Good morning, everyone. As Darcy just said, my name is Tony Dragicevich, CEO and Managing Director of Capral. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our Half-Year Results Presentation for 2025. I'm joined today by our CFO, Tertius Campbell, who will present what we believe are a fairly solid set of results given the current tough market conditions. This morning, we're just going to run through our agenda, as I'll run through an overview and the highlights of the business. Tertius will then cover off detailed financing, and I'll be back online then to talk about the strategy and the outlook and guidance. Just turning to the overview of the business, I'll talk a bit about aluminium here. It's, you know, obviously what we do, and we're a key part of the Australian aluminium industry. Aluminium is used in a wide variety of applications.
It's both strong and lightweight, making it a preferred construction material in buildings, transport, marine, and many other fabrication applications. Because it is lightweight, aluminium also plays an important role in reducing carbon emissions, especially in all the transport-related applications like cars, trucks, planes, boats, etc. Aluminium is also important to the Australian economy, as Australia is one of the few countries in the world that has a fully integrated aluminium supply chain from bauxite mining, aluminum refining, aluminium smelting, and downstream manufacturing of aluminium extrusion and fabrication with Capral fitting. Primary aluminium is actually Australia's largest manufactured export earner, and the industry in totality is responsible for over 20,000 jobs. Capral is Australia's largest and leading producer of aluminium extrusion, and we're the number one distributor of extrusion and plate and valuated services. Turning to page four, our business in summary, we've got six manufacturing plants, eight extrusion presses.
All of our plants apart from our Queensland plant are single press plants. The Bremer Park plant in Queensland has three presses and a paint line. Annual extrusion capacity is 65,000 tons in overall 22 distribution centres. Our key markets are residential and commercial building and a variety of industrial segments. We have around a 27% share of the overall aluminium extrusion market in Australia, and our turnover in the last 12 months is about $665 million with over 1,000 employees, so a reasonably substantial business. Turning to the half-year highlights, our earnings were in line with expectation, lower volume. However, that was offset by higher aluminium-related pricing, lifting our sales revenue above last year. Industrial demand has softened, and residential demand remains soft but steady. We expect a recovery in the second half. Margins are holding up well due to effective cost management and recovery.
Turning to the performance highlights for the first half, a solid earnings result in a soft market in line with our expectation and guidance. This demonstrates Capral's ability to deliver solid earnings in what is a relatively soft market. Our volume at just over 31,000 tons was 7% down on the prior half year. As I said, our sales revenue of $327 million was up 4% due to higher aluminium prices and mix. Our underlying EBITDA at $27.7 million was around $1 million down on last year, so around 3%. Our net profit after tax of $15.3 million was above last year, but did include a $2.5 million recognition of future tax benefits given our forecast earnings for the next few years. Earnings per share on that basis were $0.89 a share, up on the same period. Balance sheet remains strong. Net cash of $53 million.
Net tangible assets increasing to $11.67 per share. Our share buyback program, which we started a year or so ago, continued for the first half of 2025. We bought equivalent back on market at $0.27 per share compared to the $0.18 under that share buyback program for the last year. Tertius will speak more about our capital management program later in the presentation, but there'll be no interim dividend declared as a result of our share buyback programs. Pleased to report improved safety performance in the first half of the year. Our total reportable injury frequency rate is falling to 5.9, which we believe is one of the leading safety performance rates in the building products industry in Australia. Turning to slide seven, just talking a bit about our volume in a little bit more detail. Overall volume, as I said earlier, was down 7% on prior year.
Market conditions were softer, mainly due to continuing weakness in the residential housing market and a slowdown in the industrial sectors, especially infrastructure projects and transport. Capral also experienced reduced demand from other aluminium resellers. We're starting to see imports of fully fabricated windows have an impact, historically mainly in high-rise buildings, but now making inroads into low-rise residential markets. This is of concern to our industry. While it's not epidemic proportions, it is certainly increasing and is giving cause for concern, and we're assisting the Australian Windows Association in terms of looking at fair playing field around fully imported windows. Industry diversification supports our volume during cyclical downturns in both housing and industrial. Our exposure to the housing market has reduced to around 40% over recent years, and with increased exposure to the industrial sectors, now at around 50%.
In terms of cyclicality and seasonality, we're expecting a stronger second half in 2025 due to normal seasonality and the lift in the housing sector starting to flow through into the second half. Turning to page eight, when we talk about the residential housing market in a little bit more detail, housing commitments remain soft, and we are expecting a recovery in the second half of 2025. The market slowed over the last few years, impacted by higher interest rates and affordability. Housing starts for 2025 are forecast at 181,000, up around 8% on prior year, but still down around 20% from the highs of 2021 and 2022. We're expecting a stronger second half in 2025 on the back of the reducing interest rates and immigration-driven demand, and the outlook for 2026 and 2027 is looking more positive for the residential market.
We know there's significant pent-up demand for housing in Australia, with immigration remaining high, and with interest rates falling, this market should continue to rise over the forthcoming years. I'd just like to share with you now if we turn to page nine of the presentation, some recent projects that we've completed, just to not only give you an indication of some of the jobs we've completed, but also where our products end up. Here we have three residential projects, one in New South Wales, two in New South Wales and New South Wales this year. Obviously, we operate nationally. These are from some of our key window fabricators, Master Windows, Finn Windows and Doors, and PCW Commercial on the Central Coast, and some high-quality homes being built using Capral's residential and AG glazing system products.
On the next slide, we look at some of our recent commercial projects, a commercial building in Brisbane for Arup, an oval in WA, in Bunbury WA, with one of our large fabricators over there, LGA, using our framing systems for all the windows and doors on that particular stadium, and then a reasonably large commercial building here in New South Wales for Nippon Express, where ADS Glass and Aluminium produced all of those window systems that you can see, framing systems you see in that particular building. We just show you these projects to see where Capral's products end up in the residential and commercial sectors. Turning now to the key industrial markets. The industrial sector has softened for the first time in a number of years. The transport, infrastructure, and manufacturing markets have slowed this year after four years of significant growth.
The marine and cladding sectors remain reasonably solid. You can see there from the slide or the graph on the bottom left-hand corner, the growth in the transport market driven by new truck and van builds over the past four to five years, from a low in 2020 to continual growth in that sector driven by activities, particularly around movement from into online shopping and the construction of large warehouse facilities and distribution points and requiring distribution. That market has come off this year for the first time in the last five or six years, and truck builds have gone from having very large and long order books to relatively modest ones. That's impacted our volumes in the first half. We do expect it to improve a little bit in the second half.
The marine markets remain pretty steady, primarily driven by commercial ferry demand from our two large ship builders in Tasmania, based in Hobart Richardson Devine Marine, and Austal shipyards in WA are busy building defense and border force vessels. Unfortunately, those vessels contain a higher steel element than aluminium, but still a very large customer for us in that marine sector. In terms of solar, this market has been challenging due to imported aluminium solar rail dominating this market. Most of the distributors of aluminium solar rail are actually overseas-owned ventures who import from their home countries, mainly China, and this market is very hard-won for us to crack. We do have a small share with some key distributors, which we support, and we've also formed alliances with those companies operating under the government Sunshot Project initiative, and that provides opportunities into the future.
It's really about aligning with potential Australian solar panel manufacturers going forward. Industrial construction infrastructure has certainly slowed down this year. We saw from 2021 to 2024 significant government-funded infrastructure growth, particularly in the major capital cities on the east coast of Australia, and a number of those projects are nearing completion. We've started to see a falloff in activity levels in this industrial construction area. However, the cladding sector continues to remain strong, and aluminium has become the preferred material to be used in facades and sunshades, and we are enjoying good growth out of that market. The manufacturing and general fabrication markets are slowing. When interest rates started to rise, we saw an almost immediate impact on the residential housing market.
Those continual interest rate rises over the last few years have finally started to see a slowdown in the general economy, and our manufacturing and general fabrication markets are starting to slow down as a result of that. Resellers, we do sell around 8%- 10% of our volume goes to other aluminium resellers. It used to be a much higher percentage of that as we grow our direct business, but those resellers have largely returned a decent amount of their volume to imports. In response to the positive anti-dumping outcomes, which we'll talk about a bit later in the presentation, there is some opportunity to grow a bit more share back into that part of the market later this year and into next year.
On the next slide, we take a little bit of time to talk about a couple of key industrial customers and projects we've completed in the last 12 months or so. The Western Sydney International Airport, Capral supplied all the ceiling battens and structural spine for the new international airport terminal at Badgerys Creek, and we've got a short video to ship one of our crafted with Capral videos to show you and showcase that project, which we'll show you in a minute or so. A laboratory project for Workplace Solutions and Mitchell Park in Victoria for West Lab, and also showcasing Volgren, one of our large transport customers. They're a bus builder in Dandenong in Victoria. I might just now share with you the Western Sydney International. This is a cut-down version of our crafter with Capral videos for this particular project we're very proud to be part of.
Looking at this ceiling and living and breathing it for the past two years, three years, it's hard to be a bit objective. It is the architectural focal point of the airport, so it was important that we pulled it off right. Early in the piece, when we engaged Austral, we started talking to Capral about different extrusion shapes that would work and started looking at the dies that we could make not only to get the strength that we need, but also the deflections and straightness in order to get a high-quality product at the end. There are over 200 Km of batten suspended here internally and externally. You see the waviness and the curves in the ceiling, but none of the battens are curved. It's the framing that sort of achieves that concept.
That custom clip that we've specifically made for WSA with Rondo has that little swivel on it. Whatever the framing is doing with regards to profile, the batten's following that because it just pivots. That custom clip had its own tolerances that needed to be incorporated into the batten design as well. What TTW, which is our engineer, and Rondo requested from us is that there wasn't any negative tolerance in this. It was just a positive. If it was going to grow, it was going to grow by 0.4 of a mm maximum. Even that was extremely difficult. I know that Capral had a big job ahead of them with regards to maintaining what was on a set of drawings that we got stamped by absolutely every consultant possible, and they delivered that.
In fact, the QA that Capral has done has been second to none in this respect to manufacturers. Capral actually invited the project team out to their factory in Smithfield, which is a really good opportunity to take our architect, Woods Bagot, and the client, WSA, to basically see the extrusion process firsthand and how all 188 Km of battens were getting produced. The fact that we were able to source this whole job with lower -carbon aluminium was a great result. The spine and what it's doing and how we've engineered it, it's become a structural element for the suspension of the entire feature ceiling. Having the network of Capral across Australia was very beneficial to us. Capral over at WA, we had 9- 12 m sheets out there that could be CNC'd in 12 mm alloy, which is what that spine is.
The width of the terminal is about 140 m and it's about 200 m long. Trying to get things to line up perfectly for that distance is not an easy feat. I think it was a combination of the quality of the Capral product and the precision of the guys on the tools. Everyone had a role, from someone on a job saw cutting a miter to a fraction of a degree, to the two other people riveting, setting up framing, joining this feature ceiling together. I've got two young children at the moment, in five, ten years, it could be them walking through here and just looking up and saying, "Look what Dad did." I'm sure not just myself, but everyone feels that way that's had involvement with the projects.
I just wanted to say thank you to Capral for all the work and the effort that they put in. Having them with us on this journey was, yeah, the best.
Okay, I hope you enjoyed that little video. It's very nice, and we're very proud of Capral to be able to be part of that iconic project. The new Western Sydney Airport and a number of parts of our organization were involved in that over a period of 12 months where we supplied over 700 tonnes of aluminium batten and all of the spine, which we evaluated through our routers to supply that, the spine for that particular facility as well. Unfortunately, that project came to an end late last year, and we haven't found another airport to build, but we're looking for other projects. It's certainly a really nice one to put on our CV. I will now hand over to Tertius to run through the financials in a little bit more detail.
Thanks, Tony. Let me take you through some of the numbers behind the story. Volume was down 7% on last year, as Tony mentioned. Despite that, earnings have held solid. That's a result of disciplined cost control, product mix, and margin management. Inflationary pressures, wages, freight, energy are real to us, but we've offset much of that through efficiencies. Margins are holding up, and that's a strong outcome at this point of the cycle. Now let's move to metal costs. Aluminium prices have been volatile this year. Average LME was up 13% on last year, rising sharply in the first quarter, then falling back, and now rebounding again and forecast to remain at elevated levels due to the pent-up global demand, easing of interest rates, and China no longer expanding their capacity. For us, higher LME means more cash tied up in inventory and receivables.
It's something we can't control, but what we can control is how we price, how we manage our procurement, and how we manage margins. That's exactly what we've done. Turning to earnings, revenue was up 4%, mostly due to higher pass-through metal cost and to a lesser degree mix. Underlying EBITDA was $27.7 million, down 3%, and EBIT of $16.1 million. Significant items were the LME revaluation due to the price dropping sharply at the end of the first or second quarter and higher stock levels. Net profit was $15.3 million. That included a recognition of $2.5 million of the third tax asset, reflecting our confidence in future earnings. The bottom line, even in a lower volume environment, earnings growth per share was up 8% to $0.89. Next slide on the balance sheet, we remain in a strong position.
Net tangible assets per share are now $11.67, and net cash sits at $53 million. We've refinanced our new $75 million syndicated facility, adding flexibility for growth. Our receivables remain excellent at 44 days. The key messages here are resilience. We're net cash positive, well within our banking covenants, and positioned for opportunities. Next slide. Cash flow this half reflects those higher aluminium prices. Working capital rose by $17 million. CapEx was modest at $4.3 million in line with plan, with around $6.5 million planned for the second half. We also returned $11 million to shareholders. The result is a free cash outflow of $4.6 million versus an inflow last year. Importantly, this is just timing. Over the cycle, cash generation remains strong. Slide eight is the capital management. In the first half, we bought back almost 450,000 shares, returning an equivalent of $0.27 per share.
Franking credits, as we mentioned earlier, are exhausted. No interim dividend was declared. Our preference remains buyback while the share price remains below or trades below the normalized NTA. Buybacks are accretive to earnings per share and to long-term value. Buybacks will resume next Monday on the 25th. Over the past four and a half years, Capral has delivered a total shareholder return of around 138%. That's a compound annual growth rate of roughly 20% per year. Over time, we remain committed to distribute 40%- 80% of underlying earnings, whether that's through buybacks or dividends or a combination of the two. We'll always take the most value accretive route. Disciplined, transparent, and consistent is our approach. To sum up, solid earnings despite softer demand, strong balance sheet, and disciplined capital management.
That combination gives us resilience at the bottom of the cycle and the real leverage to the recovery we expect to start in this second half. Tony, I think that's the only comments I want to make about the detailed financials.
We can take any questions at the end of the presentation. Moving now on to the strategy and outlook. As an organization, we continue to focus on getting good returns on the investments we make, improving our competitive position, and growing our presence in the aluminium distribution industry in Australia. Turning to the next slide, our strategy, which has remained consistent over the years, we don't really change significantly what we do. We continually have objectives and update our plans every 12 months or continuously.
Our strategies are built on three things: building on our strengths, which is our range, our scale—we're the only national extruder and distributor—our capability, and our people. Continuing to optimize what we do, one of our key values at Capral is better every day, and it's something we strive for through all parts of our business. There's continuous improvement in all aspects: customer service, manufacturing productivity, technology, and supply chain optimization. The other third pillar is growing for the future, leveraging these capabilities to develop new products, expand our distribution footprint, and move into adjacent markets. I'll talk a little bit about that shortly. Turning to the next page, I want to run through in a little more detail some of the key things that are underway in the business currently.
First of all, the manufacturing operations: we completed the first stage of the Penrith plant upgrade, which is replacing the extrusion press. That was completed in late 2023. The second stage, which is replacing the billet furnace and saw, was completed last month. We had planned to complete it earlier in the first half of the year, but due to some equipment delays and delivery, we completed it during June and July. It's a significant project. The plant was down for close to four weeks, replacing the whole furnace, which was 40 years old, and the saw. Planning for the third and final stage is well advanced in terms of planning, which will be all of the material handling and packing into the plant, and that'll be completed towards the end of 2026.
We're also in the process of upgrading our shop floor control systems within our plants, with four plants completed and two remaining, and that will take place over the next year or so. Moving on to our distribution business, we continue to grow our distribution operations with the objective of Capral growing our direct-to-market channel. In our building systems business, we released a new residential window framing system last year, and we've added to that this year with a thermally efficient variant, and that was launched in the last couple of months in response to changes to the National Construction Code, looking for more thermally efficient building systems. On the industrial side of our business, over the last few years, we've acquired four Aluminium Trade Centre businesses. We continue to seek other opportunities to expand our distribution footprint geographically and also into other adjacent market segments.
We recently announced the acquisition of Comsupply in WA , an acquisition cost of around $6 million, so a modest acquisition. This is a $15 million revenue aluminium systems and hardware business, and that transaction is due to complete early next week. Our plan is to, this is a very well-run business with around 350 customers in WA , focusing on partition systems in particular and specializing in hardware for both the residential and commercial market. The reason for buying this business is not to buy a well-run business in WA , but to use this model as a blueprint to be able to take us into the major markets and growth in this area of our business in the major markets on the east coast of Australia. In terms of sales and marketing, we continue to invest in technology to improve our sales effectiveness.
We've launched a new website and e-store in the last year or so. Earlier this year, we joined the Australian Made campaign, and you can see that logo being featured at the top of this presentation, but more importantly, on all of our extrusions as it's manufactured. We think it's really important for our business going forward to be associated and our customers with the Future Made in Australia programme, the government's rolling out, and also the Australian Made campaign, which has been in existence for some time. We continue to promote our partnerships with our customers through the Crafted with Capral series of videos that we've just seen, the one for the Westminster New Airport. We produce about five of these per year. They're very well regarded by our customers who also use them to showcase their business and also to showcase the partnership that we have with Capral.
Okay, turning to page 22, and I just want to spend a little bit of time on this particular slide. It has been the topic of conversation around the world in the last 12 months, I guess, with the new changing government in the U.S., that trade and tariffs have become almost a daily discussion. First of all, I just want to say that Capral continues to lead the local extrusion industry in the pursuit of fair trade. We chair the Australian Aluminium Council Fair Trade Panel, which consists of the other extruders in Australia. All the work we do on anti-dumping is on behalf of the industry. Because we are the largest and only national player, we take those cases and investigations are done with us leading them, but it's done on behalf of the total local industry here in Australia.
Just in terms of the global context, and I've spoken about this previously, the U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminium, obviously particularly for aluminium for us, have no direct impact on Capral because we don't export anything to the U.S. The resulting changes in trade flows are a real risk, not only to ourselves and our local competitors, but to the Australian industry, wider Australian industry, which is why Australia needs a robust anti-dumping system in place. In particular, in relation to where we are with measures on aluminum extrusion, the measures we had in place against China expire in October this year. When we take a case, those anti-dumping measures stay in place for five years, and every five years they come up for renewal, and you have to submit an application to have those continued, which we obviously have done.
The preliminary report on that investigation, or that continuation investigation, was released last month, and it's a positive sign that Australia is prepared to stand up for fair and balanced trade. It's a recognition that effective trade remedies are essential to help insulate Australian manufacturers from unfair competition. The preliminary findings from that investigation recommend a continuation of measures. They recommend a floor price and modest dumping and countervailing duties. The final report will be issued late October. There has been significant response to this from importers and exporters out of China. There's been a number of submissions gone up on behalf of those with vested interest in supporting imports, and we're working with our customers and with our other local competitors to reinforce the Anti-Dumping Commission's position that they've come to in their preliminary report. It's a positive outcome.
It's still to be confirmed, and it's a step in the right direction for ensuring a level playing field, particularly against dumped aluminum extrusion coming into this country. In the political environment and the global context we're currently in, it's very important for our industry that this threat to local manufacturing, that we do have reasonable measures in place to ensure that we can compete on a fit level playing field. Just to finalize out this particular slide, we do have measures in place against Malaysia. They're in place until June next year. We've applied for a continuation investigation, which is currently underway, and measures against Vietnam remain in place until 2027.
When we say that measures are in place against Malaysia, Vietnam, and China, there are still exporters from those countries that are able to sell into Australia without dumping duties because they are selling into the country, and those products are being imported at an undumped and fair price. This is not about eliminating import competition. This is about creating a level playing field. While we've made some market share gains, while local extruders have made some market share gains post-COVID against imports, imports still represent over a third of the total aluminum extrusion market. Now the supply chains have normalized and international trade flows are in a state of flux. It's even more important that we continue to fight for that level playing field and fair trade for the local extrusion industry.
We do contribute over 2,000 direct jobs to the Australian economy, so it's important not only to us but to our fellow extruders here in Australia. We do have just one other point to note. We do have a new extruder startup in Newcastle this year. It should be up and running probably towards the end of this year, next year. The site is affiliated with a large Chinese importer who already imported large volumes into Australia currently. Moving to the next slide, which is sustainability. Our journey to, we're very active in this space, as all companies are, with the upcoming reporting regime not far away. We'll be one of the first companies to report on the new accounting standards or climate reporting standards at the beginning of next year because we run a calendar financial year. Our journey to net zero emissions by 2050 is on track.
We have a 20% reduction target by 2030, and we're well ahead of that target to date. Importantly, we're the only ASI-certified provider of lower -carbon aluminium in Australia. This enables us to offer certified lower carbon aluminium through our trademark brand, LocAl. I think you would have seen in that Western Sydney Airport video that part of one of the reasons why Capral was selected as a vendor for that supplier to that key project was that they were able to supply that lower carbon alternative aluminium to them for that project. One of the key things this year we've focused on is enhancing our data capture capability for climate change reporting and making sure that it's very accurate because it will be audited.
We're very well placed to meet the requirements of those new reporting standards as they come in place at the end of this year for the 2025 year. Now turning to our outlook and guidance. Based on our forecast lift in market conditions, primarily from the residential market, we expect earnings for FY 2025 to be broadly in line with prior year, which is maintaining the guidance we last gave at our AGM address, Tertius. The markets are certainly a little bit softer, or a bit softer in the industrial side than what we'd anticipated. Providing we see the lift starting to flow through from the increased residential housing market approvals and commencements, we should see that lift in the second half of this year as interest rates continue to fall. Total residential starts in 2025 are forecast to be higher than the year before.
On the back of that, we are starting to see that market start to flow, some of those volumes beginning to flow through into our manufacturing operations. As I said, the industrial markets and commercial markets have softened, but we do expect that to be offset by a lift in the residential activity. Tertius spoke about LME, and it is volatile and subject to global factors. As Tertius said, it rose sharply at the end of last year and then early 2025. In the second quarter of the year, it fell quite sharply at a time when we had quite high stock levels of billet. It has since rebounded and is expected to remain at elevated levels during the remainder of this year and probably into 2026. There are many factors at play, and that volatility is sure to continue.
Inflationary cost pressures continue to impact, especially employee, albeit employee wage rises now coming back to more normal levels. Energy remains challenging with cost of energy still continuing to increase, and we're still seeing modest increases in packaging and freight costs. The area that is impacted the most by the higher metal costs is our working capital levels, both on our debtors' levels with higher selling prices and higher costs in our inventory. That will be a drain on our cash, and that has been in the first half and will continue to be in the second half. Our capital expenditure this year is planned to be at around $11 million. Some of that, the biggest project, as I said, was the Penrith Stage 2 project, but we have a number of other maintenance capital expenditure projects to conclude through the rest of this year.
On this basis, Capral will be in a position to continue our returns to shareholders, firstly in the form of on-market share buybacks topped up as necessary by unfranked dividends if required. Thank you for your attendance this morning and listening through that presentation. We do have an appendix there which shows our footprint for those of you that are interested. We are now open up to any questions that anyone may have.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you would like to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. If you would like to ask a question via the webcast, please type it into the ask a question box and click submit. Your first question today comes from Simon Samuel from Delta Asset Management. Please go ahead.
Thanks for that presentation. A couple of questions. The accumulated losses, which provide the income tax benefit, are in the order of $330 million still. Is that all available to use as income tax credit offset, whatever you want to call it?
It's not $300 million, and it's just over $200 million in total. We have different types of losses, but the bulk of it is same business, these losses, but they're all available. Yes, it's all operational losses and no capital losses.
These losses were generated 15- 20 years ago. While we have reduced them significantly from around $400 million over the last decade, they are still significant.
That leads to you won't actually be paying any tax for probably, let's say, $50 million a year, five years, let's say. Is that about right?
In that order, it depends on obviously our assessable income every year, but it's for the foreseeable future, yes. Yeah, for the next five years at least.
Okay. The second point is the share buyback. You pause that come the first of each, the period of the new tax, the reporting season every six months. I can understand why you would do that for directors, but why do you need to do that for the company? Surely, you continue to do the share buyback.
Our policy states that we've got a blackout period between the close of the financial year and until reporting of the financial results. That's part of our stated policies. That's why we close off.
Is that not a bit superfluous? I mean, that policy sounds like it's something from a very long time ago. I just would have thought that, you know, you're limiting yourself, you're cutting off six weeks of the year in which to, twice, in fact, in which you can conduct share buyback, albeit you're not buying a whole lot. You know, that's opportunity missed in a fairly illiquid market.
Simon, all I can say about that is, I mean, we're not the specialist in this. We've had external advice, and that was the advice that we've received as to best practice, not to do buybacks during that period. We'll definitely take it on notice and have a discussion on that as well.
Okay, I don't think any other company does that to the degree you do. They might restrict their directors from buying shares in a blackout period. Anyway, I'll leave it with you. Thanks.
Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question via the phones, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Andrew Johnston from MST Access. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gentlemen. Well done on a good result in spite of, or certainly not as bad as, the volume decline that we saw. Just focusing on the measure of earnings per ton, can you talk about, because you know we certainly had improvement even in EBITDA per ton, can you talk about the drivers of that stronger performance of earnings per ton?
Yes, it was a challenging first half in terms of volume. The acquisitions that we have made, albeit small ones, are in distribution businesses, which is higher margin. A lot of it was to do with the mix. We've managed to grow or hold our volumes in the areas of the business that have higher margins. In that, that is some of our trade centres. Our margins have held up and our volumes have held up in those trade centres that we've acquired and our own trade centres.
Our building systems business, which we've invested significantly in over the last five years, continues to grow and we continue to grow our market share due to the investments we've made over that period of time, not only in new window and door systems, but also we put a fair bit of new resource and new people and new salespeople and technical people into that business. Those areas have continued to grow. Where the volumes have dropped off have typically been in the bigger volume customers where the spreads, as we call them, or the margins are much, much lower. I spoke about the drop in volume from other aluminium resellers, particularly those who service some of the other and service industrial markets, but also some of our large industrial customers that buy mill direct are buying at relatively tight margins as well.
It's really a mix is what is driving that, Andrew.
Okay, thanks, Tony. There was a comment there where you called out the increase of imports of fully fabricated windows. This is a trend that we've been seeing probably for decades now. I'm just interested in the extent you're calling this out for the first time for reasons that you're looking to work out how you can hold position against those imports. To what extent is it just a continuation of what is a fairly long-term trend, or has there been some step change in the last year or two?
Yeah, look, that's a good observation, Andrew. It has been a trend, but it has been a bit of a step change in the last 12 months or so. With the changes in tariffs around the world that have really erupted in the last 12 months, those countries and those products that don't have measures in place or a strong regime, you can get caught out. We've seen that, and this is in its infancy. It has been a bit of a step change in terms of volume in the last 12 months. We've seen it in a related industry that we play in, in glass. Australia's last and only float glass manufacturer went out of business earlier this year. They were closed down because they allowed their anti-dumping measures to lapse some time ago. They weren't vigilant in maintaining them.
We saw a flood in the last few years of dumped glass coming into the Australian market. Combined, that wasn't the only reason why they went under. They also had a $25 million, were facing a $25 million rebuild of their gas-fired furnace. For anyone's support for investing in a $25 million rebuild gas furnace in the current climate we operate in from a sustainability perspective was difficult. The decision was made to close down that facility. The point I'm trying to make here is that this is a sign of changing trade flows. The window fabricators in Australia need to be really concerned about allowing fully fabricated windows to come to this country that are being dumped here. Obviously, we don't fabricate any windows; they're a customer base.
Our role is really to provide the necessary technical expertise to allow our customers to be able to take some action on the trade measures, trade remedies front around this, should they so desire. There's a concern. Obviously, window fabrication represents around 40% of what we do. Not of epidemic proportions, but it is a concern.
It's a really, really interesting insight, Tony. Thanks. By the sounds of it, the window fabricators haven't really been involved in anti-dumping cases up until now. Clearly, your leadership in the aluminium extrusion industry, I'm sure, can help them put their case forward. Let's hope it's as successful as we hope the extruded aluminium case will eventually be when it gets final approval from the Minister. Good news. I've got two other questions, but I'll leave it there for anyone else on the call or come back. Thanks.
Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Thank you. Your next question is a follow-up from Andrew Johnston. Please go ahead.
That was quick. Two other questions. Tony, you mentioned normalised NTA. What's the normalisation that you do for your net NTA calculation?
Normalisations would normally include things like the AASB 16 Lease Standard, but at this moment, the 16.1167 don't include any normalisations. That's true NTA, as reported NTA.
All right. Okay, great. Finally, Tony, you mentioned the acquisition of Comsupply, as well as being a good acquisition in its own right. You see it as a model that you can use to expand into the east coast. Can you talk a little more about that in terms of which parts of the Comsupply model that you see as a useful model for the business on the east coast? Does that mean that you'll be able, do you expect to be able to expand further without additional acquisitions under that Comsupply model?
Yeah, look, you ask a very relevant question, Andrew. I was going to be a little bit careful what I say here because our investors aren't the only people on the calls.
Look, feel free to leave it there if you like. I was just interested in the comment.
Yeah, look, it is an aligned market that we operate in. They do sell aluminium systems, mainly in their own. They've got some quite clever partitioning systems, commercial partitioning systems, but they do have a knowledge and access to hardware supply and dedication to it and sales channel of it that makes it more different than what we do. We see some opportunities either through organic growth, taking that model, bringing that model to the east coast, or through potential acquisitions, albeit we haven't got any, you know, we don't have anything on track at the moment. It's very early days, but that's sort of the rationale behind it.
Okay, terrific. All right, thanks very much. Well done again. Thank you, guys.
Thank you. Your next question is a follow-up from Simon Samuel from Delta Asset Management. Please go ahead.
Yeah, just a question about the capital management. Now, you've said that you'll continue to resume the buyback on Monday. Now, and the dividend will be, what I'm getting at is the buyback funds that you manage to deploy will be subject to pricing. Now, will the balance of the final dividend be the balancing item, if you like, between how much you spend on share buyback equals what's left over for a final dividend?
That's the plan, and that's what we've done, what we did last year. You know, all things being equal, we're providing our earnings hold up to where we expect them to be, that the company will be in a position to return, you know, make distributions to shareholders.
As we stated, and you quite correctly, I guess, thought through that yourself and come to what we thought, what we don't make, what we don't do in share buybacks will top up with a final dividend. That's the plan.
Thank you.
Thank you. If there are no further questions at this time from the phones, I'll now hand back over for any webcast questions to be addressed.
I don't actually have any webcast questions here.
Okay. That brings the presentation to a conclusion. Thank you for your attendance and on the call, and hopefully you found that of useful. If there are any other further questions, we're happy to take those offline at a later stage. Thank you very much, and we'll do it all again in six months' time as we look at our full year. Thank you.