Full investor presentation covering off a little bit about company, providing an update on the financial highlights for the period. Touching on operational highlights for the period, then addressing outlook and guidance. We also provide as part of the presentation, although I won't be running through it in any detail this morning, an appendix, which contains a lot of additional hopefully informative information. Lycopodium remains a leading global engineering and project delivery group, working across mineral resources, industrial processes and infrastructure industries, with an extensive book of quality clientele and 18 offices across the world. I speak to our clientele.
We have an amazing bunch of clients across all those industries I mentioned, through you know, very large clients, mid-tiers and junior explorers and miners. And we're very grateful for that client order book. As a project-focused organization, it's of significant importance and to our benefit to have involvement with projects from the very early stage, hence our involvement in scoping and feasibility studies and the evaluation phase of projects. Through to the full engineering and project delivery, as a full service provider in that space, and then also on to optimization and expansion phase works. Enables Lycopodium to benefit from a project's full life cycle.
It's been something we've focused on over the years, both in broadening our the services which we provide, but also broadening the time which we're involved in projects. We maintain a high workload with a strong current order book of studies and delivery phase activities, on a broad range of quality projects. Committed contracts are valued at AUD 415 million. That's up on last period, and also revenue opportunity pipeline is AUD 1.3 billion, also up on the last period, which really indicates, and I'll talk more about it obviously later, the outlook for the business, but indicates that, you know, we're continuing to see a busy market, enjoy a busy market and see a busy market.
By way of financial highlights, Lycopodium did AUD 174.5 million worth of revenue for the period, and AUD 18.3 million NPAT, which provided a 10.5% NPAT margin, which is in line with our expectations for NPAT, so achieving our NPAT target. The board, the directors declared a AUD 0.22 per share fully franked dividend for the half year. Again, returning to our traditional sort of dividend policy, our dividend expectations had strong cash flow back at the half year. The company enjoys excellent diversification across a broad range of commodities, clientele, and geographies. Those of you that have seen this slide previously, you may note that we continue to achieve more balance in support of this diversification across these metrics.
And we, we're striving to continue to do this on an ongoing basis. We would like to see a strong balance in terms of diversification across commodities, across geographies. In particular, it provides surety and strength moving forward. From an operational perspective, we've recently been awarded a number of FEED or front-end engineering and design briefs, which we expect to position us optimally for the next phase of each project. These include the Winu Copper Project for Rio Tinto, the Asutlo Divibango Gold Project for Devon Mine, which is their next development project, the Doropo Gold Project for Resolute, and a number of others, including most recently, Pilgangoora plant expansion lithium project here in Western Australia.
We've also started initial work on two material prospects, being Tulu Kapi Gold Project and the Blackwater Expansion Phase 1A project for Artemis Gold . In terms of the latter, we hope to be able to transition on to a larger project with at Blackwater an expansion project and await news on that, which we believe may be imminent. Of note, however, there has been a shift to the right on these projects, particularly Tulu Kapi and Blackwater from a timing perspective, probably about a three to four month shift from what we previously expected and forecast, and it has impacted our financials and forecasts. However, we continue to invest in building capacity in anticipation of these and a swathe of other material opportunities. And this is really important.
We are in a, you know, a competitive labor market across the world for our people, and we've retained our people and continue to grow our people count and also our capacity in terms of office space and just general corporate capacity. What we see is being you know, a large number of prospects. Our study pipeline is very strong. And those that have been on our calls previously, you would have seen this slide in particular, which tries to demonstrate our early phase work. Our work, which is, you know, we call it midstream and in the middle of its delivery, and then that stuff that's being completed, those projects which have been completed in recent times.
You can see there's quite a number of new opportunities and new projects which have tipped into that early phase work. I spoke around the Blackwater Expansion Phase 1A , Tulu Kapi, et cetera. There's other projects such as Diamba Sud, Bweede, and Doropo, where we're doing the FEED work, and we hope that those projects will go to full execution, and we will be able to participate in the full delivery of those projects. We've also got a really strong portfolio of projects which are in, you know, called heavy delivery, including Koné, in Côte d'Ivoire, Yanqul copper in Oman, and a number of other projects which are listed there, and of course, some projects which we've already completed.
So, you know, we're very, very happy with the number of studies that we've got, and that's traditionally a key metric for the business. If we're working on a good number of and quality of studies, it tends to be a good indicator of what we'll be doing next. Our focus on people continues as we seek to maintain and enhance our status as an employer of choice and a place where people can develop excellent careers, advance themselves personally and professionally, and enjoy growing with the company. Our approach to keeping our people and those on our managed sites safe is demonstrated in our exceptional safety track record. So on to outlook.
Demand for our services remains very high, based on our excellent track record and performance on all of our most recent projects, as well as market conditions, which generally sees commodity prices at strong, if not historic, high levels. Obviously, gold being very, very strong. At the moment, we're seeing an enormous number of opportunities emanating out of our traditional markets, including Africa and Australia, but also across the Americas. Silver being another commodity, which we're seeing a number of projects which we've started work on the PFS for Unico Silver in Argentina, supported obviously with our investment in Saxum.
We're also seeing, on the basis of our expansion across the Americas, we have, you know, lots of, many new opportunities and, and the like being presented to us or prospects that we have identified and are pursuing. But we also continue to invest in building capacity and capabilities globally. We've in the last 12 months, we have planned for the next 12 months, to increase the capacity in Perth, Toronto, and Cape Town, in Lima and in Manila. And that's in preparation for the work and the prospects which we continue to see, and we see that this will, you know, bear fruit in, in subsequent financial years, certainly. But also, we also expect that it's going to, support a strong second half to this financial year.
We've revised guidance primarily due to the shift right of a number of those major prospects. I spoke about the two main ones, which are expected to contribute materially to our forecasts. We now provide guidance of group revenue between AUD 370 million and AUD 410 million, an impact between AUD 37 million and AUD 41 million, in line with our target impact expectation of around 10%. I will obviously continue to keep the market and shareholders updated on any material changes or any material awards. But, you know, we consider that the second half will be strong to achieve that guidance that we've provided. We remain a secure, stable and sustainable business, doing great work globally.
This is based on, you know, the deep engineering expertise and, you know, growing teams and keeping teams of exceptional, high caliber personnel. And we provide lots of, what I call value, in the services which we provide globally. We have a long track record of highly disciplined risk management. We're also focused on ensuring that we have a good portfolio of contracts and style of work, which talks to both risk, but also talks to return. And, you know, again, leveraging experience that we've honed over the years. We have a very strong history of execution of projects, and execution of business generally, with strong alignment, with management and our shareholders.
We still have around 30%, of the company's ownership held by board and management. We have a very capital-light approach, so we're not, you know, we're not an organization that requires to spend a huge amount of capital to generate our returns. And we continue to pursue business in that fashion. I've touched on and in the appendices, which you can go through at your leisure, and you can review the very strong field of blue-chip clients that we have. It's a very diverse list, and lots of clients have been with us a long time. We continue to deliver repeat business as predominant. The quantum of work that we do is in the form of repeat business for clients, new projects for existing clients and the like.
Strong commodity diversification. I spoke around that earlier, and I think we continue to strike a good balance there. Even in the light of, you know, a very strong gold price, we're still busy in lithium, we're still busy in uranium, copper, and a bunch of other commodities. Lycopodium certainly against our peers, appears to have an undemanding valuation. And the geographic diversification, I think, for us is key. We continue to expand geographically. The Americas as being, you know, a fantastic geographic expansion for us. The acquisition of Saxum, the Lima office and the Boulder office, et cetera. We're seeing a tremendous number of opportunities coming through.
Again, it's fairly early days, so, you know, we have got expressions of interest in and proposals in on a number of new opportunities across Latin America in particular, but also, and North American operations are continuing to see a level of inquiry which is unprecedented. So I think, certainly the word is out about Lycopodium across the Americas, and we expect to, you know, see continued, sort of, growth and, and opportunities for business activities, across the next couple of years just coming out of the Americas, let alone our, our traditional, you know, Africa and, and APAC, regions. As I said, we also provide some additional and hopefully informative content as an appendix, to the presentation, and to further explain and illustrate the strength and quality of our business.
I'm not going to go through that this morning. I welcome you to walk through them if, as ever, after this presentation, any of you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us with those questions and we can ask them on the appendices. Thank you for attending our webinar, and I welcome any questions you may have now for us, and we'll do our best to answer them. Thank you.
Thanks very much, Peter. As a reminder, you may ask questions by submitting a written question via the Q&A function, or covering research analysts are invited to raise their hand via Zoom, and I'll endeavor to get to you shortly. First question comes from Oliver Porter at Euroz. Ollie, please go ahead.
Hey. Hey, Pete, just thanks for taking my question. Just a quick one. You mentioned adding capacity and headcount kind of across the board globally. Can you just talk to how you're finding the labor market, and perhaps if by geography, you're having any particular challenges or how that sort of is gonna look over the next six to 12 months? Thanks.
Thanks, Ollie. Yeah, the availability of good talent is always challenging, and that sort of is a constant, and we're seeing that in, you know, Australia, we're seeing that in Canada, and we're seeing that in South Africa, in particular, where the two large operational hubs are. But we continue to recruit good people and bring good people in, and again, yeah, talking about, I touched on, you know, our focus on people and a focus on careers and a focus on providing people new, exciting and diverse work is something which we sell, and we don't, you know, we never have people come to Lycopodium and think that they're joining anything other than an exceptional business, which is great.
So it makes it a little easier, but they are tough, tough markets to find, you know, there's a dearth of high-quality, experienced personnel globally, so we value it very much. To that point, I mean, across the latter part of the first half, that we maintained capacity where if you weren't expecting to continue to see growth and demand, we may have trimmed capacity at times just to maintain utilization up, which is pretty metric for our business. But we maintained it, particularly in Cape Town, knowing full well it's not easy to get people. You can't just let people go and expect them to rejoin you in two months' time.
You know, with the full knowledge that we had with our work and the season, our work potentially ahead of us, we sort of were very careful to maintain our teams and to, you know, to continue to keep an eye on that capacity and growing that capacity.
Right. Thanks. And just with Saxum, so it's been a slightly slower start than you initially expected, but can you speak to how the opportunity pipeline as it stands today compares to your expectations when you made the acquisition?
Yeah, you're right. Their own performance, so their performance in their own right has demonstrated it's been slower than we would have liked. Again, for those you've heard us speak about the Saxum acquisition before, for us, the acquisition of Saxum wasn't so much about what they would contribute to the group in their own right. It was about the opportunities that they would bring to the group and the beachhead that they would provide within Latin America and the Americas, more particularly Latin America. It enabled us to access clientele and opportunities that we hadn't been previously. We wind the clock back 18 months, you know, Lycopodium wasn't bidding anything in Latin America, was unaware of and I'm sure lots of opportunities.
And we're now sort of much more across and attuned to and enabling and able to pitch for opportunities. As I said, Unico Silver is one example. It's pre-phase, obviously, at this point in time, still relatively early days, but they're an Australian-listed company with a silver project in Argentina. Saxum, in fact, secured the PFS on the back of the relationship and the fact that it's part of our group. And supported by, in that case, our Americas offices and process teams. We're currently bidding an expression of interest with a view to bidding a large copper concentrator opportunity within Argentina.
Again, supported by APAC, driven by our APAC hub, where we've got a lot of horsepower and a lot of track record in large copper concentrators, but only enabled by the fact that we have the Saxum business. So, in that respect, it's, it's going exactly to plan. Integration of the business has occurred and has occurred really well. And there's no issues there, no, no concerns there. Their cement, the traditional cement market is slower than we would have liked to have seen, and they would have liked to have seen, of course. And, you know, have we, have we landed a big fish or a medium-sized fish at this point in time? No, but we're really in very good stead on a number of great opportunities we wouldn't have had before, pre-Saxum Corp.
Great. Thank you. That's it from me.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ollie. Next question comes from Steven Scott at Veritas. Steven, please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Just on slide , with all the green dots, just noticed that, Europe and also maybe, Middle East, maybe, have presences there. Do you have any thinking about that in perhaps the medium term? Thank you.
Thank you, Steven. Europe is not on our radar per se. There's not a huge amount of mineral activities in Europe. There obviously is some mineral activity, but not a huge amount. Middle East, on the other hand, is on our radar. In fact, of course, we're currently working on the Yanqul project in Oman, where that project's being delivered out of our Americas hub. But also the Americas hub is seeing a number of inquiries from Dubai-based and Middle East-based groups. Some projects in the Middle East, some projects funded out of the Middle East and particularly into Africa.
And we also, we have an entity established in Dubai, where at this point in time, it's on the shelf. But, acknowledging that if we do need to and do find the level of prospectivity in that region increases to such a point that we consider it important to have an operation there, we can, you know, activate that. But certainly, I think we, the Middle East, from a level of prospectivity perspective, something we have an eye to, and could serve us out of APAC and out of Africa or out of our Americas hub, you know, where clientele are and where relationships exist. There's quite a, quite an amount of, I guess, money that's coming out of out of Dubai, in particular, Abu Dhabi, Saudi, alike.
I expect to keep seeing some opportunities coming out of there.
Thank you.
Thanks, Steven. The next question, well, we have a couple of questions on the shifting timelines. Are there any specific factors that caused the delays to the Tulu Kapi and Blackwater? And are there any second-order impacts on these delays? And specifically, there's a couple of questions around, you know, how much extra cost did you have to carry during the half that are associated with those delays, and is that visible in, you know, increased project expenses as a potential forward indicator?
It's not in, it's not indicated. It's not related to additional project expenses, per se. What it relates to, first of to the first part of the question, and that is, around timing, project delays, and the like. Unfortunately, the reality of our world is that we don't control when projects start. We have influence, obviously, by completing our study work efficiently, effectively, and well, making projects more fundable, more easily fundable. And, and dealing with what we do, our part, our inputs to projects, and making sure they are high quality, and I like to think we do that regularly and on an ongoing basis.
But the, you know, the timing of when a project starts, when it gets funded, when it gets permitted, some of those, you know, call them nuances, around when a project has a full green light, is not something we can control. And I'll give you an example. We bid a project last year, early, last calendar year, a project in Arnold, Canada. We gave it a red-hot crack. We were shortlisted and have cause to believe perhaps even the favored party. But that project time was, you know, apparently going to be starting in second quarter, calendar year 2025. That project still got permitting and some effectively native title issues that it's dealing with. These things we can't control.
We do our best to forecast and to do a likelihood and probability of a project going, and then a likelihood and probability of us, you know, skewing that project and then what that might mean for our business size, our capacity, our capabilities, and all that, you know, all that business planning that we do. But unfortunately, we don't control the timing of projects. And two that we've sort of singled out in our presentation today, we singled out because they are material contracts, potentially. Well, they, we, you know, they get the full green light, and we fully secure them. They're both material contracts, and have material demands on the business.
You know, we prepared in advance for what was meant to be a kickoff in, you know, call it fourth quarter 2025, and you have to do that because you can't be caught flat-footed on these things. They all have aggressive and challenging schedules. You know, when things don't kick off necessarily exactly as per our forecast, we have to, you know, adapt contingency plans and the like. And to the second part of your question, increased project expenses that you're seeing in the financials really relate to FG Gold, Baomahun, which is a relatively soft form of half EPC. I don't know too much detail, but it's a project where you're seeing some direct costs being coming through our books.
So that's where you're seeing project equipment, project costs. And on the equipment side, it's we've started a business about 18 months ago called Podco, where we sell some form of OEM products, leveraging our technical capabilities and our technology stuff developed over the years, and that's what you're seeing there. And to the last part, are we seeing, you know, have those project delays caused us to incur costs? Well, in one respect, yes. What happens with project delays is where you start seeing a softening in utilization of our personnel, because you know, you bring on 40 people, and they're not fully occupied to the level you'd like to see them occupied.
That can have an adverse impact because you're carrying some of their costs; it's not going to flow straight through to projects. But again, it's just a reality. We tend to model our commercials around a certain utilization level. If you're doing better than that utilization, then you'll make more profit. If you're doing less than utilization, you start eating, eroding into your target profits.
Thank you. Maybe just as a follow-up to that, can you comment on first half 2026 utilization, particularly in the second quarter against PCP? What would your expectations be for the H2 balance?
We expect to see utilization increase. So utilization was reasonably high through the first quarter of this financial year. It softened across the second quarter, as I said, certainly for some of our operational centers. APAC and Americas were running both fairly high utilization levels, but Africa, as I had mentioned, was lower, as was our process industries business in China and Saxum. Again, though, as a group, we were still running above target. Utilization levels were softer than we'd seen in the first quarter. We expect those utilization levels to increase. Our forecasts are that they will increase through Q3, Q4 of this financial year.
But certainly, beyond that, I would expect, based on our forecasts, that we'll see utilization increase into FY 2027 as well, and not only increase, but we expect probably bigger numbers, bigger headcount in due course. Obviously, evidenced by, you know, we're taking on more office space and the like, so that's kind of the plan.
Okay, great. Thank you. And in regards to the number of studies being currently undertaken by Lycopodium, how much would that be up on, perhaps a 12-month range?
That's a bit of a tough question to explain. In studies, in terms of total quantum, it's probably there or thereabouts, maybe a little higher. But it's obviously also the mix of studies and what those projects look like that we are studying, what the size of them are, what stage of study it is, et cetera. So it's always a tough question to answer, but if you just look at, you know, we've got more studies on today than we had on this time last year, probably I'd say we do, because we're doing more studies in the Americas, more similar number, similar amount of studies here in APAC, and probably a similar number of studies out of Africa as well. So it's probably up.
Thank you. Maybe just the last question this morning. Can you give us a sense of the conversion rates you currently see through the life cycle of project development? I.e., for each client that commences a scoping study, do they utilize Lycopodium for delivery and operations?
Often, yes. Sometimes, no. I'd say, most of the project work which we get involved with, we've been involved with study work and, you know, we expect that you... Well, we know that you have an advantage if you've delivered a feasibility study, whether it be the PFS, DFS. Often, if you're doing a scoping, you generally roll into PFS and DFS and so on and so forth. But what I will say is taking a project from scoping study, so especially a copper project, copper concentrate, for example, the scoping study level through to execution might take you 10 years. So these things take a long time. Gold projects, somewhat less, particularly this market.
We've got a number of clients who haven't done a Scoping Study and want to be in execution, want to be pouring gold by Christmas next year. Which is unrealistic, of course, but there's no shortage of sort of enthusiasm, call it, that side of the fence at the moment.
Okay, great. Thank you. I think that's all the time we have for live questions today. If there are any follow-ups, please feel free to email me and/or Justine, and we'll endeavor to get back to you. Maybe just with that, Peter or Justine, I'll pass it back to you guys for any closing comments.
Thank you very much. Nothing else to add, other than, you know, we're very happy with the way the business is tracking at the moment. We're really, you know, working to plan. Obviously, we're dealing with the batteries and the separate project timing and some of that impact that it has to the business over time. But in terms of the strength of the business, the fundamentals of the business, the balance sheet, of course, remains strong. You know, we're always looking for new opportunities, looking for how we can leverage our capabilities, and you know, do more and continue to do it as well as we're doing it, if not better. So yeah, that's it for the presentation.
Again, as I said earlier, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to myself or Justine, and we'll try to help you out with answers. Thank you very much for your attendance.
Thank you very much for joining today's Lycopodium first half results call. Enjoy the rest of your day. Goodbye.