Thank you, Julia. Hi, everyone. The main intent of this webinar is to give everybody a little bit of an update about the recent capital raise, and some of the new products which we've launched, and our latest business developments. Some of the important things that have really happened, I'll just run through these key highlights. We've had a significant reduction in annual burn rate, and all of those changes are now in place. We've cut the burn rate down to about $10- $12 million a year, and we've secured funding arrangements of up to $22 million. That's made up of a facility from a New York-based fund called GEM, which is up to $20 million. We've just recently completed a capital raise of $1 million. The shares haven't been issued yet, but the capital raise itself is closed. We're about to launch a share purchase plan.
We're in the process of putting that documentation together, and that'll come out early next week. Looking forward, the near-term catalyst, we have in place an MOU to sell a Hadrian robot to Habitat NT, and we are looking to turn that into definitive docs and finalize that sale. At the moment, we're working with Samsung Heavy Industries on an engineering services agreement. We're through phase one on that, so we'll be delivering that quite soon. We've just launched recently on our website a new product which is DST enabled. It's called Mantis. It's a very large welding robot, and we're working on our sales pipeline for that. Of course, we're continuing to develop a sales pipeline for both machines and also Wall as a Service in Australia and the USA, as well as other places around the world.
I'll cover through a few of those things in a little more detail. On the machine sales side of things, we have a memorandum of understanding with Habitat NT for the sale of one of our Hadrian X units for $7.8 million. Habitat's a Darwin-based residential, industrial, and commercial construction company. They've got a really good pipeline of residential and also defense work over the next few years. One of the big factors which is really boosting their workload at the moment and really leading to a big shortage of brick and block layers up in the Northern Territory is a couple of different things which have all come together at the same time. The NT government has put out a $50,000 homeowners grant, so that's really stimulated demand. They have a lot of work on up there, building out social housing and also NDIS housing.
Of course, there's massive defense infrastructure up there. One of the things which will kick off is a new marine base for the U.S. Marines, which will accommodate 6,000 defense personnel full-time. All the accommodation for that has to be built. I went up and visited Darwin a couple of weeks ago, and it was absolutely amazing to see the amount of building and construction that's going on up there. There's definitely a shortage of brick and block layers, not to mention the difficulty of working up there, particularly in the wet season when it's really humid and very, very hot. It's very difficult to attract brick and block layers up there. That's one of the main reasons that Habitat NT is really interested in purchasing a Hadrian X machine to help deliver all of the work which they have to do.
The buildings which they build up there are very similar to what we build in Florida. We anticipate quite a smooth transition for Hadrian X to get into that work up there. Our intent at this point in time is for the H4 Hadrian unit to be supplied. It's currently undergoing commissioning and laying its first blocks, and we expect completion in this half of the calendar year. We've also had a lot of inbound interest in Hadrian X sales, not just from the Northern Territory, but also Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, the USA, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. There's a lot of global interest there, and really it's up to us to deliver some Hadrian X units and get it commercialized. With Samsung Heavy Industries, for those who aren't familiar, SHI or Samsung Heavy Industries is a very large shipbuilder based in South Korea.
They're definitely inside probably the top 10 of shipbuilders in the world. There are three really big ones in South Korea, and they're located near Busan, which is in the south of South Korea. The shipyard, which you can see in the photo there, employs about 25,000 people, building around 70 big ships a year. They are really into automation. They're automating as many different aspects of their business as they possibly can. Whilst they're a potential customer for Mantis, our work with them actually kicked off with a different project, one which is very large and employs a lot of people in delivering this repetitive process. They've been trying to automate it for a while, and they've identified that our DST technology and long boom and through-the-boom delivery technology is something which will really help them automate.
They've engaged us to do phase one, which is developing and testing one particular aspect of this automation. Once that's cleared, we'll be looking at doing the much larger complete automation. Phase one, we're developing and conducting physical demonstration and validation of a core technology module of this particular shipbuilding construction robot. We're expecting that to be completed this calendar year. Just over a week ago, we launched Mantis, which is a project where we're looking at other verticals for DST and our long boom technology. Ever since FBR listed, we've known that Dynamic Stabilization Technology really enables robotics to go to the next level and be used at much larger scales and environments where traditional robots are not viable. The fabrication is a very large industry. For example, there's about over 70,000 welders employed in Australia in various industries.
A large part of that industry in Australia is building very large components for industry and particularly the mining industry. There's also a very large shipbuilding industry, more so overseas than in Australia, but we do do some shipbuilding here. There's quite a bit of interest in building components for AUKUS and the nuclear submarines and so on, which are very large fabrications. There's also a recently announced agreement between Korea and the U.S. for the Korean shipbuilding industry to get involved in the U.S. defense industry. That's a potential application for Mantis as well, because all of this involves welding up very large ships. Welding robots are quite common in industry. There are tens of thousands of them used, but typically they only have about a three-meter reach.
With DST, we're able to extend that out to eight m, and in the future, we'll be looking at even larger ones, which might have the reach of up to Hadrian type reach, which is about 30 m. We think the eight-meter size is a very good target market for us to start off with. Here in Western Australia, there's a lot of fabrication that happens in that size. It's a DST-enabled welding robot with an eight-meter reach targeted at heavy fabrication industries such as mining, shipbuilding, and defense. It's got a pendulum workflow capability, which you can see on the top right of this slide, which means that a single Mantis can be set up and have four different work zones. It can be working on one particular piece, welding it up, while humans are setting up and tacking up other components ready to be welded.
A lot of this heavy plate work really takes a long time to weld out. What we're looking at doing is simply augmenting the humans who are already involved, but in very short supply, and automating processes which are either done manually or involve very laborious setup work to set up things like track welders and so on. This product came about through a couple of different reasons. I've been involved in the fabrication industry for my entire career of about 30 odd years. I've got a reasonable knowledge of how to build big steel structures. Of course, Hadrian itself has quite a few steel structures in it. We were looking at how we could get robots to build our robots as we scale up. What became apparent is that there's not really a good off-the-shelf solution for welding up structures that the smaller existing six-axis welding robots can't reach.
There are, of course, gantries and track welding type setups, but they have a lot of limitations. They're quite expensive. They're difficult to set up. They don't have generally the agility and access that a six-axis robot has. In part, Mantis has been designed to help us build Hadrian robots. In particular, there's a lot of heavy big fabrication in the mining industry, things like dump truck bodies, excavator buckets, things like that, mining chutes, big pipes, and ductwork, which happens here in Perth. Some of those fabrication shops employ hundreds of welders and produce thousands of tons of product every year. They're already using automation and robots where they can, but there's definitely a need for this bigger product. We're just working on that sales pipeline now. We expect to have our first Mantis delivered in 2026 or this financial year.
If we look at a lot of its features, it's intuitive and adaptable programming. We've got complete control over the control system. We're not just integrating a third-party robot. We actually build it from the ground up. We're leveraging a lot of the technology that we've already developed for Hadrian, which means that we're relying on 10 to 20 years of development work that we've already got in place. We're simply applying this into a new vertical. We're partnering with other organizations who have the specific expertise in welding and heavy fabrication and programming welding robots. We're teaming up with a company over here which distributes other welding equipment and robotics and cobots and so on. We're also partnering with Verbotics, who's an Australian company which uses an AI programming system to really make that easy to program.
We're really excited about the launch of Mantis and we're looking forward to getting our first customers for that. I'd like to open it up to questions, but not just yet, because one of the things I do want to talk about is our recent capital raise. There's probably going to be quite a few questions about the GEM facility, and I'll try and anticipate those. What it is, is a $20 million ability for FBR to call on capital raising as we need it. It's entirely at the discretion of FBR. There's no compulsion for us to use it, but we do intend to use it from time to time.
What it does is it means that we can ask GEM, and they have to, we submit a capital call notice, and they will purchase shares at a 10% discount to a price which is worked out in the following 15 days. There are some limitations on how much we can request to be drawn down. That volume is worked out over the preceding 15 days of volume, and it's 1,000% of the average trading volume. That puts limitations on how much we can use the facility. What it does mean is that facility is in place for the next three years and really solves a big part of the funding FBR. we've also enabled existing shareholders to participate. We're on very similar terms. We've launched an SPP, which will go live next week, and that's on similar terms.
We just completed a capital raise at $0.045, which is about a 23% discount to the recent VWAP. That's been a really good result. Really good pricing on that capital raise. We just raised $1 million there to get us through our cash flow requirements as we shift into product sales and so on. On that basis, I think it's probably time to open up for questions. Over to you, Julia.
Thank you so much, Mark. I have plenty of questions here. We have a few here about Mantis target market, some about the raise. I will start with a question regarding Hadrian. Is FBR's target market for the Hadrian building robot confined to medium-sized builders like Habitat NT? What about larger builders like the Mervacs of this world?
Yeah, look, it's a really good question. We are targeting, if you can say targeting, all size builders. We see that there's a housing crisis in Australia and across the world, if people haven't noticed, and I'm sure they have. We think that Hadrian can make a really significant contribution to that, not only here in Western Australia and Australia and Darwin and the Northern Territory, but across the world. We're working with organizations that range from small builders who only build a few homes a year, and they're most likely to engage with Wall as a Service. Of course, that means that somebody has to own Hadrians and be able to deliver that wall and laid blocks on a contract basis. We're working through how we can do that in a lot of different markets.
Both Perth and Habitat intend to offer that in some form, as far as I understand it, up in the Northern Territory. They'll be doing not only their own work, but potentially other work. Although they've got so much work on at the moment that it seems unlikely they'll be able to do that for quite some time. In the U.S., there's quite a few smaller builders, and even some of the larger builders are more interested in using Wall as a Service and contracting out Hadrian to deliver wall rather than actually purchasing Hadrians. We think that mid-size builders, such as Habitat, are very interested in purchasing Hadrians, particularly if they're building sort of between 100 and perhaps 300 homes a year. That's a demand which is sort of perfectly suited to one Hadrian.
In the Northern Territory market, for example, where there's a really big shortage of bricklayers and their delivery constraint, their delivery ability is really constrained by the number of bricks that they can get laid. It makes a lot of sense for them to get control over that delivery and actually purchase a Hadrian. Here in Western Australia, the WA State Government has a tender out for 1,150 home units to be delivered. We're working with a very large organization on that. We've been named in that tender. We don't know if we'll be successful or not. This is all in the control of third parties. Even if that organization that we've been involved with wins the work, there's no guarantee that we'll have Hadrians available to deliver the work. We certainly intend to, and that's a project which will extend over quite a significant period of time.
We're pretty keen to get into that. To give a long answer to a short question, yes, we're targeting the mid-sized builders like Habitat NT, but there's also a place for the smaller builders and also the very, very large builders. We're working with 28 different organizations in the U.S. to work out how we're rolling out Hadrian X, who's going to get it first, and in what form that's going to be. Some want to purchase Hadrian X, some want Wall as a Service. We're not really funded at the moment to provide Wall as a Service, but I think as we build up our pipeline, we'll be able to change that and get the finance and so on in place to cover the capital equipment cost of Hadrian X.
Thank you so much, Mark. What are the potential cost-based ramifications, marketing and sales expenses, especially from the gradual addition of new offerings like Mantis to FBR's product portfolio?
Yeah, it's a good question. Our intent is to have these new product offerings essentially self-funding. We've gone through the design process, obviously, on spec, but we're doing all of that and have done that on the basis of our existing technology and our existing team. We're not really incurring additional costs as such. We're using the team we've already got in place. As you know, we do a lot of our marketing in-house, and we have some contractors who we work very closely with. Of course, we're doing that expenditure within the bounds of what we can do. Our intent certainly is to get early customers and have new verticals such as Mantis be a self-sustaining business from as early as possible.
Thank you, Mark. That's brilliant. Thank you. FBR has indicated that phase one of the memorandum with Samsung Heavy Industries will be delivered in the second half of calendar 2025. What will ensuing phases entail? What will they cost FBR? Realistically, how long will it take before we know the Samsung relationship would deliver a material commercial benefit to FBR?
Yeah, really good question. As I've stated, we're delivering phase one this calendar year. Beyond that, it's really in the control of a third party. I can't really give any guidance on that. What I can say, however, is that the project is potentially very large. It would be valued in the order of tens of millions of dollars. Our intent is for that to be entirely funded by Samsung Heavy Industries. It's not something FBR will be doing on speculation. If and when that goes ahead, we anticipate it will be revenue positive FBR from a very early time.
Brilliant. Thanks, Mark. FBR has already established a presence in Australia and the United States. What is the company's strategy to quickly grow its footprint in other stated target markets like the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia?
Yeah, so in those jurisdictions, we're looking to partner with organizations who are already there. We're not funded at the moment to expand into those regions. Any work we're doing there needs to be self-sustaining and standing on its own two feet. We are in advanced discussions in all of those jurisdictions, not at the point where there's anything material to announce as such. We are progressing those discussions, and we hope that they'll eventuate to something.
Thanks, Mark. Question from anonymous attendee. Can old Hadrian, so the earlier iterations, e.g., H01, be stripped and rebuilt with H4/H5 standards?
In a way, they could be. However, you've got to look at, you know, what's the cost-benefit of doing that? There'd be significant re-engineering and design changes required to upgrade H1 and H2 to the H4 standard. We've introduced a lot of different features on H4, and of course, it's designed to handle much bigger blocks and have a longer reach, so it does have to go on a bigger truck base than H1 and H2. One of the big productivity advantages of H4 is it has a longer boom, which means that for typical structures which are built in Perth and in Darwin and even in Florida, we're able to reach all of that building site from one position. Whereas with H1 and H2, quite often we have to move Hadrian, which introduces a lot of inefficiencies.
There's been a lot of productivity and reliability improvements introduced into H3 and H4 and even H5 that's underway. Our plan at the moment is to use H1 and H2 more for R&D work and demonstration work here at FBR rather than out on site. We know that H3 and H4 are much more commercially viable and productive and more profitable than H1 and H2. We've only got a small team, so we have to target and focus our activities on what's going to generate the most revenue for FBR, and that's why we're focusing on H3 and H4.
Thank you so much, Mark. The recently announced funding initiatives give FBR a runway to finance the commissioning of a further Hadrian X robot and multiple development projects. What about funding required to scale and commercialize FBR via increased product sales?
Yeah, so look, our plan is to obviously increase product sales, and we want to do that in a profitable way. I don't want to be losing money on selling product. I'd rather just concentrate on R&D than sell product and lose money on it or deliver a service and lose money on it. All of those sales activities need to be sustained by the sales and Wall as a Service projects that we'll undertake. It'll be self-sustaining as much as possible. We may need to use some working capital to get those projects up and going, but we're certainly not planning a massive expansion or anything until we've proven out that Wall as a Service is viable and that Hadrian's profitable for the customers that use them. That sort of provides an organic growth model and a trigger for more rapid expansion.
We don't want to do that too early. We want to go steady, steady and build things up in a sustainable fashion and grow at a sustainable pace.
Great. Thanks, Mark. What other DST robots are FBR looking to roll out next?
Yeah, so look, Mantis is already launched, and we'll be building our first one of those later this year. H5 will be commissioned next year, which is essentially the same as H3 and H4, just minor continuous improvements on that. We're also looking at other parts of the steel industry and potentially a bigger version of Mantis. Before we do a bigger version of Mantis, we want to get some of those out there in the market and go through that early adoption phase and introduction. In the future, we're looking at bigger Mantis and other applications in the steel industry, particularly in refractory relining. We know there's a big market there that's not really being serviced by the automation industry in the way that it needs to be.
We're just looking at how we can get some customers on board for that, and that will be most likely the next product. In the short term, we're focused on Hadrian, H4, H5, and Mantis deliveries.
Excellent. Peter has asked, what is the path, what does the path to cash flow positive look like? What risks do you foresee?
Yeah, that's a difficult one to give guidance on. Obviously, it's dependent on making sales and converting the sales pipeline that we're developing. Obviously, if we sell some Hadrian X units, that will introduce quite good cash flow into FBR. Similarly, with Mantis, we know there's good gross profit on both of those. It's just about us getting the sales levels up to where they need to be to make FBR sustainable and profitable.
Thank you, Mark. How soon will FBR be able to make multiple Hadrian X units per year?
Yeah, once again, that's really driven by sales. We're in a position where we have a 10,000 square meter factory. We've got all of the equipment that we need to produce Hadrians. Like most production environments, the amount we produce really will be driven by sales. We have a very strong focus on sales. Capital equipment, you know, that costs as much as Hadrian does, you know, about $5 million U.S. or nearly $8 million Australian dollars, often has quite a lengthy sales cycle. There's a period of time from when a company or an organization might express some interest in doing it to when they actually have the finance in place and the approval for the capital expenditure. That's one of the reasons that we've launched Mantis and made it public.
We know that most, it does happen from time to time that somebody might ring up and buy one off the shelf. We know that it's more likely that it could take, you know, months to perhaps 18 months for that sales cycle to kick in. We're ready to produce Hadrians. We can scale up as we need to. It's really dependent on the sales. That's what we're really focused on is getting the sales for preferably machine sales, but also Wall as a Service. Wall as a Service needs to be established in a pipeline where it's self-sustainable and profitable from day one, which is what we're working on.
Gary has asked if there are any pre-orders for Mantis.
That, of course, would be an announceable thing. No, we don't have any pre-orders yet, but we do have a good pipeline of leads, and we're in discussion with a lot of potential customers. We're just in the process of turning those leads into actual sales. When that happens, that, of course, will be an announceable event.
Thank you. Are there any plans to integrate the Mantis onto the Hadrian boom?
No plans to do that specifically. We do think that there could be the potential for a mobile Mantis where Mantis is mounted onto a truck to make it more deployable around different sites or even within a factory or within a shipyard. We've not developed that yet. We think the first application, the easiest application, is for fixed Mantis robots. That would certainly fit in with the way that shipyards are building their big prefabricated blocks, typically 20 m by 20 m, weighing up to 800 tons. That would really suit a few Mantis located around it. You'd need more than just one to weld that up in an efficient fashion. The Mantis is also well suited to heavy fabrication shops, which build things like mining buckets and dump truck bodies and things like that. There's really no requirement to have Mantis as mobile as what Hadrian is.
Certainly in the future, we might consider a mobile version of it.
Thank you, Mark. Here we have a question pertaining to Brickworks and Solpats. Peter has remarked, it looks like FBR will be part of Solpats emerging company's portfolio. Do you have any insight on what the proposed Brickworks and Solpats combination will mean for FBR?
That's not something I can provide any guidance on. As the market knows, Brickworks and Solpats is going through a merger process. In due course, the market will be informed of how that's going to pan out in the long run.
Thanks, Mark. A few more questions here. Okay, how long does it take to make a Hadrian? What can be implemented to speed this process up?
Yeah, so really the speed of manufacture, it's a difficult thing to define because there are long lead time items which need to be, you know, purchased from outside vendors typically months in advance. We have a global supply chain, so there are components sourced from overseas. We manufacture a lot of components ourselves. As we shift into more volume production, that becomes sort of a rolling manufacture process. Then there's final assembly, commissioning, and delivery. At the moment, it does take quite a while, but we've only ever built four of this type of Hadrian, you know, being Hadrians one, two, three, and four. We have five underway. In mass production, we anticipate that a Hadrian could be rolling off our production line here roughly every two weeks or so. In some ways, you could say, yeah, we could build a Hadrian in two weeks.
The reality is that, you know, from when you start that process to actually having a Hadrian delivered, you know, it's really probably a six-month process. Much as, you know, car manufacture, you know, while it's just in time and there might be a car rolling off the assembly line every 30 seconds, you know, it's taken years to build up that production pipeline. If you track components from when they first started to when they end up on a car, you know, it's probably months to perhaps even a year during that production cycle. Once again, apologies for the long answer to a short question, but we have the potential here in Australia to expand our production capacity mainly by adding people.
Once we get to that sort of production numbers, we also hope that we'd get some support from the National Reconstruction Fund, which is a federal government initiative to help advance manufacturing in Australia. We have a grant application in for that. We're sort of in that chicken and the egg situation where they want to see us producing a lot more Hadrians before they'll fund us to produce more Hadrians. I'd encourage all of our shareholders to talk to their members and so on and encourage the National Reconstruction Fund to fund businesses in Australia, which can really contribute to some of Australia's big problems, not just in critical minerals, but you know, also solving the housing crisis.
It's one thing to stimulate demand, but we also need to increase the supply ability in those critical industries, particularly things like housing, where there's definitely a shortage and a shortage of production capacity. We're doing everything we can, and we're just asking for a bit of help so that we can speed up, do it faster, and help solve the housing crisis for all Australians.
Thanks, Mark. Okay, I have a few more questions here. Okay, Ashley, congratulations on the recent progress, Mark. Also, thank you for finally offering an SPP. Do you have a forecast to be operating cash flow positive?
Look, that's not something I can give guidance on. As I've said, that will mainly be dependent on our sales pipeline, and we're just too early in the process to know what sales we will be making. That's all dependent entirely on third parties. We've got our costs under control. We know exactly how much we're spending each year. We've got really good budgeting and good cost control, as you would expect of an ASX listed company. What we don't have control over is sales. Obviously, we're working towards that. As that develops, we'll keep the market informed.
Thank you so much, Mark. Everyone, thank you for attending today. We hope you found it useful and insightful. If you have any further questions, my email is julia@thecapitalnetwork.com.au. Thank you so much for your interest and your support in FBR, and have a fantastic day. Thank you, Mark.
Thank you, Julia.
Fantastic. Thank you, everyone, and enjoy your day.