Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Acrow Limited FY twenty-four results conference. All participants are in listen-only mode. There will be a presentation, followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I'd now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Steven Boland, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and thanks, everybody, for joining us this morning as we present another great year of growth for Acrow. I'm joined today by Matt Caporella, our Chief Operating Officer, and Andrew Crowther, our Chief Financial Officer, and each of those gentlemen will talk about their particular areas. So I'm gonna run through the investor presentation that was released last night. So firstly, headline numbers for the year, twenty-eight percent improvement in revenue and forty percent improvement in EBITDA year on year. Also, profit before tax was up thirty-nine percent. That's a very important number. Just I'll talk a bit about the fact that we're now a full taxpayer is a fairly significant item for us in the year, but now it's normalized a lot of things in that in the business.
In terms of general growth in the business, I think I'm really proud of how we've diversified our revenue and profit streams over the last couple of years, and this was, you know, more evident in the last twelve months than any other period, with our industrial services business now representing 33% of group revenue and heading upwards on a fairly significant trajectory. That's a combination of both some very successful acquisitions that were made during the year and organic growth from the existing Acrow business. New products such as jump forms and Acrow Deck that are now coming into our fleet, that are providing fantastic cross-selling, organic growth opportunities, again, fresh revenue streams. A continued strong product development pipeline run by Matt and his team.
In terms of the general market, we've had a record number of contracts or record volume of contracts secured in dollar terms this year. The pipeline is at the strongest point that we've ever seen it, and despite now paying full tax rate of 30% versus 8% in the prior corresponding period, underlying NPAT grew by 8%, and statutory NPAT also grew by around that same number over that period. Six weeks into the new financial year, we're guiding towards circa 20% revenue growth year on year and double-digit EBITDA growth. I stress again, we're six months into the new financial year, and, you know, further updates should be provided as they become available. The business is...
continues to leverage very strongly off its competitive advantages in terms of engineering expertise, product range, geographic footprint, and quality of people. I will go into more detail clearly about the growth in industrial services. It's opened up some additional lines of revenue and branches for us over the last year, as we go through the rest of the presentation. Journey so far from listing in April 2018 to where we are today, and sort of the milestones over the period of that journey of over six and a half years now. Natform acquired in August 2018, then Uni-span acquired in October 2019. Jumpform's first contract was in October 2022. They are all formwork related, so are the screens purchases from Heinrichs.
They're all part of the formwork growth story, and then the MI Scaffold acquisition and the Benchmark acquisition over the last year have really taken us to a new level now in our industrial services business. So the highlights of the year: firstly, the two acquisitions, to me, were the standout highlights. They were done extremely well. We paid well for the businesses. We don't overpay for our acquisitions, low fours or under in terms of multiples on EBITDA. We've now consolidated the Benchmark business pretty much into a combination of MI Scaffold and Acrow, so the Townsville branch of Benchmark is now being run by the MI Scaffold team, led by our manager in Mackay. So they've now got a Townsville, Mackay, and Gladstone footprint there in central and northeast Queensland.
Sorry, central and north Queensland, and then the southeast Queensland business of Benchmark has been consolidated in with the Acrow Southeast Queensland business. Both of those businesses are going extremely well. The organic growth, primarily in WA and SA, and you'll see this in some of the numbers we present later on. Very strong now, being primarily driven off Jumpform and Screens growth. As I did mention, we've had a hire contract secured, up 17% year on year, and the pipeline up 33%. The pipeline number continues to grow. It's now hitting over AUD 200 million in our pipeline. Sixteen contracts have now been secured in Jumpform. So, you know, this is quite a large activity, really, when you consider that we started something from absolute scratch.
We've sort of got ourselves in a position now where we're probably the number two provider of Jumpforms in the country, and making real dents into the number one position there. We've now got a full service in screens with the acquisition of the premium screen system that we bought this time last year, and we've continued to be pretty much the formwork go-to formwork company for major infrastructure projects across the country. In terms of our safety results, incredibly proud of this. As you can see, we only had one lost time injury in the year, despite a significant increase in the number of hours worked in the business with the advent of MI and Benchmark. Going to the business overview and the metrics, revenue up 28%, EBITDA up 40%.
I mean, I wanna make it, again, the point, so it's really clear to people that we are paying an additional AUD 10 million in tax, or accounting for an additional AUD 10 million of tax in these results, because we've now got no tax losses left. So those who have been following our story closely, when we listed, we had upwards of AUD 50 million in tax losses. We expected that to last a lot longer than it did. The business has outperformed our expectations in terms of profit. Those tax losses in the last financial year are now gone. So even despite that, our NPAT, both statutory and underlying, was up by 9% and 8% respectively. EPS was flat.
We did issue more shares over the course of the year, primarily off the back of the capital raise that was part of the MI acquisition. But to maintain the EPS flat despite about an AUD 0.02 difference in the value of that, the tax paid, again, I think that's an outstanding result. And I'm very pleased that we're announcing an AUD 0.03 dividend, fully franked, for the second half of the year, bringing to an AUD 0.059... Well, actually, AUD 0.0585 is the actual dividend for the full year. Track record, you can see again, and again, I want to point out here, because you might look at the return on equity and go, "Oh, well, it's reduced," but there's AUD 10 million of additional tax factored into that number now. That obviously reduces that.
I mean, we're running a 27% return on equity as a full tax payer. Again, I think that's a pretty outstanding, outstanding result. Continuing to grow revenue, continuing to grow EBITDA, continue to pay higher dividends. In terms of the hire wins and the pipeline, as I mentioned, 17% up year on year, and AUD 189 million is what we finished the year. The pipeline is now over AUD 200 million as we sit six weeks into the new financial year. Some of the highlights were, we had a cracking month in June. As an example, we did AUD 12.3 million. It's our biggest single ever month of securing work. Part of that included the biggest screens contract we've ever won, which was AUD 2.5 million with Royal Formwork, who are a formwork servicing Meriton.
That job won't start until the second half of this financial year, but that's using the premium screen system. We wouldn't have been able to win a job of that size without the premium screen system. Mentioned the pipeline there for jump form screens and industrial was kicking this up over that 200. Some really substantial industrial services wins across the course of the year in Acrow, in MI, and also in the newly acquired Benchmark business. So Visy Tumut's contract has been renewed for an additional five years. Our Ampol contract for the upgrade of their facility at Lytton was originally sized for AUD 5 million. It's now going to be more like AUD 13 million, and that'll kick in in the second half of the year.
The Benchmark business won the Sun Metals Zinc Refinery maintenance contract in Townsville just at the time we were acquiring that business. The MI Mackay-based business won contracts at the Kidston Hydro Project and also the Abbot Point Coal Terminal just after we purchased the business. That was some of the highlights. Industrial is continuing to go from strength to strength. Seven of our jump form projects have got screen hire attached to them. Again, screen hire contracts. Page 13 again represents the linear nature of contracts you win one year, translating into higher revenue the next, and there's no reason why that won't continuously go forward. I'll now pass over to Matt Caporella.
Matt will talk us through some of the engineering developments across the year, and, I think especially focusing on the, you know, the really important product development program we've now undertaken in Acrow.
Thanks, Steve. We're still on our journey, and we've basically evolved now into a full service engineering solutions provider. So the team's now 50 people strong. Our biggest strength here is the team is Australia-based, and we're in every state. So we've got designers in all our offices, and they're now extremely strong customer focused with those engineers, so we're getting in front of the clients. There's two main points in the engineering team now we're really focusing on, and the first one really is learning and development. So we've got a really good structure now in place, where we're teaching the young guys straight out of uni or during uni, teaching them to our high standards internally and bringing those guys through the business. So we've had a very strong success rate now across the business.
We've got six of those cadets have now actually retained full-time positions in the business. Two of them are now senior managers. We've got four cadets this year graduating into full-time roles, and we've just got another four cadets starting. So we've partnered up with UTS and QUT, and really got a good flow now with the next growth of our engineers in the business coming through as young people. The other part of it now is we're really embracing technology in the business on the engineering side. So we've started on a journey of moving all our 3D drafting into 3D modeling. By Q3 2025 now, I think 90% of our designs will be all done in 3D.
So the biggest benefits of this now is we're sort of going above and beyond what our clients' expectations are, so you can foresee clashes and issues on site before you even get there. The designs are a lot clearer. You can see exactly what you're getting. You can incorporate every single element into the designs. But what this really does is it does set us apart from our competition and really adds value to the designs, and in turn, we actually can charge more for our engineering services. On the product development side of the business now, so we've had really great success with the AcrowDeck and the Powershore 150, which we'll talk about a little bit further down in the presentation.
But this is now sort of really embedded into the business, that the plan is we sort of bring two props, one main product into the business this year and then a couple incremental items. So we really focus on three key areas for the product development. The first one, we're developing products with multiple use cases, so this really drives up utilization, and we're really focusing on continued year-on-year returns. So not just bringing in a product for one year, it's continual, higher in the market. And then they can suit different applications. So might use a product on a jump form that can also be used on a bridge. So we can just move it around and use it in different parts.
We really focus on owning the IP and controlling the supply chain. So everything we bring out now is registered designs, patents, and then we own the IP, so we can go to any manufacturer and develop, get the products manufactured to our specification. We focus on cross-selling. So this is especially evident now in the jump forms and the screens, and the big product that we're gonna launch this year, that's sort of due within the next four weeks, we're gonna bring into the market, is a product called Platforms, so loading platforms. These are like a loading platform that goes on a multi-story building, that you basically put construction equipment on.
So they go hand-in-hand with jump forms and screens, and it'll just sort of be a value add to it by offering a one-stop shop. So the biggest benefit of the platforms really is, we've designed this platform that it's actually universal, so you can actually adjust the width. So everyone else on the market has a fixed platform, so you've sort of got to have a range of platforms that might not be utilized. Our product is basically adjustable, so if there's a demand for one width, you can adjust it to a certain width. So that's just gonna drive up utilization. It's gonna help with transport to site, you don't have wide loads, and it's all galvanized, so we're reducing what we've been saying before. Everything we're bringing out now is galvanized.
It's reducing maintenance and, increasing longevity. That's probably the main stuff on the front that I can see.
Okay. Thank you, Matt. I'll walk through the three segments of the business and firstly, the overarching business, as you can see, EBITDA from AUD 74 - AUD 74.6, up from AUD 53. I mean, look, the thing that I'm always looking for here is how much that we are passing through from the growth and our contribution margin to EBITDA. This year, that was 73% of the contribution growth. So for a AUD 29 million dollar uplift in contribution, we only needed to employ an additional AUD 7.7 million dollars in operating costs to service that. You know, we normally sort of look for about a two-third pass-through, so this year was outstanding in that regard.
AUD 19 million dollars up in revenue in formwork, 31 in industrial, which is a combination of the acquisitions and the organic growth. Commercial scaffolds, as we've been saying for some time, it moves up and it moves down. It did move down this year, and but it's now settled at a level well above where it was a couple of years ago. So we, you know, what we're seeing as we go into the new year, that's sort of flattened out now, but it's flattened out at a level that's far above where it previously was. Good margins, clearly. Contribution margin remained constant, and an EBITDA margin of just under 35% in the business.
And the growth in the business, as page 19 represents, AUD 20.8 million of the contribution growth comes from hire, which you always want to see, and then 7.1 came out of industrial services, labor hire, which is relevant to the acquisitions as well as growth within the existing Acrow business. I would say, I mean, our industrial services labor hire margin is sort of low 20% in an industry where a lot of our competitors run it below 10%. Specific to formwork, now, this is, this again, is a diversification of revenue streams now. So, you know, you can see on that page 20, that we're up to AUD 19 million in revenue and AUD 18.7 million in contribution margin.
If you go to the next page, which is the states, I mean, there's some stories to be told here, so clearly, we're the market leader in Queensland. We continue to be the market leader in Queensland. The activity levels in Queensland have dropped off in the last sort of six months, and a bit at the moment as well, but I don't think, you know, if you read the papers, this shouldn't be a surprise to you. The Queensland commercial sector especially has been under a lot of pressure with both some government uncertainty, especially around the Olympic Games projects, and then some pretty horrendous behavior from the CFMEU in Queensland. I mean, we hear about that in New South Wales and Victoria, but to be honest, from our experience, it's far worse in Queensland than it is in New South Wales and Victoria.
So there's been a lack of confidence in that, in the commercial sector there. I mean, there's some huge projects in Queensland. There's a pipeline of work, the largest I've seen in my eleven years with Acrow. And now that, you know, again, following the stories, you see what the federal government has now done in terms of appointing an administrator to our friends at that union. Already there is, you know, discussions going on in Queensland about confidence returning. I mean, the way this translates is that, you know, developers and builders are not gonna start a project to some degree, if they think that they're then gonna have, you know, losing every second or third day with industrial action on their sites, and that's been going on for some time in Queensland now.
So despite that, you know, we still, you know, did AUD 41 million of revenue, and certainly we didn't reduce market share of anything, we gained it. And then as you can see, New South Wales, we've been talking the story of getting the market share gains in New South Wales. Well, this year, again, that's evident. We've only doubled the formwork revenues in New South Wales over two years. Victoria is a... The story of Victoria, which is clearly a great story in that year, is all about major project focus.
So we've become the go-to guys for major projects, and that has resulted in a great result this year, and that's while I don't expect that revenue to be the same this year, we won't be that far off now that we've again become you know the premium supplier to the North East Link, and very early days at the moment with the Suburban Rail Loop. The story in South Australia and Western Australia is about organic growth. It's not about market activity in those states, it's about new products to new markets, and you can see we've you know enjoyed tremendous growth in both of those markets over the last couple of years off the back of new products and new markets.
In terms of marquee projects, you know, we continue to do incredibly well out of Sydney Metro West, Cross River Rail, West Gate Tunnel, Snowy Hydro, including our labor contract there. Coomera Connector is still in its infancy. Metro Tunnel, Victoria. See. I mean, there's not a major infrastructure project in the country that we don't have a major hold on. In terms of the other things in formwork, so Matt talked about AcrowDeck. I mean, we're bringing a brand new product to market here. We've been doing it over the last 12 months. AUD 800,000 dollars of higher revenue in the second half, and two million dollars of sales of product. Incredibly well accepted, this product.
We are allocating capital here that's getting better than 40% return on the investment into opening up a new channel for revenue, which should continue that diversification story. It's the same with the jump form business. Now, Andrew will talk a little bit about this shortly, but, you know, the majority of our capital this year is being spent on areas that are opening up new revenue streams. We're hardly spending any capital at all on existing parts of the business. This is all about creating more revenue streams and profit streams from Acrow. So jump form, we've run 24 systems, wins across 16 projects. People are using the system and are repeat customers. We've already got AUD 6 million of committed revenue for this year.
We expect to do probably close to double that across the course of the year in revenue for jump forms, heading towards the target that we've given ourselves of getting to a AUD 20 billion dollar business. So we'll be well on the way to that by the end of this financial year. And you can see across every state. Now, Victoria is the outlier. We're desperately keen to win a project in Victoria to get the market to understand that, but strong acceptance in WA, New South Wales, and Queensland. In our screens business, our biggest every year of revenue is AUD 16 million dollars. We've now got a complementary system between the existing old Acrow screens, the premium screens we have.
There's pretty much a project in the country now that we can't do off the back of either of our screen systems. We're now utilizing the Premium Screens system, which was just Queensland-based, out of Queensland. We've got our first New South Wales project, and I think it'll be the first of many. So you can see, you know, we are by far the market leader in New South Wales, with 33 projects across the year. Growing in Queensland, we need to do more in Victoria and, you know, we, it's great to be in WA now. I expect to see far more in WA. Industrial services, so clearly we're up significantly in revenue, which is a major contributor of that, is the two acquisitions, same in contribution margin.
The contribution volume dollar value of 27.5, a margin of 38.2%. But it's not just about those acquisitions. The organic growth from the Acrow business probably contributes around 30-odd% of the growth in both revenue and contribution margin. We're extremely pleased with the acquisitions. They're performing beyond our expectations. We've now got, as I said, you can see the recent contract wins. The other thing to mention here is the Snowy Hydro contract that we have, that's operating at the moment at circa AUD 600,000 a month, is going to double by January. And we are currently evaluating additional M&A opportunities, both in New South Wales and Western Australia.
We are keen to grow this business to a sort of a minimum AUD 150 million revenue business over the next 18 months to 2 years, and we certainly have a trajectory and a pathway to be able to get to that kind of growth. I mentioned MI and Benchmark. I mean, again, you know, we bought businesses that were doing, on average, AUD 42.5 million, and AUD 9.2 million in revenue, and AUD 9.2 million in EBITDA. They will exceed those numbers. And as I mentioned earlier, we now integrated the Townsville business in with the MI management, under our Qld manager, Chris Adlington, and the SEQ business of Benchmark has been amalgamated into Acrow Southeast Queensland. Commercial scaffold won't go on it.
It's a great deal, except, you know, it's down because it's that kind of market. We, you know, two years ago, we were well below AUD 22 million and well below the rates. It has definitely softened, as it was always going to, but it's stabilizing now at a far better, at the sort of average volume and rate than what the historical levels were. Going on to the important subject of people and culture. Matt mentioned the cadetship program before. It's absolutely vital that we breed our own people, not just in engineering now, but also across administration and sales functions. So, it's a major focus of the business to have cadetship programs where we can bring young people into the business, and hopefully, once they've been fully qualified, they stay in the business.
Complementing that is a very, detailed now and highly focused learning and development, professional development program across all levels of the business. Big focus on our senior management team. So pretty much everybody in our senior management team who reports to me has now had some external professional development opportunities. And I think that's an incredibly successful program and, as you know, it's leading to a well-rounded group of people. And now we are implementing a sales training program for everybody that comes into the business, and plus, like, a refresher course for our existing salespeople. You know, we're trying to very much position ourselves now as there's an Acrow way of doing business, and that's why we're focusing the sales training program. We've become the market leader by far in formwork and sales and hire in the country.
We take a best of breed approach in terms of industry standards, and, you know, one of the examples is the testing facility that Matt established a number of years ago. We're now looking to do the same in industrial services, and we, there's no reason why we can't have aspirations to be in the particular part of the industrial scaffolding market we focus, become the Australian market leader. Now, one of the things we'll be doing shortly, is developing a training facility at Mackay, basically adjacent to our MI Scaffold branch, where the intention is that we're gonna, again, breed our own, scaffolders through that program, and train them in the way that we wanna do the Acrow way of running an industrial scaffold operation. And innovation also becomes, continues to become a very important part of the business.
Matt talked about product development, et cetera, but it's not just that, not just in product development. There's Revit technology software for our engineering team. It's quite revolutionary in terms of the time saving that will be involved for both our sales guys and our engineers. And it's gonna be. You know, it should mean that our salespeople have got up to another 30% or 40% of their time that they can spend working with clients, specifically, without having to do some complicated sort of takeoffs of work. And then obviously, we've relaunched that Acrow brand in September of last year, driving collaboration and connection between all the business units now, and then the emphasis on product development and our best of breed approach. And we are now Acrow Limited. We're not no longer Acrow Formwork and Scaffolding.
We're Acrow Construction Services, Formwork Construction Services. We are Acrow Limited, embracing a range of businesses all under that one banner. I'm gonna hand over to Andrew, who will talk about the financial results.
Great. Thanks, Steve. Hi, everyone. I'll just take us down from EBITDA, which Steve's already talked through, down to NPAT reported. As Steve said, NPAT's increased from AUD 53 - AUD 74, or a 40% increase. Below that, we've got depreciation's gone up by 36%, AUD 5.5 million. You can see in the balance sheet, our PPE has increased quite a lot this year, on an average from AUD 113 million - AUD 151 million. The depreciation rate slightly increased as well because of some of the sort of more advanced products we've got. We've also had more yards, so our lease asset has also increased. That's the main reason for our depreciation increase.
We head down to net interest. You can see interest has gone up by AUD 3 million or 63%. Whereas our average debt has increased from AUD 40 million - AUD 60 million, and likewise, our lease liability has increased from AUD 27 million to AUD 30 million. And as you can imagine, our interest rate has gone up slightly as well, which explains our net interest increase. So pre-tax profit, AUD 33 million -AUD 46 million, so almost a 40% increase. So even with the... it just shows you that our asset program is working very well. Now, Steve's already talked through the, probably the most important one-line item in our result, is the tax expense. Up until, basically last year, we had very high utilization tax losses.
Last year's tax, effective tax, underlying tax rate was 8%. This year, it's circa 30%, so there's a AUD 10 million input there. But even with that, we've got 30 million NPAT underlying from 30.5 up to 33 million, or still an 8% increase. Now, just to if we actually had like-for-like, which obviously we didn't back then, if we had like-for-like tax last year, our underlying NPAT last year would've been circa 23.3. So we would've had a AUD 9.7 million increase, or a 40% increase. Moving down below, NPAT underlying, we've got significant items. So we've got quite a large significant item amount this year, the AUD 3.3 million.
Look, about half of that was the acquisition DD, 'cause we had two relative, you know, small to medium acquisitions. So that was, that was the acquisition costs, the due diligence costs, the legal costs, and those sort of costs around that. That was, that was just over half of it. We also had a few branch relocations. Now, these are very, very expensive things to do. As you can imagine, you're moving all your, all your gear, and there's a lot of trucks that have to do that. So there was, there was about AUD 500,000 of branch relocation there. We also had rebranding costs, quite significant rebranding costs went through this year. That's sort of the majority of those significant items. Now, the other thing that's new this year, we had amortization of intangibles.
As part of the MI acquisition, we split up our intangibles between goodwill, and we had 17, on top of that, we had AUD 17 million of brand and customer relations or customer contract intangibles. Because these are under accounting standards, these ones have to be amortized. So these will be amortized over 12 years. And on a weighted basis, this was AUD 900,000 this year. So this is a non-cash item. Obviously, you know, we paid cash up front. This is a non-cash item that will go through, and this will continue being in significant items below the line. And then under that, we had share-based payments expenses, which is very similar to last year.
Look, these are those things that could be in underlying, but we've kept them in significant items because that's for like-for-like. It's just easier to show. And then NPAT reported. It increased by AUD 2 million or 9% from 23.5 - 25. So, EPS underlying increased. Oh, sorry, slight. It was pretty much the same, 11.6- 11.5. Getting back from. If it was a like for like, the EPS would have increased essentially by AUD 0.02 if the tax had gone through. From a. As Steve's already said, the dividends, because we're basically a full taxpayer now, DPS is now.
The dividends are fully franked, and we've declared, we're declaring a 3-cent dividend, which on top of the dividend from the half year gets us to 5.85, or approximately a 5.5-cent, percent yield. Over the balance sheet, you can see that our total assets have increased quite a lot from 218 million to 312. That was on top of the MI acquisition of around 38 million of assets, the Benchmark acquisition, about 9.5. We've got goodwill on those acquisitions as well, we've got 12.5, and CapEx, reported CapEx of around AUD 30 million. That's the main increase. But importantly, our...
If you have a look at our net debt, our net debt has increased by AUD 22 million, or 46-68, but our actual debt metrics have remained very, very steady. So our gross debt 34-35, and our net debt to EBITDA 1-1.1. So pretty steady and right where we like it. Down below that is our net debt bridge. So we started at 46.4. We've got underlying EBITDA of 74.6. We had working capital movements in the year, working capital went up by AUD 11 million. It's important to note that about AUD 7 million of that related to some very large sales we did in June. So that really impacted our working capital right at the end.
Without that impulse would have been quite low. Lease payments of AUD 8.6 million, approximately. You can see the tax paid. We paid tax this year of AUD 7.6 million. Last year was significantly lower than that. That's probably gonna be heading. That's gonna be the full tax payments next year. It's very hard to work out exactly what that'll be, but that'll probably be circa AUD 14 million-AUD 15 million of tax paid next year. We had finance costs of AUD 6 million, maintenance, AUD 5 million, and then you can see the growth and acquisition CapEx. So this is where the majority of the cash that we received went this year. So we had growth CapEx of AUD 25 million, MI acquisition of AUD 26.5 million in cash, Benchmark, AUD 5.8 million.
We had the capital raises that covered a lot of that, MI, and also the DRP. AUD 15 million dollars of capital raise for MI, and we had a DRP underwrite of seven point six. From a cash perspective, fourteen million dollars went out for dividends, and that got us to net debt of sixty-eight point six. Over the CapEx, capital expenditure, as Steve said before, our overall CapEx for the year was thirty million dollars. Now, that doesn't include the ex-hire replacement of CapEx, which is really the way we see that. That's a cost of sale, incurred cost rather than CapEx.
So we had approximately AUD 25 million of growth CapEx, and the majority of that, by far the majority of that, was in the areas where we're moving towards now. Very little in normal civil infrastructure CapEx. We had just over AUD 11 million in Jumpform. We had about AUD 4 million in Acrowdeck, which is the new product that we're setting out, and we had quite a large amount in the Ringlock and in our industrial services area. So also, our return on investment, we're still well above the 40% on the return on investment on the growth CapEx. And we won't invest in anything that will. That doesn't achieve that growth.
Over to funding and liquidity. During the year, you can see our debt, as I said before, our debt went up. We had to restructure our business loans when we did the acquisition of MI, being AUD 15 million, and Benchmark, AUD 6.4 million. We also increased our equipment finance facility by AUD 5 million to absorb the additional growth we were doing. You can see our headroom was AUD 21.2 million, compared to AUD 16.6 million, which is still quite a healthy headroom. It's what we've done from 2022. You can see that I was just having a look from what we've done from 2022. Our assets have basically gone up by almost 70%. Our EBITDA has doubled.
So this was the appropriate time to really having a look at where our absolute capital profile was. So we've got a very close relationship with our bank, and we've been working with them recently, and we're finalizing terms right now to basically get us into the future so that we have three things: We've got certainty of funding if we have any acquisitions that we're looking at, which we're always looking, we wanna reduce our amortization, and we wanna improve our cost of debt. So that's, we're finalizing terms right now, and I think this will help us into the near future. And as I said, we... This doesn't mean we're gonna be blowing up debt metric spots wherever.
We look at those things very closely, and even though we may move up a little bit, we'll always have a pathway to get back down to one point one. And I'll hand back over to you, Steve.
Thanks, Andrew. So I'll just sort of wrap up on what the outlook looks like at the moment. So I think this-
Pardon me, we have temporarily lost the speaker's audio.
Projects we're talking about that are backlog.
Please go ahead.
Sorry. Okay. So some of the projects I'm talking about that are backlogged are not being canned, they're just being slow to start, and they're going to have to start. But we've got an Olympic Games coming up, that date's not moving, all right? There's a significant hospital project. Our hospital spend in Queensland is being pushed out, but it's not going away, and contracts are now being awarded. So, in the medium term, we believe that the general construction sector that we participate in, primarily being commercial and civil, will see an uplift over the next sort of five to 10 years. In terms of the civil projects that are kicking in, North East Link, we talked about the fact that we've now won, I don't know, Matt, we're up to about AUD 7 million worth of work.
We've won North East Link, and it's continuing almost every day. Contracts are now being awarded for Suburban Rail Loop. We're still some time away from Torrens to Darlington, but that we expect that to be a significant major project for them.
Announced.
So, who's the major contract? Been announced?
Uh, Legal.
Okay, got it. Sydney Metro West, we've now secured our first contract for the Aerotropolis station for AUD 1 million. We've also won another contract for about AUD 700,000 for another station on Sydney Metro West. Melbourne Airport Rail, and then you go on to Brisbane Olympics and, and Queensland Hospitals and Coomera Connector, which we're enjoying some good revenue at the moment. The biggest part of that project kicks in at around about six to 12 months' time, and we expect that will go a very similar sort of opportunity of revenue for us, as the Bruce Highway extension was, which was one of our absolute lead projects over the last few years.
... The internal product development will open up more channels for revenue and additional growth. The AcrowDeck product platform was mainstreaming. Jump forms are continuing to grow. Other smaller products like Bridge Access will just generate more revenue. The general market opportunities for product development, I mean, we're not even scratching the surface here at the moment. Industrial services, so clearly, I mean, we now. I now believe the industrial services business is just as important as the formwork business is to Acrow. It gives us high certainty of earnings, you know, strong annuity earnings, great contracts with blue chip clients such as Visy and BHP and Sun Metals, et cetera, Ampol, et cetera, et cetera, Snowy Hydro. We're very keen to continue to grow this business nationally.
We are looking at some acquisitions at the moment, both in New South Wales and Western Australia. Early days, but, you know, promising, in terms of, in terms of potential for us. We wanna grow into that New South Wales market and the Western Australian market to complement our strong position in Queensland. We won't be paying more than low fours for anything that we acquire going into the future. The training facility, Mackay, I talked about, is part of the overall strategy, and we wanna make ourselves, you know, give ourselves the best opportunity we possibly can to be the market leader in this space.
So, you know, we think, well, I believe, that we can grow an industrial services business within a couple of years of doing circa AUD 150 million of revenue on similar margins that we're making at the moment, so general outlook, sort of summarizing the points we've just made there. The general formwork position, business in terms of contract wins and pipeline, has never been positioned better to take advantage of what's in front of us in both civil and commercial, and I mentioned those Queensland Hospital and Brisbane Olympics projects.
They will start to kick in, in the second half of this financial year, and then for the next few years will be a significant revenue generator for us, as long as we can maintain our market share, and nothing says that, for me, that we won't do that. We are already basically aware of winning many millions of dollars' worth of work for both screens, jump forms, and our traditional formwork in the hospitals as those contracts get awarded, and you know, again, nothing really yet to report on Brisbane Olympics, but I don't see any reason why we won't maintain our market share in Queensland as that kicks in.
We will get further form of growth this year, off the back of the new revenue channels generating off the back of AcrowDeck jump forms, screens, and the other internal products that we develop. Our industrial services outlook is incredibly strong. The businesses that we purchased are performing better than we expected them to, so we'll see growth off the back of organic and also further targeted acquisitions, as I've mentioned earlier. Commercial scaffolding revenue is down, and it will be down this year compared to last year. We're starting to see that in the second half, but now it's basically stabilizing at above historic levels. That's a supply and demand market. It's the cyclical market we participate in, and it's the one we place the least importance on.
And at this stage, we're guiding to 20% organic growth in revenue year on year, and double-digit EBITDA growth. I mean, the thing that's just driving the same, it's double-digit EBITDA growth, is just some degree of uncertainty about commencements of projects that will definitely commence. Will they commence this half? Will they commence next half? That's the only thing that gives us any degree of slight uncertainty, but the environment, especially in Queensland, has been difficult for, given again, some uncertainty about what the state government's plans are. There is an election in Queensland in a few months. And then you can't underestimate the uncertainty that the CFMEU issues, certainly in Queensland, have been affecting developers and builders in that state.
I now expect that to change dramatically over the next few months now that the federal government has taken the action that it's taken. So that's the summary from us at the moment. So thank you for listening, and now happy to pass through for any questions.
Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two, and if you are on a speakerphone, just please pick up your handset before asking your question. First question today comes from Philip Pepe at Shaw and Partners. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Well done on a good result, and thanks for taking the question. Just taking-
Thank you.
Quick ones, please. Just on the guidance for the 20. Very specific on the revenue, 20% revenue growth, double-digit EBITDA growth. Does that mean 10? Does that mean 25? Can you give us a bit more color as to whether some operating leverage comes through or cost cutting?
Oh, Philip, we could have given you a range, but the range would have been silly, because there's just so many moving parts. So we're happy to give that. I mean, there was a debate internally about whether we should nominate a number, but we're gonna stay with where we are, and then we'll provide more color as we move through the year, and certainly by the time of our AGM, further color. But you know our history. We don't intend to change from our history, which is that we'd like to upgrade as we can through the year, and we always like to overachieve. So nothing's changed in that regard. We can be more specific on revenue because, frankly, the revenue is driven a lot these days by industrial.
There's a big revenue out of a lot of the major big labor revenue, a lot of other major contracts, so we can see the revenue. A lot of it, but of our formwork business has significant impacts on the EBITDA, and it's just a commencement date of project profile that gives us a degree of, I'll say, uncertainty, but we just. It's too early. It's too early for us to get more specific than that.
That makes sense. And secondly, you mentioned some large revenue, large work that came through in June. Has that cash come through post period end to reverse the working capital drag in June?
Yeah, but it's starting to, yes. Yeah, some of these were negotiated sales, so it just takes time to come through, but it just happened to happen in June. It was just the timing then.
Thank you.
So, yeah.
Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from James Leonard at Petra Capital. Please go ahead.
Congratulations, guys. Just a couple from me. Firstly, just on your guidance for revenue, just curious to know, you know, based on what you're saying, your record pipeline, you're gonna get full 12 months from those recent acquisitions, there's cross-selling opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. Just wondering, you know, is that guidance you've given, you're fairly comfortable? Is that conservative? Just seems if you back out the M&A contribution you'll get for the full 12 months, you're looking at sort of only an incremental sort of 10-15 mil of revenue growth on PCP.
And we're pretty happy with that as a starting point, to be frank, James, right? Again, we're six weeks into the year. If we're continuing to get growth from the general business on top of what's gonna be generated by the acquisition industrial, we're pretty happy with that situation to start with right now. Again, you know, it's this environment we're operating in at the moment, nationally, from a construction sector, is actually not wonderful, right? To say our results, I think, anyway, I think they're remarkable given the sort of the macro environment, and there's some other results that have been coming out around the place that are showing significant downturns. What we're seeing is that the pipeline's never been as good.
We're winning more than we've ever have before, but the start dates are questionable, right? So that's the only thing that gives us any uncertainty. And I'm not worried about that. I don't get worried about projects that are delayed by two or three months, because they eventually happen. I get concerned if projects get canceled. I also get concerned if we lose market share. We're not losing market share. In fact, we're gaining market share pretty much across all of the country, and major projects are not being canceled. So that just means all that revenue is gonna be generated at some point. At the moment, I just don't know whether it's first half or second half, or first half next financial year.
I certainly agree. I think, yeah, your profit before tax is, it's a great growth number, so, well done on that. Can you please remind me also just on, on the margin contributions, industrial services versus formwork, is that, as you sort of grow the industrial services, is it naturally there'll be a slight decline in that margin?
Yes, definitely, mate, definitely. I mean, if you look at the numbers at the sales contribution margin line, formwork formwork contributes 74% margin, contribution margin. And our industrial is about, just let me get the page, 38%, right? So clearly, as we grow the industrial part of the overall pie, that will reduce the margin, but still be highly profitable. I mean, what we've got here is a balance, and this is the thing that we've been making the point for some time, and it is absolutely the strategy of Acrow. We have a formwork business that's incredibly profitable, high returns, very strong margins, but you've got to go project to project. So we've got to keep winning work, keep winning work, keep winning work, to keep the thing going, and we do, right?
But there is... I'm not gonna say there's a cycle, but you're gonna go through periods where you're going from project to project. And then you've got an industrial business that's margins, compared to others in the market, are incredibly good. But not as good as formwork. It's also not as big a drain on capital, but it's far more predictable earnings. I mean, if we're gonna make 35%-40% contribution margins out of industrial business, that's actually quite fantastic, because I know that other companies are lucky to be doing 10% or 15%, in this regard. So we've got a very specific focus about how we run that part of the business. But yes, you're right.
Over time, if the industrial business becomes a bigger part of the pie, as it will, that overall EBITDA margin in the company will probably reduce.
Also, just on the one-offs there, are you done with the relocation of yards, or is there still some sort of significant items that we'll see in 2025?
Yeah, not really. There's not that much in that regard. I mean, we have a very big project over the next two years to relocate three yards into one in Southeast Queensland. So we're building, or getting built for us, a purpose-built facility in Southeast Queensland. We've currently got three facilities that will go into one, and that's a couple of years away yet. That's a very, very big undertaking to set stuff in the future.
All right. And just last one from me, just on the CapEx, just to be clear, the guidance you're giving for CapEx, that's gross CapEx, or do you net that out with what you expect to sell in terms of-
No, we don't forecast that, 'cause that's very hard to forecast, 'cause that'll change year by year. Yeah, so that's pure growth or staying business CapEx.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please register by pressing star then one on your phone. Your next question comes from Alex Lu at Morgans Financial. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Hope you're well.
We are.
Let's start with Jumpform, please. It looks like the Jumpform pipeline's gone from AUD 36 mil six months ago to 42.5, and can you correct me if I'm wrong, but did Jumpform deliver about AUD 8 million -AUD 7.9 million FY 2024? Do you think you can still get to that run rate of 20 million, which was your target, by say, you know, FY 2026?
... We can, but no, it didn't deliver eight million, you know, it's just less than that now. All right, so we'll go from about, what was it, Matt? Five?
Five.
Yeah, so we're gonna go from five to probably 12. I mean, Matt's gonna keep me under the table. That's our budget for Jumpform revenue this year is AUD 10.8 million, up from five.
We've already got 5.9 committed.
Yeah, we've got 5.9 already committed, and we're winning projects-
Yeah, 6.6 .
6.6. So, you know, our internal target's 12. Right? And then you get that momentum moving, and so there's absolutely everybody is involved in Jumpforms, and the business is focused on getting to that critical AUD 20 million revenue number. I think the other thing to point out, Alex, around CapEx, is you get to a. You know, we're spending a lot, we're spending upwards of AUD 30 million on Jumpform year, over a couple of years to get us to that point where we're making, you know, AUD 10 million-AUD 12 million dollars of profit out of that business, and then you get to a critical mass. Now, you know, that's, I think. I hope people understand in our CapEx profile, that these are choices we're making. We're making choices to invest in Jumpforms.
We're making choices to invest in AcrowDeck. We're making choices to invest in our industrial business. We're spending not much in our traditional core Acrow business, because we're looking to diversify the revenue and profit streams. So we're not a one-trick show. We're not just a Queensland formwork business, you know? We dropped AUD 4 million of revenue in Queensland formwork for the year, and we got up AUD 20 million nationally. So these are the sorts of things that we're needing to. We're investing in, but just to make Acrow more bulletproof, further bulletproof as we go forward over the next decade.
Okay, thanks for that, and can I move to then industrial services, please? You're targeting further organic growth, and obviously, you've flagged some acquisitions there, but can I just focus on the organic side of things and I guess explain how you've been able to expand organically over the past few years and obviously going into FY 2025 as well? Just wondering, you know, is it leveraging existing customer relationships? Is it, you know, are you being aggressive on pricing? You know, you're cold calling, so just, yeah, just trying to understand that organic growth part of industrial services then.
Look, there's a combination. One thing I'll say, this is not a cold-calling industry, Alex, in industrial. You're dealing with BHP and, you know, UGL and Downer and-
AGL.
AGL, et cetera. So this is; it's not a cold-calling industry. So to a degree, yes, we have leveraged off relationships with the likes of UGL and Downer to win other contracts that they let out in, say, New South Wales, or off the back of South East Queensland relationships. We got into Visy off the back of a guy that works for us, that we hired, who had a strong reputation there as a manager and a service provider, and they just stuck along with him. We've worked really hard on Snowy, and we've got ourselves in a great position there now. And we're gonna talk about organic growth. So Snowy, I said Snowy's doing about AUD 500,000-AUD 600,000 a month at the moment in revenue.
With the program that's there, by January, that'll be AUD 1.2 million of revenue at 20% margin. Right? So that's part of an organic growth story. The Ampol contract, there was no existing relationships whatsoever involved in the Ampol contract that we won at Lytton. Our guys just worked incredibly hard to win the contract and it's now gonna be worth AUD 15 million, and again, that's generating at the moment only a couple of hundred thousand dollars a month, and it's gonna go to sort of 3x or 4 x that, as we go into the second half of the year. So it's a combination of targeted. At the moment, we've got some very targeted contracts we're working on in Western Australia.
Even though we don't have a big presence yet in that industry, we've got a lady who works for us, who's very, very well known in Western Australia, and she's got some targeted contracts there that we are hopeful that we might win a piece of, and then we're looking to grow in, you know, sort of an M&A to complement that in that state over time. So look, we are definitely. This is not just about the M&A. It's definitely organic growth in the traditional Acrow business.
Okay, great. Thanks for that. And just one last one from me, please. So, apologies if you've mentioned this earlier, as I jumped into this call late, but the new loading platform system, Steve, so what-
Yeah.
Is that used for?
So it's basically a platform that goes on multi-story high-rise buildings that you put material on. So if you basically keep building slabs, and you need to get material onto a lower level, you put these on, and it basically retracts in and out of the building. So if you've got to put, like, plasterboard or windows or something onto the lower slabs, this comes out, you load it up, and then you basically pallet truck them back into the building. So it's not a revolutionary product. We've definitely changed a little bit of stuff on it by making it adjustable is probably the biggest benefit of it, because every other product in the market is a fixed width.
So you'll get a two point two or a two point six or a four point two, so you need a range of these platforms. I've made ours universal, so if there's a demand at one time for two point twos, I just expand it or bring it in. But yeah, it's doesn't need much engineering, it's-
Look, this is not gonna be a massive game changer, Alex. It's something that might generate AUD 2 million-
That's it.
Additional revenue and profit. And we can lump it in together with jump form and screens quotes, right? So, you know, and those customers that want a slightly better system and have a one-stop shop. So again, this is not gonna be. This is not an AUD 20 million dollar kick like jump forms. This is a couple million bucks a year, that we hope to be able to get in with the next couple years.
This is complementing the other products.
Complementing the other existing products.
It's giving the clients a one-stop solution.
Yeah.
Yep. And so were you outsourcing that previously, and now you're doing it yourself?
Yeah, we've never been in that space.
Oh, so you've never been in that space. You kind of see that as an opportunity, but yeah, I guess what you said is kind of small, but-
No, we've never hired out a... We've never done it before ever, right? And now we were looking at it, we saw a demand, and we're being asked by some of our clients who contract us for jump forms and screens, if we can provide those products. Matt's worked out that he can. He's getting it designed and getting it manufactured, and we'll be bringing that to market, Matt, what, in the next four weeks?
First month.
Next month?
Yeah.
Yep.
Okay, great. Thanks a lot, guys.
Thank you. Your next question comes from [Tina Wilson] at [EME Capital]. You may go ahead.
Hi, thanks, for taking questions. Just going back to industrial services, you mentioned that the competitors are running a much lower margin, but are they also going after the same sort of clients as in, you know, the bigger blue chip clients that you are after?
Yeah, now, look, this, well, it's like there are competitors for us, who look to do a whole range of other services, right? So they'll do painting and blasting and insulation work, and scaffold provision might be just part of all of that. They'll do rope access, they'll do a whole range of things. We're not interested in those sorts of contracts, right? We're a specialist access provider for industrial. And that's what we focus on. So there are certain styles of contracts that we just don't quote on. Now, those contracts don't go for 20% margins. They go for 8%, 9%, or 10% margins.
Yep.
It's a very different market that we focus on than some of the other larger companies in that area. We want to be good at what we're good at, and as I said, it's providing access on industrial facilities.
Yep. Okay, great. Thanks. That's all. Thank you.
Thank you. That concludes our question and answer session and the conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect your lines.
Thank you.