Good morning, and welcome to the Wynnstay Group PLC full year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press Send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I would now like to hand you over to CEO Alk Brand. Good morning to you, sir.
Good morning, everybody. It is a pleasure to talk to all of you. My name is Alk Brand. I'm the CEO of Wynnstay Group PLC, and today with me is Rob Thomas, my colleague, our CFO, and we're delighted to talk to you about the results of our previous financial year. We would like to focus on quite a few things in the presentation. So I will focus on some of the highlights of the year, Rob as well, followed by a discussion of our business model, update on some of our changes. Rob will focus on our results and the business review, and then I will come back in on our summary and outlook.
So, I'm happy to say that the past financial year was a successful one, and was the first year of our Project Genesis. We are now in year two of a three-year project, to improve the financial results of the business, and I'm pleased that, after year one, looking back, we can say that it's been a very successful year. So with that, I'm gonna hand over to my colleague, Rob, and, looking forward to discussing this with our investors today. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Alk, and good morning, everyone. As Alk mentioned, we are pleased with the results that we have for the financial year ending October 2025. We believe they are stronger results, and they do reflect the early benefits of our transformation plan, which is Project Genesis. Our profit growth has increased by 20%, and that was ahead of the original market expectations we set at the start of the financial year. We've delivered that through improved margins and cost control across the group. We have a strong balance sheet. We're an asset-backed business, and we've maintained that balance sheet strength in the year of transition. We believe in strong shareholder returns, and we have a progressive dividend policy as part of our Capital Allocation Framework, which I'll talk about later.
But that means that we've increased our dividend for the 22nd consecutive year, and that's a real signal from the board around our confidence in the prospects of the group. Our strategy, Project Genesis, which was our 3-year turnaround plan, has completed the design phase on plan, and we're pleased today to talk you through our growth strategy, which is called Strategy Genesis. Just moving on to our financial highlights. Our revenue is GBP 583 million. Now, that did reduce during the year. It reduced in our feed and grain segment, and that was due to a lower harvest, which meant lower traded volumes in our grain trading business, and there were also a couple of feed mills that we exited during the year, and we'll talk through that as we go into the project review.
However, our gross profit, which is a better underlying indicator of our activity and performance because we are a commodity-based business, increased by 1.6%, and the gross margin percentage increased in all three of our business segments. As I mentioned, our adjusted PBT increased by over 20% to GBP 9.2 million from GBP 7.6 million last year, and again, that increased in all three of our operating segments. Our net cash was GBP 25.7 million, and later on in the presentation, I'll talk to you about how we've deployed capital in investing in improvement plans, growth, and also how we're using working capital to grow the business. We've maintained the number of shares on hand during the year, so we no longer offer scrip dividends or issue shares for other purposes.
That means through tight equity, our profit growth drops directly into increased earnings per share. As I mentioned, we've maintained the progressive dividend, and a dividend for the full year of GBP 0.178 is an increase of 1.7%. Alk will now talk us through the business overview and Project Genesis.
Thank you, Rob. As you are aware, last year, we started reporting our financial results in three different segmentation profile: feed and grain, arable, and stores. It's important to say that our focus very much is to be the supplier of choice for British farmers, and I'm excited when we look at the results of all three of these segments, and Rob will go into more detail. All of them, all of them has improved through the year, and all of them are scalable, and all of them are part of Project Genesis in terms of our improvement plan.
Just to remind everybody, our feed milling and grain is one of our reporting segments, and that includes all our feed milling activities, our two anchor feed mills, our blending plants, and then also our raw material trading new platform, GrainLink. In terms of arable, it's our fertiliser business, both Glasson Fertilisers , and also the fertiliser activity through our Wynnstay team, and then our seed business, and then our 51 stores, which all together make us a really scalable and strong integrated UK agricultural platform. We're very proud to say that there are several things which makes Wynnstay different. We have a very unique route to market with a very, very strong team of salespeople going to farms, advising our farmers throughout the UK.
At the same time, on the other side, we have our retail stores, our agri traders, our telesales functions, our online activity, and all of them, through all our sales, commercial, and marketing effort, are aligned on one goal: to be the supplier of choice for British farmers. We've got a very strong product portfolio mix, which help us to reduce seasonality and risk. We've got the ability to cross-sell through our new integrated business platform. Our focus in feed milling are on livestock, poultry, and edible. It's a good balance. We've got a geographical reach from Cornwall to Scotland, very strong, deep customer analytics, and proud to say, 108 years of heritage with strong brand awareness and customer support.
Wynnstay, as we are today, and in the, in the past, but as we are today, are a very attractive investment opportunity. We've got a simplified and integrated cost model, easy to understand for everybody, for all our stakeholders. We are busy unlocking growth opportunities from our current asset base, and Rob will talk about it, but we're very, very proud of our asset base. A very strong, well-invested asset base, which are scalable for the future. And all our reporting segments are scalable with margin enhancement opportunities. And our Project Genesis execution platform has been established, and our teams work relentlessly, day, weekly, monthly, to improve everything in our business.
At the same time, although we sit with a healthy balance sheet and cash available to invest in our business, we have a disciplined capital allocation, and we're well aware that we are working with our investors' funds, and therefore, everything we do are calculated through this capital allocation to ensure that we spending our money wisely. We've got a strong asset backed balance sheet, and we really believe that we are only in the beginning of an improvement plan and that the best is yet to come. We are a strong, integrated agriculture supply business. We have strong manufacturing sites, all scalable, 51 stores. And we are selling a lot of products through all these platforms.
Furthermore, our direct wholesale, retail, and routes to market is incredibly strong. Our focus is very much on seven product categories. We will talk about it later again in the presentation. We have three complementary divisions, and although we report our financial results in these three divisions, we operate the business as one integrated business. We are very proud to say, also longstanding customer relationships and local presence, which have been fostered over 108 years, and that is definitely one of our key strengths in our business. Our Project Genesis has now been well-established, and we made certain promises on the Project Genesis, which I'm very proud to say, we've honored all of these promises.
Last year, and many of you on this call have been on the call last year, you will remember that we said we planning to simplify our sales structures and to align our trading regions, and we have completed that successfully. We said that we will consolidate the group-wide feed and grain trading teams under one, and we have completed that by the end of the previous financial year. We've integrated Youngs Animal Feeds into the wider business, and we've consolidated our facilities, including Glasson, under one Wynnstay manufacturing leadership team, to fully utilize the existing asset base of our business. So today, Wynnstay does not operate in silos, but under one leadership team, one executive team, and in terms of manufacturing, one leadership team, and in terms of commercial, one leadership team.
In terms of operational performance, we said we'll fix short-term operational issues, address bottlenecks in our manufacturing processes, which we have started doing, and is aligned with our 3-year plan under Project Genesis, with some very early success stories to tell as well. We said we will focus on efficient manufacturing principles, and we've applied that, and the net result of that is very strong, improved performances in our manufacturing processes. And we said we will focus on supply chain efficiency and demand planning, with a result to make sure that all our deliveries are on time and full, and then in the last 12 months, we've dramatically improved our service levels throughout the business to a point where we are getting extremely good feedback from our customers.
And then, at the same time, we had to have a plan for growth, so we wanna increase the capacity of our anchor sites. We started doing that. Early example of that is Carmarthen, plus some of the investments we made into Glasson, which we will talk about later. The outcomes are that we are now a leaner, more integrated, and more responsible, responsive business with a strengthened ExCo team. We have a much more stronger supply chain resilience. We've added 30,000 tonnes of added manufacturing capacity to the business, and our results and cost focus brings initial earnings and return improvements across all reporting segments. We are now in the implementation phase, so in year two of Project Genesis, and that is fully underway.
At the same time, our focus in Project Genesis, last year, this year, and the next year, is going to be very specific, dedicated project work streams. So we've identified many areas in our business we want to improve, and big Wynnstay presence is in all these areas. So just to remind everybody again, our focus is on revenue growth, on margin improvement, on project-focused stores, on our supply chain and logistics, manufacturing efficiency, raw material trading, effective procurement, people and culture improvements, and system and process improvements. And I'm pleased to say that we have made big progress in the last 12 months in all these areas, and all of that focus have translated into improved results of the previous year.
But at the same time, we, we realized that the business cannot always just continue to focus on improvement. So that is why we always believe that Project Genesis will have a natural end in three years, so this year and next year, and that will need to be translated into a continuous progress and continuous improvement mindset, which I'm sure will happen. Continuous improvement is like to peel an onion. There's always more things to do, and as the world change around us, we will continue to also make sure we are ahead of that curve.
But at the same time, our business are a business which are very much commercially focused, and we wanna grow our business, and we've agreed a new five-year plan last year with our board of directors, and this is very much focused on growth. The growth will be getting traction through our asset improvements. So most of our growth, which we anticipate, in the next five years, will come through our own current assets. All of them are scalable, as we said in the beginning. All of them have much more growth opportunities after investment, and we also believe that will be the best return for our shareholders and the best option for our customers. We are gonna continue to build volume traction through this asset improvement.
We're gonna execute our share of wallet plan, which we will speak about later about in more detail. Then in all our stores, our stores are really our crown jewels. We're very proud of our success in our store network, and many plans are there to even do better in that regard. All of that should deliver the growth which will keep Wynnstay ahead of the race in terms of our competitive landscape. I'm very, very proud that the things we've now said we will do is well on track. Our strategic focus is very much on seven core products. Now, I wanna just briefly stand still on that. The seven core products we speak about is that . We have a very strong database.
We know that there are certain products our customers, our farmers are extremely focused on, and Wynnstay historically has been very successful in that. We are doing all effort to increase our sales in areas of products which we don't manufacture ourselves. We've created seven focus areas for us to work very, very hard on over the next number of years. We believe that all these areas are scalable, and that will make us even more relevant in terms of being a core supplier to these customers. We're very customer-centric. We've got a very good database. We have a very good, strong marketing team behind us, strong technical advisory team behind us, and that will continue to help us to grow our business.
And then all of that is underpinned by a very, very strong operational discipline through our cost discipline, our digital systems, simplified structures, and we will continue to aim to lower our cost base and to reinvest that in service, data, and product innovation. Today, Wynnstay is a company which is relevant, which is strong, and will continue to play a very, very strong part in agricultural GB, which is our focus area. So with that, I'm gonna hand over to Rob. He's gonna take you through the financial detail of the past financial year. We will also spend some time on focusing specifically on the three segments, and then at the end of that, I will take back the mic, and we will talk about our growth plans. Thank you, Rob.
Thank you. So our strategy is an operational strategy. It's going to be implemented in five, what we call, enabling areas. As Alk mentioned, we're very focused on growth, and we believe we can deliver growth in two ways. Firstly, through strategic selling, growing share of wallet, selling more of the products that Wynnstay make to the farmers that we currently trade with, and from that, increasing that to other farmers as well... We are a manufacturing business. We have feed mills, we have fertiliser blending plants, and we have a seed processing plant, and we have a strategic plan to create an additional 160,000 tonnes of capacity across those three areas. And given the, the assets that we have, we'll talk shortly about the asset review that we undertook in the year, and that did mean that we exited certain underperforming areas of the business.
But we do have some exceptional assets, in across the country that we can add incremental capacity to in a very efficient, capital, way, which means that we can maintain fixed costs whilst increasing the throughput, which improves efficiency, and we can grow in a very margin, enhancing way. We also, across our stores, have 25,000 product lines. As Alk mentioned, we have seven core product categories that those cascade into, and as you'll imagine, we have very strong supplier relationships across those, and through partnering with suppliers, on shared marketing campaigns, business plans, we believe we can both grow but also increase the margins that we make on those core products. And then Sections D and E are all about the business support that we have in the group.
We've integrated the group, we've made it leaner and simpler, and we've now got a structure in place to ensure we've got talent, cultural support, we can make decisions quickly, and they can be data enabled through enhancing our digital backbone, data, CRM systems, and business intelligence, which can support growth across all the group through an integrated finance and IT function. So moving on to the targets that we believe we can drive from our strategy. We want to grow our revenue by 10%, we want to grow our gross profit by 10%, and we want to improve our operating margin to 2% on that revised platform.
We believe that will drive an EPS growth of 20%, and we're calling these medium-term targets, and in our mind, that's a 3-year target that we can really strive for off the back of this strategy. And in doing so, we'll drive that growth through doubling the share of wallet, doubling the amount of products that we sell to farmers currently, and being market leaders, so a top three U.K. player in all of the core categories that we have identified. So moving on to the financial review now. This is a look back on the 12 months to October 2025. As I mentioned, that was a transformative year, a year of significant change, but also pleasingly, a year of improvement in financial performance. That's the early benefits coming through from Project Genesis, driving adjusted PBT and EPS up 21% year-on-year.
Our margins were improved across the group. Our gross margin percentage were improved in each of our operating segments. We ensured we had an efficient cost platform that meant that our overhead levels were better year on year, and that led to improved net profits. And as we've improved our operating platform, increased our profitability, that has improved our return on net assets or RONA, as we refer to it throughout this presentation. Our RONA has improved from 5.6% to 7%. We're pleased with that return in the first year of Project Genesis. We'll talk later about how we believe there's much more we can do, and as we've highlighted previously, we're aiming for a RONA across the group of over 10% in the medium term. Moving on to the income statement.
As I mentioned earlier, we've improved our PBT in all three business segments. Feed and grain, GBP 1.3 million versus GBP 0.7 million in the previous year. Arable was GBP 2.3 million versus GBP 1.4 million, and stores, GBP 5.7 million versus GBP 5.5 million. We've had a strong contribution from our joint ventures. As a recap, our main significant joint venture is a company called Bibby Agriculture, which is a feed-selling business that operates across Wales, north and south. Bibby had a record year last year, performed very, very well. We have a really good partnership with Bibby.
We manufacture compound feed for them from our mill in Carmarthen, and they are a real part of the growth play that we've got, and we're very pleased that we've been able to increase our capacity and increase our sales to Bibby, and it's good to see it coming through in improved financial performance in the group. We also had improved finance cost. They benefited from a strong funding position throughout the year and also reductions in interest rates. As we've mentioned, there's been a year of transformation, a year of change. Unfortunately, that meant that we had to exit a number of manufacturing facilities and restructure the business, and with that came non-recurring costs. We incurred GBP 5.9 million of costs.
However, the cash impact is much lower, around GBP 2.5 million, and that's because some of the activities we closed were quite working capital intensive, and we've been able to recover the working capital as part of the wind down of those operations. I'd also like to add that our business restructuring under Project Genesis is now complete, so there'll be no more business restructuring exceptionals going forward. We've got the platform we need now to drive and grow the business and take it forward. We talked about our strong balance sheet. We've maintained that through this transformation year. We've completed an operational asset review. The assets that we have in the business now, we're very confident that we continue to invest to maintain, grow, and take forward.
We're very privileged to have a strong liquidity position, so our net cash of just under GBP 26 million means that we have the financial ability to fund all of our growth and investment plans included in both Project Genesis and Strategy Genesis from our own balance sheet. We have a, on top of the liquidity position that we have, we also have committed finance facilities. So we have a GBP 10 million RCF facility with a further GBP 5 million accordion available if we require it, and we also have a GBP 10.5 million overdraft in excess of that. So we are in a very fortunate position that we've got the financial ability to take the business forward.
I'd also like to just draw your attention to the return on net assets by each individual business segment, and as you can see, we've improved those year-on-year. Our stores at 11.7%, arable at 7%, and feed and grain at 2.5%. Feed and grain is the area of the business where we, we've had the most impact of change and reorganization, but I'd also add that it's the part of the business that's got the most potential to grow through additional capacity and growing off the platform that we've now established. Moving on to our cash flow.
As many of you will know, who follow Wynnstay, we have a seasonal working capital cycle, so at the end of the financial year, we often report our peak cash position, and as the year moves through to the half year, we will absorb working capital, as the agricultural calendar flows through. So we'll be buying raw materials for feed and fertiliser as we go into the peak requirements of those seasons, which normally arises in March, and then it unwinds in the second half. Year to year, we've generated operational cash flows, and then we've invested them in our growth plans. I'd probably point out a couple of areas here. So we have net CapEx of GBP 5.3 million, where we've been investing in capacity expansions, and improvements across the group.
I'll talk about those shortly in the business segment review. We've also invested in working capital year to year, so we'll talk about our new plant in Avonmouth shortly. That's a 60,000 is that blending facility in the southwest of England. Very low capital expenditure, but we do have to stock the facility out, and there was an incremental GBP 2.2 million of working capital that we've invested into that growth venture. I'd also like to say that going into the start of this financial year, we wanted to learn from some of the mistakes that we'd made previously. Last winter, we found that we didn't have suitable levels of stock in our stores, so we wanted to go into this winter with stock in front of us.
So we've spent an additional GBP 3 million of working capital, or probably more correctly, we've drawn that forward from the Q1 cycle to make sure that our stores are fully stocked and also that our fertiliser blending plants have the orders and the order book ready to furnish fertiliser going into the busy Q1 season. So we want to make sure that we deploy our capital responsibly, but we don't just wanna gather cash on our balance sheet. We want to use it effectively and tactically to grow the business and drive it forward so that we can meet the ambitions that we've outlined in our strategy. As I mentioned, our other main area of investment is around our dividends, and we maintain a progressive dividend policy, and that moves me into our capital allocation framework.
So it's a fairly straightforward capital allocation plan, but what I would say now is this is firmly embedded in everything we do as a business. Shareholder returns, as I mentioned, with the progressive dividend, that is a cornerstone of what we do, and we remain committed to a sustainable and progressive dividend. But the other three areas, investing in the growth of Wynnstay, we want to invest to improve efficiency, so look after the assets we've got. We're now very happy with the assets we have across the group, so we want to continue to invest to make sure they're efficient, modern, operate well, and support the business that we have. We want to target organic growth. We want to invest in capacity and expansion. During the year, we've increased capacity at Carmarthen Mill by 20,000 tonnes.
We've already sold over 12,000 tonnes of that, and the return is very strong. We've also invested to grow our fertiliser business by establishing a blending plant in Avonmouth in the southwest. That gives us a new route to market and a new geography. It was approved in September 2024 and went live in April 2025. So a very fast turnaround, well-executed plan that was completed on time in full, came online, and right here, right now, today, is operating strongly and driving improvement in our fertiliser sales and volumes. And finally, we do have a focus on disciplined M&A activity.
Whilst we haven't included M&A directly in our growth plan, because we don't want to be held hostage to fortune against targets to buy businesses on certain times, we do know that agriculture and the sector we operate in is an industry that will consolidate, and we believe Wynnstay is well-placed to consolidate that, and if we have the opportunities to do that through M&A, and they meet our requirements in terms of business fit, cultural fit, and capital allocation, then we'll be very, very keen to progress with those. Just turning briefly to a business review over each of the key segments. We've talked through this throughout, but I think it's worth just focusing. Feed and grain was an improvement in profitability. It was focused on transforming the business. We had two feed mills that we closed during the year that were loss-making.
We took early calls to do that. We completed those activities by the end of Q3, and those have all been completed. All costs have been incurred. What that means is, we've now got a business that's got a stable cost platform. We've improved our margin by understanding and controlling our pricing, particularly in feed sales, and we're able to now generate and grow that forward, and we're aiming to improve the return on net assets significantly above 2.5%. We also have a feed trading business, GrainLink. We've integrated that. We previously had 3 trading platforms across the group. They're now all brought together under one platform that went live on a new system on the first of November, all ready for this financial year.
They're now trading at around 100, well, 1.5 million traded tonnes, so we have some scale in that business by bringing it together. It's much more efficient having the team working together, and they're also focused on purchasing the requirements for all our feed milling operations, so good integration and margin opportunities from that development. And as I mentioned, we added 20,000 tonnes of capacity to Carmarthen, and we've got future plans to grow over 100,000 tonnes across our feed milling business over the next two years. Our arable business was a story of improvement through improved sales and growth. Our fertiliser blending volumes increased by 14%. That was driven by our improved performance across the business as a whole, but also through the new facility that we've got in the southwest in Avonmouth. We improved our margins.
We set our stall out to ensure we got appropriate margins across the business early as part of Project Genesis, and we're very pleased that that's been the case. That's driven improved return on net assets, and we're now confident that through a modular investment-based plan to grow our market share through geographical expansion, we can take that forward into the next two years. There's plenty of other opportunities that we're currently identifying, and we believe that we've got a scalable business. Our seed business performed well. We have a seed processing plant in Shrewsbury that focuses on cereal seed, grass seed, and other environmental mixtures. It was good to see strong sales in the autumn, in particular, and grass seed that drove good returns from our seed processing plant. Finally, moving to our stores. We had a resilient performance in stores.
Footfall was stable in a stable marketplace, but we improved our gross margins that drove improved revenues. We also maintained our cost overhead base and managed inflationary pressures well. As a final piece of business transformation, we had a business called Youngs Animal Feeds that used to sit in this segment. A lot of the business was wholesale, supplying into our store network. We took the decision to discontinue that business, but we have maintained a significant portion of the sales and the gross margin while reducing the working capital requirements and the asset footprint of this segment, and that's improved our return on net assets from 9.3% to 11.7%. I'll now hand back to Alk, who'll talk us through a summary and an outlook for the group.
Thank you, Rob, and to everybody on the call. I hope that you will see that this is a significant improvement of the past. But I wanna make it clear, this is only the beginning, and this was year one, and we've got some several focus and KPI opportunities going forward. So before I go into the slide in front of you, I need to say, because I have been asked this now in the last three days, I got this question from several investors in terms of our segmentation. Clearly, not all of them are giving us better returns equal to some of the better ones. Is there any reason why you are focusing on some of the segments which are lower returning assets? And the answer is yes.
We report like this, but we are integrated business, and our focus is to supply farmers with a broad basket of products. And these three segments need each other. In an integrated business model, focus on several products, not only one or two. We need all these business segments, and all of them are scalable and improvable. I believe that the work we have done and started to do on the Project Genesis will give us even better returns on the feed milling side, and we're well aware that there's still a big mountain to climb there. But I'm also confident that our team will be able to continue year after year after year to improve our results in that area as well.
So in summary, the benefits of Project Genesis coming through, our profitability has improved, our group margins have strengthened, our returns have improved, our cash generation is resilient, our operating model is now stabilized, and I wanna emphasize it is now stabilized. So we've done some difficult decisions. We made some difficult decisions. That's now been done. There's no more surprises to come. The focus is now to do what we have in front of us to do that successfully. Everything is scalable, but I wanna temper that through the capital allocation, which Rob spoke about. So, the money we will spend will be on projects which will give us the best possible returns, and I really believe that we've now got a clear growth strategy which is executable.
So in terms of the outlook, we are already in a new financial year. Trading is in line with our expectations. Our transformation benefits continue to flow through. Our operational execution remains a priority in our business, and our Strategy Genesis, which is now focused on growth, provides all of us with a clear framework to move the company forward. So, I hand back to the presenter with great gratefulness. I say thank you for the support of all our investors, and we are now looking forward to taking some questions.
That's great, Alk, Rob. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to read those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via our Investor dashboard. Katie, at this point, if I hand over to you to take us through the questions, then I'll pick up at the end. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Alex. So we've had several pre-submitted questions that we'll start with, and the first one is: How are you actively working towards, to become a more environmentally sustainable company in the long run?
Thank you, Katie. The answer to that question is absolutely we are focused to do that. But I have to say the starting point is that I think we already are. I know that all these investors on the call today will get our annual report, and in that it will be clear that we have embarked over many years on a wide range of areas to focus on our sustainability and environmental impact. But saying that, it was more difficult to be scalable in the past, and the reason for that was that we operated the business in several smaller business units. It's so much easier from a integrated platform to do so. So we've only started that in the last 12 months.
For me personally, and for the leadership team of the business, our focus is to make sure that sustainability and anything impacting our environment is in the center of decision making. So whenever we talk about something, that is a key part of our decision is what is the impact or alternatively, on a positive side, what positive impact it will have. So we're working on several actions to align sustainability goals with our broader strategy. So just to remind everybody, our broader strategy is to improve the business results, but also to grow the business. And therefore, we always have to make sure that everything we do also aligns sustainability and the environmental impact on that. And then for me, the most important thing personally is accurate measurement.
It's easy to talk about anything, but you need to know where you are today and to validate that and then to move forward. Focus very much on carbon reduction in the business. We have invested in the past 2-3 years a significant amount of money on solar panels to be less reliant on electricity. Electricity and energy use is a significant part of our business, and we will continue and are currently looking at several projects to reduce our reliance on that energy source. Then water use and the use of plastics in our business is getting specific attention.
We've recently made a senior appointment, reporting directly into the executive team, of a person which oversees this as part of her role, this specific area. And then in terms of everything else we do, product formulations, transport, logistics, there's very specific plans to help us to be moving this very key area forward. Agriculture is responsible, and our British farmers are very focused on improving environmental impact, and Wynnstay would like to continue to be a very strong partner for them in this journey, which we take very seriously.
Thank you, Alk. Another investor has commented saying, "I know that you've suffered from two successive poor harvests in the last two years, and I wonder how much that has impacted on sales and profits, and does a poor harvest make to us compared to an average harvest?
Yeah, that's a very tough question to answer. I tell you that my response to that is that we have improved the financial results of the previous financial year. So, if I take that as just a question, just as an absolute given, then it sort of will indicate that the reason for the improvement is a better harvesting year. And I really believe that the point I'd like to make is that there's a lot of things which is in a company's internal control. How you manage your costs, how you... How efficient you are, how well you execute things, how you improve your logistical efficiencies, and so on. That is Project Genesis, and that is what we're focusing on.
Without any doubt, environmental impact, no rain, too much rain, and the impact on that on the size of the crops does play a role. But equally, even in a very favorable year last year in terms of crops, we also have to realize that grain trading is an international commodity and global impact on that also plays a role. And we just felt as a leadership team but although we can't deny that that is definitely gonna influence our results in a year, there are so much more we can do to improve our business and to focus on the stuff which is within our control.
Therefore, we do not really spend a lot of time as a business to analyze the impact of crop size, and we just accept that as a reality in our business and believe that, regardless of a good year or a bad year in terms of harvest, Wynnstay has the ability to improve our financial results, and that's where we're gonna focus on.
Thank you, Alk. The next question is: How many years should that Avonmouth plant take to become profitable?
I'll take that one, Katie. So we, in our business plan, we expect that Avonmouth will become profitable in its second year. So as you would imagine with a manufacturing facility, there'll be a period of commissioning and bringing it up to speed in a controlled way. That's what we plan to do in the 2025 financial year, and I'm pleased to say that our performance for Bristol was in line with the plan. We expect it to become profitable this financial year, and we expect by 2027 that it will be at capacity. And at that point, it will be achieving the returns that we have in our project plan, which for Bristol itself, we're over 15% return on net assets.
Thank you, Rob. Moving on to Project Genesis. Someone has asked, "Will Project Genesis deliver your 15% RONA target? And if so, how?
Okay. Well, I think what I would say here is, and we've spent a lot of time this week talking around what's a promise and what's an ambition. And as Alk's mentioned, you know, it's very, very core to us as an executive team and a management team that we deliver on the promises that we make. So in the medium-term targets, we're earmarking a RONA of 10% as the commitment in the medium term. However, in terms of the ambition, and we've talked to many investors about this, the ambition is, and as we've set it in our hurdle within the capital allocation framework, the ambition is to bring that return on net assets to over 15% over the five-year strategy period, and that's what we're working really, really hard to try and do.
And so how will we do it? Well, probably refer to the last question. Going to the plan behind Bristol, the RONA target was set at 15%. We've got a plan to do it. We're on track to do it. All new projects that expand the business have that filter built to them, so we believe that that will raise the bar. And the 160,000 tons of capacity that we've outlined in the strategy will all be subject to that level of scrutiny, business planning, and ensuring that it is improving the net assets of the business. The other point that I'd refer to in the Genesis strategy is the share of wallet growth and the margin improvement through partnerships with suppliers.
That's a way that we can improve sales and margin on, margins on product that we make and also that we don't manufacture. And clearly, there's opportunities there to improve margins on the fixed overheads of the group, which in turn will drive that return over 10%, which is the commitment we're making in the medium term, but also towards the ambition of 15, which is the real kind of ambition and determination that we have as part of our strategy delivery.
Thank you, Rob. Staying on the topic of RONA, someone else has asked: "How much CapEx is planned for the current full year, and what is the RONA hurdle for this?
Okay. So our forecast for the financial year is GBP 7 million of net CapEx. Of that, GBP 4 million is expansionary CapEx, and as I mentioned, when we're doing a review of expansionary CapEx, we have a hurdle rate of 15%. There are certain instances where we will look at deviations. The bare minimum for an expansion is 10. And as you would imagine, for a manufacturing business, a heavy asset business, there's certain things that we just have to do. So any, for example, health and safety CapEx, we're not gonna put a hurdle on that. The priority there is around safety and the you know the safeguarding of our colleagues and assets. However, for expansionary CapEx, we are setting that hurdle at 15 as the first port of call.
Thanks, Rob. Moving on to the next question. It's: What were the financial benefits of consolidating grain trading, and from what point were those benefits effective?
Okay. There's the bringing three businesses together, there's some fairly straightforward, simple benefits in terms of overheads. So if you're operating off just one platform, you don't have to pay for three platforms. Clearly, there's efficiencies, and this is part of the wider Genesis plan of having an integrated group. You can then have integrated finance team, support functions, IT teams, and that will bring a benefit. However, the main benefit for bringing the platform together is having a combined trading team, and that is probably a little bit more difficult to quantify. But what it means is, by running one trading operation, you have consolidated raw material forward books.
That means you can better match your purchases to your sales, and so you don't get trading inefficiency that you might bring by having three separate teams working in isolation and working in silos. It's also introduced by giving the business the mandate to buy for our feed mills. So again, where we had been sourcing from other suppliers, that was margin leakage from the group. And finally, there's the throughput benefit. So having a 1.5 million traded ton business, that means that any marginal improvements on margin get multiplied by 1.5 million and drop to the bottom line of the group. So no, we're really pleased with that project. There was a lot of hard work that went into it across the group, bringing those teams together.
But it was live from the first of November, and so from that, from that point on, into this financial year, we'll see the benefit of that.
Thank you, Rob. We've had a few questions that I'm gonna collate, which talk about how much of the total UK agri supply market does Wynnstay have? But also looking at maybe commenting on your competitors and your ability to penetrate further to the eastern side of the UK, as another question was: Are you considering opening more stores in other parts of the UK, such as the east and the southeast areas?
Yeah, I'll take that one. So Wynnstay operate in quite a broad area, so our focus is to be supplier of choice for British farmers. But we can't move away, and, you know, I'm very happy that we are where we are in terms of our geographical focus, which is very much on livestock. So, and the livestock business are from north to south, but mostly in the west part of the UK. And, our focus will and should remain there. One should focus on where your core strengths are, and clearly, we have a strong scalable benefits there.
So, of course, we will continue to try to gain market share from competitors, and to express our market share as a totality is just impossible because it depends if you talk about our stores, our grain trading team, certain of our seven share of wallet items, feed milling, and so on. So it's all different. But, the market in the U.K. is incredibly fragmented, and then I personally believe, as Rob also indicated, there will be consolidation in that market as well, which will give Wynnstay, with a strong balance sheet, some opportunity to gain market share.
And we will continue to do so by being outstanding suppliers to farmers, and that we hope that that strength of us will help us to gain new market share. But saying that, we are very focused on our current customers, and we believe that we can sell even much more products to them, which is where we came with our core share of wallet concept. When we analyze how much of that seven core areas we are selling to some of our customers, it's clear that there's big opportunities to grow in that. And I think our biggest growth will come from that in the short term, short- to medium-term, over the next three years.
That is absolutely our focus area. When a company are focused on operational excellence, you have to be incredibly disciplined, and therefore, when we do expand, and clearly, you know, the plans are to do so, we will do it, you know, very carefully. And then I believe that right now, the biggest opportunities are still within our current asset base, and slowly, slowly, we will look at opportunities outside that. But more than enough to do with what we're busy with at the moment, to help us to keep the growth we spoke about.
Thank you, Auke. The next question talks about the ROCE. How much lower is your ROC compared to where you believe it should be in percentage points?
Rob, do you want to take that?
Yeah. I think in the medium term, at 7%, we're 3% lower. We wanna be 10%. And, you know, the ambition is to get to 15, so we wanna more than double our return on net assets. And, you know, as Alk talked there about growing from the existing asset base, we think there's a credible plan to do so.
Thank you, Rob. I know we've briefly touched on things in and out of your control. However, someone has asked, do you envision the recent flooding issue to have a material impact of... Oh, also, how, of the inheritance tax changes on the farming sector, and what's the sentiment among farmers currently subdued?
I think there was a bit of a breakup in the beginning, but if I understand the question correctly, it's about the flooding in the U.K., and then after that, the sentiment around tax.
Yeah
... if I got you. So-
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, it's a bit difficult to quantify it right now, but the feedback I have is, I don't think personally it will impact us substantially in terms of the flooding. But it also needs to become more favorable now. So if it continues to rain for another two months, then unfortunately, there will be a different answer. But so far, I think it's okay in our area. Listen, I'm not gonna commentate on British farming in totality. I'm talking about in our catchment area, in terms of our customer base. I think that it won't have a significant impact right now with the information I have.
In terms of impact on Brexit, and changes in that on British farming, clearly, that's got a negative impact. You know, nobody can be not concerned about that. But at the same time, probably like Wynnstay, our farmers have also had to go back and say, "It is what it is, and I have to work with what I have." And I've got no doubt, and I'm not afraid to say it, and I will say it on any platform, that British farmers are the best farmers in the world, and therefore they have shown over many, many years that with, you know, many things going against them, they still succeed because their focus is very much on food security for the nation.
Wynnstay would like to be a very close partner for that. So when you go home, when we go home, when the farmer go home, we're sometimes disappointed about what happens around us, and we're disappointed with some decisions which most of us feel is a bit harsh. But when you have to deal with what you have in front of us, and and the results will have to be continued to be positive, and under very difficult circumstances, before and now, British farmers are producing food for the nation, and and they're doing a magnificent job, and Wynnstay is proud to be part of it.
Thank you, Alk. We've got just under five minutes left, and a few questions, so we'll see if we can get through them, and if not, we'll do written answers. But the next question is, do you feel there is too much feed manufacturing capacity and that some mills need to close?
Well, I may actually answer it, and then the person which sit on the other side is probably not gonna like it. But, I think that the fact is that business needs to be scalable and only business of a certain size probably will be able to sustain it over a longer period. So, we live in a market of supply and demand. As long as the supply continues to be on the level it is today, I personally think that there will be natural consolidation.
Thanks. And staying on capacity, someone's asked, what is the incremental investment to unlock the 160,000 tons of capacity? What is the expected return on this incremental investment?
Rob?
Sure. So we've targeted GBP 14 million worth of CapEx over the next 2 years. We have an underlying level of what I'd call maintenance CapEx to look after the assets, that we already have, but we've targeted GBP 8 million-GBP 10 million worth of expansionary CapEx. And, you know, I kind of feel like I'm going back over the same answer, but in terms of our capital allocation plan, we'll be applying the same hurdle rate of 15%, on that expansion. So, you know, we're committed to doing it, but we've got to do the finer detail and make sure that it all stacks up, and we'll be aiming for 15, but at the very, very, very minimum, it will be in excess of 10.
Thank you. The final question is around your growth strategy and whether it's likely to be self-funded, or could you juice that up with some loan capacity?
Well, everything is possible. We have a strong balance sheet. We have a bank which supports as well. We have facilities in place which will support that as well. So, I think that it depends what's in front of us and, for now, I think we've got the ability to fund our growth plan, either ourself or through the help of our financial institutions.
Thank you very much, Alk. That's all the questions, so if you just want to do some closing comments before the end of the presentation.
Yeah. So thank you very much for everybody listening to us, and, I'm enormously proud to lead Wynnstay with Rob and my executive team and 811 colleagues through a time of transformation. Not to be forgiven, but to be forgotten, that we are a 180-year-old company, established well through great leadership teams of the past, and we are grateful for the legacy which we've been handed. The world is changing around us, and I feel that Wynnstay is well focused and well equipped to deal with that.
British agriculture is something we believe in, and we want to play a significant part of that growth, and stability in the country in terms of, that, and, we will continue to work very hard and communicate with all our stakeholders on our progress through the year. So I thank everybody for joining us, and, looking forward to speak to all of you again.
Fantastic, Alk, Rob. Thank you very much indeed for updating investors today.
Thank you.
Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.