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Good morning and welcome to Rubicon Water's investor webinar to discuss the company's first half FY23 results. On today's webinar, we have CEO Bruce Rodgerson and CFO Jason York, who will run through the presentation released today on the ASX. To ask a question, please submit them via the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. We'll do our best to get through as many of those as possible. I'll now hand it over to Bruce.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Bruce Rodgerson, the CEO, and joined today by my CFO.
Good morning, everyone.
Yeah, so we're not going to go through a detailed presentation today on what we do as a business. We cover that from time to time. Just one slide on this. Clearly, our business is about delivering systems which add value to governments, water management managers, and farmers, and the first part of that is our technology manages open canal irrigation infrastructure. This is the infrastructure around the globe that delivers 50% of the world's water resources and pre-modernization at horrible efficiencies, and we've got a track record of improving the efficiency of that and saving an amazing amount of water. We've got a couple of case studies today which will demonstrate that. As importantly, though, and as valuable, is that the level of service we provide through these systems enables agricultural production through farmers.
The second photo here of an Indian farmer at the tail end of one of the channels in our signature KBJNL project in Karnataka. This guy here is saying he is receiving water supply when he needs it for the first time in 30 years of being connected to that network. And that's as a result of our technology. We move to the fourth slide here. We're seeing an emerging part of our business in automating flood irrigation on farms. There's a program in Southern California called SWEEP, and they've done a pilot project this year on the Southern Desert irrigation project. We, as our technology, has won 10 of the 17 projects awarded in that project. That's 68% of the funding went to projects with our technology. The pilot is a $2 million pilot.
It's a $ 2 million pilot, and it's expected to deliver 6,000 megaliters a year of water savings. Now, 6,000 megaliters is roughly three mcg's full of water, and it's going to lead to increased food production, which is the other benefit that comes from automating these systems increased food production, which leads to food security. So, in a nutshell, our technology covers these opportunities to deliver benefits. S o moving to our results, so clearly, our first half result was underwhelming in a $ 27 million revenue and an underlying EBITDA loss of 4.2. As we had flagged previously, that result was materially impacted by the contracting and payment delays with a single Indian customer. However, we are going to move to positive cash flows in the second half of FY23, and that's importantly underpinned by a broader spectrum of expected receipts from established markets.
USA, Australia, Chile, which provides a balance against the ongoing unwinding of the debtors in our Asia segment. Clearly, Rubicon is fully funded to deliver on our FY23 guidance. Importantly, that guidance hasn't changed. Our full year forecast is maintained at an EBITDA of greater than $ 12 million, and that's on the back of strong expectations of contracting near-term opportunities from our pipeline. Through this period, we haven't stepped back on our investments at all. We are making those key, and importantly in that is the investing in the on-the-ground resources close to our markets. This is a fundamental foundation for our future growth. Really important investments, which is going to pay dividends in the near and medium term. Evidence of that is we have significant ongoing opportunities across Asia and the rest of the world.
Not only there, but particularly in modernization programs in North Africa, Central Asia, and North America, where there are opportunities in each of those markets themselves that could be transformational for the business. So our success this year in sort of that international expansion in some of these projects has been recognized independently. So we won the Australian Sustainability Exporter of the Year this year. And we also were awarded by the International Congress on Irrigation and Drainage, so the preeminent global group managing this infrastructure that we work on, with the WaterSaver Award, which was around our India project. So it's important if we talk about this India project. Clearly, as we've flagged, the delays in payments and the delays in contracting future works has been a major contributor to our poor first half results. However, this project is a fundamental example of what our technology can do now.
Incredibly challenging conditions in rural Karnataka, 400,000 hectares, remote area. We've delivered 4,300 sites across 400,000 hectares. And we are delivering the benefits. You saw the networks coming through to that farmer. Those farmers are now getting adequate water supplies. And we're still optimizing the system, but it's having huge benefits. And that was evidenced by Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, who inaugurated this project as part of a political rally, but he was on site on our project. 200,000 people were there to witness him doing this. You can see a small clip here of Narendra Modi. This was at our inauguration. What he's doing here, what he's talking to here is he's equating water security for India to be equivalent of national, border, coastal, and internal security. So he's putting it up there as one of the biggest issues that India is facing at the moment.
He's then referring to our project, the Narayanpur Left Bank Canal System, and that this new system is going to deliver water and bring water service to 400,000 hectares of those farmers. He then goes on to say, importantly, that this network is now delivering water in the volumes needed to the farmers across that whole entire network. One of Modi's key slogans in this space is more crop per drop. Our project, 400,000 hectares, delivering enough water. He's telling the farmers across those 400,000 hectares, "Enough water is going to come to you for a very long time, and you're going to grow more crop from a drop." This is a milestone moment for Rubicon having this level of profile in one of the biggest potential markets we've got. We've got a project that's delivered.
We've got political will behind it, and there's allocations of budgets as well. So I thought it's worth emphasizing here, despite pointing to the problems that the India market has caused us, it's still a massive opportunity for us, and we are incredibly well positioned going forward. So I'll throw to Jason to go through some of the numbers.
Thanks, Bruce. As Bruce alluded to, our results for the first half have been somewhat challenging with revenue of $ 27.2 million and an underlying EBITDA loss of $ 4.2 million and a loss after tax of $ 5.8 million. I'll touch on the next slide on just a breakdown of some of the revenue movements year over year. When we look through to a gross margin perspective on lower volumes, we have headwinds on our gross margin percentage due to a fixed nature of a portion of our cost of goods sold. As a result, our gross margin percentage is down 7% to 35.5% when compared to the prior half. We expect to see a recovery in our gross margin percentage as we see an increase in volumes over the second half.
Despite the challenging conditions in the first half, as Bruce alluded to, we've continued our investments in operating costs, including continued investment in our globalization project with the expansion of our assembly capability further in the U.S. for additional products and the sourcing capabilities within our facility in India, where there's some in excess of 2,000 products now available to be sourced out of the India market. We've also continued over the half our investment in our R&D programs, which is for the next generation of Rubicon products, and we've also added capacity to our software development team as well. Looking through at our revenue now in a little bit more detail, looking at the positives, our recurring revenue for the half year was up 3.4% or $ 200,000 to $ 6.5 million for the half year. We look at our recurring revenue in two buckets.
The first bucket is in relation to our software and support, and the second bucket is in relation to our product parts and consumables and support. So looking at the software revenue more particularly, a really pleasing result for the first half, which was up 10% relative to the first half of last year. And then this was offset slightly by a slight decline of $ 100,000 on our components and support revenue, which was down by 4% relative to last year. Looking at our segment performance on the positive, our rest of world segment was up 3% to $ 12.7 million for the half year.
That growth was driven out of Latin America, so had really positive growth out of Latin America for the first half of the year, while the U.S., Europe, and our global markets were in line with the half of the first half of last year. Pleasing to note for us, in particular in the US, we had a very strong result in FY22, and we've continued to deliver similar quantums of projects in the first half of FY23. Also during the first half and rest of world, we've seen pleasing progress through our pipelines in both Europe and Central Asia. Bruce alluded to the potential of transformational projects for us coming through the pipeline here. If we look across to ANZ segment, a challenging first half in ANZ, down $ 1.7 million to $ 9.4 million for the half.
We did have some natural challenges in the first half for a number of our customers with the floods in southeast of Australia. These had a real impact on a number of our customers by the flooding, which impacted both their capital works programs and maintenance programs in the first half of the year. This has resulted in Australia and our hardware sales being down by $ 1.5 million compared versus last year, and a reduction in our parts and support income of $ 200,000 relative to the first half of last year. The Asian segment, as Bruce previously stated, we've been continued to be impacted by the time of contract signings in the Indian market, which is the main driver to the challenging first half within the Asian segment.
On a really positive note for us, the China market, despite being heavily impacted by first COVID lockdowns in the first part of the half and then following on with actually dealing with the outbreak of COVID in the second half, despite this, we saw a continuation of the modernization programs in the Ningxia province. So in China itself, our revenue was slightly up relative to the prior year. Looking across to our cash flow for the first half of the year, so our cash flow from operations was a cash flow out or a cash loss of $ 6.9 million. Points to note or highlight for us, we did see through the first half a continued investment in our inventory over the first half. We've spoken about it previously with some requirements for longer lead time ordering on componentry, which has continued through the first half of this year.
These holdings of inventory will ultimately provide us the flexibility and capability to deliver on our forecast for the second half of the year. Focus for us in the second half is very much on execution. It's going to be securing projects and delivering on projects. And the expectation is that we'll see an unwinding of this inventory position in the second half. Also important for us as we look forward to the second half is our expectation is to have a positive cash flow from operations in the second half. And Bruce alluded to that in the initial slide, has a balance of expected receipts out of mature markets as well as the material unwinding of receivables in India as well. Looking across at our cash flow from investing, so our capital programs have continued in the first half of this year, in particular with the development of software.
Our spend overall relative to last year is slightly down in the comparable period we established the assembly facilities in the U.S., which haven't reoccurred. From a cash flow from financing perspective, so just under $ 3 million of cash inflows for the period. That is a net inflow of $ 3.5 million from our HSBC facilities, while around $ 600,000 was paid on our lease liabilities for the period. And again, reaffirming the message that our expectation for the second half is that we'll move to a cash flow positive from operations in the second half. Looking through to our balance sheet now, so as a business, we maintain a significant asset base of $ 127 million, and our net assets are sitting just over $ 17 million.
Looking at our banking facilities and debt, as at the end of December, our HSBC facility limits were $ 34.5 million, and our net bank debt at the reporting period was $ 24.6 million, meaning there was approximately $ 9.9 million of cash and facilities available to the business as at the reporting date. Subsequent to December, the company has secured additional working capital facilities of $ 6 million on favorable terms from related parties. These additional facilities will provide a backstop to the business as we move into the second half of the year. Given the result for the first half has been challenging, we've had to work with HSBC on our covenants.
HSBC have provided us waivers for both the December quarter and also a preemptive waiver from the measurement of our covenants for the March 2023 quarter. We fully expect, as we move through to the June quarter, to be fully compliant with all our banking covenants.
If we can go to talking a bit about the opportunities again for the business. I think one of the drivers for the investment in our technologies is water stress. We've got a series of newspaper articles here from recent weeks, and they typically, well, they are news articles around for water stress in the areas where our near-term pipeline is based. The Aral Sea loss caused 92% of the water aggregated there. Massive issues there. Our markets of Uzbekistan, but particularly Kazakhstan, we've moved from pilots into implementations, and we're working on national plans there with both governments around coordinated strategies to optimize irrigation. Italy, we've made a big forward investment. As we said, we've put the people on the ground in the markets that we expect to move. Italy and Europe is one of those.
The EU funding around water resources and water efficiency projects, we've seen that in the pipeline. It's huge, and we've been actively pumping projects and proposals into that funding pipeline, and they're starting to come to the market. We've got a succession of projects in the market tendered or contracted now. You can see that was only yesterday. Venice's canals run dry as the Alps receive less than half the usual snowfall. The Po River drying up for the first time in living memory, and then you move on to Colorado, another one of our key markets, the Colorado River and Southern California and Arizona. From the 20th of February this year, Lake Powell's hit its lowest historic level. Year on year, it's lower and lower.
The crisis is there, and the opportunities, and they've already been the first slide there spoke about the opportunities in Southern California around the SWEEP program and what the biggest users of agriculture can contribute by efficiency, so these are the drivers behind the funding for our investments, but it's not an immediate flip from government funding through to specified projects in the market, so what that means for our pipeline, importantly, the pipeline has grown again over the last six months, but more importantly, it's moving towards the near-term projects for us, so as we move through our funnel, like any of these sales funnels, scale, contracting, and timing becomes more certain, so we are moving through that 13% increase again over the next six months. Really pleasing progress in rest of the world.
So there, Europe, which is Italy, Spain, but predominantly Italy, and North Africa, some amazing opportunities coming out of Morocco and Egypt, and as I say, the potential of transformational changes to our business there. All being, as I said, by the droughts and the global thematic around water are really pushing people to look at efficiencies in the infrastructure that's delivering 50% of the world's water resources. Emphasizing again, it's a long haul here. We've got to get the resources in the ground to build these pipelines in place. That's the investment we've been making over recent years, and it's going to pay dividend in the near term. Big investment we've made, and one of the reasons for the IPO was our software platform. So 28-year-old business, core software we had built over that time.
We needed to make a fundamental transformational investment in that business and the technologies and system and deployment methodologies. You can see here that the blue dots are our installed irrigation district customers around the world. The purple dots are the new customers over the last seven, eight months. So last year was our record number of new software deployments. And an absolute key for us is the adoption of not only those new customers, but our legacy customers in moving to the newer tech. So the investment we're making is paying dividends, but it's the foundation for the building of the business going forward. So every one of these customers is a new opportunity with our software. The key, we're really proud of what we've developed here. The team we've built last year has a record percentage of their capacity on this new tech development.
The adoption of this here is really powerful. If you look at the cloud adoption as the last little graphic that's popped up there, so these are customers that are implementing our systems hosted in the cloud. And that will be the future across these networks. Next, s o moving to a case study here. And again, to understand the value in Rubicon, you've got to understand the value in the technology we provide. So in 2021, late 2021, we finished installing a project in Northern Queensland and the Mareeba Irrigation District in Far North Queensland. It was about an $ 8 million project on our technology and about a similar amount on the civils and related project management works there. This project, and this is difficult to run from an irrigation point of view.
It's steep, it's hilly, it's got a combination of all the hydraulic challenges you can get, and that meant that it was hard to run manually like these districts are around the world. Sunwater is reporting after the first year of that program that the water savings of around 8,000 megaliters a year have been achieved and are expected going forward. Now, 8,000 megaliters a year, to put in perspective, to use my mcg analogy again, is five mcg's full of water, or to put it another way, it's the volume of water that would support a town of 100,000 people, but in this sense, that water is going to be allocated for additional water use licenses in that Mareeba area, so this is highly fertile agricultural land, starved of water. Now there's 8,000 megaliters available to that.
The predictions from Sunwater are that 8,000 megalitres applied to high-value crops in that region could be up to $5 0 million of additional agricultural production. So these are the business cases that are driving governments around the world to look at the solutions that we provide. And it's what gives us confidence in our pipeline. So summing up where we've got to, clearly a challenging first half result, not where we wanted to be. But importantly, we're holding our guidance for the full year here. This pipeline is moving, the contracts are coming. The sales pipeline has grown. It's $ 1.9 billion, and the near-term opportunities are there. We've got that progression to the more certainty around the near-term opportunities. We continue to invest in what we need to do to build this business.
The globalization project haven't got specific slides on that in this presentation, but the ability to build in the volumes we need to deliver on that pipeline closer to and in the markets where our customers are, that's a big investment we're making, and it's already paying dividends. Our R&D program, and as I said, the software deployment, really important. We're fully funded to deliver on our growth for this year, and that those cash flows in that model are spread across established markets, not just in Asia and India where cash receipts have been challenging but are unwinding, but we're on top of those issues. We did have a significant contractor award in China as they return to business as usual. I can say our China team has never been more bullish about and excited about the opportunities over the near term. The investments are coming.
It's been stagnant for a long while with COVID, and our team has never been more been issue about that. We do believe the India project is imminent. The tender process is underway, and there are other very meaningful projects to occur in Asia this year as part of our plans. Rest of the world, as I said, transformational opportunities for the business could come out of any or all of these markets. And that's the big part of our future. It's Asia, India, huge, but there's equally scaled opportunities around the world that we're going to move to, which is worth. Then my final point again is just to emphasize that the opportunities are big, but the timing of these contract awards is always difficult to predict. And that can lead to inconsistent financial outcomes, as we've just seen in the last six months.
Over time, as we get more and more of these footholds in these different markets, that's going to be the foundation for our future growth and then be able to provide greater earnings certainty. So thank you for that. I might throw back to Ben to run through any questions.
Yeah, thanks, Bruce. Just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please do so by the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. Just a question here. With the continued delay from India, are you concerned they will be prolonged for a significant amount of time? And if so, what would the ramifications for the company be?
Yeah. We can see, as I said, the Indian tender is in the market and it's closed, and we're going through the process there. So we're very confident in our position there on that and several other opportunities. We don't see those contracts, including the one with existing customer being imminent. But again, we're broadening the base of the business here. So not just from a cash flow point of view, but a revenue point of view, there's more and more coming from around the world. So very confident in India, despite the challenges that have been there. But it's not a full bet on India. There's lots of other transformational opportunities that are coming to the fore.
Thanks, Bruce. ANZ revenue was down 16%. Was this purely impact of the floods, or were there other factors? And do you think there could be a trend here?
Yeah. I mean, we've been open about the maturing of the capital programs in Australia. That Australia is only a small part of the world market. Our systems are well deployed across it. But there are still significant programs to be delivered. And this year's impact is not a factor of that reduction. It was a result of the floods across the Southern Murray-Darling Basin impacted the ability of the capital works programs to get out and measure and contract sites. And that was planned programs with existing customers which were put on hold due to the inability to get out and specify those systems. And likewise, the maintenance side of things as well. The floods didn't impact our infrastructure as such because we're up on the channel banks.
But it did impact the ability of our customers to get in their cars and access sites to be able to take those maintenance programs. Already, we're starting to see that maintenance work come back, and the work isn't lost. We expect to see that come back in this next winter program and next year's program.
Thanks, Bruce. Just wanna talk 10-year timeframe, which segment is likely to provide the most growth by geography?
Clearly, if you looked at our pipeline and the scale of that, and the biggest part of that pipeline is India. India's 69 million hectares of irrigation. We've just modernized successfully and produced huge benefits on 400,000 hectares. There's a massive opportunity there. If I talked about some of the other opportunities, probably we're working with the Egyptian government around a program in Egypt. The Nile Delta there has 70,000 kilometers of man-made canals. The Nile River is the lifeblood of that community. It's the only water source. Upstream of Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia are building some of the biggest dams in the massive dams. Egypt knows not only it's not just climate change, it's the fact that their inflows are going to reduce, and they have a massive program there.
So we're working with Egypt, with the Egyptian government, on a plan to automate those 70,000 canals. So that's the scale of the 70,000 kilometers of canals. And similar things in Kazakhstan as well. And as I say, even the Po Valley in Italy, it's one of the most intensive areas of surface gravity-fed surface irrigation in the world. And we are starting to enter that. So I would say I wouldn't pick a single one. I would say the opportunities across those North Africa is potentially the scale of India. Central Asia is as well. Europe, North America. So we've got a broad spread of opportunities. It's not a single bet.
Thanks, Bruce. So another question. EBITDA loss of $ 4 million in the first half will be turned around to a $ 12 million EBITDA profit for the full year. This implies a $ 16 million second half EBITDA. How confident are you in this forecast?
Yeah. So I mean, obviously, we're confident because it's there in the forecast. I suppose Jason pointed to the build-up in inventories and the mix of these works. So when we look at these forecasts, there's obviously the ability to get the contract signs and the assumptions around which contracts we will sign. And then there is our ability to deliver and recognize revenue. So we are in with our globalization project and the amount of inventories we have, we are in a position to deliver on that forecast. Not completely within our control is the ability to contract those works. But we are seeing these markets come through. The big part, again, is India, which has been some of the delays. But we have contracts in the market now, multiple contracts which have been tenders, have closed. We're in negotiations.
So we're confident in that, obviously, because we've made the forecast. And as we will see, if any of those foundational type contracts drop off, we'd come back to the market immediately and obviously inform them that they're not likely to be contracted this year. But at this stage, we're confident in that statement, understanding the $ 16 million turnaround from a $4 million loss.
Thanks, Bruce. So that concludes the Q&A segment. I'll now hand back to Bruce for closing remarks.
Yeah. Thanks, everyone. Probably spoken too much already, but understand the challenging first half. But our team, our executive team, the founders of this business have never been more optimistic around that near-to-medium-term pipeline. The need for our technologies, and now that we are demonstrating that across these different geographies on the scales we are, we see the bright future despite the poor results in the first half. So thank you, everyone. And we'll talk next time.