Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Acro Half Year twenty twenty one Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. Please be advised that this call is being recorded today, Tuesday, February 23, 2021. I will now hand over to your speaker today, Mr.
Stephen Bollin, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you.
Thank you very much, and thanks, folks, for joining us this morning. It's my pleasure to give you an update on the performance of our business in the first half of the twenty twenty one financial year and also to outline the way we think the next 6 months is going to go and certainly into the future after that. I'll be running through the investor presentation that we released to the ASX yesterday. So firstly, I'm very, very, very happy with the 1st 6 months financial performance of the business across all the key metrics. It's an incredibly strong performance in my view, 32% up in revenue.
We're now tracking to over $100,000,000 of revenue per annum. Our EBITDA up 41% to $11,100,000 NPAT up 72%, sales contribution up 24%, underlying EPS up 42%, EBITDA margin up 140 points compared to last year. And we have declared a near dividend of 0 0.75 dollars fully franked. So across every financial metric in the business, it's been an extremely good 6 months. It consolidates the excellent work that we did last year, consolidating the Unispan acquisition and the NetForm acquisition into Acro.
I'll talk a bit more about those achievements shortly. But on the business that we have today and that we will have in the next 3 to 5 years is actually nothing like the business that we had when we were becoming a public company 3 years ago. And we have transitioned this business almost completely now to focusing on engineered solutions in the formwork area, focusing on civil infrastructure and now the industrial scaffolding business that we acquired as part of the Unispran acquisition. In terms of the, I guess, the slightly non financial key achievements in the first half of twenty twenty one, We have secured over the last 6 months higher revenue contracts up 31% on the prior corresponding period last year. That trend is continuing into the new financial year.
I'll talk a little bit about that shortly. We stated clearly when we became a public company that we wanted to grow our formwork footprints primarily in New South Wales and Victoria in the civil infrastructure space. We have succeeded beyond our own expectations certainly in the Melbourne market where our revenue is now up 120% on the prior corresponding period in Melbourne. We've gone from nothing to being absolute clear market leader in that market now in Melbourne. And really, I guess, the last part of the jigsaw puzzle for us in that grow to deliver on our promise is to get the same position in New South Wales, and I'll also talk about that shortly.
Product sales growth is or product sales in general is now a very important part of the agro business has become more important since we purchased Unispan and have the relationship now with UMA. It's now 80% of group revenue comes out of product sales. It's proving to be an incredibly effective tool for us in both acquisition and retentions of customers, something that really Acro never really had a full understanding of until we made the Unispan acquisition. That sort of segues into the next point there in our expanded offering footprint. We have a great opportunity to organically grow our business in, I guess, the previous non platform Unispan states of Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania by utilizing both Walmart and Natform products in those regions.
This is especially now in the case of UMA products where we have we have GED now in Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia that we didn't previously have. We've just had a very large contract in Western Australia worth surface $600,000 to $700,000 utilizing all your equipment for the first time in that state. So this opening up new channels to revenue in new markets will be a very important part of our growth story going forward. The industrial scaffold business, you'll see if we go through the numbers later, is a highly profitable business with great growth opportunities. We're still focused primarily on the Queensland market, but we have won contracts now in both New South Wales and South Australia.
And I expect this to become a significant part of the agro story as well going forward. And the last point here, I'm extremely pleased to be able to report that the Natform business sales revenue was up 33% on the prior corresponding period. I will go through a bit more detail around this later. But if there were any doubts about the value of the Natform acquisition in ACRO and its results, I think they are now extinguished. Turning to Page 7 of the presentation.
We will continue to show this because it continues to be the story and it's becoming even a larger part of the story. So I mean, where are we in this cycle? This question gets asked quite frequently around when does the civil infrastructure boom in Australia peak. And you can see by this chart, it isn't even close to peaking yet. So a couple of sort of reference points here.
From 2018 when Akravic came a public company to where we are today, there's been $2,000,000,000 of growth in the civil infrastructure spend in the country over that period. Between where we are today and between the peak the projected peak of sort of 'twenty three, 'twenty four, there's still another 70% of growth in major transport infrastructure projects in the country forecast. The really important thing for AGRO in this is if you look at that chart, the 3 biggest projects that are forecast to increase that spend over the next 2 to 3 years are all in Queensland. The Bruce Highway, the Cross River Rail and the Inland Rail are primarily well, Inland Rail is primarily a Queensland project and certainly Cross River Rail and Bruce Highway are Queensland projects. We are already winning very significant packages on both the Bruce Highway and the Cross River Rail, which I'll talk about later on.
So I'm extremely encouraged by the continued growth in this area, and it's and what is doing a significant hill that's going to climb in the next 2 to 3 years. What's not talked about here, and this is transport infrastructure, are other civil infrastructure projects across the country that we're also getting a strong foothold on and will contribute to our revenue growth over the next period of time. In the mining sector, we're getting at the moment circa $100,000 a month of revenue out of a dam. We will shortly be confident in securing a significant package on the raisins with mine in Queensland. In utilities, the Snowy Hydro, we've mentioned in the past that we've sold the first platform of equipment under that job.
It was only around about $300 odd $1,000 sale. But over the next 5 years, Snowy Hydro will be a significant contributor to revenue in our business. The Warragamba dam upgrade in New South Wales, we put packages in to the major tenders for Warragamba dam project over the next 5 years. Rookwood Weir in Central Queensland, another dam project, significant dam project. Coomba, which is on the Gold Coast Water Treatment Plant, another significant utilities project.
And in the defense sector, there's an Australian Singapore military joint venture to develop a training facility for the Singapore Army, just north of Townsville. Again, we are already getting inquiries around that project, which is effectively building a mini city. So the transport infrastructure is a great picture, but there's a significant number of other non transport style civil infrastructure projects that we are already on our radar that will contribute to revenue to our business over the next 3 to 5 years. In terms of the state of the markets, one thing I'd say there is we go green for good, amber for stable and red for soft. If there was something called double green, that would now be Queensland Civil.
So I've never seen anything like the pipeline opportunity for ACRO in the Queensland Civil Infrastructure market at the moment, after the 8 years I've been working in ACRO. That's particularly good news for us given that our market position in Queensland. So you can see across the country, pretty good news across most sectors except for New South Wales Residential. Now those who follow that story know that we've exited the 2 story house residential market. And whilst there's been a lot of reports that that sector is now going to see some uplift due to government funding initiatives, In the part of the market where we play, which is more to do with high rise residential, that's still incredibly soft.
I'll talk about that a little bit later on too. In a lot of cases, I mean, the residential story for Rackro has become basically a non event. It's now such a loss such a small, sorry, part of our revenue and our earnings now have potential that it's almost now not worth talking about. Equipment, higher wins and pipeline. So we had a very, very good 6 months compared to prior corresponding period, up 31%.
We had a very good 6 months compared to the last half of last year. And as I said, we've had a very good start to the year, 2 months in, and we still haven't finished February yet. Obviously, we still got 4 days to go in February, and we're up sort of 25% compared to where we were in January, February of course corresponding period. The month of February at the moment is the 3rd best month in the history of the business in terms of new contracts won, sitting at about $3,600,000 That number could well get to $4,000,000 $4,500,000 by the end of the month. In terms of the pipeline, the one thing I will point out is that if you're looking at the June 'twenty number to the December 'twenty number, the June 'twenty number included $15,000,000 on one package on the Cross River Rail in which we were not successful.
So I'll take that out and that was always going to be very difficult for us because it would have quite an enormous amount of capital investment and we're up against a couple of European companies that had proprietary equipment already that they've been doing similar work on the Sydney Metro Rail project. So that one excluded, we're still up significantly in the rest of the business on pipeline value half to half and certainly compared to the last December 19 to December 20 period. We are getting real value out of cross selling and we're getting, as I said earlier, real value now out of opening up new channels of revenue by utilization of Unispan, ULMA, Netform equipment across all of the smaller geographies in which we operate. Page 10 just proves again the strategic pivot and how now irrelevant residential is to ACRO. 80% of our earnings now come out of formwork and industrial scaffold, up from 43% in 'seventeen.
And every 6 months you look at our business, you'll see a lower number again in residential. At what will be a growing total revenue pool, you'll see residential continue to reduce in that story. So you can see that we've got very good growth in that industrial scaffold from full year 'twenty in the half year 'twenty one. That will continue to be a more important part of our business. But the pivot that we undertook 3 years ago is continuing.
It's not complete. As I said, I'm sure when we do a full year 2021 presentation, residential will be less than 20% of the total value of revenue in Accra. A bit of color around these marquee projects. We've really developed and taught off the back of the brilliant work of our engineering team and the innovation that our engineering team brings to civil infrastructure projects. We've developed a real sweet spot in the rail projects, which is really important clearly given the predominance of rail projects across the Houston seaboard in the next 3 to 5 years.
So on Sydney Metro Rail, we last year undertook work in both hire and sales on Barangaroo, Marrickville and Chatswood stations. And in the last 4 months, we won $4,500,000 worth of work on Waterloo and our Crows Nest. We're particularly pleased with the Crows Nest contracts that we've only won in the last few weeks. We've won $800,000 worth of hire contracts on Crows Nest that will go for 6 month period between March September. And the fundamental difference for ACRO on those projects was the innovation that our engineering team have brought to the requirements that the customers had for those jobs.
On Melbourne Metro Rail, the absolute flagship project for ACRA over these last 6 months has been the Ardent Street station, where we've generated circa $1,500,000,000 to $2,000,000 in hire. That now will continue, maybe not exactly at those same levels, but we will win packages on CBD North, CBD South. And there's more work to be done in Almond Street. The Western distributor, which is actually interesting because I'm sure 2 years ago, we expected to be getting more revenue from Western Distributor than we have at the Metro Rail. It doesn't mean the Western Distributor is not a great contributor.
It just goes to show that the Metro Rail is sort of dwarfing it now in size of opportunity. Western Distributor has been quite well publicized that this thing it's slower than it was what anticipated due to some government issues with the contractors around getting rid of contaminated soil, etcetera. But it's still generating good revenue for us now. We're only now getting into the High Street Bridge part of the project in which we'll probably see the greatest amount of revenue for Aker over that project's life. And now we're turning our attention to the Brisbane Cross River Rail, where we've got our first package of approximately $600,000 of revenue for the Gabba station.
We won about $400,000 worth of sales revenue for some of the tunneling work, and we're now turning our attention to Bolgo Road Station and some of the other stations there. What we we've now come up with almost a unique ACRO proprietary system for the station boxes. And this is really important because if you look at the growth of the rail projects in New South Wales and certainly the Cross River Rail and how that's still going to translate, there's something like 40 more stations to be built in on the Houston seaboard the next 3 to 5 years. And what we've come up with as a way of dealing with the station boxes, I think, will roll out, will give us a great opportunity certainly to roll out that sort of work over this next period of time. On Page 12 of the presentation in terms of our segment breakdowns, total revenue, you can see half to half up 32% and still up from the second half of 'twenty to the first half of 'twenty one.
And that's despite the biggest higher contract that we've ever done in our scrub Sun Metals, generating something about $2,000,000 in formwork higher in first half second half 'twenty and not being replicated in first half 'twenty one, that contract finished. We still managed to keep the revenue for the business at that same level despite that $2,000,000 of revenue dropping off from Sun Metals. Similarly, on the sales of formwork, dollars 19,000,000 we had a one off sale to BKH Barangaroo Station that generated $2,800,000 of revenue in second half 'twenty. And despite that not being replicated directly in first half 'twenty one, the revenue is still being able to be maintained at that level. So strong revenue, strong sales contribution, strong underlying EBITDA of from 7.8% to 11%.
The 11.6% down to 11% is just representative really of the Southern Metals high margin revenue dropping off, but still that's a result that we're incredibly pleased with and it's above our budget and was above our expectations as we entered that half. In the Formwork division, total contribution is up despite again Sun Metals and net sales of BKH. The standout figure is Melbourne 120% up, extraordinary result really over that 6 months, first half 'twenty to first half 'twenty one. I will point to key project wins here. I'll have to mention Gabba Station, Karooi Takara Highway upgrade, which is the Bruce Highway in Queensland.
Is work that we have won, but has not commenced yet. Waterloo Station in Sydney, it's work that is just in its infancy, will go from sort of January through June, July. Arden Street is pretty much now complete. Most of the revenue is in the first stage of that. The Shenton Quarter Urban Village in WA, which is the 1st former contract in WA has not commenced yet.
We're kicking in about March, April and it's worth about $600,000 over about a 7 month period. And now I will just not mention there is I can point to the Crowsiness station that we have won $800,000 worth of higher revenue in New South Wales that will go from March to September. New South Wales is very important for us now. I've got more confidence now than I've ever had that we've now got the right team and I'll point to a part of that shortly. And Natform, biggest evidence screening contract in the Natform business, the $1,100,000 contract at 100 and 80 George Street, Parramatta is going along at the moment.
So all good news in that form of division. Couple of specifics is a story around Melbourne. We talked about 120% increase year on year. The market projects at the Western distributor in Metro Rail, record secured contracts of 1.6% for the period, up 4.5%. And you can see in the chart below the way the quarterly revenue has gone from Northern Formwork over the last 6 quarters.
Bob Caparela, who has been the standout formwork guy in that room now for certainly the whole eight years that I've been here, moved from Queensland to Melbourne just over 2 years ago, has done a remarkable job between down there and getting us to where we are now in the Melbourne formwork market. And Bob is now moving to New South Wales. He will be starting as the New South Wales GM in the next week. And we've appointed a new Victorian former GM sorry, Victorian state manager, sorry, in Brad Craven, who comes from the construction industry after a search. Very confident that Brad will continue the great work that Bob has established there with the team.
I mean, look at the history of Queensland, Bob set that business up with a great team there, moved to Victoria, the momentum in Queensland has continued. Exactly the same thing, I believe, will happen in Melbourne. And now we'll get the benefit of Bob's expertise in the New South Wales market with some really good guys that we've now been on our Formwork sales and engineering team in New South Wales. So good days ahead, I think, there. In terms of Net Form, again, I think probably the achievement that I'm most proud of in ACRA over the last 12 months, you can see the chart in the bottom there how the NAT Form revenue has gone quarter to quarter over a 6 month period.
We had a slow start to this acquisition, but now it's exceeding the expectations of the business that the business had when we first bought that form. Fantastic pipeline of opportunities, incredibly talented and entrepreneurial management team. These some really great young people in that business who really understand how to make a dollar. And current forecasts show that quarter 4 'twenty one will be the best quarter of revenue in the Net Form business. And not just in New South Wales, we've got some really good signs now of growth in Queensland.
And already the numbers in Queensland are excellent. And in the next 6 months, we believe that will get even better. In terms of the Industrial Scaffold division, again, you can see the returns. It's a very profitable business, 48% contribution margins, revenue growing from 6.6% second half to 8.2% first half, which is a it's a real like for like 6 month comparison. We are opening up new markets in New South Wales and South Australia.
We won our 1st contract in South Australia Olympic Dam. We won a significant contract at Bayswater Power Station in New South Wales, and we're in the throes of hopefully securing a second contract in the same area. We have renewed the Origin Energy contract, Surat Basin, which is the core sort of underlying generates sort of almost 25% of the total revenue industrial scaffold. This will be a growing story. We'll be investing in this business over the next 12 to 18 months to expand this business both from a geography perspective, but also in the style of work that we can carry out within industrial scaffold.
So it's a watch this space area for ACRA. Commercial scaffold, look, it continues to be, as I said, less relevant. I'll give you a sort of a bit of a story around what's happening in this market. 1 of our largest competitors in Australia in this business whose whole business is commercial scaffold is trying to flog it. I got a phone call 6 weeks ago.
They're trying to sell the business for asset value only and they're not getting any takers. This is a business that turns out for $120 odd 1,000,000 and they can't. They just want to get out of it and they can't sell it. And we would not be interested in buying that business. Certainly, in the New South Wales market, anything that's got CFMEU type involvement on a project is almost not worth even tendering for.
The process is ridiculous and we'll continue to watch in brick, but we've got better things to do with our time and energy than knock our head against the brick wall in a market that's in decline, and it's not particularly a smart market to operate in. Certainly, in other parts of the country, like in Tasmania, for example, most of our revenue in Tasmania comes out of residential scaffold, and we make good money in Tasmania because we make good money in South Australia at a residential commercial scaffold. We make we've developed quite a nice model now in Queensland and Victoria where it's dry, higher and medium density. We don't even go anywhere near a job that's got CFMU involvement. We'll be doing the same thing in New South Wales and this will stabilize this business.
But as I said, I don't I expect the revenue out of this part of the business to stay fairly constant, but it will become a lower number as the revenue grows in formwork and industrial scaffold. Big contract wins, I've alluded to a number of these already, but I'll quickly run through them. I mentioned the Sarat Basin for their industrial scaffold. I've mentioned Waterloo. I've mentioned the Bruce Highway, Kuroi da Cara, which is 1,400,000.
That's already now more like $2,000,000 worth of revenue. George Street for the screens for Merrickens for the screens business, the Shetland Quarter is the CC4 job. Another screens contracted Christy Street, St. Leonard's. Then a couple of our significant wins in industrial scaffold, the UGL Torong North Standard and Basewater Power Stations, the Downer EDI, Minarong, Wivenhoe and Power Stations.
And then a few contracts that just well, certainly the Natura partners we mentioned because it uses a number of different agro systems on the one job. It's scaffolding, it's labor, it's screens, it's a full package. Our first Cross River Rail contract, there's a couple of others getting very close to fruition there as well. And just as an indication further of what Knapbourne does, Knapbourne also wins the screens work in Canberra. So a $350,000 screens contract for the nightfall job in Canberra.
I think we've got about 5 live projects at the moment for screens in the Canberra market. So all in all, a very good 6 months of the business. We're looking forward to a better again next 6 months. I'll hand over Andrew now to run through the financials, and then I'll wrap up with more of our forecast in the coming period.
Great. Thanks, Steve. I'll push everyone over to Slide 21, which is the profit and loss. I think you can see from the outcomes of this, the strategic pivot towards the Table Infrastructure and Formworks industry has been quite successful. So I'll just start off from below EBITDA.
Steve, I think, has covered the 41% increase to 11,100,000 dollars enough. So the way that we've depreciation and interest both increased in line with the 4 months of Unispan plus the renegotiation of a number of leases we had in the year. This is reflected in those increases. Now tax expense, you'll see we've got a $532,000 tax expense for the year. This is probably something that's going to be on an ongoing basis relatively where what the base is going to be.
This tax expense is based on the 2 taxpaying businesses being Unispan and NetForm. So the approximate effective tax rate will probably hover around the 12%. That gets us to an NPAT underlying, an increase of 72 percent from $2,100,000 up to $3,700,000 which then leads us to an EPS underlying increase from $1,190,000 to $1,680,000 or 42% increase. And Steve has already mentioned the $0.75 fully franked dividend that has been announced yesterday as well. Moving on to the next page, the balance sheet.
Our net debt percentage has moved from 20% at June up to 23.8%. This has been a function both a decrease in cash from $7,200,000 down to 2,200,000 dollars and a decrease in the loans and borrowings by $1,000,000 Now the cash has decreased essentially from a deferred payment of $3,500,000 approximately for the last Natform deferred payment plus the 1st Unisand deferred payment. But that's essentially, that $3,500,000 is essentially a reduction in a debt item. We've also obviously had the final dividend from the last financial year, plus, as we'll get into a moment, relatively elevated CapEx for the 1st 6 months. That was basically the reduction in cash that we're seeing here.
It's also worth mentioning on the balance sheet, you'll see that inventory has increased by about $2,400,000 from 5 point $6,000,000 to $7,800,000 This reflects the this is really in line with the increase in sales this 6 months, and it's probably the inventory levels we have will probably hover around this and that going forward. But obviously, this does have a drag on working capital.
The other
point worth pointing out on the balance sheet itself is the other payables amount down just above total liabilities. That's decreased by $7,200,000 down to $3,400,000 And as I said, that was we paid $3,500,000 in the 1st 6 months, relating to deferred payments. We now have only 1 deferred payment left due to the Unispan acquisition of $3,500,000 And after that, that's it for deferred payments. It's also worth pointing out from a receivables point of view, our debt is down, even with what's been going on with the world and with the economy, our debtors days actually improved by 3 days from the prior corresponding period from 58 days down to 55 days to the outcome. Moving on to the next page, the cash flow.
As you know, the way we look at dividends and what our sort of cash properties, we look at our underlying EBITDA and then take off our maintenance CapEx and also any tax pay. So what you can see on the top left table, we've got $11,100,000 EBITDA. We take off actual cash leases of $2,500,000 because they used to be included in our underlying EBITDA and it's a cash item. We've got maintenance CapEx spend of $1,600,000 but we've also included another line called IT spend. And what the reason we've included this spend as a take off is we've had elevated an IT refresh during the period of just over $700,000 plus a sort of a normal amount of office maintenance, office infrastructure spend.
But the over $700 of IT was an unavoidable refresh of all our IT hardware and some of our software. This is essentially a one off. Obviously, in any number of years, something like this will be required again, but not in the foreseeable future. So that was elevated. We also had the cash tax, as I mentioned, of 600,000 dollars So that gets us to a cash operating profit of $5,500,000 or 26% increase from previous year.
If we've taken out the elevated IT spend, we would have had a cash operating profit of 6,300,000 dollars Just below that, we have the net debt bridge, which shows basically where we got from the $14,600,000 net debt at June 'twenty to the $18,700,000 in December 'twenty. And as you move to the right, you can see we had cash flow from operations of $11,700,000 The majority of that, when you look at where the uses of that cash has been, we had CapEx of over $6,000,000 which we'll get into in a moment, and deferred consideration, which we've already mentioned, of $3,500,000 So the majority of the cash flow from operations in reality has been used from still investment spend. Moving over to the capital expenditure page on 24. This is our standard page on describing CapEx. So during the half year, we had $6,000,000 of total CapEx, dollars 3,500,000 of growth, $930,000 in office and IT maintenance and $1,600,000 in maintenance CapEx.
Now I can confirm that, that $3,500,000 is elevated the 1st 6 months, but we will get the benefit of that ongoing, in particularly in the next 6 months. We've done a review of our growth CapEx, and I know we've, in the past, we've talked about it needing to achieve a 40% IRR. But we can what we're looking at now is more 50% IRR on growth CapEx. We've done a review of our previous projects, and we are achieving these levels. And one of the examples we can use, and it's a great example of the way that we look at CapEx, is we had the Sun Metals job that Steve was talking about before, where we spend around $3,000,000 on gear.
And essentially, we got that return back in the first job. That gear is now being redeployed to other states and being deployed to other jobs. So we've basically got it back on the first job. The other thing that we have a look at with growth CapEx is we do not buy speculative gear. We'll only buy gear that achieves these IRR or that we model up that are going to achieve the IRR targets.
So we're still building the formwork business. You've seen the position on where civil infrastructure is going, not just with transport but with, as Steve said, defense and other areas. And the reality is there's still going to be an impost on capital ongoing, and there are significant opportunities still coming up with for the business. And with that, I'll hand over to Steve.
Okay. So just going through strategy, outlook and priorities, Page 26, it's the
same as it's been for a while, which to me is a
good thing, but this is a consistent strategy. This is what the business is about. This is what we're doing. We have become a leading engineer formwork sales and hire equipment provider in Australia. We've done that.
We aspire to become a leading engineer scaffold solution provider. I continue to be thrilled with the quality of the people that are working in this business, both those that are being coming into the business new and those that are developing their careers within ACRA. We have some incredibly talented people in the business now. It's almost unidentifiable from what we had 8 years ago, 7 years ago when I first came into ACRO. We've refreshed the team almost, I'd say, 75% and I think we've got some great people in the business.
The organic growth will continue to be now, I think, a more important part of our story going forward, probably more important at the moment than acquisitions. But there's not today one specific acquisition that's on our radar. We're always open. There is I'm sorry, there is one that we would look at. We've had some discussions.
It's probably a few years off, to be honest. So organic growth through geographical opportunities opening up for a range of products and for product development, I mean, I should say here on this point, our research and development going on through our engineering team now is absolutely phenomenal, something again wasn't happening in that growth for a long period of time. We've got new products now coming into our range that will go straight out on jobs off the back of the work being done by our engineering team in research and development. And then last point around acquisitions, yes, we are an acquisitive business, but right at the moment, there's nothing that I can put my head on that I think will come off in the next period of time. But I just want to make the point here that if you look at the look at what this business has delivered in the last 3 years, we've delivered on 2 now very, very successful acquisitions that have helped us transform this business dramatically.
We've delivered on a great story in Melbourne Formwork. We said we're going to penetrate that market than we have. And in my view, we've really only got one more thing to do and that's New South Wales. We need to get the New South Wales model the same as Queensland and Victoria And the early signs are we've got some very good opportunities in that area. And then, again, it's about rolling out the new products across the country and that will be the Afro store.
Page 27, just again, just this is who we are, very unique business now. We've got geographical spread across the country. We've got a fleet of equipment that no one can replicate. It's a great position to be in. In terms of our outlook, we go into these next 6 months, and we're going 3 months through now with strong tailwind off the back of the new hire contract secured in the first half.
I mentioned that earlier that January February, we're already up to the circa 20%, 25% again in new contracts secured compared to the prior corresponding period. And February looks like being our 2nd best month probably ever in new contracts secured. Very, very strong product sales opportunities exist in the business at the moment. And I mentioned Queensland before, there's absolute uplift in activity in Queensland. Almost every day, there is something new significant coming up that would add to us.
And I said, the position in Queensland in terms of market opportunities better than I've said in the eight years I've been with ACRO. Natform's 'twenty one earnings second half will be in line with first half. However, definitely the Q4, Q4 'twenty one will be the best quarter in the history of the Natform business within ACRO. It's a great sign of being a tailwind going into the following financial year. Mentioned New South Wales and I expect to see significantly improved results.
City Metro Rail Projects, both Crowsnest and Waterloo secured. Further growth in industrial scaffold. I still think that there's a bit of a 2 speed construction going on in that sector going on. It's probably not as pronounced as it was, a little bit more confidence obviously coming with hopefully the results of COVID in the country and vaccines and things what that might do and borders reopening and all those things will give a bit more confidence in general. In terms of our forecast, we say we're remaining comfortable with consensus broker forecasts.
We're not a company that wants to go out there with bold statements about where we think we're going to go. We'd like to be conservative. We'd like to be doing we'd like to do better than expectations. So at the moment, we're going to continue to say we're comfortable with consensus forecasts. And finally, the wheel of priorities is still the same story, new markets, new clients, promoting former capabilities across the markets, grow industrial scaffold, further focus on sales and product sales and what they can bring to the business.
Our absolute key competitive advantage being our engineering expertise and developing that across the whole of the country and growing that across the we've got 30 odd engineers. We are continually bringing in high caliber professionals. Just in the last 6 months, we've brought in a very experienced formwork guy who worked in New South Wales, who's worked across the country into our New South Wales business to add to depth there. We've just hired a new Victorian State General Manager who comes from the construction industry with a great track record in higher in the construction industry. And that commercial scaffold, look, it's probably becoming less important in terms of looking for opportunities there.
There's lots of opportunities to make acquisitions in this space, and it's just not part of what ACRO is about these days. So as I mentioned a few times now, I think we'll hold that in terms of what the total revenue for that business will be, it will hold. But in a growing business, it's going to become 20% will become 18%, will become 15%, will become 10% of the total revenue stream over the coming time. So that's it from us. Thank you.
So now we'll open up to any questions any of the participants have got. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Your first question is from the line of Alex Liu from Morgan. Please go ahead. Thank you.
Hi, Steve. Hi, Andrew. How are you guys going?
Good. How are you? Good. How are you?
Yes, that's good. I've just got a few questions. I might just start off with product sales, please. And obviously, revenue from product sales was up very, very strongly, so that was almost 200% there. But just wanted to just maybe dig into some of the details behind the reasons behind that strength.
You say you're focusing more on it, but is it more are you marketing it more? Are you kind of yes. And also, is it mostly in a few states? Or are you seeing that product sales strength across all states?
Look, I think, firstly, Alex, it came out of the acquisition of BeautySpan really in terms of the stimulus. It's always been something that we were we thought was we've sold fine timber and we still sell fine timber and there's a very good opportunity for us there now to grow our margins in that area. We sold hardware consumables to Form Workers. We sold a bit of new equipment, but we really didn't have a proprietary sort of system as we do now with Almirall, where we can sell systems into Form Workers and then get the benefits of repeat sales and cross higher opportunities as they seek to grow more volume of work and they need more gear to compensate what they've got the compliments from what they've already got from us. It's very strong in Queensland.
It's very strong now in Victoria. It could be stronger in New South Wales and it will be. It's actually in the last 3 to 4 months, it's become a really strong part of the Western Australian formwork business. So we only do formwork in Western Australia. We don't do any commercial residential scaffold there.
And sale of product has become a significant generator of profit in that WA business since probably about November and shows grade size improved. There are right now, as I sit here, I know of at least 3 very big opportunities for sale of product and with the real profits tax to them that may or may not come off. And they are they're big swing factors in their numbers, and we're not factoring any of those things at the moment into our forecast, but they can add considerable benefit to you if they come off. So I've said this, I think, for the last maybe 12 months. Sale of products now has almost become as important to us as generating higher revenue, and we run a pipeline of product sales now that we monitor on an ongoing basis the same as we do with higher revenue.
Yes. So do all your customers know that you do higher and also product sales now as well? So is that clear across your current customers and also your potential customers?
Inform work, yes. I'd say that's well known now, Inform work. It's never you can always be doing better. And I think in the New South Wales market, again, I'll say that that's going to be a growing understanding of our capabilities in that area. We also generate sales.
We saw scaffold in the Queensland market at pretty simple levels, both in industrial and in commercial, but mostly in industrial. And I think we definitely can grow that market in New South Wales, Victoria and the rest of the country. So the Queensland scaffold business generates an average of around $300,000 to $400,000 a month in new sales. And we do probably $50 in New South Wales and Victoria. So that certainly is near that we can further grow.
Okay. And maybe moving on to industrial scaffolds. So you had a strong result as well. And obviously, the plan is to expand that business both geographically. And I was interested in the part when you said into new industries.
So maybe just talk about the types of industries that you're currently in and then the ones that are potential opportunities in the future, please?
Yes. So it's not just maybe in new industries, but it's in new products that we bring to some of the existing customers and customers that we're targeting. Previously, we would have just basically given them the access scaffolding system for their shutdown. I'll give you an example right now. So Bayswater Power Station in New South Wales, we've invested circa sort of $100,000 on what's called a furnace kit, which is a scaffolding the scaffolding sits inside the furnace when they're doing the shutdown.
Now we never had that equipment before in Unispan. We've invested in it. We've run a contract worth sort of 3 times that amount of money for now for base water power station for the scaffolding that sits inside their furnaces as well as the so we get we do get that as well as the perimeter scaffolding required for the workers to have safe access while they're doing the shutdown. We've also got a small investment in something called rope access, which is effectively where the workers are on a rope and a harness hanging off the side of tanks, etcetera, while they're doing painting and maintenance work. So there's other types of systems that go hand in hand with just providing the perimeter scaffolding access when shutdowns are happening.
So that's the sort of stuff. But look, this is mining, power stations, gas and oil fields, utilities, so the hydro power in Queensland. We at the moment would have still, call it, 90% of our revenue of that 8,200,000 dollars 90% of it's coming out of Queensland. A bit starting to come out of New South Wales, a little bit starting to come out of South Australia. There's nothing yet in Victoria.
There's nothing yet in Western Australia. I think I've said similar things to this 6 months ago, but it's a real story of growth. And there's also we're also looking to invest in a different style of scaffolding system that just works in the industrial scaffold for us that will open up a whole range of further opportunities with customers that want to use that style of scaffold. So I think I'm not going to sort of speculate as to what this number could be in terms of total revenue over the next 12 to 24 months, but certainly it's got considerable growth opportunity in it.
Okay. Thanks, Steve. That's all for me.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you very much. Your next question is from the line, I believe, from Pierre Wilson from EME Capital. Please go ahead. Thank you.
Thanks, Steve. It's Tina from EME Capital. I just had a few questions on the pipeline. Hoping you could just help us understand what sort of your forward visibility on the pipeline? That's the first question.
And secondly, once you've identified coming in the pipeline, what's sort of the loss of average time from projects in the pipeline to you guys bringing it? That would be very helpful. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you for that question. So firstly, I want to, I guess, clarify what goes into our pipeline are actually jobs that we have put a quote for tender info. So you don't you won't see it in our pipeline, for example, Snowy 2, which is going to be a big opportunity for us in the next 5 years. There's no specific package on that job at the moment that we've closed on that's in our pipeline.
So you won't see we think there's $10,000,000 worth of work on Snowy Hydro in the next 5 years. You won't see that in the number. You only see absolutely jobs where there's a package identified and we've either quoted or about to put a quota and tenure in. So it differs between the different types of sectors. So on civil infrastructure, for example, you'll have a job that you'll there might be sort of 6 to 4 months away.
But when you get the project awarded, you've got to mobilize in the space of maybe a little 2 weeks. So we've Chatswood Station is a prime example of that. We won the Chatswood Station 2nd stage. We won 2 parts of that. 1 was worth 500,000, 1 was worth 300,000.
The $300,000 part of that contract is going to go for 6 months. We won that on Friday. We've got to have gear on-site for that job in 2 weeks. And it's a lot to do in 2 weeks to mobilize that equipment, but that's how quick that stuff happens. On general scaffolding and certainly on the industrial scaffolding work, you get a lot longer lead time to build up.
You'll get you might get sort of 2 months of lead time and time of winning the contract and mobilizing the contract. So that can be quite different. And sorry, screens are the same. So screens is actually quite a large number in that pipeline. I think it's surplus sort of $30,000,000 of the $70,000,000 in our pipeline at the moment.
They're actually in that form screen type jobs. And they couldn't and some of those jobs are probably 12 months away. So it's very different across the segment.
Okay. And if I could just ask, now you've completed the NetForm and UniqueSpan acquisition, have you signed have you done like in terms of your competitors in the tender, has that changed in your experience?
No, definitely. I mean, we're now able to quote on certainly, we weren't in the screens business before we bought NetForm. But we are getting fantastic cross selling opportunities off the back of the NetForm business. Actually, in the last 6 months, especially in Queensland, we're doing some great package deals now of where we provide the screens. We provide perimeter scaffolding.
We provide the propping scaffold required that's sitting under the laying concrete, whole packages. And in the formwork area, yes, we've got a level of equipment available to us now that the old macro didn't have. Certainly, some of the old macro meat and potatoes gear is still out there and certainly in Melbourne. A large percentage of the work that we've won in Melbourne has actually not been off the back of ULMA or Unispean gear. It's just been really strong utilization and strong engineering capability of sort of, well, again, what I'd call existing meat and potatoes acro gear.
But across it was across our fleet and across the country now. I mean, I know I'm not making the bold statement that I can't back up if I had to, but I can back it up. We've got a fleet of equipment across the whole of the country that's probably second to none now of any back end pieces.
Okay, great. That's all from me. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. There are no further questions at this point, gentlemen. Please continue. Thank you.
Okay. On the basis that there are no further questions, I'd just like to thank everybody for coming on board this morning. That's a very, very busy time. I know there's a number of companies in the like industry that are doing their results presentation at exactly the same time as we are today. So it's an incredibly busy period, but I thank those of you who have come on board and take the time to listen to our story and who continue to support our business.
And we look forward to chatting again in 6 months' time with our full year presentation. So thanks again for your time and questions today.
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our teleconference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect. Thank you.