And CFO, Andrew Bendall. They'll go through the presentation that was released this morning on the ASX. To ask a question, please, submit them via the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen, and we'll do our best to get through as many of those as possible. I'll now hand it over to Bruce.
Thank you, Ben. Yeah, thanks everyone for attending our half year update. In May this year, we're going to come to the end of our 30th year of operations. Across that period, we've delivered AUD 1.2 billion worth of infrastructure and services globally to modernize around 2 million hectares of the irrigated land globally. Big numbers, but it's only 1% of the market we're chasing. You know, the effort we've made in recent years is in setting ourselves up to pursue that bigger global market will come to fruition, and we're excited about the future. In terms of last financial year, revenue of AUD 29 million was down about 9% on the previous year. That was impacted by a number of factors.
We are now an export business, so we are exposed to the Australian dollar exchange rate. Whilst that does move up and down, the H1 this year was inordinately impacted by movements in the exchange rates. That's because a lot of the contracts, many of the contracts that we signed last year, we had progress last year in terms of costs and revenue recognition. Those contracts were paid for this year. The gap between incurring the costs and recognizing the revenue, and getting paid for that, incurred a real appreciation in the Australian dollar. That impacted not only revenue, but that impact was also felt directly into the bottom line.
The bigger impact, though, for us was the government shutdown in the U.S. and the funding freeze in the U.S. That impacted more than just, you know, our target was not the AUD 32 million of the last comparable period. Obviously, we were planning and expecting significant growth on that, and the major contributing factor to not achieving our goals was that U.S. funding. As I said, you know, the, those impacts come across to a gross margin and underlying EBITDA, and we'll delve into that.
As an example of the U.S. market impact, four projects in the U.S. that had been approved by the previous administration remain approved by the new administration. Because of the funding freeze, have not been given the funding allocations to allow the notice of proceeds to be issued. Those projects remain approved. We expect them to come through. What we are hearing is positive news as we enter the new financial fiscal year in the U.S., that funding is starting to be allocated. We're hopeful that we'll see that come through. Offsetting the project funding in the U.S. is the significant number of major projects we've won around the world, particularly Chile, Costa Rica, and Italy, totalling AUD 11.9 million in the H1.
We'll dive into a bit more detail in those in the coming slides. Significantly, though, tenders underway for our major projects of focus of a combined value of more than AUD 30 million. We expect those tenders to be won in time for us to make a material contribution to FY 2026 results. That's a real movement in that pipeline to the final stages of tendering. Some of those tenders close in March, and we remain very strong in our position on those. Added to those pipeline of jobs, particularly those large priority projects coming through, we had a really strong start to the H2. January, February are traditionally low order months for us.
post-Christmas, start up of fiscal years in other parts of the country. This year it's been strong, notably strong. AUD 9.3 million of new contracts signed since January 1, that compares with AUD 3.9 million in the prior comparable period. That AUD 5.4 million obviously is, albeit orders rather than revenue, but it compares with the AUD 3 million undershot on revenue from prior comparable period. Really importantly for the business, we do spend a bit of time, we're going to spend a bit of time talking about corporate funding. This is a fast moving pace, fast moving space, and we have won our first direct contract from corporates looking to achieve water savings for their ESG goals.
There's a lot happening in that space. We also recently were awarded a AUD 2.7 million contract in Australia for our offering into floodplain management. Not a space we've really been in in Australia before, it's really quite exciting for us in that market, both in Australia and globally. Why are we confident when we talk about those tenders in the market? Why are we, you know, so confident in our ability to secure that contract? It's because of our unique end-to-end value proposition. When a customer or a tender enters the market looking for an end-to-end solution to modernize an irrigation district, to save water and increase agricultural production across a gravity-fed irrigation district, we really don't have competitors.
Not only don't we have live competitors, we've got the demonstrated track record and reference sites that deliver that solution around the world now. We're, that's why, that unique proposition, value proposition is why we express so much confidence that when the tenders get to that stage, we're very well placed to win them. We're gonna go through a few of the global highlights now that we did achieve this year, obvious. I'll go through those one by one. As I said, the United States, negatively impacted by the funding freezes, and the record shutdown. It's fair to say we did not anticipate that there'd be, you know, the biggest funding we have for our projects in the States historically has been U.S. Department of Ag and USBR.
We did not anticipate at the, you know, at the start of this financial year, that we'd be sitting here in February with no funding released from either of those agencies into our place. That's not been in our history that in the U.S. that has happened. Obviously, it's a unique situation in the U.S. We are hearing budget allocations now that in the new fiscal year, things will start to move. We're looking forward to that. Importantly, our base business in the U.S. has remained strong. We have achieved year to date, $9.2 million across of signings, across 81 separate orders from our existing client base. That is not, it underpins the business, not just in the U.S., but elsewhere.
When we deliver our solutions to a customer, there is ongoing work. That AUD 9.2 in the U.S., across those 81 contracts, is from existing clients, either enhancing, extending or maintaining their existing systems. Total year-to-date signings in the U.S., AUD 11.6, that includes a privately funded project around ESG water savings, we'll talk about that soon. Importantly, as well, with the reference sites continue to build, particularly in the U.S. Chaffin Farms has implemented our system over the last 12 months, we've made some really impressive results there. Chaffin Farms is in the areas we've modernized, has increased their yield by 18% while decreasing their water use by 35%. That's nearly a doubling of the productivity of irrigation water for that farm.
I encourage you to have a look at our website. There's a video detailing the work we've done at Chaffin Farms. Grant Chaffin himself talks to the benefit around our technology. Also, Turlock Irrigation, it's the one of the largest and the oldest irrigation districts in the Central Valley, California. They've been a long-term customer of ours, and they're now moving to full automation of their system, right from farmers ordering, all the way through to the delivery and measurement of the water. First part of that is the Ceres Main, which is going live as we speak. Irrigation is about to start over the next few weeks. The system is live, farmers ordering their water through our technology, and that's a fantastic reference site for us.
In Europe, continues to be really strong for us. AUD 6.9 million in contract signings in the H1 and AUD 8 million year to date. A good part of that is Spain, AUD 2.4 million. Importantly, though, that is two customers there, Bardenas and Alto Aragón, which are two of the largest districts in Spain. Entry points into two of those very large districts for us. We see that as a good opportunity, but by far, the most exciting part of our EMEA business is Italy.
We, on the back of Agro Pontino last year, our largest ever European contract, we've had really solid signings, building on AUD 5.5 million of contracts secured so far, that is expected to continue to flow. Additionally, again, reference sites. Angeli-Cerese, Genaiceto, Ottomila, these contracts we've delivered are delivering significant water savings in an audited sense, which provide fantastic reference sites. The other really, you know, equally or probably more exciting about Italy is the funding. Italy itself is investing huge funds into their National Recovery and Resilience Plan. EUR 880 million of that is aimed at reducing water loss in distribution networks.
In our space, and we are already seeing that come to the fore in tenders in our space, and contracting in our space. That, that secures the funding over the next few years for a continued expansion of our business in Italy. LATAM as well, has been an exciting space for us. Costa Rica, we've spoken about that a few times, we've last year, we won stage one of the project in Costa Rica. This year, we secured the second phase, and we are in the process of delivering that. Importantly, though, the third phase now is being fast-tracked on the success of the first two phases. The third phase is a much larger phase and deals with our core technology.
Phases one and two are about dealing with the headworks, automating the storages and the main feeder canals with our technology. It's our software, it's our comms networks, it's our instrumentation, stages three, four, five, and six over the next few years are then dealing with the broad-scale deployment of our core technology on much larger projects. Chile as well, our largest ever project in Chile importantly, with the Department of Hydraulic Works, Francisco Rivas is the contract. Department of Hydraulic Works is the federal funder in Chile for the large infrastructure projects. This is the second of our projects with the Department of Hydraulics and sets us well up for the future.
We've also been deploying the project we won last year in Argentina. Despite the economy in Argentina, we do see that as a, as a growing, as a growing market for us as well. With the in particularly in the Italian and our Florida markets, we've set there's an opportunity around the dual use of these canals. In Australia, the canal systems are pretty much around delivering water to farm for irrigation, and that's a primary use in, say, the Po Valley in Italy. Though, in places where that are susceptible to flooding and heavily urbanized areas, that same infrastructure is used then to get rid of floodwaters.
In Italy, the summer storms, particularly the increasing number of summer storms with climate change, these systems have to very quickly flip from delivering water for irrigation to getting rid of floodwaters. We've been working to develop solutions and business cases there around what our technology can do, and part of that has been we've developed a new product called the Floodgate. It's a dual acting gate that allows overshot flows for irrigation deliveries and then can remove itself completely from the waterway to get rid of floodwaters. That product has been instrumental in us winning the project in Australia for in the Murray-Darling Basin for for flat, the environmental water across priority floodplains.
That's as part of the Murray–Darling Basin Plan, the better use of the Commonwealth environmental water allocations to strategically apply to floodplains. We see that as a really strategic win for us here in Australia as well, in a growing market, but with global applications. If I move on to corporate funding, as I said, this is an exciting space, and this is where corporate entities are making ESG commitments, not just about carbon credits and energy, but are around their water use and sustainability. Making, there's, you know, around the globe, but particularly U.S. entities, we're seeing a major move in this space.
Corporate funding in the States, as I mentioned in the summary, we received a contract this year where we were directly funded by a corporate entity to provide a solution for Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District to modernize part of their network, save water, and then provide the audited results of those water savings for 10 years. Importantly, that project was different in that it contracted Rubicon directly, which these funders are keen to do, rather than fund various entities and individual irrigation districts. They're looking for vehicles like Rubicon that can deliver technology to be more efficient in the rollout of their funding. We did have two other projects as well, which were funded, where the funding from corporates went directly to irrigation districts, who then contracted us for the work.
That's in Arizona, in Gila River Farms and Bear River in Utah. Those two contracts were, over the last year, have been funded by corporates. We are engaged with several of the top 30 companies U.S. companies by market cap as they look to increase their investments to meet the water stewardship goals. Importantly, when we say engaged, we're not, you know, we are not talking about swapping business cards or a pitch at a conference.
As an example, one of the world's, the GM of sustainability for one of the world's largest company has requested us to provide details of what our, of the projects where our technology can make a material difference to water savings across the Colorado River Basin, and they're requesting us to provide that summary by the end of March. This is a fast-moving space for us. This chart here really shows the history of that water stewardship commitments. You know, Coca-Cola back in the early 2000s was one of the first to come on board. You can see by this chart the number of corporate entities that are signing up, and there are initiatives and guidance and standards and commitments that are being made.
First stage of which many organizations are saying 2030 is a critical period. At 2026, we're getting close. We have a business development executive dedicated to this space now. He's been in the States for a week-long conference called GreenBiz in Phoenix, Arizona, last week, where he has been engaging with many of these corporates. Importantly, that conference, GreenBiz, did a field trip to Gila River Farms to view our technology, making water savings efficiencies. It was one of the few field trips that was actually able to demonstrate and visualize exactly the water savings that they're chasing, and it's Rubicon technology for Gila River Farms.
That's a bit of a summary, and I might throw to Andrew now to lead through the results.
Thanks, Bruce. Look, I'll make a couple of brief comments around the financials for the H1. The top line reduced AUD 3 million period on period. AUD 1.7 million of the shortfall was as a result of the stronger Australian dollar on translation of our offshore revenues, particularly against the U.S. dollar and the Indian rupee. The other AUD 1.3 million was the net effect of lower volumes in the U.S. and Australia, partially offset by Europe. The gross margin percentage was down 6.7 percentage points compared with the H1 of FY 2025. 4.8 percentage points of this gap was attributable to the revenue shortfall, of which the FX translation impact at a 100% gross margin was 3.6 basis points, and 1.2% for the volume impact.
A further 1% was as a result of the lack of new price contracts in the U.S. in the H1 to fully absorb the tariffs imposed. Operating expenses were AUD 1.2 million higher during the period, predominantly on the back of higher employee cost. The business also incurred extra legal services as we resolved a number of issues in exiting our old joint venture in China and setting up the new one. As a result of the impact of the gross margin and operating expenses, the underlying EBITDA was AUD 4.2 million less than the previous corresponding period. The AUD strength also generated an adverse unrealized FX impact on the revaluation of our intercompany loans of AUD 2.1 million versus the H1 of 2025.
The bottom line loss for the period was AUD 6.4 million, AUD 5 million less than the previous corresponding period. Onto the cash flow. Despite receivables being reduced during the period on solid collections, including the last part of the Indian NLBC project debt, overall operating cash flow for the period were an outflow of AUD 2.9 million, driven by the lack of sales and ultimately the negative profit result for the H1. The business has kept up its investment for the future by maintaining spend on our next generation software, NeuroFlo. Key movements on the balance sheet since 30 June were reduced cash and receivables, while stock and contract assets were stable, combining to see a reduction in current assets of AUD 6.4 million.
An increase in the deferred tax assets on the back of the loss increased non-current assets, and net debt rose by AUD 5.2 million to AUD 19.5 million as a result of the operating and investing cash outflows. On to the projects pipeline. This slide captures the progress of our major projects of focus. The pie chart on the right represents our project pipeline as of today. The chart on the left was as of the date of our AGM, the last time we showed our pipeline. The one segment, being the left, the light green, has shown has grown by the inclusion of the Chilean project and an expansion in the scope of the Italian Villarosi project.
As has been mentioned earlier in the presentation, we now have a number of priority projects that have entered the tender phase, and as such, are within our close category, the purple, which has now grown to AUD 61 million from AUD 42 million. Some of the projects in our likely and possible categories have moved to close, whilst others, as we would expect, as the year progresses, move out to the gray next year category. Overall, we believe our pipeline still looks very healthy, with 18 priority projects totaling AUD 189 million in our sights. Back to Bruce.
Thanks, Andrew. In summary, you know, we are confident in H2 FY 2026 and FY 2026 in general. That's based on improved market conditions and conversion of several of these near-term projects we're talking about, but also importantly, our base business. That's, you know, we have Australia as our base business, and as I spoke about those AUD 9.2 million year to date on 81 different customer orders from our existing customer base in the U.S. That base business that we rely on, you know, is solid. The new funding avenues, as I've spoken about, are quite exciting for us. Moving away from government funding to more corporate timelines and decision making, is obviously a positive for the business. Not replacing, but supplementing and extending.
The proven customer outcomes become really compelling. The results of the work we've done in the U.S., in Italy, are seeing the amount of interest in our projects and tenders and our pipeline expand there. That is the case around the world. What the examples we've got in the U.S. now with Turlock and Chaffin Farms and Fondomonte are really powerful in driving the pipeline. This near-term pipeline is very strong. As I said, we've got tenders about to close to in excess of AUD 30 million that we expect to materially impact FY 2026 results.
The contract signings we have, around the world, as well, you know, demonstrating, you know, relatively small countries in terms of the global scale of our opportunity. A country like Costa Rica is only small, but the opportunity there for Rubicon is close to AUD 30 million, over the coming years, and we're embedded in there now with stages one and two, and, that will flow on.
You know, we obviously have been spending some time here talking about corporate funding that's new and additional, but the government funding, the reform, as was done in the Murray–Darling Basin, as we're seeing in the U.S. with the Colorado Basin, and the reforms happening there, and as we're seeing in Italy with the need to achieve water efficiencies and that EUR 880 million dedicated to improving the efficiency of these broad distribution networks. All that goes to our optimism about the future. I thank you for your time, and I'll throw back to Ben to take any questions.
Yeah. Thank you, Bruce and Andrew. Just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please do so via the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. First question here: The prior strategy to reach profitability required growing to a certain level of sales, which would cover OpEx at constant gross margins. Given growth has faltered, is there an opportunity to be more assertive on pricing and capture higher gross margins?
Yeah, Bruce, I'm happy to answer that. I guess there's a couple of points I'd make. The prior strategy is still our strategy. We do intend on growing our sales line. Certainly the H1 is not where we would want it to be. Like all listed companies, we have a hard close at 31st of December. I don't think our growth has faltered. As Bruce has pointed out, you know, we, if you were to extend it to an 8-month period, as distinct from a 6-month period, we're actually ahead of the same time last year.
Some of those markets which were slower than expected, like Australia, in fact, in the first six months, in the last two months, picking up the Floodgate work, along with a whole lot of base spare parts type of business, that's back ahead of where it should be. You know, the priority pipeline that we spoke about, of some AUD 61 million in the close, we're still very much targeting growth this year. In terms of the gross margin, look, there's always going to be elements that are going to be outside of our control, and, you know, the currency piece on translation does have a big impact, because obviously you reduce your revenues, but nothing happens to your cost base, and therefore it becomes quite effective.
We have said before, and this absolutely holds true, that volume, and this is because not all of our cost of goods sold are truly variable. Volume certainly will pick up that margin from where it is, and we're expecting to have higher volumes in the H2. On top of that, and whilst it wasn't in the question, you know, we are taking a number of operating cost measures across the business to be able to reduce costs in the H2 also, so we can return to profitability.
I think the only thing I'd add there is pricing as well. As that uniqueness does allow us some flexibility in pricing, or a good amount of flexibility to increase prices. The environment in the U.S. does facilitate that at the moment with tariffs and a range of things. The one thing, it's not an immediate effect on pricing for us, because we're building these opportunities that are contracted, we're setting the price and the business cases sometimes, you know, or always months, but sometimes years ahead of when the works are actually contracted.
We are continually look to use our advantage in being unique, to be able to, you know, to push our pricing to the extent that's practical, as long as we're meeting the, you know, the business case objectives with our customers.
Right. Thank you. I've got two separate questions here. One's, they're both sort of along the similar lines, one for India and one for Egypt. Just wondering what the situation in those two regions are and whether there's any update
Yeah. India, we have, we still have large projects being delivered in India. The Right Bank Canal and several other contracts in Karnataka of a smaller scale. There are significant pipeline opportunities, so we're still very bullish about India, as those that have heard me speak before, it's the largest opportunity for us globally, in terms of the scale of the infrastructure and the investment that's being made, and we hope to be able to or we expect to be able to make some announcements on the next stage of our growth in India, and we expect India to be a material part of the near-term revenues coming to Rubicon. Egypt, we're still well engaged.
We have our office in Egypt, and we have a manager for that North Africa region. There was a project in our near-term pipeline, which was a substantial part of our pipeline. That's been pushed back a bit, mainly because we've had to change partners for that project, and we are still engaged with the future of the Egypt Authority, which is a government authority around what our technology can do. We are working through that.
Again, we see Egypt as a big, still a big part of our future, and we will hope to be making announcements in the medium term around the scale of what Egypt will mean for us.
Thank you, Bruce. Next question: How are you managing FX risk, given a rising Aussie dollar, which has impacted the H1 results?
Thank you. Look, we're always looking into what we could do differently in terms of the foreign exchange piece. It's certainly front and center in this last half because of the impact it's had. I guess with FX management and hedging, hindsight's always a wonderful thing. We will look at it. It's not by the nature of transactional hedging, which typically allows you to be more specific about volumes and timing. Translation's an interesting one. It's effectively unrealized, if you like, until something's actually transferred back in terms of the intercompany loans. We will look at it and work out whether there's not some sort of hedging that would not put the business in more risk rather than less risk.
Yeah. The other fact that the primary way on the foreign exchange is pricing, I suppose. Again, as I said, timing sometimes on that is difficult, but, you know, clearly, as an Australian business, we're pricing these projects internationally based on our expected exchange. Over time, we get to flex that pricing in line with exchange rates and other things like tariffs and so forth.
Right. Thank you. Just regarding the corporate water stewardship, can you tell us why Rubicon is positioned to be the technology partner of choice for the major corporates?
Yeah, I think it comes, for those that have seen previous presentations, I suppose one of my, one of the things I've gone to in previous ones is a third of. If you break up pie chart of the world's water use in a year. A third of the water's used on urban and industry, a third of the water's consumed by irrigation crops, and most of the remaining third is lost by getting the water to those crops. That's the biggest opportunity. When we're engaged with these corporates, yeah, some of the investments that they make are things like leak detection in urbans. The scale of the water savings they can get out of that is a fraction of what they can get out of investment in irrigation efficiency.
The GreenBiz conference that visited Gila River Farms saw a scale of water savings that is not achievable by other investments. If you're looking at the big opportunities for creating new water globally, it's diesel, which comes at high energy costs and pollutant cost, or it's fixing that link between supply and the root zone of irrigation crops, which is Rubicon's business. We're established not, as I say, not only with the unique technology IP protected, but with the reference cases and the customer base that's demonstrating that.
I think there's been, the level of engagement we've got now is about, and like in, you know, getting briefing from our, from our business development manager that was at GreenBiz, you know, the, you know, jaws drop when we're talking to these corporates around the scale of water savings we can achieve. One of the metrics there is the AUD per cubic per 1,000 cubic feet of water. Compared to what they're achieving in the urban cycle of things like leak detection or enhancement of parks and gardens, you know, we're less than 10% of the cost per 1,000 feet cubed across many of our projects. Yeah, that's just a compelling case.
If you want to save large amounts of water, you go to where the biggest inefficiencies are, and you look at the company that's got the best record in demonstrating, improving those efficiencies.
Right. Thank you, Bruce. That concludes the Q&A segment of the webinar. I'll now hand back to Bruce for closing remarks.
Thanks, Ben. Clearly, AUD 29 million is, and the underlying results below that, even more so, is not where we wanted to be for the H1. However, I hope this presentation has shown the confidence we have in the future, and in the future being H2 FY 2026. That corporate funding, as I've spoken about, these contracts that are, you know, in the market, that are off scale and are gonna make a material difference to H2 FY 2026, and also that government funding. It will come back in the U.S. It is there in Italy. It's there in places like Costa Rica and around the world.
Yeah, we remain very confident in where we're going as a business, and I thank you for your time.