Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's full year FY 2024 results call for Helloworld Travel. My name is Sam Wells from NWR, and I'm pleased to have joining me today, Helloworld's Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Andrew Burnes, AO, as well as Chief Financial Officer, Mike Smith. Both Andrew and Mike will spend some time reviewing the results released to the ASX this morning. I'll pass it over to you, Andrew.
Thanks very much, Sam. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for those of you who joined us this morning, and we are live from Melbourne. I am pleased to present and just to talk briefly. I know everyone's flat out with various results coming out all over the place, so we'll keep it short and brief this morning. But I'm very pleased that we've now released our FY 2024 results. I think they were quite solid. We're quite pleased with them and continues to show our focus on cost, our focus on growing our revenues as well, and our ability to generate cash. And they'd be the three main points I take from these accounts today.
I'm sure if you've had the opportunity to read the announcement, you will have seen we obviously made an underlying EBITDA of AUD 67.5 million. Our guidance was AUD 64 million-AUD 72 million, so we came in there just a slight tad under the midpoint of 68. That's up 52.9% on the prior year, and our TTV was up 62.5%. Bit of a margin decline for us, and that's mainly because of the lower margins that ETG has operated at and operates at, and it's pulled our overall margin down. That was no surprise to us, but just to explain that. AUD 0.192 per share, our basic earnings. That's an increase of 54% on the prior year, so that's getting back there and improving.
I beg your pardon, and we've declared a final dividend of AUD 0.06 per share, takes our total dividends for the year to AUD 0.11. I've previously said in a number of presentations, and we have disclosed that our franking credits, we haven't got a huge amount of franking credits left, so we've used them up in declaring that AUD 0.06 a share. It's a fully franked dividend, and it takes our full year dividend to AUD 0.11 a share. So I think that's representing a dividend, a yield of about 4.9%, based on our last closing price from yesterday.
which I think is a good outcome for investors, and we will, obviously, be looking to utilize the franking credits that we get from a not insignificant amount of tax that we're paying on our FY 2024 profitability. We'll be paying that tax in the next month or two, and that will significantly top up or bolster our franking credit balance there. Good news, all geographic segments were profitable. Australia, New Zealand and Fiji have gone well for us. Our trucking business was profitable, not as profitable as the prior year. I've explained that in the past, but just to touch on that again, that was caused largely by setting aside a lot of equipment to run a particular program that was booked with us, and that program canceled.
And consequently, most of that equipment sat in the yard for the three or four weeks that that program was meant to be running. Really did hurt our results in the first half of that trucking business, but in any event, we've come out with a reasonable small profit, but expect things to improve significantly in FY 2025 in that business. I want to highlight our total agency and broker numbers. They're now totaling just over 2,700. We've provided here a delineation of those. Sorry, I take that back. We have 530 franchisee members in various franchise brands, Helloworld, Magellan, Alas, et cetera.
We have 1,500 agencies in buying groups, as part of the Helloworld and ETG businesses, and we have 650 members of our broker businesses in Australia and New Zealand, so they now total over 2,700, so that's unquestionably the biggest network of agencies and brokers in Australia and New Zealand. Our balance sheet is very strong, continues to remain strong. We continue to hold 1.4 million CTM shares, and I won't comment about what we think about that. I think that's everyone's got their own views about that, but we still hold 1.4 million of them.
And, it's not our intention to keep hanging on to them forever and ever, but I think, if we do, ultimately, the pricing of that particular stock should improve, and we'll be looking to exit that at over time in an orderly fashion. So, that's what's happening in that regard. We've got there, set out on page two of our presentation, all of the results. I won't go through that in any detail. It's all pretty clear for you. And, I think the important thing, as I indicated earlier, liquidity and funding. We held cash of AUD 162 million. It's about the same as the previous year.
We don't have any bank debt, and we generated 63.5 million of operating cash in the full year, so that was quite strong. We also paid for the ETG acquisition throughout the financial year, and that was settled mainly with cash, but there were also some Helloworld shares issued as a result of that. The final point I'll make is in relation to outlook. We've got a small paragraph on that. Numbers are, you know, returning. Everyone keeps benchmarking against 2019, but I think we're just about ready to move on from that. But with that in mind, we're still benchmarking some FY24 numbers against where we were at in 2019. Outbound, inbound, coming back to similar levels.
We're going to wait another couple of months until we put our guidance out to the marketplace until we've seen what the September quarter actually looks like. There's a lot of geopolitical disturbances out there at the minute. I think that we'd like to see a bit more resolution around those particularly in the Middle East as well as in Europe and throughout with what's going on in the Ukraine, et cetera. Those sorts of things certainly have the potential to impact our business negatively. We've seen that before.
Generally, the travel industry recovers from major shocks like those in about 90 days, but we're not suggesting that may happen, but we'd like to get to the end of September before we start coming out and suggesting what we believe our final outcome for FY 2025 will be. So, that's it from me. I'm going to pass over to Mike.
Mm.
to run through some of the accounting outcomes and other things.
Yeah.
Thanks, Andrew.
I'll pass over to you, Mike.
Yeah, as Andrew's already commented, I, you know, I just want to reiterate, you know, we did have very strong cash generation- operating cash flow generation for the year at AUD 63.5 million. And that's a good increase in the second half. For the first half, our operating cash flows were at AUD 12.3 million, and as I said, finished at AUD 63.5 million. And for those that, you know, have been following Helloworld for a while, you know, you would know that generally speaking- well, not generally, the second half is when we generate the majority of our cash, and we saw that happen again this year. Sort of coming more back into line with, you know, the way it kind of all worked pre-COVID.
In terms of the operating cash flows, we benefited again from interest income. For the year it was at just under AUD 6 million, AUD 5.9 million, and we continue to focus on cash management to generate solid returns on that excess cash that we do hold. In terms of the investing cash flows, Andrew has already covered the fact that our biggest outflow from an investing cash flows point of view was around the cash paid for the investments. Express Travel Group, cash outflow of AUD 53.7 million and Phil Hoffmann Travel, cash outflow of AUD 4.4 million. There were shares issued as part of consideration in addition to that cash.
And from a financing cash flows point of view, the major item there is, of course, the dividends that we paid, comprising the AUD 0.06 final dividend for FY 2023, and also the AUD 0.05 interim dividend for FY 2024. Andrew, I don't think there was anything else specifically that I want to cover. I just want to sort of make the point that, you know, the cash flow that we generated during the year was extremely solid.
Thanks. Thanks, Mike. I think the point I'd probably like to just finish on is that we've done some analysis now towards the end of FY 2024 on the number of employees, the number of consultants who are actually working in the-
Mm
.. travel agency networks and buying groups that we have, and they total now over 10,000. So, the brokers, generally, they average about 1.1. Some of the brokers actually have some employees on a part-time or even on a full-time basis, but they average about 1.1. But within our agents, they're averaging between four and six people. Some have quite a lot more, some have just two or three, but all up around Australia and New Zealand, it's just over 10,000 personnel that they have as travel consultants selling travel to Australians and New Zealanders.
We wanted to put some information together around that, and I think that our efforts with the academy, we've now put nearly 400 people through the academy that we set up in last year, and we've got a lot of graduates from that. The vast majority of those who've come in, signed up with an agency to work, signed up to actually do the diploma that you get as a result of this particular course. They have stayed on as full-time employees with our agencies around Australia and New Zealand, so that's been extremely successful, and we'll, as time goes by, continue to result in more and more experienced people in the agencies and selling travel to them. That's going quite well.
In any event, I once again thank you very much for joining us this morning. It's short and sweet. We wish you all the best with the rest of the results and tuning into many of these types of presentations over the next little while. We'll be doing a number of presentations ourselves, and we look forward to seeing you either on the screen or in person in those. Thank you very much.
Thank you. That concludes today's FY24 earnings call for Helloworld Travel. Thank you for joining, and have a great day. Goodbye.