I would now like to hand the conference over to Robert Bulluss, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, and Rod Jackson, Chief Financial Officer of Coventry Group. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Hi everyone. I'm Robert Bulluss, the CEO and Managing Director of the Coventry Group, and we also have our CFO, Rod Jackson, on the call today as well. Today I'm going to provide you with an update on a number of areas.
The first is our half-year FY2024 financial results, talk about how our markets are trading, go through our key strategic initiatives and objectives for the remainder of FY2024, and also going into the 2024 calendar year, and then also talk about our significant growth opportunities across all of our business units. There will be the opportunity for questions at the end of the session. First of all, to the H1 FY2024 results, our trading performance improved again during the period with continuing sales and pre-AASB 16 underlying EBITDA year-on-year growth.
So any reference I make to EBITDA during the teleconference will be to underlying EBITDA pre-AASB 16 and before significant items, which in this case, those significant items relate to the ERP upgrade. Pleasingly, we're on track to deliver our seventh consecutive year of sales and EBITDA growth despite the many challenges we've faced during our journey today. With continuing profit growth, completion of the ERP system upgrade in calendar year 2024, and the availability of tax losses in Australia, our debt position is forecast to reduce quickly in FY2025, placing us in an excellent position for future growth. Key highlights from the first half of FY2024 are the sales up 5.4% to AUD 185.3 million, and very positive EBITDA growth up 18.1% to AUD 9.8 million. The initiatives to grow EBITDA percentage to sales to 10% in the medium term delivered positive improvement.
These buy-side and sell-side initiatives were implemented early in the financial year, and the run rate from these initiatives improved over the second quarter with Q2 EBITDA up 28.9% on the previous year. We did report a small statutory net loss for the year, really due to the investment that we're making in the ERP upgrade. The cost churn for that project at the moment is at its highest level and will start coming down as the year progresses back to zero by the end of the year. Balance sheet remains strong. We've got net tangible assets of AUD 35.8 million and net assets of AUD 112 million. Net debt up slightly at AUD 37.1 million.
This was up a bit on last year's 30th June, but not a bad result when we consider that we had AUD 5.4 million of spend in relation to the ERP project and another AUD 2.1 million for our normal capital expenditure. These results of positive sales and profit result were achieved despite a number of factors influencing us externally. The first and the main one is the New Zealand economy has definitely weakened due to the recessionary environment over there, and that's having a short-term negative impact on our New Zealand operations. But as a small and dynamic economy, we expect it will bounce back strongly. So far, February sales have been quite encouraging. We've seen price deflation on steel products and a reduction in discretionary spend due to the higher interest rates in Tasmania, which is impacting our Nubco business unit.
Again, we expect Nubco to bounce back strongly as the year progresses. The high wage inflation environment has continued. Cost inflation is back at normal levels, but we have seen high wage inflation. That's particularly impacted the Trade Distribution business units. The Fluid Systems business unit is able to pass on a large part of that inflation through labor recovery rates. Finally, labor and skill shortage is still an issue for us in the Fluid Systems business. It's constraining some of our growth there but also adding to high costs because we need to use quite high levels of overtime and also high labor. From a business unit perspective, sales in Trade Distribution up 2.2% to AUD 107.7 million. EBITDA slightly down at 0.6% to AUD 8.5 million.
Really pleasing, Konnect and Artia Australia performed very well with sales up 9.3% and EBITDA on a lower base dollar profit level up 89.2%. That was then offset largely by the performance in New Zealand where the markets are particularly difficult and to a lesser extent down in Tassie. Overall, really good and pleasing growth story in the Konnect and Artia Australia business. In Fluid Systems, a very, very good result. Sales up 10% to AUD 77.6 million and EBITDA up 24.1% to AUD 9.4 million. Another excellent result, particularly considering it was curtailed by labor shortages. Corporate costs at 4.4% of group sales. That's down from 4.6% last year. All business units were able to improve trading and gross margin results during quarter two. Our buy-side and sell-side initiatives will continue for the remainder of FY2024 with further gains achievable.
To date, we believe, or the numbers tell us, that we've achieved around a 2% improvement in our gross margin in the first half of the year. So really, really pleasing result from that initiative. Our sales and profit results for January were ahead of the previous year, and we expect the positive momentum of the first half to continue into the second half. So that's a bit about the results. Moving on to the outlook for our markets, we're still cautiously optimistic that all of the market segments will operate well and continue to perform and therefore expect the group to continue to grow profitably. Obviously, New Zealand economy down at the moment, and we are impacted there by our greater reliance, let's say, on the residential construction market, but we do expect to see improvements there.
So in our primary end markets of mining and resources, infrastructure, commercial, construction, and industrial, we consider that they'll continue to perform as the year goes on. So starting with mining resources, there's continuing strong demand for products and services in that market. Commodity prices remain solid. We don't really have any exposure to the nickel market, which is obviously down at the moment. So other than the labor and skill shortages, we see continuing growth in that market for us. We expect the infrastructure sector to continue to perform strongly. There's consistent government spend over the next 10 years. We've continued to build our capability, our value proposition to support that market, and we're continuing to win new business there. So a very good market for us and one that we targeted a number of years ago as a growth sector.
Moving to commercial construction, that market continued to perform well despite cost inflation and labor shortages. The number of business failures has reduced. It's still happening, but again, in large, when they do fall over, another company comes in and picks up the work and picks up the workers. Most of our major customers continue to report solid order books and projects for the future. In Australia, we've got limited exposure to residential construction with a more significant impact in New Zealand in the roofing sector. We have a much larger roofing screw market there. But look, that decline in residential market spend, we believe, will come back. There's housing and rental shortages combined with immigration in both countries, and we expect that to drive demand for medium and high-density living, which is a greater opportunity for us in any case as opposed to single-dwelling construction.
Industrial and manufacturing markets are driven by the activity in the other markets we serve. They're all continuing to perform well. And then our secondary markets, which are target growth markets of agriculture, aquaculture, transport, renewables, oil and gas defense, and recycling, all continue to perform well and be a great opportunity for us, particularly for Fluid Systems where we look to diversify out of the mining resources sector. So look, markets overall performing well for us, and as always, we expect them to do better than GDP. So moving on to our key initiatives and projects, the activities to improve EBITDA margins to 10% are already delivering positive outcomes. In this area, we're looking at our organic growth story, and we've got a number of initiatives there.
We've got all of our business units focusing on improving the trading and gross margin, and those buy-side and sell-side improvements will continue in the second half of the year. On top of that, we manage costs sensibly and make sure that where we trade down, we're super careful. As an example, if we have people leaving, we try and not replace them until the market comes back to us. We're continuing to accelerate growth in KAA. Last week, we opened our 42nd store, a new store in Yatala, which is in between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and we've got our 43rd store set to open in March. We're continuing to drive our program of store makeovers and relocations. Combined new stores, store makeovers, and relocations will do 12 of those, complete 12 of those in FY2024, and we've got a similar program set up for FY2025.
Wherever we do those store makeovers and relocations, where we've got the right team, we get immediate improvements to sales and profitability in those stores. The ERP upgrade project continues to progress well. The key objectives of this project are to substantially improve our customer service levels and the productivity in the business. So to achieve that, we've got a very experienced project team, project partners, and dedicated subject matter experts running the project. To date, we've completed the build and configuration phase and 2 rounds of testing. We will do a minimum of 3 more rounds of full end-to-end testing, including testing with all of the external systems that we use. The aim at the end of that testing will be to do a go-live in a pilot branch mid-year.
We'll then roll out to the other branches in batches with the aim to complete the rollout by the end of calendar year 2024. As the year goes on, that monthly cost of the project, which over the last four or five months has been close to or around AUD 900,000 a month, will start to reduce and end up at zero at the end of the year. The last thing is our inventory optimization project. That did slow in the first half of FY2024 as we focused on the margin play, but we'll accelerate that again in the second quarter of FY2024. Once we have the new ERP system, that will make managing inventory a lot easier for us in the future. So the last thing I wanted to touch on was just the growth opportunity for the group.
In both our Trade Distribution and Fluid Systems markets, we have at best 5% market share. Our markets are ripe for consolidation through both organic growth and acquisitions. Specifically, in our Trade Distribution markets, our key strategic growth initiatives are increasing share of wallet with existing customers and winning new customers through our value proposition based on specialization. So that's quality products, high stock availability, the expertise we can provide our customers, and our really agile service. Increasing market share through new branch openings, branch relocations, and branch refurbishments. So over time, we believe there's an opportunity to rebuild a network of 100 Konnect branches in Australia, 20+ in New Zealand, and expand Nubco into regional Australia. And remembering, in the group's heyday, we did have 100 Fastener branches in Australia.
If you look to validate that opportunity, just looking at New Zealand, we have 20 stores there, around AUD 50 million of revenue, whereas in Australia, we've only got the 42 and around AUD 100 million of revenue. So it does indicate that the 100 stores and AUD 250 million of sales are achievable over time just based on the population in the two countries. We've also then got the ability to enhance our sales and marketing capability. We've now got a marketing team in place and also building digital capability around online stores, vendor-managed inventory, and other things like that.
In Fluid Systems, the key strategic growth initiatives are expanding sales in existing markets, diversifying into markets outside of mining and resources, expanding or relocating facilities to accommodate growth opportunities, increasing our engineering capability, and developing expertise to take advantage of the move from manual processes to automated and electric systems, exploring options for branches in new geographical regions, and exploring acquisition opportunities in a fragmented market.
So from a group perspective, the strategic priorities for FY2024 and beyond, ensuring we've got the right people for growth, critically important to our success, our target 10% EBITDA initiative, which encompasses our trading and gross margin activities, sales growth, and sensible cost control, accelerating organic growth and improving margins in Konnect and Artia Australia, and moving towards that much larger branch footprint, focusing on right-sizing inventories and cash conversion, delivering the ERP project by the end of this calendar year, and continuing to reinforce with customers our focus on specialization. So we've done a lot of work on the business. We've built it back up to have the infrastructure and the capability to grow. And our job now really is to leverage the scale benefits of the platform that we've established and, in particular, get our Trade Distribution business and Konnect and Artia up to best-class margins.
In summary, we are operating in very, very big fragmented markets with very small market shares. We've got very clear plans for accelerating profitable growth. We operate in the right markets. We've got a successful strategy that's delivered six years consecutive sales and profit growth and is on track to do the same again. We've got the right people to execute on that strategy for us. We're looking forward to getting behind the ERP project, getting the obvious benefits from that investment, but then growing profit, taking advantage of the tax losses that we've got, and delivering greater returns to shareholders. That's it from me. I'll hand back now to see if there's any questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Ken Wagner with Petra Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, Robert. Afternoon, Rod.
Hi, Ken. How are you going?
Very well. Yourself?
Very well.
Excellent. Just a couple of things from me. The margins in Trade Distribution, I'm just interested in your thoughts around the second half there. Clearly, the slight decline there would have come from a sort of geographic mix, really, with New Zealand and Tasmania being a bit weak and there being the higher margin parts of the business. Do you see that weakness sort of continuing in the second half and, therefore, it's not expecting a heaping margin improvement, or are you seeing that gross margin, the benefit you got in the first half, to sort of flow through and dominate that other effect?
Yeah. So a few parts to that question, I guess, to unravel. The margin piece will deliver a stronger result in the second half of the year because, effectively, we started the project to improve trading and gross margin, let's call it, in the end of July, start of August. And so it's been building through the first half, and you can see the impact in the second quarter from that as it's improved. So we're now two percentage points higher, and we'll get that the whole way through the second half, probably plus some additional improvement as well. So that will definitely help the EBITDA line for the second half for both Fluids and Trade Distribution, for that matter. New Zealand, we do expect that economy to improve as we go through 2024.
You don't want to measure anything on three weeks, but February trade for us has been better than what we expected. So if that continues, that will get us a better result than what we're thinking at the moment. Tassie's probably going to be flat for the next few months as we just do a little bit of a reset into a couple of new markets down there. So look, I expect a better result in the second half, but look, New Zealand's going to take a bit of time to come back. And we think by the end of calendar year 2024, hopefully, that economy will be a lot stronger. Hope that answered the question.
Yep. No, that did. Thank you. Just to clarify on that 2% gross margin improvement, is that pretty much uniform across the two divisions, or is it higher in trade, or how's that played out?
No, it's pretty much uniform across the two segments and all of the business units. So we've been successful in delivering that initiative across the board.
Great. All I've got so far. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. We'll now pause a moment to allow for any final questioners to register. Thank you. Your next question comes from Liam Cummins with Petra. Please go ahead.
Hi, gents. It's just a quick one on the ERP. Just between now and when you do go live at the end of this calendar year, what the sort of the main critical hurdles are? And then as you roll it out, sort of how you sort of how much of a working capital release you think you get as you sort of you manage the inventories more closely and what that sort of cash release might look like.
The first part of the question is the hurdles that we've got to get through. We'll start the third round of testing on the 1st of March. That's a full end-to-end round of testing. And then we have two more rounds. So we've got benchmarks at the end each of those testing rounds from a pass rate that we have to hit to go to the next step. We've taken a bit of extra time in between the second and third round to make sure we do get the result we're looking for at the end of round three. So look, by the end of round five, most companies doing ERP only do one, maybe two rounds of testing. Some don't even do full end-to-end testing. They test parts of the system. So we're pretty confident at the end of that fifth round, we've got a robust system.
The next hurdle is the pilot go live. That needs to go very smoothly. As long as it does, we'll then start rolling out the rest of the business in batches, batches of branches. And the first batch will be a test to see whether we've got the capacity to support a number of branches at the same time. So there's quite a few sort of go-no points in there, if you like, that we've got to tick to go to the next level. One thing that I will assure you of is that we won't go forward if we don't pass the tests the way we think we should. So we won't proceed if something's not right. We'll pause and get it fixed before we move on. So that's that.
As far as the working capital release, that's a pretty tough question to answer and depends a bit on our sales growth profile as well. So as you grow, you tend to normally need to add additional inventory in. We're aiming to pull a bit of inventory out even before we go live. It's actually a pretty tough question to answer. And I don't think we'll see an immediate gain just while we fine-tune the new system and get it right. So it's probably calendar year 2025 before we see any real huge improvements in the inventory.
No, that's a good enough answer. Thanks, Rob. And maybe just as you sort of flagged the continuing weakness in New Zealand, if it's creating any opportunities for growth over there, whether there's some good sites that some struggling competitors might have or maybe looking at the other way, sort of how nimble you can be on the cost base if weak conditions sort of continue?
Yeah. We'll be nimble on the cost side because we won't replace people until we know the market's coming back at us. What the competitors will do, if history repeats itself, is they'll cut costs. So they'll pull people out, and they'll potentially shut locations. So that creates a much, much better opportunity for us as the markets start to grow again to take that market share off them. So look, we've done this before. We're pretty confident that as soon as the market's right, we'll start performing at the normal levels of growth, if not better, that we normally do in New Zealand.
Thanks, guys. That's it from me.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Robert Bulluss for closing remarks.
Okay. Thank you. Look, really, the same words that I said last year. We're operating in the right markets. We've got the right strategy. We've got the right people, and we've got clear plans for accelerating profitable growth and increasing shareholder return. So we're confident we'll continue our growth story this year and in coming years. So look, that's it. I look forward to providing updates through the year. Thank you.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.