Thank you and good morning. Look, first up, we are not a gold miner. However, as you are going around the conference, almost every gold miner that you meet is defining their resources and running their operations based on either our technology, PhotonAssay, or based on fire assay. Fire assay is hundreds of years old. It is laborious. It is a bit of an ESG nightmare. It is pretty tedious to run. By contrast, PhotonAssay, faster, safer, more accurate gold analysis. Talking about the miners that are around the conference, we have been deployed at Barrick's gold mine site for five years.
Gold Fields use us for all of their Australian operations. Northern Star use us all over the world. We have also just released videos with OceanaGold talking about their adoption of PhotonAssay, so certainly encourage anyone to check those out after this discussion.
It is important to note as well that analysis is required across the entire mining value chain. A miner cannot run, they cannot define a resource. It is a non-discretionary spend for the industry to have analysis, and we do it in a better way. So what does that mean? Why are miners adopting PhotonAssay? So time per sample. Time for a PhotonAssay is around about two minutes. Time for a fire assay, three to four hours. But you put that in the context of operations, and generally you are talking about, on a mine site, waiting about a day for a fire assay. We can be turning around quasi real-time data to allow miners to make informed decisions about how to operate their mining, how to operate their process plant. Sample size is particularly important.
If we keep in mind that a miner is not just looking at what is in the sample itself, they are trying to establish what does their ore body look like, what is going on in their process plant. So the size of a sample dictates how representative it is to the bulk sample, and we will come back to this in a second. But we run 300 g of pulp material, 500 g crushed material. Meanwhile, fire assay is running at 10 g- 50 g, depending on the material. From an ESG perspective, it is lower CO2, lower hazardous waste, lower energy use. It can also be automated in a way that people have not been able to automate fire assay in a good way. PhotonAssay is applicable across the entire economic ore grade.
We have a lower detection limit of 0.01 gram per ton, the whole way up to 10,000 g per ton. And we are completely insensitive to sample matrix. So whatever you put into a PhotonAssay jar, we will analyze. That means it could be a sulfide, it could be an oxide, it can be a slurry. You can cut the end off a drill core and put it into a sample jar, and we will tell you how much gold is in it. One of the things, though, that we are really, really proud of is removing lead from the laboratory environment.
So at the moment, from an OH&S perspective, fire assay exposes operators to lead contamination in their blood. The way the industry typically works around this is by rotating operators through different aspects of a laboratory to keep their lead levels below an allowable amount for that laboratory.
The WHO has come out and said that there is no acceptable lead contamination level. Pre-PhotonAssay, there really hasn't been a way around it. We're talking about here laboratories in Western countries. As recently as last year, there was an Australian laboratory that got fined for having its operators having excess lead levels. So we're very proud of the fact that we remove lead as a hazard from the operating environment, and we believe that no lead exposure is acceptable. I won't bore you with technical detail here, but this is something that is pretty important from PhotonAssay, is that accuracy is important. You're talking about miners making billion-dollar decisions based on the ore grade of their deposits, based on what's going on in their mills. So what we've got here is eight samples that we have PhotonAssayed, so that's the eight rows.
We've taken that same material that we've PhotonAssayed, we've split it out into seven fire assays and fire assayed it to extinction. So if we take row one, for example, sample one, you've got a fire assay running from 1.3 g per ton down to 0.44 g per ton. There is a general assumption in the mining industry that by the time that you pulverize the sample, you have a homogenous sample. What we see is that that is simply not true.
As soon as you've got heterogeneous material, as soon as you have native gold in your ore, you start to smear gold, you start to create a heterogeneity even at a pulverized level, leading to errors in your results. So you can see here that a single PhotonAssay matches up to ± 4% to the fire assay to extinction.
Yet, if you took only one of these fire assay samples, you could be out at times by 65%, 60%, - 114%. Again, these are the decisions or these are the samples that are being used to make billion-dollar mining decisions. So accuracy is important. How does PhotonAssay work? Very briefly, we bombard samples with high-powered X-rays. You're talking about 100 to 1,000 times the power of an XRF. We're exciting gold atoms at a nuclear level. So we basically rearrange the protons and neutrons inside the sample to an isomeric state. As we stop bombarding it with X-rays, it decays back into its relaxed state, and we can measure the gamma radiation that comes off the sample. So we are effectively exciting atoms and then atom counting the number of gold atoms in the sample.
Again, that comes back to we are insensitive to sample matrix, we're insensitive to how the gold is in the sample because it's atomic, not mineralogical. We are all around the world now. So we've got 46 units deployed. We've got 87 contracted units. We're operating in five continents. We're trusted by the world's leading gold miners. So we're deploying at the moment into Newmont. We've been deployed for years with Barrick. I commented on the other ones before. We are expanding with existing partners. The industry trusts the laboratories, and the laboratories are a channel partner for us that we work with very closely, and we count ALS, SGS, Intertek, BV, and MSALABS as our customers and partners in the industry. We're then increasing direct-to-mine-site deployments. If I just go onto this slide.
The yellow and blue on the right-hand side here are the volume of samples that we run through hub labs, and then the volume of samples that we run direct to mine site. We are increasingly deploying our technology directly to the mine site, and that is where the value really vests with the miners. That faster analysis, more accurate analysis, leading to better decision-making by the miner, adding value to the miner, is really where our focus is. Long term, we would certainly expect that blue line to continue to grow more and more beyond the yellow and become the dominant source of sample volume for us. Into the business model itself, and I guess going down the investment side of the company. Every single one of our PhotonAssay units, Chrysos own.
We build these units, we deploy them at our cost, and then we lease them to the gold miners or the laboratories. The goal here is that the cost per analysis is competitive with the cost of fire assay. Our price discovery is relatively simple because everybody knows what they pay for fire assay, so we simply come in and charge the same or a little bit less for our PhotonAssay technology, and we are clipping that ticket every year as we go through. Each of the units is deployed on a take-or-pay. We will have a miner or laboratory commit to, say, 10,000 or 20,000 samples per month. We get paid for that on a take-or-pay. We then have upside where we have a customer running excess samples compared to what they are committed to.
The nice things about this model is that the capital stays in the mine. Effectively, the money from the miner is really going toward what they do well, which is mining and adding value from that perspective. There is no obsolescence risk, so every one of our units around the world, we service, maintain, we upgrade with all of the improvements that we make to the technology. Costs scale with use. For the miner, they are really only paying for those samples that they use. On the pure financial side, it costs us about AUD 4 million to build a unit. We run at around about AUD 2 million of revenue. These are all Australian numbers, AUD 2 million of revenue per unit, about AUD 0.5 million in cost. That gives us a AUD 1.5 million gross profit per unit per annum.
We see these units lasting 20 years with a small amount of CapEx rebuild along the way, which gives us an NPV of about AUD 20 million per unit that we deploy into the industry. You have a 2.7-year payback period, 37% annual ROIC, and then there is further upside based on additional utilization of the unit. It is long-term contracts, so it is five-year renewable contracts. We fully expect the technology to remain at a mine site for life of mine, or when it is deployed into a laboratory, effectively to stay there in perpetuity. Keeping in mind, again, that our counterparties here or our customers here are Tier 1 counterparties, big laboratories, big miners. Moving through to the financials. This is looking at last year's financials. We printed an AUD 88.1 million revenue, which was up 33%.
You can see there that EBITDA is growing significantly faster than revenue, so we're growing revenue faster than cost. We've got a 68% increase in EBITDA, up to AUD 27.2 million. Operating cash flow of AUD 17.9 million, which is up 103%, and we're reinvesting all of that cash that we generate back into building out our fleet. Our general goal is more units, higher utilization per units that drives the revenue per unit, increasing operating leverage, and we're using that cash to reinvest. It is important to say here that we are linked to production, not exploration.
A lot of our samples are coming through from the miners themselves, from grade control, from that required samples for the miner to operate their mine. Where are we at the moment? We've got 46 units deployed. We've got six units deploying, 87 units contracted.
That means that there are 35 contracted still to deploy units. We've got a long pipeline of deployments to come from here. We did release guidance in August, taking us to AUD 108 million-AUD 118 million in revenue, AUD 35 million-AUD 42 million in EBITDA. Again, you can see a very large step-up there in both revenue and EBITDA. We've also increased our manufacturing capacity to 18 units per annum. To get those 35 units out there is going to take us in the order of two years. There is growth beyond gold, so we focus relentlessly on the gold market, on being the best for the gold industry and adding as much value as we possibly can to gold miners around the world. But we also now have silver and copper analysis available.
If you look at the right-hand side there, looking at these alternative analyses, we are seeing momentum in those alternative analyses, where we've seen the sample volume grow 55% year-on-year, and that's in comparison to our revenue growing at 33%. The alternative analyses will continue to play a big part. The overall elemental and analytical future of Chrysos is how do we provide all of the analytical services that a miner needs to operate their mine? At the moment, we are sitting at about 7%-8% market share if you look at our number of units deployed. In the U.S., we take on a relatively small proportion of the overall samples in the market. In Australia, we're actually now the dominant gold analysis technique according to the laboratories that we work with.
How do we get from 8% to a much larger capture of our addressable market? We partner with the laboratories. All four of the major laboratories around the world are our customers. They are channel partners. They get us into new regions. As we deploy to an individual laboratory company, they give us access to multiple miners from that lab. Also, the miners trust the laboratories. We trade on that trust. We work with the laboratories to make sure that the miners are getting the analysis. We embed deeper at the mine. Rather than just a like-for-like replacement of fire assay, we are focused on adding more value for the miners. How do we use the differentiating features of our technology to add value and really build that relationship with the miners, become critical infrastructure for those mining companies?
Expanding the analysis, really becoming that one-stop shop for all of the analytical requirements of a miner. We are moving as well toward fully auditable data. As you have a PhotonAssay result, you will also be able to see what batch was it run in, what was the QA/QC, where did the sample come from, chain of custody, how was the unit calibrated, and exposing that directly to all of our customers. Lastly, it has got to be simple to run on-site. We are looking at the moment at automated sample prep and how do you simplify the overall operations of analysis on a mine site. We estimate the market at 200 hub labs, so that is these big labs in places like Kalgoorlie, Timmins, where you have got multiple miners running through a lab, and then 410 on-site laboratories.
The 410 is based on the number of gold mines around the world at the moment producing more than 40,000 oz of gold per annum. That is what we have set as our lower production level for where we think that we can provide a competitive cost and competitive operations to the fire assay that they are currently running. So a significant runway from where we are, even though we are on a very high growth trajectory and even though we already count most of the major gold miners and all of the major laboratories as our customers.
Our technology is unique. We are the only company in the world producing PhotonAssay. It is the product of 20+ years of research and development. It has a mosaic of patents wrapped around it that cover the science of PhotonAssay itself, but also the design of the equipment that we run with.
I do think, though, that there is a step beyond just the protection of IP here. What we are building out as a moat is our ability to service and maintain what is relatively complicated equipment all over the world in some pretty gnarly mining jurisdictions. Some of the places that we have been longest on mine sites are in Tanzania, the DRC. Mining happens all over the world, not just in simple countries to operate in, like Australia. From the commercial standpoint, we really value our relationship with the miners. I talked before about becoming critical infrastructure for the miners, embedding ourselves in their processes.
That is a big focus of ours. We work incredibly closely with the miners. As we develop new aspects of our technology, they become the natural sales point for us. We do not need to go out and market to a completely new industry.
We are effectively working with miners, adding analytical capability for those miners that we are already on-site with or working with through the laboratories. Why Chrysos? We have proven disruption of this industry. We have an incredibly high growth trajectory. We are displacing a centuries-old fire assay technology. We have got a large runway, so we have got 46 units deployed against the 610 that we estimate as the addressable market. When we look at that TAM, we are really talking about the TAM that we consider that we can take all of it, not that we are going to get to 20% or something like that.
The TAM is where we expect to be operating PhotonAssay going forward. We are funded for growth. We have got 87 contracted units. We have got AUD 140 million in debt that is undrawn at the moment, allowing us to build more of these units.
Come back to the economics, it costs us about AUD 4 million to build a unit. You can work out that runway of how many units we can build from that without taking into account cash flow and growth from here. Industry adoption, we are running 1 million samples a month. We have tier 1 miners and all four global labs as our customers. We are seeing utilization increase in our units around the world. We expect that to continue to drive forward from here, and it is incredibly difficult to replicate what we are doing. We also keep a very close watch on the industry, on anything that is going on in the gold analysis space.
We do not expect that anything is going to come in and compete with us with our technology. However, if someone comes up with something interesting, we always want to be across it before they start to displace us.
All right. Thank you, and we will move to questions. I will say that anyone that is interested, we have got some one-on-one spots tomorrow as well, so feel free to reach out. Over to you. Awesome. Any questions from the floor?
Dirk, quick question. As you mentioned, speaking at the event, you are speaking with gold mining companies typically. In terms of a comp, what would you sort of look at as an industry comp from a point- of- view of, obviously, resources companies are dealing with revenue and cost movement. How would you comp the business on earnings or.
It is a tricky one. From a comp perspective, there is not really anything like us, particularly on the ASX. I mean, the only other really large mining technology company would be someone like an Imdex, but we are very different to Imdex because Imdex have competitors. Essentially in our market at this point, we do not have competitors. So really, you are looking at growth and DCF and that type of thing to work out how much we are worth. It is quite interesting to watch all the brokers try to, as we go quarter- to- quarter on our number of units deployed, number of samples run, how much our forward-looking value continues to change as well.
Yeah. On that cost line, it is fairly defendable from a margin point- of- view of the business. Happy to talk to that.
Yeah, absolutely. We run about 70%-80% gross profit per unit. Our units then cost us AUD 4 million to build. We make AUD 2 million of revenue per unit, and each unit is costing us AUD 400,000-AUD 500,000. Within that then you have a take-or-pay, so the revenue component is made up of the take-or-pay, which is about 1.4, 1.5, and then additional assay charges, which is the utilization-based revenue, and that is making up about that AUD 500,000- AUD 600,000. Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you very much.