Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us today. As we present our first half FY 2026 results, I am joined by our CFO, Andrew Crowther, and our COO, Matt Caporella, who will assist me in the presentation today. I'm gonna walk through the presentation that was released after market close last night. Firstly, in terms of the overview of the business, I think, what has become clear over the last couple of years is that the Acrow of today is actually now a very different business than it was, certainly, you know, a few years ago, or seven years ago when we listed. Today, we're a multifaceted company providing services to both the industrial and construction markets.
Clearly, we've grown our industrial business very significantly over the last couple of years. Today's presentation, we'll talk a fair bit about that and the future prospects for that division. We've really concentrated over the last two years on diversifying the revenue streams within Acrow. That has been a successful strategy. Again, as we go through the presentation, we'll talk about how that looks. Certainly, a lot of this presentation has to be seen through the lens of what is our biggest formwork market in the country, being currently, the one that's you know, probably performing at the lowest level, certainly the lowest level it has for some time, but also has, by far, the biggest upside opportunity in it within the next relatively short period of time.
The highlights of last year. Again, the industrial access division is now 62% of group revenue in this half. Over a two-year period, both organically and via acquisition, we've almost tripled the revenue within this division. The two acquisitions that we made at the tail end of the last financial year, Above and Brand, and what is now known as Acrow Infrastructure, based in Muswellbrook, in the Hunter Valley. Both of those businesses are performing above our expectations. Over the first six months, we've had significant growth in our green Screens business. We are the national market leader in the provision of protective Screens on high-rise projects. It's a highly profitable division, high return on the investment, and will continue to grow.
The biggest project currently underway in probably all of Acrow is the Column Climber at the Meriton Cypress project on the Gold Coast. It is industry first, primarily using our Jumpform technology. Matt will talk more about that project later on. It has had a very heavy capital investment into it on that project, but it has very, very strong, both medium and long-term prospects at a whole new level for, you know, high level, probably above sort of 50 or 60-story construction projects. The SA and WA formwork growth in the first half has been very encouraging. I think this is indicative of the business's ability to capitalize on opportunities when markets turn in their favor.
You can't invent work, but when the markets are there and the opportunities present themselves, this business can capitalize on them and the growth we're getting in SA and WA is indicative of that. Our higher revenue pipeline continues to grow. It's grown by 12%, to AUD 235 million this half, so indicative, again, of a strong forward outlook. That next page, in terms of the pipeline, so you see that? It's been a stable period in terms of winning higher work. It does fluctuate on a month-to-month basis, but I'm still happy with the trajectory in this, in that regard. Our labor hire forward, our order book, is now up in excess of AUD 300 million. I mean, that's become obviously a very large part of Acrow as we've pivoted heavily towards the industrial markets.
In terms of safety, look, again, this is a more complex area for us now, given the growth of our industrial business, then we have, you know, circa 700 to 800 scaffolders in the industrial access pool at any given time. We've increased the number of working hours by some 40% year-on-year. Look, our aim clearly is to have a very low TRIFR, low total recordable injuries, and low lost time injuries. I still think there's work to be done here. I think the result is okay, but there's work to be done. We've recently appointed a new national safety general manager, who has come from one of the larger construction companies based in Queensland, and already he's making a big impact in our business.
In terms of the key financial metrics, while, you know, obviously, it's great to have a 23% growth in revenue, none of the other results you can we be pleased with, clearly. Again, I just want to point out that they need to be looked at through a lens of what's going on in the Queensland formwork market on a year-to-year basis. We will talk about this a little bit later on, there's a AUD 6 million reduction in EBITDA in that business, PCP by itself. If we were just even able to hold that, let alone grow it to what we know will happen going forward, every one of those metrics would have been in positive territory. When we get to the dividend, we've given the heavily front-loaded CapEx again for us this year.
We just think it's prudent at the moment to reduce the payment of our dividend down from 2.9% to 2%. Clearly, we'll review that on a full year basis when we get to July, August. Firstly, you can't, again, look at these results without understanding what we've done with capital over this period. We're not investing in core formwork products. We are investing in Jumpform screens and industrial access. The screens growth is generating almost 100% ROI even within the first year of operation. The industrial goes hand in hand with that, you know, tripling of the revenue in that business over the last couple of years.
The Jumpform spend is heavily slated towards the Column Climber Project, and then again, Matt will talk about in more detail later. We expect for the second half to have a very strong reduction in spend. We spent AUD 25.5 million in the first half, expected to spend between AUD 5 million and AUD 10 million in the second. We are not going to back away from opportunities, if they present themselves, that will generate strong returns. 40% is still our hurdle rate. We probably won't accept 40% for the balance of this year, but certainly in screens and some of the other categories, but screens primarily. We're getting 1 turn of revenue based on AUD 1 of capital spent. We're going to continue and invest in that system.
For the first time, we've now broken our business into two divisions, a construction services business, which encapsulates both formwork or formwork screens, Jumpforms, and commercial scaffold, and the industrial access business. You can see in the half, with 62% of the revenue now comes out of industrial access. Going to the construction services division, we have had a AUD 4 million decline in revenue. We have had a AUD 3 million decline in underlying EBITDA. I think it's the next page of this presentation that spells that out very clearly as to actually what's going on. If you go by state, you can see here that, the AUD 14.4 million of revenue in Queensland is AUD 6.8 million less than the first half 2025.
It's another couple of million dollars less than the first half 2024. As I said before, you can't invent work. We haven't lost market share in Queensland. This is purely a result of the conditions within that market, and I think if anybody who also follows other construction-based stocks, everybody's saying the same thing about current results in Queensland. I think everybody's also saying the same thing about the I would call it medium to long-term opportunity in Queensland, that we'll talk to later. Clearly, great growth in Queensland, great growth in South Australia, great growth in Victoria. Whilst Victoria sorry, in South, in WA. Whilst Victoria shows a couple of million dollar decline, there's a project profile change in Victoria, and I would expect that Victoria's second half will be better.
While I'm on the second half, already with work secured and what we see in front of us for Queensland, we're going to get a circa 25% increase in revenue for formwork in Queensland, second half to first half, and that's going to be heavily slated towards an increase in the last quarter that takes us into the new financial year. Just some facts around Queensland. You know, we called out, you know, you can see clearly we understand what's going on here. The projects in December 2024 that were making up the vast majority of our revenue, that have all finished. The projects that are in play at the moment, and there's not a lot of them, and we're talking civil infrastructure here primarily.
The projects that will commence from Q4 2026 through to Q4 2027, we've already secured a lot of revenue on the Rockhampton Ring Road and Puma Connect South projects. You know, I could put some dollars around the size of the revenue opportunity for us there. I won't call that out today, they are substantial. In terms of Jumpform and Screens, both of those divisions are heading towards the best revenue and EBITDA performances that those divisions have had since we started them. Certainly, they are complementary, as there's almost hardly a project now where we don't, where we don't need both the Jumpform and Screens package. As I said, we're heading towards record revenue levels in both.
In terms of industrial access, I called out 62% of group revenue. It's still a very strong gross profit margin of 35%, and EBITDA margin of 21%. Any company that is primarily providing labor, I think, would be quite envious of those results. There is a reality that with the contract impediment that we've won, it comes with a lower overall margin. Given that there's no higher revenue on that project, it's basically all labor. It comes with a lower margin, but still acceptable 13% of labor margin. The business that we bought, Brand based in the Hunter Valley, I mean, their overall margin, as a percentage of their revenue, is lower than what we have in the rest of Acrow, that's totally taken into account with what we paid for that business.
The actual profit performance in that business is turning out to be something like a 3x multiple on what we paid for what we paid for that business. We now, as I said, you know, we've got a national profile in industrial. You can see where we're operating at the moment. We are heading towards. The current target actually is AUD 195 for revenue for the year. I hope we hit AUD 200 because it's a bit of a milestone. The 97.5, second half looks like circa AUD 98 at the moment. We've still got clearly month months, 4.5 months to go. We're gonna keep growing this business. We're gonna keep growing it organically.
There's lots of opportunities opening up into new sectors like defense, marine, industrial mining, et cetera, off the back of some of the contracts that we've won recently. Asset maintenance in Above Scaffolding, what we're doing on the Sydney Harbor Bridge is quite radical. I'll talk about some other stuff there a little bit later on. We like this business. We're gonna keep growing it, and it's gonna happen both, as I said, both organically and through M&A activity, probably into the next 24 months. I'll now hand over to Andrew for the financials.
Great. Thanks, Steve, welcome to everyone. As Steve said before, when we look at the P&L, this really is a reflection of what Steve talked about with the Queensland formwork market, and on the other side, our high convictions for the future, in particular with our CapEx profile. If we get into the P&L, slide 19, our EBITDA, as Steve said, AUD 38 million down from AUD 39 million. EBITDA margin is slightly down from 30.8% to 24.4%. That's a reflection of the change in mix between industrial access and commercial only.
We've pretty much held our margins there with, as Steve said, industrial access has slightly gone down because of a couple of projects and, in particular, Fuderman and the Brand acquisition. Depreciation increased by from eleven and a half to AUD 14.7 million, or 27%. That was a reflection of the increase in our Property, Plant, and Equipment from an average of AUD 180 million to AUD 217 million in average PP&E. The actual average depreciation rate was pretty much steady at 8.7% odd. It's just a reflection of the increase in the CapEx. We had to front-end this CapEx, as you've seen, with the very large pipeline of work we've got coming up.
From a net interest point of view, interest, likewise, AUD 4.7 million, up to AUD 6.6 million. Our average debt increased from AUD 80.5 million PCP to AUD 134 million. The debt, which we'll go into a moment, was to finance basic working capital increase and obviously our large CapEx in the first half. We get to pre-tax profit, down from AUD 22 million last year to AUD 16.6 million. Tax expense, the statutory tax expense was about 36%. The reason that's above 30% is because of the acquisition-type expenses we have that are non-deductible. When we go below, NPAT underlying, sorry, is down from AUD 16 million down to AUD 12.8 million.
Significant items, we had significant items of AUD 2.7 million during the period. AUD 1.8 million of that was in relation to the integration and restructuring of the two acquisitions we had, plus the ATEC acquisition, so Brand Above and ATEC. It's a very expensive to do these restructures and integrations, particularly from a system point of view. We also had an amount. We're doing a new ERP system at the moment, so there was quite a bit went into that. We're looking at some of that may be capitalized in the future. We also had a depot move, and we had some other advisor items in that significant items. We had contingent consideration.
This is AUD 1.579 million is in relation to a AUD 1.1 million expense on the MI earn-out. You probably remember from last year, we actually had MI, we had to pay a full earn-out of AUD 4.95 million, which is a excellent outcome, considering, given they made their full amount. We had to expense AUD 1.1 million, because we actually didn't accrue enough when we first did the acquisition. We also had another AUD 500,000 in relation to other earn-outs to build up what we have to pay in the future.
We also had, so in the future, that'll be a low number, a very low number, because we paid out the big MI number now. Amortization of intangibles, this is in relation to brand and customer intangibles that we've taken up. That will be a pretty much an ongoing expense of about AUD 186,000 per month, but obviously, that's a non-tax item. We had share-based payments that were quite a bit lower than last year. That's just the timing. NPAT reported AUD 9 down to AUD 6.5, but our EPS down from AUD 5.38 down to AUD 4.16.
As Steve said, an interim dividend of AUD 0.02, 100% franked for the period. Over to the balance sheet. Net Debt it increased in the period from AUD 28.2 million to AUD 151.5 million. That was predominantly CapEx related. You know, just under AUD 25 million, and we actually had an expansion of labor in industrial access. Every time we increased our industrial access, there's a working capital hit, and that was about AUD 7.2 million. In general, basically all that increase in debt was growth-related items. If you have a look at the actual Net Debt bridge, you can see the AUD 123 million up to the AUD 151 million.
The predominant or the largest parts in this, when, which relate to growth, there's the working capital hit of AUD 7.2. There's also other significant items of AUD 2.7, which was cash, and that relates to predominantly our past acquisitions, and then we have 25.5 growth CapEx. Now, all the other items there wouldn't have really increased our debt to the level it did. Net Debt to EBITDA went from 1.8 to 2.2, which is above the level that we said we're comfortable with. We've got a plan to start reducing that level, and that's through reduced CapEx, for one thing. EBITDA is obviously going to increase in the future, and also we'll start rationalizing our working capital.
In particular, we had a large inventory balance at the end of December, that'll start monetizing itself. Working capital sales was actually not a bad level at 23% versus 25.7% at June. We aim for 25, to get below 25%. Current assets of AUD 22.4 million versus AUD 6.8 million at June. Now, the AUD 22.4 million, we actually did a restructure of our debt, and AUD 10 million of out what had been our overdraft or at call, has been moved down to non-current. It's actually not like for like, but we still do have. That part that was current is now non-current.
Cash flow from operations, we had AUD 27.6 million, a 73% conversion rate. Slightly up from 71%, the main differences there with the conversion is working capital and ex higher sales. That's sort of the main differences there. Over the next page, our debt. As you can see, we had AUD 158 million of gross debt, up from AUD 131 million from the previous period. Our headroom went down at June from AUD 40 million down to AUD 13.4 million. We actually had to restructure the debt during the period. We've got a very close relationship with our bankers, Westpac. We increased our debt headroom by AUD 15 million.
Because of the, as I said before, because of our large upfront CapEx and our working capital impose from industrial access, our net debt went up to AUD 2.2. I think that's it from my side.
Okay, thank you, Andrew. I'll go through the current, sort of, I guess, mid-term growth opportunities as we see them in the business, and Matt will help me with a little bit of this. Firstly, just, you know, the, the other areas other than just winning work, the other areas that go to making our business as strong as it is today. Clearly now with scale, we've got a very capable and flexible workforce.
Both in terms of looking at our scaffolders, you know, with the number of people we have available to us now in this particular industrial access space, we can undertake much larger projects. Every day, basically, I'm hearing more opportunities that are presenting themselves across the country due to the scale of that operation and the talent of that operation. Obviously, the effort we put into growing a very strong engineering team continues to pay dividends for the business. We focus on training and development. We've got a great cadetship program for engineers. We've broadened that to include now sort of administrative, HR, and sales type roles. The ATEC acquisition that Andrew mentioned, which is a training facility in Brisbane and now one in Mackay, basically focused on growing our own scaffold talent.
Very important part of the business. I've got real hope for how that can not just be an internal training facility, but also can be a profit-generating business down the line. Massive effort going into making sure our supply chain is as tight as possible, given the work that we see that's in front of us as we lead into the Olympic cycle, certainly in Brisbane, where if you've got the equipment on the island, you'll be able to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves. Andrew mentioned our ERP project, that is well underway, and we hope to have a new system in place by sort of, you know, July, August period. Industrial access. You know, we've grown this business to an AUD 200 million business now.
I have aspirations to double that over the next two to three years, both through an M&A focus and through organic growth. Give the Above Scaffolding example. We bought the Above Scaffold business in May last year. One of the things that those guys do particularly well, or there's two things that they do particularly well that are new to Acrow. First is their relationship with, start with defense and with the Navy at Garden Island. They've got some substantial contracts that they do, maintaining the fleet, the naval fleet, when it comes into Garden Island. It's opening up more national opportunities for us. The second big one is in asset maintenance and primarily bridge maintenance. We've got some really strong packages of work we're currently undertaking on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
They will continue to multiply over the next number of years. There's not... That expertise now is more broad than just the bridge. Only in the last few months, the Above team won a significant package of work on the Nowra, what was the Nowra Road Bridge in New South Wales, that is being converted to a pedestrian bridge. That's around about a AUD 2 million-AUD 3 million package of work. It's become a real opportunity and sweet spot for Acrow nationally now to look at bridge maintenance. I mean, we've got a lot of, you know, road and rail bridges across the country that are in pretty urgent need of maintenance, given their age, and we see this as a great opportunity, given the expertise that's coming out of Above.
We're going to target organic growth in WA and SA. We've recently hired a very senior guy from one of the biggest industrial providers in South Australia, Western Australia, to head that opportunity up for us. We've launched our own industrial scaffold product, Uni-Ring. Matt will talk about that more in a second. That gives us an opportunity to both sell that product into the market and also to grow higher opportunities off the back of having our own proprietary system. That's a good segue, Matt, into where we're up to at the moment with product development.
Thanks, Steve. As Steve mentioned, we've over the last six-12 months, been focusing on sort of 3 new product groups, such as the Uni Ring, Powershore 60, the column one I'll cover a little bit later, and a new market segment in the property insurance space. As Steve mentioned about the Uni Ring, we launched this in January 2025. Far, we've landed around 4,500 ton of the product in Queensland, WA, and SA, and it's 100% compatible with our existing Ringl ock kit in the industrial sector. The key here is scalability. We own the IP of this product. We have multiple manufacturing options, importing it directly through our existing supply chain.
What this is doing now, is supporting a good margin on when we're selling products and also improving our ROI on buy-to-buy kit as well. Ultimately, our supply chain continuity is remaining great, as Steve mentioned. The Powershore 60 product is new. We've launched this in January 2026. It's already hit the ground running. The market response has been immediate. We've had an AUD 220,000 sale between through March, when the product arrives, before we even actually landed stock in Australia, which is a good sign, and we've got our first five projects starting at the end of March as well. This product here sits beside our Powershore 150 product we launched about four years ago. It's in that heavy duty propping space performance-wise.
Our we've innovated on this product. It's brand new to the market. It's twice as strong as the comparable products, and it's only 20% heavier. It's integrating seamlessly with the rest of the Acrow fleet. In another market segment where we're looking at now, and we're getting into the propping insurance segment. We're leveraging our existing fleet here, the formwork tips, and then building on the Powershore 60 and Powershore 150. We're targeting more propping-only projects, and this is allowing us to unlock sort of new opportunities and return on the assets that we already own. We're really excited in this space. We've made a few key acquisitions, that's helping us along and that are experiencing in the propping insurance space.
In people.
In people. We've mentioned this in the past, but we're well advanced now on the ground flooring space, too. We are looking at this space. We've got some innovative stuff that we're working on, and we plan to sort of launch that in the next financial year.
Thank you, Matt. Okay, just turning to major infrastructure projects. Look, the infrastructure pipeline in the country is increasing, it's not decreasing. We're sort of at the very, very start of Suburban Rail Loop in Victoria. We're not seeing a lot of revenue from that yet, but we will. We're doing very well on North East Link at the moment. Torrens to Darlington also, it's in its infancy, but you can see from our South Australian form work numbers, we're getting very good penetration on that job. Rockhampton Ring Road is interesting because it's a, you know, you look at it and say, it's a AUD 2 billion project versus some of these are AUD 30 billion and AUD 26 billion. That will probably be the biggest generating revenue project for Acrow in civil infrastructure over the next 12 to 18 months.
We've already won some very, very large packages that are sort of going to kick in for both sale of product and hire in probably the May-June period. It's going to be, I would say, this time next year, we'll be reporting it as our largest civil infrastructure project in the country. The North, the Whyalla desalination plant in South Australia, just really at its infancy. Sydney Western Harbor Tunnel, we have one.
About AUD 1 million.
About an AUD 1 million package on the Sydney Western Harbor Tunnel. Sydney Metro is in sort of a lull at the moment and about to kick into a very large upgrade of projects, also the same for Coomera Connector. This is just a snapshot of some of the projects across the country. As I said, the infrastructure pipeline is actually going to increase, not decrease, significantly over the next period of time. Just a bit on the Olympics. I think there's been a bit of a misunderstanding about when Olympic revenue opportunities present themselves. Building tenders are starting. I saw the first one go out a few days ago. A tender went out for the building of the new aquatic center. It's the first one I've seen.
If you look at the timeline there on the bottom, the timeline is relatively accurate. You come to this time next year, where sort of some of the construction commences, and clearly from the end of 2027 into 2031, that's the peak period. For us, at the moment, it's about focus. I can say we are really clearly focused on all of the Olympic-oriented activity in terms of tenders that are being led, who the potential tenderers will be, and getting in very early, having very early engagement with potential tenderers. I'm very happy with the focus in our business in relation to the opportunity this presents. It's a broad opportunity.
I've said many times before, having lived through the Sydney Olympic Game development, this is once in a generation stuff, and it really is. It's the one project that the commencement date cannot get pushed back. Anybody that wants to tell you that Queensland's ahead is wrong. They are behind. There is going to be a strong condensing of work required, and if you position yourself well with equipment and manpower, you're going to be in an extremely strong position to capitalize on this, I'd say, from the tail end of FY 2027 through. It's not just about the Olympics in Queensland. There's going to be an unprecedented project spend in civil infrastructure outside of Olympic activity between the current date and FY 2029.
The next four years, forecast spend in major projects in Queensland is gonna almost tripling, 10 to 30. We're starting to see some of the seeds of that now, certainly with the Rockhampton Ring Road and the next stage of Coomera, and then a range of other projects that we sort of referred to earlier. You're gonna get this perfect storm in Queensland. Again, I make the point. It's currently actually the weakest performing part of our business compared to where it would normally be. It's a AUD 6 million impact on our EBITDA for this half, and you're gonna go from that to over a period of time, but it's, well, it's clearly the business and the market that has the greatest opportunity for growth over the next five years.
We're extremely well positioned to take advantage of that. Matt, more detail, please, around the Meriton column climb?
Yeah. We mentioned the Column Climber. The Meriton project itself, 78-storey tower on the Gold Coast. We've got our main Jumpform on there. There's two parts to it. There's a standard Jumpform that's up and away. It's sort of level 10 at the moment. There's something that we've called it a Column Climber. There's 16 mega columns around this tower. As you can imagine, for a 78-storey building, they're quite large. What we're doing is we're using a lot of our existing Jumpform kits. We've also basically done product development on a new bit of kit using the existing juts to climb all 16 columns and our perimeter screens below the upper ones.
When this is all built and climbing, we're going to be getting 850 tons in one go. It's a massive project. It's Acrow's biggest project and one of the biggest formwork projects in the country at the moment, this column climbing sort of project. Over the last six-12 months, we've been developing the project. It's been a lot of focus on reusability. This system now is 100% reusable on sort of any sort of multi-story tower. It's suited to over 50 stories, we can sort of plug and play now onto any column up to 4 m by 2 m. All the hard work's been done now. There's a lot of opportunity in the space.
We have priced a few more projects that are starting next calendar year. There is a lot of towers, especially on the Gold Coast in Brisbane, over that 50 stories in the works. There's a, yeah, strong pipeline. Installation on the Cypress project has commenced, so we should be climbing middle of March at the moment, as is planned.
Again, unapologetically, this has been a very capital-intensive project. Given that it's game-changing opportunity for that high-rise market, we've invested a lot of capital in this first project, but as Matt said, totally then reusable on the next series of projects. In terms of our screens business, as I said, we are the market leader. We're heading towards, you know, AUD 20+ million in revenue this year, up from AUD 15 million last year. One of the main things that we see some of it this year, but going into next year, we will get an improvement of around between AUD 2 million and AUD 3 million in EBITDA out of a Western Australian screens business.
We want a range of projects that we won five, six, seven months ago, only start generating revenue around about June. That will give us a great lead into the next year. We're going extremely well in New South Wales. Queensland's actually really improving now. We've got a good business in Victoria, and we're going to have a AUD 2 million-AUD 3 million profit business in Western Australia next year that we don't have this year. Finally, just wrapping up the observations. As I said, we'll keep growing that industrial access division. We will push towards AUD 200 million. The recently acquired businesses are going extremely well, and as I mentioned, they're opening up new markets for us. We're gonna keep looking at WA and SA organically.
We're renewing our M&A focus in that industrial space into next year, and then we're gonna keep growing the screens and Jumpform forms business. We mentioned WA specifically. We have got, right now, as we sit here today, we've still got subdued trading conditions in Queensland, in quarter three, but there is now clear signs of improvements in the quarter four. As I mentioned, we think we'll be up about 25% in formwork revenue, second half in Queensland compared to first, and all of that growth is gonna come in the last quarter. We'll keep seeing really good results in WA and SA, and New South Wales and Victoria will continue to operate at acceptable levels.
Without giving a number, but I can say very clearly, Q4 FY 2026 will deliver the largest quarterly contribution to the year in terms of EBITDA by quite some way, carrying that momentum into FY27. We're giving guidance at the moment of revenue between AUD 315 million and AUD 325 million, that'll be 21% up from last year, and EBITDA, AUD 80 million-AUD 84 million, 2% up on last year. That's the presentation stands at the moment. Thank you, everybody, and happy to hand over to any questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star and then two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before you ask your question. Our first question comes from John Hynd with Petra Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Hi, Steve, Andrew, and Matt. Thanks for your presentation this morning. I just wanted to follow on, perhaps, Steve, from the comments you made then. Can you perhaps provide a little bit more commentary on how the construction segments have performed in first quarter, second quarter, and then into the third quarter? Also, when we take into account the new revenue guidance range, in consolidation with the industrial access guidance commentary for AUD 200 million worth of revenue, you know, when you back all that, it looks like you've flat to slightly up in construction. Can you overlay that quarterly, those quarterly insights into that guidance range you provided, please?
Thank you, John. It's fair to say that the first quarter was very soft. The second quarter, reasonably significantly improved. January and February are always by far our quietest months, and they were that again this year. You get momentum with projects commencing into that April, May, June period, and that's where we get the really significant uplifts that takes us into next year. I mean, there is a bit of a yearly cycle, but then there's also a macro cycle on top of that. There is a yearly cycle that says January and February are poor every year. That's the worst period every year.
There's a macro cycle that I see now that shows that, as I said, 25% increase in Queensland, increasing revenues in Victoria, and probably stable revenues in New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia into that second half, coming off, you know, good results from all of those businesses in the first half.
Thanks. Just on that third quarter, if you may, is that, would that have been, would the performance have been below that of the first quarter as well?
About the same.
About the same. Right. Thank you. Just I've got a couple here. You've narrowed your range on the Olympic build as well, like when you expect activity to start. Can you give us a little bit more color on how you expect Acrow to be involved? I mean, is it gonna be the early stage type work with your formwork, or do you think you'll be heavily relied on for the Jumpform and Screens work as well? I guess, how are the contractors talking to you guys at the moment on the ground about how they're gonna use your products through the process?
Well, it's very early engagement, John. It look like, Look, it really does depend who wins. Like, in terms of I've said it many times, I think you've heard me say this: the Olympic Stadium is not the prize, right? You know what you, what, in my experience, some of those bigger, high-profile projects are actually not the projects you target. However, depending on who the builders are now, the consortiums are being formed. We now know who the consortiums are that will be bidding for the major construction projects like the, like the main stadium. Depending on who wins that project, will change our view because there are some builders that we work with who work with certain formworkers, who we work with, that will mean we'll absolutely be doing the work.
In other cases, we know that if a certain builder wins it's not likely to go to us. Again, I stress, it's not the big prize anyway. I think it's gonna be, it's across a range of areas. It's definitely gonna be in venue construction. It's definitely gonna be a very big opportunity for us in all the different villages, because there's 4 villages, right? It's not just Brisbane. There's Rockhampton, Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, and Brisbane. There's 4 villages. Then there's the range of venues. There's a massive amount of other smaller venues that will all require formwork activity. Then you get to all of the associated infrastructure to get people around. I think that's probably even our biggest opportunity.
I mean, I think the high-rise stuff will be great for screens and jump forms and potentially for our decking systems, form of decking systems. There's the all the other infrastructure to get people around the city of Brisbane that is unraveling itself now. It's, That's a massive amount of work, in road, pedestrian walkways, bridges, et cetera. That is absolutely right in our, in our sweet spot for our formwork business.
Okay, thanks. Perhaps it's a, that's a good section to talk about that investment in kit that you made late last half or in the second quarter. It's largely Jumpform, I think, that you've acquired here. Where, like, where did you expect to deploy it, and how long is that project, I guess, gonna engage that kit for? How do we think about the, like, the return on that investment going forward, please?
The vast majority of that spend is on the Cypress project.
Yeah.
It is a significant amount of the capital spent on that project. I won't call it out because it's, there's a competitive confidentiality thing around that, I think, really. It's a significant spend. The gear is gonna be on that job for, mate, for how long? 18 months?
Yeah, about 18 months, 2 and a half.
18 months or so, that gear is gonna be tied up on that project. It's fair to say the return on investment for that gear on that project is not on a normal level. However, you go, you move from that project to using that gear on other similar style projects that I think will attract a far higher revenue value than the revenue that is attributable to that first project. Longer term, the returns for that equipment are gonna be considerable. I mean, we're getting to scale with our Jumpform business. Now, we are absolutely getting to a scale where you don't need to keep investing at this level. I mean, if it wasn't for the Column Climber, we would have been spending far less in CapEx this year for Jumpforms.
It's almost got to be seen through a lens of it being another business, but not just a traditional Jumpform business. The great thing about our system is the fact that it's goes from one job to the next. There's basically almost very, almost no kit that's just only to be used on one application.
Right. With the, with the Cypress project, with the deployment of this kit, hopefully, that I guess what you get back, it's the, you know, you get back your sort of cost of capital, or you get back, sorry, the capital investment. Essentially, next time you use it, you're talking about full margin. There's no risk that this project is, I guess, not delayed, but is extended further, and the kit's tied up for longer?
Oh, Matt-
Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's 100% will be used on another project with no costs. If we did another project similar, it's, yeah, it'd be 100% margin. Yeah, there is risk of this tied up, but the main core is now at level 10. They're doing four a week. Once the Column Climber starts, I mean, this project is the way it's designed to go, it should perform, and we're aiming for a week cycles, so 78 weeks.
Look, you know, these things do blow out. We do get project revenue overruns on it. Definitely, the next style of project that we do that uses this system will attract a far higher revenue value than the current project. This was an entry into the market. This was an entry project that was, that I think was priced at a level that we would not price again, and we wouldn't have to price again. You know, we've invested, to be frank, more capital into this system than we probably expected to start with. I, the next time we're talking about winning a project of this nature, using that kit, it'll be a highly profitable entry or highly profitable project for the company.
Now that makes sense. Thank you. You've given us a little bit more detail with the EBITDA segments this year. How should we think about the cost? We can see the costs within the segments. How should we think about those individual cost lines in the second half, 2026, and then by 2027? Like, for example, with construction, you know, as kit is utilized and, you know, Cypress, for example, winds down, should you see yard costs and labor costs actually come down as leverage improves? Is there any impact to the cost lines with industrial access as well?
Not really, John. I wouldn't call any of that as being substantial.
sort of flat, half on half.
Look, I think, you know, I haven't done the exercise. There's no great shifts happening in any of the branches across the country at the moment. You know, there's a bit of investment in yard staff for Jumpform, because once you get that kit back in the yard, rather than on jobs, it does require maintenance to get it back out to the next work, for the work. No, I mean, there's no significant changes in that area.
Got it. Okay. Last one from me. With industrial access, obviously, you know, you're consolidating the acquisitions, you called out Brand as having a lower margin versus the other businesses within that segment. How Is Brand a larger component of the revenue of industrial access now? How does the growth profile look for Brand compared to the other businesses within that segment going forward? I guess what I'm asking is, where do you expect segment margins at an EBITDA level to settle now?
The brand business, which we now call Acrow Infrastructure in the Hunter Valley, is incredibly stable business. It's probably one of the most reliable businesses that we've got in terms of its profit every month. You've got to look at that business for what we paid for it. Right? Again, we're gonna get probably, we probably paid even less than 3x EBITDA for that business. You know, its revenue is consistent, its profit's consistent, its contracts are long term. It does overall make a lower margin than the rest of the, sort of on average, the rest of the business. Again, you've got to look at it through what we paid for it versus what it's returning.
No, I completely understand that. I'm just thinking, looking forward with the margins, will it keep margins at these sorts of levels, or, will they go lower in the second half as Brand becomes a bigger part of.
No, the brand's not going to become a bigger part.
Yeah.
Brand's staying exactly the same level.
Great.
Turnover, which is turnover, staying and pricing exactly the same level. Yeah.
Okay, thank you. I'll go back in the queue.
Your next question comes from Philip Pepe with Shaw and Partners. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Not sure how I'm going to follow John with all these, all these two questions, but I might throw one in. John, call me afterwards with your numbers, please. Just on the $6 million reduction in form work because of the slowing down in Queensland, what have we learned from that about the cost base, presumably it's labor and yard work. Going forward, how do you better position yourself for downturns, or is it just a short-term blip and you, and you ride it out? Can you verbalize more costs, or is it just got to trade through it?
It's... You would be making very short-term decisions, Philip, that you'll pay for in six-12 months time. I think, you know, we didn't expect to be at the level we are in Queensland formwork. You know, we've been talking about this for some time. We didn't expect to be at this level. We expected to see the uplift in work quicker than this. If you, if we made significant reductions in yard staff, for example, and that would have to come with redundancy expenses, et cetera, you'd just be redeploying staff in a very short period of time. That would be a very silly decision to make.
Understood. I'll ask a second question. Might be, I don't know what the right answer to this is. With your gearing now above 2x , you did again, reduce, but did you consider not paying a dividend just to get the debt, below 2 times a little more quickly?
We did discuss a whole lot of options, but we thought on balance, like we go through a lot of metrics, we have a lot we go through, as you can imagine, but we landed on 2, and 2 is for a company in growth mode like ours, it's still not a bad return. We, you know, fundamentally, our operations are still going well, so what we did want to reward shareholders, but also retaining some cash for the growth.
Makes sense. Thank you.
The next question comes from Alex Liu with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Hope you can hear me okay.
Yeah, all good.
Just Okay, great. Just the first question on the screens and Jumpform, please. It sounds like you're doing really well there in WA, and Steve, I think you mentioned that you're expecting a AUD 2 million or AUD 3 million EBITDA uplift in WA. Yeah, just interested in what's driving that improvement. Like, you know, what are you doing well there that able to, I guess, deliver that performance?
We weren't in the WA market for Screens at all, Alex, 12 months ago. When we started the Jumpforms, the guy that we hired to start the Jumpform business was WA based, and he did a really good job of getting us to penetrate the Jumpform market in WA. In fact, WA is our biggest market.
Yeah.
The most work that we've got, I mean, not the biggest projects, I mean, Cypress is clearly the biggest project, but in terms of number of projects that we've got active at any time, WA is our biggest Jumpform market. The screens and Jumpforms go hand in hand. We didn't have a screens business. We started to look at that, but we're actually being asked by our customers, "Can you provide screens?" There wasn't a lot of screens in the Western Australian market anyway, and now from scratch, we've now been winning projects that are screens and Jumpforms together. We've won a lot of work in the last six months that only starts, like I said, at the end of this financial year.
From a standing start, we will have a AUD 2-AUD 3 million profit business next year in WA screens that we haven't had this year.
Yeah, that's a pretty good effort. Just the second one, just on the M&A opportunities that you're looking to renew in industrial access in FY 2027, can you just remind us about the, I guess, the types of businesses you're looking at, and are you still targeting WA for acquisitions?
Look, they're similar businesses to the style we've got today. We're not looking to, you know, radically go into something that doesn't, isn't an access business. At the moment, we're not looking at any WA opportunities. We, we've looked in the past, and there's nothing that we like particularly to other markets. You know, we, it's the same metrics. You know, we're not, we're not gonna pay above our normal less than 4x EBITDA metrics. You know, we're not gonna buy anything that doesn't have great growth opportunities. Brand is a bit of an outlier there because, again, we bought it so cheap, and it's got great sustainable earnings. Yeah, it's very similar businesses to what we've done in the past.
To your specific WA question, we do not currently have a WA target.
Does that mean that at this stage, it's more of a organic growth, guess, strategy in WA, then, in industrial?
Absolutely. WA and SA, absolutely, organic growth strategy.
Okay, great. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, guys.
The next question comes from Benjamin Young with Ord Minnett. Please go ahead.
Hi, gents. If we can touch on net debt for a second. You mentioned that it's above target debt levels at the moment. You're looking to get that down over the next 12 months. Can you give us an idea of where those levels are, and is that within the scope of the 12 months?
Yeah, so, like, by the end of this financial year, we'll still be around. We won't be able to, unless something dramatically changes with our guidance and so forth. We, well, I mean, we're not going to have anything like the CapEx we did in the first half, in the second half. Just from our EBITDA cash generation, the lower CapEx, and in particular as well, our monetizing of the inventory, it will come down, but as I said, not below to June. In 2027, that will come down. It'll start coming down quite fast.
Yep, understood. In terms of seeing signs for the fourth quarter rebound in Queensland, can you give us an idea of what exactly you're seeing that gives you that indication?
The Rockhampton Ring Road project starts. That's one strong example. We've already won upwards of AUD 1 million worth of work on that project, and some of it will be delivered in May and June. That's just in that one project. There's also a very large project, which is the next stage of the Queens Wharf development in Brisbane, where again, we want a package of work. I don't know, how long ago, Matt? How long ago?
12 months, maybe.
12 to 18 months ago, where the gear is now going out, and that's worth AUD 200,000 a month by itself. Just between those two projects, Benjamin, there's lots of revenue that we don't currently have today.
Fantastic. Thanks, gents.
The next question comes from Tina Wilson with E&P Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my questions. Just wanted to ask about the higher contracts won and the pipeline. You've won a little bit less higher contracts, but you've got a bigger pipeline. Could you just help us understand the dynamics behind that?
Thank you for that question. The higher contracts one does fluctuate month to month to month. I mean, the overall trend is still okay. I mean, my target is to win about, if we can win AUD 8 million a month worth of work, I'm happy. You can see that 8 6 is 48, so we're not far off that number for the half. A bit to do with that, like, the big numbers that go into there is when we win Jumpform and Screens work, but there is quite a long way out, certainly in Screens. I mean, if you looked at our Screens page, we actually won more Screens work last year than we've won this year, but now we're seeing the revenue.
And that, so we're seeing the uplift of revenue in that area for what we won last year. Now, we know that we've got now a very strong, at least 12 months of revenue with what we've won in screens, and then we've got to replenish that. The next, that's a very strong focus in the business now about winning work in that part of the business that probably doesn't start until sort of July or September of this calendar year. Similar with Jumpforms. You know, we actually don't want to win Jumpform work today, that we have to start in two months. We couldn't do it. All right?
We're focusing very clear on that, on that part of the business, on work that will start at a time that we can both from a, you know, just comp, engineering capacity, but also from without having to invest more capital, we can take that work on. The pipeline, the big money in the pipeline is actually in Screens and Jumpform forms.
Okay, great. Thank you. Just a question on the guidance range. Between the bottom end and the top end, is it largely driven by how quickly Queensland would recover? Is that how we should think about the range of the guidance?
It's always for us. I mean, we always focus on hire, we always focus on labor, but there's a factor in our business about large sales. We, you know, we haven't had a lot of big sales this first six months. We've got some big ones in the second half, and we've got some big opportunities in the second half. It's more, actually more to do with those. Do they tick into pre-30 June, or do they tick into the next financial year? That's really the factor of change.
Okay, great. Thank you very much. That's all for me. Thank you.
Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Boland for closing remarks.
Thanks everybody again for your attendance. Thanks, Andrew and Matt, for your comments, and we look forward to talking to everybody again in six months' time. Thanks very much.