Thanks, Dario. I just need to check with Martin if we're on time. All right. Well, first of all, Let me begin today by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Cabrogal Clan of the Dharug Nation, and we pay our respect for the elders past, present, and future. Thank you for joining us this morning. Thank you to the ones of you who have come to Prestons, and also thank you very much for the people who are online, who are listening in to the presentation. The proceedings for today are in four parts. First, the individual members of the executives will give you an update in regard to the strategy. We follow that with Q&A session.
Once we have the Q&A session, we invite, obviously, the people here in the room to come with us on a tour of our facilities, and then after the tour, we invite you for light refreshments, lunch, back here, and that gives you an opportunity to mix with the executives and with some of the senior members of the team. In regard to the presentation, again, four parts. I start with an overview of GWA, especially ones of you who don't know the history of of us. Then we go into the strategy. We're focusing on three growth pillars. They are presented by Craig and Caroline, and clearly growth pillars are only effective if you have the right foundation. There are four of them, and we have Melissa, Alex, Ernie, and Pat providing update on that.
We can't have an investor presentation without talking about financials, and I have to tell Keith we won't give you a financial outlook for the next five years, but Calin will give you an update on capital management. We close off with Q&A, and then once we've done Q&A, we take you out to the plant. Before I start, let me just introduce my executive team. Some of you know. Calin Scott, our Group CFO, and Craig Norwell, our GM for Sales. You would have seen the two of them. They came with me during our year-end presentation, end of August. It feels such a long time ago, but it's only a few weeks ago. We have Ernie Lagis, our Company Secretary and General Counsel. Caroline Sunaryo, responsible for supply chain and innovation. Alex Larson, our CIO.
He oversaw a very successful implementation of the ERP, which we talked about in August. Melissa Hayes, responsible for marketing, and Patricia Oliver, responsible for people and performance. When we go out to the tour, you will meet a number of the members of the senior management team, and we introduce you to them as we go to their stations. Let me introduce GWA. I don't cover the whole 90 years of GWA. I go back about 8 years. If I start in 2015 was the year where we stopped local manufacturing, and we moved our sanitary ware production overseas. During the period of 2015-2019, we sold and divested non-core businesses, Doors and Access, Dux Hot Water. Really for us to start focusing on our core business being bathroom, laundry, and kitchen.
In 2019, we acquired a New Zealand-based company called Methven. Methven is well known for their shower technology. I'm sure you've heard me saying worldwide there are 6 patents in regard to showers. We hold 3 of them, and clearly Methven joining the GWA Group gives us an additional product into our portfolio. In 2021, we sold the last production facility in China, which first came from the Methven plants. In 2022 last year, you would have heard us, we decided to close the sales function in China, and we took the exercise of implementing an ERP. Before I go into some of the details in the strategy, let me talk about safety. Safety clearly is part of the foundation's ESG, but safety for us is the number one priority.
Our ongoing commitment, you see on the graph behind me, has seen our safety performance improve year-on-year. Not surprisingly, over the last two years, we were very active in managing a comprehensive COVID safe program to ensure that our staff and stakeholders stay safe. Over the last 12 months, we've introduced site mental health officers and trained them in mental health and first aid to continue to drive our safety culture. Our number one objective is whoever comes to work in the morning is able to go home at night safely to their family and friends. How can I best describe GWA or the GWA, the business model? There are certainly four things we're very proud of. First of all, we are the leading water provider for buildings. We are specifically focused on bathroom, kitchen, and laundries.
We focus on specific categories, including sanitary ware, basins, baths, showers, taps, smart solution, both for and commercial solutions. Again, you will have heard our best estimate is that our addressable market is somewhere between AUD 1.4 billion and AUD 1.6 billion in Australia. We know that we have a market leading position. We are the owner of some of the best known brands in the market. Caroma, Methven, we've recently done surveys. Everyone understands and knows our brands. We have a long history of innovations. If you look back in 1980, GWA was the first company inventing and introducing dual flush in toilets, and you will hear more about it when Ernie talks about ESG. We have an unparalleled strong reputation in regard to quality and technical services.
Yes, we produce our products offshore, but we have our own quality teams at the major production sites testing the quality of our products before they're shipped to Australia. We can guarantee to our customers when they install these products, they will work. While we don't manufacture anymore, we have exclusive and cost-effective long-term arrangements with key suppliers across China, Southeast Asia and Europe. Again, while we don't manufacture anymore, we maintain two strong center of excellence. One here in Sydney, and you will see some of it later this morning, and one in Auckland. That gives us the unique position to develop product and solution, solutions which are unique and specific for our local market. No one else can do that. Then clearly you see with the IP, we have many hundred patents. We, again, it's a reflection of our innovative nature as a business.
For us to go forward, clearly we need to have strong financial foundation. We have a strong balance sheet. We are highly cash generative. We have a history of paying high dividends. Our business is resilient to go through the cycles and take advantage of in selected markets as we choose. A fantastic platform to build our strategy on. Just quickly, a snapshot of the business. As I mentioned, about AUD 1.4 billion-AUD 1.6 billion addressable market in Australia. As you can see, the largest element is repair and renovations. If you look at our business revenue by segment, we just produced a little bit less than AUD 420 million in financial year 2022. Just over 60% is in the R&R space. That includes both residential and commercial, and 21% is in commercial new build.
We have a very strong position in commercial new build. If you look at our revenue split by geography, just over 80% comes out of Australia, 11% New Zealand, and international these days is our U.K. business, who's focusing mainly on taps and showers. Everyone is interested in outlook. Now for you, what we're gonna include is the BIS Oxford Economics, some of the graphs they recently published. If you look at residential, we believe residential completion continues to be strong, and I think we talked at the year-end. We have seen over the last 2 years that completion sort of moved from 9 months to 12, 15, 18 months. We clearly believe that we see these segments to grow stronger for longer. Multi-residential, as the borders are opening up and migration starts increasing, this is a positive segment for us.
While small for us, we see an increase going forward. Commercial, we continue to see expected improvements and there's a number of areas. New build commercial, but we also see good trends, particularly in healthcare. There's a lot of hospitals where we will take advantage of. Then renovation and replacement, yes, while the graph shows a slight decline going forward, the rate is still at an economic historically higher level than what we've seen for a long time. Overall, our market is positive, and we are well positioned to take advantage of this market as we move forward. Let me talk about the strategy. You would have seen the strategy on one page. Ultimately, we want to be the trusted and integrated solution partner in the delivery of sustainable water solutions for bathrooms, kitchens and laundries. We identified four key growth pillars.
We're gonna talk to you about three of those today. We do recognize to be successful with the growth pillars, we need to have a solid foundation. Again, we give you an insight into our four foundations. Then most importantly, everything is built on our culture pillars. We are one team, we are customer-focused, and we care for each other. Pat will refer to that when she talks about the aligned organization and some of the strength we have within GWA. It's probably worthwhile looking at our environment with our stakeholders. We have quite a complex environment. Melissa will. When she talks about customer experience, she will go into some of the details. Most of you know that the majority of our products sell via merchants, so it's a typical push.
If you go through a purchasing journey, a lot of different stakeholders are involved at different times. First of all, you start with advice. You quite often see architects, interior designers, or from your own experience, if something goes wrong in your bathroom, you ask the plumber, "What shall I do?" The plumber gives you advice. It comes to the decision. Quite often it's the consumer, it's the plumber, or it's a commercial property owner or asset owner who will decide. We have the purchaser who actually go out and purchase. Sometimes you're going out as a consumer, but quite often it's either the builder and the plumber. Our overarching strategy is that we want to continue with our push, but really focus on the pull scenario.
As you can see, one of the industry which is consistent in every single step of the purchasing journey is the plumber. Craig Norwell, when he talks about the first and the most important strategic pillar, he will come to that in more detail. Why do we think we have a great future ahead of us? The changes we're gonna implement can be summarized. We will strengthen our relationship with plumbers and end consumers to drive above market growth via push and pull strategy. Craig will talk about that in Win the Plumber, and he will also address it in aftermarket. We have a clear customer value proposition, both for our brands and our products. You will hear from Melissa in customer experience and from Alex how important digital will be for this. We establish a clear NPD, new product development innovation pipeline.
The climates and the fashion are changing in the bathrooms, and we need to find a way to adapt faster to changing market needs. You will hear from Caroline how we drive those. All of those we're doing is underpinned by a solid ESG framework. Therefore we strongly believe that we will have above-market goals, we will drive towards be the employer of choice, and clearly, we will create sustainable returns for our stakeholders. With this, I hand over to Craig to talk about Win the Plumber.
Thanks, Urs. Good morning. For those people I haven't met, my name's Craig Norwell. I'm the GM for Sales at GWA Group, and it's my great privilege to lead the number one strategic growth pillar around Win the Plumber. What I wanted to do first is sort of talk about why we think that's unique and so powerful for GWA, give you a flavor of why, what we're focused on, and how we're leveraging that number one strategic pillar to differentiate ourselves in this part of the world, but also outgrow the market, not just in the short term, but for the medium and longer term. What I wanna start with, I suppose this is really about deepening, broadening, and leveraging our relationships in the plumbing industry. It's something as a business we've had a rich history in, but it's really been quite narrow.
As good as we've been, the opportunity to be great by expanding that into places and customer coverage that we've never seen before is very, very clear to us. There's something really unique about our position in this part of the world across Australia and New Zealand around being a technical partner. Our focus here is all about being the number one choice to plumbers as their technical partner because of the trust and the value they get from our solutions, but also from our service as well. Across both the first pillar around Win the Plumber and around how we develop aftermarket offers, I'm gonna try and bring to life the headroom that's available for us across both Australia and New Zealand.
I thought before I do that, though, I'd talk to you about why plumber, and I thought Urs did a really good job of talking about how complicated our sales process is. There's so many people involved in these, whether it's you renovating your home or someone building a new home for someone or someone building a new commercial business or maintaining that commercial asset. A lot of people involved, there's one common denominator that's very unique to this part of the world. In this part of the world, irrespective of who's involved, 90% of what we sell or what our competitors sell has to, by law, be installed by a licensed plumber. It's illegal to do it any other way. You wouldn't find that to be true anywhere else in the world.
Installation is in the hands of the plumber, therefore, they play a key role in any decision that Urs touched on before. The second one is, again, the uniqueness of this market is the ability or the desire to have things come in on budget and projects come in on time, tends to be handed down to a trade, so that they're next on the hook to say, "I want it to be on budget, and I want it to be on time." In our case, that's the plumber, and it means that in the majority of cases, they're either the decision-maker or they're actually the person that purchases the product from the merchant themselves. Here, despite all the people involved in any sort of purchasing decision, the common denominator is the plumber.
The reason why is by law, they're obligated to install 90% of it, and the majority of those cases, because of budget, risk, and things being delivered on time, they're the ones that's either deciding what's going in or they're the purchaser behind it. Very clear why amongst our strategic pillars, this is without doubt, the number one opportunity for us to focus on one specific type of customer. Why is it a commercial opportunity to us? We've built a really good business, and Urs talked about 80+ years for Caroma around a focus on plumber. It's been really narrow. We've strongly focused on 5,000, typically large commercial plumbers. We know from our partnership with the Master Plumbers Association, I talked about you have to be a licensed plumber.
Every licensed plumber in Australia and New Zealand is a member of the Master Plumbers Association. We know those installing products relevant to our opportunities is closer to 36,000 plumbers across Australia and New Zealand. Typically g ood business focused on 5 of a total customer base of 36. Over the last 12 months, we've gone from 5- 10,000, but our goal is to get that as far above 25,000 plumbers in the next 12- 18 months' time. I mean, you can do the math. A good business at 5 with a real clear runway to get to 25,000+ to unlock a lot more advocacy, a lot more loyalty, a lot more volume on the back of it.
They have to install it, they're the key buyer or decision-maker, and we have incredible headroom to get to more plumbers and be unique. As I said, our competitive advantage here is around technical expertise. No one has our technical expertise or our scale in Australia and New Zealand to apply it to that many plumbers. For us, it's about the number one choice for a plumber as a technical partner because of the trust and value they get from our services and our solutions. You probably then go, "Okay, so it's clear why they're number one. It's clear what the headroom you have as a business to go good into great. How are you gonna do that?" I really wanted to sort of spend some time on four key thrusts.
It's really around technical service and support. It's around the role we have in training, education, and accreditation of plumbers. It's around creating loyalty and advocacy in plumbers. It's also about collaborating with plumbers to ensure that things are easier to install, use, and make life better for them and their customers. On the first one, it starts with technical services. We're already significantly increasing the amount of investment we place in plumbing specialists, not just in the frontline meeting with plumbers and servicing needs, but also in call centers, behind our digital tools, and also in other functions to really be the number one choice to plumbers as a technical partner. It's all about technical services.
Really, it's about an investment into services that allow plumbers to come to us first when they have problems, when they have issues to solve, when they're troubleshooting, so we save them time and also reduce the risk that they're exposed to in the jobs they're completing with their customers. I'll give you an example that's relatively new for us in a sec. The last one is around digital solutions. You'll hear a lot today from a number of speakers, including Alex, who'll talk about digital and a plumber's hub. We can't service 25,000+ plumbers in a typical face-to-face way, and a lot of the younger plumbers don't want us to do it that way anyway.
The only way to be available to 25,000+ plumbers when they need it in the way they need it and solve their problem in real-time is to have digital solutions that allow us to take our technical expertise and our services to people when they're required in real-time. There's a big focus on investment behind digital solutions beyond phone, beyond face-to-face calls. A real-life example of this new plumber that we're connecting with now is a gentleman here in New South Wales. He has 20 vans on the road. He typically replaces things in your home when they're broken, and he encounters so many old toilet suites that are old. They're not available now, and he doesn't really know how to work out what is this toilet suite? What's a suitable alternative, and where do I find it from?
There's a real shortage on labor on plumbers. Hourly rates have gone significantly up. That job should take half an hour, typically for him, a lot of cases. He can charge an hour. With those old toilet suites, the feedback we had from him is it takes me two hours worth of homework to find out what is this toilet suite? What's an alternative? Where do I buy it from? One of the examples that we've never offered before is a technical service to work with his guys in the van to help him identify that, tell him what else could go in there to minimize the cost and time, and tell him where he can source that from, which merchant, and how we can help facilitate that purchase.
That's taken a 3-hour exercise, 2 hours of homework, can't charge—I can charge for 1 hour into a 1-hour job and 15 minutes worth of conversation with us. A real clear example of one, saving time, saving money, getting more into his day, but also managing the risk that he might get that wrong. Second of all, training and accreditation. There's really three main for us here. One is, you know, trades are incredibly sticky. They're incredibly loyal when they're trained at the start and what they use in terms of product and solutions they trust. A big focus for us is owning the way apprentices in Australia and New Zealand are actually accrediting their third year to go on the tools and be able to install a front-of-wall product.
There's a big focus for us across the Master Plumbers Association who train through PICAC and also TAFE to own that franchise. Once a plumber graduates and they're on the tools, as I said, you have to be licensed. To maintain your license, you need to complete 12 hours of continuing education every year. A big part of that is technical skills to ensure the quality of the plumbing is increased, but also those plumbing businesses keep abreast with today's trends. We have a focused program around the role we can play in being front and center on those 12 hours for each and every one of those plumbers that we're engaging with.
Lastly, which was an idea that came out of plumbers in the way we've collaborated on training and accreditation, is we have a brand that's incredibly trusted in this part of the world, and it's famous for trust and quality. Us working with plumbers to accredit them as Caroma Accredited installers was a rich place they wanted us to explore beyond just the training of apprentices and beyond the ongoing training of plumbers that are employed in the marketplace today. The third one is establishing loyalty and advocacy. We're very fortunate that we have a program that's in its 26th year called CARC, Caroma Accredited Research Customer. That's created great loyalty from those 5,000 commercial large end new build customers. And we've got incredible solutions as a result of that, and I'll talk about that on the fourth stream.
That's been something that's really created a level of loyalty to Caroma that really is the envy of everyone else. The trouble is we've kept that to the plumbers that are of a certain type in those 5,000. The goal now is how do we apply that type of franchise into the different types of plumbers completing different work with different needs that's now 25,000 plus, which is our ambition to go from a good coverage into a great coverage. Lastly, the first three are incredibly important, but at the end of the day, loyalty to our brand and our solutions and services won't happen unless we make life better for a plumber.
The fourth one around making things easier to install and use products, and you'll get a real feel for that when you go out into our innovation and distribution center, after these presentations, is about how do we collaborate with plumbers to understand their needs, understand their varied pain points, and create solutions for it. When you get out the back, you'll meet a person called Nikki Marshall. She heads up our commercial business. She plays a key role in this Win the Plumber pillar, and she'll show you two things that are a direct result of those collaborations with plumbers. She'll show you one you would've seen on the video up front, an adjustable flush pipe. Often, a plumber goes in, installs pipes in a wall, and the floor will be set at a certain level that they'll sort of anchor the pipe off the back of.
Often when those things are installed, the tiler or the concreter will actually install the floor at a different level. For a lot of cases, that means the plumber has to come along before he installs a toilet suite and reset the pipe in the wall. That can take 2 hours every single toilet suite, and happens many times in any sort of commercial building that's being erected. We've come up working with plumbers to talk to them about how we make an adjustable flush pipe that means if someone else doesn't deliver the solution to spec, that they're able to adjust the way the flush pipe's set out. One means that no 2 hours is not required. Two, the quality of that installation and it causing problems over the next 5- 10 years is eradicated. One clear example.
The second one is I've talked a lot about labor and the enemy of time. She'll also show you a modular wall frame unit that we've worked with plumbers and builders to actually take a lot of the installation work off-site and allow them to deliver more efficient solutions to site and reduce the amount of site time required. In so many projects, we've already integrated that into it, saved 20% of labor time on the back of it. There's not another organization in this part of the world that would be able to collaborate with plumbers to understand those opportunities or pain points and create the solutions off the back of it. Lastly, you know, I've talked about plumbers, I've talked about licensed plumbers. We're very fortunate that we have an incredibly strong relationship with Master Plumbers and with TAFE across Australia and New Zealand.
A huge part of all four of the things I talked about around engaging, what do you do with these 25,000 plumbers? How do you differentiate as a technical partner, is to continue to secure industry advocacy. Master Plumbers, their training institution is PICAC, and TAFE play an incredibly powerful role in being advocates for not only our brand offer, but also the solutions we offer, and the ability to be a technical expertise to all plumbers throughout Australia and New Zealand. Hope it's given you a flavor not only for why plumber number one, but the real headroom for us to take a skill we've had and apply it to many more plumbers and ensure that we grow not only ahead of the market, but create a level of technical partnership here that's without rival in this part of the world.
Now, what we wanted to do is I'll get Caroline, and she's gonna bring to life pillar two, which is around how we innovate through design and partnerships. Thanks, Caroline.
Thanks, Craig. Good morning. I'm Caroline Sunaryo, and today I'm very delighted to be presenting the innovate through design and partnership strategic pillar, where we'll look to combine our in-house capability with our global partnerships to fast-track value creation and also portfolio modernization. This pillar is as much as it is for us to support our top-line growth ambition as it is emphasizing GWA as the only sizable Australian and New Zealand business with strong in-house capabilities, local understanding of the local market, and also extensive R&D capability to provide products and solutions for the Australian and New Zealand market at scale. The GWA brands has been long known for innovation and high-quality products. With globalization and technology advancement, we are seeing the markets changing, where customers are getting more choices, either in design, technology, color, or finishes.
With that, the product trends are evolving faster than ever. To stand apart and continue to lead in the market and grow our share, we will be playing to our technical strength, our innovation heritage in providing distinctive and purposeful kitchen and bathroom solutions in alignment with each of our brand value proposition. We will also be leveraging our supply partnership with some of the world's best manufacturers to fast-track new product introductions. Also combining that with the strong partnership that Craig has mentioned with installers and customers, we'll be able to have insight to the market needs and market trends to enable us to introduce product trends that is actually meeting on-point market needs, and with that, fast-track the market uptake.
Our competitive advantage will be enhanced through design collaboration, providing access to technical solutions, and also providing access to customizable logistics delivery models. By 2025, we want to be known for the products and solutions we design and develop here in Australia and New Zealand for the Australia and New Zealand market. We want to be recognized as the progressive industry leaders in sustainable bathroom, kitchens, and laundry solutions. To bring those ambitions to life, the three key areas that we'll be focusing on are five years rolling NPD or New Product Development and innovation roadmap, design and innovate in key areas, and also utilizing our strategic partnerships.
Our five years NPD and innovation roadmap will enable us not only to focus on distinctive products that we will be known for, but also to ensure that we'll continue to deliver tactical products to meet immediate market needs and complete our portfolio. In the tour that you will have later on today at in Prestons, you'll be able to see some of the product and innovations that we are currently having in the pipeline. On design and innovation in key focus area, the four areas that we will be known for are design leadership, modularity and installation, health and wellbeing, and also water experience and sustainability. Design leadership will means for us is all about consumer smart product. Smart not just in a sense of electronic smart, but also water smart and installation smart.
Easy to install, easy to service, and easy to mix and match, and also good value for money. Design leadership for us also mean introducing new products as complete collections. Having more complete collection will means that our product will be easier to recognize, to choose from, to range, and also to price position. The Contura II will be the next product range that we'll be introducing as a complete collections, where we look to combine leading-edge technology, unique design, and also alternative materials. Design leadership for us also mean introducing products in key emerging categories. The three categories that we'll be focusing on are modular building-friendly products, connected bathroom in a residential application, and also water safety technology through behind the wall water leak prevention technology on our Caroma Smart Command platform, and also lead-free products.
On health and well-being, we want our products to cater to meet a full life cycle of consumer needs. With that, we also want, similar to Win the Plumber, we want to start brand recognition early in the consumer life. With that, we will be introducing a new range of youth care product targeted for school, childcare, and also parent room application. On the other side, we will be bolstering our assistive living product offer, cater not only for healthcare application, but also to cater for growing aging population of Australia who wants to stay home longer and have their bathroom as stylish as it is functional, and also easily upgradable to meet their life's changing needs. Some of our Opal collection are here today for you to see. On water experience and sustainability, these are core to the Caroma and Methven innovation heritage.
As you would see in the lab tour today, we are working on our next generation shower spray technology, the Auraline, to progress our Methven shower spray technology legacy. We are also working on our next toilet flush technology, water management, and also water power harvesting technology to progress the Caroma water conservation journey. On modularity and easy installation, through our Easy-Switch platform, our core products will be modular with common in-wall bodies and common product footprint to make it easier for consumer and to encourage to renovate with us in the future without the need of a tiles off renovation. As Craig will touch on next, we will be looking to expand our smart installation solution, where we introduce product to solve common installation issues, and with that, grow after market share.
To deliver on this initiative, we will be leveraging our supply partner network to fast-track new product introductions. Through combining that with joined up design planning and new product collaboration with and for our installers and also our customers, we are looking to deliver a customizable consumer experience, and also faster market uptake. With our five years R&D roadmap in place, our collaboration model in place, and also our product database in place, we are well-positioned to deliver on this initiative. To measure our success in this key strategic pillar, the two key metrics that we'll be using are, first one, vitality index, which is a new product percentage of our revenue measured up to two years from launch, and also a new product introduction speed to market.
By 2025, we are aiming to have our vitality index to sit at over 10% and improve our speed to market by 20%. With that, I will hand over back to Craig Norwell for aftermarket strategic pillar update. Thank you.
Thanks, Caroline. Okay, you've heard about Win the Plumber, you've heard about innovate through design and partnerships. The third growth pillar is really a bit of a change of gear, and I think it's built around two things. It's built about rightful share. Talked about headroom in plumbers before, and it's also talked about resilience to the cycle. Why it's important to us is, if you reflect back on what you heard from Urs, it's a business that's been successful for a long time, but typically through, you know, strong sanitary share. When we reflect back on the purchase of Methven around shower and tapware IP, that was really to start to get our tap and shower share back to a level of rightful share that you'd sort of anchor off sanitary.
You've seen that in the results we talked about at the end of the last fiscal year. We're really starting to see momentum. When you get out the back, you'll see really clear, inspiring collections from Caroma that wouldn't have been possible. When you reflect back on aftermarket, there's a couple of reasons for why this is incredibly important for us, is we do have a new build product share that's quite envious of a lot of other players in this part of the world, anywhere in the world for that matter, that we talk to. The second one is our customer coverage is incredible. The trouble is a bit like the narrowness of plumber. We haven't really focused as much on the replacement, the maintenance, and the renovation needs of a lot of those assets, be they residential, commercial, that our products go to upfront.
As good as our share is of new build, we know that for every dollar spent on a building, in a bathroom, a kitchen, or a laundry, when it comes to water products, when it's built, three dollars are actually spent on those products over the course of its lifetime, be it from a repair or renovation perspective. When you look at our share of the R&R piece, Urs talked about it being the largest part of this ANZ market to our new build, it's significantly lower. There's significant headroom to leverage this great footprint we have out there in the R&R space. The second piece Urs talked about, and you saw on some of those segment charts, a bit of a rollercoaster ride, isn't it?
When the going's good, when business cycle is good, new build's strong, but when it's not, then new build starts to get challenging, and it gets challenging to sustain growth. A big part of this focus on aftermarket is not only the headroom on volume and share, but also it's incredibly more resilient to a cycle than new build is. One, it represents upside to grow ahead of the market. Two, it's incredibly important to the resilience of our organization in this part of the world and the exposure to a, I suppose, a business cycle. Our share of new build product out there and our customer coverage are the two areas to leverage. There's a few areas we're gonna go after that. One is I talked about plumber.
If you think about technical partnerships, you think about troubleshooting, solving problems today in real-time, and getting a solution to me fast. Spare parts is incredibly important to that service, but also it's a real volume and a profit opportunity for us as well. If I talked about the under-index in R&R versus new build, it's lower again when you look at our performance in spare parts. There's a clear opportunity for us to make life better for plumbers and the customers they work with and take volume share in a sustainable way by offering a formidable spare parts offer that we've never offered before. Second of all, Caroline talked about, I suppose, the smart water solution footprint. We have in excess of 200 buildings. You'll hear Ernie talk about it from an ESG point of view later on.
209 to date, to be exact. Half those connected to the cloud, drawing information down from all the fixtures, the other half connected to a BMS. We're already seeing rich data being drawn from those assets working with their owner and also the property manager that's putting us in a very different space on how we create spare part opportunities to service the needs of those assets over the course of their lifetime, and that's not a space we've been able to expose ourselves or have a seat at that table ever before. Plumber and the smart water solutions are two real opportunities for us when you think about how we partner with customers on spare part opportunities.
The other one linked to that is, obviously, we have a large customer base that owns incredibly large portfolios of commercial assets out there. We've partnered successfully with them on design, collaboration, and new build, but haven't really had a seat at their table, either on the replacement needs they have. I touched on spares. The refurbishment needs when those buildings are refurbed after seven years, when they go through a more major refurb after 15 years. We haven't exposed ourselves to some of the services around water management. You'll see later on around leak monitoring and how we control the 20% of water used in a lot of commercial buildings is a result of actually leaks in a lot of those older buildings.
There's services that our asset owners, our customers pay and participate in there that we haven't had access before that sits above the AUD 1.4 billion-AUD 1.6 billion market we play in today that Urs talked about before. How we partner with these key commercial customers to not only provide services, but look for different ways to sell offers and solutions to them. Not maybe always the big CapEx up front, but an ongoing OpEx plan that covers the entire lifetime, of the asset. There's rich opportunities for us to ensure that we're there for the lifetime of those assets. Lastly, delivery models.
I think if we've seen one thing through the last 2.5-3 years around COVID, it's accelerated e-commerce, online, digital sort of mediums in this country, but also it's empowered consumers in a way we've never seen before, and it's made them so much more, I suppose, demanding on their role in the decision process and also the desire for pace and agility. The third thrust for us, and we hear Alex talk about it when it comes to digital tools and how we actually partner with services with homeowners and decision-makers, and how we create different types of mechanics to deliver solutions through trades, through our plumber, into their homes or commercial assets, there's a whole new opportunity there for us to play a role, and we've never played before.
Really, it's all about spares, it's all about services with major commercial asset owners, and it's all about being a partner with the plumber, but also with asset owners in different digital ways that really take us to places we haven't been able to, I suppose, become relevant in before, where we see major upside, both from a volume but also a resilience point of view across the board. They're the three strategic growth pillars that myself and Caroline have covered off. Now we wanted to change gears, and as Urs said, the pillars, incredibly important, but they won't be what we need them to be without a strong foundation. Now I wanna pass over to Melissa, who's gonna give you a far more richer view on how we're going to deliver great customer experiences.
Good morning, everyone. I have the privilege of being able to cover off what is quite often a very emotive and perhaps evocative subject, that of customer experience. I suppose I wanna start a little bit, just by understanding the context of this, of our first foundations, because a lot of what you've covered off already, we've had the discussion around winning the plumber as one of our core customers. Really there's a whole thing around why is customer experience important for us? The who. I'll cover a little bit about our who, what we're focused on and also how we're planning to get through that path that's relevant for us as a GWA Group.
As I say, customer experience can be a very evocative one, partly because, you know, each of us as individuals can no doubt recall those moments that matter in various types of experience. The ones that we either feel really fantastic about or alternatively could almost call them the moments of mutter. When you really just have that really bad experience, and let's face it, the products and the solutions that we offer are the sort of products and solutions that you don't want to have those bad experiences with. As we go through the concept of our brand experiences and our customers' experiences, we have to think about how we can ensure that those solutions integrate customer experience. Think about a very diverse tapestry of who. Urs had covered a little bit about our framework of complex customers.
Absolutely underpinning our win the plumber, that is predominantly a very important part of who we are and who we need to approach. In addition to that, there are a whole breadth of other customers that we have to respect and be able to tailor our solutions, services, and approaches to meet their moments that matter in their journeys as well. In integrating our customer experience, we have to ensure that our brands and our category solutions are those that are relevant. If you think about customer experience, there are some words that have already been used in the course of this morning. Certainly relationships. Relationships are fundamental. You have to be able to have that strength and conviction and understanding that you know what that customer is all about.
The next thing is relevance, because we want to ensure that we've got the right solutions and they connect in ways that are meaningful to those outcomes. There's a value and a quality proposition that if you don't meet that, you don't have the ticket to the game. If you do all of that, you start on that journey to advocacy. That's part of what we're trying to achieve in our whole customer experience, is be relevant, build the relationships, do so with quality and value propositions that are meaningful, that leverage the strength of the brands that we represent and are known and trusted in the marketplaces and the markets that we serve, but do so in a way that we build further advocacy and sustain into other generations. Why our customer experience and what are we actually trying to achieve?
I probably already gave an indicator on that, but at the end of the day, it's about advocacy, and it's being that brand of choice. Being a brand of choice is not just about a logo. It's not just about something that's on a box. It's about all that it represents. Certainly when you get into being a brand of choice, you have to understand what value proposition we can bring as well. We'll cover a little bit about that when we get into the what's. Our customer journeys are complex. If you're a consumer and you're undertaking a bathroom renovation, I'm sure many of us have been down that path themselves, it can be quite a confronting experience in itself.
From a consumer perspective, we have to understand each of those touch points and support them through that conversion journey so that Caroma or Methven or the other brands are part of our portfolio are the ones that are the brands of choice relevant for those customers, that they stand for all of those things that we've covered already. Answering all of this, we actually do need to deliver customer experiences that are valued, they deliver what they promise, and really give that sense of confidence and assurance that as a customer, you know you've made the right choice. That's a little bit about the why. The who aspect is quite an important one. Plumbers, absolutely. Even in addition to our plumbers, we know that plumbers are not just one set. There's not just one type of plumber, and Craig covered that.
We have to be able to to deliver to the different types of club plumber needs. In addition to understanding our plumber needs, there's also the whole breadth of architects and designers, specifiers, our consumer market, the care market, and commercial markets, each of those having very complex and challenging and changing needs that we have to be across and be able to adapt to. That's a little bit about the who, and now we'll get into the what's. There are three areas that are how we are planning to deliver our great customer experience and really set that whole lifeblood of the delivery of all that is GWA. The first is this compelling market proposition. We are incredibly blessed to have so many strong and trusted brands in our market space.
As part of understanding what's going to be compelling, though, we've had to map each of our customer journeys, be them the consumers, be it the commercial customers, be it our merchant channels, be it our plumbers, to understand those various touch points. Over the course of this last period of time, we've gone through each of our customer profiles, delivered those profiles, and also identified the journey stages that we can support as well. The second one that's up there is on refocusing our brand portfolio. We have strong brands, but we have to ensure that they stand for something that is relevant and authentic. A lot of companies focus on purpose in marketing.
We have to be purposeful, but we also have to be authentic to what our value proposition is in market. One of the blessings of our whole GWA portfolio is it's not just about the products that you see in front of the wall, it's all that goes behind. That's that bridge for a plumber as well, is that strength of proposition that things are purposefully beautiful. They deliver the aesthetic, but they work where it counts. Our brand portfolio, we wanted to look at how can we be even more competitive, ensure our proposition is strong, it's authentic, and that we can play in-market where we can competitively even more so. We engaged in a really significant piece of work that has gone through three phases. The first was spending time with our existing customers to understand what works well and what doesn't.
The second phase of that was looking at the competitive market landscape and going through a quantitative and qualitative survey to get a real gauge of where do we play well and what's unique to us and what are customer expectations. We had over 1,792 responses across Australia and New Zealand covering all of our different types of markets, and from that, we were able to clearly articulate the unique role that each of our brands plays in the market space. In addition to that, we went through a whole piece of work to understand what our brands stand for, not just the way that they're presented, but what they're known for. That now comes into us looking at the strength across our portfolio and playing it in the ways that are relevant for our customers.
The third one in there is about reviewing and improving our range. We have a breadth of products, services, and solutions already available. We wanna be efficient. We want to ensure that we have a speed to market, as Caroline has talked about, in terms of new product innovation, but also our existing solutions. Across the breadth of our categories, we've recently engaged in a series of product lineups just to look and reevaluate the strength of each of our product SKUs in each of those category areas. Which ones are or are not performing? Where have we got gaps from a category lens, not just from a customer lens? Where do our brands actually have a unique place to play in some of those ranges, and where can we accelerate more because we can see some gaps coming?
The pieces of work around that are so that we can ensure that we're going to markets with propositions that have a brand that's authentic, that we have the products and services and solutions that are not just aesthetically nice, but they actually deliver the value proposition that somebody wants, and that we do so respecting the journeys that people will go through, that, be that through physical touch points and/or digital touch points, as Alex will go through shortly. The various touch points as is relevant for each of those different types of customer types. That segues very well into our engaging channel experiences. Every customer experience that you have, in essence, you'll want to be easy and engaging in a way that's relevant for you.
Across our footprint, we have a physical footprint with our Caroma on Collins flagship location, and that flagship location is used for educative purposes to provide CPD points for architects and designers. It's used as a place for other types of events, but it's also an opportunity for us to get our new products to market and have commercial customers, care customers, and consumers walk through and interact physically with our products. Customers can engage in specifications, get an understanding of what works in their spaces as well. We have our Caroma on Collins and also a Caroma on Parade location in South Australia. Across our footprint, we will have different types of physical footprint requirements that are relevant to that local market area. Some will tailor for builders, as our Caroma on Parade is particularly prominent with our builder locations.
In Brisbane, we have just refurbished our Brisbane Design Center in the Brisbane Building and Design Center. We need to be relevant in each of those local geographies to target those different types of customer sites in ways that physically are appropriate for them. We will be talking around some of the investment plans in that footprint as well. In addition to the physical side of our experience, we're also our digital customer interactions. We've just recently launched our virtual showroom tour, so you can now go onto our websites and actually walk through virtually our showrooms and see our products in that space. There are other tools that we've invested in terms of the digital experience to help tailor for that diverse tapestry of types of customers that we have.
Whether they're at a stage of just researching or whether they're actually trying to compare or whether they're now at that point of choice, we are actually engaging in the different types of engagement experiences across our channels, be it physical or digital, as is relevant for them. With those two, the third one then talks about data. Frankly, nothing works well unless you have quality data. For us, that means that we have to have it correct, complete, and have it connected in meaningful ways. Some of our customer channels, for instance, want to be able to extract information and ensure that they're replicating the correct information in their environments. We have to be ensured that we've got the right information, and it's enabled for the different types of uses, for the different types of customers that we have.
There's a piece of work underway at the moment to clean and enrich right across our product information, ensure that we've got what is needed as a mandatory environment, but also the types of fields that will help you experience that product virtually as best as possible. Craig had mentioned the plumbers hub, and I know Alex will cover off a little bit more around some of the experiences that this quality of information then brings to life in those domains. The final one there is around data as a service. As we know, the nature of what we provide as an organization in terms of our quality of experience, we have augmented reality. We have fantastic tools available.
This then enables us to not only supply services and solutions to a consumer or to a plumber, but to support our channels in other and valued ways. With those three focus areas, how do we know that we're gonna be successful? There's been a lot of work delivered across each of those, as you can see to date, but we're introducing a couple of new metrics, but some very targeted metrics to help ensure that we're on track. Firstly, brand equity monitoring. A lot of companies track just brand awareness. We have awareness, but what do our brands mean? The brand equity measure enables us to look at the saliency of our brands. Are we actually hitting home with the value propositions that are meaningful?
That's a new measure that we'll be introducing just to ensure that we can track that we're hitting the mark as is relevant to our customer base. Most companies will talk about net promoter score. For us, our net promoter score is not just a ubiquitous measure, it's something we have to target and ensure that we're actually making those moments that matter in the market spaces that we're targeting. Two core areas that we will be going deeper, not wider with, is certainly in our merchant space and also in our plumber space. Again, just to ensure that we're hitting the mark and we are on track. A lot to be done in our world of customer experience to ensure that every touch point for our relevant and very complex tapestry of customers is cemented.
with that, I'm now going to hand over to Alex Larson, so he can walk a little bit more around some of the digital experience and the tools that we're enabling. Thank you.
Good morning. Can everybody hear me okay? No problems. Well, today I'm here to talk to you about the digital area of our strategy and really what that entails. We're all turning to digital as a new channel of accessing products and services simply because it's more efficient, more convenient, and more personal for our customers. Our digital journey here at GWA is to underpin our strategic intent, primarily win the plumber, deliver great customer experience, and our aligned organization. The road ahead for GWA consists of taking a strong position in the digital channels.
Most of our competition at the moment is focused on e-commerce engagements, but as you heard from Craig earlier, one of our major sales channels to market are our plumbers, which is why we're pursuing what we believe to be a winning strategy with our plumbers, our merchants, our architects, mixed with consumer reach and brand awareness that you just heard from Melissa. Digital for GWA is both internal and externally facing. From our ERP, CRM, and warehouse improvements through to digital tools for consumers, plumbers, and the commercial sector. Investment into digital opportunities delivers superior customer experience, spanning multiple experiences across the bathroom, kitchen, and laundry. These include things like visualization. The more realistic the reality, the greater the personal experience.
This is why we want to engage with more personal experiences with our customers in the comfort of their own home, creating a brand position and stronger relationship with our consumers directly. GWA also wants to branch out from its core to create experiences that matter. Whether we're building, renovating, we currently constitute only a portion of the entire base, or process, of the products that we provide. We want to harness digital and data to partner with our partner capabilities to make that whole experience a convenient one. We also want to connect with our plumbers to harness deeper industry connections using our digital tools to make the work environment more accessible, connected, and convenient. FY 2022 established a foundational build of our digital capability at GWA.
We introduced things like augmented reality, virtual reality, and reality planners, where we can provide engagements with our products in the convenience of your own home, with the ability to overlay our products on your existing ones through the window of your device. We've also introduced, as you just heard from Mel, virtual walkthroughs of flagship experience centers with the ability to interact with our products. We wanna create greater customer reach with the ability to reach customers far beyond those who are able to physically visit our flagship stores or shops to access those products through our digital channels. In FY 2022, GWA transitioned its ANZ, ERP, CRM, warehousing, and marketing systems, all helping to improve internal efficiency with automation of internal processes and speeding up order-to-cash touchpoints for our consumers.
We enhance customer experiences by improving those customer touchpoints with more accurate data and information availability. We're trying to build resilience around all of our data with stronger data continuity and data leverage for greater insights, decision-making, and productivity gains. The road ahead for FY 2023 continues to grow these digital offerings, as well as introduce a few new ones. We plan to look to capitalize on our current investments in building on our traffic growth, plumber engagements, and increasing our customer satisfaction. You would have heard from Craig earlier, mention how Win the Plumber creates a more convenient experience for our plumbers and saves time and cost for our consumers.
One of the offerings that we're planning to bring to market through FY 2023 includes our plumbers hub, harnessing digital tools for our plumbers to provide seamless offerings across things like up-to-date information, diagnostics, stock availability, spare parts, product recognition, loyalty programs, and faster support to technical services. These are all part of our superior services and solutions that we hope to bring. You'll see on the walls actually on your left-hand side a number of examples of the tools that we bring to market. You can scan those with your phone, those QR codes, and play for yourself. If you'd like a demo, come see me in the break. More than happy to take you through that. I encourage you to explore it, engage with it. Better yet, take it home. Have a play.
Overlay on your current bathroom using those devices and see just how much better our products look. I look forward to sharing with you new features and functionality as we go through FY 2023, so please keep an eye out. With that, I will hand over to Ernie, who will be taking you through a bit of a deeper dive on our ESG aspirations. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Alex. I'm Ernie Lagis, GWA's Company Secretary and General Counsel. GWA has a rich history in helping its employees, customers, communities, and partners improve their ESG impact, and we know that to be future-focused and successful, we've got to continually improve in that regard. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that ESG is a foundational pillar of our corporate strategy. Our ESG agenda is focused on two primary objectives. The first one there is to operate our business in a sustainable manner by using our resources as efficiently as possible and also acting in a socially responsible manner. Our second objective is to provide leading-edge sustainable water solutions to help contribute to a sustainable environment. What does that mean on the ground at GWA day to day?
Well, that ESG focus always starts with our people, and we heard from Urs at the beginning of today that we've seen a sustained reduction in our time injury frequency rate. Well, in addition to that, I can also report that for the third consecutive year, GWA's medically treated injury frequency rate has been 0. Our continued implementation of preventative measures, whether they be hazard reduction, toolbox talks, root cause analysis, has led to a real sustainable improvement in our work health and safety focus. On the environmental side, while GWA is a low emissions intensity entity because our business activities, comparatively speaking, are less carbon intensive than other sectors, we're nevertheless committed to making positive environmental change and meeting the expectations of our stakeholders.
There's a number of environmental measures that we look at and analyze year to year, but I did wanna call out two particular wins that we had over the last financial year. The first was in relation to our water consumption. Last financial year, we had a staggering 43% reduction in water usage. While some of that reduction can be attributed to the exit from in-house manufacturing and the COVID lockdowns, when we analyzed the numbers, we saw that a significant reduction was driven by the water saving measures that we've implemented. A number of our sites have water recycling and water harvesting systems. And we've also installed the Caroma Smart Command system across the majority of our Australian-controlled sites, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later.
In relation to carbon emissions, we continue to actively identify energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction opportunities. For example, here at our Prestons facility, we have a 250 kW solar panel system. At our next largest distribution center in Pinkenba, we have a 100 kW system. Now, what does that mean? Well, last financial year, those systems collectively contributed to the saving of 340 tons in CO2 emissions. That's 37,000 tree seedlings grown for ten years, the carbon sequestered from those trees. Those initiatives saw a 19% reduction last financial year in our carbon emissions. Now, you'll recall earlier, that I said that our second objective was all about providing leading-edge products that help contribute to a sustainable environment.
The supply and heating of water, as well as the subsequent treatment of wastewater that we produce, is carbon intensive and has significant impacts on the environment. Our belief is that every effort should be made to reduce water usage through water-efficient fixtures. In that regard, our unique product portfolio can help the economy transition to a low carbon economy. Urs mentioned at the beginning that in 1980 we developed the dual flush toilet system. That's a system that's continued to be used today, and on average, it helps each household save around 32,000 kiloliters of water. Sorry, 32,000 liters of water. Since then, we've elevated water efficiency to business as usual. 87% of Caroma's taps are 5- or 6-star WELS rated, and 95% of Caroma's sanitary ware is 4-star WELS rated.
One of our more recent product innovations, the Caroma Smart Command, continues with that theme. Caroma Smart Command is a range of intelligent tapware, showers, urinals, toilets, and eco valves, which help building owners control water usage and monitor water usage in near real time. What does that mean in reality? One of our most recent installations was at the Market Lane office building in South Melbourne, a relatively low-rise commercial building of just 5 levels. There in our analysis of the system that's been installed to date, we can see that the system is projected to save 487 kiloliters of water annually when compared to regular bathroom fixtures. To put that in another lens, that can contribute to 67% of a NABERS half-star improvement or a reduction in 433 kg of carbon impact.
While everybody at GWA is proud of these achievements, there is more to be done. On this next slide, I've set out some of the future priorities over the coming 12 months. I don't propose to cover those in any great detail other than the first one there, which is to have an effective ESG framework and governance structure. We don't believe that ESG should be squirreled away into a separate business unit, or that reporting on an annual basis is good enough. Our goal is to integrate ESG into our everyday operations and decision-making, and we think that having an effective framework and governance structure will enable us to do that.
The framework and governance structure will start a long-term process of ensuring that there's regular engagement with our stakeholders, that we're properly planning and successfully executing our ESG initiatives, and that we're continually reviewing those initiatives and responding to emerging ESG issues. That's all I wanted to say for now about ESG. I will note that our sustainability report is being released this coming Friday. If you would like to learn more about what I've spoken about or about any of the other initiatives, please do download a copy this Friday. I'll now pass over to my colleague, Patricia Oliver.
Morning, everyone. My name is Patricia Oliver. I'm the GM of People and Performance. I'm gonna be taking you through our foundation pillar, Aligned Organization. Aligned Organization is the pillar that's focused on enabling the delivery of the pillars that we've just heard about from the team. It's the how we plan to go about aligning the organization culturally to set the strategy up for success. We all know that culture eats strategy for breakfast. The initiatives under this pillar are all underpinned by the premise that the best laid plans can only succeed if we've got with the right people, the right skills, and the right performance in the organization.
Aligning our organizational development strategies which are either in place or in progress, ensures that we can attract, retain, and develop the right people to deliver on our strategy. On a more granular level, Aligned Organization is really around having the right people in the right roles, doing the right work with the right skills to deliver the right outcomes. In terms of how we're approaching this cultural alignment piece, we're focusing on four key enablers, structure, systems, skills, and what we call shared values. Let's drop that. Firstly, in relation to structure, the focus here is on alignment. We needed to ensure we had the appropriate resources positioned in the right place, and that these resources had the right level of autonomy and accountability to drive results.
We've identified where these resources were needed, and we've put some of our best people on the biggest opportunities. We've also committed to investing in additional resources and have secured a number of external hires to support the larger pieces of work. For example, Win the Plumber with the hire of some new plumbing specialists to drive our technical offering. Secondly, from a systems perspective, this is all about continuing to extract efficiencies from our recently implemented ERP CRM system, Akuna. We've introduced a continuous improvement discipline to enable us to adapt and adopt quickly to new ways of working to meet our customer needs. Since go live, we've already achieved new levels of efficiency across order-to-cash processes and some of our customer relationship management processes as well. Thirdly, we're focusing heavily on skill and capability build.
The focus on skill is in recognition that with a shift in strategy comes a shift in the types of skills required to deliver that strategy. We've recently deployed a comprehensive learning and development plan with a focus on sales, functional, technical, and leadership skills development. From a talent management perspective, we have in place a disciplined rhythm in relation to talent identification and succession planning. This has allowed us to identify and address any talent or skill gaps, current or imminent, around our critical areas, including technical, digital, innovation, and leadership. This leadership space is really where we've got the greatest ability to impact the culture because we know that leaders set the tone of an organization.
We've started to deploy a suite of leadership development programs at all levels of our organization, frontline and senior, to build confident and competent leaders for today and for tomorrow who can lead in this new world of work. Finally, our fourth area of focus is in relation to what we're calling shared values. We know that in a highly competitive labor market, a compelling employee value proposition makes the difference in attracting and retaining talent, and we've kicked off a piece of work to differentiate our value proposition in the market. We're currently running discovery workshops with our people to unpack what matters, knowing that there's been a notable shift in relation to people's work life priorities and expectations post-pandemic, and we wanna make sure that our offering meets those expectations and priorities.
One of the things that makes GWA special is our deeply ingrained values and our that we refer to as our cultural pillars. We care for each other, we are one team, and we're customer-focused. Our cultural pillars are deeply entrenched in the organization. Our people are particularly passionate and personally attached to them, and we wanna leverage this competitive advantage to drive performance. We've embarked on a piece of work in regards to those cultural pillars to ensure that the values and behaviors that we promote support a high-performance culture focused on collaboration, accountability, and the customer. From a reward and recognition perspective, what gets measured gets managed, as we all know. As part of our FY 2023 goal-setting rhythms, we've ensured our people at all levels of the organization have goals set that are directly related to delivering parts of the strategy.
Lastly, we're refreshing our annual rewards program to align the focus of rewards to key parts of our strategy, and we'll continue to celebrate these achievements internally but publicly to ensure that we're driving momentum. We're confident that with these organizational development initiatives that are either in place or in progress, that we'll continue to attract, retain, and develop the right people to deliver our strategy. Thank you. I'll throw to Calin Scott, our CFO.
Thanks, Pat. Almost there, and then we'll get on to the more exciting part of the morning, the tour around the warehouse. We remain in a strong financial position and maintain financial flexibility for investment in both organic and inorganic opportunities. While our leverage in FY 2022 did trend upwards and net debt trended upwards, you may recall from our full year presentation that this was primarily due to three main factors. Firstly, our proactive build of safety stock in our faster moving category A SKUs, timing of debtor receipts as a result of the ERP implementation in June, and the impact of one-off significant items on cash flows for the year. Notwithstanding these, our leverage remained within target levels, and we expect this to trend downwards in FY 2023.
In terms of interest rate exposure, we have several interest rate swaps in place that mature between October 2023 and April 2026. Our effective interest rate for FY 2022 was 3.1%, and despite rapidly rising interest rates, we expect to maintain this profile for FY 2023. We're currently in the process of extending our AUD 40 million bilateral facility that matures next month and are looking at various options for extending our 3-year AUD 180 million facility that matures in November 2024. We maintain a high level of interest expense coverage. Moving on to the next slide. This slide sets out our capital management strategy, which supports growth initiatives and drives shareholder returns.
In relation to investment and growth, you would have heard previously we are actively engaged in several organic growth initiatives across our various pillars, and our capital allocation policy is designed to fund these activities on an earn to invest basis. This strikes a balance between returns to shareholders and retaining funds for growth in the business and ensures that we remain focused on those activities that drive growth. With regards to shareholder returns, while cost management and mitigation strategies will always be a focus, we are confident that our strategy will deliver top-line revenue growth. With the strong operating leverage that we have in the business, that top-line revenue growth will translate into both EBIT dollar and EBIT margin growth. This will drive our target of 5%-10% compound annual growth rate in earnings per share for FY 2023-2025.
GWA is a highly cash generative business, and through disciplined cash management, we are targeting cash conversion of EBITDA to cash flow from operations of 80%-85%. This conversion will support the deleveraging of the business, providing returns to shareholders in the form of dividends and funding growth initiatives. In looking at funding capacity and leverage, we have sufficient headroom in our existing facilities to fund investment in organic opportunities with headroom of approximately AUD 80 million at the 13th of June. Should an inorganic opportunity arise, we will look at the most appropriate form of funding at that time. We believe the leverage target of 1-2 times is appropriate given the risk appetite and profile of the business.
In relation to capital expenditure, with our exit from manufacturing, apart from some discrete component manufacturing in New Zealand, our capital expenditure requirements are largely directed at new product development and those initiatives that fund growth for revenue. While our ongoing capital expenditure is expected to be between AUD 6 million and AUD 8 million, I did flag in the full year presentation that our FY 2023 spend will be in the region of up to AUD 11 million. This additional capital is allocated to our experience centers in Western Australia and Victoria. It also includes an investment in digital initiatives and the plumbers' hub. Finally, with respect to dividends, the board remains committed to providing strong returns to shareholders with a dividend pay-out policy of 65%-85% of net profit after tax, subject to prevailing market conditions.
We believe this policy strikes the right balance between retaining profits in the business and providing returns to shareholders. I'll now hand back to Urs for closing remarks and Q&A.
Thanks, Calin. Thank you very much to all of the presenters this morning. I hope you were able to demonstrate to us, to you that we have a clear and focused strategy. Each of the pillar is owned by one of the executives. We believe that we have specific plans in place to grow our revenue, and clearly what we're doing is supported by a strong financial balance sheet. With this, I hand over to Q&A before we go onto our tour.
Any questions? Just raise your hand or use the microphone next to you.
Morning. Thanks for taking the question. I might just start off with a query on that EPS target that you spoke about at the end there. You mentioned the top line element of that target. Do you expect that to be more price or volume driven?
Ultimately, probably a combination. Really our plans will focus on the volume growth business. I think we mentioned at the year-end presentation that we usually pass on price increases, and we've done that in the last two years very successfully to offset some of the input increases. For us to be successful, we will focus on volume growth.
Right. In that volume growth projection, do you have, I guess, an anticipation of what you hope to beat the market by, expressed as like a percentage in terms of volume growth against the PCP?
Good question. I'm not gonna commit to a target because a number of you gonna write it down, and then you question me on it six months' basis.
Yeah. Fair. Okay. I might just ask another on the new product component. You know, talking about the new products that are in the pipeline, do you anticipate that will be through a new brand or a completely new channel, or are these new products more building on the existing channels that GWA is working through, you know, in its current product suite?
The key focus will be on our existing brands, and I think Melissa talked about some of our strong brands, Caroma, Methven, in our existing channels.
Okay. Just one more if I may. On the spare parts business, so quite an exciting opportunity.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Do you have, I guess, you know, an expected timing of when that might be, you know, converted into top line growth?
Look, we already do some business within the spare parts. It's relatively small, and we would expect that we will see a steady increase and improvement over coming years.
Okay. Is there a TAM for, you know, that space that you have in mind and, you know, a potential sort of market share that you have as an objective?
Market share. Now what we see as an opportunity, we would see the spare parts opportunity being in excess of AUD 50 million.
Okay. Great. Thanks. I'll pass it on. Thank you.
Thank you. Keith, I would have been disappointed.
Also I might revisit one of those questions on the EPS target, if that's okay. Are you relying on market growth to deliver you top line going forward? Is that part of the equation? I mean, obviously, those charts are all pointing north apart from R&R, but is there an element of reliance on growth, or do you think you can deliver revenue growth without the help of the market?
Look, the market is always very helpful as the market goes. I do believe with some of the specific initiatives, we should be able to outgrow the market in regard to volume.
On the cost side of things, in that 5%-10% EPS growth range, are you relying on cost out, or will that be an added benefit?
Two things. I think, as Calin said, cost management is always a key focus for us, and especially Caroline in her area continuously look at how can we source more cost-effective products. As you know, we have quite a good leverage business. As we get volume growth, we see a lot of the volume growth translating down to the bottom line.
Okay. Just a question on the vitality index. You know, we live in a world of fast fashion, and everyone wants the latest trends, and trends change really quickly. The vitality index north of 10%, and you'll have to excuse my ignorance on this, but it seems low to me in the world that we live in. Can you help us understand where your vitality index currently sits, within your product suite, and how far north of 10% or how realistic north of 10% is? Just to help us gauge what is realistic.
All right. Let me first put it into perspective. We are not a fast-moving consumer goods company. If you look at the bathroom, the average consumer renovates the bathrooms every 8-12 years. Bringing out a new product every month doesn't really suit our business model. In regard to the vitality index, where we are at the moment, you want to answer that, Caroline?
Sure. We're sitting at about 7% at the moment for FY 2022.
Come again.
We're sitting at about 7% at the moment for FY 2022.
How hard is that to push it above 10%? Like, how hard I don't know how you can characterize it, but yeah, just to push it from 7%-10%, like, what's the level of work that's required to do that?
With what we have in the pipeline at the moment, it's very realistic for us to go above 10%, quite comfortably. I think what we need to remember about the vitality index is any new products only stays there for two years. After two years, it drops into our new, like, our BAU products. With that, where we see why, you know, like, I think between the or 10, how far north that we're looking at. As we said, like, you know, part of our business would be, like, you know, we want to grow the spare part market as well. We do have a lot of products that we have currently in our portfolio that are performing really well.
The last thing we want is try to grab like the next big thing and actually neglect our core portfolio, which is currently in the replacement market. It's a highly profitable market. We're trying to strike a balance between the two.
Okay.
Let me just give you a different perspective. When I first sort of introduced GWA, we provide products and solutions across about 6-7 different categories. In the old days, when we had a more a manufacturing focus, we tried to develop products in each of the categories. We have some 6,500 products. We can't do that. The new strategy, what we said is, what we are very clear is we will focus on our core expertise, being the water efficiencies and the shower technology. In between, we work closely with our supply partners and be able therefore to bring products much faster to market than what we have done before. We don't need to invent every single new product. Some of the products we will bring in directly from suppliers.
Some of the products, such as, like, the new technology sanitaryware, some of the new technology shower technology, we develop ourselves. That will be a fundamental change as we go forward.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thanks, Martin. Just on overhead costs, could you give us a bit of a sense of how closely or how carefully you're needing to balance this extension, I guess, or broadening of your organizational capability, people strategies, et cetera. There's obviously some incremental investment you're making from an OpEx perspective. How comfortable you are around being able to maintain that investment in a potentially softer market environment, or do you not see that being a constraint to still delivering some of the margin improvement expectations that you have?
A good question in regard to overhead. I'm glad you're asking me and not our marketing director, because I'm sure she would have quite a different view to me. First of all, yes, I think we mentioned in Craig, in Win the Plumber and also Pat, we absolutely have invested and invest some more in regard to our plumber specialists. To really deliver technical service, we need to have plumbing expertise ourselves. The one thing we've also mentioned, particularly in the year-end presentation, we need to invest some more in advertising and promotions. You would have. You remember it was quite low during financial 2022. That was really because we sort of regrouped and wanted to understand our brands. Overall, our approach to operating expenses is earn to invest.
We will earn the money before we invest and spend it.
Just back on the overall market outlook.
Yep.
Within that three-year target, are you assuming basically that we're looking at a flat market over those three years on average? Just trying to understand that.
Look, probably in some of the segments, we have a bit of a combination, so flat. In general, we see a small slight improvement over the next 3-4 years.
Okay, thanks. Just on slide 13, in terms of the market advice decision of purchasing players there. I guess one thing that is missing, perhaps, in terms of that advice is maybe merchants like, you know, you or I might go into a Reece, for example, and, you know, they're obviously gonna try and talk us into perhaps their private label offering as opposed to a Caroma solution. How do you balance that, you know, that merchant role within that, you know, that tree?
Look, number one, the merchant channel for us is important because we have a fantastic relationship with our merchants that provides us a great distribution network, which we don't have ourselves. Yes, as a matter of fact, some of our merchants are our biggest customers, but also our biggest competitors. I think that's a combination. First of all, the way we service the merchants, but then where we strongly believe is the more we focus on the pull and provide informed information to the consumer in the early journey. When you walk into Reece, you are better informed.
If we get to a point where we can help you furnish your bathroom with the different collections by the time you get to Reece, it will be harder for someone like a merchant to switch you out in one of the products because you like the collection, it fits together, and you understand the quality. Some of that historically has been missing.
Okay. Thank you.
Urs, I'm probably going back a few years ago, but the company always struggled with DIFOT, and you mentioned NPS. Do you have a sense of where you are now when it comes to that particular metric?
To be honest, not where we should be. I think Melissa mentioned in the customer experience, there's clearly some work to be done. To be honest, we've had some inconsistent measures in regard to NPS. The new ERP implementation will help us actually establish a solid baseline then to work on, but we need to improve on that one.
DIFOT?
The same thing. We're getting better. We've had. I think we mentioned at the August briefing, especially with the implementation of the ERP, we saw some supply disruptions, but pleasing to see, we've seen steady improvements going forward.
You've got a big footprint out there already, as you described. Have you ever looked at agency or thought about agency, or would that just fray the focus too much?
When you talk about agencies, what are you referring to?
Taking other people's brands, overseas brands.
Look, we are open to everything. I do think when we talk about the year-end, we had the discussion, one of the fundamental shifts in our culture is we will move our culture from a manufacturing-based approach to more of an import and distribution opportunity. We're not gonna become an agent for an overseas product if it directly competes with one of our main brands.
Thank you.
Thank you. Hi.
Could you give a little bit of color as to what you refer to on slide 47 as strategic inorganic growth opportunities? Just combining that question, you said that you have headroom of AUD 80 million. How much would you envisage drawing down to achieve that inorganic growth opportunities?
Okay. Thanks for that question. If you look at our growth pillars, there's four. We talked to you about three, win the plumber, aftermarket, and innovations for design partnership. The fourth growth pillar for us is strategic growth opportunity, and I think we sort of made comments in the past. We're always on the lookout. Are there specific technology which will enhance our product or service offerings? Are there specific technology which we've determined will be cheaper to buy than to develop ourselves? Or are there specific strategic geographic areas where we would like to expand, where we will consider inorganic growth like an acquisition. How we would fund that would depend very much on the opportunity.
Oh, yeah. Thanks for this. Just on the slide 27, the comment around under indexing and your rightful share in R&R. I'd be keen to understand why you think that's been the case historically, and whether that's low-hanging fruit, and how quickly you think you can over-index or get to your market weight.
Let me hand over to the person who's in charge of sales. That gives me an opportunity to form his KPIs at the same time. Put my neck on the line rather than someone else's. It's a good question. I think, I referenced. Geez, that bright light. Light's bright, isn't it? I referenced the Methven acquisition for the same reason. This business has been incredibly strong in share. It's been, you know, great cash flow, great profit. That's been built on sanitary. You'll see it out here. It's an incredible sanitary expertise like, you know, dual flush toilets, like clean, you know, rimless toilet. Everything being developed in a toilet suite or a urinal. In a lot of cases, for quite a number of years, basins has been led by Dr. Steve, who you'll meet, and the Caroma brand.
That stuff doesn't break very often, so I suppose our participation in the replacement, in breakage or refurbishment, a lot of things will be replaced in terms of, like, tapware, accessories, showers, et cetera. We hadn't been exposed to that for a long time. We've caught up on that now, I suppose, in participation or a relevant offer through Methven, and you'll see that through Caroma now going from a strong sanitary offer to a bathroom offer. You see that in the results behind FY 2022's outcomes, collections and us growing significantly higher in tap and shower sort of play a role. I think the completeness of our product offer will lead to different types of replacement over time. But that's ahead of us rather than behind us.
The other one is that, you know, a lot of you'll meet one of Rob's plumbers with Dr. Steve today, who leads a big commercial new build business in terms of plumbing for us. We've been a bit like that, as a lot of our success looks like here. We wanna come in, make a huge difference to the customer, the asset owner, and then we'll move on to the next new build. The business has never really been as focused on the replacement maintenance needs and also renovation. When you think about the narrowness of plumber, there's an example. When you think about the product offer, there's an example. I think there's significant headroom. Urs talked about it. We've seen at least AUD 50 million plus just spares alone. Is it low-hanging fruit?
I think it's incredibly, you know, opportunistic for us to access 'cause we've got the footprint out there, we've got the customer connection, but it'll be slow and steady. A bit like Keith's question on NPD. Nothing changes quickly. The lead times here are long and habits change slowly. There's significant upside, but I think it'll be over the course of the journey to 2025 rather than this almighty spike in volume in the next, say, 12-18 months.
Thanks, Craig.
Yeah. Okay, thanks. You can stand in front of that projector light and I can interrogate you properly if you want.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Maybe that's in 12 months time.
Just one more if I can. You gave some guidance around EPS and you spoke to, I think, EBITDA dollar and percentage expansion. Is there a margin target that you've got in mind, and are you happy to share that?
Well, I think we said before. First of all, if you look at our business, sanitaryware probably attracts the highest margins. Clearly sanitaryware is quite important for our ceiling business. If you look at our ceiling business, we always said our target is to get to an EBIT margin closer to 20%.
Okay, great. That's it for me. Thanks.
Any more questions?
Might just sneak one or two more in, if I may.
Sure.
Just on the plumbers network.
Yeah.
If that's okay. If you could just potentially provide a bit of a steer in terms of how we should think about the expansion of that network and what that means for top line growth going forward. You know, FY 2022, 4,500- 10,000 increase in that network. Now we're talking, you know, a 25,000 target. Is there some sort of a lag in terms of timing that we should consider between, you know, the expansion of that network and more dollars in the top line? And yeah, what would that lag be?
Let me refer back to Craig, the sponsor of Win the Plumber. I'm not gonna go this side this time, so I'll go the other side.
I think the honest answer on lags, yes. Like, this isn't sort of pioneering for us. We've certainly got track record through those larger commercial plumbers that we can extrapolate a view on. We know how many others are out there, and we're well advanced on classifying in terms of the types of projects they work on, the type of needs they have, the volume attached to it, and how we probably segment that need and classify based on grade. We've also got. Caroline talked about the supplier base, so we've got a couple of.
The agency question, I suppose, in terms of we have got some really close relationships with some, I suppose, overseas brands who manufacture for us, in terms of our needs here. A lot of them are their pull is all about installer and plumber through sort of European sort of markets, so we better learn from them. We think it's a significant volume opportunity. They're not all as large. Like, you'll meet Rob later on. You know, it's common for him to spend AUD 1 million, AUD 1.2 million dollars on a major hospital or a major project. Obviously, a lot of our referenced guy we're working with here that does installations, renovations in homes. That's smaller. We think it is the extrapolation from 5- 10- 25,000 + is real.
Probably not. It's not a straight line in terms of they are not all the same scale, but there will. We're conscious there'll be a lead time to it. Like habits, I talked about training. Habits in trades are incredibly hard to change, but certainly when you get them, they are incredibly loyal. We know we can convert, but there's very much a lag that's not measured in months. It's probably measured more closer in a 12- to 18-month lag from when we start to engage, you prove your expertise as a technical partner. They come to you enough times when they need. The trust is then built, and then volume comes afterwards.
Right. Okay. That's helpful. Just one more. Just on the network, you know, the universe out there, are the residual with, you know, competitors of yours? Are you needing to win them off your competitors, or can they come into your network and they're, you know, just sitting there, without sort of any attachment to another name right now?
That's a good question. There's probably two things. Like, I mean, there was a question around Reece or an incredibly formidable customer service machine. They do a really good job beyond the, I suppose, technical partnership that we focus on. We think that that's complementary rather than a competition, and that's dialogue we're sort of involved there. On the other brands, it tends to be there's probably two types. There's some that focus in a specific area, like, focused on healthcare or aged care, or you have some that are focused on sort of, I suppose, correctional facilities and the like. Certainly their offer is a solid, strong offer.
There's a job to do there for not only the quality and the superiority of the products that you'll see out here, but also how we collaborate and innovate, in a form far more formidable way than they do. There's a job for us to raise the bar on how we spoil that plumber relative to what they're doing now. There are a whole host, like the gentleman I spoke about, that spends two hours of homework he can't charge for. There's a whole host that’s an unmet need at the moment in this part of the world. That is less about the challenge of conversion. It's where things like investment in people on the street, investment in call centers, and investment in digital is more, how do I get to as many of them as possible?
Okay, great. That's helpful. Cheers.
Any last questions? Getting off lightly, yes.
All right. Now we come to the fun part. We got 15 minutes.
It says like 10. Can we do 10?
Ten.
10. All right. 10 minutes. Refresh bathrooms if you want to have a bite to eat. Would you please all get a safety vest? They're lined up there. When you came in, you probably saw that you got a number, 1- 3. To make sure you have the best exposure to what we're gonna show you, we break you up into three groups. Number 1 will come with me, number 2 will be with Caroline, and number 3 with Craig. We ask you now, please do not take any pictures as we go through the site. There are certain products which are in development which are not yet in the market, and I really don't want to see them first on social media before we go and talk to our merchant partners.
10 minutes, and then we regroup into our groups and go for a little wander. Thank you.
Toilet is just on the other side.