I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Todd Scott, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Good morning to those in the room. Thank you for your time, and thank you very much for anyone joining on the webcast or even listening to the webcast later on. For those who haven't met me, my name is Todd Scott. Up until three weeks ago, I was the CFO for SciDev. As of three weeks ago, I'm now the CEO of SciDev. A lot has changed, but thank you very much. I want to thank the support of my board through that transition. I want to thank the support of my management team, many of those who I have here today, including John Gardiner, my Interim Chief Financial Officer, Jamiel Muhor, Head of Process Chemistry, Ronan Duffy, Head of Water Technologies. On the line, we have Chris Dartez, who's joining us from Houston. He's the Head of our Energy Services business.
We also have Ollie Kelly, who's Head of People & Culture. I just want to actually thank John for the transition. He's been great in supporting me in getting up to speed in the new role, and I want to thank him for what great business he's left me with, and that I want to take forward and be pushed through going forward. Before we begin, a few formalities to get through. Firstly, disclaimer. I'll take this largely as read, but I want to highlight that this presentation does contain forward-looking statements. These statements are no guarantees of future performance and should be read alongside the disclaimer and the continuous disclosure regulations on the ASX. Also, a quick word on safety. We're here on level 2 of the Quay Quarter Tower. On this map here, you'll see where we are on the top left of the screen.
If there is an emergency, you'll hear the alarms go off. Please take the stairs, not the elevators, the stairs. Emergency exits are signified in the green dots there. We will be marshaling in the Domain. It's called the Memory of a Creation Without End. Probably anyone who's been to Sydney is familiar with this. It is straight up that way, I believe. Here's how we're going to be spending our time together today. It's going to be a pretty honest and raw presentation in parts. We're going to start with an honest look at our share price performance, our earnings performance, and an assessment of where and why we've under-delivered. We will take you through the strategic review that we completed in the second half and the lessons we've drawn from it.
We're going to move to the significant opportunities we see in the market, how we intend to execute it, and we'll walk you through in detail why we believe we're well-positioned to actually execute on that strategy and have a right to win in those markets. Following this, we'll look at the financial frameworks. Basically, how are you going to fund this growth? How are you going to apply capital better to make better investment decisions? Finally, we'll look at our outlook for the next steps. Again, thank you for your time today. The first thing we do need to talk about is, quite frankly, the share price underperformance. These are not charts I like presenting. Looking at the share price on the left-hand side, give or take a few percent, we're down 80% year to date.
When you're down that much, down to 2 times, 0.2 times FY 2026 revenues, it's hard to put a spin on that. Decline on that scale really reflects a loss of trust with investors, both current, past, and really potential investors too. Rebuilding that trust is going to take time. It's going to take hard work and consistent delivery to win that back. Everything I will say here going forward is informed by that knowledge, and it's an effort to win back that trust. How we got here is told by this chart on the right-hand side. Our deteriorating performance through the past year forced a series of downgrades to our FY 2026 revenue forecast. You can see the step downwards from June guidance to the February, most recently, the April guidance. What you will see is that we have not changed the guidance to date.
That remains from the Q3 trading update. These downgrades are principally due to lower sales in energy services impacted by a sharp increase in competition for commoditized chemistry and scheduling movements relative to the timing of the Rum Jungle project. We do still expect to have revenue between AUD 82 million and AUD 87 million for this fiscal year, and underlying EBITDA of around that AUD 4 million number. I think it's worth stopping for a second and understanding I could just sit up here and just read by this slide, hope you forget about it. I'm a shareholder too. I feel this pain. What not a lot of people realize is I have actually spent more money buying SciDev shares out of my own pocket than I've actually been paid by SciDev in the last seven months. Actually, a substantial lot more.
I'm now a 1.1% investor in SciDev. I wear this, I want to improve. I want to get even more exposure back in to what I think is a better story going forward. What you'll see from our team, from me, is we are driving as hard as humanly possible to get better outcomes. I know there's some of my management team here who's bought shares as well, and they're just as passionate. Before we get on to how we're going to improve, I just want to spend a little bit of time on what was driving the decline, because the direction of the decline is not uniform across each of our businesses. As I mentioned, the revenue decline was seen in our energy services businesses, which what we saw was effectively tailwinds in this cycle turning into headwinds.
That's clearly shown on the bridge on the left-hand side. What's masked in the group aggregate number is actual growth that we saw in our water-focused businesses, if you aggregate that together between the domestic-focused process chemistry business and the water technology business. When you combine those two together on the right-hand side, you've actually seen 16% CAGR growth since FY 2023. There's actually a great story of structural underlying growth in those businesses that is an important distinction because it is going to form a lot of the strategy that we're going to talk about in the slides to come. Again, drilling on the numbers. You know I'm a numbers guy, so I don't mind talking about numbers. This does explain where we got to where we are and why we need to take action.
On the left-hand side, you see after strong years of cyclical tailwinds in Energy Services, it did mask more mixed performance elsewhere in the group and a growing cost base. Importantly, that cash that we were getting from Energy Services was funding growth in other areas. Not all of that was good growth. A lot of it was, you could argue, growth for growth's sake. We pursued scale in high-risk offshore markets at the expense of lower-risk, attractive markets closer to home, particularly in the domestic mining industry. We also expanded our corporate function line, I would say arguably prematurely before we did see the sustained growth in earnings.
When the energy cycle pulled back in this fiscal year, it exposed us to those issues, requiring significant action to exit both loss-making overseas water operations and meaning we would fully reduce costs across the business, including corporate. This was not only a revenue problem that we were seeing. There was growing evidence of inefficient capital allocation, which made the formal strategic review necessary that we did in the second half. We completed that, and a lot of that's what we're going to go through today. That review took part in two halves. We had an honest internal look at ourselves and then a structured external look at where our markets are and where our shareholders, where they're giving us feedback. Starting internally, we did that internal review. The core message to us was a broad-based lift in discipline.
Not just in one area, but across capital allocation, forecasting, business development, and the process we make decisions to grow. I'll walk you through the five learnings on the left-hand side that we saw and what we're doing to change. Firstly, capital allocation. We do need better ways to improve our business case development, consider alternatives to those business cases, and quite frankly, knowing when to make a hard decision to exit if it's found to be a not an appropriate business place for capital. To correct this, we're standardizing our business case templates, implementing consistent modeling, and defined hurdle rates. Thank you. Proper filtering before capital is committed. You have to know we don't have much capital. We have to be very judicious with how we apply it and being more consistent and transparent internally with where that money is going.
Secondly, we need to improve our forecasting clearly, as the second half showed. In the past, we've placed too much confidence on lower visibility areas of the business, and lower earnings visibility areas, and that's come through in potential overoptimism in terms of where our forecast has sit. Now we're moving to better risk-weighted forecasting that aligns with how much the visibility we have in the outlook and more practical balance between that ambition and realism. Thirdly, we need to address customer concentration. In the first half, we had real issues with the energy services business situated around Exlake and one large customer we had, and that's exposed problems in the past. We can't repeat that, so we need to build that customer base while aggressively protecting the high-value relationships that are business critical to us that we still have.
Fourthly, when we look at our go-to-market strategy, it feels like we've been missing a few opportunities there. We currently have many cases where we've got a Tier 1 client that's only buying one of our products, and we think they could be buying several. To maximize the value of our most valuable asset, which is these existing relationships, we're going to go through greater integration and cross-selling, something that Jamiel is actually going to take us through later on in the pack. Fifthly, yes, we have chased an inefficient expansion strategy, and that lack of focus probably diffused our growth efforts into some small-scale pockets that is really hard to sustain and create a moat around. The correction is to concentrate our efforts on our core markets where we can actually build scale and defensive positions.
To that point, we've now exited from the overseas water business, and we're going to hold ourselves accountable to what you see in front of us. Next, our external review. Our external review took in the views of our customers, our suppliers, employees, investors, and analysts. Some of you in the room right now. It addressed our markets, our competitive position, and our strategic options that flow from that. Across our key stakeholders, we've seen that our customers do value the solutions we have, our chemistry and our service, our engineering. In addition, what they want is more data analytics capabilities from us. That's something we already have, but everywhere in this world of data and world of AI, data is king, and everyone wants more of it. We've got to get more of it through them.
Our suppliers across goods, services, and capital are supportive of our growth. They're patient, which is a great thing to have, but they want a strong partnership as well. Our employees are motivated, but they want a clear strategic view of where they should be going, where they should be putting their efforts into. Our investors, clearly disappointed on the guidance misses, but they do see value in the business. When we speak to recent investors, they do see that there is a business that has strength that we can build upon. They're also supportive of strategic simplification. Analysts and investors that we saw, analysts and advisors we've spoken to have expressed conviction in the need for solutions to the water scarcity issue that data centers are creating. Broadly been supportive around the outlook for mining, which we are highly exposed to.
Looking at the market side on the right, we continue to see large-scale opportunities of more than AUD 4 billion in core addressable markets that are near to us in our niche segments, in home markets. These markets are growing at a strong rate. They need tailored engineering, chemistry, and the services that we have that give us a competitive differentiation. Overall, the conclusion is that the strategic review was that there is a substantial market opportunity across both the solutions we have in water and energy services where SciDev has a right to win. However, our growth must be disciplined where we do have differentiated advantage. We do not have any advantage in commoditized services. We need to find our niches where we can extract value in the highest margin and deliver that with discipline. We took a look at the water treatment sector.
What we found is a very large market that is, for the most part, non-discretionary and is structurally inefficient. Firstly, when we look at chemistry, overdosing is rampant in the industry. Sometimes, Jamiel just told me he came back from doing some testing work and dosing rates that were double digits, some large double digits over the required dosing rate for the flocculants, for the mining customer that he was speaking with. To the point that, Jamiel, if I get this right, that you had to stop your testing because there's so much residual chemistry in the water you were testing. Monitoring and measuring across a range of factors are difficult.
In some cases, in our mining client base, at remote locations, it can require manual grabs, which means going back to lab analysis, causing long delays and high costs for trying to get the data that you critically need. Also, the use of commodity and legacy chemistry is causing significant underperformance at mine sites in critical areas like separating solids from liquids. It's also impacting, of course, water recovery and metals recovery. Most importantly, again, Jamiel told me recently, sometimes at the gold customers that we work with, we're seeing residual metals like gold in the waste streams that they clearly want to recover. All of these inefficiencies cause significant waste in the water treatment industry. That waste is an opportunity for us to create more value that, of course, will be shared with ourselves and our clients.
To solve these issues, we're building a platform, which you can see on the right-hand side. Three of these four solutions we have right now. Starting from the bottom, engineering, we do build quality engineering systems across what we do for D&C, O&M, and boost systems. We have high-value chemistry both in our mining, our process chemistry business, but also what we do in energy services. We have data and sensing, data monitoring solutions right now. Internet of Things connectivity and what we have there. They're called HydraIQ and OptiFlox. Both solutions for groundwater sensing, but also sensing on plant. What we don't have and we're building is this AI-driven optimization platform. I feel like that's something we're going to try to develop over the next year.
It's going to be another great part of that stack as we build that full platform that we can integrate with our customers. As we scale, we can't attack all areas at once. To increase our chance of success, we'll be focusing on the markets we already have strength. That's mining, utilities, and infrastructure. Over time, a new thing we'll be talking about a lot is data centers. Looking at slide 14 here, you can see the opportunities in the markets and the solutions as they come together for the company as a whole. We are building an integrated water solutions platform that combines our engineering, chemistry, data, and optimization across our focus markets. Part of our advantage is that we already have an established customer base to begin cross-selling these solutions into. We don't have to win the customer twice.
What we have is deepening the relationships we already have. The market opportunity is large. We estimate in our current addressable markets about AUD 4 billion per annum of value that these solutions could have, including managed services. Within this, we see about AUD 1.1 billion in mining, about AUD 1 billion again in utilities and infrastructure. Then data centers right now, which is in its very early growth stage, probably about AUD 100 million or less in value right now. The growth rate of that is poised to break out as more data centers are built out in Australia, and the consumption of water clearly necessitates the need for a solution. When we look at those markets individually, in mining, this is an established and growing market driven by tightening regulations on discharge and water reuse mandates.
Our advantage, of course, is that book of business that we have with existing clients and the embedded chemistry, which makes it more difficult to switch to other players than ourselves. In utilities and infrastructure, the market again is large, it's stable, and has regulations like growth. In data centers, the market is growing rapidly with massive water requirements that are growing that need a solution and no entrenched incumbents at the moment. Part of our advantage is that we have a team that's already done these solutions in Europe, which Ronan can speak to more when he gets into his part of the presentation. Together, we see a market in water solutions that represents about AUD 2.2 billion in value here. That's expected to grow to over AUD 6 billion by 2040, including double-digit increases in data centers.
Showing some of those numbers right on this slide, particularly on the right-hand side, you can see how that ramps up, particularly in the data center space. Before we get into our right to win in these markets, I'm going to take you through our current revenue mix, and then each market in turn, Jamiel, Ronan, and Chris on the line will walk you through. By market, the majority of our revenues right now come from mining at about 72%, followed by utilities and infrastructure at 28%. You'll see we have no revenue from data centers right now. We should be honest about that. We do see FY 2027 being a transition year of first revenues and then potentially for that in FY 2028.
Within the engineering solutions, you can see PFAS, something we've talked about a lot in the past, remains a core part of the value and our differentiation that we're delivering to market. That's about 32% of that engineering space. With that, I'll now hand over to Jamiel, who will walk us through aspects of our mining business. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks, Todd. Jamiel Muhor was my name. I'm the Head of Process Chemistry for SciDev Ltd. When we talk about mining, for our business, it's all about minerals processing. We have an established client base that we've worked hard to build over the past seven years since I first began with SciDev. As part of that, we have blue-chip miners that are already buying both engineering and chemistry. As Todd has highlighted when we talk about water solutions, it's both our water technologies business and the process chemistry business, with Alcoa being dominated by engineering through our water technologies business. You can see the list of other key miners there, Iluka, Largo, Barrick, First Quantum, Peabody, Yancoal, and Idemitsu, all buying our chemistry. We have a very solid reputation in solid-liquid separation
Our MaxiFlox brand is very well-recognized, in particular here in Australia. However, we are expanding overseas as well. We have a solid footprint already in the Americas, in particular North America. Through our joint venture, we are actually looking to enter other regions such as Africa and South America. We have a secured supply chain. That's through our partner in Nuoer Group, who we established our first relationship with in 2019, becoming the exclusive distribution partner for them in Australia and Oceania. We've now formed a joint venture company in Singapore and more recently in Santiago, Chile, which I'll talk to shortly. We have a proven regulation and driven track record, and again, through mine remediation and PFAS, in particular with Alcoa in the mining sector, which is growing and giving us an opportunity to further cross-sell.
I guess one of our most valuable assets is our client base. As you can see there, with the introduction of Barrick most recently, and also a reestablishment of First Quantum Minerals, we can now establish ourselves as a global reach player, understanding the operations that they have globally. We have many customers that just use our chemistry, so there's opportunity there to cross-sell. That's where bringing together our water technologies business with our process chemistry, our minerals processing group, we can start looking at using the client relationships to expand our offering across their platforms. Talking about the joint venture. Why Nuoer Group? Nuoer Group is the second-largest polyacrylamide manufacturer globally. They have a very strong footprint in the Chinese domestic market and are looking for an opportunity to expand globally, in particular in the mining sector. That's where SciDev plays a role.
Through our joint venture entity, as I mentioned, which is headquartered in Singapore, which I'm actually the managing director of, we've also now created a Nuoer-SciDev SDE in Santiago, Chile. Our developments are currently in North America, South America. We've also entered the Eastern European market, as well as Southeast Asia. We're also having our first client trials in the African market in Zambia, further showing the reach and our capability of our MaxiFlox chemistry. The Nuoer partnership gives us a strong strategic supplier access. We have excellent manufacturing capability with a diversified supply chain supporting competitive and reliable market delivery. Our response is quick, so we can turn our development into revenue very quickly through the partnership of Nuoer. And we've got great technical and commercial integration as well.
We combine our technical expertise, which is built through our Australian business, with the global manufacturing capabilities of our partner in Nuoer. We look at this as a partnership-led customer model, which is a long-term approach for our business. There is definitely an opportunity in the domestic market here in Australia to continue to grow. However, through this joint venture, we will expand our reach into other regions and continents. This also gives us an ability to brand our MaxiFlox chemistry, which will also open up the opportunity here locally in the domestic market. Working with companies like Barrick, BHP also, in particular in South America, who are very well-recognized here in Australia, as well as Anglo American, who we've also started developments with in South America, is going to establish us as a global player in the polyacrylamide and process chemistry market. Thank you. Moving on.
Thanks, Jamiel. My name is Ronan Duffy. I'm running the Water Tech business for SciDev. Just wanted to run through, I suppose, currently what our business model is like, and then I'll move on to the next slide on the data center. I suppose what we currently have is like a two-edged model. We have utilities and infrastructure, and we have mining as well, Water Tech. We're using our PFAS technology across mining and infrastructure and utilities. We are also introducing the chemistry side of the business for floc, et cetera, upfront as part of a pre-treatment. I suppose what's good about this model is we have short-term revenue with larger margin on the BOO operations, and that's applicable to infrastructure, utilities, but also then on mine sites, where we can establish a BOO operation, which will go on for a number of years.
We've one particular piece of equipment on site that's done 3 gig of PFAS water treatment already, and it's going to stay on site for the next number of years. And on the back of what we've done on that site, in particular, is we've secured a data design and construct project to replace the BOO operation. It's a good entry into a larger scale project, because it improves the technology and it's high margin for us. We are probably seen in the marketplace as a really strong player. We're since Complex Waters. We have a really strong engineering team, and we have a large track record, 40+ projects and strong relationships that can reference us within this market. On the other side of the other engine of the model, we have utilities and municipal, which is a longer process.
Each project could be from we see it 18 months, 24 months. That is usually a BOO or can be design and construct model. Short-term BOO into design and construct possibly. We're proven in that PFAS treatment, so we have really good references. We're strong, but that gives us a large reoccurring revenue, secured revenue over a large number of years. I suppose one good thing, and Todd alluded to it already, what we have designed on our BOO equipment is market leading, with quite a lot of automation. We're seen as a really good high-end company to deliver long-term assets on the site, which we can remotely monitor, optimize, and is really cost-effective for long-term customers. On the data center piece, basically, we've started this. My background has been in data centers for the last 10 years across Europe.
We can see an emerging problem here, which gives us a serious opportunity, to deliver large design and construct projects within the data center space. We are seen as a really good option for end users, as in the likes of the large data center companies, because we can take on a project at 10% feasibility stage, work with the team directly, and then go 30%, 60%, 90% design and get paid throughout that engineering process with a practical solution. Then also we have an offering of operation and maintenance on the back end of them assets for long-term reoccurring revenue. I'll show you the next slide, but what we're seeing here is anywhere we're going and promoting our HydroCool technology, the doors are open for us. There's no secured leader in this space.
I think there will be a number of companies popping up, we're seen as a really good practical solution, good value, listening carefully to what the client requirements are, and really help them even secure, helping them secure planning permission and getting the development going. Like for us, it's a rapid use of water that's coming down the track, and we're really well-placed. We've done a lot of work in the last six months to get us up to speed to have a product, which we know works. It just shows the strength of our engineering team to go from zero to where we are now within a really short time. The model here that I'm showing you, this is what we present as a one-slide deck for all the water that is available for data center cooling.
We're really looking at all water sources because what we're finding is data center development needs any type of water source to get the development up and running, and with what they call is the final solution, which could be a Sydney Water recycle plant, that could take 10 years for that to happen and that water to become available. The data center companies don't want to wait. What we're seeing is there's a real interest in us providing them a really neat solution, which is a HydroCool solution trademarked by us. What we're doing here basically is we're looking at all water sources, rainwater harvesting, tertiary water, stormwater, bore water, and sewer mining. It's this hot tub at the moment.
The unique solution for us is we have PFAS also plugged in to our HydroCool solution because we're seeing PFAS traces in bore, in sewer mining, and also on the tertiary water side. We have the process to remove that as part of our HydroCool process. The other unique piece that we're currently working on really hard, and this is what I come from over the last 10 years, is this piece here, and it's recycle, reuse piece. Generally, what's happened in the past within data centers, one use of water and straight to trade waste. What we're doing is we've put in a system, designed a system that's proven we can recover 30% of the water that's getting used in a data center, and that is a lot of benefits.
It's a lot of benefits, sustainability benefits, also it's really good for environmental control, environmental and secure and planning permission also. The good thing, too, the payback is really quick. On the recycle, reuse, we're looking at an ROI of five to six years, compared to 11 years if you went doing it just without any of these systems, without the recycle, reuse. Also, what's really interesting is because we can sort of basically save a third of the water usage on site, it takes the pressure off Sydney Water. What is really good, the CapEx that's needed for any of these systems, the sewer mining or the bore, CapEx is reduced by a third because we don't need to employ it. It's really smart use of our technology, proven.
We're not doing anything extraordinary, we're providing a process that robustly works, the financial benefits, sustainability benefits is massive for that. Thank you. Chris, are you with us on the line?
Yes, sir. All right. Thank you, Ronan, and good morning, everyone. Regarding the energy side of our business, SciDev has a proven differentiated chemistry solutions that directly increases oil and gas production and ultimately lowers costs. We've been able to validate at scale in the field. As we continue to prove on a day-to-day basis, CatChek is not theoretical. It's been validated across well sets of more than 3,000 wells, that has also been independently verified with results. This gives us a rare advantage in oil and gas chemistry. Real-world repeatable performance data that our customers can justify and can also recognize. We consistently deliver high production outcomes, including 13% of BOE, or barrel of oil equivalent, until uplift in oil wells and up to 78% uplift in wet gas environments. We don't just think-
Chris, go back.
Up to 41%, leading to lower handling and disposal costs and equipment life. As our experienced field support teams supported by differentiated chemistry, we prove every day in our ability to perform. CatChek simultaneously addresses two of the major oil and gas challenges, that is increasing hydrocarbon recovery and reducing flowback wastewater. The dual impact makes our technology highly valuable. SciDev's advantage is built on proprietary chemistry, field-proven result at scale, and technical support in customer operations. Slide 24 confirms that we have a product that works. As we transition to slide 25, we'll demonstrate our rooms to growth. SciDev has a proven product in high-value niche of the oil and gas market, creating upside potential. We are currently targeting an accessible market of about AUD 800 million in high-risk shale formations. This has been a premium segment where performance matters.
Our focus continues to be developing consistent relationships with operators and service companies to penetrate the market. Today, we currently hold about 2% market share, leaving considerable room for growth as we target high-value shale basins. Our growth will be driven by expanding across existing basins, increasing operator penetration, and partnering with more active service companies. The basins we're currently concentrating in are the Permian and Eagle Ford, where the market size is large, we have growing opportunity, we have proven performance and credibility allowing us for efficient scaling. SciDev is also in advancing discussions in emerging plays like the Beetaloo Basin in Northern Territory of Australia. Closing the gap from 2% market share requires systematic business development with operators, a deeper partnership with oilfield service providers. The energy services team has created a combination of proven technology with measurable ROI.
Chris, are you there?
Yeah, I'm sorry. Thought I'll hand the presentation back to you.
Thank you very much, Chris. Appreciate that. Thank you, Chris, but also Jamiel and Ronan. Strategy is great, but it has to be profitable. Over the next few slides, how are we going to be thinking about this with capital allocation and the key benefits going forward? Firstly, just a few comments on our P&L and balance sheet as they stand right now. The table on the left, you've seen that earlier in the deck. It is worth highlighting when you look at these numbers, particularly FY 2026, you do see more balanced revenue and earnings profile across the water solutions and energy businesses. As well, it's really important to highlight that those negative impacts you're seeing from the international water business will not be going forward in FY 2027. We have fully exited that business now with no operating costs going forward.
Additionally, we have taken out a meaningful amount of costs in that corporate line. We expect that to be sustained going forward. On the right-hand side, net cash, we did improve from what we reported at the Q3 trading update up to AUD 1.4 million now at the end of May. Total liquidity, when you add in our debt facilities, we have total liquidity of AUD 6.9 million. That's more than enough room for us to fund operations. Within this movement on net cash since December, the decline is really largely reflected in the working capital demands for the Rum Jungle project. That's hitting its peak position right now as we expect working capital to normalize over the next few months as we pass through this period, which has large capital outlays flowing through the balance sheet, and a lot of spending.
When that clears through the system, we should see that working capital, that net cash position normalize. We've been talking more about recurring revenue lately, and for a good reason. We started talking about this at the first half results, it's critical to create less volatility in our earnings base and more reliable growth. Over the past few years, we've seen even that as revenue has declined at a group level, the quality of that revenue has improved. We've seen and expect recurring revenue to reach 38% of the total revenue in FY 2026. That's up from 30% last year. In dollar terms, that's a 5% uplift in absolute dollar terms. Importantly, we define this as long-term BOO and O&M contracts in our engineering business, plus multi-year chemistry contracts.
One change I should point out here is we did present this number for the first half results. In that number, we included CatChek. We've removed that in this period, just noting that CatChek sales are not long-term in nature. They're more short-term in nature. Even though we do tend to see more resiliency in those revenues, just for more comparison, we've taken that out. However, if we did keep that in, that number will be 59% of total revenue. For those of you who don't know already, in an earlier life in my career, I was a sell-side equity analyst. In addition to having a CPA, I have a CFA, I think I can be rightfully called a numbers nerd. I love it, I love getting into the details to the pain of all my management team.
As you might expect me to say, I think this is a really important slide. There are many KPIs to look at to judge our performance, but there are four that I'm going to highlight that I think are often most critical. Firstly, gross margin. For a business like us, this shows how we're progressing on our transition to high-value chemistry and data services. Again, we're not a high-volume commodity business. We're more of a technical services, high-value chemistry business. We want to see the gross margin growth coming from that. IRR really relates to our capital allocation decision-making tool. We use a hurdle rate of 15%. We see that as a minimum, really just to cover your cost of capital then some. Ideally, we want to get IRRs that are well above 15%, again, with that limited pool of capital that we currently have.
Return on capital employed, ROCE, we target a minimum of 20% across each businesses. This is a metric I find very interesting because it puts both profitability and capital efficiency together in one metric. It helps everybody focus on both the profitability that they're getting the efficiency of that production and profit. Actually helps a lot of people think more broadly about working capital and how you're actually moving that denominator. Of course, most importantly, the net profit at the bottom. We need to grow profitably and consistently. When we look to the right-hand side, we've laid out a model for capital allocation. Capital primarily come from operating cash flows and capital recycling, where it's available, supplemented by debt or equity, the opportunities have to be significantly attractive to support that.
We're very mindful of the sins of equity raises and the dilution that can cause. That's not something we'll pursue just for any sake, certainly not something that's on the cards. The capital will be allocated to the highest risk-adjusted returning, strategically core uses within this organic investment into growing out that solution set that we talked about before. That's first priority. M&A, only if it's strategically aligned and makes clear sense creates clear values for shareholders. Again, nothing in the pipeline right now, at some point, we would like to consider that if it makes value if it makes sense. Again, we are not chasing growth for growth's sake. We're focused on profitable, consistent growth. Bringing this all together in the outlook and next steps. Our priority actions for FY 2027 are focused, it's deliberately focused.
In mining, we're going to build out our sales function to cross-sell across that platform of engineering, chemistry, then bring more data services into our installed base. In energy, we want to expand CatChek's reach, leveraging our most efficient sales point through tier 1 service providers, which we have relationships with now, and deepen the direct relationships we have with the E&P clients, but in the high demand basins. Not everywhere. We can't be everywhere, but focusing on the Permian and the Eagle Ford where it makes most sense. In data centers, FY 2027 will be a year of effectively starting slowly, establishing that reference work with operators, engineering firms, anchored on the value proposition of water recycling and reuse. Data and optimization, we do have existing platforms with HydraIQ and OptiFlox. We want to start commercializing these more.
They are being commercialized now, we want to commercialize those more, and start bringing an aggregation of those data sets that we have. We have a lot of data in our system right now. We need to apply analytics on top of that to start promoting that next generation of solutions and optimization. Being honest with ourselves, the plot on the right-hand side, you can see the development stage, and current revenue stage. The reality is, when we look at data centers, it's an incredibly high potential market. Are we making a lot of revenue from it right now? No. Do we need to grow a skill set in there to be able to become a clear leader in that space? Yes. I think we've got a clear path to do that. I believe in Ronan's ability to lead that through his experience.
When we look at where we are good, of course, is chemistry, mining, and engineering. I don't need to explain that much. Our job is, of course, to move all of those dots to the right and upwards. Looking across our near-term visibility for earnings, we've bucketed this into 2 categories. One is the contract order book of AUD 39 million that's sitting there. What is that? That's that recurring revenue base I talked about before, plus contracted work that we already have in, such as Rum Jungle, which is worked out still into FY 2027. I would look at that and say that's a pretty low number, because that's the base. We're going to build off of that, and that's where the right-hand side comes in.
This is our open tenders and risk assessed proposals. We are constantly doing business development, constantly engaging in customers to try to win work.
It is highly unlikely that we will win all AUD 158 million in that pipeline, in that open tenders. However, we will win some, as much as we can. We'll try to increase our win rate. This is a very fluid number. This is, of course, anything one will go in addition to the order that you're seeing. We are constantly filling this pipeline as a run or loss than new tenders are submitted. Let me summarize the whole of this in 5 points. 1, we've done a clear diagnosis in that strategic review of where we sit. The earnings, the energy services totality, it exposed the structural weakness in revenue quality and forecasting and capital allocation. 2, we've had a strategic refocus on the markets where we really believe we've got a right to win, and we're ready to do that.
That's water solutions for mining, utilities, infrastructure, data centers, where our better relationships, chemistry, and engineering create a defensible advantage. Three, we're building an integrated water platform, transforming a full stack of offerings through energy, chemistry, data, and optimization, embedded through and enabled through cross-selling and higher margins that are focused on recurring revenue growth. Four, we know we need to execute better, both in the delivery of our business cases, delivery in terms of everything we try to achieve, and allocation of that capital needs to be disciplined through the regard for decision-making. It delivers this shift from growth for its own sake to returns-driven growth. Five, touching upon that visibility of earnings and visibility going forward, we are doing our best to improve that and making sure the durability of our earnings, sustainability of our earnings, improves as strong as possible.
This is a good and sound strategy. We stand behind this strategy. Our management team, the board stands behind this strategy. Success does not come from ideas alone. You can get a lot of ideas just by Googling an AI these days. The success of a strategy comes from doing and executing the strategy. We're committed to doing that. We're committed to focus. We're committed to using those lessons learned from the strategic review and actually applying that how we're going forward with this, with focus every day. I do thank you again for your time today, again, both here in the room, on the call, and know myself, my team, and everyone inside us is working hard to make sure that your investment is worthwhile. Thank you very much for your time, and we will be happy to answer any questions you have.
I think we've got some through the webcast, and then anyone from the room, if you have any questions, please, the team is here. If there's none from the room, is there-
I got one.
Yes. Absolutely.
That was my intention, the webcast.
Well, let's go to the room first.
Okay. Just one thing, I've been in sharehold for a little while. One thing I've noticed with SciDev is we don't seem to get our wins out there as much to the market.
Yeah.
It's always something, but it's a long time between wins and things like that.
Yeah.
It'd be great if we could get more information out to the market, because obviously that shows we're doing well as a company and we've got these new contracts or whatever. We had the one in Sweden a couple of years ago.
Yeah.
Things like that. I don't know where that's progressed and things like that. Your website doesn't sort of.
Okay
update things as regularly as an announcement or we just need to know what's going on. That's what.
Very good point. I'll take the second part first and then address the releases. We'll be updating the website holistically, personally, I think we could improve in terms of who has information, so that's where we're at right now. Not only if you are a potential customer of SciDev, but also if you're an investor. There's a lot of things there that's hard to grab at.
Yeah.
We're going to be rebuilding that in the next few months. Hopefully, well before the end of the year. Secondly, in terms of updating the market for our commercial wins and what we're doing, it's a great thing. I think in the past, we've waited to aggregate several announcements to have one big lump. We don't need to do that. What you'll be getting is more of a flow of announcements now. We're not waiting for a AUD 10 million announcement. That might be a AUD 2 million or a AUD 3 million announcement. Just so you can see how we are going on those tenders that we're winning. I completely take your point.
Just one other thing too is, I don't know if you saw in the news recently, like in The Telegraph, there was something about PFAS.
Yeah
It was a big deal, front page news.
Yeah.
I mean, in Newcastle, all the fire stuff up there and there's some PFAS up there. I don't know if we look at those opportunities or things like that. It's just something I thought, "Well, we have a product that we can use for those sorts of things.
Yes, absolutely. Those are things that we're gonna looks at.
Yeah
Very much so all the time.
We have a really good business development network.
Yeah.
We're probably only for three, the top of the pyramid, the top three.
Yeah.
We handle it produced by three teams.
Yeah.
Because it needs three for that.
Yeah.
We're constantly building relationships, that has been my big driver in business development.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's really important for me, business development. I think, for example, when I joined, we had AUD 130 million competing, now it's AUD 360 million.
That's aggregate multi-year.
Yeah. I've been a big focus on the business development side to ensure that we're a lot more visible in the marketplace, but also we're consistently competing. For example, every week we'll do a business development meeting internally at the end, that's what's driven our data center piece. We were known in this market and we did 2013 decent customer development since 2002 as part of that.
Thank you. James?
Hi, James from Druid. Just a question around the bottom line. You mentioned the proposal, the money in 2024. How does that compare to historical spending? I know you don't have any energy in there, which probably is a very conservative number, but then you don't control the energy business.
Yeah. You're right, it does not include energy. I think we're obviously being quite conservative with that. It implies that there's no sales for energy next year. That's clearly not the case. What you'll see is the majority of the sort of risk-assessed proposals is from that energy segment. That's where you see most of that fall in. The energy segment, clearly, you'll see the second half has been difficult for the energy business. Part of that is, as we've alluded to, the cycle has come down. We put that onto the oil price, but it has been a constrained cycle, rolling off, I guess, historically low prices coming into this calendar year. There's more competition. Going forward, our success will be determined by two things.
Number one, the strategy we laid out, making sure we're targeting the right basins and the right customers to drive that business development pipeline. Truth is, too, if oil prices hold where they are, we should hopefully see a tailwind from the cycle. You can't set your watch on that, and that's not how you operate a business, but that would certainly help the outlook for at least the second half of 2027.
Just with that, on the other half of that tracking over time.
That's because it links quite well to the recurring pipeline that we were just talking about. It is improving over time. That's that aggregate number. Those are the same basis. Anything on top of that in terms of the order book would be D&C project wins that we would have locked in in the future year. I would say relative to past years, that would be a stronger number than we would've seen in the past.
There are a few. To a degree, they overlap a bit. I'll still ask them.
Yeah.
First one, tell us a bit more about energy, in particular, energy tinkering. What are the main drivers to success, either winning the bid or implementing?
It's a great question. We have, and I'll have a quick background, let Chris answer as well. We've got a great team that knows our product. It's really blending the sales team skills of being able to get in front of our customer base and then pairing that with our data sets that we built over time, like we talked about with well performance and historical data, and then getting someone who's got a very good technical skill set, but not a salesperson per se, to be able to have those technical conversations with the right people at the right levels. Chris, if you don't mind, perhaps do you want to add any color on that?
Pairing the technical applications and the benefits that we are currently seeing with our current clients and
Producing that into a successful result with a potential client is what we've been pairing our team with. As we continue to grow, that's the need for that technical support as we go forward. That's truly what makes us a technical leader in the market today.
Thanks. Thank you, Chris. Is there further questions?
Looking at our business for the last 12 months, you answered it partly already. Tell us a bit about Energy Services. We're looking forward, do we feel it's stabilized? What's the leading environment? Sort of address that's part one. The AP, what are we seeing? What are we expecting moving forward there in percentage commitments? Obviously, it's already in the U.S. Earlier, we had a situation in the Middle East, I think perhaps now what are we doing?
Okay. Again, I'll have a stab at each one, and then Chris Dartez, you will truly tell me where I'm wrong. In first, I believe was a question around the overlooking outlook for sales. We're clearly in a tough market still. I think we can't hide from that. The visibility, though, is always limited next to the visibility. We do have strong customer relationships, though. The people who use, particularly CatChek, remain strong customers. I think there's something I would say which is really important to point out, is the durability of what we've seen in the CatChek sales. When we look at total sales for energy services in the first half of fiscal 2026, CatChek was 35% of total sales. When we look at the second half, it's over 80% of total sales. What you're getting there, it tells two stories within that.
One is, of course, a shift to higher margin sales, which is certainly always helpful. The second part of it is it does speak to the durability of those CatChek sales. They're still subject to the macro, but they are certainly much more durable than what we get from commodity sales, which has been the biggest quantity chemical sales, which has been the biggest driver of the revenue decline. If we look forward, that gives us support to those revenues, but we certainly need to build on that, in terms of our business development pipeline. The second one, I think, is the third part that I You're talking about the E&P outlook, what we're hearing from our E&P clients. What's happening in the market is generally the large E&P clients, particularly, they set their annual schedules, they set them annually to calendar year, for the most part.
That's what's created this rigidity in the well site standing, which has impacted our revenues. They have not yet reset their CapEx budgets for calendar year 2027 yet. You can see in the frac spreads there has been some elevation in those numbers. It has been starting to pull through well sites, well activity to a lesser extent come through, but not to the extent that you would've expected from 40% or more, AUD 100 a barrel oil prices. They have not risen to that extent. There's been a delay in terms of that E&P activity. The third question I believe was around what's happening in the Middle East. I'm guessing it's in relation to the energy services business. The reality is higher oil prices do drive more profitable outcomes in the energy services business. We have not seen that flow through yet.
As I said, higher oil prices have not necessarily led to significant increased spending in the E&P and oil field sector. Chris, is there anything you want to add to that?
I think well said, Todd. The one thing that I will add, that proving the return on investment for products like CatChek has been increasingly important as we drive forward. It's just a further complement to not commoditizing our business as we go forward. I do think that as things continue to roll back around, capital budgets begin to reset in a calendar year, we will start to continue to see a level of activity, at least from our purview at this point, that will continue to drive forward into FY 2027. I think that initial production will likely be on the horizon, and the U.S. will be a strong part of that. Therefore, ultimately, our hope and what we can see at this line of sight of the market is that it will continue to stay relatively strong at a pace we are today.
What we don't see is that initial investment in basins that weren't driving a higher rate of return. We're seeing a lot of client and E&P focus merging to more basins like the Eagle Ford and the Permian, and then even the Haynesville to supply the LNG ports that are now going in throughout ports within Texas and Louisiana. That will be strong movement as we continue to go forward for certainly the foreseeable future, maybe as much as the next two to three or even five-year outlook at this point. We feel that things will continue to grow, or at a minimum, stay very steady as we go forward.
Thanks, Chris. Jamiel.
Sorry, Jamiel from Process Chemistry here. I just wanted to talk around a couple of those questions around tenders and commodity chemistry versus specialty chemistry, et cetera. Obviously, Chris references CatChek. One thing that we need to also reassure our investors is that we do have a commodity product line. When it comes to tenders, typically, our clients are tendering for commodity-type chemistry. Strategically from a business model perspective, for us to participate in that tender and conform in tender, we need to actually have that portfolio available, and we do. We'll participate in that tender based on a commoditized type chemistry. However, to get that foot in the door and to get that win gives us an opportunity to then bring in our specialty chemistry.
We don't want to miss that tender opportunity by trying to bid with our specialty chemistry when the client's not asking for it. That's typically what happens in any tender type situation as well, and we see that with all our blue-chip clients as well. Strategically, we're set up on both fronts, which gives us an opportunity to have two bites at the cherry with, obviously, in our business, the process chemistry business. We've got a really advanced flocculant chemistry that Todd referenced delivers metal recovery and enhances water recovery. That's our focus. That's where we deliver the value for our clients. However, sometimes to get there, we've got to bring in a commodity chemistry at a low price and a lower margin. I just wanted to make that clear, and it's similar case for Chris in the energy business with CatChek as well.
That's all.
Thanks, Jamiel.
Thanks, Todd. The last question I have here is related to pipeline in the verticals. Please tell us a bit more about pipeline dynamics, and if you can, average conversion rates and trends in conversion pipeline and contract.
Yeah. Thanks. Obviously, a critical question because everyone's looking at that AUD 115 million number right now and trying to figure out how much of that should they put into their forecast. I will disappoint you. I can't give you a clear number. The dynamics of each of these are different in terms of what you're looking at for energy, even in the mining space. I can tell you in that mining slice right there is one AUD 10 million contract sitting in there, I think 10.8. That contract actually has a reasonably higher percentage chance of winning. This is a single source. We've done the design work for them. We think we've got a reasonable chance to win that. The rest of the pie probably isn't as strong.
It's lumpy within that, so I can't give you a hard and fast number, but I can tell you that we're doing everything we can through our business development teams to increase that win rate. It's something we look at constantly about how are we getting the right people in front of the right people with the right product to increase that conversion rate.
Thank you. That's clear.
Thank you.
We've got one more.
Yeah.
We talk about our client and our high-value clients, and we have a win with a blue-chip company, but we never seem to mention their name. I know I asked that before.
Sure.
Previously, we've talked about a high-value client, and we didn't mention their names. Is that because they tell us not to or is it?
Often, it is that case. They ask not to. Sometimes it's over time. If you think about it this way, when we have the contract in hand, it's a period where there is a change in the relationship with the incumbent and ourselves, and that becomes a very diplomatic challenge because we want to tell the market as soon as possible and have to tell the market as soon as possible, but they have to manage a relationship with the incumbent that's coming off the job. That means we can't necessarily say immediately, but when we become the incumbent over time, it gets into a presentation like this.
Okay.
Yeah. Thank you. Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I'd love to be able to announce all the wins that we do have, particularly in the Process Chemistry business. When you look at these blue-chip clients or operations, they've got multiple operations around the world, and we're not necessarily winning the business at all of them. Our competitors are still on some of the other sites. We've got to manage it quite carefully as well. Are they as well. We're more than happy to let people know that there's clients that are.
Sure.
These are.
Tell us who could be.
I'd love to say BHP up there as well.
Exactly. Someone will know.
Yeah. We are, and I can confidently say that we're working very closely with BHP at a number of their operations as well. Yeah, it's a difficult one. It's a difficult one for my team as well, trying to go and ask for the permission as well. It's never an easy conversation. Yeah. We'll get better at it.
Thank you. If there's no further questions, thanks again for everyone's time. Operator, we can now close the call.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference call today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.