Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us today, and it's a great pleasure for me to be here today to host you, our shareholders, at this information session on CSL. I would like to begin today by acknowledging the traditional custodians on the land on which we gather today, and I pay my respects to their elders past and present, and extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today. This is our first visit back to Perth since the COVID pandemic, and it's great to see so many people here today. I know that some of you have travelled quite a long way.
One gentleman I spoke to has driven 380 km this morning to get here, and so he was enjoying his biscuit and will be well and truly ready for the light lunch when it is served, I'm sure. Thank you for coming, for your support, and your interest in CSL. This morning we're going to give you an update on CSL, where we are today, and where we are investing for the future. I'll leave plenty of time at the end of the presentation for you to ask your questions, and then we will have a light lunch. I'm joined today by a number of my CSL colleagues who will also be happy to take your questions during the light lunch, and I'm going to ask them to stand now so you know who they are. We're joined by Fiona Mead, who's our Company Secretary.
You probably see Fiona's name on all of the written correspondence you receive from CSL. Mark Dehring, who heads our investor relations function. Chris Cooper, who's joined us very recently. Chris was a research analyst writing on CSL, so he knows a lot about us, and it's great to have Chris on the team. Bernard Ronchi, who's been the engine room behind organizing today. Steve McKeon, where's Steve? There you are. Very good. Thank you. And Bernadette Murdoch, who is in our communications team. So each of these people will be able to answer questions that you may have if you don't want to ask them in the open forum. But before I begin my presentation, a little bit about me. I joined CSL just over three years ago, in March 2021, when the pandemic was still very much front and center.
Prior to that, I had been the group CFO of Bupa based in London. I was in London for six or seven years, and prior to that with Bupa in Australia. Then going back earlier in my career, I spent most of my time in the food industry and fast-moving consumer goods, pretty well always in finance roles. It's a great privilege and pleasure for me to stand here today as your Chief Financial Officer. As many of you know, CSL began more than a century ago, and the acronym CSL stands for the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, and it was a department of the Australian government. Today, CSL is a global biotech company that develops and delivers innovative medicines to help people with serious and life-threatening conditions live full lives and to protect the health of communities around the world.
We have market-leading positions in large and growing markets, and as you can see on the slide here, we're either number one or number two in the major sectors that we operate in. We've achieved a lot as a public company. We currently provide life-saving products to patients in more than 100 countries, and we employ about 32,000 people globally. Around 2,000 of those employees are scientists in our research and development team, where we spend over $1 billion a year to develop new pipeline and innovative products. We also have spent in the last five years a bit over $5 billion in capital expenditure to expand our capacity to meet the expected future patient demand for our medicines. This slide will give you an overview of the CSL Group. We currently operate in three business units.
CSL Behring develops and delivers innovative therapies for people living with rare and serious diseases across a number of therapeutic areas. In order to produce many of these therapies, we largely rely on human plasma. At CSL Plasma, we operate the world's largest and most sophisticated plasma network collection. We have nearly 350 plasma centers, mostly in the U.S., but also in Europe and China. As one of the largest influenza vaccine providers in the world, CSL Seqirus is a major contributor to the prevention of influenza globally, and we are a transcontinental partner with governments in pandemic preparedness. In 2022, we acquired what is now known as CSL Vifor, a leader in iron deficiency renal and nephrology products. This next slide, you'll see a snapshot of CSL Behring's manufacturing facilities around the world.
As you can see, we have an extensive network of manufacturing sites, including Bern in Switzerland, Broadmeadows here in Australia, which is a northern suburb of Melbourne, Marburg in Germany, Kankakee in the U.S., which is just south of Chicago, and Wuhan in central China. For CSL Seqirus, we have three large-scale manufacturing operations across three continents. Parkville in inner-city Melbourne, which uses egg-based production and is the only manufacturer of influenza vaccines in the southern hemisphere. Liverpool in the U.K., which also uses egg-based production and is the U.K.'s only injectable flu vaccine facility. And in the U.S., Holly Springs in North Carolina. This facility utilizes a newer technology, which we call a cell culture technology, and it represented the first major advancement in influenza production in over 40 years. And our Holly Springs facility is the only globally scalable cell culture facility.
We are also building another state-of-the-art facility in Tullamarine near the Melbourne airport that will use the same technology that our Holly Springs site uses, which is the cell-based influenza vaccines. But it'll also use what we call the adjuvant technology. So the adjuvant is when we put it into a vaccine and it stimulates the immune system. We use that at Liverpool, but we'll also be using that in Tullamarine. And we also, in Tullamarine, will be moving the production of our anti-venom and Q fever vaccines. Construction is well advanced, and it's on time to commence production in 2026, and that will replace the current operations that we have at Parkville. And then on the right-hand side of the slide, you can see a picture of our St. Gallen facility, which is CSL Vifor.
CSL Vifor has been a pioneer in the development of iron-based products, and this picture at St. Gallen is in east Switzerland, just outside Zurich. So on the next slide, you'll see our financial performance over the last 10 years. Our revenue and net profit has grown significantly, with revenue for the last year reaching $13.3 billion and net profit after tax but before amortization, which is the measure we now use as the underlying performance of the business, of $2.6 billion. So this compound average growth of 10% and 8%, respectively. Like many businesses, the COVID pandemic significantly disrupted our performance. Limitations on community mobility interrupted our ability to collect plasma, to distribute our products, to build our manufacturing facilities, and for many patients, receiving a doctor's diagnosis was no easy thing.
Through this process, fundamentally, our costs escalated significantly as we really struggled to meet patients' demand. Today, I'm pleased to report that we are emerging from this difficult period, and we are starting to see positive momentum and expect to return to the strong and consistent growth that shareholders associate with CSL. It's this strong growth that enables us to reinvest back into the business, underpinning our future growth, and yet at the same time progressively lifting our dividends over the years. The next slide shows our most recent set of results for the first half of the financial year 2024, or the six months ending December 2023. I think this result reflects how COVID is very much in the rearview mirror. It's an excellent result, driven by a strong performance from the CSL Behring business.
Revenue was $8.1 billion, up 11% at constant currency, and NPAT-A, which, as I indicated, is our indicator of the underlying performance of the company, was $2 billion, up 13%. Net profit after tax was $1.9 billion, up 20%. The major highlights in the period really reflect the growth in the CSL Behring business across the portfolio, especially in immunoglobulins, or our Ig franchise, which grew very strongly, up 23%, really reflecting the availability of plasma supply post-pandemic. We have some great specialty products, KCENTRA and HAEGARDA, among them, and they continue to be outstanding contributors meeting the needs of patients. Our gross margin in the Behring business, which was materially compressed through COVID, is starting to recover.
We have a number of initiatives in our plasma business, which is gaining momentum, including rolling out new innovative technology in our plasma centers to improve both the efficiency and the yield of collection of plasma. We have submitted a regulatory filing for a new product called garadacimab. It's a next-generation therapy for patients with HAE, or hereditary angioedema, and it has been accepted for review by the FDA and the EMA in Europe. We anticipate bringing this product to market later this calendar year. CSL Seqirus delivered solid sales growth, outperforming the market in a challenging season, and this was primarily driven by our adjuvanted influenza vaccine, Fluad, which grew 14%. In partnership with Meiji in Japan, regulatory approval has been received in that country for the world's first self-amplifying mRNA vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19 in adults.
We also commenced a Phase III clinical study for aQIVc in the northern hemisphere, with the last patient enrolled in the study well ahead of schedule in January 2024. This product is really exciting. It brings together the adjuvant technology and our cell culture capabilities, and we believe this product will become the new standard of care in influenza vaccines and will be produced here in Australia, in Tullamarine. CSL Seqirus continues to expand its differentiated portfolio, and we're passionate about bringing these innovations to the market over the next few years, including our second-generation, or sa- mRNA, vaccines for influenza as that science progresses. In CSL Vifor, this business is well positioned for the loss of exclusivity in iron in Europe, and we've seen limited impact to date.
Tavneos, which is a product for treatment for patients with severe active ANCA-associated vasculitis, has exceeded our expectations, mainly in Germany and in the U.K., and this momentum is projected to continue as we expand into additional markets in Europe. Patient conversion of MIRCERA, our long-acting ESA for patients who are on dialysis, has been very strong. For CSL Vifor, while the strategic potential of the business and the adjacencies with our CSL Behring portfolio are strong, we have encountered some challenges, which have dampened our near-term financial growth expectations for CSL Vifor. CSL Vifor continues to generate strong revenue, margin, and cash flow, and further, we are extracting substantial synergies over and above our initial expectations, and we remain very positive about the long-term strategic benefits of CSL Vifor to the broader CSL group.
At its core, there is a significant unmet patient need for CSL Vifor's iron products and nephrology therapies. Over time, we plan to participate in expected demand growth in these therapies, and these are key areas of strength for CSL Vifor. I would like to take a moment to look at the CSL share price over the last nine months or so, going back to the middle of 2023. As you can see, the CSL share price, which is the red line on this chart, has been quite volatile over the period. I want to make a couple of comments about that, because there's two or three main factors that have been materially impacting the share price. The first and most significant factor is that long-term bond rates on this slide, and as represented by the 10-year U.S. government Treasury rate, which is the blue line.
So as inflation was increasing last year, we saw a sharp rise in interest rates, as you know, reaching 5% in October. When government bond rates, or long-term interest rates, increase, this normally has a negative impact on the equity market as funds move out of shares and into bonds to capture the additional yield. And this is particularly acute in growth stocks with high PEs like CSL. So you can see the quite clear correlation on the chart in that period. As inflationary expectations began to ease in the later part of 2023 and into 2024, the bond rate fell quite sharply, and in turn, you saw CSL share price increase quite strongly. There are a couple of other factors, though, that I would like to point out.
Firstly, in October last year, the Danish pharma company Novo Nordisk announced a trial result for their GLP-1 drug OZEMPIC. Now, this has attracted a lot of attention, and I'm sure many of you have heard about OZEMPIC. And it attracted a lot of attention with investors, and there was quite a sudden outflow of funds from traditional healthcare stocks into companies producing these anti-obesity drugs, and CSL was one of those companies. And secondly, in February this year, we received the top-line results from our Phase III trial, our cardiovascular product, CSL112. And again, if you've been following CSL, many of you will have heard about CSL112 for many years. Unfortunately, the study did not meet its primary endpoint, which was disappointing for people inside CSL and investors alike.
But this is the nature of these types of experiments, and I'll make a few further comments on CSL 112 shortly. It is not our only near-term asset in our R&D portfolio, and again, I will talk further about the new products that we have coming to market. So as you can see, there are a number of external factors that have adversely impacted our share price over the period. As a management team, we are very focused on what we can control, and at our capital markets day last October, we outlined our plans to continue to deliver annual double-digit earnings growth over the medium term. We remain very focused on delivering sustainable growth, and we very much expect that shareholders will see the benefits of this going forward.
I'd like to turn now to the factors that have underpinned our long-term sustainable growth and that give us confidence on our future growth ambitions. There's three areas I'd like to focus on: our strategy, our approach to R&D, and our commitment to sustainability. The first part is about strategy, and I'm sure it doesn't come as a surprise to many of you, but it's often an underappreciated part of strategy is actually the ability to execute in a disciplined manner. CSL is a company with an unashamedly long-term mindset. Our strategic direction has actually been broadly the same over the course of our history. But every five years or so, we refresh our forward view for the next 10 years, revising the guardrails, ensuring that we're aware of external realities, and translating that into our operational plans.
So the strategy, in its current form that you can see on the slide, was devised in 2019, and at the heart of it, of the organization, is our people, our culture, our values, and our commitment to patients and to public health. We then have five key areas of our strategy, and it really starts with focus. In the biotech industry, it's very easy to get distracted. There is so much potential to make a difference to people's lives, so many problems to solve, and so much science to translate. CSL is typically very deliberate about targeting areas where we know we can have a competitive advantage. Oncology, for example, we believe this has become a very crowded space, and it's one that we have deliberately chosen to stay out of. Instead, the manufacture of plasma-derived therapies, that's a complex process that we know very well.
So we believe we've built a sustainable edge in collecting plasma, along with discovering new therapies, making and distributing these therapies, and we're confident there remain significant unmet needs in these markets for a long time to come. Innovation has been vital to our success so far, and it will continue to be so into the future. CSL has a large and dynamic supply chain across our different businesses. As I mentioned, regardless of whether we're producing biologics or vaccines, these processes and operations are complex. We know that to remain a top-tier company, we need to focus not only on reliability but maximizing efficiency. This manifests through technology and continuous improvement and a sizable capital investment program.
For sustainable growth of the enterprise, we're committed to serving the populations with the best available therapies across some very targeted scientific platforms: plasma fractionation, recombinant protein technology, cell and gene therapy, preventative vaccines, and iron therapy. And of course, if you're not digitizing these days, you're definitely being left behind. So when we put this up in 2019, as digital being one of our core areas of focus, we didn't necessarily realize that generative AI was going to become as big a part of that as it is. But that's where we're focused in continuing to digitize our processes. On the next slide, I want to spend a few moments around talking about how we manage capital. So to be able to successfully execute that strategy over the long term and to grow in a sustainable way, we need to manage our capital in a focused and disciplined manner.
On the screen is our capital management framework that I'd like to spend a few moments on. Firstly, the balance sheet. We aim to maintain a strong and efficient balance sheet. We do not have an appetite for being too highly geared. Following the Vifor acquisition, our debt levels did rise above historic levels, and we are making good progress on paying that debt down. We also aim to have a strong aim to maintain our investment-grade credit rating. In terms of shareholder returns, while we don't have a formal dividend policy, our practice has been consistent over many years. And that is, we grow our dividend in line with the growth in the company's profitability, and we typically pay out a ratio between 40%-45% of our earnings.
The vast majority of our profit is derived from outside of Australia, and so we don't accumulate a significant amount of franking credits. We do, however, distribute these credits when we have accumulated a meaningful amount. Return on investment is an important metric, and we pay close attention, and that brings me to how we choose to reinvest. Our spend on research and development underpins the sustainability of our future growth. And we tend to spend for many years now, we've been spending about 10%-11% of our revenue in research and development. It's an absolute imperative that we continue to innovate, continue to disrupt ourselves, both in our platforms and in the new therapies and new medicines. And having been at CSL for three years, I can absolutely vouch it's an innovative culture is very much the core of who we are.
In addition to continuing to make selective investments in R&D assets where we think they might bring advantage, rather than necessarily feeling like we have to do everything ourselves. Our capital expenditure is, of course, another way of investing in the business. Historically, we try and spend about 70% of our CapEx in a growth-focused way. So increasing capacity to support additional sales, building new capability to produce new products, building new plasma centers, things like that. And the remaining 30% tends to be maintenance CapEx, which is really ensuring that our assets remain in good condition. So what do we do with the excess cash? Well, essentially, we return it to shareholders. We regularly review our overall capital structure in line with our growth ambitions. Lastly, a couple of words on our approach to acquisitions and partnerships.
When we make an acquisition or partner with a third party, we're looking for long-term value creation. We want to do things we understand and can add value in, so rare diseases, complex manufacturing, developing markets, creating demand. We look for where we have capabilities, where we've got competency, and where there are logical adjacencies. Value creation can take time. In 2015, we acquired Novartis's influenza business, and that created Seqirus, as we know it today. It took three years before that business even turned a profit. The rollout of our strategy for Vifor and the extraction of value growth will take some time, but we fully anticipate that the rewards will ultimately be there. We are not a serial acquirer. We very much acquire something, integrate it, extract the synergies, and continue to drive strong organic growth.
So now onto the second area of our long-term sustainable growth, and that is our targeted R&D with continuous innovation. R&D and innovation can sometimes get confused, and the terms can get used interchangeably, but in CSL, we're very clear that they are interrelated, but they are two separate concepts. So our therapeutic areas that we've chosen to focus on, as I mentioned, I talked about the focus in the strategy. So these are our core therapeutic areas: immunology, hematology, respiratory diseases, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, nephrology and transplant, and vaccines. And on this slide, you'll see the snapshot of our R&D portfolio.
Now, I know it looks a bit like an abstract artwork, and I don't expect you to kind of read all of the words on the slide, but it's up there to give you a bit of a feel of the way we think about the overall portfolio. On the left of the screen, we have our very early-stage candidates. And then as you move to the right, we see our more advanced potential therapies. And the color coding actually relates to the different therapeutic areas that I mentioned earlier. In a long-term business like CSL, we require to have a pipeline that's got a good balance at all times because it often takes 10-15 years for something to move from the left-hand side of that page through preclinical into a big Phase III trial, into then being approved by regulators and commercialized.
And so we like this balance to occur within that annual R&D budget that we talked about of about 10%-11% of revenue. So you can see that keeping that in balance and where we choose to make investment choices is a big topic of continuous conversation inside the company. So moving on from the complicated slide, this one is a little easier. There's a couple of late-stage programs that I would like to highlight where our investments are coming close to nearing fruition. I mentioned CSL 112, which did not meet its primary endpoint. But we are still analyzing the data from the full trial, and while we do not have any near-term plans for any regulatory approval, there is still work going on internally. I also mentioned earlier that we have filed for regulatory approval for our homegrown monoclonal antibody garadacimab.
And as I said earlier, this is a therapy for the treatment of a very rare and potentially life-threatening condition called hereditary angioedema or HAE. Patients with HAE experience spontaneous swelling, which can be very painful, and if the swelling is in areas that block their airways, it actually can be fatal. So the Phase III study that we have finished with garadacimab shows that this product provides significant prevention of an attack with a monthly dosing. So we're hopeful to get this product approved in this calendar year, and we believe it will become the standard of care for patients with HAE. KCENTRA is a fantastic plasma product that we have, which is used to stop acute bleeding. We're currently undertaking a substantial trial for trauma.
We see quite a lot of off-label usage, particularly in the U.S., where doctors are using it for trauma patients. So we're undertaking a trial to see whether we can get that put on label, which would allow us to actually market that product and open it up for trauma patients. aQIVc, which I mentioned earlier, is our next-generation influenza vaccine, and it combines the adjuvant technology, which stimulates the immune system, with the cell-based manufacturing. Cell-based manufacturing, we believe, is more stable than egg and better for the environment. We believe, again, this product will become the standard of care for influenza vaccines. mRNA, there's been a lot of talk about mRNA post-COVID, and so we are definitely exploring that as well. We have a second generation, or what's called a self-amplifying mRNA product, in conjunction with partnered with another company.
As I mentioned earlier, that has been approved for COVID in Japan, and we've started a trial using this platform for influenza. Overall, we continue to have a multitude of late-stage programs that are well advanced and are coming to fruition in the next few years, which will be an exciting time for CSL. The pipeline is in a strong position, and it really does set us up for sustained and profitable growth into the future. Our R&D team are also working on a number of projects to strengthen our core platforms, including optimizing our yield outcomes for both influenza vaccines and for our immunoglobulin products, as well as supporting our CSL Vifor iron franchise and our patient blood management initiative. The importance of yield should not be understated.
If we can extract more influenza from the drug substance, actually, it means we can delay putting more facilities on the ground to actually produce that. If we can extract more Ig from every liter of plasma we collect, again, it means we don't need to expand our capacity as quickly as we otherwise would. So it's both margin-enhancing and great from a return-on-capital perspective as well. So finally, to our third area. Sustainability has already been mentioned a number of times today, but I'd like to talk about it in a slightly different context. I want to start by talking about how we think about how we create value at CSL. By far and away, the most important value we create is by contributing to a healthier and a more productive society. This is by saving lives and by protecting public health.
The second aspect is our financial growth, delivering consistent, profitable growth for our investors. It is our financial growth that provides the fuel for more innovation and more research. And if done successfully, this is a great continuous loop, and CSL has been able to demonstrate this consistently over many years. The third part is about social and economic opportunity, enabling people to benefit as we grow as an organization, be it our employees, whether it's our suppliers, whether it's our plasma donors, or our research partners. So we think about these three ways that we create sustainable value. But we know that we also need to do this in the right way, and we need to do it in an environmentally and socially responsible way.
And so a few years ago, we refreshed our sustainability strategy, and you can see on the slide here the three pillars of the environment, the social, and our sustainable workforce. And we think these are the three pillars that are material to the sustainability of our business and where we are directing our efforts and accelerating our actions over the longer term. Now, you might notice that we haven't followed the much-promoted ESG framework, and to us as a top five ASX company, good governance has and always will be a non-negotiable.
Under the environment pillar, we've set some targets to reduce our carbon emissions by 2030, seeing a 40% reduction of absolute Scope One and Scope Two emissions, and for Scope Three to ensure that suppliers who contribute 2/3 of our Scope Three emissions have set their own Scope One and Scope Two target reductions aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative. This is important because about 85% of our emissions comes from Scope Three, and only 15% come from Scope One and Two. We have made good progress on these targets. Our European sites have since January 2023 are all using 100% renewable electricity. Last year in Australia, we signed a renewable-linked power purchase agreement with AGL, which comes into effect in January 2025 and will result in a further 23% reduction in our carbon footprint.
That leaves the U.S. as the place where we need to go next. On our Scope Three, I saw actually just yesterday in the internal communications that popped up in my email that of the 67% or the 2/3 of our suppliers, we've just popped over 50%. So now 50% of our suppliers are committed to their own Scope One, Scope Two target reductions. So that's good positive progress. In addition to making absolute reductions in our carbon emissions, we are also integrating environmental considerations into our key business decisions and minimizing waste through removal, reduction, and recycling. The one I would call out that we have work to do in is actually wastewater and our water usage. Interestingly, as we move from egg-based production to cell-based production for influenza, that has a material improvement in the use of water.
This year, though, we're going to slightly shift our focus, and we're going to put much more effort on the social pillar, the middle column of our sustainability strategy, where we're focused on our donors, our patients, and access, and we'll be sharing more information on these efforts as we progress. So I'd like to finish with a few comments about the company's growth outlook. CSL has demonstrated a strong track record of success over a long period of time. We are well-positioned to keep delivering sustainable and profitable growth into the future. We expect to deliver annual double-digit earnings growth through the strategic drivers that I've covered in my presentation. We have leading positions in high-growth markets where there is significant unmet patient need. We have durable products driven by our continued innovation.
Our R&D pipeline is robust, and we have several programs coming to fruition which will continue to drive growth. We have made substantial capital investment to expand our manufacturing network, and we now have the capacity to meet demand and deliver future growth. As part of our capacity expansions, we've also invested in new innovative processes to deliver higher Ig and vaccine yields, thereby improving efficiencies. It's worth a comment at this point to say that in the COVID period, CSL, we could have chosen to pause some of that capacity expansion work, and we chose not to. It was a very intentional and deliberate choice to continue to invest in capacity expansion. Sitting here today, we're very glad we have because we're well-positioned going forward. Underpinning all of this is our disciplined approach to capital management and capital allocation.
Our strong cash flows enable us to maintain a strong balance sheet, to reinvest back into the business, and to deliver returns back to you, our shareholders.