Well, good morning everyone, and welcome to Nashville. For those of you who are watching us on the video, you'll be pleased to know that we did make it. If you were watching yesterday's video in Houston, I can confirm that it was a three-and-a-half-hour queue at Houston Airport, but we got through it. That was an interesting experience. Here we are at day two of the Investor Day, looking at Sims Lifecycle Services. We've just been on the site tour. Thank you very much, Isaac. Really appreciated the tour. It was really good to get your insights about how we go from when the material arrives right through to when we finally dispatch it for resale or back to the redeployed unit.
Thanks very much for that tour. The agenda for today is I'm going to give just a really quick introduction, then I'm going to hand over to Ingrid. Ingrid and Sean will take us through a presentation, then we'll have plenty of time for Q&A. We don't need to rush to an airport like we did yesterday. My first slide is entitled Why SLS Matters to Sims. I think after you've been on the tour, it's quite self-evident. I just want to make a few high-level comments. This has not been an overnight success.
I know from the market's point of view, SLS has grown rapidly, you know, really for the first half of 2026 and clearly we've put out some guidance for the second half of 2026. So it appears like a rapid growth. We've been in this business probably since 2019, when we sold off another part of the business and decided to focus on hyperscalers. We've been building up relationships, we've been building up our operational capability, we've been building up our sales capability, our redeployment capability over that time, in preparation for this. I'd like to point out it's not just an overnight success whatsoever. SLS now is a key part, clearly is a key part of Sims. It's a key part of our growth.
If you look at the chart here, I mean, I think it puts it quite starkly the EBIT contribution from SLS, how it's grown over the period and, you know, by the time we get through to the forecast year-end. It is going to be a massively significant part of our business and therefore an area that we've been working on, and we're really pleased that it's now getting the limelight that it deserves. I think you'll see throughout the presentation, it's the skills that we've developed, it's the relationships we've developed with hyperscalers, how we're embedded in their business, the trust that they have with us. This is the I think the magic sauce in many ways to the SLS business. It's complementary to our metal recycling business.
In a sense, they rhyme. You know, to create a world without waste, to preserve our planet. It's a very logical thing for us to be doing what we're doing with SLS. In other ways, it's completely independent from the metal cycle or the metal environment as well. We've got ourselves another significant EBIT stream in the business, complementary but independent, to our metals business, which I think creates a better balance sheet, it creates a more reliable cash flow, creates a more reliable EBIT. I really do think it is very complementary. The second last point I make on this slide here is capital light.
I don't know if of those you remember, when we first talked about the SLS business, we referred to it as a no regrets strategy. It was always going to be a capital light business. Yes, we'll be investing some money in robotics, as you saw out on the floor today, but it's not significantly large amounts of capital to get that in place. I remember saying right at the beginning, if we turned out to be wrong on the SLS opportunity, which we haven't turned out to be wrong, but if we did, we weren't putting a huge amount of shareholders' funds into it. It's a very capital light strategy, very high return on those assets.
What the SLS business, the final point I'll make before I hand over to Ingrid, is we really do have a good understanding of the secondary markets, whether that be redeployment back into a data center, which is a skill absolutely unique to SLS, no one else does that, or selling into the secondary market. We really do understand those markets. We understand what they need. They understand our quality. They understand our processes. They understand that when you get a refurbished DIMM, I guess, and what we're talking about particularly we'll focus on today, you're getting one of extremely high quality with SLS. On that note, I'll hand over to Ingrid and then Sean, and they've got a really exciting presentation for us, and then we'll come back for Q&A.
Thank you, Steven. All right, it's me. I'd like to introduce you to my executive team. We're independently managed from Sims. I report to Steven, but my exec team is completely independent because we tend to move at a different pace from the other parts of the business, just due to the nature of the business we're dealing in. Sean Magann, my Chief Commercial Officer, who's here. Lynn Jacobs, who used to be my CFO last time we had our Investor Day and has now taken over operations, Chief Operating Officer. Chris Guerrini, who joined us from Metals. He's in a new role, Chief Digital Officer, and that's because we felt we needed to elevate digital. He's gonna be all about digitally transforming the business, so we can continue to stay abreast at pace with our clients.
Very fast-moving. Chris has a load of things on his agenda to go through. Jim Clarke also joined us from Metals, and he's our new CFO. Marie Burke, our Chief People Officer. We are all headquartered in Irvine, California. We felt it really important for our team to be together, so we could move quickly and make decisions and keep strategy moving forward with the pace. Why California? California because that's where most of our clients are. Headquarters in the Bay Area, so very much California-based. Plus it's nice weather. Right, Stephen? SLS. Global leader in circular cloud solutions. Global, we are in 11 countries, and where we aren't, we'll use subcontractors. We're in 60 countries in addition with our subcontractors.
If some of our clients need services somewhere where we're not placed, we'll use subcontractors. Global, because our clients are global. We need to be consistent. The reporting has to be the same. It has to be sustainable. That's why it's really important for our business to be globally present. Circular, we're all about extending the life of electronics as much as possible, so doing the reuse, the re-engineering, redeploying, and at the very end, recycling. Cloud. We positioned ourselves, as Stephen mentioned. In 2019, we really turned away from electronics recycling, so we could focus more on hyperscalers and taking advantage of the growth in that area. We positioned ourselves to be adjacent to the growth. Who are our clients? Well, as you saw out on the floor, hyperscalers make a big part of it.
Enterprise clients, we have banks, insurance companies, also have on-prem services, hyperscaler data center type services that they need as well, and OEMs. The folks that are making the servers and the racks are also our clients. We have about 150 clients under contract, and Sean will talk a lot more about that when he comes on later. As I said, we positioned ourselves strategically to take advantage of the data center growth that's going on that we're experiencing today. That was a strategic decision we made in 2019 to really focus on this area. We operate very close to the hyperscalers to take advantage of that growth. We partake in the technology refresh cycles and of course, work in the supply chain.
We provide a lot of parts to go into that circular in the hyperscaler space. Stephen mentioned, it took us a lot of years to build these trusted relationships that we have with these clients. We've been working with them for a long time. This site here, it took us three years to get the technology approved, the process approved to get it going. Now it's you see it's running very well. We provide the secure services. That's very important. What you'll see, Isaac mentioned all the cameras we have. Security is of the ultimate importance in this area about data. Anything with data, super important. What we've proven is that we can move quickly when they need capacity. That's the big part. Hyperscalers need capacity. It's normally comes in bins when they decommission, it's big slugs.
What we do is we provide the capacity when they need it. We can put a site up in three months, which we've done three times here, and the high quality. You know, Isaac mentioned how important it is to have quality because we are competing against new material. It's a manufacturing-like process. The volume is the growth. Like what Sean likes to say, we gotta stay on the horse and just continue taking part in the pie growth. As it grows, we grow with it, grow with our clients. We're adding new services to continue to grow. We're going in new geographic areas like Ireland, for instance. That's also to provide capacity to a client that request it.
Also continuing with our core base of the enterprise clients so that the banks, the insurance companies still need our services, and there's still some growth in that area. You might ask why. Why do hyperscalers outsource? Why do they do it? They can focus on their core, right? They can focus on their core innovation instead of taking space and personnel to do what we do. We provide operational efficiency because decommissioning cycles tend to be very lumpy, so they can't handle the big slew of material and then reduction of material, whereas we can because we can overlap different decommissioning cycles from various clients. We just help with economic recovery. We help them do a more efficient operation, get some revenue back, and also repurpose where it makes sense.
As you saw out on the floor, this is the main process. The decommissioned equipment comes from the hyperscaler sites, comes to us. We harvest what is requested. We assess which way it goes. Does it go for redeployment? Testing and preparation, relabeling. Does it go to resale where there's rev share, or does it end up being recycled, which is the commodity recovery. With that, I'll hand it over to Sean.
Thank you, Ingrid. Very nice to see everyone this morning. I see so many familiar faces and some new faces as well. As Ingrid mentioned, my name is Sean Magann. I'm the Chief Commercial Officer here at SLS. I'm based in the San Francisco Bay Area, as Ingrid mentioned, but I spend an equal amount of time at our Irvine office. I did my undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, and from there went on to get an MBA. I've been in the industry for about 30 years. I was very young at the time. I started with a Canadian smelter that would process electronic scrap and import that material into Canada for precious metal recovery.
One of the projects I worked on that I'm quite pleased with was we set up pre-processing sites all over the world, specifically in Southeast Asia, and would process the material in country and then ship the semi-processed material to Canada for smelting. What I learned there is to maintain margins and to really keep customers happy, there's three pillars of service that we have to maintain. The first is service itself, right? All customers have SLAs, and it's critical that we meet these SLAs of customers. Isaac does a fantastic job with Crystal here in Nashville, and our customers are very pleased, and that's one of the reasons why we're offered new opportunities, is because we consistently outperform on our SLAs. The second is compliance.
Shipping material cross-boundary, it's a multi-jurisdictional process, and there's a lot of different laws that govern the movement of this material, and so it's critical to be compliant. I don't know if... Has anyone heard about Supermicro recently? Have you seen the news? When you have a chance, read about it. It tells you what happens when you're not compliant with shipping some of these materials internationally. The third is capacity. As Ingrid mentioned, our business tends to be lumpy, so you have to have the capacity to meet customers' needs. That was something we employed at my past company, and that's something I'm very pleased that we were able to bring to Sims. How do we make money? We have three basic buckets of money, of revenue, I should say.
It's resell, service fees, and commodity. We'll start at the top with resell. Each of these shapes roughly approximate the relative percentage of revenue we get. Resell is the top now. Essentially what we do, simply put, we take whole units such as laptops and servers and desktops, as well as components, hard drives and GPUs, CPUs and memory, and we'll process those materials on behalf of our customers. We'll wipe the data. In some instances, we'll load an operating system, do some of the work that you saw out here with relabeling. We'll process the material and sell that material to our worldwide buyers. Now, my team spends quite a bit of time vetting and approving buyers globally to make sure that they're compliant and that we also receive a fair value for the material.
In general, there's a 70/30 revenue split between the client and SLS, with the majority going to the client. It works really, really well because it incentivizes us to try to find the highest value because we price participate. Again, we spend quite a bit of time finding the best sources globally to take our materials in a compliant way. The second bucket you see there are service fees. Most items that we receive will have a service fee, usually per unit. In some cases, we still have service fees per pound. We'll charge the client per unit per pound to process the material. What's nice is in some cases, we can double-dip with the same unit. The same unit, we may have a service fee, we may sell that unit and also price participate on the resell.
The processes, the service processes can include redeployment, where we put something back into a data center, drive destruction, which I think you saw a little today, remanufacturing of units, and also data center decommissioning. That's the second bucket there. The final bucket is commodity revenue. We process something for something that's not available for redeployment or resell. We'll go ahead and sell that for commodity, and we'll enjoy a revenue share with the client. What I really like about this slide is five years ago, six years ago, the recycling would have been the majority of our revenue. Because we consciously put ourselves in a position to go upstream, we've really balanced our revenue streams where resell and service fees are much, much larger than the commodity side. Why?
It's more repeatable, the margins are better, and it's something we can control. You can't control commodity prices as we know. This slide may shock you guys, so I want to make sure everyone's sitting down before you look at this slide. It's no big news to anyone here, but data center spending is going up exponentially. A few notes on this slide. You have two lines. One is global, one is domestic here in the United States. This only includes hyperscaler spending. Now, there's no one true definition of what a hyperscaler is, so we list the hyperscalers that we include on the bottom there. I hope you can read that there. The question I get asked most about when this slide comes out is folks say, "Well, does this include land acquisition, concrete, external cooling?" It does not.
This is only for their IT spend. This is how the data centers make their money on processing and doing AI and whatnot. This spend is for material that we could process. You see it's a pretty steep curve there. Now, one thing to note, too, is there's a delay between when something's installed and when something comes to us for processing. Typically, it'd been about a five year end of life from installation to decommissioning. We've seen those time frames compress. It's on average three years now we're hearing with some of the AI equipment. We actually have someone well-placed in the data center industry saying that time has actually been compressed down to two years. We're seeing that lifespan shorten. It's interesting to note that the relationship the hyperscalers have with their data center equipment has changed.
Before, it was an asset you would sweat long term. Now it's almost a consumable, something they use and discard to keep up in this AI arms race. What I like about this slide, and hopefully what you as investors like, is with that lag, let's assume it's a three year lag. Some of the equipment you saw, like even this rack here, was probably put in place in 2021. We'll assume a three year refresh cycle. That means the material that we're seeing, even though we're having a really, really great year, is from material that was probably installed in 2022, 2023. That was before this exponential spending. If you put two and two together, it seems like we have a really, really bright future.
Not giving guidance, but you just see the amount of volume going in would be the amount of volume that has to come out. This is why we're excited about our business and hopefully why you guys are excited as well. I can answer questions on this later at the end if everyone has any questions on that. Memory, right? Memory, there's a lot of talk about DIMMs, right? DIMMs. Specifically DDR4 memory, right? The price has gone up exponentially in the last year. The question we get as a leadership team is why is it going up and is it going to last? Hopefully, by going through these three bullet points, I can answer that question for you. What's going on?
Number one, DDR4, which is the second most utilized version of memory, is being removed, right? It's not being idled. It's not being turned down until prices pick up. It's being permanently removed. If you look at the bullet point or the circle at the bottom, it says this is not a pause in production. It's a deliberate strategic exit from DDR4. Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron all announced last year in summer of 2025 that they would be ceasing production of DDR4. Those three companies make up 95% of DDR4 manufacturing. They've been very public to say, "We're out of the DDR4 business." The last buys to the hyperscalers is this year. As we understand it, as of next month, the hyperscalers are done. They cannot buy any more DDR4 on a large scale.
You have one, the supply being constrained. The next question I get is, "Well, why? Where's the money going?" Right? You said a bunch of money is being spent with data centers. Where is this money going? Well, it's going to DDR5 and something called HBM, which is high bandwidth memory. The amount of spending going into manufacturing of DDR5 is unprecedented. As you see the chart there, it was AUD 29 billion in 2024. What is that? AUD 53 billion in 2025. Since this chart was created four weeks ago, the forecast for 2026 has gone up to AUD 71 billion. Money is being spent. It's just not being spent on DDR4. All the manufacturers have placed their bets on DDR5. Question, why do the hyperscalers want DDR5? Why isn't DDR4 good enough?
There's a lot of different attributes that make DDR5 better than DDR4. The main two attributes are speed. DDR5 is a lot faster than DDR4. Again, in this AI arms race, speed is everything, and it's also more efficient with power. One of the big constraints with data centers is energy. There's just not enough energy to do what they need to do. Anything that's faster and better with energy is much, much sought after by the data centers. Because of this, now we know why the hyperscalers want it. The reason the manufacturers want it is because they can make a lot more money. Per unit, it's estimated between five and 10 times the amount of revenue selling a DDR5 versus a DDR4.
Even though short-term, the price of DDR4 is going up, the manufacturers know that long-term, their future lies with DDR5. Now we're comfortable with that there's a supply constraint with DDR4. How about demand? There is a huge locked-in base for DDR4 demand. This isn't hyperscalers. This is everyone else with a data center, co-location site, et cetera, that they've got assets. Again, that they will normally sweat these assets between five to seven years, and it's all built around the DDR4 platform. DDR5, in general, isn't backwards compatible with DDR4. The exception being the CXL that we saw out on the floor, but that's specifically a hyperscaler technology, and we can talk more about that. In general, it is not compatible.
If you're running a system, if you're a bank, an insurance company, a smaller tier data center company, you have two choices. You can either replace, if you want to upgrade your system, if you want to add capacity or upgrade your system, the whole system, which is built around the DDR4 ecosystem, which is expensive, or you can pay the high prices on the elevated prices for DDR4. Depending on what you read, we expect this demand to last three to four years. Again, there's a lot of articles about it. You can Google search on your own, so it's not just me. We see the demand lasting for the next several years where we all know that the supply is going away.
One just quick thing to add about the supply, one of the questions I get most often, I think one of you fellows asked me about it last night, was how about China? Is China going to fill the gap for DDR4, right? Can they come in and make a lot of inexpensive DDR4 and try to find or fill that supply gap? In my opinion, based upon what I've read, that's not the case. The Chinese government's been very, very specific telling Chinese manufacturers not to invest in last year's technology, that they want the Chinese manufacturers to invest in DDR5. Again, AI is an arms race. It's an international arms race in a sense, and the Chinese government does not want to be one generation behind. So it's very, very unlikely to see China enter into the market in a big way.
There may be some odds and sods that may fill a small gap, but in general, this supply gap should last for many, many years. Finally, this is just an overview of the transition of memory technology. The version before DDR4, you guys wanna guess what it was called? It was DDR3. We've seen this transition before from DDR3 to DDR4. When that happened, there was a spike in prices. We've seen this before. Every time someone talks about prices going up and when the question comes up, is something a bubble? The answer is always it's different this time. It is truly different this time because what's happening now, when the transition from DDR3 to DDR4 happened, there wasn't this rush.
It was a gradual transition where manufacturers still supplied a DDR3, and the demand for the DDR4 wasn't as great as it is now. For DDR5, 90% of all that capacity I talked about earlier with that spending, that AUD 71 billion this year, 90% of that capacity is already spoken for by the hyperscalers. So you have the demand side being extremely aggressive. While again, on the supply side, it's being turned off instantly. That did not happen before with the transition from DDR3 to DDR4. It was a much gradual. Even though we saw a spike, it wasn't as prolonged as I expect it to be now because the fundamentals are quite different. I've given you a lot of information. Happy to take any questions later. I can talk about memory all day long, as you probably see. With that, I'm gonna turn it back over to Ingrid.
Thank you.
All right. Let's pull this all together and walk through what this means in the financial results of the business. The first point that I want to bring you to is that we're introducing a new volume metric. In the past, we were using repurposed units, and that could have been anything. It could have been a laptop, it could have been a memory stick, it could have been a switch. We're turning away from repurposed units, and we're gonna go to gigabytes of memory sold. The reason being, if you look here, you have two sticks of memory. In the past, that would have been two repurposed units. But a 16 GB module is not the same as a 32 GB. It's twice the value. For those of you that are counting the chips, remember, it's mirror image. You've got chips on both sides.
We're dropping the repurposed units, going to memory gigabytes sold. In future slides, I'll explain, whoops, why this is important for you to follow when you're looking at our financials. Okay. Sorry. We're standardizing the memory because it just makes more sense for our business as we're going forward. We've spoken to you before about TrendForce. This will be the page, the landing page that you go to if you go to trendforce.com. I'd like to draw your attention to the red box there. That's what we use as our benchmark, and it's a DDR4-3200, and that's the speed. That is a benchmark that we use to help us guide in our pricing. If you remember, at the half-year results, we said that we were about 50% of that price.
Well, that was, you know, over here in the gray part. What we've seen starting in December is this huge hike in pricing. Really now we're at 25%-30% of that pricing, of the TrendForce pricing of a new gigabyte. The first half and second half were quite different. This one here. Let's pull this all together. There's a lot of information on this slide, and I think you're gonna see some good information for you. Last week, we posted a trading update of our underlying EBIT for fiscal year 2026 to be between AUD 165 million and AUD 185 million. What we're doing now is providing you more detail, especially around gross margin. Sean mentioned the three buckets of revenue.
Our three buckets of gross margin are resale, service fees, and the commodity. Certainly, the resale is the largest gross margin bucket. 80% of that is enjoying the tailwinds from memory pricing. 20% is your consumer tech, and that's your probably slower growth, PC sales, laptop sales. There'll be some growth, but not to the same extent of 80% coming from the memory. 20% of the gross margin is consumer tech, so that's about AUD 40 million-AUD 45 million of this 220-230. Service fees will see some growth, but again, not as much as the tailwind we're seeing from memory pricing. Commodity will be, you know, probably like your inflation. You can decide what it is in commodity, but not to the extent that we're seeing in memory.
We're forecasting our memory gigabytes sold for FY 2026 between 65 and 70 million GB. What we'll have to point out here as well, the first half, the split between first half and second half of the gigabyte memory sold, we saw a higher 60% in the first half, and we're forecasting 40% in the second half. That's because we're seeing more 16 GB memory modules coming out in the second half as opposed to the first half. Okay. Ireland, we talked about the geographic expansion, how we're gonna continue to grow. We expect to be operational by July 1st, so our next fiscal year. We estimate in the first year we're gonna have 4 million GB sold, and as we continue to scale up, it'll be 15 million GB sold by FY 2029.
You know, you can estimate an operating cost of EUR 4 million and EUR 27 and EUR 5 million in 2028. Plenty of room for other hyperscalers to come in. This is dedicated to one client. We go where the capacity is needed, and this was with partnership of our clients. Plenty of room to add others. Sean's gonna work really hard at getting other hyperscalers into this site. This is very exciting for us because Ireland is certainly the largest concentration of data centers in Europe, and it'll be a great footprint into that market. We're structured for growth, as I've mentioned before. We have plenty of capacity. We're probably using about 30%-40% capacity here of 60 million GB for the U.S., and we can add additional capacity as needed by changing some of our sites around.
We have plenty of capacity to continue to grow and to take advantage of this attractive market. We also future-proofed it by adding the automation. The automation will allow us to continue bringing in efficiency and also to dial up and dial down as needed with the decommissioning cycles that come through. It also will be compatible for DDR5s once that comes out. In conclusion, the key messages I want to leave you with is that, we're already a material earnings driver for Sims, which is quite attractive. We are exposed to structural non-cyclical growth. We're embedded with hyperscalers, and we're a capital light and a high return business model. We have multiple diversified revenue streams.
We are taking advantage of the attractive structural tailwinds in the memory markets, and we have significant growth runway ahead of us, so we can add extra capacity as needed and continue to grow. With that, I'll turn it over for questions. Lee.
Thank you. That was a great presentation. Thanks for that. Just on the pricing side, why do you look at an 8 GB price when you sell 32 GB and 16 GB?
No. That is a chip. So t hat's one chip.
Okay.
Sorry. You would multiply it out.
Yep. Okay, that makes sense.
Okay. It's a one chip, that's one new speed chip, and you'd multiply it out by 32 or 16, depending on the module to get the price reference and then take the discount to what we're getting.
Ingrid, if I can add to. I think the confusion might be that what you looked at, that in that it says 8, it's G little b, that's gigabit, which is 1 Gb. I know it's really confusing, but that's that chip is only 1 GB. So even though it says 8 G little b, that means 1 GB capital B.
Okay.
That's why we use.
There's 8 bits.
1 GB as a baseline.
Eight bits in one byte.
Okay. Thank you. I need to go back to technical college clearly.
That makes more sense, right? We're not basing it on a divisor of eight. It's one. It 's 1 GB.
Yep. That makes sense. Then if we think about the lags that you've talked about in the past of call it a month, and there's maybe some flex around that if the customer wants you to hold back and not sell immediately. Most people, I guess, track a new pricing series because that's what we have access to, and it seems the pricing has stabilized over the last few months. I guess what I'm trying to work out is how much of the spot price that we're seeing out there is in the guidance that you've given for the first quarter. Is there some equivalent price that you can say in that series that's baked into the EBIT guidance? What's your assumption?
I might go ahead and handle the guidance question. I won't let Norman jump up, but I'll do it because I've got. I'm miked up. We've pretty much assumed that as you've said that price has risen to that level and stabilized. That's what we've assumed in the price and our guidance, and we've assumed that we get 25%-30% of that price. The lag effect has finished, I think. I mean, as it ramped up dramatically, you know, it was a little bit hard to say exactly where it was. As it seems to have settled at this higher price, that's the price that we've used, and 25%-30% of that is what we've assumed we will receive for the second half.
Okay. I mean, you obviously have a volume story here as well, but if volumes were to stay the same, you would print a similar number of earnings for the next quarter?
Yes. Although bear in mind, as Ingrid pointed out, which is why we've gone to gigabytes sold, we are seeing more 16 GB in the second half. I wouldn't read too much into that, though. I mean, this is just the particular ones that are being decommissioned. But we've said 65 to 70 million, and if you look at, we've also said that about 60% of that happened in the first half, and 40% of that 65-70 million will be in the second half of gigabytes sold. Interestingly, more repurposed units in the second half, but because they're 16 GB, gigabytes sold. I think as we get used to that as a measure, you'll understand the benefit of us moving to gigabytes sold as a much better indication of future revenues.
If we were to look on that metric, what would've FY 2025 or if you go back, what's the level of growth we're seeing in that metric?
In FY 2025, interestingly, because it's recycling, the gigabytes sold would've been around about 5% higher, to be frank. The repurposed units in FY 2026 versus FY 2025, around 22% higher. It's all to do with the mix at the time between 16 and 32s. We had some more 3 GB in that DDR3s in that period as well.
DDR3 .
What I would say is we're seeing good growth in volumes. The mix this year has been slightly different to the prior year. Again, I mean, I think the point I really need to make is don't read too much into that. It just depends what particular data center's been decommissioned at that time.
On the volume side, like we heard on the tour just about the lumpiness that can be in the business just in terms of deliveries. In terms of the capacity, installed capacity, how do you think about adding additional capacity in a world where utilization is relatively low but it's very lumpy, and you obviously don't wanna disappoint your customers by not being able to take a shipment?
As we're moving off guidance questions now, I'm gonna hand that back to the guys. I'll hand it back to Sean and Ingrid. I mean, I have a general view around how we manage capacity, and we manage it well with a number of customers. Let me hand it back to those guys who actually have to manage the you know, the cycle.
Right. We manage capacity by adding additional shifts and with the automation you saw, so you can dial it up, dial it down. We have plenty of capacity to continue to grow. Sean's gonna fill up our sites .
Maybe for Sean, do you wanna give us an idea of how you're tracking R&D about reusing or recycling HBM and rare earths and some of the other opportunities that you have for the business?
We're lucky enough to where they're a bit separate, both of them. The rare earths, there's several companies, a lot of these with government grants, that are looking to have a better story for some of the rare earths. We've got NDAs and relationships with four of the big companies doing that, both domestically and internationally. On the HBM, it's a little bit trickier, right? Because you've got the memory manufacturers, and you've also got the Nvidias, the folks making the GPUs. We're working with our hyperscaler customers. It's really different now that we have a relationship with hyperscalers because we can see a line of sight of what's coming out. We're working with the hyperscalers.
This is why we have those test tracks to figure out the best way to maximize the value for the stuff they get. Our line of sight, to answer your question, is working with the hyperscalers. They know what's coming out, we know what's coming out, so we're working with them to trying to find the best homes.
Thank you. Maybe just a last one. Your view chatting to either your customers or suppliers around the relationship between used and new pricing, like do they think that the 35% holds, or do they think we go back to the traditional 50%?
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
That's why we didn't give out so much guidance at the half year. We're waiting to see where things are moving. So far it looks as though the pricing is staying the same.
It's stable.
It is stable. We would expect it to go back to 50%.
Yeah. With that stability, because you're not having that big price curve, I think both the spot and the new and the used price are starting to normalize a bit. I suspect we don't have enough data to prove that is what's gonna happen.
We just need a bit more time.
It makes sense that that would happen.
I think it is important to say, though, that we didn't assume that in the guidance for FY 2026. We assumed the 25%-30%.
Yep. That was why I asked the question. Okay, thank you for that.
Yeah.
Ken, just a quick question on the competitive environment. Particularly with the hyperscalers. Where are you winning? Where are you not winning, and why?
Well, certainly for us, what we do, we're the only ones who do the redeployment. So that is something that gives us very good relationships with hyperscalers, shows our ability to meet their needs. 'Cause in redeployment, they're after the parts they want to go back into their data centers. So that is a competitive advantage for us because we're the only ones that have that technology, and it took us three years to get that approved, to get through all the engineering specs, the security specs and that. So it's not something that can be easily replicated, I would say. And then on the other side, you wanna add more .
Yeah. The customers we work with, it's not just here in Nashville. If you go around, we've got different sites around the country and around the world that are sort of semi-tailored to that particular client. I'm thinking of Atlanta with the other hyperscaler. With the hyperscalers we work with, we win the majority of the time. There's still a few hyperscalers that we don't work with. One of the reasons, it's not so much the competitive environment, it's more that they're doing it themselves. I suspect that over time that can change. Ingrid had mentioned early in her slides why hyperscalers look to outsource it, and a lot of it to me is just growth, right? I think the hyperscalers that do it themselves, it's easier to do when it's a smaller environment.
with the exponential growth, I think the hyperscalers that do it in-house, or I know that the hyperscalers doing it in-house are struggling with it, and they're trying to find a better way to do it. I hope that answers your question.
Do you see more competition in the future? Obviously, there's sort of a three to five year kind of prep barrier to entry on getting in this business.
I think so. Whenever there's money in the water, the sharks are gonna come, right? You guys know this. We certainly see people trying to enter into it. There's something to scale with what we do. We're very, very embedded with our clients, right? It's not just the services we offer. It's we're embedded from an IT standpoint. We have APIs that go back and forth from a compliance standpoint. We've done a really, really good job. On one customer in particular, we have individuals inside their data centers performing some data eradication. I think we as a company have done a really, really good job embedding ourselves to sort of protect ourselves from competition. I worry about competition every day, and that's part of my job. Again, I think we've done a really, really good job making SLS sticky with the clients.
Great. Thank you.
Has there been any pressure on the 70/30 split, or has that been static over time? Do you foresee any pressure on that?
Well, no. At the moment, no. 70/30's been fine. You know, we do have other clients that aren't at 70/30, but overall, the average is 70/30. Sean, you might wanna speak to that.
Yeah. As I mentioned, again, it's 70/30 to the client's benefit. First of all, they do receive the lion's share of the revenue. In my experience and what we see now, we never wanna take anything for granted, right? We always wanna be competitive. If we can continue to deliver the highest price, right, by finding the best market for this material, and if we can continue to service our clients, we don't see as much pressure. I haven't seen it yet. Now, it could happen tomorrow, but I doubt it because we offer such a great service that 70/30 really seems to be the standard.
Just on Ireland, so was that hyperscaler you've entered that market with insourced before and they've outsourced to you? Can you give us some color?
They have a supplier currently but t hey can't meet the capacity. They've asked us to go move there to help with the additional capacity.
In addition to the program that you saw in our plant today is unique to SLS. The hyperscaler in particular would like to replicate that process. Because of all the QC demand, the three years that Ingrid mentioned, it's not easy for the other supplier to get into the space. It's much easier for us to walk in and do the redeployment, and that way, they don't have to certify a whole another vendor.
Okay. You've got guaranteed supply there?
Oh, nothing's guaranteed. We have a line of sight to the volume, and we're very, very confident that we will be able to action on that.
Thank you.
Sure.
Just on the chart that you had up very early on around the dollars spent on data centers. Is it sensible to link that to your gigabytes sold? Like, there's obviously some mix and a few other things going on, but why? I mean, I guess why put that chart up? If it won't link to your volumes on a lag basis, why not?
Guidance question. I think we put the chart up for a couple of reasons. Firstly, just to show that the amount of investment that is going into it. Yes, I think you can infer from that we believe that we will grow with it. The point that Sean made is that the stuff that we're now taking out the stuff that got put in in 2022, 2023. Not huge growth there. You know, by the time we get to 2027, 2028, we'll be taking out the stuff that's in 2024, 2025, 2026. You can see that growth. Absolutely, we think it's going to be linked from a volume perspective. Our job as SLS is to make sure we get that increased share of the pie.
Yep. It's held in prior years 2022, 2023 makes sense with your point?
Yes, it does. I mean, I don't think in global picture, no, I mean, not global, in the total picture, there's no reason to think why it would change. What will change is what's our share of it. We think we're doing a very good job of it. If we just maintain our share, our percentage share, we would grow with it. If we can increase our percentage share, we'll grow faster than it.
Have you done any more work internally around where you think your share sits? In the past, it's been very, very small for b eing the number one player.
We have. Ingrid and I were talking about that the other day. I mean, and I will hand over. It's still pretty small where we are because Sean noted that there was something like 8 billion.
8 billion GB in install of DDR4. DDR4, for all that we've seen in literature, there's 8 billion GB that are installed.
At least by 2026, w e're forecasting to resell 1% of the 8 GB. It's. We're still. I guess implicit within your question is how much runway is there. I think there's still plenty of runway. We've got to win it. I do need to stress that none of this is guaranteed to us.
Thank you.
Okay. I might wrap up here. Doesn't look like there's any further questions. Thank you. Thank you everybody for joining us today for an excellent tour. As you can tell, we're extremely excited about the SLS business. It's very complementary to our metal business, but I like it independent and complementary. If you haven't got the message that we think it's capital light, we think there's plenty of growth, I'm just gonna reemphasize that message. It's ours to be got. It's a competitive market, but we are genuinely very excited about this business. The last point I'll make, we've been in this business for a long time. This is not overnight success. This is just overnight recognition. That's it. Thank you for the last couple of days, and we will see a number of you back in Australia.