Morning, ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders and investors. I kindly welcome you to join us for the EOS Webex seminar, during which we want, first, to formally introduce us as the new management team of the company. Second, to discuss and analyze the disappointing result of the first half year. Third, to introduce to you the turnaround strategy of the company and the associated action plan. Please note that you can raise questions throughout the entire session. They will be recorded, and we will come back to them and answer them at the end of this presentation. EOS is in new management hands. We have a new CFO and a new CEO on board. I kindly ask my colleague, Clive, our new CFO, to introduce himself.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Clive, and I joined the company on Monday in the role of CFO. As the slides indicates, I've been a CFO for 15 years in a variety of businesses and a chartered accountant for over 25 years. Among other areas, my focus is going to be on ensuring a disciplined approach to commercial decisions in the business, including cost management, cash flow, and of course, importantly, managing funding. We'll come back to that a little bit more later on, but I'll pass you back to Andreas to talk about his background.
Thanks, Clive. My name is Andreas Schwer, aerospace engineer. I spent my entire career in aerospace, defense, and heavy industries, and I was already successfully managing companies throughout very challenging times. Before we start with the formal part of this meeting, I would like to pass on to you some personal words. Clive and I are joining this company during times where EOS is sailing in very rough seas. We both have been fully aware on what we have to expect. We were fully aware of the big challenges the company is currently facing. We both signed our contracts not because we were naive or business adventurers, but because we are both absolutely convinced that we have the right business attitude, experience, and recipes to get this great and wonderful company back on track.
We both promise you here and now our 100% commitment to the job and a management style which is characterized by integrity, honesty, and transparency. The agenda of the meeting is shown here on the slide. We will start with the CEO actions from the strategic review. This is the part I will take. Then Clive will lead you through the half year results and the funding update. I will then conclude with an outlook before we go into a Q&A session, where we kindly invite you to raise questions which we will address one by one. An independent external expert consultancy performed a strategic review of EOS, its business model, order portfolio, management, and organization. They came up with a list of actions which are, from their perspective, indispensable to implement.
The board of EOS has gratefully accepted that advice and will rigorously implement all and any recommendation. Those recommendations span from a renewal of the leadership team, that's the reason why we are sitting here, for example, to an alternative approach to market, up to a very severe restructuring of the company. This restructuring will also encompass a very significant reduction in the actual cost base in both areas, labor and non-labor. Let's start with the company strategy and approach to market. First, of utmost importance is the cash management. Cash is king. We will immediately stop any kind of discretionary cash drain into non-profitable business. This includes, foremost, SpaceLink. We will come back later on this in more detail. We have also reviewed the scope of business in the product portfolio. The company will concentrate its business into two strategic pillars.
First, this is our bread and butter business where we are excellent in for many, many decades, is our remote weapon station and turret business. It is the cash cow of the company. Second, directed energy for ground warfare, ground to air, and ground to space warfare applications, in addition to the traditional EOS space awareness and intelligence business. Those are the two pillars, the two business segments, which will define the scope of our activities for the next years to come. We also have revised our market approach. Concerning the domestic market, we first want to exploit much more and more aggressively national defense funds in research and development. We simply cannot afford any longer to fund our research and development activities by our own means.
We've reached a point where this is almost impossible to continue, and I can tell you that other companies in U.S. and Europe, they always benefit from those kind of national governmental funds. We need to get to the same point to become competitive. Second, we want to push towards the Australian government the Buy Australian Plan. We want to be considered over foreign suppliers, over overseas suppliers for significant national programs to come up. Concerning the NATO markets, it's a very significant change. We want to stop the OEM approach. We do not want to open a business overseas as EOS and try to get into the market. It is an approach which is really CapEx intensive, and it takes a long time. We have seen this in the U.S., where we've invested more than $20 million.
We are close to get contracts, but it was a long time and a significant pre-investment. We don't want to do this any longer because of the liquidity situation. Instead, and that's our new recipe for the NATO markets, we will respectively team up with national champions and employ a licensing model. This will allow us to save CapEx, and it will minimize the time to market. We are okay sharing the revenues and earnings of such kind of approach because we are convinced that the benefits are significantly higher. Concerning non-NATO markets, we intend to downscale our existing high-end product line to generate products which are affordable for second-tier markets. I can tell you that we have never lost any competitive trial against any competitor on global scale, which is excellent. It's an excellent result.
On the other side, many of our clients simply can't afford this first-class quality and first-class performance products. That's the reason that for non-NATO markets, for the so-called second-tier markets, we need to have an offering. We will downscale our products to be able to enter those markets. Concerning the Middle East markets, we are in the process of the creation of local joint ventures in order to acquire local funds from the local governments there, which will allow us to enter into new product development and local production. This is one stream of funding which would allow us to save internal investments into R&D, and it would give us a kind of exclusive position in those markets. Next slide. Second point of the strategic review, the reorganization and restructuring of the company. Let's first have a look to our portfolio assessment.
Let's look to SpaceLink. SpaceLink, we are still in ongoing negotiations with strategic investors. We have taken the clear decision that we stop the money drain. We have, within our budget, AUD a few million left, which will last us till the end of 2022. Either we have found a strategic investor who's ready to take over the majority role with his own funds in this company, and we can continue, or the company, EOS, will look to alternative options, including liquidation of the company. I can promise you, by the end of this year, the money drain to SpaceLink will be finished. EM Solutions. This is one of our crown jewels. It's a very profitable, independent, and attractive business. Let's go to the reorganization. We distinguish here three aspects. The first aspect is the quantity, the quantitative aspects.
We will execute a group-wide program to reduce the total workforce across all levels by 30%. This right-sizing is needed because the company was obviously in the good belief that the growth over the last couple of years will continue in 2022, 2023, 2024. For different reasons, which we will outline later on to you, this growth did not happen. In consequence, we have an overcapacity, which we cannot afford to continue with. We are forced to reduce the workforce by this number here, 30%. Second point, management. We have to recruit key personnel, not only us, or the managers at the next level, with strong commercial background and industrial experience, with more business acumen and a clear track record in those domains. This is a process which we are starting right after this meeting. Third point, a lean organization.
We have prepared the company in the past to become a truly global player. We've introduced a structure which serves global coordination, obviously creating lots of headcount and overhead with this. In consequence, as we cannot afford that to continue, we will reduce hierarchy levels, and we will merge departments across all the layers of the company. This will lead to a very lean organization and to significant cost savings. Our estimate that we can save across all those measures around AUD 20 million per year. We come now to the indirect savings and the processes. Based on the simplification of our organization, the lean organization, we need to adopt and adapt our processes. This will increase overall efficiency and responsiveness to our clients. Most notably, we will introduce a granular labor cost tracking project by project.
This will allow us to keep costs better under control and to have an early warning process in place. The savings from those measures we still need to analyze. The reduction in number of operating sites is also a major action plan which we have to work on. We've decided to close one facility in Australia in Greenvale, and we move the people and activities to our main site in Hume. We also have decided to close one facility in the U.S., in Tucson, Arizona, and we move the activities to Huntsville in Alabama. The third point, we will reduce our headquarters facility by 50% subject to finding a tenant for the other half. This will save us around AUD 1.5 million per year.
Obviously, we will do what is necessary on the indirect savings, so we will look to all the travel costs, consultancies, insurances and other aspects, and we expect total savings there, including the head count activities and the reduction of the operating sites by around AUD 3.5 million per year. Next slide. I will hand over now to Clive to lead us through the H1 results. Please, Clive.
Thanks, Andreas. Good morning again. For those who joined the call late, my name is Clive, and I joined the company in the role of CFO on Monday this week. As Andreas said, I will go through the slides now on the first half result, and we'll take questions at the end. The performance overview, key indicators are shown on this next page. I'll just go through some of the key numbers. The revenue for the period was AUD 53.8 million, which is down from AUD 98 million last year. EBITDA result was a loss of AUD 35 million, down from breakeven in the first half last year.
We also, during the first half, recorded impairment provisions of AUD 58 million in total, AUD 54 million of which relate to SpaceLink. Looking at the year-on-year result, the biggest issue clearly is lower revenue, which is principally a timing issue and cost base, as Andreas said, which is far too high. The positive news, if there is any in this, is that the product margins, I can advise, are consistent year-on-year. There's been no significant change in margins at the product level, although clearly what we've got is, compared to the prior year, lower revenues, steady margins, but a high overhead base, as Andreas said. That's what's driven the fall into loss at the EBITDA level.
I'm gonna touch now on the main drivers of the result, then touch on impairment, and SpaceLink, and then touch on funding. If I look at the main drivers of the result, there are four main causes, which are listed on the screen here. The biggest issues were items one and two, customer delays and supply chain challenges, which many people I know are familiar with, but I'll just explain what that means. Both one and two are timing matters. In the first half, compared to the prior year and our expectations, we experienced delays in the customer pipeline.
As indicated before, what that means is the award of new contracts, the setup of new contracts, and the progressing of these by customers has all been slower than it was previously and slower than we expected. I know everyone's heard this before, but it is something that tends to have a lag effect on us in the business. Comment on the market, though, as Andreas said, the market for defense and the national security activity around the world has strengthened, as I think many people are aware, during the first half, and that we expect to translate into growth opportunities for the company in 2023 or 2024. There is a positive outlook, but clearly, we've had an adverse impact on the first half.
On supply chain challenges, as I think many people are aware, the business operates in a very complex supply chain. We rely on suppliers to the company. We also depend on suppliers to customers. We cannot fit our products to a customer vehicle if, for example, the vehicle has not been received by the customer. This is the nature of the business that we're in, and it did have an impact on first half. The good news is that some of the constraints, both on our suppliers and customers' suppliers, are easing in some areas. This is not good news, but clearly items one and two are the biggest drivers of our lower revenue. They do relate both to timing.
We haven't seen any change in product margins, as I said, and if anything, the market pipeline is getting stronger, but that's gonna take a little bit of time to translate to revenue. The third item mentions rework. This is not a major impact in cost terms, but we did carry out a voluntary recall of uninstalled parts that had been supplied to customers. Not a significant cost at all, but it did use up some of our productive capacity, which reduced our ability to deliver regular products. Finally, as Andreas has mentioned, the big item that has impacted us is the cost base clearly too high.
Action, as you've heard, is well underway, and we do expect reductions in the cost base of AUD 2 million per month to be locked in before the end of the year, so that we have AUD 25 million per annum of annual improvement feeding into 2023. The next thing I'm gonna turn to is, SpaceLink and the impairment that we've recorded there. The context, I think as many people are aware, is that the company has been seeking partners and investors for this. We have not succeeded in this, and we've decided to focus, as Andreas said, on the core business. As a result, the company is required to comply with accounting standards, and accordingly, provisions totaling AUD 54 million have been recorded against the carrying value of the SpaceLink asset.
As Andreas said, action is underway so that the further spend on SpaceLink will be severely restricted. Now I'm gonna touch on funding. Just before I get into funding, just the context. You've heard the plan is to curtail spending on SpaceLink and significantly reduce costs. Both of these programs are within the control of the company. They're not market-dependent. The timeline for both is very soon, and we have a high level of confidence in executing these plans. In addition, as Andreas said, to drive the growth of the business, we're gonna refocus on the core business and change the way we approach different markets. This is intended to lead to an improvement in performance. It will not happen overnight, and it will take time, but we need a secure financial foundation for the company.
For the last few weeks, the company has spent a significant amount of time in discussions with funding providers. Discussions have mainly been with a long-standing equity investor, WHSP, and as a result, stage one of a refinancing has been completed this week. This means that, firstly, the legacy $35 million of borrowings have been repaid to our previous lender, Roadknight, using a new $35 million facility from WHSP. That new facility is on the same terms as the old facility, except that it's for a 21-day initial term while we complete stage two of the refinancing that I'll talk about in a moment. In addition to that refinancing of existing debt, WHSP has provided an additional $20 million working capital facility.
This is to support the company as we go through these restructuring changes, and it's an important first step in our refinancing, and it represents the confidence in management plans from our long-term equity investor. Further work will continue over the next few weeks with the company and WHSP to develop funding opportunities, including looking at additional sources and additional funding. The format of that funding and the amount are not yet determined, and all we will say at this stage is that nothing is off the table. That is all that I was going to cover on funding. Just before I hand back to Andreas, I'm new in the role. When you get somebody new in the role, there is an opportunity to look at the way we communicate with our stakeholders, including investors, and to look at the content of our investor material.
We will be looking to revise the way that we communicate and the material we develop for formats like this, for the next time we meet. In the meantime, thank you for listening and, we're gonna hand back to Andreas, who's gonna cover the outlook and the, and some conclusions, and then we'll go on to questions.
Thanks, Clive. We come to the outlook in a few words. You are certainly aware that the company was issuing a guidance for the 2022 business year for the revenue in the order of AUD 212 million or even above. We have just discussed the various challenges and problems we are facing. We were facing through the first half of the year, and some of them will still impact us even in the second half of this business year. On the other side, there are a few short-term opportunities which are new to the table. As the new management team is only in place for a few days, you will certainly understand that we are not currently in a position to give you today any credible statement on where we will be at the end of this year.
It would be simply unprofessional to come up with a quantitative number. Clive and I, we will perform a very thorough business review over all the contracts on order and all potential new orders to come. This will allow us to come back to you within the next 6-8 weeks with updated data, which will have a very high level of confidence. We kindly ask you for your understanding. Let's come to the conclusion. The motto is back to the roots. H1 was very challenging for the company. This is the history. U.S. is now under new management, a new management style with much more business acumen and commercial activity concentration.
We will conclude our stage two financing over the next few weeks to have a very solid base for further action and for future growth, and the market is expected to improve in 2023 and 2024, also for the U.S. In terms of near-term actions, we expect that the stage two refinancing will be finished by end of the actual month, end of September. We will roll out and implement and conclude on our complex program of change, including the complex restructuring program by mid of October, and we will come back to you with a more detailed business outlook and revenue outlook at the same period of time, mid to end October.
Last but not least, the decision on SpaceLink, the future of SpaceLink and the future of EOS within SpaceLink will be decided before Christmas time, before end of this year. Again, in any case, if you mean that it's a stop of the cash drain from EOS into SpaceLink, I think that's a very important message for all of you. With this, I want to conclude our presentation part of this meeting. The floor is now up to you to raise questions. Please allow us to group them. In case there are too many questions, we will answer in writing and post all of them on our website.
All right. Questions have been coming in through a couple of channels, and these questions have just been grouped for us and, Andreas and I are looking at them now. The first question that we've been given is why did you lodge your accounts late? I might just provide a little bit of context on that. As we've indicated, the company was in discussion on funding matters with WHSP and working through that over the last few weeks. We made the decision that it was important to bring these discussions to a conclusion and to secure the new funding arrangements before we filed the 4D.
Unfortunately, as a result of that, we missed the deadline for filing the 4D, and that is what led to the results being finalized last night and published this morning. I would add that it is not our intention to repeat that. We expect to meet deadlines going forward and communicate well ahead of time. Thank you for your forbearance.
The next question is, does EOS USA have security certification to participate in U.S. defense contracts? The answer is yes. It's in execution in Washington, and we hope to be finished with this process by end of this month. As some background information on that one, it is a very complicated and costly exercise to get the certification to be able to access the very dominant and huge U.S. defense market. Obviously this contributed to our high administrative cost base in the beginning of this year, but I can promise you that it is worth the effort as the U.S. market is bigger than the entire European defense market. Yes, we are almost through that and hopefully we'll be able to enter the first contracts very soon. Next one is, what is the current backlog of EOS?
The answer is, on group level we have a backlog of approximately AUD 300 million.
Okay. The next question that I have been sent through is, the EOS Loan Plan is the largest shareholder in EOS, and that's the question. The question continues, how can the holders of these shares have such a significant voting interest in the company when the shares are either worthless or the holders will never take possession? That's a good question. I might explain, the EOS Loan Plan rules specify that shares do not vote until they vest. The overwhelming majority of shares that have been issued under the EOS Loan Plan have not vested, and accordingly, they carry no voting rights. To put your mind at rest, the holders of these shares do not have voting rights in the company.
The next question we've got is in relation to the statement. We've said it in one of our documents, that the market capitalization of the company has fallen substantially over 13 months, reducing scale. This may mitigate against larger contract awards in some markets. I think the comment that we would make on that is clearly we had a market capitalization that was significantly higher. One of the things that different customers in different markets look at is the scale of the company. First thing I would say is that the scale of the company's operations over the last few weeks has not changed. The revenue levels are what we've just published. The activity levels of the company's not changed, but the market capitalization has.
Some major programs in the U.S. particularly look at market capitalization, but we will continue to work with that. It's just one of the factors that some customers and markets bear in mind. It's more of a risk factor than something that's having an immediate or a direct impact. Andreas, do you wanna add to that?
Yeah. By all means. That's one of the reason why we have changed our go-to-market approach, our export market strategy. We will not go on our own. We will not apply as OEM to get a prime contractor in large markets like U.S. market. Instead, our approach will be to team up with national champions, with the big local companies into legal structures where the backing, the financial backing would come from the partner side. Even our reduced market cap here in Australia will not prevent us from entering into those larger scale contracts on global level. The next question is the R400 in your future product range? Yes, definitely yes. The R400 is our cash cow product. It's the backbone of our product range and there's no reason why we should give up on that one. Next question.
What's the production status of SpaceLink? The capital program for SpaceLink has been paused pending achievement of a co-investor. It was made clear from the very beginning that EOS is seeking for a strategic investor. An investor not necessarily coming from the financial world, but an investor coming from the space world with dedicated knowledge on operations and the production of the satellites behind. As I was mentioning in the course of the presentation, we are in very intense negotiations with some potential investors, and hopefully get some achievement before end of this year. As I mentioned earlier, end of this year is the deadline. If we have not achieved that by end of this year, we will consider any other option, including liquidation. Next question is, any update on the C4 cntract? That'so an Australian contract we are bidding for.
The answer is, this contract is in a strategic review at the Commonwealth as part of the overall strategic review of the new government. At that point in time, there was no tender on the market on which we could formally put a proposal against. It's in progress, but it's one of the programs which are in delay. That's a good example of why our results in the first half year was not as expected. It's a typical example of those. Next question: What's the status of directed energy to laser demonstrations? The answer is, we are on schedule with our DE program, and we will have several demonstrations to many international customers throughout the last quarter of this year.
Those demonstrations will be predominantly happening in Australia, simply because of the effect that it takes a very long time to ship the equipment from one continent to the other one. Obviously, we are open for demonstrations at the beginning of next year overseas. Next question: Are U.S. contracts under review to limit dependence on customer-delivered equipment? Yes. Customers have been very cooperative in overcoming these issues, including contract amendments. If you allow me to make one more further annotation to this point, one of our most major and important contracts is a contract in the Middle East. We have succeeded over summer this year to have the formal amendment in place, which allows us now to cash in all the inventory which we have piled up. That's one reason why we are very optimistic concerning the longer-term future of this company.
These are the main questions that have been submitted over the course of this call. We're just gonna give a couple of minutes for any other questions to come in. If there are no more questions in a few minutes, we will end the call. We'll just give a minute for any more questions. I see, I think there may be another question just coming in just now. One second. Okay. No more questions have come in. Andreas?
Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders and investors, in the name of the board of EOS and the entire management team, I want to thank you for your time and active participation in this session. In line with our commitment of transparency, we will come back to you in due time to report on the actual progress and the business status. Thank you for your trust and confidence into the new management team. Have a good day. Bye-bye.