Afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us on the call and allowing us to take you through the Half Year Results for FY 2022. Just starting on page two, talking to the Metarock executive summary. The half year has certainly been dominated by our work to establish Metarock as a specialized, diversified underground mining services group. This is part of a strategy that we've been communicating for some time around our expansion into the adjacent hard rock sector, as well as bringing through our mine operations contracts. We've now established our hard rock division and we're well progressed on our whole of mine contracts, which is delivering stronger growth, stronger revenue, and a significant uplift in margins for the entire business.
The PYBAR acquisition is integrating really well and this is a business that is strongly aligned with our core business at Mastermyne. Early integration is largely now complete, and we have 1,100 people and a strong order book with a national footprint on completing that acquisition, and a significantly broader commodity exposure. We've also seen the core coal business continue to perform really well over the half, and we've seen really strong cash generation through that business. We've continued to maintain a strong market share in the coal business and also seen some really strong results out of the Wilson Mining business, which is our specialized ground consolidation business, which we've owned for about 18 months.
The order book has now grown with the acquisition of PYBAR from AUD 1.1 billion to AUD 1.9 billion. As you can see in the graph on the right-hand side, the group revenue is now well on track to triple over the 18-month period. This is contracted work which we'll now focus on delivering over the next 12 months. The half year results delivered AUD 190 million of revenue, which was up 62% on the previous corresponding period and normalized EBITDA of AUD 16.6 million with some one-off adjustments to the EBITDA for Crinum and for some acquisition costs, which we'll talk to further in the presentation pack. Recent contract wins early in the second half, Cook Colliery, was announced.
It's a four + two-year contract generating AUD 70 million of revenue. This is a really important contract, as this goes to the revenue and margin uplift that we see now locked in for FY 2022 second half and also into FY 2023 and beyond. We also secured the Maxwell Drift projects commencing in FY 2023. We see this as a really strong endorsement from our clients on the new larger business and a real point of differentiation, you know, when a coal and hard rock business come together to provide a unique solution for a client. Our FY 2022 guidance has been revised down a little bit, predominantly because of the impacts of Crinum, and we'll talk to those in the next couple of slides.
Also a bit of a softer start with the PYBAR business and the early integration performance as well. Importantly, we've included some FY 2023 or the FY 2023 guidance there of AUD 700 million-AUD 750 million and EBITDA of AUD 80 million-AUD 95 million. I think, you know, it was important for investors to see why we're confident that the investment made in FY 2022 brings a material shift in the long-term financial outcomes for the Metarock Group. Again, we'll talk to those in the next couple of slides.
Just turning to page three, this is laying out our strategy on a single page, and we've been focused for some time now in communicating to the market that we wanted to diversify our business and expand into the adjacent hard rock market. But also, the other important part of our strategy has been the mine operations, and we're really pleased now to be able to say that we've executed on that strategy really well and our focus now shifts to execution. You can see in the middle column there, starting with our coal contracting business, established for 25 years, and this is a very strong part of our business with a very strong market share. It's a very stable business, you know, with very little competition in the coal market.
The mine operations business is where we drive a lot of the growth going forward, and we see there the significant growth from FY 2022 = FY 2023, and importantly, the margin uplift that will come with that. What's really driving this part of the business is this ownership changes that we're continuing to see where the large tier one operators are exiting the coal space and junior miners and investment groups are picking up these assets and don't necessarily have the capability to operate those assets. That's creating quite a niche market for Mastermyne, who is one of very few contractors who can actually perform that work.
Also see the approvals, difficulty in attaining new greenfields approval is driving more of this work to brownfield expansion and remnant mining, which lends itself to bord and pillar mining, an expertise of the business. Fundamentally, this Mine Operations generates long-term repeatable revenue with increased margins. On the hard rock business, again, as part of unlocking the growth in this hard rock space, the PYBAR acquisition will deliver us continued increased earnings and a national footprint, and as we say, material scale in this part of the business.
This is a business that's been operating for 28 years as a private company, and we believe that as part of an ASX group, this now opens up further growth opportunities for the PYBAR business. We continue to grow confidence in the hard rock space and the PYBAR business and being able to unlock the value in the PYBAR acquisition. Probably just the last point there on we've developed quite a strong management team. We've appointed David Sykes as the CEO of Mine Operations, and Paul Green the CEO of Coal Contracting, and Nick Woolrych retains the CEO role in Hard Rock Contracting. A very strong management team that will now focus in their respective areas.
Just in terms of providing an update on the Crinum accident and, as everyone's aware, there was a serious incident that resulted in a fatality underground on the fourteenth of September, resulting in a fatal injury to a colleague, Graham Dawson. We've continued to remain close with the family and also to support all our people that were affected by the accident. As you can appreciate, it's had a profound impact on our business and on our people. In parallel to that, we've been continuing to restart the project and making sure that we do that in a way that's recommencing safely and efficiently.
That's been carried out with the strong approval of the regulator, which approval of the regulator reduces the risk in further delays, and we're confident in maintaining the schedule. Sojitz Blue remains very supportive of the operation, so the client continues to work closely with us. We're making decisions now that are going to accelerate the schedule by investing in equipment to be able to bring forward production. We expect production will commence in the fourth quarter of FY 2022, progressively ramping up in the first quarter to three units by FY 2023. It's just worth noting there that the fall of ground incident occurred in the access tunnels in a very localized area at the start of the drifts.
The geology that you know was the cause of the incident is not impacting the underground working areas. The underground mining area is very different to the area that was affected by the geology in the tunnels. As a result of that, you know, we're confident that the mining areas underground won't be affected by the same geological impacts and the production schedule will be maintained. All up, the accident has cost us about 20 weeks. The majority of that was in the completing the investigations and working with the regulator to establish the mining plan for the restart.
Since we started the mining, the restart work, that work has moved quite quickly now, and gives us confidence in the dates of being able to start in the fourth quarter. The direct impact of the fall and the delays has cost the business AUD 7 million, and that's direct costs that were incurred in H1, in the first half. There are some remaining costs in the second half, and they've been reflected in the guidance for FY 2022. Whilst, you know, we have had quite an impact from this issue at Crinum, we're looking forward to, you know, this being a very strong project and with a very strong contribution to earnings and to margins from the Crinum project.
I'm on page five, just to talk about how the integration of PYBAR is going. We're just looking here to reinforce the rationale behind this acquisition. This is a business that's highly complementary with our core business and expedites our diversification, you know, gives us exposure to a broad suite of commodities with immediate scale. Importantly, 1,100 employees with a strong position in the East Coast market. Having such a strong workforce in a tight labor market is a real competitive differentiator. As I say, we're looking to exploit further growth in this business by really bringing in the Mastermyne or the Metarock way of doing business. This has been a really well-run business for 28 years but has been somewhat constrained by being a private company.
We're already seeing clients overcoming hesitation in dealing with the company, enabling us, you know, access to larger contracts. The recent Malabar wins is a vote of confidence from our customers in that new larger business. Probably just the other point I wanna sort of talk to there is, with the acquisition, we assumed AUD 50 million of equipment financing, and this provides us with a very specialized suite of hard rock equipment, and that equipment is all OEM-backed finance. And that fleet is hired directly to the client. Since the acquisition, we have had a revaluation on the fleet, and we've seen a AUD 13 million uplift in the valuation of that equipment from AUD 56 million to AUD 69 million.
Probably the last point there is, you know, the strong pipeline in this business really fits with Mastermyne's track record in acquiring private businesses and really driving the growth. You can see from the Wilson Mining business, you know, how we've demonstrated our ability to take private businesses and really grow those businesses once they become part of the Metarock Group.
Thank you, Tony. I'll now step through some of the financial performance metrics on slide six. As Tony mentioned, some good revenue performance at AUD 180 million and a 62% increase from the prior corresponding period, generated by strong performance in the coal contracting business. Normalized EBITDA, we've mentioned there the normalized numbers include the remedial and delay costs from Crinum for AUD 6.8 million, and also the one-off adjustments for the PYBAR transaction cost, which is about AUD 1.1 million. Normalized EBITDA margin 9.2%, slightly up 0.5% prior corresponding period. That's due to good contract management and good management of the contracts for our margins on the coal contracting business as well.
Normalized NPAT 2.2 million. This is up by 12%. Just to note, that's also been impacted by additional depreciation, as we mentioned, the uplift on the equipment valuation, that generates additional depreciation for the first two months from the PYBAR equipment. Also the amortization, both these non-cash costs, but amortization on the intangible assets also written off on the PYBAR acquisition. That's about another AUD 1.5 million, which is included in that NPAT result, which is additional amounts. Normalized EBITDA up, the adjustments at AUD 16.6 million, up by 70% prior corresponding period, and normalized EBITDA at AUD 5.6 million.
Should also note the CapEx for the period, as I mentioned, to generate the revenues in 2023 that we're looking at and tripling our revenue. We've got capital spend for this half, which is about AUD 19 million. Majority of that was for the Crinum CapEx to bring that project into fruition. We'll talk further about the further CapEx spend in the second half, bringing those projects into full ramp up, as well as the Cook CapEx spend as well. In addition to our sustaining CapEx to keep the lights on, keep the overhauls going on our current equipment.
On page seven, to touch on our safety and sustainability, you know, quite obviously the Crinum accident has really reinforced our commitment to our health and safety and our focus on those key features of being a high-reliability organization. We've also made good progress in understanding the PYBAR safety management system and approach. We see there's a lot of strong synergies and learnings in the health and safety approaches across the coal and hard rock sectors. We're already seeing numerous examples where the respective businesses have benefited from the ways that each of the businesses deal with health and safety issues.
Also progressing our sustainability roadmap as the organization continues to grow and has an increasing influence in the areas that we operate. With respect to our people, you know, for some time we've been talking about the significant investment that we've channeled into growing our people. This becomes a real point of differentiation for our business, particularly with the growth pipeline that we had ahead of us, and we have ahead of us. You know, with the PYBAR acquisition, it certainly strengthens our leadership team, and we're seeing, you know, very much the investment in our learning development system starting to pay off, with a lot of internal promotion of people.
you know, these are people that have been with our business for a long time that are now growing into the project roles that are supporting the growth in the business moving forward. Really important is our in-house recruitment and onboarding teams. we've got, you know, excellent track record in delivering the right people as we grow. this is a process that was honed, you know, in the 2010 to 2013 resources boom. we're now starting to apply a lot of those processes back into the business now as we continue to grow Cook and Crinum and the PYBAR business.
Also our underground simulators play a very important role in delivering a pipeline of employees or cleanskin employees safely and efficiently across our not only our coal business, but also our hard rock business as well. We've got our first simulator being built in Orange with the first trainees expected to be coming out of that simulator in about April, May this year.
Thank you, Tony. Can I now step into some more detailed financial performance metrics starting on slide 10. Just breaking down the segment reporting that we'll show on our financial accounts that have also been put on the ASX. The segments are Segment Mastermyne, which as we've discussed, includes our coal contracting and our mine operations business, and then PYBAR being the hard rock. These are showing the normalized results against the prior corresponding period. We've mentioned the revenue, the PYBAR contribution for the two months. The acquisition was completed in early November. PYBAR includes two months of revenue in these results for AUD 43 million. The Mastermyne revenue was up by 23% at AUD 237 million for the six-month period.
We've mentioned the performance is impacted by initial integration issues with PYBAR, and we'll talk about that further in the divisional review, on page 21. Normalized EBITDA is up by 70% for prior corresponding period. As we mentioned, the normalized adjustments for the Crinum and the PYBAR acquisition costs. PYBAR contribution from November was AUD 3.5 million of EBITDA, and the Mastermyne normalized EBITDA was up by 34%, which is quite pleasing as well. We've mentioned the EBITDA margins. Also the additional PYBAR depreciation and intangibles, as I mentioned on the previous slides. Just moving to the next slide, on Slide 11. Again, this is now the step through just the statutory to our normalized results, just to provide the step through.
On the left-hand column, the statutory results is as reported in our audited accounts. The Crinum impact and the PYBAR acquisition impact, AUD 6.8 million and AUD 1.1 million flowing through. Moving to the next slide for cash flow on page 12. Really the highlight here is the strong cash flow generation from operations has really been helping to assist our first half cash payments in terms of CapEx and other investment for growth. Over the period, we've generated operating cash flow of AUD 19.5 million. During the period, we've made the following payments for the PYBAR acquisition payment, which was made in November for AUD 11.7 million. We've made the Wilson Mining Services acquisition that we made back in 2019.
That had an earn-out payment for the period of AUD 2 million. We've also paid the full year dividend of AUD 2.2 million. As we mentioned, the significant capital expenditure in first half to help the transition to mine operations projects and Crinum project was AUD 11.5 million, and our sustaining capital spend for Mastermyne and PYBAR for the two-month period was AUD 7.3 million. This just shows the strong financial discipline we have around our receivables and our working capital to make sure we've got a strong operating cash flow, can help assist with that future investment for growth. Moving to the next slide with the balance sheet position.
First of all, across our group, we've got undrawn facilities of AUD 117 million between equipment leasing facilities and working capital facilities, which puts us in a good position to be able to fund our mine operations projects and the capital required over the next six months and onwards. In terms of movements for the balance sheet between the periods, really the significant impact here is around the PYBAR acquisition and the impacts to the balance sheet. As we mentioned, the trade receivables and inventory increases up by AUD 52 million. Property, Plant and Equipment increase of AUD 69 million.
We mentioned that's an uplift in value through an independent valuation process that we formed after acquisition and as part of the acquisition accounting that moved that from what we assumed it was, initial AUD 56 million, the book value. On valuation, that increased to AUD 69 million, which was good to see. The average age of the fleet is in good condition and relatively short in age, at three-four years. There were borrowings associated with it of approximately AUD 50 million that came across, but this is all related to hire equipment that are actually used in projects on a day-to-day basis.
The intangibles increase, the PYBAR acquisition was represented by goodwill and also by other intangibles around client relationship arrangements, client contracts, etc. The net debt position at December was AUD 70.2 million. That was a gearing ratio of about 1.5 times for the half. We're targeting to come back to a one times gearing ratio by the end of 2023, and we'll talk about that with our capital requirements on the next couple of slides. Equipment debt is fully backed by the equipment or fully supported by the equipment value. The other liabilities include the PYBAR acquisition for the deferred consideration amount, which is approximately AUD 10 million due in November.
I mentioned the undrawn facilities, which is split between equipment leasing, which it has about AUD 65 million available, and our working capital facilities between invoice finance facilities and overdraft, is about AUD 52 million available. The next slide is around capital management over the next 18-month period. As we mentioned, H1 we spent about AUD 19 million on capital, predominantly on the Crinum project for AUD 11.5 million. H2 we see a significant increase in our capital spend to bring the Crinum project to production, and to bring the three units into place over the following period, into 2023.
Also the Cook project, which we announced last week, mining services contract, we now will have about AUD 11 million of spend for that project to bring that to full production as well. We also show there our sustaining capital requirements for the second half and also for 2023. As you can see, the second half of 2022 is a significant step up in our capital spend, but a requirement to bring those projects into fruition and generate the revenue and profitability performance in 2023 that we've highlighted in our guidance. We show there that our gearing ratio steps up at June 2022 to about 2.2 times on a normalized EBITDA.
We show there that comes back to under one times by the end of 2023. A clear path there to come back to a one times gearing ratio, which is really the aim, one of our financial disciplines and targets we're going to achieve. Also mentioned our current banking facilities, fully sufficient to fund our capital project requirements into the future, but also looking to in the future to develop capital light strategies for any future growth projects as they arise. Next slide is our financial disciplines. I mentioned briefly about this before, but there's really three areas there in our efficiency, value creation, and capital management. Efficiency is around delivery of our projects, making sure they deliver the outcomes that we expect, the margins we expect.
Delivering target margins, keeping our overheads to a suitable level. Working capital focus, ensuring our work in progress is billed efficiently, quickly, and we recover our dollars and get the cash in the bank from our clients. Value creation, making sure that our contracts are flexible and work with our clients to get the outcomes that they require as well as the returns that we require. Capital investment, making sure we make sound decisions around our equipment that gives us the advantage to secure contracts with our clients. But also the opportunity to purchase and maintain and countercyclically if we're required to buy equipment opportunistically.
Mergers and acquisitions, we will look at acquisitions in the future that target complementary services that continue to build the geographic footprint and continue to expand our existing services. Capital management, we have a low debt tolerance, and Mastermyne have been that way in the past. We've got a clear pathway to come back to a debt ceiling of one times EBITDA by the end of 2023, and return to a net cash position which has been our previous capital management target in the past. Dividends, there is no dividend announced for this half, given the capital requirements that we have for the next six months.
Looking to return to a payout ratio of 40%-60% of NPAT after we get to the 1x EBITDA. Excess capital, maintaining a cash position of AUD 20 million just to have that war chest and requirements as we need, and look at buybacks and special dividends to return any excess as required.
Just stepping through to the divisional performance on slide 17. Just breaking down the Mastermyne and PYBAR businesses and the mine operations. On slide 17, this is the consolidated contracting and mine operations numbers. And you can see there, you know, quite a strong result from the contracting business. Probably the key point here is that, you know, we're continuing to see operations expanding, particularly in New South Wales. We have a number of projects which are now getting close to being awarded in New South Wales, which will come through in the second half as well.
As mentioned earlier, the Wilson Mining business has delivered consecutive half year of strong results, and we're continuing to build that market share in the Wilson Mining business in coal, but also expanding into the underground hard rock sector as well. Mentioned there the RTO business, MyneSight, which is a really important piece of our overall strategy in being able to deliver the people pipeline, which really differentiates us from our competition is being able to have a strong pipeline of highly qualified people coming into the operations. On page 18, just to talk to the mine operations projects.
Crinum, significant progress, as I said, been made in terms of progressing the remediation work in the drifts, but also with all the key infrastructure as well. That's progressing quite well. I've mentioned that the production is scheduled to commence in quarter four, and ramping up progressively thereafter. Overhauls are all on track to meet that schedule. Importantly, the contract duration remains at six years with no change to that mining schedule, and that annualized revenue, you're looking at AUD 95 million per year from FY 2023 when we ramp up to the three development units. Current workforce is at 71 people on site, and we'll start to see that ramp over the next six months.
That will grow to 180 people once the project's fully up and running. On the Cook project, as Brett mentioned, that's just been announced early in the second half. That revenue ramps up over the second half to a full run rate of AUD 70 million per year. That infrastructure is now all being recommissioned. You would have seen in the previous announcements, we talked to phase one work, which was to get the mine ready for production, and all that work has now been completed. We've actually started to actually cut coal at Cook and that will ramp up to the three mining units over the next couple of months as well.
Production machines are well underway. So these are purpose-built bord and pillar miners that have been specially designed around the Cook and the Cook seam and the methodology that we're using, which is a low risk methodology for that operation. Similarly with the workforce, there's 60 people now on site, and that will ramp up to 198 people. Cook and Crinum obviously are, you know, both very important projects in terms of our FY 2023 step up in revenue and in our margins. On page 19, the divisional overview of PYBAR. Starting off with, you know, taking full control of the PYBAR business from November. These are the November, December results.
We're only very early in the integration process, and we're already seeing some opportunities to create some further values by bringing the two groups together. That's only still very much in its early stages. As we mentioned, we've been awarded the Maxwell work. We've extended a contract in Western Australia with Gwalia at St Barbara, which was a really important win for us over in the West. We did have some softer results in November and December, which were predominantly around the Thalanga project, which had some ground support issues, which required us to divert a lot of our production fleet, development fleet to doing ground support remediation.
That work's now been completed, and we've now moved back into development and production from sort of late January, early February. We also had an underperforming contract, which was known at the time of the acquisition, which contributed sort of a bigger loss in November and December than anticipated. Importantly, we're now well advanced with discussions with the client around resolving that, and we expect that to resolve, you know, in the second half and very early in this quarter. You know, of all the projects, we have had some issues at Thalanga and this and one other contract.
To put that in perspective, of the 10 major projects, eight of those projects are performing really well, and those scopes are expanding. With the benefit of the involvement of the Mastermyne and Metarock Group, we're confident we'll turn these two projects around very quickly. We just wanna remind people that, you know, the outlook for PYBAR is very strong. This is a business that has historically had very strong performance, very strong margins. Over the next 12 months, we expect the business to be back and performing really strongly and growing quite quickly through into FY 2023 and FY 2024.
Just to touch on the outlook and the pipeline on page 21. We're seeing our order book now at AUD 1.9 billion, AUD 245 million of that will be delivered in the second half, and we also have some recurring revenue which comes through as well. What's really important of the FY 2023 revenue is 83% of that revenue is now under contract. We also get quite a bit of recurring revenue work, which comes over and above that. We can see when we put the guidance out for FY 2023, it's underpinned by a very strong order book and contracts that have already been secured. You can see the run-off there in the order book post FY 2023.
The pipeline currently stands at over AUD 2 billion, so a very strong pipeline, and that's been supported by very strong commodity prices in both the coal and metals business. On page 22, we've just laid out the order book. You can see there the previous tenure of many of these contracts, and the order book going forward. Both PYBAR and Mastermyne have very strong track records in rolling over contracts and renewing contracts. What we have there is, you know, a very strong order book with a number of tier one operators, and all good quality contracts, you know, which support the FY 2023 revenue and beyond.
Just to finish up on the outlook slide on page 23, you know, we just wanna reinforce the message that we've got very, very clear line of sight to the uplift in our in our revenue and margins in FY 2023. You can see the EBITDA bridge there building from where we currently are through the mine operations and the full contribution of PYBAR for 12 months gets us to the midpoint of that revenue for FY 2023. The Mastermyne contracting business, you know, continues to travel extremely well. It's got a very strong track record. As I mentioned, we've got new contracts which we expect to bring through in the second half. Wilson Mining continues to perform very strongly with very strong margins.
That's all supported by the people pipeline that's being delivered through MyneSight. Our mine operations, we talked about the Cook announcement, but also now the Crinum restart, which is well progressed and very clear line of sight to the start of production in Q4. That mine operations, you know, not only underpins a material shift in revenue, but it also underpins a material shift in the overall margins for the business as well. Our capital intensity on those projects falls away from FY 2023. It's really an investment year in getting Crinum and Cook up and running.
We see those projects move into operations and generate very strong cash flows, operating cash flows from those two projects. The PYBAR business, again, you know, has a very good, very strong track record in delivering revenue and profit. We've seen that in the historical performance of the business. We've got a very, you know, clear plan to recover the two underperforming contracts, or, sorry, the underperforming contract. Thalanga is now back on track, and so that's really well progressed, and we're very much focused now on delivering growth.
Malabar is our first major win for PYBAR, as part of the Metarock Group, and we expect to be able to deliver more of those wins in the next 12 months. Just finishing off there with our guidance. Again, reinforcing, you know, FY 2022 is very much a year of investment and realizing our strategy. It's about putting our strategy into action, which we've now done, invested in the equipment that's gonna give us the uplift. As we move into FY 2023, you see the material shift in the business. Importantly, again, reinforcing that, you know, this is work that is now contracted, and our focus now quickly moves to really strong execution. Finishing off the long-term outlook.
You know, I guess the summary of this is that we're very early in the stages of a broad mining cycle. We've seen, you know, commodity prices remaining very strong. You know, we believe that mining services contractors will benefit from that. We've seen many of the pre-production contractors in drilling and engineering are currently experiencing strong results. With that, production exposed businesses like Metarock will benefit from that current development activity. We've seen a number of committed projects, you know, have grown sharply in recent years. That exploration activity as well as those committed projects, you know, will lead to quite strong order books over the next couple of years.
I guess in summing up, we're saying we're in the very early stages of a broad mining cycle. I think we're only, you know, just seeing the early stages of that, and that's been evidenced by say the committed projects and the amount of exploration work that's going on. You know, the growth in our operating mines and our hard rock mining investments has transformed our business. As we said, FY 2022 is really a year of investment that underpins a significant long-term step up in revenue and margins.
Once we move into operations at both Cook and Crinum, we'll see a material step up in our operating cash flows, which supports our capital management plan and reducing our targeted gearing ratios. We're also, as I said, very well capitalized with undrawn facilities across equipment leasing and working capital facilities. We're well positioned to get through the second half of FY 2022 before we move into that strong operational focus. Just again, reinforcing our revenue in FY 2023 of AUD 700 million-AUD 750 million and our EBITDA of AUD 80 million-AUD 95 million. I'll hand back to the moderator for any questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. We'll now pause a moment to allow for any questions to register. There are no questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Caruso for closing remarks.
Thank you. Again, thank you everyone for giving us the opportunity to take you through the FY 2022 results. We look forward to catching up with many of you when we undertake the roadshows in the next couple of weeks. Thank you.