Please be advised that this call is being recorded today, Wednesday, 25th of August 2021. I will now hand over to your speaker today, Mr. Steven Boland, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you.
Thank you very much, and thank you folks for joining us this morning. I'm very pleased to be presenting, announcing the full year results for Acrow Formwork and Construction Services for the FY 2021. It's another year of growth in the business. It's actually the 8th consecutive year, going back to when we were pre being a public company of growth in our EBITDA. Over eight consecutive years now, we've had growth every year, which to my mind sort of defies the assumed sort of cyclical nature of the business. This business is proving itself to be able to continue to grow irrespective of any cycles through the wider construction industry. Incredibly pleased with these results. It's a testament to the staff of Acrow and their ongoing commitment to our customers and the service that they provide.
The key financial highlights, I'm going to walk through the investor presentation that we've provided. I won't go into every single dot point, but pick out the areas that I think are of most relevance to the results for the year. In terms of the financial results, all the metrics are in the right direction. Revenue was up 22%, AUD 105.7 million for the full year. EBITDA, AUD 24.3 million, up 25%. Pre-tax profit, up 35%, AUD 10.2 million. Margin continues to be solid in EBITDA, 60 basis points to 23%. I'm very pleased that we are announcing a full-year dividend of AUD 0.019 fully franked. We paid AUD 0.0075 in the half year and AUD 0.0115 further now. We will have a 5% DRP in place, and as I said, it's a fully franked dividend.
In relation to both NPAT and underlying EPS, while we did have 10% growth in NPAT and a flat EPS, I'll let Andrew Crowther, our CFO, who will walk through the financials a little later, talk about the factors involved really in those numbers being relatively flat versus our other metrics. How we know that both those numbers will change significantly into the new financial year. In terms of the achievements within the business across the year, the first one really around our higher revenue contracts. It is the core key lead indicator of future performance in the business. We are primarily still a project-based business, so we need to keep winning work. Over the course of this year, we picked up AUD 39.3 million worth of new higher revenue contracts, which is up 34% on the previous year. I'll go into a bit more detail about that later.
We've had, in the course of the last year, our four best months in the history of the business. Over the eight years I've been involved in the business, we've had the four best months in terms of new contracts won over this period. Three of those have been in the last six months. This is a very good sort of three- six month lead indicator. Look, all of the other key achievements, actually, I just want to point out quite strongly that over the last three years since we've become a public company, there's been four key initiatives that have effectively changed the Acrow business that was listed in April 2018 to what it is today. The first of those initiatives was around pivoting our business away from residential markets and concentrating on civil infrastructure formwork markets.
Primarily on the East Coast and primarily expanding what was already a strong Queensland business into Victoria and New South Wales. What's happened in the last three years, and there's a bit more detail later on in relation to Melbourne formwork, is an absolute verification of that strategy. We have successfully been able to penetrate that market to become from a very low market share company to almost probably the market leader in the Melbourne formwork civil infrastructure market. Number one formwork pivot successful. Number two was the acquisition of Natform.
We bought that business in August of 2018, we were absolutely committed to how that business could expand nationally out of its primarily New South Wales base, and also what it would do for the business and enable us to offer packages of various services on jobs that the screens would have sort of give us an introduction to. It's fair to say that business had a relatively slow start for the first probably 12- 18 months, it's gone at a cracking pace over this last year. Revenue's up 31% in prior corresponding period through expansion in Queensland and Victoria, and also consolidation in New South Wales. It's now a very important part of what we do and is achieving results far superior to at any time in its previous ownership structure. Second key point, Natform acquisition successful.
The third key initiative was really the Uni-span acquisition that we made in November of 2019. This business has transformed Acrow in terms of our relationship with a European manufacturer of formwork equipment, ULMA, and how we've been able to introduce that equipment now nationally. Also, it has introduced us strongly into the industrial services market that we previously didn't really participate in, is now a very important part of what we do going forward. It's also, I guess through the ULMA relationship, given us an opportunity to participate in the sale of formwork systems into the market rather than just the hire, which I'll talk again a little bit later how important that is. The fourth one is around the industrial services scaffolding business that was Queensland-based at the back of Uni-span.
We set out 12 months ago with a mission to expand that business nationally. That's now been incredibly successful. Basically doubled the revenue in the last 12 months. We'll be going up another 50% in the next 12 months. Four key initiatives, pivoting formwork and going across the East Coast, the Natform acquisition, Uni-span acquisition, and the industrial services growth nationally all have been achieved successfully. It's now enabled us to have a wide footprint of services and products that we can offer across all of the Acrow geographies, which is every state in Australia. That's one of the key advantages for our business now, is that we've got a range of products and operate in a range of geographies that none of our competitors can provide.
In terms of the markets that we operate in, it's fair to say that the civil markets across the country continue to be incredibly strong. On this page where we give the traffic light green, amber, red picture, you actually have a double green, well you have a double green on Queensland Civil at the moment. That market is about to take off in a very strong fashion, which is great news for us given our predominant market share position in Queensland. The only really soft market that we see in the country at the moment is residential New South Wales. We don't really participate in that market to any degree any further. Across all of the markets we participate in, we're in either good or very, very good positions going forward into the new financial year.
We roll this out on a regular basis, but it's really the next page that's probably the most relevant point here. I will point out some things on this page. Over the last three years, the growth in civil infrastructure spend in the country has only actually been a growth of 16%, despite forecasts of it being far superior to that. Over the next two years, it's forecasted to go up by 74%. I don't believe it for a minute. Those projections will not be accurate. These projects will go longer and flatter. There's no doubt there will be an increase in activity over the next period of time. A longer, flatter cycle here is just very good news for us.
On this major infrastructure projects page, the main thing that I want to point to are projects near the top of this chart in crimson, the Bruce Highway and Cross River Rail, in the black at the top, Inland Rail. They're all Queensland-based projects, and they are happening right now. Especially for the Bruce Highway, that will become probably the biggest infrastructure project and biggest generator of revenue that Acrow will have over the next couple of years. The next page for me is really the story around what's happening in this space. To take you to the middle graph, you can see that infrastructure spend depicted graphically. You can see it's only gone up from AUD 12 million to AUD 13.9 million over the last three years, 16%, forecast to go up 74% for the next couple of years.
I don't think that will be the case, but it certainly will be greater than 16. The story is that Acrow has grown in excess of that same growth pattern. Bottom right-hand graph, the national formwork revenue for civil infrastructure in Acrow has actually gone up 73% over that same period from 2018 to 2021. You can see in the top right graph, Victoria has gone from basically nothing, AUD 2 million of revenue in 2018 to AUD 13.8 million of revenue in 2021, from next to no market share to probably 35% market share. New South Wales, it's always been sort of a troubling state for us in terms of not getting enough representation for the size of the market. Whilst that's still the case, you can see that from between 2019 and 2021, we've almost doubled our civil infrastructure formwork revenue in New South Wales.
We're now starting to get real penetration across some of the most significant projects in Australia that I'll talk about a little later on. I think the real story for us this year, and for the next couple of years, is going to be Queensland. Again, in that top left-hand chart, you can see in 2019, our formwork revenue out of civil infrastructure dropped to AUD 11.7 million. We've just come off a year where it's AUD 19.6 million. In a half-to-half basis, the second half of 2021 was over AUD 11 million. It's going cracking ahead at a pace now, and I expect that to have significant upwards over the next couple of years. In terms of our success this year in getting new contracts, top graphs shows that 33% that we talked about earlier.
Up from 16.3 in second half of 2020 to 21.6 in the second half of 2021, and up on a full year basis, 29.2 million in 2020 to 39.3 in 2021. As I said again, it's a very, very strong lead indicator. One of the most pleasing aspects of this growth is Natform nationally was up 61% year-on-year in secured contracts. The Queensland business in Natform was up 150%, so we went from near nothing. We were doing about AUD 50,000 a month of hire revenue in Queensland screens about 12 months ago. We're now doing AUD 250,000 a month in hire revenue in screens in Queensland.
In terms of the pipeline, while the pipeline here shows a decline, I should point out strongly that in the June 2020 number, we had a AUD 15 million tender that we had put in for a Cross River Rail package that we were unsuccessful on. That obviously skewed significantly how much work was in the pipeline at that point. If you take that out and look at it, there's nothing anywhere near that size currently that sort of stands out as one huge package like that. While it looks like it's gone from AUD 76.3 to AUD 73.5, I would point out there was one tender worth AUD 15 million that we didn't win over that period.
Overall, again, as a lead indicator for future success. Three to six month lead indicator is the most important thing that I look at on a month-to-month basis in terms of making sure that we're continuing to share and we certainly are. In the second half of 2021, we averaged AUD 3.6 million worth of new work won per month. I know that half of the business is about AUD 2.8 million. At AUD 2.8 million, we'll hold our own. At AUD 3.6 million a month, we're going to be going further ahead. The next point is around the pivot from residential focus into other focuses, civil infrastructure, and now our burgeoning industrial services business. This pivot is complete. Discussing residential in Acrow is basically an irrelevant point now. It's 16% of the total revenue and sales contribution of Acrow. It used to be 60% three-four years ago.
Formwork and industrial services now make up 84% of our contribution, that will just continue to go up over the next 12 months as certainly industrial services grows by another AUD 10 million in revenue from AUD 20 million to AUD 30 million minimum over the course of the next year. Our capital investment focus is in the areas of formwork and industrial services. The second graph on this page shows how much further contribution we now get out of product sales as well as hire. Acrow had a smallish product sales business prior to the acquisition of Uni-span. You can see we're doing sort of AUD 16 million a year and now doing AUD 36 million a year. Important point to make is that the Uni-span business in the year before we bought it, did about AUD 10 million in this space.
We've grown that AUD 10 million on top of the Acrow 16-36 in the last year off the back of, obviously we're a national, the national footprint that Acrow's got, the ability to sell product across all of the markets in Australia rather than focusing on the Queensland market as did Uni-span. Important thing here is that this does not take away from our hire revenue. It accentuates our hire revenue. There are a range of especially formworkers across the country that like to buy equipment as well as hire. You tie them into your product. They buy your product as their formwork system. They top that up with hire, and then they top it up further with further investment in sales when their economics make sense to them. These two things are working very well hand in hand.
I next want to just point out a few of the projects that we've worked on just to show the sort of things that we do in Acrow that are not your normal, straightforward meat and potatoes work that you would expect a company of our nature to do. First project here is the Melbourne Metro Rail State Library Station, and we've been incredibly successful on the whole Melbourne Metro Rail project. This particular project highlights the highly technical nature of the work we do and the engineering smarts that our people are involved in. Now, this system is effectively a gantry that travels 250 meters in length along the cavern that's being formed over the course of this project. It's on rails, as you can see, and it moves along with the requirements of the construction timetable.
We're using ULMA MK system here that has so much versatility and use over a range of different applications. The customer here, which is CYP, Cross Yarra Partnership for Metro Rail, they've now engaged us to supply an additional two gantries on other parts of the construction due to the success of this project. As you can see, this is highly technical equipment. It's basically our engineering team being able to put together the various components of the Acrow system to be able to come up with a solution specific to what the customer needs on a project of this nature. Second one I want to focus on looks a bit more bland in nature, but is actually a very great use of a brand new Acrow product.
Our National Engineering Manager, Matt Caporella, and the business in general, noticed that we had, I guess, a gap in our product offering to the market and it was in the real heavy-duty propping sort of market. We developed this Powershore 150 product over the last 6-12 months. It's now the heaviest duty prop in the market. The photo there is the first application of it nationally from a brand-new product that was only commissioned six months ago. This is propping up an underground car park that is having a multi-story tower built on top of the car park. Whilst that's going on, they require very heavy-duty propping arrangement to keep the car park in place while the construction is going on top of it.
We should note that this particular application, which is on a job in Duncan Street in the Fortitude Valley in Brisbane, we're getting basically 90% return on the investment of the product on this job, on the first job. This is something that we designed in-house. We commissioned in-house. We got it manufactured overseas. It comes in at a cost. On this first application, first job, we're getting 90% return on investment. Look, a great effort by our engineering team to come up, understand the gap that we had in our product offering, and this product will now be rolled out nationally through Acrow. In terms of the major projects we're involved in, you can see they are all the top-notch projects in civil infrastructure across the country. Excuse me. Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane rail projects.
The Melbourne Western Distributor continues to be a very strong project for us, but I want to highlight the last two, Bruce Highway and Snowy Hydro. Bruce Highway, as I said, I think will be our biggest project in the next couple of years. We've already secured revenues on that project of upwards of AUD 3 million. I'll talk a bit about that in a second when we look at some of the major contract wins. Snowy Hydro is only really just starting to get cranking, and we've only in the last couple of months going into this current financial year, in terms of work won and also from both hire and labor provided on the job and products we've sold onto the job, something somewhere around AUD 2.5 million worth of work we've won just in the last few weeks on that project.
It's a speck of sand on Bondi Beach in terms of what that project will generate over its course. The main points that I want to focus on in terms of the overall segmental breakdown and profitability of the business, as you can see, AUD 86 million, AUD 87 million up to AUD 105 in revenue. Total sales contribution, AUD 52-AUD 61. Our contribution margin remaining constant with respect to the fact that a lot more of our revenue now comes out of sale of product. Our yard costs, we've able to maintain them at a good level despite the extra period of time with the Uni-span business. Whilst the internal labor has gone up, we're investing a lot of money and effort into growing engineering capability. I don't apologize for that one iota because it's clear to me it's a major competitive advantage that Acrow has.
Investing in high-quality engineering, we now got an engineering team of more than 30 people, and we're continuing to invest in this area, is making a considerable difference to Acrow against our competitors across a broad range of the markets that we operate in. One thing that I will point out on the underlying EBITDA of AUD 24.3, that number has basically doubled since we listed three years ago. The business is producing excellent results in that area. Across the segments, the main things to focus on in our formwork area is a 19% increase in revenue, a 20% increase in contribution margins. You can see that our margins are maintaining while we are growing. Rates are not being reduced to win work. Tremendous results in Melbourne Civil, tremendous results in Natform, 84% growth in Melbourne revenue year-on-year. Product sales on our contribution, 49%.
This is our core business now, a very profitable core business. In terms of our industrial services division, this really is actually the story of the year for us and going into the new financial year. We set it on a mission to penetrate the New South Wales industrial services market. The market, in general, has very similar dynamics to formwork. You can just see the returns are very similar, in terms of it being highly engineered work, not straightforward perimeter scaffold as you would know in a high-rise construction. This is very heavily engineered, safety-focused, reputation, customer experience. It's all of that. It's all of the things that make the formwork market so attractive to us also makes this market attractive. We've grown that business from AUD 10 million turnover to AUD 22 million, just under AUD 22 million in turnover.
You can see we've basically maintained our margins from around the 47% mark. The real story is how we've expanded our business out of Queensland now into primarily New South Wales. We've also won contracts in South Australia and Tasmania. It's a New South Wales story. Just in the last few months, we won contracts with Mount Piper Power Station, Eraring Power Station, Bayswater Power Station, the Visy Tumut Kraft Paper Mill, and also the Snowy Hydro Project. We're targeting another 50% growth in revenue and contribution this year from this business. We expect to be over AUD 31 million in revenue, and the sales contribution is more than AUD 1,500 in the new year.
To give you an example of the sort of work that this business does, it's not easy to take photos of the sort of things we're showing you because it doesn't photo very well inside a furnace. You can see, this is the Mount Piper Power Station job that we've won, that we are on now, and will go for probably around about a couple of month period now. We've started in the new financial year. Sorry, the new calendar year. There have been some delays, some reductions in the current scope of the project due to COVID that will then kick back in in the second half of the year. Overall, you can see, the graphic we've shown here, this is scaffolding equipment sitting inside a furnace schematic that you see here. You can see it's far from straightforward.
Specialized equipment needing to be designed in such a way that sits in the throat of the furnace and allows the work that needs to be done for the maintenance of the furnace to carry on. We've invested fairly significantly in this sort of equipment over the last 12 months. It gives us the ability to have a complete turnkey approach to this kind of work, where we can provide the furnace work, we can provide the other access requirements around the other parts of the plant that require to be maintained. Again, this is a lightweight scaffold that is easy to move, and again, as you can see, it's not straightforward, highly engineered, and it's making a considerable difference to the offering we have in that market.
We do participate in commercial scaffold, and we will continue to participate even though it continues to be a problematic business. You see in the numbers, you can see the higher revenue considerably dropped by AUD 3 million year-on-year, whilst the labor and the cartage number went up by AUD 1.4 in revenue. That's in significant volume. Volume is strong. Rate continues to be very challenged, especially in the New South Wales market. Look, we're not focusing on this business. We'll continue to operate in it because it will turn. This is a significant business. It's part of our offering. Like I said, we'll stay in it. We do very well out of in some markets like Victoria, South Australia, and actually Tasmania.
New South Wales does remain challenging and it's now a small contributor to the overall Acrow business, challenged by rate, but again, something we will stay in because there will be opportunities to grow margins in this business over time. I'll run through the major contract wins quite quickly. We can see, I just wanted to highlight some of the different types of things we do. Melbourne Metro Rail, 75% of the package is being let with winning. We started from scratch there. We've just developed a great relationship with not just the head contractors, but also the subbies that we're using on this overall project. It's a combination of hire and sale of equipment. AUD 2.5 million plus revenue, and we continue to generate hundreds of thousands of AUD a month for us at the moment, and there's another 18 months or two years to run.
The Caboolture Hospital Redevelopment, et cetera, basically, that's one very large package of work with one commercial formworker in Queensland that is indicative of the Queensland commercial market for formwork picking up. Melbourne Western Distributor, again, sort of indicates the stickiness of the customers that we started work with here. Again, winning most of the packages being let, that project was supposed to go for three years. It's probably going to go for five or six. We're still generating around a couple of AUD 100,000 a month of revenue. The next two I wanted to highlight because they're indicative of package selling for Acrow. Both the White Residence and The Capital Court Towers are both jobs that we are providing a range of products on, including screens.
The Queensland growth in our screens business has been a lot to do with being able now to offer packages to builders around their formwork requirements, their perimeter scaffolding requirements, and the screens requirements, and both of those jobs are indicative of that. The next project is the Crows Nest Metro Station for the Sydney Metro project. Just an indication of penetration into the New South Wales market on an AUD 800,000 package that we won on that job. That last one there, I meant, is actually the job that we looked at earlier with our Powershore 150, AUD 750,000-plus in revenue on that job. Not just the Powershore 150, but again, a range of other products that enabled us to offer that package. We wouldn't have been able to do this without the introduction of the Powershore 150.
The Kolan River Rail Bridge is a civil infrastructure project in Queensland. The next one is actually the big one really for us. The Bruce Highway, Cooroy to Curra part of this project, there's something like 40 bridges that have now been awarded to different subcontractors to construct on this project. We will be on all 40. At the moment, with the packages that we've let, we are at 100% strike rate on what's going to be a very, very large project. The next group, Visy, Mount Piper, Snowy Hydro, Eraring, all in that industrial services space. All contracts we've secured in the last few months, weigh considerably to our FY 2022 results. The last two are screens contracts, one in Queensland and one in Victoria.
Large contracts, again, just wanted to indicate the growth of our business in the screens business and that form of business outside of its traditional New South Wales home, winning contracts of this nature in Queensland and Victoria. Next, I just wanted to, I guess, talk a little bit about the Acrow team and the culture within our business and how that's developed over the last few years. We've got an absolute focus now on succession planning. It's something that I spend a lot of my, I guess, thinking time around making sure we've got the right focus and the right plans in place here, developing the depth of talent across the business level.
It's so important for a company with our growth aspirations that we continue to inject new blood and make sure that our people have been developed and have got the right career development opportunities, especially in the engineering space that I said is so important to Acrow's overall competitive advantage. We've had some recent appointments that have sort of attracted some of the best talent. Our new Victorian GM, Brad Craven. Brad comes out of a long experience of managing sizable businesses servicing the construction sector in Victoria. Peter Beldon, who came on board in the last few months, has been absolutely crucial in our industrial services strategy. Peter was a 40-year veteran of one of the major industrial services providers in Australia and made the choice to come and join the Acrow team, has been absolutely instrumental in assisting us with that growth.
Just in terms of our culture, we've got a much broader culture document than this, but I just want to pick some points out of it that these are the things that we absolutely believe in. Safety first. We're a safety-first employer. We are a customer-focused company, so they're a part of everything we do, and it's about providing solutions to customers. It's not about meat and potatoes work necessarily. There's an element of that, but it's coming up with the best potential solution for a customer for their specific needs of their project. We want to set industry standards. We aspire to actually exceed whatever standards are currently in both the specified formwork and industrial services markets. Internally, we have a culture that's very entrepreneurial and it's very direct, but it's always open, honest, and constructive. We do have a one-team approach.
Whilst Acrow operates across a series of branches with a branch network, the way I describe it is that we have a common approach, a common strategy in the business with very strong local ownership. That's the way I believe business is run best when there is a common focus, With that high degree of local ownership. That's all from me for the moment. I'll hand on to Andrew Crowther to walk through the financials.
Great. Thanks very much, Steve, and welcome all. As Steve's already shown, our sales for the year went from AUD 87 million to AUD 62 million. You add on to that very tight cost controls during the year combined with contribution margin being maintained, we had a healthy increase in EBITDA from AUD 19.5 million up to AUD 24.3 million, a 25% increase. Moving from EBITDA down to our pre-tax profit, depreciation moved from AUD 9.4 million up to AUD 11.2 million. That's a AUD 1.8 million increase, but the majority of that is caused by our friend, IFRS 16. One and a half million AUD of that AUD 1.8 million increase is because of the lease amortization.
That's because you'll probably remember we renegotiated almost all of our leases last year, and this is basically the full year impact of that. Getting down to net interest. Our net interest moved from AUD 2.5 million up to almost AUD 3 million, or a half a million AUD increase. The majority of that is actually the IFRS 16 movement in the lease renegotiations. There we have it, moving down to pre-tax profit. We are at AUD 7.6 million last year, up to a AUD 10.2 million pre-tax profit, or a 35% increase. The most significant move you'll see in the P&L, which I'm sure stands out a lot, is our tax expense. Last year, we had a AUD 300,000 odd tax credit. This year, a AUD 1.5 million tax expense.
Just starting with the tax credit we had last year, if you did go into this last year, this credit, it wasn't an anomaly, but it was because of essentially the Uni-span acquisition we had that allowed us to basically take up an acquisition tax credit. The credit we had was not, what you'd say, a sustainable ongoing tax expense. I think in the past, we'd always mentioned that our ongoing tax expense would be between 11% and 12%. Before I get into this year's tax expense, I'll reiterate. Acrow, before we took on Natform and Uni-span, we were a non-tax paying entity. We had a lot of tax carry forward losses, and even at this stage, we have approximately AUD 45 million of ongoing profit that will be tax-free. This only exists in the Acrow or the legacy business.
The new entities being Natform and Uni-span are both taxpayers. What we've had this year is we still have the Acrow business having no tax payable, but Natform and Uni-span, in particular, the industrial services business, have actually been more successful in the second half of the year than we essentially forecast. What we have here is we have an underlying effective tax rate of 14.8%. That's not a bad thing. That just means that the great businesses, Natform and Uni-span, are doing better than we thought. Ongoing, that's probably going to be a similar sort of tax rate. We obviously are always looking at this to maintain or to more efficiently use our structure. Ongoing, that's probably what it's going to be.
That brings us down to an NPAT underlying of AUD 7.9 million to this year, an AUD 8.7 million underlying NPAT. Excuse me. Down to earnings per share. The underlying earnings per share, which we mentioned before, was relatively flat. AUD 0.04 to AUD 0.04. I think, excuse me. It's important to note, as I said, this is all about tax. If you think about it, if we'd had a similar tax rate last year, say 14%, from the 2020, we would have had an EPS last year, underlying EPS last year was roughly AUD 2.3, we would have had a 20% increase in the EPS. This is a tax issue. Ongoing, we won't have that issue because this tax really will stay similar to what it is now.
Moving below the underlying NPAT, we have significant items, you see this year of AUD 2.5 million. This is still mainly a hangover of the Uni-span acquisition. Included within this was some integration, IT, and other integration expenses. We had the final earn-out calculations of AUD 150,000 in this number. We also have a number of strategic redundancies. This sort of stuff has been continuing on. It's basically coming to a finish now. We also had a number of maintenance and life extension expenses that we had to actually take up for some of the year that we've taken on, that had we known, we would have taken that up when we first acquired the business. One of the big expenses within the significant items on our go is an additional tax expense of AUD 670,000.
The reason we haven't put that in the underlying is this tax expense relates purely to the pre-acquisition period of Uni-span, being before November 2019. What we did when we've gone through our 2020 taxes and 2021 taxes, we've had the ability to restructure some of the pre-essentially asset holdings of Uni-span and essentially make the most of their pre-acquisition tax losses. Without going into further details of it. If we'd known this at the time we acquired it, what we would have done is actually increase the goodwill of Uni-span, essentially reduce the cost base at that time. Because we're beyond 12 months, we had to take up that AUD 670,000 in the tax expense. From an NPAT reported, AUD 3 million last year to approximately AUD 4 million this year.
As Steven's already mentioned, we've announced the final dividend of AUD 0.0115, which, when you combine it with the AUD 0.0075 interim, that takes us to a AUD 0.019 full frankly there. We'll go into that a bit more in a moment. Moving on to the balance sheet. From a balance sheet point of view, this is obviously pre the capital raising we have just recently done in July. Our net debt is up by AUD 7.9 million. Cash included in that, cash is down by AUD 5.5 million, debt up by AUD 2.4 million. The big change in that, we've had to pay the Natform Uni-span deferred acquisitions back in October. There is elevated CapEx, or elevated for three or four years in this year, and obviously dividend payments. From a working capital perspective, you can see our receivables are up quite considerably by AUD 7.6 million.
There's two reasons for that. Firstly, as Steve has already gone to, our sales are up by 22%. That takes quite a deal of it. Also because of the way that our sales are increasing, we've got some very large sales and we've got certain negotiated terms in those sales. That's what takes up the other increases there. Also our inventory, you'll see, is similar to what we were at the half year. We've made decisions to increase our inventory holdings to take into account the increased sales. Also there is some slower or some, as we all know, problems with international transport. To a certain extent, we do have to hold more inventory. Down to creditors, the other big increase there, that's similar increase to our debtors and because of our sales going up, we've got more turnover of stock and so forth.
We also had a lot of CapEx, which we'll go into in a moment, towards the last quarter of the year. A great deal of that creditors accrual relates to that. From a gearing point of view, the net debt gearing is 26.7%. Obviously we've just made a capital raise of 10.5 or AUD 10 million after cost in July, that net debt gearing came down considerably. Obviously, where that heads this year depends on our capital expenditure, we do see that coming down during the year, it will come down considerably in the 2023 year. Moving over to the next page into the cash flow. I'll take you through what this page gives us is the operating cash profit and also our net debt bridge.
Operating cash profit is the way we've always defined this, is our underlying EBITDA, less maintenance CapEx and tax. What you can see here, we've had to take into account that we've moved from pre to post AASB 16 that is. For FY 2021, you can see we have underlying EBITDA of AUD 24.349. What we do is we will take off the actual lease payments of AUD 5.9 million, getting us down to a pre-tax EBITDA of AUD 18.435. I just want to highlight that you can see the lease payments here going from last year to AUD 4.4-AUD 5.8 this year. We haven't got a whole lot of other leases. If you remember, we renegotiated our leases last year and included in that was cash free periods. It's the same number just with more actual cash payments rather than new leases.
This year, we also had the next line down. We've had IT and other office expenditure of AUD 1.7 million. The majority of that was an IT one-off refresh. That won't be happening again. We just hadn't spent money on IT for quite a bit of time. Our maintenance CapEx, AUD 4.4 million up from last year, AUD 2.6. This is however below our PP&E depreciation. We've had cash tax of AUD 556,000. That actually related to the 2019 tax. Just to give an update, this year's tax, which what you're expecting next year, we don't believe we'll have any tax payable for the 2021 year due to depreciation. However, ongoing tax will start being actually paid. That brings us down to a cash profit of AUD 11.833. However, when you take off the one-off IT refresh, we have a AUD 13.2 million operating cash profit.
Our policy is to pay between 30% and 50% of operating cash profit in dividends. When we take into account the operating cash profit, AUD 13.2 million, our dividend payment for the year will be approximately 34%. That's sitting between the 30% and 50%. Given the fact that we are a high growth company at the moment, that is a pretty healthy dividend that you're paying out. Moving down to the net debt bridge, you can see we start the year at AUD 14.6 million net debt and ended at about AUD 22.5 million at the end of the year. The only thing worth really highlighting here is our cash flows from operations of AUD 23.8 million. Really most of that cash in the current year is used from a growth perspective. Our significant items from a cash perspective is AUD 950,000.
We've got CapEx of AUD 17 million, we have deferred consideration of AUD 3.6 million. Putting all those together, that's about AUD 22 million, about 23.8. As you can imagine, if you reduce your CapEx and you don't have those deferred considerations, which we won't have after this year, the cash will really start pouring in and you'll see that gearing level come down. Moving on to capital expenditure. This is a similar page that we have every year. You can see that moving from the 2018 year, really we had underinvestment in CapEx. 2019, the Natform investment, 2020, the Uni-span investment. Also within 2020 and 2021, we'll have the big pivots towards Formwork and now into Industrial Services, plus all the organic growth we're having. In the current year, AUD 16.2 million, growth of AUD 10 million.
We had the one-off expenditure of AUD 1.7 million, and we had maintenance CapEx of AUD 4.4 million. From an ongoing perspective, I think you'll probably find that the CapEx profile will be fairly similar just because of the growth profile we have in front of us. To the right of the page, you'll also see just a summary of the growth CapEx that we had during this year. I can confirm that we still operate on the 40% ROI requirement on the growth CapEx, and all these ones have been improving so far to be more than in fact that 40% return on the growth. In fact, if you actually have a look at that growth CapEx, about AUD 4 million roughly is related to the Industrial Services and Natform, part of what I was going on before with the growth involved in those.
With that, I'll hand back to Steven.
Thanks, Andrew. I'll just wrap up, folks. Just want to reiterate, our strategy is consistent. It's core, it's lived. It's what the business is about. We restate this in all our presentations, and it's consistent. It's about maintaining our position as a leading formwork, scaffolding, and hire equipment provider, becoming a leading engineered scaffold solutions provider to the Industrial Services market. It's about people. It's about ROI, organic growth, spreading the range of products that we have across the geographies we operate in and continuing to look at acquisitions. We don't really have anything again on our plate at the moment, but if something fitted our strategy and also fitted our return requirement, we are an acquisitive company. In terms of the short to medium-term growth opportunities, you can see again, they're consistent. Industrial Services, cracking that market across the east coast of Australia.
I would say I've got a very strong eye now on Western Australia. We know there's some opportunities that will probably open up there for us in the next period of time. Formwork growth in Sydney and probably the biggest one in terms of growth this time next year when we're talking about our results for the FY 2022, I'm sure we'll be talking about Formwork Queensland. 50%+ market share in a market that is really growing in infrastructure and also commercially. Huge opportunity for us in this space and certainly kicking into the second half of this financial year, I'm expecting to see numbers going up significantly where they are today. Continuing to grow the Natform market share in New South Wales and Victoria and Queensland, continuing to spread the product range across the country and continuing to focus on product sales.
Just in the last few weeks, some very significant product sales have presented themselves to us, and we're taking advantage of that. In terms of the outlook for next year then totally. We have been fairly consistent the last couple of months in saying that we are targeting better than 20% growth in revenue and EBITDA for the FY 2022 year. We continue to maintain that position.
Off the back of what Andrew was explaining earlier around why the NPAT and the EPS hasn't moved year-on-year as much as you'd expect them to do with the sort of growth we have had, that's the tax situation corrects itself, depreciation flattens to a large degree, and that's why we're very confident in the underlying NPAT and also our EPS growing circa 40%+ off the back of a similar CapEx spend in 2021 to what we had in 2020. We have this degree of confidence around our results off the back of that secured hire contracts number. We have successfully completed the capital raise. It assists with our development in terms of that capital growth without going into further debt, which is something the company was quite keen to do. We were keen to continue our growth pattern.
Formwork [episode] activity levels, as I mentioned, especially Queensland, further work in Natform, growing that Industrial Services business just by itself up to AUD 31 million and AUD 15 million worth of sales contribution. Just finally, a comment on COVID, because we have seen some COVID effect in this last couple of months with the construction industry shut down in New South Wales for a couple of weeks and the restrictions are still in place there at the moment. We did lose around about AUD 300,000-AUD 400,000 of hire revenue in the month of July. However, that revenue will come back at parts of those projects. You don't lose that revenue. It just gets deferred to when those projects kick back in and get ultimately completed.
At the moment, while there was a short-term impact on the July profit for the business, it doesn't change one iota our position in terms of our forecast for the total year. That's it from Andrew and I. Thank you. We now go back for any questions that any of the participants may have. Thanks.
We will now begin the question and answer session. First question we have from Alex from Morgans Financial. Your question, please.
Morning, Steven. Morning, Andrew. I just had a clarification question on the outlook guidance, please. Revenue and EBITDA growth in FY 2022 of over 20%, and then underlying NPAT and also EPS growth of 40%+. Does that factor in the dilution from the equity raising last month? If it does, then I presume underlying NPAT growth would be greater than EPS growth because of that dilution.
It does factor it in, Alex, is the short answer. Yes, it does.
Okay. Great.
Andrew?
Yeah, I'm just saying, what you're saying is right. At this point in time, we're saying those % that Steve just mentioned.
Okay, great. Just interesting, your trading for the first couple of months of FY 2022. You mentioned that the COVID impact in July was about AUD 300,000-AUD 400,000. Could that potentially not come back in FY 2022 and maybe it's more, that's the AUD 100,000 you get in 2023? Just interested in, I guess the risks to a potential prolonged lockdown in New South Wales and Victoria, please.
The August results that we are pretty much getting close to finalizing will have no impact of any construction shutdowns in them. Effectively what we had to do, Alex, was, and we don't like to defer hire revenue. We've got gear on sites. The fact that the whole industry was shut down for those two weeks, to be perfectly frank, we didn't want to reduce hire, but we were sort of forced into a position because most of our competitors or all of our competitors were. That revenue will 100% come back over the course of this year. In terms of trading, this you'll see it at the half year, but these next few months, the month we're in at the moment, and our very accurate forecast at the moment has taken us out to at least November. They're very strong.
Okay, great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Next, we have Raju from CTT. Your question please.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for your time today. A couple of questions from me. Steve, I could well be wrong, but I suspect Acrow has more recently been a bit of a collateral damage from some of the, I suppose, commentary, outlook commentary from Boral and Adbri and a couple of others saying that infrastructure environment is subdued. Can you just give us some color around what you think, where the disconnect is in terms of what they're saying and what you are seeing and clearly demonstrating? Is it to do with timing, or are you growing market share? Can you just give us some color on that front?
I have to say, we were totally bemused by the Boral release yesterday. They're a far bigger company than us, clearly, but we actually were sort of shaking our head a bit because that's not our experience at all. I don't really understand what's going on in their business. It's different to ours. What I do know is, and we highlight that in the Queensland picture, the biggest road project in Queensland through a long period of time has kicked off. We're on it. That's going to generate enormous amount of revenue for us. It'll be our biggest project over the next two years. I don't know whether they've got exposure to that job or not, but we do. The rail projects continue at an enormous pace. The Sydney Metro West contracts have been awarded.
That project won't kick off for another 12 months to 18 months, but the contracts have been awarded. We're in discussions right now with companies that have won head packages on that project. The Snowy Hydro project is going ahead with a pace. We're getting penetration there. I just don't understand how anybody could be pointing to that picture. The only thing I can say is that I said it again earlier about this 70% uplift, because we know it won't be 70%. If some businesses were forecasting to get back to kind of growth off the back of that, then they're going to be misled. You've got to look at where the projects are, and I think that was the point that I really wanted to make about the chart. The projects are in Queensland for us.
That's where the biggest increase is going to be in the next two years. We've got 50%+ market share in Queensland. On that Bruce Highway project, we're batting 100 at the moment. Every package that's come out, we've won. Again, I don't understand how people participating in that market can talk in that nature. Certainly, from our perspective, our pivot to civil infrastructure away from residential was the right thing to do, and we're going to continue to grow our business off the back of that.
Okay. Thank you for that. The second of three questions, if I may. Again, Steven, into the Queensland market, given the scale and scope of the projects that are there, like Bruce Highway and Inland Rail, and you talked about Cross River Rail and so on, do you foresee inflationary pressures, and how do you sort of transfer that into pricing and margins. Is there that opportunity as the next one-three years progress?
Look, I think one of the factors, and our Queensland manager is very tuned into this and he's done a really great job even in the last few weeks with making some adjustments to his pricing, is the cost of equipment is going up. The purchases of new equipment out of both Europe and China is going up at a reasonable pace. A lot of that's to do with freight costs. I think most people would understand that. Raw material costs are going up, the freight costs are also going up. The cost of a piece of capital compared to what it was 12 months ago, has probably gone up by 15%-20%, and a lot of that is due to freight.
Our Queensland manager has been leading the charge in that growth and adjusting his pricing expectations, his customer's pricing expectations, to take account of that. I don't see this as being a negative for us. We've got very good channels still to get material into the country that we know a lot of our competitors can't do at the moment. If it does become some kind of, I guess, supply shortage or pressure on that, I'm sure we can take advantage of that. I don't factor that into our forecast. I factor market share maintaining and current rates maintaining, and just off the back of those two factors, I see what the numbers potentially look like.
Okay, that's helpful. The third question is more broadly around the business and thinking about the link between CapEx and your revenues and earnings. Look, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but roughly around the 45%, 50% mark of your revenues are on the sales side and then the balances and the higher. What is the lag between a AUD 1 CapEx decision today and revenue coming in? Is it six months, nine months? How do we think about that?
Yeah. You almost hit it right on the head. It's between six and nine months. We're making CapEx decisions right at the moment. We've made them in the last few days. We know that the revenue Of course, to starters, this is the issue I guess right now of getting product out of the markets, the manufacturing markets. If we order product today, we won't see it till January, February. We know that. We're making decisions at the moment about further investments, knowing that we won't see revenue from that decision until certainly the second half of the year and primarily the last quarter. Yes, it is a six-nine -month lag in terms of the investment and when you start to see the return.
Again, we know and we're factoring into our forecast at the moment, the full-year return on the products that we're buying will give us better than 50% uplifts in profit.
Sure. Okay. Just to understand that with one follow-through question is, tendering activity is clearly high. Is there an expectation or discussions with clients that, look, if you want XYZ projects to start in the course of financial year 2022, the CapEx, the orders need to be done by October? Is there that pressure building up given the high levels of project work in the pipeline?
Yeah, I think it's becoming a realization for a lot of our customers that they've got to work a fair way in advance of what they're used to in terms of making their buying decisions, and certainly, especially in the formwork area. It's not so much pressure in the industrial scaffold market or industrial services market. I mean, we can get new product there still relatively quickly and mostly from an Australian supplier. In the formwork area with specialized gear, and we're having these discussions as an example, Raj, with CYP, the Melbourne Metro project. There's discussions going on now on a regular basis about what the six-month or seven-month programs look like, not the one-month program, knowing that it will take time to get the equipment required to do the work. I think that's becoming well accepted by our customers.
Okay. I'll leave it there, sir. Thank you very much.
Thanks very much.
Thank you. Next we have Douglas from Excellence Investment. Your question, please.
I've just got two questions if I could. Great result. Thanks, guys. You've really got the business going nicely. I like the look of it. My first question is, ULMA MK, you have product from them. What's the view going forward that we get to keep that arrangement, that franchise?
We've got, I think about 18 months to run on the current arrangement with ULMA. Look, we're in pretty consistent discussions with those guys about what the future looks like. Look, we can't foresee the future, but I mean, I think to be frank, our requirement for equipment from ULMA has been outstripping their ability to supply. I know from discussions with them, we're actually making more demands on them for equipment than they are certainly used to in the Australian market, and that's putting some pressure on them. That's not necessarily a negative thing to some degree. I mean, we've certainly also been able to source some very, very good secondhand, brand new, almost secondhand ULMA equipment from some other overseas markets to sort of top up supply of equipment that they are unable to meet.
We're tied to them as our primary manufacturer or primary formwork system supplier. They're tied to us as their avenue into the Australian market. I'm very confident that arrangement will stay in place for a long period of time.
Even as your business grows and grows, they're not likely to just all of a sudden say, "Look, I think I can do this on my own?
I think that's highly unlikely. I mean, they don't have feet on the ground in Australia.
Okay.
It's not the way they normally operate. They're different to the Peri and Doka of this world who do that. Like ULMA, they have arrangements with different contractors in South America, for example. They've got people they work with over there. They've got guys in the U.S. They don't have operations in those locations. They have a similar arrangement in place with us.
Okay. That's good to hear. The only other question I've got is just going forward on the significant items, and the share-based payments, are we expecting anything at all or similar amount to that in 2022?
I'll let maybe let Andrew slide, but I think, look, significant items will certainly significantly reduce.
Yeah.
Outside of share-based payments. I mean, look, we have just been washing up a whole range of Uni-span acquisition issues over the last sort of 12- 18 months. The sort of 18 months since we bought that business. We've been washing up those issues, and they're finished now. Share-based payments, Andrew, you want to comment on that?
Yeah. Look, share-based payments will continue on. The amount of them is a little bit hard to estimate because when we do new issues, it all depends on the detailed calculation that goes into it. It will probably be around AUD 2 million, I would think, ongoing. As Steve said, significant items is an investment. In general, it's an investment amount, so that should be significantly very low next year.
Okay. You're looking for significant items and share-based payments around the AUD 2 million mark.
I think very little in significant items, I would hope, would be counted in the low hundreds really.
The share-based payments, Andrew, it's hard to nominate the number because it's sort of To be honest, I can't work out how we come up with it. It's a mathematical calculation on the likelihood of rights being granted.
At this point in time, that's right.
Okay. Fair enough. All right. That's fine. Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are currently no questions in queue. If you would like to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. There are currently no questions in queue. If you would like to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. As there are no further questions, I will now hand the session back to you. Please go ahead.
Okay. Thanks everybody for participating. I think that's a wrap for this morning. I know it's a very busy period of time for everybody, and I appreciate you taking the time out today to hear what we have to say about our results. I'm extremely pleased with the way the business is running. Couldn't be prouder of the people involved in it. We're heading in a great trajectory and that will continue. Thanks for your support of Acrow, and look forward to talking to you all again for half-year results. Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.