plan to make ITM a stronger, more focused, and more capable company. We promised to concentrate on a narrowed product portfolio for standardization and volume manufacturing. We set out to improve capital discipline by a stringent cost reduction program in the short term and by introducing professional processes for the future. We aimed at debottlenecking fabrication and testing and at investing into the automation of several manufacturing steps, and we walked the talk. Today, I am delighted to announce the successful on-time completion of our plan.
It's impressive what we've achieved in just 12 months. To highlight just a few of in total, more than 180 distinct improvements, we have rationalized our portfolio, ceasing the production and support of older generation technologies. We have reduced the number of product variants by 75%. We have translated the world's leading PEM technology into volume products. We launched our 20 MW POSEIDON module to address the market for larger plants, while reducing complexity for integrators who seek to work with our technology. The release of our Hybrid Stack makes available our state-of-the-art Trident technology to customers operating older generation electrolyzers, offering them a material efficiency improvement of 10%. And we have substantially enlarged our product compliance reach and pursued an asset-light market entry into the US We achieved a significant cost reduction and fundamentally tightened the rigor applied to capital spend.
We reduced headcount by over 30%, while professionalizing our engineering capabilities and processes, especially with regards to design freezes, to operate in unison with other areas of the company, such as procurement and manufacturing. We have also put in place a more robust quality and process management system and strengthened compliance and validation. Our strict quality over quantity policy has driven down failure rates in production. We have visibly improved our project performance and delivery credibility, which is being acknowledged by our customers. The sale of our 50% share in our joint venture, Motive Fuels, freed up GBP 28 million of previously ring-fenced capital, which we directed back to our core business. We have also achieved the planned progress and automation of a number of manufacturing steps. This has enabled enhanced build quality and consistency, along with shortened build times and reduced manufacturing costs.
We will, of course, continue to introduce automation in a controlled way after new equipment has been validated. Over the past year, we increased our testing capacity, a previous bottleneck of ITM, and expanded our facilities in Sheffield. The development of the new site will also allow us to optimize our factory layout for stack manufacturing, automation, and serial production. It provides increased fabrication space for higher stack volumes, allowing us to grow output in line with commercial projects. This scale-up also necessitates the active management of our supply chain. Throughout the year, we have announced strategic collaborations with market leading suppliers such as Gore, Mott, and FRIEM, for essential materials and components of our products. This adds to our delivery credibility, which is becoming more and more important as stack volumes grow. In October, we officially opened the all-new ITM Power Germany in Linden, North of Frankfurt.
The facility will ensure that our state-of-the-art stacks are ready for quick deployment as after-sales spares. This allows us to minimize response time to our customers, which in turn maximizes the value our customers can derive from the use of our products. ITM Power Germany will also be home to functions such as business development, Industrial IoT, and it will offer facilities for repair and maintenance, as well as for training of customers and partners. As we scale our operations, we are gearing up for an increasing degree of local content creation in the European Union. This is our state-of-the-art product portfolio today. Our market-leading 2 MW stack platform, TRIDENT, sits at the heart of our products. It is the stack in which the electrochemical magic happens, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.
TRIDENT forms the basis of our 2 MW NEPTUNE unit, our autonomous plug-and-play electrolyzer, and of our 20 MW core electrolysis process module, POSEIDON. This offering is perfectly tailored to meet today's commercial demand. The new ITM is all about keeping it real. Therefore, here's some impressions of real projects. On the left, you can see how production and delivery against a 200-MW plant looks like in industrial reality. By the way, the world's largest PEM electrolyzer being built today. Our TRIDENT skids are being packaged and shipped to Italy, where they are then installed into 10-MW standard modules by Linde Engineering. From there, these modules are then making their way to Germany, to RWE's site in Lingen.
On the right, you see our cube and TRIDENT equipment installed on customer site for our 24 MW project in Norway, being the world's first green hydrogen for green ammonia plant. The new ITM also needed a refreshed vision and more targeted values, putting into words what we are striving for. From today, this sets the new bar for ITM. With safety at the heart of everything we do, innovation in our DNA, superior technology, precision manufacturing, integrity, and respect, we deliver the world's best electrolyzers, scale our operations profitably to meet the rising demand, grow our global footprint and reach, challenge ourselves to become better than yesterday, every day. To help customers decarbonize their operations, drive sustainable change within industry, government, and society, accelerate the world's transition to net zero, and increase shareholder value. Let's take a look at the long-term rationale for hydrogen.
The pathway to net zero is a challenge that is unparalleled in scale and complexity, but also an unparalleled opportunity. Today, there's broad consensus that green hydrogen is a key enabler for the energy transition. This relates to grid balancing and to the decarbonization, particularly of hard-to-abate sectors, which account for circa 30% of global emissions, such as steel, heavy-duty transport, chemicals, shipping, and aviation. By 2050, it is estimated that hydrogen and derivatives will meet a sizable share of the energy demand, equating to approximately 15%-20% of the energy mix, with 90% of global electricity expansion expected to be renewables in the next five years, for example. This would require 613 million tons of annual clean hydrogen production, with 2/3 of this number expected to be green hydrogen.
To put this into perspective, today, the world is producing just 0.7 million tons of clean hydrogen each year. 5 terawatts of electrolyzer capacity are required by 2050, meaning an average of around 160 gigawatts of electrolyzers installed per year, with a few gigawatts in the short term, followed by an exponential acceleration thereafter. To be fair, I am personally not a big fan of long-term predictions, but in this case, does it really matter whether you or I believe in it being 400, 600, or 800 million tons by 2050? In any case, this will become a massive market, which is also demonstrated by the early and significant investments into infrastructure around transport and storage by governments all around the world. Targeted funding programs and alliances between nations aim to stimulate and kickstart a cross-border hydrogen economy.
The European Union and the US foresee more than $700 billion of investments into their markets alone by 2050. As such, the outlook for green hydrogen remains excellent. Let's take a quick look at the UK market, which had been lagging behind the European Union for quite a while, but which is now gaining traction. The UK government's Hydrogen Allocation Round, short HAR mechanism, to kickstart the green hydrogen economy in the UK, has the ambition of 1 gigawatt of electrolyzer capacity in operation or in construction by 2025 and 5 gigawatts by 2030. The first of in total seven planned allocation rounds concluded project selection at the end of 2023, providing GBP 90 million of CapEx funding and an impressive GBP 2 billion of future revenue support for 125 megawatts output across 11 projects.
HAR 2, the second round, earmarks up to 875 MW. HAR 3 and HAR 4, up to 750 MW each, and so on. I think it goes without saying that ITM, being the only commercial electrolyzer manufacturer in the UK, is obviously best positioned to supply into these projects. This is maximizing the economic benefit we can derive from taxpayer money. We, ITM, are committed to grow the UK hydrogen economy and to create hundreds of jobs in the country. It was certainly no coincidence, but an acknowledgment of our great economic potential that Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, chose ITM's premises for his public announcement in November last year. From our factory, he launched the Green Industries Growth Accelerator, short GIGA scheme, foreseeing GBP 960 million of funding for the manufacturing of clean energy technologies, including electrolyzers.
In the short term, the electrolyzer market is still immature, though, with lots of noise, but only a few OEMs and technologies credible for commercial deployment. A year ago, I predicted our competitors to experience issues, while ITM chose to proactively slow down to firm up our foundation. As competitors are now indeed facing challenges, we have emerged stronger than ever. As a side effect of many OEMs now falling short on their promises to customers in real-world projects, customers do continue to require assurance and certainty around product readiness, technology, and delivery performance, all of which are areas in which ITM is now regarded as an industry leader. This is being acknowledged by existing and new customers alike. We have been seeing the number and size of project inquiries increasing significantly. At the same time, peak energy prices, cost of capital, and inflation are not helping FIDs right now.
A normalization of these macroeconomic effects will unlock many FIDs. Whilst government incentive programs can stimulate market growth, and we of course, welcome that, overly complex schemes or delays in approvals can also slow down project decisions. The good news is that while many projects are developing slower than originally expected, ITM made it on almost every credible project OEM shortlist, and we are not losing projects which we take seriously. In summary, the long-term trajectory for green hydrogen remains excellent and unchanged. In the near term, industrial scale-up will be incremental, though. Momentum will only accelerate over time, but then exponentially. This dynamic market development requires us to get the balance right, implying a need for readiness and flexibility whilst managing cash commitments carefully.
Our strategic priorities have to underpin the theme of readiness, flexibility, and cash discipline, and they need to take into account the complex environment we are operating in today, as just explained, ranging from a massive long-term opportunity, just waiting to be captured dynamically but at different speed-developing markets. Macroeconomics slowing down the acceleration in the near term, with demand not falling away, though, but piling up against the unchanged need to decarbonize. This will cause an exponential growth thereafter. We have therefore defined the following three priorities. First, we will remain at the forefront of technology, product, and delivery credibility. We are confident that today we have the most advanced PEM technology in the market. In order to further widen the gap to competition, we will of course keep evolving our technology and products, and we will selectively extend our portfolio to address emerging needs of the market.
We will be prepared for rapid stack volume scaling and will further evolve processes in manufacturing, engineering, procurement, services, and all other parts of the company. We know, of course, that shaping a successful and resilient business is an ongoing journey. Second, we will scale our operations whilst retaining flexibility and conserving cash. This can go hand in hand. We will deepen the level of automation, and we will grow capacity in line with commercial projects. Given the EPC timescales of large-scale projects, we can indeed maintain rapid scaling capability even for gigawatt-scale endeavors. In an environment with lots of noise, not only on the OEM side, but also on the project side, it is critical to identify and focus on the credible opportunities in the market, and then capturing a significant market share through superior product and large-scale delivery performance.
Third, we will grow our global footprint and reach by staying adaptable. This requires us to ensure an appropriate setup in all attractive offtake regions. We want to be best positioned and best prepared for a rapid demand uptick wherever it occurs. This critical adaptability, as opposed to over-committing and becoming static, can be achieved by pursuing an asset-light, product- and service-first approach. This will also include further expanding our regional product compliance. ITM is an ambitious company. The market for green hydrogen will be huge, and ITM will become the market leader for PEM electrolyzers. Our 12-month plan has transformed ITM into a credible delivery organization. The recently announced paid 100 MW capacity reservation from Shell Deutschland as a repeat customer is yet another testament to this.
We will continue to remain agile and adaptable, which will turn out to be a key differentiator, considering the development timelines for large-scale projects. Over the last couple of months, I was more than once asked whether ITM is somehow losing out on selling compared to others. Well, to answer that question, let us take a look at some market data. This may also give you some more context on what I mean when I'm speaking of noise versus industrial reality. The numbers on this slide were compiled based on publicly available information relating to the PEM market over the last 12 months. Of course, it always depends a little bit on where exactly you are drawing the line in terms of vagueness, but in this time frame, more than 3 GW of MOUs or other vague forms of collaboration were announced globally in the PEM space.
Especially for larger projects, it's not uncommon in the industry to perform a so-called FEED study. Such FEEDs are preceding a refined investment decision. Over the last 12 months, 437 MW of FEED studies were announced. As experience shows, not every FEED leads to a positive FID for the full project. Speaking of full projects, 873 MW were awarded. Compared to all the noise in the market, this number appears small, but it actually isn't. In reality, this is a steep increase compared to the previous years. A closer look at the awarded, or I would also call them the real projects, reveals that 70% by MW are being built in Europe. Europe today being by far the most important single market. The US, whilst having great potential following the government's IRA funding scheme, contributes together with Canada, only 28%.
Rest of world, including Australia, 2%. ITM has just started to bid into more world regions. In 2023, though, we were basically only bidding into Europe. There, we have achieved a 33% market share. The other 67% are Siemens Energy, Plug Power, Cummins, Nel on the PEM side, H-TEC, and Elogen.... As you see, in reality, beyond all the noise and shaky announcements out there, ITM is doing quite well on market share. But of course, we have to acknowledge that the market is still young and remains volatile to individual large projects, which can change this picture overnight. Normally, I wouldn't show you snapshots of volatile numbers, but if I'm being asked whether ITM is falling behind on sales, the short answer is no.
When I joined ITM a bit more than a year ago, this was our global reach from a product compliance perspective, limiting the regions in which we could do sales. Throughout the year, we worked very hard to expand our reach to unlock new world regions offering new opportunities. We have achieved massive progress. Today, our global reach looks like this. This was enabled by the intentional design of our Trident stack platform, which offers unparalleled compliance flexibility. We can deliver the same stack into all highlighted world regions. This unlocks obvious volume manufacturing advantages, including a consistent supply chain approach. As a next step, currently in the making, we will add compliance for Australia, where our stack is expected to achieve compliance without design changes as well.
With vast renewable energy potential, the country is emerging as an important market for domestic green hydrogen generation and for export to various world regions. I already mentioned the future evolution and selective expansion of our product portfolio. Just to emphasize it once again, our portfolio today is market leading and perfectly suited to meet today's commercial demand. It consists of our 2 MW TRIDENT stack platform, offering the highest current density, highest levelized conversion efficiency, and lowest precious metals loading on the market worldwide. This technology sits at the heart of our 2 MW plug-and-play container unit, NEPTUNE, and our 20 MW module, POSEIDON. To defend our pole position, we will incrementally evolve our TRIDENT stack platform. We will keep introducing design improvements in a controlled manner via formal product releases. Right now, we are manufacturing TRIDENT Mark 4 and will soon progress to Mark 5.
The same applies to our NEPTUNE container, of which we are currently producing Mark 1, soon to be succeeded by Mark 2. POSEIDON, which is being realized with project-specific integrators, will be subject to continuous improvement with every project executed. Let's move on to future portfolio additions, which are currently under development. We have started working on a larger capacity plug-and-play electrolyzer unit to even better address mid-size projects. Even more important, now officially under development is Kronos. Kronos will be our game-changing, next-generation, higher-capacity, future tech stack platform. Sadly, for competition reasons, I can't disclose more today. We will, of course, keep you informed about the progress on both portfolio additions as we are nearing official product launch. This concludes my part of the presentation. Over to you, Andy, for our financial results and for our full year guidance.
Many thanks, Dennis, and good morning, all. Thank you for joining us. My first slide shows the summary half-year financial results for the period ending 31st of October 2023. The revenue for the period was GBP 8.9 million, which marks more than a four-fold increase compared to the GBP 2 million for the same period the year before. Our revenue was driven predominantly by product sales, being cube deliveries into Germany and a number of Neptune contracts. The GBP 8.9 million recognized constitutes an increase compared to our December trading update value of GBP 7.5 million, as we concluded a commercial agreement with a customer which was still under negotiation in December. The losses have improved significantly year-on-year, with a gross loss of GBP 8.2 million versus a gross loss of GBP 45 million a year ago.
This improvement has been realized through the better management of in-flight contracts, with provisions made in the period primarily relating to working with existing customers to use the projects in the field to trial new stacks, being the fastest route to us getting validation on those products. In terms of EBITDA, we lost GBP 21 million in the period, compared to GBP 54 million the year before, a significant improvement and driven by tighter cost control, particularly after the restructure that was performed in March and April 2023 as part of our twelve-month plan. The administrative expenses presented in the income statement are net of cost recoveries and have increased period-on-period due to a lower level of cost recovery on project spend, which has been tighter controlled to avoid previous overspend, and on product developments, where we have narrowed the focus on our core products.
These costs will be further absorbed as product volume increases in the future. Our like-for-like overhead cost is, however, lower, even though we've been driving skills and capability within the organization over the last 12 months and uplifting the standard that will enable us to be ready for future income generation. There remains a need to stay vigilant around costs that are not resolved through volume, and we are now scrutinizing these routinely as a business to keep improving our financial performance. It is our aim to become a profitable company. Let's take a closer look at cash flow in the period. Our opening balance was around GBP 283 million, and our closing balance, GBP 254 million, a movement of a little less than GBP 29 million. In terms of what contributed to that, the adjusted EBITDA accounts for an outflow of GBP 21 million.
We've then had an increase in inventories in the period of GBP 18 million, and I'll come back to that figure. We've then made improvements to working capital of nearly GBP 12 million, namely around getting improved payment terms with suppliers and better chasing outstanding balances from customers. Beyond that, we have continued to invest in factory automation as we set out to do, and are on course to complete our capacity uplift, having had to invest less money than previously expected. The cash utilized with CapEx was predominantly around expanding our testing facility, so putting our money into the next in-line bottlenecks to free up our factory.
In contrast to previous periods, we have spent less money, at GBP 1.3 million, on new product development, but rather, as set out in the twelve-month plan a year ago, we have used our time consolidating the existing, more narrowed and targeted product portfolio. The final balance relates to interest received, which was GBP 6.7 million in the period. If we turn the spotlight back to inventory, ITM has a significant balance, which has also increased by GBP 18 million in the period. This increase is driven by three factors. The first is delays to customer collection of certain units. So ITM have moved from a position of being almost always on the critical path to starting to exceed the site timelines that customers and integration partners have, resulting in more finished products at ITM Power, waiting for collection.
The second driver is that we have selectively bought in products, especially precious metals, to control downside risk in volatile markets. What has improved, though, is the processing of our stock. The inventory has largely been processed into finished subsystems and products, with the raw materials balance evolving, reducing from GBP 36 million as our interim results a year ago to around GBP 9 million in the first half of this year. The stock balance requires careful focus and remains an opportunity for ITM to further improve our working capital. My final slide shows the evolution of our guidance for the current financial year, and I am pleased to be able to report an improving position with regards to the guidance for our full year financials. Whilst our revenue guidance remains unchanged in terms of EBITDA losses, we are previously guided to a range of between GBP 45 million and GBP 55 million.
As year-end is approaching, we are narrowing the guidance to the better end of the range, with guidance of GBP 45-50 million. This includes the planned ramp-up of validation of new products, which is expected to increase our utilities costs and the cost of R&D consumables. The most significant change is our guidance for the full-year CapEx. We had previously committed to increase our capacity within our factory in Sheffield, and in doing so, increasing the level of automation while spending between GBP 35-45 million. This figure also included product development. I can report that we are on course to achieve all of our automation and capacity targets for this financial year at much reduced spend. Our new full-year guidance will be between GBP 15-25 million spent on CapEx.
It is important to note that we have managed the business to a lower spend profile here. Our residual CapEx plans, which in the following financial year include the fit-out of the site next door to us, remain unchanged. This concludes our presentation, and I am happy to open for questions.