Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Chrysos Corporation Limited FY 24 results. 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. Dirk Treasure, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning, shareholders. Thank you all for joining us today for our full year FY 24 results presentation. As usual, I'm joined by our CFO, Brett Coventry. Brett and I will give an overview of the operational and financial results for the year. Slide three, please, operator.
Thanks, Dirk, and good morning. Our agenda for this morning is firstly, our financial year 2024 results highlights, followed by PhotonAssay overview, which we recap some of the details here for those who are new to Chrysos. Next, to our financial year 24 summary, then looking forward to our FY 25 guidance. Following this, we'll open the floor for some questions. Also, in the back of the release today, you will see some About Chrysos notes and slides we previously published, for some more detail for some of the background information.
Next slide, please, operator. Thank you, Brett. In an ongoing story of sustained high growth, I'm pleased to present the highlights for FY 2024. Firstly, our total revenue was AUD 45.4 million, a substantial increase of 69% year on year, and in line with our revised guidance provided earlier this year. Ongoing increasing revenue is reflective of the sustained adoption of PhotonAssay by the global gold industry, particularly during a period where gold exploration expenditure remains suppressed. Our EBITDA has increased by 156% over FY 2023, to a total of AUD 9 million. Importantly, our EBITDA conversion has improved to 20%, and that's compared to 14% in FY 2023, illustrating improved operational leverage, bolstered by our strategy of clustering units, leading to reduced unitized costs.
We remain very well positioned from a funding perspective, with AUD 61 million cash on hand, which is further supported by an undrawn AUD 95 million banking facility with the Commonwealth Bank. Mindful that each of the units costs us shy of AUD 4 million to build, and the business is operating cash flow positive, this gives us a solid runway of circa 40 additional PhotonAssay units from our current total. We finished the year with a total of 29 units deployed, having started the financial year with 20. In addition to the nine new units, we've also successfully redeployed two units during the year, highlighting our growing installation capability, as well as showcasing our ability to pick up and move a PhotonAssay unit when required, which allows us to be nimble and make changes in line with market demand.
Post-year end, we've inked four new contracts, two of which we discussed during our recent 4C, with a further two signed between the 4C release and now. Slide five, please, operator. The two new additions to the contract book are both for deployment to SGS, which is one of the world's leading laboratory companies. We're currently installing a unit with SGS for Barrick's North Mara Gold Mine in Tanzania, which we had disclosed during our last 4C, but that's now a confirmed signed contract. And this is further bolstered by our new agreement with SGS for deployment into Orange in New South Wales, Australia, to support the major gold miners in that region. The Orange unit will operate in a hub-and-spoke laboratory. Our focus remains on building out our pipeline of deployment opportunities and diversifying our customer base to realign our deployment cadence with our manufacturing capacity.
These four recent contracts support our growth plans for FY 25, as we continue to broaden our network of PhotonAssay units around the world. I'm pleased to announce that the first Nevada Gold Mines' PhotonAssay unit with MSA has begun installation, and we anticipate that at least three units will be deployed in support of the NGM mining complex. This presents a broader opportunity for Chrysos, apart from being an extension of our relationship with Barrick as part of their global adoption. The NGM complex is a joint venture with Newmont, which remains the biggest gold mining company in the world. We expect that our operations within NGM will provide us with better access to Newmont once our PhotonAssay technology is being used on the site.
With one unit beginning installation, we've also completed manufacture of another unit, which maintains a total of 14 units available, having passed factory acceptance testing to support our FY 2025 PhotonAssay rollout. Slide six, please, operator. We continue to achieve record sample volumes from our deployed units. Our customers span laboratories and miners, and we count some of the world's biggest gold miners as our direct and indirect customers. We are also well supported by our laboratory partners, which are some of the biggest laboratory companies in the world, and it's through these strong partnerships that we're able to deliver PhotonAssay to our customers around the world. It's important to note that all of these samples originate from the mining companies themselves, so growth in sample volume is a function of two things.
First, increasing sample volumes processed by existing customers, which is supported by broadening application of PhotonAssay, and secondly, by adding new mining projects to our customer base. Accordingly, growing samples or growing sample volume is indicative of broader use of the technology by new and existing customers. Slide eight, please, operator. I want to take a moment to talk through Chrysos' business model and why our technology is so successful in the global gold industry. So apologies to those familiar with Chrysos' journey to date, if I'm going over old ground. Very briefly, we build what is called PhotonAssay units. We deploy them to our customers, which are miners and laboratories... and then we charge them a fee for use over a long equipment lifetime. PhotonAssay is a gold analysis technology, which uses high-powered X-rays to measure gold in a sample.
Analysis is a non-discretionary spend for miners, and we're typically displacing an existing analysis method called fire assay. We're seeing rapid adoption of our technology all over the world because it offers substantial advantages. First developed by CSIRO, PhotonAssay is well protected by a mosaic of patents on a global basis that would make it very difficult for anyone to compete with a similar technology. We also keep a very close watch for any alternative gold analysis techniques in the market. The technology has quickly become adopted by the industry. It's been used in JORC and NI 43-101 compliant releases, and we have now processed in excess of 10 million samples. Slide nine, please, operator. Our vision is to become the world's leading provider of innovative assay services and technology, and that really starts with our PhotonAssay technology.
The goal with PhotonAssay is to convert all major gold mining projects around the world, displacing their incumbent analytical technique. We're building strategic partnerships with our customers, as evidenced during the year with our announcement of global adoption by Barrick, as well as our broadening relationships with ALS, which operate PhotonAssay in Australia and North America, Intertek, which operate PhotonAssay in Australia and Ghana, and now our expanding relationship with SGS, which will operate PhotonAssay in Australia and Tanzania. We consider these partnerships as key to our success and work closely with our partners on new opportunities. Our business model, which operates as a fee per sample, reduces barriers to entry, minimizing the investment required by our customers, making for a very simple adoption proposition.
Our commitment to availability and performance of the equipment, supported by our global maintenance team, de-risks adoption for a technology that becomes critical infrastructure for the mine site. For Chrysos, this business model offers a long-term annuity-style revenue post-deployment, where our economics are supported by our minimum monthly assay payment. We also retain exposure to industry upswings, where our additional assay charges can drive unit profitability higher. On the right-hand side, we illustrate market penetration into our total addressable market. Our TAM is made up of hub-and-spoke laboratories, accounting for around two hundred deployment opportunities, and the miners, which account for around four hundred and ten opportunities. Once a mine is large enough, it requires on-site analysis to operate. Otherwise, it would effectively be running its process plant and mining operations without any information.
As a gold mine processes more tons, it generally correlates to a higher volume of samples. We've estimated our total addressable market at those mines around the world, which are mining at least 40,000 ounces of gold a year, which equates to around $100 million USD in revenue. There are also plenty of opportunities for PhotonAssay beyond gold analysis. We currently analyze commercially for copper, silver, and gold. We also offer a moisture service, allowing customers to process wet materials. We are also actively developing other elemental capability. Slide 10, please, operator. This leads us to the question: Why are we seeing miners adopt this technology around the world? Firstly, it's significantly faster, reducing analysis time from hours to minutes. It's more accurate, particularly where miners have complex mineralogy. It allows reduced sample preparation, which reduces overall analysis cost and time.
It's completely automated, with a technician needing only to place a sample onto an input conveyor and then remove samples from an output conveyor post-analysis. It has reduced labor requirements, where we have a number of partners running both fire assay and PhotonAssay in the same facility. They've told us that it's about one-third of the labor to run a similarly sized PhotonAssay compared to a fire assay operation. PhotonAssay samples are also 10-20x the sample mass that is processed by a fire assay, leading to a more representative sub-sample for analysis. Slide 11, please, operator. For every PhotonAssay that displaces a fire assay, we reduce CO2 emissions by 50%, and we have no waste product. So as we grow our penetration in the industry, this impact continues to grow.
From the roughly 10 million samples that we've processed, we've already reduced carbon dioxide emissions by over 5,200 tons and reduced hazardous lead-contaminated waste, which would otherwise go to landfill, by over 3,500 tons. We're also very proud to drastically improve health and safety for operators. In the fire assay process, operators are exposed to lead, which gets into their bloodstreams and causes all sorts of nasty side effects. The WHO has come out and said that there is no safe level of lead contamination, and yet, when performing fire assay, it really isn't a question of whether lead contamination will occur, but to what extent. Just recently, a laboratory in Western Australia was fined for having their operators' lead contamination levels dramatically exceed allowable levels, and this is occurring in Australia, where there are relatively stringent controls.
Often, laboratories in developing countries can be much worse. Slide 12, please, operator. Moving back to our business model, our equipment requires an initial capital outlay and then generates secure revenue over a long lifetime. While the equipment is high CapEx, our agreements with key suppliers allow us to delay payment of a large proportion of this cost to align with the revenue generation of a deployed unit. You can see from this chart that our initial outlay for a unit is in the order of AUD 100,000 to secure a long lead time component, which occurs approximately 18 months prior to factory acceptance testing. We then proceed to order the complete PhotonAssay unit, approximately 9 months ahead of factory acceptance testing, and we expend around 20% of the unit's capital at this point. Once the equipment is built, we then pay an additional 20%.
This model basically means that 60% of our capital outlay for the equipment is delayed until after we begin to generate revenue from the PhotonAssay unit. Once deployed, we operate typically on a five plus five-year lease contract, but fully expect to be deployed for the life of the equipment, which we estimate at around 20 years. Accordingly, each PhotonAssay unit that we deploy has an NPV exceeding AUD 20 million, based on the revenue, cost, and CapEx that we currently experience. Slide 13, please, operator. I'll pass to Brett, so he can go into some further detail around these numbers.
Thanks, Dirk, and we should be on slide 14 now. We introduced this slide earlier in the year as part of the maturing of our information we provide, to give more visibility to the business and for those building their own models, a view to the direct costs associated with the deployment of PhotonAssay. We continue to achieve very strong margins, achieving 76% per unit this year. We've also included here the indication of underlying minimum of the assay payments, of course, being the stable locked-in revenue for the year. This is important, as the minimum monthly assay payment is the baseline revenue, revenue for the business, while the additional assay charges will fluctuate with market conditions. Noting the revenue achievement, MMAP grew by 85% to AUD 39.5 million this financial year.
The opportunities exist both on the revenue side, with the ability for additional assay charges driven by increased utilization, and the cost side, with increased reliability and clustering of our units amongst the drivers of this. Next slide, please. Revenues across the globe increased by 69%, with revenues outside of Australia now representing 55% of revenues globally, up from 33% in the previous financial year. Both our international regions had strong growth, with 211% growth for the EMEA region and 203% across the Americas. We expect the growth to continue in these regions and with ongoing deployments, including LATAM or Latin America, with our first sales manager employed in this region. Next slide. Revenue growth is continuing in line with the growth in the fleet of PhotonAssay units across the globe.
A quick reminder here, revenue commences from SAT or site acceptance testing, being the date we hand the PhotonAssay unit to our client. At the same time, costs associated with operating these units are in line with expectations of achieving a strong market. For clarity, when we talk about PhotonAssay expenses, this is the all-in expenses of operating PhotonAssay, being the maintenance spares and employee costs of operating our units. The achievement of the EBITDA position at AUD 9 million is in line with our original guidance and is reflecting an ongoing improvement in margin conversion as our business matures. We expect our operating expenses to become increasingly incremental, and this year's results are reflective of our business's ability to be agile, adapting to change, manage costs, and deliver our financial goals.
We note there was an improvement in loss before income tax of AUD 500,000. Movements in income tax are the pickup of the deferred tax assets as they become realizable over the next few years. As we did last year, we've guided to EBITDA, but we do have a view moving forward to NPAT. Movements will be largely driven by the depreciation profile. We touched on SAT just before. Depreciation commences at the same time. From accounting view, we have segment depreciation, primarily depreciated over the first 10 units, with parts of the assets having a 20-year useful life. In short, the capital nature of our business, we do expect to see our D&A expense continue to grow, noting this is timed directly to revenue generation of those units. Next slide, please.
Annual cash flow continues on a positive basis at an operating level and contributes to the ongoing investment in deployment of PhotonAssay. Those following closely from your quarterly announcements would see a movement down of the operating cash flow around AUD 1.3 million. Not a change in total cash flow, however, this relates to repayment of customer deposits due to them under contract, which appear in the balance sheet as borrowings and have previously been classified in our cash flow as repayment of borrowings. We've spoken throughout the year about collections from some of our regions we operate in. We have high-quality counterparties and no major concerns, but particular Africa collections can be slow. We expect to increase capital expenditure in the coming year, aligned with the deployments for the future year. From the funding perspective, we have AUD 61 million in the bank.
During the year, we expanded AUD 65 million of debt facility, taking our available debt to AUD 95 million, which is currently undrawn. As Dirk discussed earlier, our funding allows for approximately 40 more PhotonAssay units before we consider the positive cash flow impact of deploying each unit. Next slide, please. Our balance sheet remains strong and well-placed for the continued deployment of PhotonAssay across the globe. We expect the balance sheet to continue growing non-current assets as we deploy more PhotonAssay units, with 29 units deployed and contracts to deploy a further 25, taking the total of contracts and deployed units to a total of 54. With that, slide 20, please, and Dirk.
Thank you, Brett. Consistent with our full-year update last month, we provide the following guidance. Firstly, on revenue, we're providing guidance of AUD 60-70 million for FY 2025, indicating continued strong growth of revenue of approximately 45% at the midpoint. Underlying this guidance, the two main levers impacting revenue are timing of deployments and revenue per unit. From a deployment perspective, we've aligned our deployment team more closely with the sales team, and more specifically, as frontline in customer communications. We consider deployment timing to be more predictable going into FY 2025. On the revenue front, the global gold industry remains in a relatively slow environment, with low exploration spends, and accordingly, global industry sample volumes remain low. We consider that we're bumping along the bottom of this cycle, and that Chrysos is incredibly well-poised to take advantage of a macro uptick when the cycle turns.
The timing of this is uncertain, and for the purpose of guidance, we've assumed no change to the market and that revenue per unit will remain similarly stable. Moving to EBITDA, we're providing a guidance range of AUD 9 million-AUD 19 million, with the really wide range in EBITDA driven by the revenue range. Our strategy of clustering units in key mining regions is allowing us to control our unit costs, and as we continue to deploy additional units, our overheads do not need to scale proportionally. Therefore, we're able to largely mitigate the impact of inflation and to drive EBITDA margin. Slide 21, please, Operator. Summarizing FY 2024, we've had continued top-line growth, with revenue up 69% and EBITDA up 156% year-on-year, with both metrics in line with our revised guidance from earlier in the year.
There are now 29 PhotonAssay units deployed around the world, with 9 new units deployed during the year, as well as 2 redeployments. We have a strong pipeline of contracts, which is further bolstered by our 4 new contracts signed post year-end, which are supporting our efforts to expand our customer contracts and diversify our customer base. We've been very well supported by our customers via public endorsement of our technology. Firstly, with Barrick's global adoption of PhotonAssay, announced in October last year, but further bolstered by Gold Fields, which talked about their exclusive use of PhotonAssay in Australia during our site visit earlier in 2024, mindful that both of these companies are top 5 gold-producing companies. More recently, Agnico Eagle, which is now the third biggest gold miner in the world, presented their adoption of PhotonAssay by their Fosterville Gold Mine at a recent AusIMM conference.
We anticipate this interest in our technology to continue to snowball as adoption by these big miners de-risks adoption for smaller gold miners and explorers. From a funding perspective, we remain well-funded for future growth, with over AUD 145 million available for investment into PhotonAssay units, mindful that we're operating cash flow positive. I'd like to close with a quick thank you to the ever-growing Chrysos team for their dedication and hard work, without which we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have during the year, and I'm excited to see how FY 25 unfolds. Thank you, and we'll move to questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Josh Kannourakis from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Hi, Dirk and Brett. Can you hear me okay?
Yes, loud and clear, Josh.
Yes, good, thank you. First one, just, well done on, you know, some, signing some of the new contracts. Can we talk a little bit more about just the potential for, I guess, expansion, with SGS and just maybe a bit more context around maybe how much they're sort of doing on mine site? I know, I think they do more of that than, say, an ALS or something. So just interested in what their positioning is in that market versus sort of more the hub-and-spoke market that they also operate in.
Yeah, look, great, great question. So SGS, at least to my understanding, are the biggest provider of on-site laboratories in the gold space around the world. So we see that as a great opportunity for us. Any growing relationship with SGS, as you can see from the recently signed contract, is excellent for PhotonAssay and for adoption. I mean, having, you know, effectively the world's biggest laboratory company advocating for our technology out in the industry also just helps to de-risk the adoption by, well, small and large gold miners. So we're very excited by the growing relationship here with SGS.
Yeah, fantastic. Okay, that's great. And just second one, just around, I guess, on the MMAP side of things. So it's good to give the context on the dollar value. Just wondering, like, those new contracts around that sort of – are they signed at similar levels? Are they – How should we be thinking about, you know, the incremental units signed in terms of what that does to some of the MMAP intake leading into FY 2025?
Yeah, look, perfect, perfect questions again. So all of our contracts continue to adhere to the same type of metrics and economics. So, you know, you're talking about having a locked-in MMAP, the opportunity for additional assay charges coming through. Everything's on a long cycle basis. So yeah, you could assume that they are relatively consistent with the other deals that we have out in the pipeline.
Okay, that's great, and final one from me, and I know obviously for many reasons, which you explained last time, not giving sort of deployment level guidance. Obviously, you've got those 14 units sitting there, and ability to do more, how should we sort of think about just nearer term in terms of both, you know, deployments, but just in terms of the weighting across the year and that at the moment? Is there any extra, maybe a bit of extra color you can give us on how we should be thinking about that?
That seems like a question we've had before, Josh.
Yeah. Yes.
Good, good question, and certainly from our perspective, the goal here is to move to a point where deployment cadence matches manufacturing capacity. So I think we've demonstrated manufacturing capacity in the order of 20-odd units a year. So certainly the plan is to get deployment cadence to that level. As we continue to roll out more contracts and basically ink more deals around the world, these are ideally near-term deployments as well. So the four contracts that we've talked about that have been signed post-period are all intended to be deployed within this financial year. So quite positive for the deployment cadence of the business, but without providing sort of specific color around how many to expect on a quarterly basis.
Yeah. And just so the pipeline in general then, do you just feel like... I mean, there obviously feels like a little bit more activity in terms of, you know, some of the markets. Obviously, the backdrop still remains relatively, you know, favorable, despite exploration levels still not really picking up too much. Like, what are you seeing in terms of the sort of end market dynamics? Is there any sort of changes over the last few months or any other further inbound or pipeline activity that's worth noting?
Look, I think the industry is getting more interesting again. I think, you know, I've commented before that we're bouncing along the bottom. I think that with the gold price up where it is, people are taking notice of the gold market, which we would fully expect to translate through into an increased exploration spend. In saying that, though, you know, as we've said before, we haven't specifically seen that, particularly in Australia at the moment. But I think that there are a lot of exciting opportunities around the world. I think one of the big points for us, though, is that as we deploy more of these units into these prolific gold mining regions, we are incredibly well poised for when the industry turns, and that's just something that we keep an eye out for.
So if you look at the unit economics on kind of a revenue per unit basis, we've managed to keep that relatively consistent even with the market where it is, but we think that there's an incredible opportunity there as the market starts to pick up.
That's really helpful. Okay, well done. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Josh.
Thank you. Again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. You may press star and one to ask a question. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Treasure for closing remarks.
Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone for attending today. I'm actually incredibly excited by the year that we've had and the year to come. The global endorsement of our technology by the world's biggest gold miners, as well as the global footprint that we've built out during FY 2024, provides a solid foundation for success going into FY 25. At some stage, we feel that there will be an industry upswing for gold exploration, which will further bolster our unit economics and adoption. Admittedly, we had some misses during the year regarding deployments, but we've built the infrastructure within the business to support future growth. I look forward to providing further updates to the market and look forward to seeing you at either our AGM or during our next market update. Thanks again.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.