Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm your Chair, Jim Walker, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2022 Annual General Meeting of Austin Engineering Limited. I'd like to introduce you to your directors and our Chief Financial Officer and Company Secretary. David Singleton, who is our Managing Director, and Non-Executive Directors Chris Indermaur and Linda O'Farrell. Unfortunately, Non-Executive Director Sybrandt van Dyk was unable to join us today due to personal reasons. Our Company Secretary, Katina Nadebaum, and our Chief Financial Officer, Gareth Jones, is seated in the front row. Representatives from the company's auditor, BDO, Dean Just, here, and will be available to answer questions on financial statements in relation to the audit. The Company Secretary has informed me that we have a quorum present, and I therefore declare the annual general meeting of Austin Engineering Limited open.
I'm pleased to advise that shareholders who are not able to attend physically are able to watch and listen a live webcast of the meeting. The webcast will be the only opportunity to view the proceedings of the presentations at the AGM and the shareholders to submit online written questions during the meeting. However, the webcast is provided for convenience only and does not replace a physical AGM. Shareholders will not be able to participate in the meeting or vote via the website facility. Given the logistics, and the fact that people watching over the webcast are not taken to be present at the meeting, we propose to address any questions that are sent through over the webcast at the end of the meeting and once the meeting formalities are concluded. I'd like to explain the format of today's meeting.
Firstly, I will give the chair's address. I will then invite David Singleton to give the Managing Director's address, and after David's presentation, we will consider resolutions outlined in the notice of meeting. I'm very proud to say Austin Engineering has performed strongly on both an operational and financial level over the year, despite significant macroeconomic volatility and continued impacts of COVID-19. Austin's refined strategic focus on enhancing margins in tandem with improving our product range, performance and customer support delivered a strong full year result, including a 155% rise in EBITDA to AUD 32.5 million and a 525% rise in net profit after tax to AUD 20.6 million. The results exceeded our forecasts and were a direct result of the growth measures instigated as part of the company's global strategic review undertaken last year.
David will step through the initiatives undertaken by the company to increase orders and sales to improve our product range and performance and customer reach. Together, this has resulted in a significant improvement in financial and operational aspects of the company and crucially has set us up with a buoyant momentum and robust financial performance that is sustainable in the longer term. We have released new products onto the market using the latest in technology and innovation. The lightweight HPT truck body and JEC high performance buckets are the best in class and showcase Austin's superiority engineering expertise in creating products that meet the changing needs of the customers and offer improvements in safety, efficiency and environmental footprint. Our bucket product range will significantly be enhanced by the recently announced acquisition of Mainetec.
This Australian-based producer of high-performance buckets with the Hulk excavator and dipper range will allow us to grow our bucket market offering domestically and to expand that offering internationally, especially into the Americas. David will speak more about that acquisition shortly, but it is an excellent addition to our company from an operational and a financial perspective. Our enhanced focus on prudent cost control, increased utilization of Batam in Indonesia into the Austin supply chain and our agile hub-and-spoke strategy has enabled us to source materials and labor in highly efficient manner. This has allowed us to effectively manage rising costs for input materials like steel, as well as the tight labor market in Australia.
While those pressures have resulted in a difficult time for Asia Pacific region, this has been offset by record revenue and earnings and margins in North America and South America, which looks to be able to be sustained. Sustainability has been a key focus of the board during the fiscal year. We have made significant strides in this area on a number of fronts. We are cognizant that clients increasingly want greener, more sustainable solutions that are safer and increase productivity. Our people's safety and wellbeing are a central part of our business and continue to be critical focus area for Austin. We are pleased to report a significant improvement in our safety performance once again this year. We released our sustainability report last month, and that details Austin's environmental, social and governance credentials and provides a baseline to work from.
Austin is building a safety first, environmentally conscious and diverse business that will ensure a prosperous long-term future ahead. The substantial strategic innovation we have undertaken during the full year of 2022 has given us a solid platform for 2023. We are set up for a strong year ahead with increased orders and much improved business. We'll pay a fully franked final dividend of AUD 0.003 per share later this month, bringing the dividends for the year to AUD 0.005. Our policy reflects the importance of paying dividends to our shareholders, balanced with the priority of retaining the financial flexibility to enable the continued execution of our growth strategy. We'd like to welcome our new Non-Executive Director, Linda O'Farrell, who has recently joined the board. In fact, her first board meeting was today, and who is with us here today.
Linda has held senior resource sector roles in people, culture, leadership development, roles with Newcrest, BHP, Mount Gibson Iron. Linda currently is at FMG as a director of Fortescue People. We are very grateful to have Linda to join the Austin board. Next month, we welcome our new CFO, who is with us here today as well, Mr. David Bonomini, to Austin. David has global experience in leading governance, regulatory, and commercial initiatives in high growth companies and was most recently CFO of Orbital UAV, which has operations in Australia and the U.S. I'd like to thank our current CFO, Gareth Jones, for his contribution to Austin, ensuring a smooth takeover to David. Thank you.
In closing, on behalf of the board of directors, I'd like to extend my thanks to our CEO, David Singleton, and the management team for achieving excellent growth while navigating a challenging year and wide-scale inflationary pressures and the lingering impacts of COVID, which are continuing to ease. To our workforce on sites around the world, along with our contractors, suppliers, support services, you are key to our success, and we thank you for another year of hard work and commitment to a safe and successful operation. Thank you to my fellow directors for their wise counsel and support, and also to our company secretary, who works long hours getting us all prepared for us. Lastly, thank you to our shareholders for all your commitment to Austin and its growth strategy. I'll now hand over to David Singleton for his CEO and Managing Director's address. Thank you.
Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon to everybody. Feels like a room full of friends and good colleagues who've helped me out over the last 15 months in this role. I thank all of you. We have BDO, our auditors here. They've transferred from a base in Brisbane to Perth. They've had to go through that transition this year and done that very successfully, and I appreciate their support. A number of representatives here from Euroz. Euroz have done a great job in helping us to rebuild the shareholder register at the institutional level for the company over the last 12 months or so.
I think, you know, if I'd have thought about what our share register would have looked like a year ago compared to what it does today, it could not have been better than I could have dreamed of back period ago. Thank you to the Euroz team for the work that you've done as well. We've got JWS law firm here as well. JWS helped us with the recent acquisition of Mainetec. I've been through a number of acquisitions with law firms in the past. JWS did a brilliant job. Really effective and right sized as far as what we needed for that. Also, Peter here from UBS, who also assisted us with the acquisition of Mainetec.
Again, you know, a bulge bracket firm, very capable firm, able to come down and do the work at the level that we were operating at. So thank you to UBS as well. I'd also like to recognize that we're going through a changeover of the CFOs at the moment. The fact that one of them sat down there and one of them sat over there is not representative of their working relationship. They've actually been working very closely together to make sure that there's a smooth handover. Gareth and I have worked together before, so that's been a pretty easy process. Gareth's got some other things he wants to do with his life, which I think is great. David joins us from Orbital Engines.
And also we've got 14 or 15 shareholders and some shareholders in the room here as well. 14 or 15 on the web link. I'm just going to run through a few slides now just to give you some thoughts about the past and what we've done over the last 15 months in the business. How that more importantly provides some clues to how we think about the future and how the future will travel, 'cause that, in essence, is what we're all focused on today. A year ago I published a strategy for the business.
Because I'm a fairly simple guy, we broke it down into three parts, three steps to heaven. Actually we did it in a triangle, and we said there were three elements that we would focus on, and that's really been our guidance since then. One point was about reducing our overhead levels, so the cost of running our business on a day-by-day basis to what I saw as a competitive level. Second thing was to improve our manufacturing operations to become more efficient and have cost leadership as a manufacturer here, both here in Australia and overseas as well. The third element was to improve our product range, invest in our product range, and make sure that we continue to have leading products.
What I'm going to talk about is a little bit about the progress we've made on that and the impact of that, how it gives us some clues about the future and what the future might look like. I've tried not to use any of the slides that all of you will have seen from the full year results. It's, you don't have to go to sleep quite yet. We took the cost base of our business, and in about five months we took AUD 11 million out of the operating cost base of our business. Much of that was people in North America and in Australia in particular. I've been through that, unfortunately in my career. I've been through people reduction programs forever.
I started in the United Kingdom when unemployment was 14%-15%. When you laid somebody off, you wondered whether they'd ever work again. In fact, some didn't. What's really pleasing in the environment we're in at the moment at least is that when somebody leaves the business, they probably walk out on a Friday and then they walk into another job on the Monday. The business is much more efficient and capable as a result of the cost reduction program that we've gone through. Of that AUD 11 million, we invested AUD 3 million of that into product development and other activities, and AUD 8 million of that went through and into the bottom line of the business and drove some of the improved profitability last year.
That's essentially done as an activity. All we need to do is just make sure we keep it that efficient. I talked a year ago about advanced manufacturing, and I've kind of changed my wording on that a little bit now to think about manufacturing cost leadership. One of the things that I've known about manufacturing all through my career is that there are no prizes for being an inefficient manufacturing operation. It does you no good whatsoever to be more costly than the competition. It either drives down your margins or it drives down your win rates, or it puts you out of business in the end. What we're doing is striving for cost leadership.
I think we've made tremendous progress, but also on a journey to much more of that. Top left-hand corner. I realized that in Austin and Australia alone, we were going out and buying steel around 30x a year. So that's 2, 3 x a month, we would go out and place a steel order. Relatively small steel orders and typically with stockists. What we chose to do was to aggregate our annual demand and go out twice a year. Our annual demand initially for Australia, and then we brought in Indonesia quite quickly. We brought in the Indonesian demand as well. Now that sounds pretty simple, right?
If you think about going and doing your weekly shop and you think about, now, I've got to shop for the next six months, you've got to have a really clear perspective on what you need over the next six months. Who's going to come and visit, and what you're going to cook and what you're going to do over the next six months in order to get that right. Otherwise, all that happens is you keep doing top up buy. You bought things you're never going to use, and you have to keep doing top ups. The same thing goes with getting that right for manufacturing, and you have to know what steel you're going to buy.
It's, you know, steel comes in many sizes and many types, and so it brings some real complexity and that's why we were buying steel so often. We went into a process of aggregating our demand in Australia and in Indonesia, and now go out to buy steel around about 2 or 3x a year, but much bigger buys. What that's allowed us to do is not buy from a stockist, but buy directly from the mills. If I just give you an indication of the cost benefit of that, quite often we will pay. If we go to a stockist, we will pay AUD 6,000 a ton for steel. If we go to a mill, we buy that same steel for less than AUD 3,000 a ton.
Now, if you imagine that steel is half of our cost base and you can halve the cost of that steel, then the opportunity that you have to drive cost effectiveness in your business is huge. If you can do that in a unique way, that is something that we can do in Austin that other people can't do because they're a much smaller business, then it gives us a natural competitive advantage. It gives us a big element of that cost leadership that we're looking for. Now, we're not there yet. We're just about to bring South America into that equation, and then we will bring North America in as well. This prediction of what steel we need for the future is pretty tough.
You get it wrong, you make mistakes, sometimes you underbuy and sometimes you overbuy, and that will take some time to settle down. Nonetheless, we are on a pathway and on a journey, that will make a significant difference to our business. If you look at the top right, a couple of things I think that we should justifiably be very proud of is the US business, really took on a challenge last year to improve their manufacturing efficiency. They've been a business that has typically achieved 11% or 12% EBITDA numbers for many, many years. The same business with the same people doing the same thing, last year achieved an EBITDA level of over 20%.
They did that by carving 30% man-hours out of their operational base, a real focus on getting 30% more efficient, and they did that over a period of about five or six months, of reducing the cost of steel suppliers and getting their overheads down as well. It's a really first-class effort. In Indonesia as well, we've seen good efficiency improvements in Indonesia as well. Now, in Indonesia, those efficiency improvements in labor are not so financially important in the sense that cost of labor is a much smaller proportion in Indonesia than it is somewhere else. But it is important in terms of being able to use people more effectively in the organization, so you're not swamping the factory with people because of your inefficiency.
In Chile last year, we had our first real operational profit in that business. I would say forever. I'm not sure if that's true because I haven't got a result forever. Certainly if you go back five or six years, it's the first time we've had a proper profit out of that business where we've allocated all the cost of that business rather than hold them in the center, and then we look at how efficient that business has been. That's been very pleasing. Advanced manufacturing has really. One of the focuses we had for advanced manufacturing was improve the quality out of Indonesia.
Quality is always important in our business, but it's particularly important in Indonesia for us because the future I have for Indonesia is to be the core or the hub of our manufacturing operations globally. That is to say, we will build as much as we can in kits or full assemblies or sub-assemblies in Indonesia and deliver those into Australia, into America, where we not only have high labor rates, but real problems in getting hold of people and retaining people. We all know about the Western Australian story associated with that. It's if anything slightly worse in Queensland, in Mackay, and it's just as bad in Wyoming, where we have our U.S. operations. Everywhere across the operations, including Antofagasta in Chile, in actual fact we've got real problems on labor.
If we can get the quality of our operations in Indonesia up to an international standard, which we strive to do, then that becomes seamless as being able to bring goods out of Indonesia and into those other operations. I think we've made tremendous strides on that this year. I said we wanted the third point of the triangle, if you remember, was product leadership. We've launched two new products this year. I'd like to thank Apple, who invest tens of millions of dollars in thinking through their advertising strategy. We've lifted their strategy, and this is now our lightest ever truck tray. It's not our best ever iPhone, it's our lightest ever truck tray.
That's a true statement, of course, because why would you build another one that's heavier than the last one? In the same way that that's true of an iPhone. It is our lightest ever truck tray. For Rio Tinto, we were able to give them 7.3 tons more carrying capacity per tray, just on the back of taking that weight out. Now, what that really means to Rio Tinto is that's AUD 2.8 million per tray per annum they get additional revenue through. Multiply that by 400 trays and you're in the billion-dollar kind of category for the cost saving to them.
These are really significant numbers when you're paying, you know, $350,000 for a tray, but you save a customer $2.8 million a year and you can multiply that up. You can see why that's important to a customer. Also, buckets. We've launched a new series of high-performance buckets this year. These are what are known as linerless buckets. Instead of putting wear liner kits on the inside, which is a lot of weight and dangerous to cut them out at the end of the operations, you put that weight in to stop the bucket from wearing. But as I say, you put 5 tons of material in, that's 5 tons of less carrying capacity.
What we've done here is produced a linerless bucket, which means that the structure of the bucket is made out of a better material and constructed in a different way, so you actually don't need the liners at all. Although I will say some of the miners want a linerless bucket, and then they want to put liners in it, but takes time. Some of this stuff come out at the annual report and I'm going to flip through this quite quickly. But what does all that mean? You know, we're 12 months into this, or we were 12 months into this at the end of the period. What does that all mean?
Well, we've seen our EBITDA profitability jump as a result of, primarily as a result of those cost savings I've talked about, the AUD 8 million that we took through cost a little bit in the manufacturing area last year from an average that was sort of in that 9%-10% level previously to 16%. That feels good. We've also got our return on equity up to 19% from what was around 9% or 10% before. Now, the reason why that's important is that one of the ways we try to differentiate this business from a normal mining services business is to say this is essentially a capital light business. Now we don't invest a lot of capital. We don't buy a lot of yellow goods.
We don't have hundreds of millions of AUD of capital on our balance sheet. We have relatively straightforward factories and equipment that goes in those factories. As a result of that, we have a relatively low capital investment. Therefore, once we get the profitability right, we get a really good return on equity. We've seen our order book grow. Our order book at the beginning of FY 2023, this current financial year, was 74% better than when we started in FY 2022. In fact, we're a couple of months into the year, two and a half months into the year, and the whole of our first six months of order book is now completely covered and we're well into the second half as well.
I can remember being four and a half, five months into the first half of last year, and we still were only at about 92% of our first half was covered by order book. We're in a great position from order book coverage as well. Our win rate has stayed high. We've gone in Australia, for instance, from a win rate around about 40% to a win rate that's now above 80%. That's been about focusing on the strategy of how to win rather than just peeling out offers to mining companies. That's been a real sea change for us and helps our predictability around steel purchases and those kinds of things. Buckets produced. This is a relative scale, not an actual scale, so it wasn't one bucket.
It's set at one, and then we've increased the number of buckets by about 4.5x from FY21. The reason for that is partially more focus and partially about product launch of the new HP bucket, which has gone down particularly well. I'll talk a little bit later about buckets going forward. The last point is that our net debt has been coming down over several years. We've managed to continue that trend as we go forward. You know, I think a pretty solid set of numbers as we go into FY 2023. Right. What can we expect next?
Boringly, I have to say, it's really about more of the same, and it's more of the same in most parts because what we've done so far is to get the ball rolling, but the ball hasn't got to its end game yet. What we're doing through 2023 and into 2024 will be really about extracting those benefits that I've already talked about. If I look at the cost base, we will just maintain the cost base. That's kind of a, you know, commitment we have to make sure we keep the cost base at level. That does create some strains. I can tell you, every week someone tells me how they can't possibly operate with that amount of overhead.
I have certain sympathies for some people from time to time when they say that. It's important to our business that, you know, if we're going to invest more in an overhead, we do that on the basis of a bigger revenue base, not on the basis of just increasing our cost. One of the things I know about business, it's really easy to put cost in and really hard to get it back out again. The discipline of maintaining that cost base is something we'll maintain this year. The next thing is manufacturing cost leadership. I was told the other day that we are the tenth biggest buyer in the world of high-hard quench-and-tempered steel.
This is the basic wear steel that we use in our business. The tenth largest in the world. Now, when you think that the others are made up of, you know, a $100 billion company like Caterpillar, Liebherr, Hitachi, Komatsu, those kind of companies, right? That's actually a very strong position for us to be in. Our buying power is now becoming quite significant, and this is why we're able to buy steel at a lower cost than our competitors. That's a really important issue for us to bake in. We're not there yet. We're still making mistakes where we haven't got the right material for a particular product.
We go out and we have to buy it on the market, and it costs us $6,000 a ton or $7,000 or $8,000 a ton rather than $3,000 a ton. That still happens. We run out of material. We don't have the right material. We've still got a lot of finessing to do in all of that, and we haven't brought those benefits down to South America yet. We're in the process of doing that now. We're doing our first buy for South America now, and we haven't brought that to North America. A bit more difficult in North America 'cause of trade tariffs, but nonetheless, we haven't brought that to North America.
There's a rich opportunity there as we get better at this and we get more focused on it, and we're more accurate with what we're doing. We're going to see more benefits as a result of us being the tenth biggest Q&T steel buyer in the world. Site efficiency improvements. I think I'm going to talk about some disappointments in a second, but Australia, we need to do more in Australia. I'll come back to that in just a second. That's a very big focus for this year. The last thing is, as I said before, is continuing to focus on Indonesia. Now, when I started, one of the things we talked about was the possibility of opening up a low-cost manufacturing center in Mexico.
What we actually found was, when we studied it, that if we used Indonesia as a low-cost center, we could actually deliver into North America and Canada cheaper out of Indonesia than we can out of Mexico. Which is really surprising when you think that you're going to move stuff, you know, from one side of the planet to the other. The reason why it's cheaper is that when you move from Indonesia, it's sea freight, which is pretty cheap, relatively cheap. When you go from Mexico to Canada, it's road freight, and that's relatively expensive, particularly when you're crossing two borders and multiple states. That led us to the conclusion that Batam can become the manufacturing hub for this business. Now, we've only just touched the surface on this, so far.
We are bringing sub-assemblies down from Indonesia and building them into our truck trays in Australia today. We're not doing that in North America. We're only doing it in a few areas in Australia so far. Part of the reason for that is we've become a bit of a victim of our own success in Indonesia, in that Indonesia is now bursting at the seams in work out of Asia, let alone trying to make stuff for Australia and North America. We kind of had to just back off a little bit.
Now that didn't worry me too much because shipping costs have been at all-time highs over the last 12 months as a result of some of the discontinuities we've seen around economies around the world and disrupted by the war in Europe. But as shipping costs come down and as we start to get on top of extra capacity that we're bringing on in Indonesia, we'll start to push forward a bit harder with Batam. The point about this is for us to keep laser focused on the strategy and where we're going with this rather than to allow it to sort of fall into the background. So it becomes an important part of what we continue to do this year.
I don't normally put slides like this up, 'cause I like to pretend not all in the garden is rosy and fantastic. Occasionally, I feel like a mea culpa. I don't know, I was on an airplane coming back from Batam, and I must have been in a particularly miserable mood and felt like we should be open about some of the things we didn't get right this year. One of those has been Australia, and that's been a real disappointment for me in that, you know, there's four wheels on our particular wagon and one of them is pretty wobbly at the moment, and that's been in Australia. It started out with, you know, COVID.
COVID came late to Western Australia, as we know, and the impact of that was probably a year or 18 months later than we saw it in North America and China. That started to get some problems. As we got through that, labor turnover was very high, and that exacerbated those problems. We have been hit with some input cost charges, so we have more fixed price contracts in Australia than in most places. When steel prices doubled last year through supply chain issues centered around China, not that we buy steel from China, but that had an impact. Tariffs in the U.S. and then the war, 100% increase in our steel price.
Many of our customers, we could change that, but one or two of our customers, important customers in this country, we were unable to pass on those costs. We also became a victim of our bucket success, and that was a business that made a few buckets a year, suddenly was making dozens of buckets a year. That transformation inside the business just didn't go very well at all. As a result of that, it was a costly year for us last year, and we're still living the dream associated with that, with those problems at the moment. That's an issue we've got to continue to fight through.
The other issue was that we started up a facility in Canada and I take full personal blame for this in that we set this up. It didn't really fit our strategy in so much as the business in Canada was really about a support, a rebuild, bucket rebuild business and support business and a final assembly business for our truck trays. What we found was we just weren't really in the right geographic position and didn't have the right reputation in order to compete. We took a very rapid decision to shut it down. Now, it's one thing getting things wrong, sometimes you got to kind of walk away and not allow that to linger. We closed that down.
That cost us a little bit of money last year when we went through that process. A good learning point for us. I'll just finish on our recent acquisition with Mainetec. You'll see that we recently paid AUD 19.6 million for Mainetec. We announced on Tuesday of this week that deal had completed, and we paid the first tranche of AUD 11.1 million to the owners of Mainetec for that business, and we've got further payments to make in the future. Why we did this was that we were a bit player in the bucket business, and I wanted to be as strong and dominant in the bucket business as we are in the trade business, both here in Australia and overseas.
The way we've done that is to augment our bucket range. We have a standard bucket, which is not shown here. We have a high-performance bucket, which is the red and gray one. We have these premium buckets that come out of Mainetec, the Hulk and the Armadillo bucket. We're a bit more conservative with our naming conventions. We use JCHBT, and they have an Armadillo. But nonetheless, there are sites in Rio Tinto, for instance, where they swear by the Hulk bucket and they won't have anything else on the site. There are other sites that swear by the Austin bucket and they don't want anything else on the site.
That's great because nearly all the buckets on the Rio Tinto sites, as an example, are either Mainetec or Austin buckets. We're in a great position there. The customer base is as blue-chip as you can imagine with Rio Tinto and Fortescue and Glencore and Peabody. Really good row of mining companies taking those buckets. You know, I've just graphically shown that that will then, of course, with Mainetec, lead to a higher number of buckets. We're expecting to see around about 100 buckets a year this year turning into FY 2024, that kind of level. That's a long way from 16 that we were producing a couple of years ago.
What Mainetec does for us, it brings us the Hulk bucket. This is a premium bucket. Sells for about $150,000-$200,000 more than our most expensive bucket. The market accepts that because of the benefits it gives. It lasts longer, it uses less dig energy. As a result of that, the Mainetec business was growing for three years in a row before our acquisition at 26% per annum. They were clearly doing something right. The Armadillo bucket is a dipper bucket. Very large bucket. These are $2 million a piece type buckets.
It's a completely different segment, something that we are involved in, Austin is involved in, but we didn't have any product leadership in at all. We just copied basically the OEM design. That's all we did. Therefore it was always a price competition. Mainetec have produced a system that is demonstrably better than the OEM buckets, most of which haven't been upgraded for 20-odd years. As a result of that, can charge premium price. We believe that the market in the Americas, they're a dominant producer of the back-end systems for these buckets in Australia. We believe the market in the Americas, Chile, North America, sorry, USA and Canada, is worth about $ 500 million a year of bucket replacements, spare parts and rebuilds.
It's a huge market for us to go after and one that we've got a pinprick really good position now in Australia and a pinprick in the Americas that we are going after already. What that will allow us to do is that bigger bucket business will now allow us to invest more in being product and being a product leader. I think that's the kind of synergistic benefit you get with being a bigger player, is you get to make more money and as a result making more money, you can invest more in. This is the guidance update. We've provided guidance for the Austin business at the beginning of the year. This is an update associated with the acquisition of Mainetec.
On the 5th of October, we paid the AUD 11.1 million of the original fee. Revenue for the nine-month period. When we did the acquisition, we talked about a run rate of AUD 40 million per annum. We're actually only going to get nine months of the year because of the acquisition delay. We should see about AUD 30 million of revenue this year, and that will equate to about AUD 4.6 million worth of EBITDA. We've taken a relatively conservative view about that because there's a lot of this is a new business for us. We don't know it that well. There's a lot of things got to happen in order to get to the end of the year.
I think if you think about the return that we're going to see for that AUD 4.6 million, given that we won't be paying any tax on that, it's going to be a very strong cash return. The synergy savings around costs are already well underway. We are already shutting our Mainetec facility in Henderson, where they produce buckets, and we're transferring that to Kewdale, where we are creating a dedicated bucket manufacturing operation that will only produce buckets, both Austin Buckets and Mainetec buckets, at a much higher rate than we've ever seen before. That's part of the plan of trying to get Australia back on its feet, to separate out the trays from the buckets and have a bucket focus and have a tray focus.
By the end of October, we should have Henderson closed. Its re-lease is on the first of November to somebody else, so we lose the lease liability, and that should save us about AUD 700,000 a year. We're well along with that. Material and labor will take us a little bit longer for the reasons that I've said. It will take us a while to get the right stocks and materials, but still, deliveries at the moment for Q&T can be 9-12 months from order to placement. If you take my shopping example, that's, you know, not only are you thinking about shopping forward for 12 months, but it's actually next year that you're trying to shop for. That's why it's complicated.
It'll take a little bit longer for some of that to really become a 100% impact on Mainetec. But nonetheless, we'll get some of that this year. I think the last point is that when we talked on acquisition about the synergies of this business, we didn't talk at all about revenue synergies. We only talked about cost synergies and our justifications on cost synergies. I actually believe that the cost synergies are kind of really clear and easy to see, and we'll deliver those, I'm sure.
I actually believe that over time, the revenue synergies around being able to take our bucket business into North America, dumper business into North America, the Mainetec impact, I think over the next two or three years, the synergies out of the revenue-based synergies will be greater than the cost-based synergies that we're talking about. Just harder to quantify right now. That's it, I think. Was that 10 minutes? Was that about right?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks, David. As you can see, he's pretty passionate. This now brings up the formal part of the meeting. The items of business to be considered at this meeting have been listed in the notice of meeting. The notice of meeting has been available to shareholders on the 12th of September, 2022 , and I'll take it as read. Before we consider items of business, there are a number of procedural matters I wish to draw your attention to. In the interest of transparency, I intend to call a poll on all meeting resolutions. I will discuss each resolution in turn and then conduct a poll after the last resolution. Each resolution and proxy count for each resolution will be displayed on the screen when that resolution is being considered.
I am holding undirected proxies in my capacity as chair, and it's my intention to vote all proxies in favor of all resolutions. Any directed proxies that are not voted at the time of meeting will automatically default to me. As chair of the meeting, and I'm required to vote those proxies as directed. Rod Soames, who's in the back there from Computershare, has agreed to act as returning officer. At the completion of the poll, Computershare staff will collect your voting cards and tally up the votes. The persons entitled to vote on the poll are all shareholders, representatives, and attorneys of shareholders and proxy holders who hold green admission cards. On the reverse of your admission card is your voting paper and instructions.
Yellow admission cards have been issued to non-voting shareholders who are entitled to speak at the meeting, but are not entitled to vote on the poll. White admission cards have been issued to visitors who are not entitled to speak at the meeting or to vote on the poll. If there's any person present who believes they're entitled to vote, but has not registered to vote, please raise your hand and a representative from Computershare will assist you. Okay. I shall now proceed with the business in the order as it is listed in the notice of meetings. Questions on any item may be raised during the consideration of that item. Please state your name and ask your question. The first item of business deals with the financial statements and reports.
These have been released publicly and forwarded to the shareholders who requested them and are now laid before the meeting. These financial statements and reports are for the financial year ended 30th of June 2022. This is not a resolution and no vote is required on it. On that note, I now invite questions or comments from the shareholders in relation to the financial statements and reports and more generally about the management of the company. As I've advised, representatives from the company's auditors are in attendance to answer any questions shareholders may ask, may wish to direct to them in relation to the conduct of the audit or in relation to the preparation of the financial statements. Are there any questions? No questions. We'll move on to the second item of business.
The next item of business asks shareholders to adopt the company's remuneration report for the year ended 30th June 2022. The remuneration report is included in pages 27-32 of their annual report, and that has been made available to shareholders. Unless there is an objection, I will take the motion as being read and refer you to the screen for details of the proxies received for this resolution. While this is a non-binding advisory vote of shareholders, the views and comments of shareholders will certainly be taken into account by directors when further considering remuneration matters. I note that a voting exclusion applies to this resolution as set out in the notice of motion. The board recommends that shareholders vote in favor of this resolution. As I mentioned earlier, voting on this resolution will be by way of poll and conducted after the last resolution.
Are there any questions on the remuneration report? No. I will now move to the next resolution. As this resolution involves my re-election, I will now hand over to Chris Indermaur to conduct this part of the meeting.
Thank you, Jim. The next item of business is the re-election of Jim Walker. Details of Jim's qualifications and experience are set out in the notice of meeting in the company's 2022 annual report. Jim has been Chairman of the company since July 2016. Unless there is an objection, I will take the motion as being read and refer you to the screen for details of the proxies received for this resolution. The board recommends that shareholders vote in favor of this resolution. Voting on this resolution will be by way of a poll and conducted after the last resolution. Are there any questions in relation to this resolution? If there are no more questions, I'll hand back to Jim to hear the remainder of the meeting.
Thank you, Chris. The next item of business is the election of Linda O'Farrell. Linda joined the board as a Non-executive Director on the 1st of September 2022, and automatically retires as Director at this meeting in accordance with the company's constitution, and being eligible, offers herself for re-election as a director. Linda is a Senior Executive with extensive experience in the global resources sector. Details of Linda's qualification and experience are set out in the notice of motion. We are delighted to have Linda join the board at an exciting time in the company's evolution. Linda brings significant expertise in human resources, people, and culture, and her experience working in global mining sector will be an asset to the Austin board as we continue to manage teams and grow our business across multiple jurisdictions.
Unless there's any objection, I will now take the motion as being read and refer you to the screen for the details of the proxies received for this resolution. The board recommends that you vote in favor of this resolution. Voting in this resolution will be by way of poll and conducted after the last resolution. Are there any questions in relation to this resolution? No. I will now move to the next resolution. The next item of business seeks approval to increase the maximum aggregate of annual remuneration of non-executive directors by AUD 100,000, being an increase from AUD 500,000 per annum to AUD 600,000 per annum.
The board has reviewed the current maximum aggregate fee limit for non-executive directors, which has remained unchanged at the current level of AUD 500,000 per annum since it was last increased at the company's 2012 annual general meeting. This was almost ten years ago. The board has not intended to fully utilize the entire increase in the maximum aggregate fee in the short term. Rather the adjustment to the maximum aggregate fee limit is sought to A, create capacity to allow for the appointment of further non-executive directors as when that is appropriate in the life cycle of the company. B, ensure that the company maintains the ability to pay non-executive directors remuneration at levels consistent with market rates and as necessary to attract and retain directors of a high caliber.
Additional information regarding the remuneration paid to each director for the financial year ended 30th June 2022, and the company's approach to the remuneration of non-executive directors is set out in the remuneration report contained in the company's 2022 annual report. Further details are set out in the notice of motion, including a voting exclusion statement in respect to resolution four. Given the interest of the non-executive directors in this resolution, the board makes no recommendation to resolution four. The proxy numbers are now shown on the screen behind me. Voting on this resolution will be by way of poll and conducted at the last resolution. Are there any questions in relation to this resolution? This is the last item on the agenda.
If there are no more questions, we will now conduct the poll on the resolutions one to four. Please now complete your voting cards and ensure you print your name and sign where indicated. When we have finished, please lodge it in the ballot box being circulated by the Computershare. If it's not being collected by hand, please let the returning officer or any Computershare representatives present know if anyone has any queries or requires assistance to complete the voting card. All good? Okay. It appears the voting process has been completed. If there's any individual present who has not yet completed their voting card, please let the staff know. I now declare the poll closed. As mentioned earlier, the results of the poll will be available shortly and will be announced on the ASX and the company's website.
Recording of the webcast will also be available on the Austin website following the AGM. Thank you for your attendance at this meeting and your interest in the company. On behalf of the board, we look forward to your continued support. I now declare the meeting closed. I think we now need to go to webcast to see if there's any questions there.
No questions, Mr. Chair.
No questions?
No questions.
Okay. I declare the meeting completely closed. Let's catch up and have a chat outside and a cup of coffee and some biscuits and etc. Thanks everyone for attending. Very much appreciated. Once again, could just say thank you to Katina and the staff at Austin for organizing this today. It doesn't seem like much when you stand up here, but I know what goes behind it, a fair bit, so thank you. Thanks everyone for attending.