Thanks very much, Sam. Welcome and thank you, everybody, for pulling into Lycopodium's Full-Year Investor Presentation. This morning we'll run you through a little bit about Lycopodium, particularly for those of you that are perhaps new to Lycopodium. We'll give you an overview of the business, hit on the financial highlights, the operational highlights, talk about our forward strategy, and then provide somewhat of an outlook. We'll do that this morning. Firstly, about Lycopodium. We're an engineering and project delivery company that delivers projects globally. We founded here in Perth, Western Australia, in 1992. This is our 33rd year coming up in September. We have over 1,300 staff globally. We're a professional services, white-collar business. We don't directly employ trades and blue-collar. So, 1,300 people are basically engineers, project managers, project delivery personnel, et cetera. Quite a large and significant benchmark of individuals.
We span across, we're a project delivery business. We do everything from the evaluation right the way through to delivery, right the way through to the optimisation. I'll talk a little bit more about that later on. We work across three sectors: rail, resources, mineral resources, rail infrastructure, and industrial processes. Again, a little bit more about all that a little later. As I mentioned, we work across the full project delivery spectrum, from everything from the evaluation, i.e., concept studies, scoping studies, feasibility study work, early, really early work on projects, give us great visibility on projects, on, I guess, onto new business for us down the track.
We then get involved in the process optimisation, coming up with the right process for the exploitation of a particular resource project, the detailed engineering, then the project delivery, project controls, construction management, project management, et cetera, and then into the optimisation. There are parts of our business which address each and every one of those very well. Again, very broad business and really the biggest strength across the organisation. Over the course of several decades, the business has steadily grown. We've been able to grow our operations to deliver a diverse portfolio of projects globally. Just last year, we managed over 15.7 million man-hours of controlled work. We managed for our clients in the delivery of their projects. We're currently working on a very high number of studies, which is a bellwether of how much future work we'll see in terms of detailed projects.
We're working on over 70 different resource projects at the moment. We are currently working hand of over AUD 390 million in services across the, you know, it doesn't necessarily extend one year or all, but it's across years. The capex of projects we're currently managing is over AUD 10 billion. Sorry, AUD 10 billion of capex of studies that we're currently working on and currently managed capex is over AUD 5 billion. Very strong workload, very affordable, and a very strong affordable pipeline in terms of the opportunities. I touched on the operating segments, but really how we operate in the core resources segment, mineral resources, but we are complemented by the strategically aligned industrial processes as well, segments.
In resources, we deliver studies and projects across a multitude of commodities: gold, lithium, diamonds, critical minerals, and now with SAXUM, I'll talk a little bit more about later, cement and lime as well, as well as a host of other things. We work for the broad round of clients. In industrial processes, we work in pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, manufacturing, specialty chemicals alike, as well as a lot of what we're doing in the renewables, green energy space. In rail infrastructure, similarly, we provide a lot of engineering, design engineering support, rail infrastructure management services to a wide host of operators, rail owners, and the like across the business. I'm very proud to say each and one of our businesses is an excellent business.
In terms of financial highlights for the year, again, really, it's been another strong year in what has been a history of really good financial performance. The earnings levels are above what we target. We target to do a 10% NPAT margin. If everything's going well in the business, we'd like to see us, we'd like to see a 10% NPAT margin return. We exceeded that this year, and we've exceeded that in recent years as well. The businesses, or the results for the last financial year, have been largely driven by delivery of EPC projects and EPCM services. What we haven't had in the last year, which we did have in some of the prior years, is any impact or any contribution of some of the EPC where we're, in one form or another, the prime contractor on delivery of projects.
Really, in the last 12 months, it's been around us delivering our results pretty much entirely on the sale of man-hours in one form or another. Again, really strong outcome, and, you know, really, you know, we're very pleased with what we've been able to achieve. In terms of the specific financial highlights, almost AUD 340 million in revenue, AUD 60 million in PBT, giving AUD 42.2 NPAT. I will note that both our revenue and our impact was towards the top end of the guidance that we provided half year in February. Very, very strong cash advance in the mid [AUS 200 million] and strong cash flows for the year. I'll talk a little bit more about that. We'll talk about the balance sheet. Yeah, 12.4% NPAT margin, which really, again, means that we're achieving what we want to achieve, and more. We're very close to that.
Also, just when I talk about cash advance, keep in mind that we've got strong cash advance having now made a satisfactory position as well. When we've done that, cash reserves will erase the debt and acknowledge the shareholders. I mentioned balance sheet, but certainly, we have seen a cash increase based due to the very strong cash inflows from our activities, AUD 37 million cash inflow. Our work capital needs are around the same as they were last year. We've seen an increase in provisions. Again, our provisions wax and wane depending on where we're at with projects and where we're at with respect to the risks associated with those projects. It's been a consistent and an approach we take each and every year to assess where we sit in our projects or where our provisions need to be and we might be allowed to support them.
A really strong increase in equity levels in the business again for the year. By way of some operational highlights, I guess one of the big things for us this year, and it talks to the strategies, which I'll speak about a little later, is the geographical expansion, obviously, the acquisition of the majority stake in SAXUM, opening their business offices in Argentina and Brazil, and in the US. We also opened our Vancouver office and we continued to strengthen our Lima office, the new Lima office across the last 12 months. In 2014, we did something recently with SAXUM. We bought a majority interest in a company called ADP. We've now rebranded that company to Lycopodium, simplifying the message to the market to try to do that.
We've continued to invest in our systems and our processes to make sure that we're able to work shared, to drive consistency, make sure you deliver high quality across the business. We continue investing in our people. I said earlier, we're up to 1,300 people, and high-quality people that need the right tools, need the right platforms, and we've given them all that and more, in terms of our people strategy. I'll look more comment to that later on. Really important, I think we've done everything that we've done, as I said, delivered over a million direct man-hours and controlled over 15 million man-hours delivery of projects. We've done that with an exceptional safety record. We maintain a very, very high industry-leading safety record across the globe, across our operations here. In terms of some of the highlights and resources, it's been a fantastic year.
We've seen the Kiaka Gold Project for West African Resources completed with Burkina Faso, the first gold award in June of this year. The Goose Project for B2Gold, another project for them. They took clients for this, these repeated projects, with first gold achieved in Canada in the same month. The Boto Gold project, I'm happy to report in the last few recent days, has also poured first gold. 100 kg poured from the m anager in Senegal, again, on schedule, and the project was delivered exceptionally well. We've started new projects, the Koné Gold project for Montage Gold in Côte d'Ivoire, Baomahun in Sierra Leone, Twin Hills in Namibia, Nyanzaga in Tanzania for the first its mining course. Strong list of projects which we've started this year. We've achieved the award of a very strategic project, the Artemis Gold Blackwater Expansion project.
We're working on phase I expansion and phase II expansion. It's a very material project, which will see us, all things being equal, having a very, very significant Canadian project, in British Columbia , delivered on an EPCM basis across the next couple of years. This is a list. Those of you that have been looking at Lycopodium for a while recognize this chart. It really just shows you the projects that are in the early stages, those that are on site in the later stages of delivery, and those that have been delivered during the course of the year. We can see that there's a good, strong list of projects across commodities and resources: gold, copper, mineral sands, lithium, critical minerals, platinum, palladium. We're even working on a chromium project in South Africa at the moment. Uranium, a number of uranium projects as well.
We've got a really strong and very interesting list of projects we're working on, and importantly, lots of those are very early phase. I guess we should have a very strong pipeline moving forward. In industrial processes, again, I mentioned that business not only works in the specialty chemicals, manufacturing, food and beverage, and the light pharmaceuticals, but also very much in the minerals and also in a lot of the green energy-related initiatives. We've been in the design of a modular facility for battery recycling. It's a modular, movable facility. We've been involved with the KMP, the Cobalt Nickel project for our data, with a new H2S plant there. We've been involved even with a range of crop protection and animal health products through Nutrien and working with, buying the detailed engineering for them.
That on top of working with our traditional clients such as CSL Seqirus, Thales, and others. In terms of our infrastructure, again, very, very busy year and a good year. It continues to be a high-quality business, delivering high-quality services to the likes of ARTC, to Pacific National, BHP, to Aurizon, with very good prospects ahead of it. We're working, continue to work with the Inland Rail project on a bunch of resilience projects for ARTC, as well as providing room services for the likes of Pacific National and multiyear contracts. We're very pleased with the workload in that business and the prospects of that business. The SAXUM acquisition, for us, has been probably the main highlight of the year, notwithstanding the excellent work we've done delivering projects and studies for our clients. It's business as usual.
That's what we've been doing for many, many years and continue to do. The SAXUM acquisition gives us an opportunity to do that in a new geography. It took us some years to find this business. We looked at many businesses. We identified Latin America in particular as a very key and important part of the future Lycopodium story and enabling us to deliver projects for existing and future clients, and to deliver our skill set into what is a very, very significant mineral resources market. We were able to secure this joining stake of a very culturally aligned business. It's a multidisciplinary business. It's a bolt-on to Lycopodium in the sense that it's not a huge business in its own right, but it opens doors for us, provides networks for us, gives us new offices, gives us exposure in new jurisdictions, to new clients.
In itself, it's very culturally aligned, being a tech-connect business. It's culturally aligned with Lycopodium. We consider it's also going to enhance our capabilities, not only sectorally, because they do about half of their work in the cement industry, about half of their work in mineral resources, but also from a skill set perspective. They're a very high-quality group of engineers, particularly in the structural space, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering space. I believe that Tucumán will become another center of excellence for us, particularly in structural engineering, high-end seismic loading and the like, which is prevalent through the Andes and in Latin America. I think a lot of that capability comes to us as well. They're going to make a contribution financially in this financial year coming. We believe what the business costs us, potential upside is really huge. This is still a transformation for Lycopodium in the long run.
We continue to support the communities in which we live and work across the world. We have some fantastic examples of that, but we support those communities via the Lycopodium Foundation, which you see on the screen there. It's through the Rafiki Ubuntu, sorry, Rafiki wa Binti initiative in Tanzania. Lycopodium is, of course, a supporter of them. We continue to support the Clontarf Foundation of Māori here in Australia, the B.A.S.I.C.S organization in Ghana, as well as the Ubuntu Football Academy in South Africa in Cape Town, which is very similar to what Clontarf does. We really focus, when we talk about what Lycopodium does through the Lycopodium Foundation, it's really around supporting the communities in which we work, really supporting education and using education as an opportunity to unlock poverty and to improve people's living standards. We support innovative thinking.
We're supporting four or five of the universities here in Australia and elsewhere on a number of key initiatives. Of course, the vibrant sustainability. In terms of some of the case studies, particularly in the resources space, again, the majority of what we do is in the resources space. I've spoken about the Kiaka Gold Project. We provided the full EPCM services for West African Resources on their project in Burkina Faso. It's the second of their projects. That's been a transformational project for that client, transferred from a single asset operator to a multi-asset operator. That project was delivered on budget, ahead of schedule, and delivered gold early, as I noted earlier, as a fantastic, current and future operation for West African Resources. We completed the Kathleen Valley Lithium Project for Liontown Resources.
Again, full EPCM, that project, notwithstanding its havoc, it's had its travails with regard to the lithium market. It is a fantastic project for operating asset, fantastic infrastructure, wonderful example of really quality engineering that deals with what is lithium. The lithium contaminant ore is a very abrasive, hard ore. That project's been designed, that plant has been designed to deal with those things very effectively and to improve it. It's just proven to be very effective. It's only early days, doing that quite very quickly. The third one is the Footprint Reduction Project for Anglo American Platinum in South Africa. This project was transformational for Anglo plants as well because it gives them a Mogalakwena mine, a longer life. It's a lifetime extension project. It transforms the economics of that project.
In fact, it's led to us now being involved with the second larger project at the [ Mogalakwena] South, a concept which we'll be talking about, I'm sure, next year. In terms of strategy, this is fairly consistent with what you would have seen, those of you that are familiar with Lycopodium, but a really consistent and consolidation of things that we think are really important for Lycopodium to continue to thrive and cross into the future. We're a people business, and we want to make sure that across our business, we attract, we grow, we retain highest quality talent. We've got a lot of initiatives that we have in place and have introduced across the last couple of years to do that. We have a strong focus on succession planning across the organization. I'm going to strongly focus on developing.
Our leadership development plans are really top-notch, I believe, and providing real great outcomes across the business. We want to leverage the tools that we've invested in across the last three or four years, the new ERP, new HIRS, new delivery systems. We want to leverage them across the business. We are using AI. We're convinced using AI, not only within that embedded within, obviously, the systems and the software systems that we use, but also to tune into our very, very significant IP and database. We've got projects and studies of reference documentation, and making that information more available, more accessible to our people, so that they can do things more efficiently and achieve our high quality, always taking the best of doing on the best. We are continuing and sharpening, I guess, our focus on client and project excellence.
We want to make sure that, notwithstanding the fact that we've been an extremely successful organization for the previous few years, and we've been a successful organization across the last 12 months, that we don't take that for granted, and that we maintain a client focus and maintain focus on doing really good work, and that we prioritize high-quality work over high-risk work. We also look into sustainability growth, of course. We want to maintain what we've got in a very mature APAC and African market position that we want to grow into the Americas, and SAXUM is a key part of that. Latin America is a key part of that, of course. We also want to do additional things that are incremental and broadening our capabilities. We can bring our expertise, our engineering expertise, our project delivery expertise into new opportunities. Certainly, we're not standing still.
We recognize we cannot do that. We'll have to continue to strive to improve and to achieve excellence. We're a diversified business. It might sound ironic when I show you the slide that says that we're, you know, 96% resources and also 94% resources and 3% industrial processes, 3% rail infrastructure. What you see when you look at us in any of those sectors, and let's talk about resources, we've got really good geographic diversification. We've got really good client diversification across the major, the global, the emerging. We've got excellent diversification of both our studies and our projects, as you can see in those charts, across commodities. What that means is it takes a lot of lumpiness, if not most of the lumpiness, out of the market. The market continues to prosper.
We'll continue to do very well, and we continue to focus on our excellent work that has seen us increase market share year on year. I believe that's been the case. The hallmark of Lycopodium is and will remain its disciplined approach to risk management. We have a really robust risk approach. I consider it, think of ours, whether it be in technical delivery, operational delivery, safety, corporate governance, contractual, the like. We want to work. We want to be busy. We love doing what we do, but we want to do it for the right people, in the right place, and in the right way. We think that's been the foundational element of our success.
We try to manage, even out the blend of our contracts and the style of contracts we have in the business from those where you suddenly can see work where we're a particular niche opportunity location. You might try to or have a view or try to get a little bit more return on some work by versus EPCM, where a little less risk, a little less return. At the end of the day, a nice balanced portfolio of projects that are going to suit us well through the year. We're a capital-wide approach. We don't have a high capital spend. We don't have to commit strong capital to any of the jurisdictions in which we go. Some people talk about sovereign risk of working in the country, for example, of Burkina Faso. Our concerns in Burkina Faso need to be about security or the safety of our personnel.
It's certainly not around capital and sovereign risk-related things because at the end of the day, we are, you know, our people, our laptops, our IP, that's all very, very mobile. That's why, again, I believe one of the key strengths of our organization. Core to us as an organization, an engineering organization, and as any engineering organization should be, is a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. It's not to say that you don't need to be efficient. You must be efficient. It's fine to innovate, but it's not to be efficient. We have examples. I'll not spoon you too many of them, whether it be digital engineering, our role with the battery industries, CRCs, you know, what we do with the Orway IQ- MillROC platform.
There are many, many other examples of doing some commercialization of some innovative equipment that we import to the market. There are lots of examples across the business of us being an innovative engineer. This is really important. You know, we don't live in a vacuum. We do have competitors. Competitors are forever looking at us as the benchmark and as that, you know, the target of charge. We need to be working hard to make sure that we're thinking and bringing our clients optimal solutions. Just by way of the outlook, I guess, not dissimilar to last year, if you like. We believe that the macroeconomics are very, very favorable for Lycopodium. We believe that demand for our services is going to remain very high. We've seen that. We continue to see that in new markets with new clients. We continue to see it.
Sometimes when a client might, you know, work with them a little while and then they go and try somebody else, they'll come back to us. This is purely because we do what we say we're going to do and we do it successfully. We think the critical minerals is probably at a relatively low end and it's got plenty of upper end or upside, should I say. We're poised to participate in any uptake in that area, with our expertise across critical minerals, equipment with graphite, copper, rare earths, et cetera. Latin America being a huge venue of hosting a huge amount of those resources. We have an ability to tap into Latin America now, et cetera, of course. Gold, still very strong. Lycopodium is, I would say, probably willing to be a permanent gold delivery engineer, gold project delivery engineer.
It remains a really, really strong part of our business and looks like, not a vacuum anytime soon. We see quite a number of new projects lining up to go. Projects have been studied for some time now with a strong price and looking to move ahead. It will ultimately be very important to us in the next 12 months as well. Also, just from an industrial processes around infrastructure, the Future Made in Australia agenda really for us means that we should see a reasonably good market for our industrial processes business in East Coast Australia. What we do in rail, we're seeing, as you see, the growing demand as well, both with government investment but also private investment in rail and equipment. We'll seek to keep the market updated routinely. Anything of note, we'll certainly seek to provide regular updates.
What we will do is to provide guidance, as we have done traditionally, around our AGM in November of this year. It's typically the first time we provide guidance cycle. Our view is based on the outlook and, you know, what we're seeing is that we're going to be very, very busy and should, should, should, financial performance across next fifth year as well. A very close sight. That's probably it for the full presentation at the moment. I'm glad that's, Sam, if we have any questions, I'll let us take it.
Great. Thank you, Peter. Just as a reminder to the audience, you may ask a question either by submitting a written question via the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen, or covering research analysts are invited to raise their hand, and I'll endeavor to get to you shortly. We do have a handful of questions coming through. We'll kick off with SAXUM. There's a number of questions relating to SAXUM. Firstly, just in terms of the integration, how is that progressing? How much has been spent on the integration thus far, and what are the remaining hurdles around the SAXUM integration?
We got a jump on the integration. In fact, even prior to finalizing the deal, we started doing a lot of the export converting across its work and done a lot of work, obviously, also through the due diligence. I think that we are very, very well advanced. We've already rolled out the ERP, the HRS, self-conscious systems have been rolled out. Our intranet, which hosts all the procedures, processes, policies, and the like, have been rolled out to SAXUM. We've had a number of teams that have visited SAXUM, the teams from SAXUM that have visited Perth or [audio distortion] or Toronto. There is already a SAXUM that's already embedded in the rhythm of the business with respect to reporting, with respect to planning, with respect to the operational conversations. There's some work share that's already occurring.
We have a number of their engineers in Toronto at the moment, working on the Twin Hills project for us. We have a number of people that have traveled and are at the Twin Hills at this thing, to continue to help the integration. Everything we've seen to date is exciting, and, you know, most importantly, there's been absolutely no surprises. It's not going to take long for us to integrate with SAXUM. In fact, I feel we're most of the way there, I would say. What will take some time, of course, is to explore the opportunities together and then to get traction with some of those opportunities. We see that's going to start occurring through this FY ahead of us. I expect to see some really great movement with SAXUM in a few years and, you know, the next two to three, four years.
Examples of that, we have representation here in Salta that enables us to participate in a bunch of projects which you have to be in Salta to do. Salta province of Argentina, plugging Taca Taca, plugging a bunch of lithium opportunities there. So far it's been excellent. The way we've structured the deal and the whole coming together of the organizations was that we're not changing SAXUM. Operationally, we're not changing their leadership. Founder, Guillermo Etse , stayed with the business for seven years. He reports in as part of our operating structure really effectively. So far.
Great. Thank you. Just on pipeline opportunity, how should we think about conversion of those opportunities? Specifically, what portion would you reasonably expect to win?
A lot of the work that we secure is, I'll say, we're repeating this for business with existing clients. A lot of the work that we secure is work that we've done, feasibility study work, or the feasibility study for, and then convert into a project. You know, I'll say all things being equal, if a project goes from feasibility study, obviously definitive feasibility study into execution, and we've done the study, I'd expect, and the project goes ahead, I'd expect that we would be at more + 70% of it at the time, we would be securing that work and doing that work. If we're open tendering, which also occurs, of course, we don't tender everything. As I mentioned earlier, we look, we prioritize high quality of work over any work and going for all and every opportunity. We probably win half the time or 40% of the time.
As I said, most of the work that we're doing and most of the projects you'll see us doing in the next two, three years, we certainly should be doing and working with clients that we've been with for a long time.
Okay. On some of the new contract awards, specifically Twin Hills, Nyanzaga, and Blackwater, could you just provide a little bit more detail around the ramp-up, pipeline timeline of these projects? How should we think about the incremental revenue expected from Blackwater phase II?
Yeah. I'll start with Blackwater phase II. Blackwater phase II, or phase I expansion and phase II. At the moment, we're working on the phase I expansion, some engineering front-end early works, and the same for phase II. The phase II project is actually bigger than the current Blackwater Expansion project. The phase II project will take the Blackwater Expansion project from, I think, it's currently 6.5 million tons per annum to almost 20 million tons per annum. That's between the phase one expansion and the phase two project. It's a really material body of work. It's in British Columbia, north of Vancouver, and we've got a very good relationship with that client. We were involved, actually, they brought us in to help them commission and start their project, their first project. I think that's going to be great work.
That work, the main body of that work will happen in late FY 2021, but it will happen through this FY. We're talking about $15 million of services. The lion's share of that work will happen the following FY and into FY 2028. That's really important work. The other two projects you mentioned, Twin Hills and Nyanzaga, we kicked off Twin Hills earlier this calendar year. That project will run for the sake of 27, 28 months. It's probably in the order of $35 million- $40 million worth of services. It's a typical, sort of, kind of a typical bell curve you see on these projects in terms of the effort. Obviously, long effort initiated with the engineering, procurement efforts, and then on to the site and structure management issue efforts, et cetera. It's going to run across 27 months. It started respectively in December or January this year.
Nyanzaga the same, actually. Nyanzaga , although we only recently announced it for the outside final contracts and given us the votes to proceed, we'll be working on that project across those years of early works, et cetera. That project will run for around the same sort of period of time, 26, 27 months. It's similar to the scale. It's much smaller than we did in Twin Hills for us.
Okay. Great. Thank you. We'll just move to a verbal question from Oli Porter at Euroz Hartleys. Oliver, please go ahead and unmute your line.
Hi, everyone. How are you going? Thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple of quick ones from me. Just on the workforce, how are you thinking about that over the next 12 months? Are you looking to add talent? If so, how are you finding that market in general relative to the last few years?
Yeah, we're rallying to add to the workforce. Ollie, we're in ramp-up mode on a number of projects. I've mentioned some of them already, but there's a lot table for sure. That's sort of the three phases of projects. You can see there's a lot of projects in the early phase that will need to ramp up. We expect our headcount to grow over the next 12 months. In terms of the availability of resources, better in some markets than others is all I can say. What I will say is consistent and constant and something I've reported on previously, it's always failing. That's why we focus so heavily on, we get them, we try to retain them and continue to develop them. We also work very hard on developing our own people right away from no matter student, graduate, and right the way through.
We're rolling out the procedure, we're rolling out the great development program even to SAXUM as we speak. We know and we've seen and we enjoy the benefit of in our teams, lots of people that have come through Lycopodium and they're growing Lycopodium and are extremely, you know, capable, confident individuals today because of that. Sometimes we call it in the market the university of Lycopodium. I don't really care. We need to get people like that people because they're not being developed elsewhere. There are people like that, or it's a, it's never an easy market.
Awesome. Okay, fantastic. One more. You mentioned incrementally broadening your capabilities. Can you give me an example or two of what sort of adjacent capabilities are on that shortlist?
It can represent broadening into new commodities within the resources space, for example, or as we start to explore new critical minerals, for example. There's examples of that. You know, we hadn't done a lot of work with platinum and palladium previously. In addition, our work with uranium proves that we work on a couple of projects of those commodities, other commodities, some of the other critical minerals as well, as we expect. There's that. There's also where we can broaden our service offering. Again, the whole IRQ is a good example of that across the last couple of years. There's a number of other potential sort of opportunities in our rail infrastructure business at the moment. Part of the rail infrastructure business is asset management planning and asset management documentation and the like.
We've already started this year working with some of the local councils in providing asset management services by using digitalisation of their assets. That's an example. I mean, there's quite a number. Obviously, it starts small, but they have the opportunity to grow. The last one is really the capabilities that, you know, SAXUM's bought. We've spoken around their cement and their minerals, but they also service other markets, including oil and gas area in Texas.
Fantastic. Okay. Thanks, Peter. Christine, I'll pass it on.
Ollie, sorry. Just one last one that just sprung to mind that I guess is really up until this morning. We've also, during the course of this year, won a contract with NAMDEB, which is the joint venture between Pierce and the New Zealand Government. That is to provide a dry mining unit over an initial phase, a couple of years, for a test period. It could grow into a very, very significant long-term renewal contract. That is, to process all pond readers of sand at a very, very U.S. dependent point, and for the mining of diamonds, basically. We've won that contract. The DMU, the initial DMU unit, is actually en route to Namibia as we speak.
Whilst it'll provide a visual contribution to our revenues even this year, in the longer term, that's really some really great, really valuable stuff that we've done really for the first time or will be operating that plan on behalf of client, and basically, you know, overnight, I suppose.
Fantastic. Thanks, both.
Great. Thanks, Ollie. Next question on margins. The company's come off a period of elevated margins through FY 2023 and 2024. You've exited the year at approximately 10% NPAT margins. What's the best way to think about Lycopodium's sustainable longer-term target?
Yeah, look, it's happening soon. We think about margins as, for us, being quite sacrosanct. We want to get a good return for our work we've done. We consider that our staff and children deserve that, because you deliver high-quality work. We target an 8% NPAT, ideally. We'd like to be doing an 8% NPAT in the business across the business. You can see the business has lots of moving parts. At the end of the day, that's really what we'd like to see at the group level. We've been able to feed that in, in recent years, for some time now, including last year, 46%, 44% NPAT this last year. For us, we focus more on margin than we necessarily do on top line. Yes, we'd like to see top line growth, but you've got to come with good work and comfort that will be the case.
We also want to make sure that we're achieving the delivery on the earnings side. I mean, we expect to make a target of 10%, and we'd like to see us do at least that.
Great. Thank you. Just as that flows through to dividend, you've referenced in the presentation a normalized payout ratio of approximately 60% excluding the SAXUM payment. How does the board think about going forward targeted payout ratios?
Again, we stick between the 50%. Our broad policy is we'd like to be, so again, all things being even, and cash flow allowed, we'd like to be paying between 50% - 70% dividend. We have lots of franking credits. Our dividends have all been fully franked. That's what you'd like to do year on year on year. We like our shareholders, yeah, and they need the dividend. We feel over 30% are still internally held in the business. All of us would like to see some return for the business, where we think it's an important part of the business. We took the decision to pay for SAXUM with our own cash, thinking and feeling that that was the right thing to do, for distant shareholders in particular. We're not a hugely acquisitive company.
We're not announcing any new acquisitions or looking to spend the cash for other things in the short to medium term. There's no reason, as we continue our good trajectory and return to a normal transition, that you won't see dividends return to what they've been historically.
Okay. Got it. Thank you. Sticking on financials, there's a question on other income. Can you provide some color on the nature of the sundry income item, which I think at $3.1 million in FY 2025 was, I think, $2.2 million higher than the previous year?
I know part of that, it wasn't the full amount, but part of that was as we wrapped up recently. We had a provision within the contract with Barrick that we wanted to make sure that we were covered for some of our costs and some of our investment. It made it established in places such as Pakistan and Dubai and the like on their behalf and whatnot. That was $2 million of that. I'm not sure it's just me. There's been a number of things to be addressed that we can come back to you with that detail. The lion's share of the % increase was that owned from Barrick.
Okay. Great. Thank you. Maybe just time for one more. Within the appendix slides, there was one or two new slides in that section talking about project phases and returns across project lifecycles. Could you just elaborate on what the key takeaways of those slides should be?
Yeah, maybe I'll just quickly jump to those slides for those on the call. What this slide is trying to show is, you know, we talk about, you know, what is, we mentioned earlier, Lycopodium's energy currently, around the $5 billion worth of capex clients and has got in the forward prospect list $10 billion worth of [audio distortion]. What this slide shows is that, you know, when we talk about feasibility studies or fee engineering or when we're into the full EPCM or EPC project, what it could mean in terms of the percentage contribution of that capex value. For example, if we talk about, you know, a typical EPCM services contract, it's somewhere between 10% - 15% of the capex value of the project.
If I say that we're managing, you know, $5 billion worth of capex, it would indicate that we're, you know, we've got $150 million, sorry, $250 million worth of services associated with that. I'm not sure I've got the maths right then just to pile away, but you get the gist. The slide basically says or tries to explain when we talk about the capex on projects, what part actually contributes to Lycopodium's direct revenues and to our earnings under an EPCM or a studied or provisioned services style arrangement. The next slide basically tries to put some color to typical schedule, typical timeframe for the various phases of the project, and tries to give you some idea in terms of our FY 2025 revenues, where they would have contributed. In terms of study phase and early phase stuff, around $30 million worth of services.
In terms of processing and engineering, around $125 million. In terms of the delivery, you know, the project management, structure management, field services, etc., around $174 million in optimization in terms. What it tries to do is just to give you that idea of when we talk about some of these numbers, how they all tie together. That project's capex, you'd see, at $10 billion. That's early phase stuff. That's stuff that's in the studies. That then becomes the strategic project phase where clients make a financial investment decision, commit to those projects, and we win those projects. We convert directly into, you know, a significant amount of work for that. That's really what that's about. Hopefully, that's providing some explanation.
Okay. Great. Thank you. I think that's very, very clear. I think that's all the time we have for questions today. If there are any follow-up questions or we did not get to your questions asked, we'll endeavor to come back to you. Maybe with that, Peter, I'll just pass it back to you if you've got any closing comments.
Yeah. Firstly, thank you very much for all of you on the call today. Very much appreciate it. Those of you that have followed us and been a part of Lycopodium for a long time, thank you for the support and interest in the business. Hopefully, you know, we've been able to provide lots of good returns over the years. In summary, for those of you that are new to Lycopodium, I mean, we're very proud of the business. We're very proud of Lycopodium, the team that we are, the company that it is. It's coming to build slowly, steadily, and very robustly over time. I think we articulate our strategies very clearly. We, in no way, shape or form confuse you about who we are and what we do in the world.
We have a very, you know, high-quality cohort of professionals in the business to deliver really good outcomes for our clients, whether it be through the, you know, higher quality technical work, feasibility study work, evaluation work we do, through the good project delivery that we do. It seems us to do the work time and time again with the same clients. We have a very capital-light approach. We're not a capital-intensive business. You know, you know, an investor in Lycopodium doesn't need to worry about us having to go and buy a new fleet of trucks or drill rigs or anything else for that matter.
We work for, you know, some really quality, well, a full range of quality clients, and we've got a really good level of diversification, which takes the lumpiness out of, seeks to take the lumpiness out of, what is ostensibly our engineering project delivery business. Thank you for your time this morning. Hopefully, the presentation has been able to shed some new light, or at least a friendly light and update on where we sit.
Great. Thank you very much for joining today's Lycopodium's FY 2025 Results Call. Thank you and goodbye.