Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Acrow FY 2022 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a question and answer session after the presentation, at which time if you wish to queue for a question, you will need to press zero followed by one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. I would now like to hand the call over to Mr. Steven Boland, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you.
Thank you very much, and thanks folks for joining us this morning as we walk through our FY 2022 investor presentation. Clearly this is a great year for the company, a year I'm extremely proud of all the efforts of all of the Acrow team in delivering the results that we're reporting today. I think it really is a watershed year in the history of the business as we've totally transformed this business over the last five years since we've become a public company. I'll give some details in relation to that shortly. In this year, we're reporting record financial results in basically all areas. The growth that we're seeing is all organic growth. It's not on the back of any M&A activity in the last actually probably three years now.
We have a record pipeline of work in front of us. We've also had a fantastic year in securing high revenue contracts and we'll talk through a bit more detail around that. Very pleasingly for me, we're getting great growth basically across all states and all markets. We are forecasting another very strong year in FY 2023, and I'll give some color around that towards the end of the presentation. I thought it was appropriate. We have a number of people I think who are on the call today who have been shareholders of Acrow since we listed in April of 2018. You know, just I guess a little bit of a step through lesson of where we've come to over that period.
Because the business that you're shareholders of today is a very different business to what it was when we listed in April 2018. I just wanted to put some, you know, information around that to show just how this business has been transformed. Firstly, clearly from a revenue and a profitability perspective, EBITDA perspective, we've basically doubled, you know, 2.5 times the number of the revenue and the EBITDA, and we're heading towards tripling those numbers in Acrow since listing. Very importantly, we've created, you know, we create that. We are now creating excellent value for our shareholders with the EPS now AUD 0.072 per share this year heading into the eights .
You know, you can see that we've had a 57% CAGR on EPS over that period. That's very good for us to see that we're creating that value for our shareholders. The key driving factor over this period has been that we've changed the focus of the business to being, you know, an engineering solutions based business rather than basically a provider of scaffold services. You can see over the five years or from full year 2018 to full year 2022, we've now got 87.8% of our sales contribution margin coming out of engineering services. Effectively formwork and industrial engineering, Industrial Services , which was only 50% four years ago.
The scaffold business now, the pure commercial scaffold business in Acrow now represents just over 12% of our total sales contribution. I think also pleasingly for myself and the management team and our board is that, in a period of such significant growth over four years of, you know, going 250% increase in your revenue, basically, we've decreased our margins. We're not buying revenue for revenue's sake. The margins in the business have gone from 20.2%, 24.5% EBITDA margin. 24.5% EBITDA margin is a very healthy position for the business to be in. You know, we focus very much on continuing the growth of that number as we go forward.
I'll quickly just, you know, touch on the overview. I'm sure most of you know this story, but you know, the business now is a construction services business that focuses on civil infrastructure, industrial markets and the commercial markets. You know, the key offering is to provide engineered formwork sales and hire service firstly. We have a specialist screen, edge protection screen system solutions business. We provide hire of equipment, labor and sale of equipment into the industrial market, and we still provide scaffold dry hire to the commercial sector. We are a national business. We have 10 locations, operate in all states, all capital cities. We have a very clear growth strategy to broaden the footprint of our civil infrastructure business across the East Coast, especially in New South Wales and Victoria.
I'll talk a bit about New South Wales because it's been a laggard for it for some time and I've been saying that's going to change and it is now significantly changing. We also have a very strong desire to grow a national footprint in Industrial Services. We operate primarily in Queensland and New South Wales in that sector at the moment. We've got a very strong eye on certainly South Australia and Western Australia. In terms of our competitive advantages, we're really honing in on these. Number one is the expertise and based on customer focus of our engineering team, which we know is industry leading, by far industry leading. I'll talk a bit about that in more detail shortly.
The general quality of our people is something we've worked on a lot over the last four years in terms of succession planning and just the general depth of staff. Again, I'll talk about that in a bit more detail later. You know, I sort of guard jealously the position that we've got to in terms of the range of products that we have and the geographic footprints that we operate in. There's no company in our markets in Australia who operate across the geography with the range of products that we do. We've really become a best- of- breed hirer and seller of formwork and industrial scaffold equipment right across Australia. In terms of the financial metrics for this year, you know, clearly a very strong year.
Revenue up 40%, EBITDA up 49%. Importantly, and I think we've been talking about this for some time, we were saying that we're going to start to see the scale impacts coming through our NPAT, not just underlying, we also have statutory NPAT. That's evident now in this year with underlying NPAT up by 104%, statutory NPAT up nearly 300%. You know, we had to get to that point of scale. That scale will now be achieved, and those numbers will now continue to grow in line with our projected EBITDA revenue growth. Again, importantly, EPS 79% growth to AUD 0.072 cents and continuing to head north, forecast to grow us into the eights in the new year.
We are declaring an AUD 0.015 final dividend for the year, 60% franked, leading to a total dividend to be AUD 0.027 per share. You know, in a business that's growing as we do and still, you know, spending a lot of money, investing money into the growth of the business with very high returns, we still believe it's a very important discipline factor to be paying dividends. We're pleased. I mean, this is the biggest dividend that we've paid for a full year in the company's history. Again, given the growth and the investment in growth in the company, our return on equity going from 14.5%-23%, I think, is a strong indicator that we're very, very well.
We very well manage our growth and we're a good capital manager. Andrew Crowther, our CFO, will give more detail later about the sort of the return rates that we're achieving for our capital growth. Those are the achievements for the year. The first one there about our hire contract. It continues to be, and I think we watch this almost every day, every week, about the number of new contracts we're securing and the value of those contracts. It is the most important key leading indicator to the future success of the business. Up 28% this year compared to last year, it gives me real transparency for at least six months, if not almost a full year, around what our hire revenue is going to look like. We're off to a cracking start in the new year.
I'll talk about that a bit later. Mentioned earlier, organic growth. I'll talk about that in line with the point that's underneath that, WA, SA, and Tasmania, because it's really where we've seen that our smaller states. It's hard to call WA now a smaller state because the profitability of that business now this year has been quite remarkable. But we've been able to move products into those markets that have previously not been seen due to our product range, open up new channels for revenue. All three of those businesses have had fantastic results across the year. Our major growth success story this year has been Industrial Services . We've put a lot of effort and a degree of capital into this market.
It does give us, you know, a repeatable earnings profile that the rest of our business is more sort of project to project-based. We're very keen to grow further our Industrial Services business that will give us that strong repeatable earnings. We grew the revenue by 110% up to AUD 45.6 million, and sales contribution up 53%. Queensland Formwork has been our strongest business for some time. Yeah, this time last year, I was saying we were going to get a significant increase in Queensland Formwork in the FY 2022 year off the back of activity and to some degree of market share growth. That has absolutely happened.
Really proud of our Queensland Formwork business, which continues to be the market leader up there by a long, long way. I'd say our market share is probably in the 60%-70% range now in Queensland Formwork. Finally, supply chain and logistics. We haven't been immune from the challenges that companies have been facing due to COVID, geopolitical situations, et cetera, in terms of supply chain and logistics issues. We've taken some really strong initiatives to minimize those impacts. One of the major things, and Andrew will talk in more detail about that, has been our ability to open up a channel of supply for timber and plywood products that a lot of other companies in Australia have not been able to do.
We've opened up a very, very good supply channel there, and that's enabled us to both grow our revenue and significantly grow our margins in the sale of timber and plywood products into formwork operators in Australia. In terms of our safety results, good improvements. A 23% improvement in terms of our TRIFR stat. 49% improvement in our LTIFR stat. Lost time injuries, you can see there's not many of them. It's six down the core. The total recordable injuries number being flat. I'm okay with that because it just means we're reporting things better, and we can take corrective action if we need to. Clearly zero is the goal, but in a business of our nature, still to have only four LTIs across the year is a reasonably good result.
Talking about the market we operate in and the general business overview. You know, we are very heavily focused on the transport infrastructure pipeline in the country. There has been a 30% growth in spend in transport infrastructure between 2020 and 2022. You can see on this chart how that's forecast to peak in 2023, 2024, 2025. It won't happen. Said this many times. This will be a longer and flatter peak, which is good for us. The availability of labor, availability of equipment to be able to provide this kind of peak just won't happen. I think it's been well publicized the range of major transport infrastructure projects that are taking longer and costing more.
That's not bad news for Acrow. You can see on the right-hand side of this page, every one of basically, the major transport infrastructure projects in the country are now significant contributors to revenue and profit for Acrow. The rail projects in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, the Bruce Highway project in Queensland, the Western Distributor project in Melbourne. As these projects are coming toward, some of them are not yet coming towards the conclusion, but as they are getting more towards the conclusion, they are being replaced by other projects. The pipeline for us here is extremely strong. It's a factor here that once you get on these projects, and Melbourne Metro Rail is a prime example because we had very little market share in Melbourne.
This is one of the great, sort of stimuluses for us to get cracking in Melbourne was this project. Once you get on the project and you provide the right solutions and the right customer service and the right engineering support with the right equipment, it's very, very hard to get you off them. We are winning 80% of the packages that we're tendering for on Melbourne Metro Rail at the moment. It just continues to roll on. You know, we've got ourselves in a really good space when it comes to the transport infrastructure projects in the country. Off the back of that, you know, I talked about a 30% growth in spend in civil infrastructure between 2020 and 2022. Over the same period, we've grown by 56% in that area.
Look, the states, it's interesting now to talk through what's happening in each of these states. I've got a WA here now, as you can see, it's quite a story as well. Queensland has gone from AUD 20 million- AUD 30 million in a year, so a 50% increase in revenue, formwork in Queensland. We predicted that would happen, and it happened. That's not just in terms of activity, but we've definitely, I believe, in some practice, picked up some market share. Victoria, if I went back to 2018 and 2019, we were lucky to have, I think, AUD 2 million or AUD 3 million of revenue in Victoria up to now, AUD 50 million.
We're maintaining our position of growth that we've now had in Victoria between the 2018, 2019 low points and the real growth we got in 2021 was maintained in 2022. WA in the bottom right-hand corner added in for the first time because it's quite a story. WA going from AUD 5.2 million to nearly AUD 9 million of revenue over the course of a year. Very, very profitable branch for us now, and the prospects for WA going forward are very good for us. New South Wales is the interesting one. While again that looks like, you know, okay, went from AUD 10 million - AUD 12 million. Not enormous amount of growth, but we've just come off in the month of July, the most profitable month the New South Wales branch has had in over eight years.
That's just going to improve off the back of projects that we have now won. You know, this time last year, I was saying that you'll see real growth out of Queensland between 2021 and 2022. This year I'm saying 2022 to 2023 for New South Wales formwork is gonna look extremely good. Hire equipment wins for the year, up 28.4%, AUD 39 million-AUD 50 million. Important that that continues to roll. I mentioned that we're off to a cracking start in 2023. The month of August, we still got a week to go, is the biggest month in terms of contract value won in the history of Acrow. We're up towards AUD 8 million just in a month, in the month of August in terms of contracts won.
The pipeline is also very strong, up 14% from where it was same time last year. 87% of the value in the pipeline is in formwork. We are winning now pretty much one in two formwork contracts that we bid on. We mentioned the strong value growth in the smaller states. In the commercial scaffold area, we're actually gonna see some gains this year as project prices are for the first time in probably five years moving upwards. The most important initiative in this business over the last four and a half years has been the focus on the engineered systems and services and heavily resource our engineering department and upskill our engineering department to deliver this kind of result.
You can see on the left-hand side, 84% of the revenue of the business comes out of engineered systems and services, compared to 43% for four years ago. Doubled the number of engineers in the business, 15 to 32. We're about to put a couple of extra engineers on again. It's in specific areas, primarily for our guard form business. I'll talk about that shortly. It enables us to make a real differentiation because we've got engineering teams that are absolutely focused on delivering results to customers. It's a can-do, will-do. How do we make this work in a safe, competitive way for customers? That gives us. So we've now got a very strong reputation around product quality and safety.
The benefits of this whole structure is that it we get significant exposure to government-funded civil infrastructure projects, and a significant amount of our revenue that comes out of this space, and it's a great tailwind in that area. Pricing is not even close to being the first focus on these projects. Importantly, you know, in an era where there's been a lot of publicity about issues with companies failing close to the wind in the construction sector, the quality of the debtors in this area on government-funded projects is a significantly different profile than if you're involved in the residential housing market. Major civil projects, I talked a little bit about those earlier, but I can talk about the Snowy Hydro. We've got AUD 8.3 million of revenue out of Snowy Hydro.
It's only in its infancy. We've put a number in there and we expect there to be AUD 30 million. It could be 2 or 3 times that amount for us over the next five to 10 years. Again, been a lot of publicity about this particular project in terms of cost blowouts and delays, and they're true. It's absolutely true. This is a troubled project, but it's going ahead, and it has to go ahead. It's absolutely cornerstones of the national power generation. We know what's going on, and, you know, so there'll, you know, there's no doubt it's going to be costing more ultimately to the federal government than originally planned, but the project's going ahead, and it's gonna go ahead at some pace. Melbourne Metro Tunnel we talked about.
You can see AUD 12 million going to AUD 16 million. We expect for the duration of the project, we think we've got double the revenue still to go on Bruce Highway, AUD 9 million-AUD 18 million. West Gate Tunnel is getting closer to completion. Cross River for us is still very much in its infancy. The new Sydney Metro is getting close to completion. However, Sydney Metro West and then Sydney Metro Inner West and Sydney Metro West will be kicking in in the next six to 12 months. In terms of operational update, now a segmental breakdown, 40% increase in revenue, all organic as mentioned before, pretty much across all divisions in all states. In terms of revenue, you can see Industrial Services growing from AUD 22 million- AUD 45.6 million is the standout.
In terms of sales contribution margin though, Formwork is the standout growing 36%, whilst Industrial Services is 53%, but AUD 14.7 million in Formwork growth for the year. Flat in Commercial Scaffold. Contribution margin, it's this is purely a mix issue. Our hire revenue is 100% pass-through from revenue to sales contribution. We've got our labor revenue is around about 19%, and our sale of product revenue is around about 25%. Depending on the mix at any given time, you're gonna get a change there. For example, in the month of July, our sales contribution margin was 50% for that month because of the mix of work in that particular month.
Really importantly for us is the sales contribution growth of AUD 20 million, AUD 12 million of that found its way through to the bottom line. You clearly can't grow a business of this nature as we have, 40% up in revenue, without having growth in some of your cost lines. We're taking a view at the moment of we're setting this business up to not be a 150 million dollar turnover business. We're setting this business up to be a AUD 200 million- AUD 250 million turnover business in the coming years with a staffing structure that supports a business of that size.
I'll talk a bit about some of the new roles we've put into the business shortly that just are as much to do with the future as they are to do with today. You know, I'm very happy to see basically 50% of the growth of our sales contribution falling through to the EBITDA of the business. Next, sales contribution bridge. This shows where we're getting our gains. Formwork hire, Industrial Scaffold hire, Industrial Services labor hire, those three which total AUD 15.3 million of our sales contribution growth. A lot of that's where our capital investment's going. Our capital investment has been going into Formwork products and been going into Industrial Services products.
That AUD 15.3 million of growth is a lot to do off the back of the capital expenditure in those areas. The other one I want to point out on that page, and again, Andrew will talk more about this later, is our timber sales. We had AUD 2.7 million of sales contribution growth out of our sale of timber and plywood this year. The numbers we're doing now I could never have imagined were possible even 12 months or 18 months or two years ago. A lot of factors off the back of that, and again, I'm let still Andrew Crowther, he will go through that.
It does come at a cost of working capital, but it's really high the return on the investment for the working capital employed to generate the margin growth that we're getting out of timber. Divisional reports. Formwork, 30% growth in revenue, 37% growth in Formwork hire. As I mentioned earlier, great contributions primarily out of Queensland and Western Australia, up 50% and 69% respectively. The growth of the timber and plywood, which has driven the 26% growth in revenue, 32% growth in contribution in sales. A lot of that's come out of timber and ply. There's a consistent growth in this business for us over the last four years. It's not gonna be stopping anytime soon. I won't go into infinite detail about all of the case studies here.
What I will point out is the first three case studies, which is a Melbourne Metro Tunnel project and a Brisbane Cross-River Rail project, and the Sydney Rozelle Interchange project. It's all the same equipment. Basically all of our MK equipment, all of the same equipment are being used in different applications. It goes to the versatility of the products, the engineering smarts of the products. I think it's. That's the main thing I wanna point out here. It's one thing to have the equipment, but it's another thing to know how to use the equipment to come up with the best solution for your customer. That's what our guys are able to do. All three of those projects, and if you look at those, they all look very different applications, and they are.
It's all using basically the same equipment in a different application. The last case study, which is a screens project for White Residences on the Gold Coast. I wanted to highlight this again 'cause it goes again to the versatility of the project. This was not an easy job for a screens business to undertake. All that equipment is hydraulically lifted. We had to build some absolutely specific stair systems and stretcher stair systems for this project. I guess three or four years ago, we'd have said no to this, that kind of project. Today, we found a way to make it work and make it work incredibly profitably for us and provide the right solution for the customer. Moving on to Industrial Services.
Here's the real success story here in terms of revenue growth. Revenue's up 110%. You can see very high growth in labor hire, which is off the back of the major contracts we've been winning with Visy, Snowy Hydro , and the Mount Piper Power Station, further contracts on Origin-Surat Basin and Incitec Pivot. The really important thing about this business is it gives us an annuity earnings profile. Visy's a five-year contract. Origin-Surat Basin a five-year contract with some further extensions added to it. The Snowy Hydro project, we basically run from six to six months. You get an order for six months, you get another order for another six months, you get another order for another six months. We'll be there for a long period of time.
That contract will be generating significant revenue in the industrial space for us for at least the next two to three years, and then it converts to a formwork project. When it really gets into the heavy tunneling part of the project. It's not at that point, anywhere near that point yet. We have invested AUD 4 million in specialized Industrial Services equipment over the period. The next page is an example of that. Really, we're now preparing this to invest in this absolute specialist kit, that's highly engineered. You can see, I mean, we can't actually provide a photo. We're not allowed to take a photo inside the furnace at Mount Piper, but this is a schematic of what it looks like.
If you'd imagine, again, the work that needs to be done to clean and maintain a furnace inside a power station, which is very specific nature of work. We've got equipment that is designed in such a way to enable that work to be carried out. It was an R&D project for us to start with. It then turns into a capital investment, and it will make very, very strong returns out of it. It's been one of the major differences that enable us to crack into this market in New South Wales as we have. The final commercial scaffold. Look, I won't talk a lot about this. You can see the contribution margin is basically flat for the year. What I will say is we're continuing to exit from scaffold with hire contracts.
The margins are getting ridiculously low on those in terms of the labor. We don't want to play in that space. We still have. By December of this year, I think we'll have three contracts nationally down from probably 10 or 12 at the moment. The other thing that's really happening at the moment is improving price on the dry hire. We're certainly seeing price lift as we speak right now. I expect to see actually some revenue or equipment hire revenue number go up between 2022 and 2023 off the back of price increase. People in Acrow are so important to what we do. Clearly, any very good business, you've got to have high-quality people, and we do. We focus a lot on succession planning. I've spoken about this a fair bit in the past.
It's absolutely front of mind for us now. We've been very fortunate to attract some very high-quality people into the business. Give us some examples there of our new New South Wales GM, Peter Fehrenbach. You know, Peter's been with the business now seven or eight months, and the month of July, or actually going towards 12 months I guess now, Peter. The month of July is the most profitable month in the history of the business in New South Wales. Evan Field, our new National Engineering Manager , he is actually in the photo there wearing the orange vest. He wound up his own business as an engineering consultant to come and work for us. Rob Parovel, very, very experienced, very sharp guy in the business.
Just as importantly, internal promotions of Matt Caporella, Jurie Roetger, and Jason Merjane, a very important part of the business. I mean, Matt was our National Engineering Manager , is now the Chief Operating Officer in the business and does an absolutely tremendous job. Importantly, though, while focused on the senior team there, we've done a lot of work on the middle management over the last six to 12 months. In the last few months, I mean, we've hired a new National Credit Manager, which was off the back of the retirement of our existing guy who was a stalwart in the business. We've got a really good National Credit Manager coming into the business. We've created some new roles.
In a business that needs to manage its cash as tightly as we do because of our investment profile, we now got a Company Treasurer. It's been a breath of fresh air having somebody in that role who reports into Andrew, our CFO. Very talented young guy who has taken basically control of the cash management of the business and is a vital part of how we run operate our business. Importantly, too, working for Rob Parovel, we've just hired a training and development manager to focus on succession planning and training.
We haven't had that role in the business, but we've now got an experienced gentleman coming into the business who will manage the training and development of all staff, from basically, you know, Chief Operating Officer and senior state general managers right through to the guys that are working in our yard operations. We think it's a, you know, it's a really very good initiative for the business. Culture, the culture. All these things are obviously important. We have safety, customer focus, solutions focus, being an employer of choice. We believe in exceeding industry standards and setting new standards, having a very open communication. The one thing that's not mentioned there, and I will mention it because I don't want to ever shy away of it, we have an absolute culture of bottom line focus.
We don't do it to the detriment of safety. We don't do it to the detriment of customer. This business is very, very focused on its profitability almost on a daily basis. The guys in the business particularly run 12 grand finals every year. At the end of each month, it's a grand final. How did we go? Did we win or we lose? Then we choose a Super Bowl. That's the way we talk about it internally. You know, we really are very focused on our profitability, but not to the detriment of safety or customers or employees. I'll now hand over to Andrew, who'll walk you through more of the financials, and then I'll come back at the end and give you sort of the outlook of the FY 2023 year.
Great. Thanks, Steve, and thanks again for joining us today. Move over to the P&L slide. As Steve mentioned before, the last three years has been a massive growth for us. We've spent AUD 32.5 million of growth CapEx in the last three years. We've acquired Uni-span and Natform. Also we've moved strategically to engineered systems. What you can see now, that's allowed us to achieve a scale of growth that we've talked about in the past, but now sees us having 79% of our EBITDA growth flowing directly through to pre-tax profit. As Steve already mentioned, our EBITDA increased 49% up to AUD 36.3 million.
Now, below that, we've got depreciation that's increased almost AUD 2 million, which is obviously part of the CapEx growth that we've had. Net interest has increased basically because our volume of debt has gone up, which we'll move on to in a second, up by about 41% on an average yearly growth. Pre-tax profit, AUD 10 million up to almost AUD 20 million. Now, our tax expense has gone from AUD 1.5 million last year to almost AUD 2 million this year. That's also come with a decrease of the effective tax rate from 15% down to 10%. Now, as you would remember, we have quite a lot of tax losses that we carried forward.
We have AUD 11.2 million still of tax-affected losses that are going forward, which translates to about AUD 37 million of profit that can go against those tax losses. Now, we've been very profitable this year, and the reality is this, we've probably got another three to four years of those tax losses to be able to use. That's a pretty good benefit to carry forward. That gets us down to underlying NPAT, an increase of 104% from AUD 8.7 million - AUD 17.8 million.
After significant items and share-based payments, which were much lower this year than last year, we get to an increase of almost 300% in NPAT before statutory up to AUD 15.7 million. From an underlying EPS, that gets us from AUD 0.04 last year to AUD 0.0717. It's also important to remember that we made a AUD 10.5 million capital raise in July. That AUD 0.0717 or 79% increase in EPS comes with a 14% increase in our actual weighted shares on issue. That's a pretty good outcome. As Steve mentioned before, as part of this announcement, we made a final dividend announcement of AUD 0.015, which is 6% franked.
That will move towards 100% as we get into a tax payable position. AUD 0.015, when you add on the AUD 0.012 of the 20% franked at the interim, that gives us AUD 0.027 for the year, which was 42% franked. It's up from AUD 0.019 in the previous year. Now, when you take into account what's happened to our share price from year-end of last year to this year, plus that good dividend yield, that's about almost a 42% total shareholder return for the year. Moving on to the balance sheet. You can see that this balance sheet is a very different balance sheet than what you would've seen last year. This is a very strong balance sheet.
We had an AUD 11 million improvement in our net current asset situation. Last year, you remember, we had an AUD 8 million deficit in net current assets. This year, we have an AUD 3 million surplus. Obviously we've talked about the growth of the company in the last year and the very profitable position we're in. That obviously comes with a cost via the debt equity and generated cash. Our net debt during the year went up by AUD 10.4 million.
Now, that supported the twenty-one, which we'll get into in a moment, the AUD 21.1 million of CapEx, the expanded sales and Industrial Services labor business, and also we paid the last deferred payment for the Uni-span acquisition. Our net gearing went up to 28.3%, which was up by 1.5%. Now that's a pretty small increase given the fact of how much we've grown in our debt growth. Our debt to EBITDA actually reduced from 1.2 down to 1.1, which is just our growth of the EBITDA and the effective use of the capital of what we've paid for.
Our intention is that this balance sheet and the gearing will remain pretty conservative and we see there will be an increase during the year, but by the end of the year, that will be lower. And as we go on and the profits and the cash keep on coming out and our CapEx becomes more conservative, that will reduce relatively rapidly. Now, one of the big things we've had, and Steve went on before, we had a rebase in a couple of our businesses during the year. Our sales business, and in particular our timber business, grew rapidly. Sales overall was up about 42% and our industrial labor business increased by about 156% during the year. Now that comes with a very large capital working capital input.
Working capital, being debtors, prepayments, inventory, less creditors, went up by AUD 20 million. Now that was, that's a pretty big one-off hit for the year. As we'll see in a moment, that, as you can see from the EBITDA growth, it actually was a worthwhile growth. We also had, as Steve mentioned before, it was an unprecedented year from supply chain issues. A lot of our creditors brought in payment terms and so forth. In particular, the timber payment terms, which I'll get into in a moment, required a lot of additional working capital. As I said, you'll see the one of the payments we made this year was the Uni-span deferred payment of AUD 3.5 million. That was our last deferred payment for that acquisition.
Going forward, that's all gone now. Moving over to the next page, funding and liquidity. Now, as I said before, one of the three ways you grow is obviously debt. At the moment, even with the increases in interest rates, even though we wanna keep a very conservative look on gearing, debt for us is still relatively cheap. We're very lucky that we've got very good banking partners, being Westpac that have supported us during the last few years. In particular this year, they supported us very closely. Our gross debt capacity has gone from AUD 31.1 million-AUD 46.1 million, and with that, our actual headroom has increased by AUD 8.6 million - AUD 13.2 million.
We've got a lot of headroom to support further growth. As I said before, our actual net gearing has gone from 26.1% - 28.3%, so relatively conservative. Our debt EBITDA has reduced, as well as our interest cover has actually increased. It's a pretty good position to be at. We actually, as I said before, we expect our debt ratios to improve during 2023. Now, over to the slide 35. During the year, we had a very large timber business rebase. Timber for us in the past, in past years, was more of a service to our customers, where we provided timber because the customers basically expected it.
Going back a few years, our the margins we'd achieve on these things, on timber, was about 10%-11%, so pretty low. It was actually a bit more of a pain than anything to actually do it, just a service. What we found this year, you would have seen, is anyone that knows landscape gardens or builders know there's a growing Australian demand for this. Also along with the same time, there's been a lot of Australian suppliers of timber that have come out of the market. So basically, people just can't access supply. Acrow during this period has managed to secure a very reliable supply from overseas of LVL and plywood.
Not just that, we've actually been able to secure this at much higher margins. You'll see this year we made a contribution margin of AUD 4 million on our timber business at a 28% margin. Last year, there was AUD 1.3 million of contributions at an 18% margin. As I said previously, that was more 10%-11%. With timber comes a very high input on working capital. We have to pay a deposit when we order, and we have to pay the full amount of this timber as it hits Australian docks. If you take into account our debtors, there's basically a four to five month lag on payment. There's an input of around AUD 5 million of working capital requirements.
If you think about a sales contribution of AUD 4 million and a AUD 5 million working capital input, that's a pretty good return on investment that we're very happy to continue going. Moving over to the next page, cash flow. Our cash operating profit during the year increased from 11.7 million last year up to 23 million this year. That's a 76% increase. Very minimal tax paid this year, although those tax payments will start increasing in the following year.
If we move down to the net cash bridge, what we're trying to show here is that this year was a big growth year for a number of reasons, both for CapEx and both for working capital and the rebases of our Industrial Services labor business and our sales business. We had EBITDA of AUD 36.3 million. We had working capital input of about AUD 20 million. That AUD 20 million is a one-off hit. You know, we will continue. We're currently at working capital. We've got about this year we're at about a 22% working capital of sales. The previous year was about 12.5%. That was too low. We see this moving back to about 18%-20% of sales.
What you'll find next year is working capital will likely increase as our business increases, but it will be a much lower input on cash usage. Now, moving over to the right, you'll see it was a big investment year as well. We had AUD 21.1 million of CapEx plus the AUD 3.5 million of Uni-span deferred payment. As you can see, if you actually move left to right, our net debt went from AUD 22.45 to AUD 22.84. However, a large reason for that was the working capital of AUD 20 and the CapEx of AUD 21.1. As I said, the working capital won't repeat itself. At any stage, we can sort of move that CapEx spend down.
As you can see, this business will start really shoving cash off very quickly once we hit peak CapEx. Now, from a cash conversion point of view, likewise, the cash conversion this year was just about 45.2%. The reason for that was the working capital input for those two businesses. Last year, it's 96%. We can see that moving to 90% in the following years. Moving over to capital expenditure. As I said, this year was a relatively high amount of CapEx, AUD 21.1 million, of which AUD 14.2 million was growth and AUD 6.2 million staying in business. Now, as Steven mentioned before, this CapEx is actually going into the investment where our growth is. Mainly the formwork and the Industrial Services business.
Interestingly, that AUD 21.1 million is up from AUD 16.2 million last year, and it's a lower percentage of both our EBITDA and sales than last year. Even though it's a larger amount, it's a smaller amount as a percentage. Now, we did a review of what our return on investment is. As you know, we've been talking about our IRR return requirement is 40% for all of our growth CapEx. We did a review of the 2021 and 2022 year because these two years were very clean from the fact that there's no M&A from the previous years involved in this. 2021 cumulative return on our growth CapEx was 43.5%. 2022 was 49.8%.
The actual hurdle rate is being exceeded by our growth CapEx. We expect to see this improve as utilization, et cetera, improves. In fact, I will hand back over to Steve.
Thanks, Andrew. Just in terms of our short to medium-term prospects and forecast into the new year, we will continue to grow our Industrial Services business. We are looking at M&A opportunities. There's nothing to report and nothing that's specific there at the moment, but we're seriously looking at opportunities in this space that assists us to get into the South Australian, West Australian markets. We will see an uplift in New South Wales formwork. I mentioned that earlier. There's no doubt in this year we will. I mentioned Snowy 2.0, Sydney Gateway, Sydney Metro West. Just on Sydney Gateway alone, in the last two months, we've won AUD 1.5 million worth of hire revenue contracts just on that project alone. We're definitely gonna see an uplift.
Queensland formwork will have another very, very strong year. Cross River Rail, Bruce Highway, Inland Rail hasn't even started yet. Gonna be a great project for us. We'll continue to drive organic growth of formwork products into the smaller states, WA, SA, and Tas. Integrated Engineering Services are a new development for us. Off the back of hiring Evan Field as the national engineering manager, being an ex consultant engineer, we're now moving towards becoming a full service provider to our customers in not just the products that we provide, but the other engineering services they require. We're now charging a significant amount of money. It's good revenue now for us, so we're charging for engineering services.
I expect we'll see an uplift in engineering services charges on the year somewhere in the vicinity of AUD 1 million this year compared to last year. Finally in platform, I haven't mentioned platform much at the moment, but platform is actually our one division that had a reasonably soft year in FY 2022. It's the one division, especially in New South Wales, that was pretty heavily affected by COVID-based delays. But the pipeline of work that they won is tremendous. This will be the strongest year of revenue in that for FY 2023 since we purchased that business off the back of already won work that's now starting off, now that the COVID-based delays are getting resolved. The next one's important. It's, as I said, the transformational investment.
I mean, there's various ways you can grow your revenue. Number one, you can put your prices up, and in some cases, we're doing that successfully. Secondly, you can get market share gains, just as we're now getting in New South Wales formwork and previously got Victoria formwork. You can ride the wave of an uplift in activity as we are in Queensland to a large degree. I think most importantly, and sustainably, you can open up new channels for revenue and new adjacencies. This is exactly what our Jumpform business will become. We now have a 10-year licensing agreement to market the system, Jacking Systems product in Australia. You see a couple of photos there of previous users of this system.
This is the Crown Towers, a project in Sydney, probably the biggest multi-level construction project in Sydney for some time. Jumpform are basically the core of the buildings. They're the lift shafts and the stairwells, the absolute core of the buildings. It's a critical part. Jumpform are a highly engineered part of the project. They're really important to the builder, the form worker. We've won our first two contracts. We announced this recently. Those contracts are on the Cross River Rail Albert Street Station in Brisbane, and the Monaco Gold Coast apartment development. AUD 4 million of revenue, 90% of that revenue will be higher, and all of the revenue and profit generated from these projects we're gonna get in FY 2023.
In terms of return on investment, we believe in Jump forms as we go forward, it's gonna be circa 20%. It's highly profitable, technical work. This is not an area that's unfamiliar to us. About three and a half years ago, we almost bought a very large Jump form business. We got to basically two days out from settling, and the owner pulled out of it at the last minute. He's probably pretty happy that he did, to be honest, because his system has not developed any revenue as this one is. I'm confident that we can develop over the next two and a half years a AUD 20 million revenue stream, highly profitable, out of the Jump form business nationally.
We've just hired a national business development manager for the Jumpform business. Starts on the 12th of September. He comes from a competitor, a guy that we've known for some time. Highly regarded. I think understands the system and will be driving the growth of the business nationally. I mean, the only limit really to us growing this business is number one, how quickly do we wanna do it from a capital investment perspective, and also just making sure on these first two projects we absolutely get it right. We know the service delivery is what we promise. Our promise is what we deliver for the customer. Really, I mean, this is a big market. This is a multi-hundred million dollar market in the country.
We believe in the next couple of years, we'll be able to carve out a very nice slice of that for ourselves. In terms of our outlook, I'm really pleased to say that, you know, we will provide an outlook for our FY 2023 year. We're confident to do that, you know, of some of the factors I mentioned. We're forecasting at the moment revenue growth of circa 15%, somewhere between AUD 165-AUD 175. EBITDA growth of around 20%, into the sort of mid 43-44 range. Off the back of both of those, NPAT about 23% and the EPS is hitting into the eights, around 20%.
You know, we're only seven weeks into the new financial year, but we already have a good enough feeling for the business to be able to give this outlook with a high degree of confidence. One of the reasons we can do that, number one, is the AUD 50.4 million of hire contracts we won last year. That's about 28%. The first two months of 2023, and we're not even finished August yet, we've won over AUD 12 million of work. In fact, that number is now 12.5 this morning, it'll be 13 by the time we finish the month. The first two months of the year, we've won AUD 13 million of work. That's unprecedented in our business. Again, gives me that high degree of confidence around this outlook.
A lot of the capital equipment that we ordered last year has only arrived at the very end of the last financial year. That gear is now out and in the field, generating revenue and profit. Finally, the revenue and profit from the Jumpform contracts is now factored into this forecast. Clearly, it wasn't there last year. It's a brand new adjacency and channel for us, and the fact that that revenue and profit into the forecast, again, it gives us a high degree of confidence about the outlook we've provided. That's it from us at the moment. Thanks very much, folks, for your attention. You know, I hope you're pleased with the result. We certainly are.
We think just the, you know, future growth prospects for the business to be just as strong as they've been over the last 12 months or 24 months. I'm gonna pass it back for any questions that we have.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to queue for a question, please slowly press zero followed by one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. That is zero followed by one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. Your first question is from the line of Alex Lu from Morgans. Please go ahead. Thank you.
Thanks, Steve. Morning, Andrew. Hope you guys are well. Can I just start with FY 2023 guidance, please? You know, you've given quite specific guidance there, and you seem quite confident with the range. I was just wondering, you know, so just some of the factors that could influence whether you get to the, say, the bottom or the top end of that range, and I guess things around, you know, project timing, supply chain, equipment availability, et cetera. I just wonder if you could just make some comments on that, please.
We're seven weeks into the year, Alex. I think this is probably my first comment around that. We've got 45 weeks to go. Look, yeah, last year we did four upgrades of our outlook. At the same time, we did four upgrades over the course of the year. I think that's the first comment around that. It's not a great factor around equipment availability dictating the forecast at the moment. Most of the forecast and the forecast that are driving this outlook, I can see out to January, February, March at the moment in terms of the won work. I mean, look, it could be, there could still be some project delay. I mean, that does happen.
It certainly has happened in the Natform business last year off the back of COVID. That's been kicked in. Natform's had its best month in July for probably the last 12 months. That can always be a factor. That can dictate the top to the bottom end of the range. We really haven't factored in into this forecast at the moment a lot of big product wins, which will only be an upside if they happen. Look, I think at the moment we're quite comfortable with what we've forecast. I think the two things to answer your question specifically would be, will there be project delays? You never know. You don't, you just don't know. That can happen at any time on any project for reasons that we don't know about.
Secondly, again, we're seven months into the year, so we've got a really good view of our. We only got high revenue forecasts that go out to November that will be accurate to probably 95%.
Okay. Thank you. That's very helpful. Can I just talk about staffing, please? Obviously engineering seems very important, you know, to what Acrow does. You know, given labor shortages and things like that, do you think you have enough engineers to service the amount of work that you have coming? If not, you know, how do you attract new engineers? You know, how are you finding that process?
Yeah, it's a very good question. We are, we've got 32 exactly, and that was more like 35, 36 now with some of the trainees we're bringing on. That is one answer. That we've got a really good traineeship program going now. That's, again, that's probably for tomorrow rather than for today. That's a way. You know, we like to train our people up from the start while they're doing their degree. As part of the Matt Caporella is. You've met Alex, is a prime example. Matthew started with the business as a 21-year-old doing his degree, and you know, 10 years later as the Chief Operating Officer. Yeah, that's the kind of progression that can happen through that program.
We've got some very specialized areas now that we're looking. Jumpform as an example. You know, we're looking for a couple of experienced Jumpform engineers in the business. One thing I'll say about the Jumpform business, for example, I'm factoring in that, you know, we're gonna be winning those two. We've won those two contracts. We'll be starting. We've had to put about AUD 0.5 million dollars of overhead straight into that business. We're setting it up as if it was three times that size to start with in terms of the staff and the support we're giving it to make sure we get it right. Look, there's no doubt, the high quality engineers are, you know, in high demand. Also. No doubt.
We're becoming a very strong employer of choice in the formwork engineering areas, no doubt about that. Then thirdly, you know, our traineeship program will deliver good results over time. It doesn't get you qualified engineers today, but it's a really, you know, it's a strong initiative to make sure that our future is well protected.
Okay. That's it for me. Thanks a lot, Steve.
Thank you. Your next question is from the line of Tina Wilson from CME Capital. Go ahead. Thank you.
Thanks for taking my questions. I just wanted to ask about formwork. Appreciate you mentioned that, you know, you're aiming for AUD 20 million annualized revenue. Can you just talk about, like, how big the market opportunity is? You know, does that sort of double your current pipeline? You know, just some sort of context in terms of how much of the market does that open up for you would be great.
Yeah. Look, thank you. That's a good question. As I mentioned earlier, we got very close to buying one of the largest Jumpform suppliers, New South Wales-based business about three years ago. We did a lot of research about that market at that time, and we liked it. You know, it's highly profitable. Now, that business makes great money, very good margins, well regarded. So we learned a little better that time. I think nationally, I would estimate that this market that's available to us. Because there's a lot of formworkers will have their own system.
You know, just take an example, the photo here of the towers, the Crown Tower we developed, that formwork, who's a very big formwork in New South Wales, BKH, now has its own system. You can't hire to them. In the available hire market, there's probably a AUD 200 million-AUD 300 million market nationally. For us to say that we're seeking to carve out AUD 20 million in the next 2.5 years is not a big ask. I don't think it's a big ask. You know, we've got a lot of our customers that we supply other services to already, other products, who've been asking us to get into the Jump form business. You know, that's an ambition of only sort of 10% market share.
Yep. Would you get similar sort of competitors when you tender for that, for Jumpform, or you'll be meeting different competitors in that market?
Yeah, a bit of both. There are some of our formwork competitors who have jump form systems. The guys like PERI and Doka that we compete with pretty heavily, they have jump form systems. Then you've got the specialist companies. There's this company that we almost bought three years ago who just do Jump forms, nothing else. It's a bit of both.
Yep. Great. Okay. Thank you. That's all.
Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, that is zero followed by one on your telephone keypad, and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question is from the line of Stanley Holly. Please introduce your company. Thank you.
Morning, Steve. Thank you for taking my question. Would you be able to give us some context about your relationship with ULMA at the moment? Would you say that would be able to to extend exclusive contract that needs to be renewed by this November 2022? Thank you.
Yeah. We enjoy the relationship we have with ULMA at the moment. We're always looking for how that works for us in terms of the medium to long term. One of the things that we're looking to do in Acrow is become, and we are doing it very, very strongly, a best-in-breed supplier of formwork equipment across the country and across all product ranges. I think it's fair to say that we don't want to necessarily have to tie ourselves into being, you know, working with ULMA. We certainly wanna work with ULMA, work with them as a supplier of equipment, but we've got a very, very strong research and development department, very, very strong engineering team now that in some cases is actually designing specific products for Acrow.
I think to answer your question, it's important to have those relationships, but it's also fair to say that we're looking to broaden the horizon. I mean, the Acrow business to what it is today, to what it was four years ago, has grown up. You know, we now in a very unique situation in terms of supply for the Australian formwork market, and our real aim here now is to become, as I said, like a and we are becoming that very quickly, a best-in-breed supplier of a wide range of formwork equipment, not necessarily tied to one supplier.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. There are no questions, at this point, Mr. Boland. Please continue. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks very much, folks, for attending on the call today and thanks for the questions and, you know, I hope that those of you who are our shareholders continue to be pleased with the development of the business. We're certainly committed to providing quality returns to our shareholders and we look forward to our annual general meeting, which will be sometime in November, most likely. You know, then we'll be obviously presenting our half year results. Clearly, we'll be going out in September with our full audited accounts and our annual report. You know, we don't think there'll be any material changes to the numbers that we presented today. Again, thanks for your attendance and look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our teleconference for today. You may all disconnect. Thank you.