Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Brambles Limited 2022 full year results conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Graham Chipchase, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone, and good morning from Sydney. Thank you for joining us today for our full year 2022 results announcement. Today, I'll start by providing a summary of our performance for the year, then give an update on progress against our transformation program and the FY 2023 outlook statement before Nessa takes you through the detailed financials. Turning to Slide 3 and the key messages from our full year performance. We delivered results that were ahead of guidance with stronger than expected fourth quarter performance, providing good momentum as we head into FY 2023. On a constant currency basis, sales revenue growth was strong at 9%. Underlying profit increased 10%, highlighting the operating leverage we generated this year from price realization and supply chain efficiencies, offsetting both short-term transformation costs and cost to serve increases across the group.
Free cash flow benefited from higher earnings and increased asset compensations. Although this was more than offset by additional capital expenditure to support longer cycle times at retailers and manufacturers, as well as a $470 million impact of lumber inflation, which led to higher pallet prices year-on-year. This resulted in free cash flow after dividends being a net outflow of $218.6 million. Our return on capital invested of 17.7% was in line with the prior period, which was an impressive achievement given the operating and inflationary headwinds the business is facing, and emphasizes our disciplined approach to capital allocation. Earnings per share growth was strong at 23%, reflecting higher earnings and benefits from the share buyback program, which completed during the year.
We increased the full year dividend declared by 11%, representing a payout ratio of 53%, and also increased the franking percentage by 5 points to 35%. In Australian dollar terms, dividends declared for the year increased by 18%. Turning to some of the business highlights. The Shaping Our Future transformation program is building momentum, and we are seeing early signs of financial benefits, though these are offset by significant cost inflation headwinds. The importance of Shaping Our Future has never been clearer, and this will underpin value creation over the medium to long term. To counter the significant cost inflation and broader challenging market conditions, we accelerated commercial and asset productivity initiatives, and we made great progress against our ambitious 2025 sustainability targets, a key differentiator for Brambles and a source of value.
Turning to the next slide, the operating environment remains challenging with unprecedented disruption to global supply chains, ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and increased geopolitical tensions. Global lumber supplies, transport capacity, and labor availability have all been affected by supply shortages or capacity constraints, and we expect the price of these critical inputs to remain volatile in FY 2023. Specifically on lumber, record levels of inflation and scarcity have impacted the supply and price of new pallets in all regions. The high levels of inflation, supply chain constraints, and industry-wide pallet shortages have meant customers and retailers have increased their inventory holdings to de-risk supply chains. We've also seen an increase in the unauthorized reuse of our pallets in response to pallet shortages and the higher market value of pallets. In response to this, we have taken several actions to support our customers and keep supply chains moving.
Specifically, we purchased an additional 8 million pallets in FY 2022. However, due to increased cycle times and ongoing low rates of returns, these purchases were not enough to replenish our plant stocks to optimal levels, with allocation protocols still in place across major markets in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. While conditions remain challenging, we expect the level of inventory holdings to partially unwind in the second half of FY 2023. We implemented new processes to refurbish 1.5 million additional pallets that would otherwise have been scrapped. We enhanced asset management capabilities, including increased use of data analytics and digital insights to improve the scale and efficiency of our pallet collection engine. Turning to Slide 5.
Considering the challenging market conditions and increasing macroeconomic uncertainty, I wanted to take a moment to reiterate the defensive characteristics of Brambles, which position us well to deliver value through all stages of the economic cycle. Looking at the composition of our FY 2022 revenue, you can see that over 80% of sales is generated from the consumer staples sector, which underpins the resilience of our business during periods of economic downturn. Our performance during the global financial crisis in FY 2009 and FY 2010 is a great example of this point. Overall, sales growth was broadly flat in both years, and CapEx spend fell by approximately AUD 180 million each year, which in turn was a driver for the business generating strong free cashflow despite a reduction in underlying profit.
In addition, we know there are still significant addressable opportunities for growth in major regions, with a strong business pipeline that we can pursue when our pallet stock is back at optimal levels. Regardless of the economic conditions, our conservative and flexible balance sheet, with plenty of headroom, provides a buffer from the ups and downs of market cycles. While our business is strong and inherently resilient, we also understand the importance of further optimizing the performance of our business and investing to build the Brambles of the future. In fact, the difficult operating environment we currently face has only reinforced the importance of our transformation program. Turning to the next slide, which outlines some of the key highlights across the Shaping Our Future transformation program, we are pleased with the tangible progress made in the year.
The business has set the right foundations for the transformation program and is continuing to build momentum to deliver on the multi-year program. On business capabilities, our cloud migration is now complete, delivering data security and process efficiency benefits. We have also enhanced the project management and digital capabilities of the business. The current operating context has led to an increased focus on accelerating commercial initiatives to recover cost to serve increases, as well as asset efficiency, which we'll cover in further detail later in the presentation. Across our network, we delivered efficiency benefits through service center automation, including the delivery of end-to-end integrated repair processes across seven of our larger service centers. In addition, we have begun piloting partially automated repair capabilities in small to medium-sized service centers, which will enable us to automate even more of our network and deliver further efficiencies.
Network optimization initiatives delivered further efficiencies, with reduced transport and storage costs during the year. Pallet durability improved with initiatives undertaken across four key pallet types in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, leading to a 100 basis point reduction in damage rates. This was 25 basis points ahead of our annual target. Turning to digital and our customers, the foundation has been laid to digitize our pool and deliver on our smart asset strategy. We'll expand on the progress to date later in the presentation. Turning to Slide 7 and our detailed scorecard, which tracks our progress against major initiatives, the majority of the metrics are progressing well and on track with some targets already achieved or completed during FY 2022. The progress to date is a strong indicator of the early success of the program. However, some metrics are tracking below target, largely due to market headwinds.
Pallet availability challenges, including lower return rates and broader supply chain dynamics, adversely impacted some initiatives. Pallet availability has been the primary reason for Net Promoter Scores tracking below target, as well as not achieving volume growth targets with existing customers. A number of our asset efficiency metrics were also below target for the year, and there have been delays in the rollout of the automated end-to-end repair processes due to semiconductor and component shortages. While we are tracking slightly behind target on women in management roles, our FY 2022 target of 34% was met in July 2022, and we remain confident of achieving our FY 2025 target of at least 40% of management roles held by women.
In the next few slides, we will outline the comprehensive plans in place to mitigate current headwinds and deliver the operational and financial outcomes of the transformation program and improvements against metrics where we are tracking below target. Turning to the next slide, we understand that the market is looking for more granularity to understand the return on the investments we are making, so let me discuss some of the more important metrics in further detail. On reducing uncompensated pallet losses, we're tracking slightly behind due to market conditions which have led to higher unauthorized reuse and uncompensated loss of pallets. If a 30% reduction in uncompensated losses is achieved, the annual value is estimated to be approximately $150 million through savings on the cost of replacement pallets and increasing compensation coverage.
We are tracking ahead of our target to reduce scrapped pallets by 15% by the end of FY 2025, which includes benefits from processes introduced in the U.S. to refurbish pallets that would otherwise be scrapped. We expect to overachieve against the FY 2025 scorecard target. Finally, while we are behind on the rollout of the end-to-end repair process, we have mitigated some of the financial shortfall through other automation initiatives. We now expect the rollout to complete by the end of FY 2025. Turning to Slide 9, the current operating environment has increased the importance of accelerating our asset efficiency initiatives.
We are proud of the results achieved during the year with approximately 4 million pallets either recovered or salvaged in an environment where the supply of pallets during the year was constrained. While I don't propose to go through every item on this page, there are some key call-outs from each category where additional context might be useful. Our improved collection ability allowed us to recover 2.5 million pallets during the year. These initiatives have been underpinned by insights from data analytics and leveraging our new technology capabilities. We ramped up our small truck fleet across North America and Europe with the increased frequency of collections, reducing the time our pallets sit at a retailer or recycler, and therefore decreasing the likelihood of loss. We estimate 900,000 additional pallets were recovered during the year.
We continued our focus on engaging with non-participating distributors in the U.S., leading to 400,000 pallets being recovered during the year. The value and demand for our pallets has shifted significantly, and this has required us to incentivize our recyclers differently. While this has come at an increase to fees, considering the current replacement value of a pallet, the incremental cost has been very worthwhile and led to the recovery of 500,000 pallets. Excitingly, we also expanded relationships with five recyclers to increase the breadth of our network to areas we cannot reach and have together created additional capacity to store, inspect, and sort pallets, leading to recovery of 500,000 additional pallets in the year. In an effort to improve pallet life and reuse, and in line with our commitment to zero waste, we have now installed pallet remanufacturing capabilities at 20 U.S. service centers.
In an environment where pallet prices remain elevated, the ability to remanufacture pallets ultimately helps reduce our cost to serve. This year, we remanufactured 1.5 million pallets, 500,000 more than expected. Finally, we increased pricing for high-risk lanes during the year, which can be seen in the higher asset compensations across the U.S. and Europe. In the U.S., we doubled our coverage rate in half a year to now cover 40% of MPD flows. Turning to Slide 10, we continue to build and refine our smart asset strategy. The data collected and analyzed across our smart asset deployments will underpin the decisions we make to build the Brambles of the future and will be a key driver of unlocking further value across our business and for our customers.
We like to think of each stream as being interlinked, and the scaling of any smart asset rollout follows a sequential pattern, starting with targeted diagnostics, laying the foundation to implement continuous diagnostics before moving to serialization plus in any given region. There are early signs of value, and most importantly, we are building the right foundations for smart assets to be successful. Looking at targeted diagnostics, we reached our target of deployment in over 20 markets in FY 2022, and the plan is to extend this to 30 markets in FY 2023. The program injects specific asset pools with a small sample of full track and trace devices. Because these deployments target known problems, be it suspected sources of loss or increased dwell times, the value these diagnostics deliver is generally material compared to the capital investment.
For example, in the U.S. this year, $50 million of benefits were enabled by insights from targeted diagnostics, which allow the team to improve pricing for higher risk lanes, as well as take actions to improve asset control in specific channels. While we do not advise this scale of value generation is extrapolated across all smart asset deployments, the important point here is that we are building the infrastructure and capabilities required, including collection points, data analytics, and creating and coding location waypoints to roll out further tracking initiatives. Next, continuous diagnostics brings track and trace capability to a small proportion of the pool, generally between 0.1%-1%, thereby increasing visibility of our assets as they travel through customer supply chains.
We have now reached our target of deploying 200,000 smart assets by the end of the year into our two trial markets, the U.K. and Canada. While it is still early and takes time to collect, analyze, and utilize the data, we are seeing initial signs of benefits which should scale progressively in the coming years. Taking the U.K. market, for example, with data from these smart assets, we have identified and commercialized 35,000 pallet flows which we were previously not getting paid for. We have also identified 650 new pallet collection points across our network and established relationships with 15 new recyclers, which will increase the number of pallets recovered from the supply chain.
The increased visibility of our pallets and early insights into the value we are confident in generating in the future has also led to the decision to scale the continuous diagnostics program to North America. Finally, we'll be trialing Serialisation+ in Chile, which combines continuous diagnostics with another low-cost unique identifier. Depending on the success of the trial, there could be a pathway to accelerate Serialisation+ in the U.S. Importantly, we continue to test our hypotheses across a range of technologies and markets before making investment decisions in digital capabilities in FY 2024 and beyond. Turning to our customer value slide.
We are aware of the price increases our customers have agreed to across all regions to recover cost to serve inflation. Against this backdrop, we understand that while these are genuine increases to input costs, we also need to create more value for our customers, which comes down to the customer experience, the quality and availability of our pallets, and being easy to do business with. We have a comprehensive list of initiatives to achieve this. We continue to look at ways to improve the customer experience from simplifying the onboarding process, making self-service easier and quicker, and providing greater visibility of pallet deliveries. We are continuing our proactive ordering pilot and have now designed proof of concepts for new customer solutions which leverage our unique visibility across the supply chain, and we look forward to sharing more details as this progresses.
I've already detailed the numerous initiatives around pallet quality and availability in the previous slides. Finally, we are finding ways to make it easy to do business with us, from turning survey insights into actions, as well as migrating key systems to the cloud, which allows for seamless upgrades and reduced downtime. These are all important initiatives to improve the experience our customers have when interacting with us. Turning over the page to our sustainability program. We continue to cement our leadership position with our credentials recognized worldwide. In FY 2022, we announced our commitment to accelerate our decarbonization strategy by 10 years, achieving net- zero greenhouse gas emissions across our whole supply chain by 2040. This is fundamental to our objective of maintaining our leadership in sustainability.
We increased the number of customers we collaborated with by 25%, and we are well on our way to achieving our 2025 target of 500 customer collaborations. We ended the year with 33% of management positions held by women. Finally, we signed a new $1.35 billion sustainability-linked revolving credit facility in August 2022. The pricing of this facility is linked to sustainability targets, including decarbonization, and highlights the increasing prominence of sustainability in capital markets. Finally, moving to our FY 2023 outlook. We expect the challenging macroeconomic and operating conditions experienced in FY 2022 to continue into FY 2023. This includes ongoing supply chain disruptions, inflationary pressures, and geopolitical unrest, leading to increased market uncertainty and volatility in our key regions.
Within this context, our FY 2023 financial expectations are sales revenue growth of between 7%-10% at constant currency. Underlying profit growth of between 8%-11% at constant currency, which includes approximately $25 million of short-term transformation costs. Free cash flow after dividends to improve on FY 2022, but remain a net outflow. In addition to this underlying improvement, free cash flow after dividends will include the benefit of the $41.5 million of proceeds received in August 2022 from the repayment of the loan receivable from First Reserve. Finally, in line with our dividend policy, the payout ratio is expected to be between 45%-60%. I'd now like to hand over to Nessa to present the FY 2022 financial overview.
Thanks, Graham, and good morning, everyone. Starting with our FY 2022 results, the group delivered strong constant currency sales revenue growth of 9% with operating leverage to deliver operating and underlying earnings growth of 10%. The earnings growth reflects recovery of significant cost to serve increases through pricing, surcharge recovery mechanisms, and supply chain efficiencies. The earnings growth includes a 1-point net benefit due to activity cost savings associated with lower pallet returns, partly offset by related operating inefficiencies. In FY 2022, the business was also cycling a one-off 1-point earnings growth benefit in the prior year relating to a site compensation in the APAC region. Profit after tax for the group increased 18% at constant currency and included a $22 million hyperinflation charge relating to Turkey. This was offset by a $21.6 million revaluation gain on the loan receivable from First Reserve.
Since year-end, this revaluation has been fully realized and loan settlement funds of AUD 41.5 million have been banked. Brambles' basic EPS growth was 23%, reflecting profit after tax growth of 18% and a 5-point benefit from the share buyback program, which was completed during the year. Turning to Slide 16. Group sales revenue growth increased 9%, driven by increased pricing with revenue growth across all segments. Pricing growth of 9% reflects recovery of input cost inflation and other cost to serve increases associated with the challenging operating conditions during the year.
Group issue volumes were in line with the prior year as pallet availability was impacted by several factors, including lumber scarcity, pallet manufacturing constraints, and lower pallet return rates due to longer cycle times and higher levels of stock holdings across global supply chains. Volumes with existing customers declined by 1%, offset by a 1-point increase in new customers volume, primarily in Europe, as well as rollover volume contribution from a large RPC contract in Australia, which commenced partway through the prior year. Looking at the drivers of the group profit performance on Slide 17. Sales growth, combined with incremental surcharge income in North America, contributed $574 million to profit growth in the year and offset material operating cost increases across the group.
The $175 million increase in plant costs was driven by cost inflation of $183 million, primarily lumber and labor, and additional repair costs associated with the refurbishment of pallets that would otherwise have been scrapped. These increases were partly offset by activity cost savings due to lower pallet return rates and damage rate improvements due to pallet durability initiatives. Transport cost increases of $154 million included fuel and freight inflation of $207 million and additional asset recovery costs in the U.S. business. These increases were partly offset by network optimization efficiencies and lower activity costs due `to lower pallet return rates in the period.
IPEP expense increased $38 million with $23 million of this increase due to higher pallet unit costs, with a balance of $15 million due to a combination of additional loss charges in the Americas segment. Overall group losses as a percentage of the pool remained in line with the prior year. Transformation costs increased $53 million and included short-term costs of $48 million. The balance of the increase related to higher ongoing transformation costs, primarily associated with digital transformation initiatives. Other costs increased $18 million as increased investment in resources to support future growth and improve commercial outcomes across the group were partly offset by higher asset compensations in the period. Finally, the year-on-year performance also included the impact of cycling $11 million of one-off compensations in the Asia-Pacific region, which primarily related to the mandatory relocation of a service center.
Slide 18 outlines our cost recovery performance in the year. Our ability to take pricing and adapt our business model and commercial terms to recover cost to serve increases is a key highlight of the results and demonstrates the resilience of the business. As you can see from the first two bars on the left hand side of the chart, we delivered $150 million net P&L benefit, which only partly offsets the increase in pooling capital expenditure during the year, which was driven by $520 million of lumber inflation increases and $155 million of additional pallet purchases to support increased cycle times and to replace lost pallets.
The key thing to note is that the investment in pallets relates to 10-year assets, and that we are therefore expecting to progressively recover this capital cost increase and generate an appropriate return on that investment over multiple years. Taking a closer look at lumber inflation on Slide 19. The slide highlights both the extraordinary lumber cost inflation and lumber market volatility in the U.S. and European markets, with the cost of lumber remaining well above historic averages. Historically, we have seen cyclical increases in lumber costs in the range of around 30%-50%, which is well below the 200%+ levels of inflation we have seen in the lumber indices.
The supply and demand dynamics impacting lumber continue to change with a range of factors, including demand from China, potential recession, housing starts in the U.S., as well as the Russia- Ukraine conflict, adding further uncertainties to a material input cost to our business. Our own demand for pallets and lumber is also impacted by increased levels of stockholding and losses across supply chain, which have resulted in increased pallets required to service the same level of demand. While lumber inflation impacts repair cost, the biggest impact of lumber inflation is on CapEx investment, with the lumber representing over 80% of the cost of a new pallet. In FY 2022, lumber inflation was the primary driver of the 40% increase in the weighted average price of pallets across the group and which added AUD 520 million to pooling CapEx on an accruals basis.
While we have seen some moderation of lumber pricing in the fourth quarter of FY 2022, we expect FY 2023 weighted unit pallet costs to increase over the FY 2022 level, with inflation impacting the price of new pallets to varying degrees in different regions. When thinking about the implications for cash and CapEx outcomes, it should be noted that a $1 increase or decrease in the weighted group unit cost of pallets equates to approximately $50 million in annualized impact on cash flow and CapEx. In terms of cash implications, there is also a 2- to 3-month lag on the cash flow relative to CapEx commitments.
Hence, it should be noted that while we provide cash flow guidance, that the price per pallet, as well as the levels of stock holdings across supply chains, remain material potential swing factors to CapEx investment spend and cash flow outcomes in FY 2023. Turning to the group's asset efficiency performance on Slide 20. The group's asset efficiency metric, the pooling CapEx to sales ratio, increased by 9 points to 30% in FY 2022, which was driven by year-on-year pallet price inflation. The impact of increased pallet purchases on the CapEx to sales ratio of $155 million to support longer cycle time and replacement of lost pallets, was offset by asset efficiency improvements, including higher asset recollections and remanufacturing of pallets that would otherwise have been scrapped.
We expect FY 2023 CapEx to sales to reduce by 3-4 percentage points, reflecting increased pallet return rates due to a combination of asset efficiency initiatives and destocking, as we see global supply chains normalize. We expect group weighted unit pallet costs to remain above FY 2022 levels. Turning now to segment results. The Americas segment delivered top-line growth of 12% at constant currency, largely reflecting pricing to recover cost to serve increases. Underlying profit increased 25% at constant currency as pricing gains, surcharge income, and operational efficiencies more than offset cost inflation in the P&L. Underlying profit margin increased 1.7 percentage points at constant currency, reflecting margin expansion across all markets, and including a 1 percentage point margin improvement in the U.S. Business.
The margin performance in the U.S. business has been supported by material benefits from supply chain investments made over the last three-four years. These investments have included service center automation, which have added capacity and agility to our service center network, and sawmill investments, which has enabled improved lumber yields as well as commercial customer service and sustainability benefits. Without these investments, the cost impact of both volatility and demand and pallet scarcity would have added incremental cost to the U.S. business over and above the actual increases reported in the year. Return on capital invested in the region improved 2.5 percentage points, reflecting the strong earnings growth. Turning now to Slide 22, looking at U.S. pallets revenue. Revenue growth of 11% in the year reflected pricing growth to recover higher cost to serve.
Pallet availability challenges continued to restrict volume growth with like-for-like volumes down 4%. Net new business volumes was flat to the prior year as the business prioritized servicing existing customers over targeting new business wins. Turning to the EMEA region now on Slide 23. CHEP EMEA delivered sales growth of 7% at constant currency, reflecting pricing growth of 4% in response to cost to serve increases, as well as net new business growth of 3%. Underlying profit increased 5% with the contribution from revenue, asset compensations, and operational savings from lower pallet returns, partly offset by an acceleration of inflationary cost pressures. Despite supply chain efficiencies and increased pricing to recover cost to serve, overall margins declined by 0.3 points due to the increased inflationary pressures during the year. ROCE also declined by 0.7 points, but remains strong at over 23%.
Looking at the sales growth on Slide 24 in the EMEA region, overall sales growth in the region of 7% included pricing growth of 4%, reflecting the increased contractual price indexation and other pricing actions to recover the higher cost to serve in the region. Net new business volumes increased 3%, largely due to contract wins in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. While like-for-like volumes were impacted by both softening demand in the European pallet business and the continued impact of semiconductor and other component shortages on the automotive industry. Turning to Slide 25, looking at CHEP Asia-Pacific. The business delivered sales growth of 5% at constant currency, reflecting pricing growth to recover increased cost to serve, and also reflects increased pallet pool productivity and rollover volume contributions from the Australian RPC contract commenced partway through the prior year.
Pallet availability challenges in the Australian business continued to impact volume growth. Underlying profit increased 20% and includes one-off impacts in both the current and prior years, which largely offset each other. FY 2021 profit included $11 million of one-off benefits, primarily related to one-off site compensation in Australia. FY 2022 includes $10 million of net timing benefits from lower pallet returns. This FY 2022 $10 million timing benefit is expected to unwind in FY 2023 as pallet returns normalize. Excluding these items, profit growth reflects increased productivity of the pallet pool, the sales contribution to profit, and incremental uplift from the Australian RPC business, partly offset by inflation and overhead cost increases.
Return on capital invested improved by 2.3 percentage points at constant currency, as the margin expansion in the period was partially offset by increases in ACI to support the Australian pallet and RPC businesses and reflects increased productivity of the pallet pool and scarcity of lumber supply, limiting new pallet purchases. Turning to slide 26 and the corporate segment. Total transformation costs of $108.6 million increased by $53 million and included $48.4 million impact of short-term transformation costs. These short-term costs were in line with the $50 million estimate provided at the September 2021 Investor Day. Ongoing program cost of $60 million included approximately $40 million of digital transformation costs, also in line with the guidance provided at the 2021 Investor Day. The balance of the spend was related to IT investments and initiatives to improve the customer experience.
Corporate costs increased $7 million at constant currency and includes $5 million related to Brambles' share of the MicroStar post-tax losses in addition to labour and insurance-related overhead cost increases. Turning to the cash flow now on Slide 27. Despite the increased inflation in the period, the group generated positive free cash flow before dividends. While the business delivered strong earnings growth and increased asset compensations, cash flow from operations of $372.6 million decreased $528.5 million over the prior year due to higher cash capital expenditure and increased working capital. The year-on-year decline also reflects the cycling of the benefit in the reduction of plant stock in the prior year.
Cash investment in capital expenditure increased by AUD 597.3 million and included AUD 470 million of lumber inflation and reflected the impact of cycle time increases and higher losses, which were partly offset by benefits from asset efficiency and scrap reduction initiatives. The year-on-year increase in working capital of AUD 42.8 million reflects higher trade receivables at year-end, consistent with the strong fourth quarter revenue growth, and the impact of lumber inflation also increased the value of working capital inventory balances. Financing costs and tax payments increased by AUD 13 million and included the reversal of the prior year tax timing benefit of AUD 35 million.
Free cash flow after dividend was a net outflow of $218.6 million after dividends payments in year of $304.8 million, which was an increase of $24 million over the previous year. Turning to Slide 28 on our balance sheet. The balance sheet remains strong and puts us in a great position to continuing investing to support future growth and to reward shareholders with dividends while maintaining our strong investment-grade credit ratings. At the full year, we have $0.9 billion of undrawn committed facilities and cash balances of $158 million and a conservative net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 1.47 times. We continue to have long dated debt maturity profile with no bond maturities until FY 2024.
Pleasingly, in August this year, we leveraged our sustainability credentials to sign a new AUD 1.35 billion, five-year sustainability-linked revolving credit facility, which replaces AUD 1 billion of existing bank facilities and adds an additional AUD 350 million of committed headroom. Turning to Slide 29 and FY 2023 considerations. I want to finish by covering some FY 2023 outlook considerations to add some further context to our guidance, which Graham outlined earlier. Given our expectations that the challenging macroeconomic and operating conditions experienced in FY 2022 will continue into FY 2023, we also expect that pricing and surcharge mechanisms will continue to operate effectively to enable recovery of inflation cost pressures in the P&L and to support progressive recovery of the increased capital cost of pallets.
Consistent with this, we expect sales revenue growth to be weighted to pricing across all regions as we continue to focus on recovering cost to serve increases. We also expect net new business wins to remain constrained. Pallet availability in FY 2023 will be dependent on normalization of levels of stock holdings across supply chains, outcomes of asset efficiency initiatives, as well as demand from existing customers and overall lumber and pallet supplies. Underlying profit growth is expected to be impacted by higher repair and handling costs as supply chains normalize and asset productivity initiatives lead to higher pallet return rates. In the APAC region, this is expected to lead to FY 2023 ULP margins being below FY 2022. The rate of margin improvement in the Americas segment is expected to moderate given the strong results in FY 2022.
In EMEA, we expect to see an improvement in the ULP margins as the region seeks to recover cost to serve increases. The expected improvement in the free cash flow after dividends in FY 2023 will be weighted to the second half of the year as increased earnings, asset efficiency initiatives, and the normalization of supply chains are all expected to be phased to the second half. The level of underlying improvement is dependent on the number of factors outlined on the slide. On a full year basis, FY 2023 ROCE is expected to decline by approximately 0.5-1 point, reflecting the full year impact of FY 2022 pallet purchases at elevated prices and progressive delivery of returns on assets with a 10-year life. Important to note that the FY 203 ROCE remains well above the cost of capital.
I'll now hand back to Graham for his closing remarks before we go to Q&A.
Thank you, Nessa. In summary, we are proud of our many operational and financial achievements during the year in challenging operating conditions. As a business, we continue to deliver on our purpose of connecting people with life's essentials every day, playing a critical role in global supply chains by supporting our customers while investing for the future. We demonstrated our focus on delivering against our financial targets with our FY 2022 result, ahead of revised guidance driven by strong fourth quarter performance. Towards the end of FY 2022, we completed our capital management program, which commenced in 2019. In total, we returned $2.8 billion to shareholders, which is evidence of our disciplined approach to capital management. We made tangible progress with our transformation program, building momentum for long-term success.
Importantly, underpinning the long-term value of the transformation program is our sustainable business model with reuse, resilience, and regeneration at its core. We continue to strengthen our sustainability leadership position with meaningful progress against our 2025 sustainability targets. Finally, our FY 2023 outlook continues to see the business generate strong profit growth with an improvement in cash flow generation despite continuing challenging macroeconomic and operating conditions. Thank you, and I'll now hand over to the operator for Q&A.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your first question comes from Jakob Cakarnis from Jarden Australia. Please go ahead. Pardon me, Jakob. Your line is now live. Your next question comes from Andre Fromyhr from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hello. Good morning. Maybe just starting with the free cash flow outlook. It strikes me that with, you know, coming in higher than with the guidance for FY 2022 giving, you know, double-digit earnings growth into next year, proceeds from First Reserve, lower U.S. lumber costs, you've also flagged an improving CapEx to sales ratio. Why are we still expecting a negative number to free cash flow after the win?
Thanks for the question. A couple of things to note is, look, we still did highlight that we expect lumber costs to increase year-on-year, because that's the trend that we're still currently seeing in pallet prices. Hence why we've called out, look, if we are wrong on that, and if we actually see the weighted average cost of our pallets decline, you know, a $1 decline is worth $50 million incremental cash flow. $2, obviously you guys can do the math on it. Because there's a range of uncertainties that impact us, you know, we factored in what we are seeing, and what we expect to happen at this point. Through the year, we'll be able to give more insights to what we actually see happening.
The other critical piece we've seen is that we've had to put a lot more CapEx into supporting longer cycle times as across supply chains, people are holding more stock. Now, we do expect to see that unwind or start to unwind, certainly in the second half of the year. The timing of that will also impact the pallet purchases. You know, there are two key factors. They're material amounts. At this point, we're highlighting we do expect an improvement, but that there are a number of material factors that are yet to be played out.
Maybe I could just move on to pricing. Obviously it's a strong feature, the main driver of sales growth at the moment, and you flag that some of that will continue into FY 2023. Do you have a sense of how the market is, you know, your competitors and the broader sort of white wood environment is moving on pricing? How's the level of tension with customers at the moment? Is it sort of acceptable when you present the data and the risk analysis that you've been talking about? You know, are you getting customers sort of walking away on that basis, or are you actually getting the behavioral responses that you're expecting in terms of asset control?
I think there are quite a few bits in that question. First of all, let's talk about the competitors. You know, as I think I've said pretty consistently, when it comes to the environment for pricing, you need three things. You need some inflation, which I think we could all say we've got a fair bit of in it at the moment. We need tightness of supply and demand of pallets, which, you know, again, we've certainly got that at the moment. And we need rational competitors. And I think, you know, what we're seeing is that the competitors are being rational and all the other prerequisites are there. There's no reason to feel that the environment to be able to continue to get price increases is there.
Now, you know, moving on to comments around the reaction in the market. At the moment, I think customers want pallets because there are not enough pallets around. To the extent that they are walking away, no one's walking away because everybody desperately needs the pallets. I think the key thing is, as we continue to suffer higher cost to serve, and we are because either, as Nessa said, we're still expecting to see higher pallet prices due to lumber inflation. But on top of that, we're also seeing higher cost to serve because we're having higher inventory holdings and higher dwell, you know, cycle times. That is increasing our cost to serve, and therefore we should be increasing pricing to recover that.
We're still seeing that, and we would still expect customers to pay that. At some time, at some point, that is gonna get more difficult. At some point, we'll see customers, you know, saying, "Look, you know, there's no shortage of pallets. We're not happy with the prices you've been charging us." That is why it's very, very important that we show our customers what we're doing for them beyond just supplying a pallet at the right, you know, the right place and the right time and the right condition. We've got to show that we're creating more value with, you know, our better networks, what we're doing around digital to give insights to them so that they can get benefits and extract some value out of their own supply chains.
I think that's. I'm not saying that's gonna be an issue in the next 12 months, but it certainly at some point is gonna become something we, you know, we absolutely have to deliver on. I would say it's okay at the moment, but are we getting lots of Christmas cards from customers, you know, thanking us for our price increases? Of course not. I mean, no one likes it. At the same time, of course, you know, they are seeing massive inflationary cost increases and all their other raw material inputs. I don't think we're, you know, we're the only people they're seeing this from, which I think somewhat makes it a bit less contentious.
Just a little bit deeper on that one. Can you foresee a scenario where the core pricing sort of either stays where it is or continues to tick up, but the customer's experience, I guess I'm thinking about the Americas here, where the customer's experience is actually a price reduction because of surcharges dropping away?
Well, well, I think surcharges will drop away at some point because they're driven by the index, you know, which constitutes the cost element, so either fuel prices or lumber. So that will absolutely happen. It's the question is, do we hold on to the, you know, you call it the core pricing, the regular pricing which we put in there because the cost to serve has gone up. If we have, you know, if we have things that change in the market that make the cost to serve go down, then we will probably want to look at that on a customer by customer basis.
That's the whole point about having a dynamic pricing model, which is driven by better data, so that those customers who give us our pallets back quicker will see a benefit compared to those customers that don't. Because at the end, we really want to get the pallets back quicker. I think, you know, the extent to which our pricing model drives a change in behavior, that's actually a good thing for us. Yeah, I mean, we'll have to wait and see what happens when conditions change. We're not seeing, you know, the conditions change yet, so it's hard to answer accurately.
Right. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Anthony Longo from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. I just had a quick question on the pooling CapEx to sales improvement. Just wondering if you could perhaps give a little bit more color as to why you're not expecting it to improve more from that 30% down to maybe 26%. Is that potentially reflective of, you know, longer cycle times and pallets being with, you know, manufacturing retailer customers and potentially higher damage rates as well?
Less so about damage rates, more about cycle time and the actual unit cost of the pallets because, you know, the reduction is really driven by more efficiency in the pool that we're expecting year on year. We are still expecting year- on- year increase in the pallet prices. Again, that is a material swing factor. If we end up in a much better place with pallet prices, that would enable us to get quicker to a lower CapEx to sales. But we factored in that despite an increase in the unit cost of the pallets, that we'd seen some good outcomes in our asset efficiency this year, and that we're expecting more of that to flow through next year. That's despite us expecting.
You know currently we're running our pallet pool with, you know, below ideal levels of inventory and, you know, that's restricted our ability to go after new business wins. We're expecting to be rebuilding that pallet pool as well, you know, through FY 2023, and that's factored in into the outlook.
Oh, that's great. Thanks, Nessa. Just a further question on pricing. I appreciate we've spoken a little bit about it already, but in the context provided on some of the high risk zones that you had flagged and you know, in the context of the inflation that we have seen, as well as you know, understanding about the surcharge dynamic as well. I mean, to the extent, how much are you still expecting the pricing to increase over the next little while? Because it looks like that second half number was particularly strong, particularly in the Americas.
Yeah. Well, as you know, we can't address all of the contracts at the same time. There's still, you know, contracts that we haven't looked at in terms of changing the NPD surcharge or additional charge. That will still go on through FY 2023. Contracts are continuing to come up for renewal, and we are continuing to, you know, renew them at higher prices to reflect the higher cost to serve. We don't, you know, anticipate any significant change in that sort of directional position on pricing. I mean, I think it is a dynamic situation. We have to look at it very carefully. We have to be.
What we've seen, though, is that increasing the NPD charge in the U.S. hasn't really changed behavior as much as we thought. That, you know, clearly is because there is such a big shortage of pallets. People are very wary about moving on to whitewood because in fact, there's not enough whitewood either. I think we've also got to be a little bit careful because recognize that our customers don't necessarily all ship all their product to, you know, to an NPD, though some of them will be going to participating distributors. We run the risk if we push too hard on the NPD charge, they'll start saying, "Well, actually, we're just gonna do away with pooled on both NPDs and PDs," and, you know, it will be counterproductive.
We do look at it on a case-by-case basis where we feel it's appropriate, we will continue to push, but in other cases, we'll say, "No, we think enough is enough." Again, it's a bit of a dynamic situation.
Okay, great. Thanks, Graham. Look, just final one for me. I won't overstay the welcome. As far as the FY 2023 guidance goes, there was a slide that you did highlight, you know, things for your targets for uncompensated, sort of pallets, pallet scrap, et cetera. For your FY 2023 guidance, does it mean that you need to hit those targets to hit that guidance, or is that largely an aspirational target that you've set there?
Included in FY 2023, we do include targets that, you know, take us along that glide path to improvement. You should be expecting that we will be showing progressive improvement over the next few years on that, but it does include improvement in FY 2023, yes.
Okay, excellent. Look, congratulations on the result, and thanks for the time.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Justin Barratt from CLSA. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks very much for your time today. Just a couple maybe for Nessa. Nessa, at the 1H 2022 result, you sort of highlighted the pressure that you're seeing on both demand and supply side in terms of lumber pricing. I was just wondering if I could get an update on how you see that currently. I guess I'm just asking in the context of you commented again about the unit pricing for pallets expected to be higher in 2023 than 2022. I just wanted to again ask if or understand why that's the case, given the record, I guess, lumber prices that we saw throughout 2022.
A couple of things to note. First is if you look at the shape of where we saw lumber inflation going up, we saw it really accelerating in the U.S. If you looked last year, we had a much bigger impact. This year, we sort of saw those impacts flowing through to Europe, where we saw that acceleration. If you look particularly in Europe, you look at Russia, Ukraine, and although we don't actually access much lumber from Russia, Ukraine markets, as a percentage of our total global supply, that's a very small number.
The challenge is it cuts off supply to other people who are buying lumber, which means there's now more people trying to buy the same lumber we are, even though there's an underlying potential decrease in demand and some challenges with, you know, affordability and sort of consumer demand that, you know, as people think about could there be a recession. You still have this underlying piece that is a challenge in lumber, in particular in Europe. Then if you actually look at what we're seeing in Americas and the U.S., while we've seen some moderation, if you look at the overall group weighted costs, which we do across all of the regions, while we saw some moderation, we haven't yet seen a sustainable decline.
You know, part of it's also impacted the U.S. pallet price, for instance, is also impacted by the number of imports that we get from Latin America. There's also supply issues there that impact the net cost, and that's always been a benefit to us. As we're looking a little bit more constrained in supplies from them, their weighted cost is also impacted. You know, we try to outline the number of factors. We're not gonna capture them all for sure. You know, things like housing demand in the U.S. potentially isn't going to be as strong as we thought it was twelve months ago, as we look at some changes in customer dynamics.
We still think flows from Latin America are going to remain a big challenge from a supply perspective, and we expect that impact in Europe of, you know, flowing through from Russia, Ukraine to be going the other way in terms of pricing. It's a combination, and that's why we're highlighting, look, we do expect an increase. It's not at the level that we've seen in FY 2022. It's a materially lower level of increase, but we're not saying we're not seeing a decrease. You know, that remains to be played out. We're very open to saying we'll continue updating the market depending on what we actually see. Remembering also that the lumber we buy isn't an exact match to what you see in the lumber indices.
Lumber indices, if you look at that level of increase that went up 200%, our weighted average cost of pallets went up 40%, and that's a bit due to the phasing on the lumber inflation that happened in the different markets. It's a bit about the mix, but also we do buy better than the market. Buying lumber and lumber supply and remembering it's sustainable lumber supply, so we're quite choiceful about where we buy from. You know, we have outperformed the market in terms of how we buy lumber. They're all factors just to think about.
When the lumber indices come down, it doesn't necessarily directly translate to us in terms of our costing, but you can be sure we'll continue to be very aggressive in terms of how we buy lumber and making sure that we get, you know, the best possible price in terms of the pallets that we buy, but making sure we stick to good quality lumber that meets our sustainability requirements.
Great. Thanks for that detail. Second one, just in terms of net plant and transport costs as a percentage of revenue, I just noticed that in EMEA, they're a little bit higher than historic levels. Is that just sort of due to the slight lag in pricing indexation that you get in that region? Just in Australia, it was much lower than it has been in the past. Is that just due to those lower pallet returns that you've called out, and hence we can see that rise or expect that to rise again in FY 2023 back to sort of where it has been historically?
Yeah. Look, I think you've done a good job on your analysis there, because if you look at it overall, you know, you take the net plant cost to sales that we set out in Appendix 5 and the net transport cost to sales, it's still around 55% on a combined basis relative to sales. You're right, we do see some movements and partly lower activity in Asia-Pacific that we'd expect to moderate. You know, if we see an increase in EMEA, you know, we particularly in areas like the U.K., where there's been particular issues with transport scarcity, you know, we have seen transport capacity challenges increase the cost. You know, they're the things to think about.
In terms of plant cost in EMEA too, we've had the impact too of heat treating of pallets post-Brexit that has been added in there.
Fantastic. One final one from me. I was just surprised by the reduction in your IPEP expense in the second half of 2022, just given where, I guess, supply chains, or the constraint on supply chains remain. Can you just describe to us what the key drivers of that reduction were in the second half?
Yeah, well, you need to look at it on an annual full year basis, year-over-year, because, you know, the timing of the expenses also depends on when we complete the audits, and some of those is down to access to sites. I kinda wouldn't read too much into what you see on a half-over-half. I'd look at the full year basis, and on a full year basis, you'll see that the loss rate in the pool was sort of around that, you know, 8.3% overall, so sort of similar year-on-year.
The overall increase we're seeing is, of the $38 million, is sort of largely driven by FIFO cost of pallets, which is $23 million, and the balance of $15 million is that slightly, you know, the increase in losses overall. That's what you know, looking at it's best to look at it on a full year basis, because depending on when we do the major audits, that's where we book. It impacts the timing of what we book.
Fantastic. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Anthony Moulder from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, all. If I can start back on pricing, please. Those very strong pricing increases in the period, I guess the question is, how many of your customers are now paying a pricing that reflects that higher cost to serve? I guess I'm trying to understand as to how many more periods those pricing increases need to continue for or are they just gonna continue to roll?
I mean, our view, Anthony, is that there's still more contracts to address, 'cause again, if you think about the, you know, the view is, average length is three years, so we're gonna be doing a third each year. Again, you know, in terms of cost to serve increases, those are continuing to increase. On that basis, you know, even if they'd stopped last year, we'd still have another 1/3 or 2/3 to go, but they're not. We're still seeing a higher cost to serve. I think the environment is still there for us to continue to need to be fairly robust on price increases. That's, I think, our forecast, our outlook statement for 2023 kinda reflects that.
I see that in the very low surcharge income, which tells me that the surcharge structure wasn't properly implemented when it was put into the U.S. It wasn't like the European program. Those price increases, they can only go through at the contract reset, or is there a discussion that can happen within that three years that you can get a higher cost to serve in the interim?
The surcharge mechanism, you can see. I think there was $76 million worth of increase in 2022. I think with it, and that was in the U.S. I mean, that is, I think, quite material. I think that's the result of all the work that's been done over the last few years to get surcharge pricing wording into the contracts to cover things like lumber and fuel.
The other thing, which I think is the one that we're really driving at here is the real cost increases in the contracts relating to either, you know, cost to serve, but in reality, making sure that the contracts are profitable and creating value, which again, you know, over a period, a long period of time was probably not happening in the U.S. That, you know, we've been addressing again every time a contract comes up for renewal, and we're continually looking to raise the bar across the network. Every time a contract comes up for renewal, we're looking at, well, is it now below the average? Does it really reflect the cost to serve? And if it doesn't, we are still going in with robust price increases.
I think that's exactly what we should be doing. I think there's no intent to step away from that provided the three underlying factors are still there around tightness of supply, inflation, and rational competition. Those have always got to be the prerequisites for that sort of a robust pricing environment.
Worth noting that if you like some of that surcharge mechanism, if you like, if you're to translate that into Europe, that happens with the indexation. Yes, there's a time lag in terms of if you take it on 1 July, but we have, in the last number of years, also taken some increased pricing in the Europe market that has been out of cycle for that indexation. It's not across every contract, but it has, you know, we have where there have been increased costs. Brexit costs has been an area where we've gone back and increased costs, for instance, for heat treatment of pallets and where we had particularly acceleration in inflation for transport costs, which is going back into FY 2022. We also took additional pricing, you know, going into this, into the second half.
There's a time lag in indexation in Europe, which obviously makes it less ideal in lots of, you know, when you have high inflation. We have taken steps where we needed to address it. In the U.S., we'd say, and North America, we think those surcharge indexes are working pretty well for us.
Good. Thank you. I guess that leads into the higher pallet costs that are being addressed by these pricing increases. Can they continue, given that the cost to your business is gonna be through the P&L at least, is gonna be higher depreciation costs and higher IP costs that, as you point out, are gonna last 10 years? How are you getting to a point that those cost offsets are reflected in the pricing increases that you're driving over the next few years?
Yeah. Good, really good question, Anthony. What we do as contracts come up, we look at sort of the whole cycle, and we factor in what the cost of the assets are into those contracts. You know, if we have multiple years where asset prices remain higher, then that'll impact the pricing we put in. We do expect there to be some moderation in lumber costs over time, so that's factored into our thinking on pricing. We have opportunities to reprice contracts on average, you know, sort of every three years, but some of them are shorter than that. You know, we continue to look at what is the total cost to serve over the contract period? What's our outlook? What do we expect? It does get factored in on a total basis.
You know, for us, I know there was some asks for us, why can't you recover it all in the one year? That would be inappropriate for our customers for a 10-year asset to try and factor it all in. If you like, we look at real cash on cash. What does it cost to service the customer? What do we earn from the customer? That's the input to determining the pricing. You're right. As a follow on, when we spend more on a pallet, there will ultimately be, for instance, higher depreciation costs and the penalty for losing a pallet is higher because we have to replace it at a higher cost and obviously, take a hit to the P&L.
You know, as you go forward, it'll ultimately over time affect the FIFO values, but that's over a longer time, the FIFO values.
I guess the question is whether or not you're recovering enough of that in the earlier period because that cost will remain in the P&L for the next decade.
Well, I think you have to look at.
I'll have a go and ask about this.
Sorry. I just think you have to look at what's the economic cost of the asset. You know, the depreciation is one component, and you can see we're managing that with over recoveries. You know, we're also looking at getting an appropriate return for the additional invested capital in the business. That's why we've been at pains to actually show those charts with how much are we recovering over and above the costs in the P&L. You can actually see what are you putting into the ACI, and does this make an appropriate return for us?
The last question. I'll have more for tomorrow at 10:30 A.M. I want to ask about the CapEx of the digital transformation. It looked lower for 2023. Is there some delay of some of those programs into 2024, please?
Part of it is we are not putting quite as many of the Ultra device, which are the high, you know, obviously the high-spec devices in because we, you know, as everyone knows, there is a shortage of semiconductors. We've not been able to do quite as many as we want. Also part of it is us, you know, taking our time to make sure that the projects we want to invest in are gonna deliver what we want. A good example is something we were gonna do for the customer experience sort of part of digital transformation.
We've just decided to wait a couple of extra months because we're talking to a specific customer on that, and we were thinking we might launch it by the end of FY 2022. It's gonna be happening in the next couple of months. I think those sorts of things have given a slight, you know, delay. But if you look at it in the round, we're saying it's on track across 2022 and 2023, but the outcome of what we're doing in 2023 will inform the CapEx spends in 2024 and 2025 because as we said back in the investor day, you know, we are stage gating those investments, and we haven't seen, you know, the conclusion of the trials yet, which will determine whether we go ahead with some of the things in 2024 and 2025.
Very good. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Niraj Shah from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Graham and Nessa. Just sort of following up from that last question, I appreciate the discussion and the sensitivities you've provided around pallet pricing for pooling CapEx. You know, non-pooling CapEx is probably more controllable. Are you able to provide some sort of guidance on what that should look like in fiscal 2023, or at least the major moving parts between 2022 and 2023?
In relation to non-pooling CapEx? Well,
Yes.
I think if you know, we set out at Investor Day what our investments were going to be through supply chain, digital, et cetera, in CapEx, and we should be broadly in line with those indicators. You know, if you use that as a rough guide, some phasing changes, some mix changes, but generally, that should be a fairly decent guide.
Got it. Thank you. You mentioned the allocation protocols. You know, are you able to sort of comment on sort of how your default or whatever delivery metrics compare to competitors in the key regions? You know, what are the customers sort of actually doing in response to being shorted sort of these pallets?
I think one of the important things to note is that, while customers are on allocation, in some of our regions, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are not able to run their production lines. It means that their safety stocks are incredibly low, and that obviously creates a lot of frustration, and concern for them. What it's meant is we've had to manage the business on a sort of day-to-day basis rather than being able to do it on a month-to-month basis, which is what we might have done when safety stocks were higher.
I think it's important just to recognize that, yeah, and as a result, we are spending a lot of time and effort trying to go to our customers on a site-by-site, you know, week-by-week, what are your requirements, making sure we're giving them exactly the minimum, but no more because there isn't enough to go around, pallets to keep the operations running. Now, occasionally there will be plant outages, but they are pretty, you know, we're keeping those to a minimum. That's been the reaction. How our competitors are doing, well, I have no idea, but I wouldn't expect to know. However, you know, what we see is our competitors are also struggling to get enough pallets.
We've had some inquiries in some markets, and I won't say which, where customers who are either wholly supplied by some of our competitors or dual supplied by us and a competitor have asked whether they could switch to a higher percentage of supply by us because the other competitor is definitely struggling, and we appear to be managing the situation, you know, admittedly not perfectly, but somewhat better. I would gather or expect that we're doing pretty good. That would be because we've got the broadest networks, the deepest networks, and we have invested in our pools quite a lot leading up to the, you know, the current situation.
As we talked through the presentation, we've tried to be reasonably innovative about things like, you know, refurbishing and recovering pallets that, you know, we weren't before. You know, I think we're doing just fine, but I don't want to say we're doing significantly better than competitors, A, because I don't know, and I think, B, it's a sort of, you know, little bit inappropriate in a situation where everybody's really struggling.
Makes sense. Thanks for the color, guys.
Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Paul Butler from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for the presentation, and congratulations on the great result.
Thanks, Paul.
I just wanted to ask about your comments, Graham, where you were saying you're expecting in the second half a partial inventory unwind. Just a look and also your comment that, I mean, which you've said a number of times before that customers are holding higher levels of pallets, or at least trying to hold higher levels of pallets as a safety stock.
What's the risk in your view that we go from this environment of pallet shortages to risk of an oversupply, you know, if we do see a slowdown in market demand as well as, you know, the safety stocks that your customers are holding come down as well?
Yeah. I mean, again, it's a really interesting and difficult question to answer because, you know, no one knows. But when we talk to retailers in particular, because I think these are, you know, that's where a lot of the buffer stock is being built up is at the retailers, you know, more than the manufacturers. It appears that, you know, they think after Christmas, they'll start reassessing the inventory levels and moving perhaps more to just in time than just in case. I think that's, you know, it could happen a bit sooner because if you think about interest rates, no one's gonna be wanting to hold lots of inventory.
I don't know if you saw the Walmart results release overnight, where they're talking about, you know, trying to dramatically reduce levels of inventory as well. That's all sort of consistent with people are definitely thinking about when are they going to start moving. Now, the risk for us or the opportunity for us, depending on how you want to look at it is, you know, I think it's best if this happens gradually, for sure. You know, I think everyone doing it at the same time on the same tape would be very unhelpful.
I think compared to the past, where we have had an issue with a big flow back of pallets around, you know, extra storage costs, extra repair costs, we are in a slightly, you can say it's better because it's not been better for the last couple 18 months or so. We're in a better position in that we desperately need to rebuild the plant inventory levels. Actually, if we get, you know, a few more coming back than we expected, a bit quicker than we expected, we will be able to use them to rejuvenate and replenish the network. I think we're in pretty good shape, but it's something we're clearly keeping a very close eye on.
You know, again, other extra exogenous factors that are gonna affect this are, you know, recession, which markets, when, you know, if at all, how deep, you know, how long. These are all things that will impact that flow back of pallets. Obviously, combined with our own actions in terms of getting them back quicker regardless. It's something we're looking at very closely. We're talking to retailers and our customers pretty regularly. At the moment, I would say no one's got a really clear idea about what to expect. Our working assumption is, you know, after Christmas, people will start making those decisions.
Okay. Just a bit further on that, like, what percentage of the pool could you absorb into getting the plant stocks back to the optimum level? I guess also in relation to that, I mean, you've talked about how you know, just in the previous question, where you're being far more nimble in terms of managing the supply of customers given the shortage of pallet availability. Is there not, you know, sort of, an opportunity to make this business as normal and be able to run the business with, you know, with a much smaller plants inventory? I mean, particularly, you know, given your investment in digital and things like that to track things better.
Yeah. To try and answer that first with the question first, I think we're sort of saying is 5 million-6 million pallets will get us back. You know, that's what we need to absorb to get us back to the right place. But on top of that, I think remember that we haven't been going out and getting new business at all for the last 18 months. There's another opportunity there, which again, you know, somewhere like the U..S. was always 1%-2% of potential new net new business wins. You know, we believe the pipeline is there. We've got, you know, targets in that pipeline, so we can go out and again, do some of that. That's, you know, that's another chunk.
I absolutely agree with you that, you know, all the self-help that we're going through in terms of all the different actions, both digitally enabled and non-digitally enabled, will also allow us to change the model. We should be able to run the business in due course in a much more efficient and effective way, you know, with a lower holding inventory across the network. We're not, you know, I don't think that's for the short term, that's for the medium term.
I think there's quite a lot we can do, you know, both through either building up the plant stocks or going after extra growth, which we've not wholly factored in because we don't really know what the timing is gonna be like for this next twelve months.
Just one more, if I may. Back to pricing. Sorry, we've had a few questions on that. In the second half in the U.S., I think you did something like 17% price and mix improvement. How much of that related to across the board price increases versus addressing the cost to serve issue with specific customers?
I think one could assume that a significant amount was the cost to serve type of increases. I think that's what I would leave it at that, 'cause we're not gonna break it down much more than that. A significant amount of that total.
Great. Thank you very much.
Bye.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Matt Ryan from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Oh, thank you. I just wanted to clarify with the comments around the higher weighted per unit pallet costs coming through in 2023 versus 2022. Just wanting to know what that's based on in terms of, you know, you making an assumption for where that might go to over the course of the year. Maybe just related to that, what is your sort of visibility when you make those sorts of assessments?
Okay. When we make the assessments, remember, we sort of buy them probably with a lead time of three months. In terms of our visibility and clarity, it's low. Hence why we're clarifying that we've assumed an increase based on what we understand. It's also for us about our mix of pallets. When we're looking at this, we're factoring in the types of lumber we buy, where we're gonna source it from, and what that mix looks like. I referenced that we're assuming a bit of a lower mix from Latin America that has historically averaged down our price in the U.S. We're looking at some increased inflation in Europe, and we're looking at our specific flows from our specific sustainability-linked suppliers as well.
You know, it can change materially, hence why we've called it out a number of times through the presentation. That is our best view currently about where we see the year playing out. We're very much aware that the market dynamics may continue to change. I think you also have to go back to that reference point. If you just looked at the indices, it went up 200%. Our pallet prices went up 40%. We're calling that out so it can help you to kind of understand or join the dots. While the indices are useful, they're not fully informative about things like our mix, what our arrangements for supply are, et cetera.
Thank you. I was gonna ask about Europe. I mean, do you feel like you've got pretty good visibility with lumber and nails and other things that might have been impacted by sanctions or other things?
Yeah, we think we do have a good view. The challenge is that if I just even take lumber, you know, we bought less than 1% of our global lumber from, you know, the Russia, Ukraine. There might have been 1% each or one, you know, somewhere between 1%-2%. The challenge for us is while we've got visibility about that, we haven't got so much visibility about how many other people are gonna want to buy the same pools of lumber that we want to buy. And what happens as you know, that supply becomes more challenging. We have part of the equation, but we can't fully see and what happens with demand. You know, if there is more recession.
If, you know, we do see recessionary impacts, then there's likely to be less competition for that lumber. We expect, for instance, now housing starts in the U.S. to be lower than we previously thought. You know, it's not one factor. There's a whole combination of factors and, you know, as you can imagine, we get our supply chain team involved, we get our lumber experts involved, we look at external. But we're very much aware that whatever we pick will be wrong. But, you know, it's on the basis of the best information we have right now, but knowing that really we don't look that far ahead in terms of having our supply chain and pricing locked in.
Thanks. I mean, just to clarify one thing with that European situation, though. I appreciate that you don't actually source that much from those places you mentioned, but the broader market sources quite a bit from those markets. Are you seeing an impact from that?
Yes. That's why we've been seeing.
Okay.
more inflation in Europe. Definitely. That's what we're seeing. It's a question of what happens if, you know, there is more, you know, of a feel for consumer spending going down, what will that mean for demand from others as well? We're consumer staples, and we know we're pretty resilient in those environments, but, you know, that'll potentially affect other demand from other places. We are seeing that impact.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Cameron McDonald from E&P. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, Graham. Good morning, Nessa. Just sort of a couple of questions from me if I can. You've mentioned the sort of the very strong growth in the fourth quarter, which was stronger than expected and contributing to the full year result. Can you just talk a little bit about where you saw that growth and or where you saw that strength and what was contributing to that, please?
Yeah. In terms of where we thought we would be, our revenue was higher than we had forecast. We sort of looked across the group, and we had a pretty strong fourth quarter, really, across the group, but we had a higher mix of pricing than we were expecting. It had a bigger flow-through effect in terms of our overall bottom line. The other thing that we saw in terms of the fourth quarter that gave us a better result than expected was that we saw some moderation in transport inflation in the U.S. That had been tracking higher. You know, when you look at it, there's a slowdown in demand from China that accounts for about 20% of the activity, the transport activity in the U.S.. We saw that.
We also saw some increased lost asset compensations come through across our businesses. Again, so we had an upside in our earnings because of, you know, the pricing, the transport and the compensation. Actually, we had even a better flow-through to our cash flow because the items that supported the better outcome were cash-driven.
Yeah, that was gonna be my next question is, you know, obviously, you've, you know, you've come in at -$218 free cash flow after dividends, you know, relative to your previous guidance of $300-$350, which you know, sort of reiterated earlier in the year. Is that really all off the back of that better asset compensation?
It's not just asset. If you were to take what would I say roughly is the flow through to cash flow improvement from the P&L, I'd say maybe $40 million odd has been due to that. You look at the earnings and there's an increased impact, if you like, on the cash flow. The balance is really due to CapEx. Pooling CapEx was sort of, you know, about $15 million better than we had been expecting. That's a timing thing relative to how much CapEx we buy. It's purely a phasing. Doesn't really impact too much. In terms of non-pooling, we had a bigger phasing there, which was probably worth about another $30 odd million if you're trying to get the top line.
Part of it is due to just the timing of completion, frankly, on one of the sawmills that we had, and another one just in terms of timing of delivery of equipment, which we're also caught up with some of these supply chain challenges. You saw the rephasing of Integra on the, you know, the glide paths that we showed for our scorecards. Part of that's due to timing of delivery of equipment, which impacts when we pay for it. Of, I suppose, that change, maybe we get about AUD 25 million of that reverses in FY 2023 or in totality when we look at it.
Yep. Okay, great. You've called out the potential or the expectation that perhaps in the second half of 2023 you start to see some inventory destocking. You know, some of your key customers and also, you know, counterparties, not customers, but certainly counterparties, have started calling out in the U.S. elasticity of demand given the inflationary pricing. You know, what are your thoughts around that? Maybe even just reflect on the last time we sort of had some sort of economic impact in the, you know, of any severity in the U.S., what you actually saw and how that impacted your business.
If we go back, as we said in the sort of the main part of the content of the presentation, when we go back to 2008, 2009 sort of crisis and the impact going into 2010, across the group, the impact on revenue wasn't significantly or wasn't significant. That's because, you know, 80% of what goes on the pallets is consumer staples. I think that would be a very reasonable read across to what we're seeing right now.
If you look at, you know, what some of the large retailers in the U.S. are saying at the moment in terms of where they're looking at destocking it is not consumer staples, it's in some of the other things like, you know, garden furniture and clothing and that sort of stuff. I think that's a reasonable read across. What we also saw was clearly the ULP was affected, but not dramatically. I think in 2008, I think it was 2008 or 2009. Actually 2009, the first year, it was, you know, high single digits impact on ULP. But the important thing in terms of value is that we generate a lot more cash because as you would expect, we start seeing some flow back of pallets, less activity.
We don't have to do so much CapEx. I think we would expect that to happen if there was a recession going forward. We'd have some impact on top line, not much. Some impact on ULP, but we've got a lot more cash coming back. The conversations with the retailers and the customers, as I think I said in an earlier question, is that no one knows. We're getting different comments from different people. I think a good guideline is to assume that they'll start looking at it after Christmas.
Yes, we saw Walmart last night say that they were, you know, going to address their, the, what they would call as, you know, overstocking or certainly very cautious stocking levels. They're starting to address it now because they had a lot of feedback from their last results call three or four weeks ago that, you know, that was not so good, and they are now going to address that. That will probably, you know, affect us in due course as well, I would think. But a lot of what they're addressing in the short term is these things which are non-consumer staples. I think people are still concerned in that lead up to Christmas that they don't have enough product to satisfy need, and they will look at it in the new year.
If we see a recession come upon us in some markets really quickly, which it might, although I think, you know, the signs are mixed on that, then it might happen before Christmas. I my gut feel is it's that's why we're saying in our outlook that we expect things to potentially unwind a bit in the second half of our fiscal year after Christmas.
Just the final question. At the Investor Day, you guided to sort of ULP guidance of low single digit growth 2023, ramping up in 2024 and 2025 to high single digit growth. Given what you've just delivered and then the guidance into FY 2023, how do we think about what the implications are for those longer term objectives of the business, please?
I think we would say unchanged. I think would be our view about those longer term things we said at the Investor Day, because I think you have to sort of recognize that in the recent history and possibly in the short- term future, a lot of it's driven by inflation, high levels of inflation, and what we have to do to recover cost to serve. But eventually, those will become less of an issue and then we can revert, I think, you know, to what we said for those outer years back in September 2021. I think are still absolutely valid.
Sorry. Just to be clear, though, are you talking about getting to the absolute level in FY 2025 or would you still expect to deliver in 2024 and 2025, high single digit ULP growth?
Talking about the percentage growth rates, because I'm not gonna go and reiterate 2025 or 2024 guidance at this point. I mean, that's just, you know, those numbers were part of that, you know, that showing the shape of the financials. We still think the percentage increases in revenue ULP and getting back to cash flow positive are valid. You know, that's what we're still looking to do.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Owen Birrell from RBC. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Can I just follow up on the previous comment around the safety stocks and that you would prefer another 5 million-6 million pallets to replenish that safety stock? Can I just ask, if you had those 5 million-6 million pallets today, what sort of cost savings would you be looking at through the next 12 months?
Well, I think you need to look at a few different ways. The first thing is we'd have more net new business growth. That's the first. Potentially a bit more organic growth as well. You know, we'd have net new business growth. We talked about, we gave you the net inefficiency that we had, and we basically said, look, we had a net benefit worth about $8 million this year, because if you take our net inefficiencies from not having enough stock and then the saving of not doing any repairs because our, you know, processing those because we didn't get those pallets back. We kinda came up with, as we did it's not an exact science, but our estimates would get us to we got about 1- point benefit, and that was cycling.
Remember in prior year, we had a point benefit from the one-off site compensation in Asia-Pacific. It isn't uniform across all the regions. I would say one of the APAC is the one that probably had the biggest net benefit, if you like, from deferred repairs, which is that sort of $10 million that we called out. You can see that there was kind of a mixed bag of inefficiencies versus benefit. APAC had a net benefit that we're calling that out as reversing in FY 2023.
Roughly sort of 10 million in terms of net benefits on effectively plant costs. What about transport cost savings? 'Cause you know there was a significant amount of additional transport runs to go and collect pallets.
Yeah. You know, that's what we've included all that together. What we've done is we separated what we think are the inefficiencies due to not having enough pallets, and that's where we come up with the net amount. We're saying APAC, just think $10 million in total. You know-
Right.
Yeah, yeah. If you have a look overall, you know, you look at the transport cost and the increase in transport cost is below inflation level because we did have some optimization and other initiatives that helped us with the overall transport costs.
I'm just trying to get a sense that, you know, if we do see pallets coming back in the second half, but we do sort of fall into a bit of a recessionary environment, what's it gonna?
Net-net, we'd be saying just think about, you know, the AUD 10 million is probably the biggest impact. The rest of them kind of seem to wash with inefficiencies, and we'd expect as we get additional repair costs, we get additional plant efficiencies, is probably how I would think about it simplistically.
Okay, that's good. I just wanted to drill into the CHEP Americas ROIC improvement that we saw in the second half, 260 basis points in what seasonally is a weaker period. Just wanted to understand proportionally how much of that came from Canada versus U.S. versus LatAm, specifically for the second half.
I would bear in mind that as you think about where we would be low on pallet stock, that would be one of the key areas. If you think about being 6 million short, a chunk of that still, you know, obviously, you know in Australia we're short, but a chunk of that is also in the U.S. You know, while they've had to deal with, you know, having minimal pallet stock, there's also an ACI benefit that as we replenish, sort of comes through. No, we're not gonna split that out by business.
Just in terms of that ROIC improvement, is it fair to say that a large proportion of that improvement was really underpinned by the transformation program in terms of the use of automation or deployment of digital assets in that region?
Look, it has to be a combination. Look, you know, as you know, we went through a big investment program in the U.S., automating, you know, and also in co-investing in sawmills. That's been a big benefit to us, adding capacity and agility. What's helped us a lot with the transformation is we're leveraging the use of data a lot more, and that's helping us to recollect assets, that's helping with the profitability. It's also helping us to inform pricing and get a better view for what the real cost to serve is. We expect to be able to continue to get better insights over time. I think it's really hard to separate which piece exactly, you know, how much would you have done without all the support.
Definitely the access to data and the transformation initiatives, which is now bringing us to more efficiencies, and we talked about some of those initiatives on transport, they're all contributing.
You've mentioned, just on the deployment of digital assets. You know, you've mentioned the deployment of those assets into LatAm and into Canada. Have you deployed any digital assets into the U.S. market outside of the Costco trials?
I mean, actually, the first place we ever deployed a digital asset was the U.S. Some of the very early trials were there, and we put some into Walmart in the last couple of years. They've had a history of being actually one of the adopters of the technology rather than one of the laggards. One of the things we've decided to do based on the readouts and some of the benefits we've seen from deploying this, the Ultras into the U.K. and Canada, is to accelerate, you know, what we're calling the continuous diagnostics piece into the U.S.
That means putting a lot of the Ultras into the system because just letting them run around and around the system rather than necessarily putting them into places where we know there's a big problem. We think there's enough benefit for doing that to help with underpinning the asset efficiency improvements and some of the pricing data which leads to, you know, support the increased pricing in the U.S. You know, that's happening for FY 2023 as we speak. The key thing is, if the results of the trial in Chile on Serialisation+ go well, then we would look to, through 2024, start building up the Serialisation+ model in the U.S. if we think the benefits are there.
Can I ask just a further question on the continuous diagnostics rollout? You've mentioned, you've called out adding another 300,000 pallets devices into the North American market. Can I just ask within the U.K. market specifically, have you fully rolled out in that market? If not, how much further is there to go there, and what proportion of that pool do you expect to serialize?
There was a couple of mixed bits in there in terms of in the U.K. we've put in, you know. If you look at the 250,000 smart devices we've deployed, 50,000 were on various targeted diagnostics things throughout the world. But 200,000 were put in between the U.K. and Canada. We're not splitting them out between markets. That's the total. You know, they're now just running and running, so we're not gonna put more in in the at the moment because we're focusing on Serialisation+ in Chile.
We think that in a market where you want to get to Serialisation+, we will have to put in somewhere between, this is not a very helpful range for you, 0.1% to, you know, just over 1% probably of the pool being the Ultras. That's, you know, that's the number. The rest should be these very low costs, and it will either be something like RFID or probably more likely a QR code or even a serialization stamp. Very low cost identifiers because, you know, the camera technology will see them as they go in and out of various places, as opposed to the Ultras, which is giving you a reading, you know, 24/7 as it moves through the supply chain. That's, you know, that's where we are with it.
There's not a view to do more into the U.K. It's about accelerating what we've learned to go into Chile and then see whether we make bigger steps into the U.S. with that, with the technology.
Okay, that's fantastic. Great result. Thanks, guys.
Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from James Wilson from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. It's Jakob Cakarnis. The start of the Q&A, if that's okay. Just wanted to clarify on the guidance sound like you're saying now that you expect most of those pallets that have been slower turning to come back in the second half? Am I right at thinking that the skew then will be higher growth in the first half relative to the second half? All else succeeded.
Sorry. In terms of what we expect, we expect to start seeing that unwinding or more going back to normalization of supply chains to start in the second half, not to be in the first half. Overall, we've been clear also that we expect to see. That's where we expect to see improvement in cash flow weighted to the second half of the year. All right. Will that reduce with the plant cost going up and potentially transport costs going up as well? Will that?
You see.
Hold back the growth rate in underlying profit?
You know, obviously it depends on the pattern of destocking. You know, if you get them back into an area that's been. For instance, if you get a whole load of pallets back in APAC, then you're going to have those repair costs go up quite dramatically straight away. If you see more of a flow, then you'll see a phased change, and it depends on the pattern around the world. If it's a small flowback, then we may not see an impact in terms of material change in dynamics. That's why, you know, our guidance is on a group basis. We've given you some considerations by region.
Because we don't know for sure, we've put this as what we estimate will happen on a group basis, but very hard to tell what the pattern's going to be, and therefore the impact on costs, 'cause it's different by market.
Okay. Thanks for that, Nessa. Just quickly, Graham, just on the progress on the uncompensated losses. Appreciate that there's a big pie to play for here. What's holding back the collection or implementation benefits from those uncompensated losses? Is it issues around implementing that in contracts? Is it issues around getting the data to take to customers? Appreciate now you've pushed back some of that benefits from uncompensated losses now into FY 2024.
No, I think I mean, there's nothing from a sort of execution point of view. You know, we're putting in the resources. We know the sort of actions we want to take. It's more about the behavior of the retailers, you know, holding onto pallets for longer and us not being able to then, you know, deal with that. Because until we know that they're definitely lost, it's quite hard or not coming back for longer, we can't do anything about it. Yeah, I think we're really confident now that, you know, that glide path we've shown where, you know, we've got the right tools in place to execute on that.
As I think Nessa said earlier, we've built those assumptions into our FY 2023 outlook there on that glide path.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Scott Ryall from Rimor Equity Research. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Thank you very much. I'm gonna ask two questions about the remuneration report, if that's all right. In terms of the personal objectives, Graham, I think you scored 67% of target and Nessa was at about 85% versus President North America at 90% and President Europe at 100%. I've got the matrix in front of me in terms of what the objectives are for that. Could you tell me where yourself and Nessa fell short relative to where the North American, European outcomes were stronger, please?
The short answer is no, because we don't. We're not giving achievement against the individual metrics. I think what I would say is, and you know, the outcome on the short- term personal objectives is reasonably mechanical. It's not reasonably-
Very.
It is extremely mechanical. There's no subjectivity in it at all. The thing that skewed the outcomes a little bit this year is some of them have done really well and some of them have not done well. For example, if someone had something on customer, you know, Net Promoter Score, as you've seen from our scorecard on the transformation scorecard, we didn't do well at all on that. The people who will have customer metrics would be the ones who are running some of the divisions. I would have it in mine, but Nessa wouldn't have it in hers, for example, because hers would be much more focused on things like asset productivity, and the transformation objectives which have gone in. You know, the transformation's gone incredibly well. There's that sort of.
There's a bit of a pass-fail on some of the metrics, which is unusual 'cause normally you'd expect a bell-shaped distribution curve, whether it be more will be meets and the rest would either. Some would be don't meet and some would go really well. The other thing is there's even within some of the objectives, they're not all equally weighted. You've got another mix impact to think about, where some people might have had a lot on one and less on others, and if that one particular one either maxed out or failed, then it was clearly have a big impact on the outcome.
I think the important thing to say, and I would say this, wouldn't I, as I've got the lowest number, is it's got nothing to do with our view about people's personal performance. It has got more to do with, you know, the outcome of those very specific metrics. I think that's it.
No, no. I understand that. I was trying to get to what I think you answered, which is the customer satisfaction metrics were the weak point. Is that a fair-
Yeah.
A fair comment?
No, absolutely.
Productivity, transformation and people, which are the others, were closer to target. That's what I'm trying to
Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah.
Okay. All right. The second one I have is on the cash flow from operations metrics. So if I look at cash flow from operations was down 50% year-on-year in both Americas and EMEA. I know that you've got $180 million of catch-up CapEx that was deferred from 2021. If I put that just in Americas and EMEA, which I think is fair given the size of their business, then that explains about half of it. I've got quite a big deviation between the rewards for President Europe was 52% and below threshold. Sorry, the metric was 52% and below threshold, whereas for President North America was above maximum at 172% versus the target.
I'm just trying to figure out why the North America cash flow from operations result was good and the European one was perceived as bad, where they look you know fairly similar just on the straight metrics to me, please?
I mean, I think you've gotta understand that REM targets split by region are based on the budgets we had at the beginning of the year. You know, and things have happened during the course of the year. A good example would be, you know, things have been much more difficult in Europe based on, you know, unforeseen pallet inflation. We didn't have that budgeting 'cause we didn't think it was gonna be a big issue in Europe in 2022, whereas it turned out to be towards the back end of the year. You know, we knew, because of what had happened in 2021, that the U.S. was having a really tough time with things like lumber inflation.
That's why, you know, the budget for them would have been set, you know, lower relative to Europe. That's how it works. Clearly, you know, we're not gonna. We never have done, and we won't be getting into the details of what budgets are set for individual businesses throughout, you know, the beginning or throughout the year. That's what drives the outcome.
Get just more insight on the cash. In the appendices, we show the CapEx to sales, and we give commentary year-on-year, and you can see some of those differences in terms of the year-on-year impacts in lumber inflation that might be useful just to inform that.
Okay. Basically, you'd forecast an extremely low cash flow from operations in North America. I understand the budgeting process and all of that. It's you'd forecast for a really poor outcome in North America, and the outcome has been better than that really poor outcome versus some of the unexpected impacts that have come in Europe, as you say, from Russia, Ukraine, and the shortages there. And that's, I guess, the key driver behind the cash flow in Europe not being so good.
Directionally, but I wouldn't use the adjective very poor is yours, not mine. Yeah, directionally I agree with you.
Okay. No, that's fine. Just with respect to that AUD 180 million of catch-up CapEx. Just so I understand the split between North America and Europe, what was it?
I don't think we split it out, but as I said, the shortage of pallets is predominantly weighted to the U.S. You know, if you're doing the math on it, just assume that the lion's share belongs to the U.S.
Okay. All right. Okay, good. No, that just helps in terms of the commentary around that allocation. Okay. No, that's all I had today. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Sam Seow from Citi. Please go ahead.
All right. Morning, all. Appreciate the time. Just one quick housekeeping question from me. Appreciate automation probably has been slow given supply constraints, but maybe can you just give us an update on when you think you can spend that $400-odd million on the machines, and then when we should start seeing some of that margin benefit flow through?
Yeah. Look, we do plan. As you can see, we've just pushed it out a year in terms of being able to complete, given the delays. If you sort of look directionally at the spend that we've planned over the next couple of years in terms of automation, it looks about right. You probably would put a bit more in sort of 2025 and some into 2026 to get back to the total that we'd guided to at Investor Day, is probably the best way. Look, in the interim, obviously, we'll be doing everything we can to see if we can go faster, but that's our best estimate as to what the plan is. You know.
We're still very committed to it, and I think what's pleasing is that we managed to get more capital-light supply chain efficiencies into our numbers for this year.
3. Just same shape, just one year to the right.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back for closing remarks.
Great. Well, thanks, everyone for dialing in and for asking questions. They've been really good. Looking forward to, I think, seeing most of you over the next week or so. I'm sure we'll continue some of the conversations then. Thanks very much.
Thank you.