I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Joe Coote, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and welcome everybody to the Bubs FY 2026 results presentation. My name's Joe Coote. I'm joined here this morning by Chris Rowe, our CFO, and we will take you through our results. If we could tab, please. If we could tab again, please. Bubs acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands on which we operate. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Tab, please. As I mentioned, my name's Joe Coote. I'm the CEO at Bubs. I've been in the role for 11 of the 12 months of the FY 2026 financial year, so it gives me pleasure to be here today to present our results.
I am joined by our newly appointed CFO, Chris Rowe. Chris Rowe joins the business with extensive experience across the markets that we operate in, particularly most recently in the U.S. He has many years' experience in dairy and particularly in the infant formula subsector. He's made a very strong start. It's been a very busy few months for Chris as we've been working on closing FY 2026. Great to have Chris on the team, and you'll hear from him in a moment. In terms of the agenda today, I'll start with a summary of the results.
I'll then hand over to Chris. He'll take us through the financial overview. Chris will then hand back to me, and I'll go through some regional performance summaries, a bit of an update on our strategy, outlook for the future, and then we will take Q&A to round things out. Thank you. If we could tab, please. Really wanted to start with our purpose this morning. It's a very simple purpose. Everybody can read it. What I wanted to reflect on is it's something that really resonates deeply with our consumers, particularly our moms.
Our moms put trust in our brand to, in some cases, provide sole source of nutrition for their new infants. It's a very critical time for those moms, and we at Bubs do a great job of that. This purpose drives our team. It rallies us each day to do what we need to do to work with our farmers and get product right through onto shelf, so when moms need that product for their babies, they have it. It's understood and appreciated by our retail partners, not just in Australia, but around the world. Particularly our U.S. retailers understand this, and they are very passionate about supporting us in delivering this purpose.
It is also respected by the regulators, particularly in the last period as we have been engaging with the FDA. It is something that they often reflect on. I think for this audience this morning, in terms of our FY 2026 result, it is of particular relevance. As we look at the year, a lot of the numbers that we have presented come back to this purpose, and I will draw two references. Firstly, our revenue. Delivering this purpose has allowed us to grow a business from Australia that now has delivered AUD 112 million of revenue.
We have businesses outside of Australia in the U.S. more than three times as big as the business in Australia. Finally, with FY 2026, it has been a year where there has been some external headwinds, and as we have looked at how we have spent our money, we have been very careful to go back to purpose, to think about our consumers, and ensure that in the first half, we maintained our presence on shelf. We did incur some additional cost to service those customers and ensure we were there for those moms.
In the second half, additionally, across our industry globally, there has been a regulatory reset. Again, we did invest additional money to live this purpose, and we believe it serves us moving forward. It grows brand equity because people trust our brand. If we could tab. If we get into the numbers now, I know everyone is waiting for the numbers. If we start on the top left there, as I mentioned, very proud to confirm that we have delivered just shy of AUD 112 million of revenue. That is up 9% across the group, but very pleasingly, up 24% in the U.S.
I am just going to move around and move across to the right. As I mentioned, and I will talk more in a moment about some of the reasons we had to put some additional money into our COGS, very disciplined execution of some challenges. The net of that meant that our gross margin was 39.8% in the year. That then pretty much dropped through to the bottom line. Our reported EBITDA is -1.8, which is within the guided range. Pleasingly, if you move across to the bottom left, that calculates to an underlying EBITDA of 5.3, which does show very encouraging growth year-over-year.
While we acknowledge and recognize the -1.8, it is significant that we do see that underlying strength in the business. If we move across just to the bullets, there are really two areas where we have needed to deploy very disciplined execution. The first one is around external disruptions. We have had a lot of volatility in the U.S. with tariffs. It has been widely publicized, and most things you hear in the media are true. We have spent AUD 3.6 million on those tariffs in FY 2026. Secondarily, we have navigated a regulatory reset.
This has been a global reset, and that started on the 5th of January. I can remember the day. We have been working with the regulators, with our customers to ensure that we stay on shelf for our moms, for our consumers, and for our babies. In the second half, that cost us just under AUD 4 million. In terms of building for growth, we started FY 2025 with a very low inventory level of just over AUD 20 million. With an aspiration to sell AUD 120 million of sales and a four-to-six-month lead time in our supply chain, we really understood very quickly that we needed to restock our supply chain.
We prioritized the U.S. It is our key growth market. It is our highest margin market. As Chris will talk about shortly, we exit the year at AUD 36.3 million of inventory. That is healthy inventory. That is the targeted inventory that we have planned for. As I said, we have had disciplined execution in taking that inventory up to that number. To do that and to protect service aligned with our purpose, as I mentioned, in the U.S., we had to air freight some product. That cost us AUD 3 million predominantly in the first half. That allowed us to protect service.
'That allowed us to be there for our mums and their babies, and that allows us to grow our brand equity and our reputation. Additionally, as we have grown and become a little bit more sophisticated as a business, we have taken on some additional capability. We have some new folks that have joined the business. We have moved some key roles up to the U.S. We have a CMO based up in the U.S. We have a chief commercial officer based up in the U.S. for that region. Very experienced ladies who come into the business with very relevant experience and relationships into the trade and doing a great job.
Finally, our marketing. In the year, we increased our marketing 21% higher than our revenue growth, and that is to show confidence in our brand. As we invest in marketing and we are delivering better content, we are very happy that that will set us up for future growth as we move forward. Just to round out, we also came to the market on the 26th of March with a growth strategy. Pleased to report, and I will talk later, some more tangible examples of how we are progressing that strategy, particularly some of the value that it is delivering.
It gives us clarity and allows us to be really clear on how we execute our purpose. Finally, I know it is something that everybody is eagerly awaiting, is the status with our FDA approval. We have progressed significantly. We are in the final review stage, and we are very confident that we will receive the FDA notification. With that said, I will hand over to Chris to take us through the numbers.
Thanks, Joe. Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here. Turning first to our income statement. A key highlight is our revenue growth up 9.2% year-on-year to just under AUD 112 million. That was driven, as Joe mentioned, by increase in sales in the U.S. of 24% year-on-year. We prioritized supply to the U.S. throughout the year. That also resulted in us incurring air freight, in a program that is now finished, but it really did enable us to achieve that level of growth in our critical growth market. When you turn to our gross profit, while revenue was up, our gross profit was down 9.4% to AUD 44.5 million.
That really reflected the impact of the air freight program that we talked about, regulatory challenges and changes that occurred throughout the year, and a combination of U.S. specific and non-EU tariffs that impacted our cost of goods as well. Our operating expenses were up 5% to AUD 48.8 million, and that reflected an increase in our marketing spend that we incurred in order to activate our brand and drive our sales program. Overall, our opex revenue ratio saw a small improvement to 44% compared to 45% prior year.
When we look at our underlying EBITDA, we were at AUD 5.3 million, demonstrating strong underlying earnings improvement and operating leverage to a degree. That was despite incurring air freight, tariffs, regulatory-related changes throughout the course of the year. The bridge on the bottom left shows the transition from our reported AUD 1.8 million EBITDA loss to the AUD 5.3 million underlying EBITDA. We move forward.
Touching next on our balance sheet, we had a clear plan throughout the year to reinvest in inventory to support the growth of our business. We have a long physical supply chain, and that requires working capital support. That saw our inventory increase AUD 16.2 million throughout the year to AUD 36.3 million. That inventory increase was funded by a combination of cash and debt. Our operating cash flow closely reflects and matches that change in inventory level.
So very much a plan that we have executed to a level that we are very happy with and have now got to a position that is about right to support our business as we go forward. We could move forward one. As I said, the inventory rebuild in our mind is largely complete.
Levels of inventory relative to sales are back to around about where they were two years prior. We are comfortable with that level of inventory. We think it is the right level to support our growth ambitions given out the length of our supply chain. We really only see inventory moving upwards in line with sales as we progress forwards. With that, I will hand back to Joe.
Thank you, Chris. If we could tab, please. I'll now take us through a summary of our four regions. I'll start with the U.S., where we delivered AUD 65.8 million of net revenue. That now represents 59% of our total revenue line. It's been a great growth story for us. We're very proud of the team. Jasmin, who leads the team out there, does a great job. The picture there on the left shows the coverage that we have now across the U.S. So we're in all 50 states.
Pleasingly, we're in the six retail formats that we choose to be in. So with Amazon, we have a direct-to-consumer capability, where anybody in the U.S. can source our product. We're also in the mass format. We're in grocery. We've recently joined the club format, where we're now ranged at Sam's Club, and we have a particular unique SKU for that format. We've recently come into the drug format, which is targeting convenience, and for those moms who may run out of formula out of hours, that's a great channel for them to ensure that we can keep in supply and live our purpose.
Then finally, we're doing very well on the specialty channel. So we're very happy with our ranging now. We've met our targets of over 10,000 stores, and now it's all about driving velocities in each of those stores. In terms of the macro market conditions, the area that we play in is premium natural, so it's a sub-segment of the total category. So within the total category, we're 1%, which in such a big market is actually significant. But in the premium natural, high margin, better-for-you sub-sector, we're actually 8%, and that's something we're very proud of.
Additionally, in the goat sub-segment, which is a sub-segment to premium natural, we are 20%. There is no goat infant formula produced in the U.S., and so our goat product does particularly well, and we're very proud of the growth that we've experienced there. So in terms of turning the ranging of over 10,000 stores now into velocities and more revenue, it comes down to marketing. So we've done some great work on repositioning our brand. We really are proudly of Australia. We talk about being gentle functionality for the baby, and we're a clean label product.
And all these attributes are very on-trend for our targeted consumers and their babies. We've been shifting our spend, looking for where we can track these mothers down and have them know who we are, and then come into the store and try our product and become users of our product. Some of the more contemporary platforms we use are Reddit and TikTok. So we're very interested in TikTok, and we're very pleased with how that platform is driving our brand. Our click-through rate on Amazon's up 20%.
We have been with Amazon for a number of years, but we're very pleased with our business there as well. And so overall in the U.S., we're very happy. We've navigated the tariffs. We're on shelf, and we're really set for what should be a great future. If we tab forward. Our second biggest market is China, and so in China, we deliver AUD 21.4 million of revenue, about 19.1% of our total. A very important market. Important to note that both these markets are outside of our home market, Australia. There is a graveyard of Australian brands that have had the ambition to take themselves offshore.
Our U.S. market is 3x bigger than Australia, and our China market is bigger than our Australian market as well. We are really a business that is globalizing, and our brand and our product, being proudly Australian, is resonating with those mums in those different geographies. In China, there has been a lower birth rate, but the premiumization within the total category is positive, and particularly for the English label. We are happy with the progress our brand is making. We have a great team in China led by a gentleman called Jackie.
Within China, the regulatory reset has been something that we have navigated with a lot of other industry players. The product flows now are normalizing, and we have reset, and we are, as we get through H1, feeling good about the momentum in China. In terms of our portfolio, China is a market where our core offer is infant, and we sell through the offline-to-online channel, where in the year, we have grown to over 1,800 stores, and our sell-out has increased by 30%. Some really stellar numbers there.
We have historically been in the CBEC channel, which is the cross-border e-commerce, and our sell-out in that channel was up 34%. You might note that both those sell-out numbers are over 30%, and that was digesting what was a little bit of an inventory imbalance that we came into the year with. The team has navigated that, and our inventory now is balanced in FY 2027, and we are moving forward positively. Additionally, TikTok. Our profile of consumers tend to be those types of mums that are consuming a lot of digital, and TikTok is their preferred platform.
We are investing not just in the U.S., but also in China with TikTok. The other thing I will mention in China is we are very proud of the progress we have made in the adult category. We have a separate brand called CapriLac. Watch this space. We are very positive about the expansion into adult. The lifetime value that we can accrue from an individual consumer in adult is significantly longer. Typically, an infant is in our system for one to two years. The team in China have done great work to expand into bricks and mortar. We are in 100 premium retail outlets. We do really well on the Tmall platform.
We have launched a China label CapriLac product. It is an area that we have strong strategic focus moving forward. We tab our home market. A critically important market for us, Australia, 16.3% disappointed with our result in Australia. Wonderful shot of a farm there. I love showing that shot to our retailers. That is one of our farming partners in Victoria. Beautiful, beautiful set up there with the green grass. Very different particularly to what people expect in the U.S. and China. That of Australia attribute is something that we really accentuate and we are very proud of.
Maybe we take it for granted in Australia, but that is a snapshot of one of our farms. In terms of the market condition, Australia is a market again where the global macro is true and that the birth rates are down, the mass market is challenged. There are some pockets of value. There are some premiumization opportunities. That is where we play.
If we come back to the year though, it has been a little bit of a journey. We have navigated through four steps as I would see it. We entered 2026 with a little bit of negative momentum. We were not spending the money that we would hope to spend on A&P. Some of the content we had to sharpen up, and we spent the first half really looking at recalibrating our brand creative. We have really gone for our purple, our of Australia, and our gentle on the tummy, and our clean label attributes, and it is resonating with our consumers. Once we had the enhanced creative, we upped our A&P spend in the second half to 16%.
What we are seeing now coming out of the year and into FY 2027 in H1 is that we are regaining market share and our brand awareness has increased a total of 10 points, which is very significant. While we are not happy with Australia, we feel positive about the momentum as we come through H1, and we will share more on that in due course. If we could tab, please, to our final geographic segment, which is our rest of world. The rest of world was AUD 6.4 million of revenue, 5.7. It was down 25%. This is where we really had some very significant impacts from the regulatory reset, particularly in the second half.
We did have some challenges in the first half with product availability. One of our large markets, Vietnam, had some changes to their nutritional panels around carbohydrates. We navigated that with that market. In the second half, we did pause in Vietnam. We just really wanted to be sure that we understood the regulatory environment. We took the time to make sure that we protected our consumers in Vietnam, and we will very shortly be relaunching in Vietnam, and we feel positive about that as a market that has huge opportunity. We have got a great distribution partner up in Vietnam as well.
Japan, a little bit similar, suffered a little bit from stock rationing. We were prioritizing markets and, a little bit softer, but they are our two big markets. We also have presence in some other markets, and we do have an ambition to continue to grow our rest of world business. If we could tab, please. Just some words on the strategy. As I mentioned, we shared our strategy with the market on March 26. It is now five months subsequent. What I can say confidently is we are bringing the strategy to life. There is a lot of activity, there is a lot of inputs, but we are driving to outputs.
There is an ROI, there is tangible outputs, and there is a contribution to the growth of the business and to a stronger bottom line. We are doing that through our three strategic pillars. Our first pillar is owned by Annie, our Chief Marketing Officer, and it is really about activating our brand for our consumers. Our second pillar is around building winning portfolios. It is led by our three commercial leaders, Chris in Australia and rest of world, Jasmin up in the U.S., and Jackie in China. It is really about having the products that are on trend with our targeted consumers.
It's about working with the right retailers and the right formats and channels. It's about differentiating ourselves from our competition through price and promotion. It all comes together commercially. Then finally, a large part of what we do, this pillar is led by Richard Paine, our COO, is connecting our farms to our families with our formula. We've done a lot of work in this area, and I'll share some of those examples at the moment.
It is great as someone who's worked for non-Australian businesses for most of my career to be representing Australia and sharing the amazing goodness that we bring in our products from our Australian farming partners and our high-quality manufacturing and supply chain systems. Couple of the enablers I'll talk to is innovation, technology. We're doing some work in AI. We do work very hard on our performance culture.
Ultimately, that's about living our values. If we tab over, couple of examples here in terms of what we're doing in the strategy that will create value for our shareholders in the future. If we start on the left with activate brand and consumer, as I mentioned, we've reweighted our digital presence. We're finding there's some great results from TikTok as an example, and that's an ongoing process. Our CMO, Annie, has built a process to look at that objectively with some technology that looks at the math. We chase the ROI. We go to where our consumers are.
We engage with those consumers so they're aware of who we are. They trial us, and then they stay with us. We've also got some exciting news coming down the pipe with a brand refresh later in the year. We'll share more on that. I'd love to share more today. It's very exciting and it will be something that we'll share in due course. If I move across to building a winning portfolio, it's really about expanding our presence. As I mentioned, Jasmin and the team up in the U.S. have got to over 10,000 stores in all the retail formats that we're targeting. We do have an innovation pipeline. There's a big focus on adult.
I mentioned that in the China update. We do have an aspiration to launch into Canada. We move one step further, a lot of activity in this area with Richard Paine, our COO. We have streamlined and optimized our farm and production network, so we are working more deeply with less partners. We are feeling really good about bringing the goodness of the Australian farms to our markets around the world. In the logistics and manufacturing space, we have delivered hard cash reductions of AUD 1.15 million. That relates to how we're packing containers for export.
It also relates to how we're reducing the number of steps in our manufacturing process, and that's money that's being banked to the bottom line. We've also made commitments to extend our goat herd through our partners in Australia by 70%. We're very confident that we're working with great people there on the farm, and it's a key part of our value proposition. We did talk at the strategy about the future network for growth. We have done a lot of work to understand the options and scenarios between buy, build, and rent. I think we've mapped the options. We've got some preferred scenarios.
There's nothing that I will share today on that, but we have a very clear view of where we will go and when we will go as the triggers in the business call for those additional capacities. Finally, on the enablers. Important that we have strong enablers in terms of living our values at a core, but also some of our operating platforms. We've done a lot of work in safety and quality. Our quality systems have held up very well. I'm very proud of our quality team. All the work we do with the regulators, particularly the FDA, our quality capability is always something they give us credit on.
The audits that we've had have all been successfully navigated, and I really put that down to the strong focus and the capability we have in our quality team. Additionally, in our finance and planning area, our operational planning, financial planning, some of the work that Chris Rowe did before he stepped into the CFO was in that space, and we've strengthened our capability there. The other one I'll mention before I close is just AI. It's everywhere. I'm sure everybody is using it. We have some targeted functional use cases.
Not surprisingly, we're going to where value is. For us, it's procurement. We spend a lot of money on dairy solids and other ingredients, so we've got some activity around procurement. Additionally, in trade spend and marketing, where also we spend a lot of money. They're our two biggest areas, so we're targeting where the value is. At this point in time, we've got targeted use cases, and we're test and learn cycle, and we hope through FY 2027 to do more in that space.
With that, I will ask that we could tab across and start to look at the outlook. It's clear that FY 2026 had some challenges, as Chris and I have highlighted. H1 largely restocking from that very low inventory position. We stayed in stock. We did that for our consumers. H2, we navigated the global regulatory reset. Some of the momentum coming into the year is still building. We hope to see that build through H1. As we have something to share, we will. But the environment has normalized, and the product flows are coming back to normal. In terms of revenue outlook, we are a growth business.
We're very confident in growth. The U.S., as we said, we've got our 10,000 stores. We've got our marketing stepped up. We now need to have the flywheel spin and turn those doors into dollars, and that's something where we do have strong momentum. China, we've got expanded distribution. We have the adult focus, and we've sharpened our marketing, and we feel good about growth in China. Australia, we're continuing to invest. We want to accelerate our recovery. We've got some green shoots of recovery, but we need to see more.
We're very confident that we've got the right strategy in place to see that recovery. Finally, in rest of world, it does remain mixed. We will be relaunching in some markets. Product flows are improving. But they do tend to be the markets that when we're rationing, where we tend to go to the other markets above rest of world. But they are critical markets. There's growth, there's good margin, and so we'll remain focused on those.
Our gross margin is expected to improve and normalize. Chris spoke about that. We have the working capital in place. We have the targeted weeks of inventory in the U.S. in our warehouse. We are in good shape. We can be there for those consumers, and we can fulfill those orders for those retailers. Finally, we will continue to invest in our brand. We have stepped up our percentage of net revenue investment in marketing. We are proudly doing that. We are watching that mindfully. We are ensuring there is an ROI, and more from that as we move forward.
Finally, it is hard to manage a regulator like the U.S. FDA. We do not make commitments on their behalf, but we are in the very final steps. We are very confident that we will come to the market with some news from the FDA in due course. With that said, I will close and ask for 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 two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Today's first question comes from Jonathan Snape at Bell Potter. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hey, guys. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, we can hear you, Jonathan.
Great. Can I just ask around the one-off costs? It looks a little bit bigger than where you were thinking. The big one's probably that AUD 3.9. How do I have to think about that? A, what is it? What was the AUD 3.9 spent on? And B, how do I think about that into FY 2027? Are there still some residual costs in these resets around the U.S. or does it largely flow out next year?
I will take that one. We see those very much as one-off costs. We do not expect to have those sorts of costs flowing into our result in any material form in FY 2027. The nature of the costs are essentially around inventory provisioning. We had a level of inventory write-off in some specific cases as we made sure that all of our product was really what we wanted it to be to meet the needs of our consumers.
Yeah, so we protected our consumers.
Oh, okay.
We've taken those-
Yeah
write-downs, and the flows are returning to normal now with the resets that we've seen from the regulators in the different markets around the world. We feel good about the future, Jonathan, and it's rapidly normalizing.
Okay, so that includes, I think when I looked in the segment notes, there's about AUD 1.5 million in provisioning and inventory write-downs in the inventory note. That's included in that 3.9, is it?
Yes.
Okay. If I look at freight, I can see the landed costs. The difference between freight charging has come down a long way in the stuff that is landing at the moment in the U.S. So that is largely through the system or is there still some legacy inbuilt cog that flows through in 2027 in some of the early parts of the year or is it all washed through now the P&L?
Mostly washed through, but a little bit of legacy. We have enough stock, particularly of the key Bubs Goat Milk Infant Formula in the U.S. that it takes a little while to wash through the system. We finished air freighting in about towards the back end of half two. So there will be a little bit left of that cost sitting in inventory, but it is not going to last long.
Yeah, and physically.
All right. Look, thanks.
All product is now back on the water. If something happened in market, like a competitor went out of stock and we had to surge, we have built the muscle to surge, and we still have positive gross margin. But clearly, as you can see from the data you look at, Jonathan, ocean freight is far, far more lower cost per unit than the air freight. We would only do that if we had to, and we do not plan to.
Yep. Yep, definitely. Look, the marketing investment, I did notice a drop-down in this result. It is a 13.5%, 14% kind of level or 13 and a half I think it was. I think you put a number in there for Australia with the relaunch was a bit higher than that. If we are looking at the U.S., the relaunch in Vietnam, where should sales to marketing kind of sit? It used to be up much closer to 20%. I think there used to be a target floating around of closer to 15%. Is the 15% kind of the right number for a business like this? Or is there a little bit
Yeah
more in that first period?
Yeah. Jonathan, I would say mid-teens. The MBA classes will tell you 10%-12%. I think we are in a category where we have got a shorter customer life cycle. We move those moms through pretty much on an annual basis. So, I would say mid-teens, and we are very committed to investing that A&P, and it varies by market. The big quantum of spend is in the U.S., so I would say mid-teens is where we will be moving forward.
All right, great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. There are no further questions from the teleconference currently. I will hand back to the room to address pre-submitted questions.
Thank you, Rocco. There were a number of investors that had pre-submitted questions, and of that, some of them were governance related, and we passed them onto the chair, Paul Jensen, to take them into consideration with the AGM itself. Sticking to the operational questions. First one, and you have kind of addressed this, Joe, but when will you receive permanent FDA approval, and what is the reason for the delay?
As we have said, we have been working with the FDA in the U.S. now for over four years. It is a long process, but it is a very worthwhile achievement when it is finally granted. We are in the final stages. We have been through the infant growth study, which is the very expensive and time-consuming part of the process. We have had people doing desktop reviews of auditing operational processes.
We have also had FDA inspectors out in Australia auditing physical facilities. That is now wrapping up. We are in regular contact. We are in good standing with the FDA. I have been in the U.S., attended personal meetings. I have attended an industry roundtable with 12 CEOs. We are included in that network now. It is difficult to make a commitment on behalf of a U.S. regulatory agency, and all I can say is that we are wrapping up the final stages, and as a team, we feel very confident that that will be forthcoming.
Thanks, Joe. Next one, AI. Not surprising to see this. Does Bubs intend to use AI to reduce freight and logistics costs?
Yeah, as I said, I gave two examples where our biggest spend buckets are. One of those sub-spend buckets on the procurement side is freight, and particularly around manufacturing costs as well. Yeah, we have deployed AI. We've been working with a U.S. business for about six months, and we are also speaking to some other folks, because what I would say with AI is it's evolving rapidly.
We're staying very flexible. We're curious. We've got very focused use cases in functional areas, and certainly logistics and manufacturing is on the radar. We will continue that focus as we continue through the current financial year.
Thanks, Joe. Turning to the U.S., the competitive landscape. How competitive is the U.S. market, and how many players?
Yeah, look, it's a very competitive market. As is China, as is Australia. This is an interesting category. As I always say, it's a precious category in the sense that those mums are putting sole source of nutrition accountability into a brand. Any retail store, the infant formula is calling for the highest trust out of any product in the whole store. That does tend to attract relatively interesting margins, particularly in the dairy complex. There are a lot of people interested in that. What we see globally is there's the macro market, largely driven by birth rates and feed rates, and there's a sort of participation there.
But the really interesting piece where we play as Bubs is in this premium sub-segment. The sub-segment is where there's more growth. We're seeing that all around the world. Typically, the category is growing on value, not on volume. In that value space, that premium natural, the better for you, the better for the environment, better for the baby, better for the animals, better for the world space is where we play. We are of Australia, we are clean label, that resonates with people. Within that category, we are goat. In the macro category, there is a dominant number of large multinationals at play.
There are two science-based players and two consumer-based players in that mass market. In the premium natural, it does tend to vary by market. In the U.S., there are about five competitors that we look at very closely. We respect them. There is one other that is in goat, we are the silver medal in goat, not the gold medal. There are a few other premium natural players. We are in there fighting.
We are 8% of that category, and we are 20% of the goat category. It is very competitive. We are unique though as Australian, and our product really does resonate because of those attributes around our functional benefit, gentle, enables sleep, gentle tummy for baby, happy family. We also have a clean label attribute. The of Australia makes us really interesting. There is no one else from Australia that we compete with. The Australian brand does resonate well, particularly with the U.S. consumer.
Thanks, Joe. Just on tariffs now, U.S. Is Bubs going to move their primary source of goat milk from the U.S.A., to maximize profits, and minimize tariff-related costs and risks?
Yeah. We do not have goat milk that is produced in the U.S. Nobody does, actually. The goat category in the U.S. is supplied out of U.K., Europe, and Australia. A little bit from New Zealand, potentially. Over time, we are very proudly Australian, our focus is on growing the goat herd. As I said, 70% up, we have made commitments to our farming partners. Over time, we are looking at options. We have got to be meeting the needs of the consumers. At the moment, our focus is on goat supply from Australia.
For responsiveness for the retailer, at some point, it is a very expensive supply chain to run with working capital and lead time. When we spoke at the strategy, we spoke about some alternative supply network options. One of which could be some canning capacity up in the U.S. that would potentially be supplied with powder from Australia.
That would give us maybe the best of both worlds with Australian powder, but canned in the U.S. for responsiveness. We're still looking at buy, build, and rent scenarios there. We don't feel we have to make a decision on that at the moment. We're happy we've got capacity. We're making the supply chain work. We feel good about supporting the growth at the moment from Australia.
Thanks, Joe. Sticking on the tariff question, this one came in a bit more recently. Why is Bubs incurring tariff costs, which is clearly something an importer would incur and not an exporter? Is Bubs absorbing some of those tariff costs in the U.S.? Has it now claimed a refund given they were deemed illegal? Maybe a question for you, Chris.
Sure, thanks. Bubs is actually the importer into the United States. We send product from Australia to our business in Australia, in the U.S., which imports that product, and as a result, we have to pay whatever tariffs, customs duties, fees, and the like, to bring that product into the United States. Equally, we need to ensure, and we do, that the margins that we earn on that product is sufficient to cover all of the costs, which clearly include tariffs.
There were a range of different tariffs that applied throughout the year under different rules and regulations in the U.S., and the amount of tariff depends or differs depending on the source of the component. Product that had Australian source components was tariffed differently to products that had a mixture of Australian and, say, for example, European source products.
The tariff rates differed quite a lot. The legal position on tariffs in the U.S. also shifted quite a lot during the year. Where there is an opportunity to claim refunds or apply for refunds, we are taking that opportunity, but we don't actually expect that to be material because the way the tariffs worked and were applied through the year, our exposure to the tariffs that were subsequently deemed to be illegal was actually quite small, and the bulk of them were paid under regulations that were not subject to challenge later on in the year.
Thanks, Chris. Turning to China, Joe. What is the current situation with the China market, and what is the plan for the coming year? Will China be a key growth priority?
Yeah. China's a huge market. It's a priority market. It's our second-biggest market. We have a great team up there led by Jackie. It's a massive scale market. It's very competitive. Jackie tells me there's over 1,000 brands. There's the imported brands, there's the domestic brands, there's goat, there's bovine. There's always something going on. There's even camel up there, actually. So, there's a lot to navigate. It's a hyper-competitive market. A lot of the marketing occurs on digital platforms. We don't have a China label market that's in the general trade, so our products are O2O and C-BEC.
But we're very happy with our business in China. The disruptions that we saw in the year through the regulatory reset, we have navigated very well. We protected service, we protected our consumers. We also have adult business in China, and that's where we see some interesting growth as well. So our adult brand up there is CapriLac. It's different to our Bubs brand. And that's where we have some innovation focus. So yeah, we feel good about China. We want to keep growing in China, but it is a very competitive market.
The other thing that we've seen is the cost to activate the brand in China. There's been quite a step up there because of the competitive nature. People essentially bid for the slots. It's a little bit like Uber surge pricing. We've been in surge pricing mode in China for a little while now. So the AUD dollars that we have maybe don't go as far as we would like. But, we've got a great team, and we are growing our business in China, absolutely.
Thanks, Joe. Sticking with China, this might be one that both you and Chris can respond to. In China, the FY 2026 result was offset by what appears to be elevated inventory levels carried over from FY 2025. Can you talk us through how tracking inventory levels in China has improved?
Yeah. It is one of those things, the market in China, the sales that we report our sales into our distributors. Essentially it is an inbound sale, and then the sell-through is where the consumer then purchases that product through the channel. Yeah, coming into the year, we had a little bit of an imbalance there. We have worked that through. Essentially, the sell-out of those numbers in both O2O and C-BEC of over 30%.
The sell-out is up quite handsomely. But the thing was, we had a little bit of inventory sitting in the pipe. We had to pull that inventory through. Now we have normalized that, and it is more synchronized between the inbound and the outbound to consumers. How we have done that is just in terms of working with our partners, working with our China team, and we have also done a better job of looking at the macro.
We call it integrated business planning, where we are balancing the supply and the demand, and we are looking at product that is on the water, and we are ensuring that we are running a leaner supply chain. We are there for consumers, and we are supporting our trade, our channel partners. Coming now into FY 2027, we believe we are in better balance. Yeah, again, we feel good about the work we have done there.
Did you want to add anything, Chris?
Oh, I think Joe has covered most of it, but it is a slightly different model for us from the standard sell into a retailer model that we operate in other markets. The team in China are really focused on making sure they are close to those distributors, understand how much stock they have got in market, and really balance up inbound orders with the offtake so that we keep that in balance from a stock flow perspective, but also make sure that the age of stock that is sitting in with the distributors is appropriate, because there is always pressure on making sure there is plenty of shelf life left on stock that is sold. You have to get that right.
Great. Very comprehensive. Next question, and this goes to the effectiveness of marketing investments ultimately. If Bubs has been going for more than 20 years, what happened to the brand such that it needed even more marketing costs to be spent on a brand reset?
Yeah. It is a critical item on any business that has a consumer brand's P&L. As I said, maybe the MBA case studies will tell you about 12% in infant formula because we have a relatively short lifetime value. We bring a mum into our system. Her and her baby might stay with us for one year, maybe 18 months, two years, if you are lucky. We have always got to be marketing to new moms. It is a little bit different to, you are six years old and you become enamored with Coke or Pepsi, and you consume for life. Maybe there is an 80-year life cycle of consumption.
Every year there are new moms and, as we know, only moms can have babies, and moms can have babies of a certain age. The new moms that are coming through are essentially who we are marketing to. They do not know us. When they are 16 or 14, they do not know us. When they decide to have a child, then they look, and then they find, and then they become enamored, and that is where we have got to be. Those types of moms, for us, because we are a premium brand, are moms that are high consumers of digital media. They are high consumers of contemporary platforms like TikTok.
That is where we go. That is where we hunt. That is where we make ourselves known. Then we do a great job to be there for those moms when they need us. That is why we have to activate our brand. That is why we have to invest. In our category, I am saying mid-teens. That is where we need to be to grow the business and to keep fueling the growth that we believe we can deliver for our shareholders.
Thanks, Joe. We have exhausted the group. They are all the pre-submitted ones and ones that came through. I will just pass back to you for closing remarks.
Right. Well, thank you. I appreciate everybody's time. I know everybody's busy. It's a busy time of year for certain folks, and we're very much looking forward to some follow-up meetings. Myself and Chris are available, should anybody wish to reach out. We appreciate the support of our investors, and we really hope we come with some good news in the near future. As we have new news, we will be back in touch with the market. Thank you for your time today, and have a good rest of the day. Thank you.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect your line.