I would now like to hand the conference over to Carolyn Barker, AM, Group Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Oh, thank you very much. Well, welcome everybody. It is a pleasure to be speaking with you again, this time at the full year. With me today is Marc Devine, our Chief Financial Officer, and also John George, our Investor Relations Advisor. Simon Morrison, who has undertaken many of these presentations to the market, has moved from Managing Director to Executive Director and Head of International Mass Torts. We will be taking the meeting today, and Simon no doubt will be listening in his Head of International Mass Torts role, which is very exciting for the business. We are going to obviously take you through the results.
You have got the pack downloaded no doubt, so we will be referring to page numbers on the way through, should we need to, so everybody can keep up to speed or up to date as we are flicking here in the room in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, our head office for Shine Justice. We do have an improved result this year, FY 2026, up 2.3% on revenue, EBITDA up 7% and net profit restored, which is very important, of course. Now, I want to point out that is on a statutory basis. We will talk about the one-off transaction that has affected our results for this year. That will be clearly articulated in the presentation as we go through. But we ended the year, 30 June 2026, reporting higher revenue, improved earnings, stable operating cash flow, and a well-funded balance sheet.
This improvement was driven by our growth in legal work, both in personal injury and in class actions, and the higher fees billed, higher average new file fees, controlling still our back-end cost. Our cost management was very important for us to keep a focus on. Then continuing to invest in emerging technology platforms, which we will talk about, and of course, international growth initiatives. You will hear us talk about IMT. That is short in Shine talk for International Mass Torts, and we will talk about that more in the presentation, as we have some exciting news about our international growth in that regard. Let me hand straight over to Marc Devine and take us through the numbers, Marc.
Thank you, Carolyn. Morning, everyone. As Carolyn said, we will reference the slide deck as published on the ASX this morning, and I will give a brief overview on the high-level numbers. As Carolyn said, there are sort of two sets, if you like, the statutory numbers. We thought it very important to call out the impact of the announcement that we released last Friday being that legacy class action, which we have had to pay some revenue and some disbursements on. I will get to that in a minute. On slide three, statutory revenue of AUD 209.2 million, which is up 2.3% as Carolyn said. Net work in progress is AUD 366.6 million. That is fairly stable. Obviously, added WIP and build off WIP, which is great. In the company's history, we are at AUD 12 billion plus in damages recovered for our clients, which is a great number.
We finished the year with around 900 staff, in 50+ offices, both in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the U.S. So, increasing our domestic footprint as well as evolving our international presence. If you move to slide four, we wanted to get this one up front and center and explain the impacts of the write-down on the legacy class action. You will see on the table there, where it really impacted was the revenue line. There was an AUD 11.2 million increase in the constraint rate carried against that matter. What that basically means is that, we had recognized revenue of up to AUD 11.2 million on that matter. Due to the outcome of the interlocutory proceedings in the U.S., under accounting standards, we have had to provision against that. So that reduced the top-line revenue by AUD 11.2 million.
Without that transaction, the adjusted number is AUD 220.4 million, which on a like-to-like basis compared to last year would be an increase of 7.8%. We do not discount the adjustment that has occurred, but if it did not occur, we would have been up around 8% on revenue for the year, which I think is a great outcome. The other part of that transaction were the disbursements that were carried on that matter, which Shine are currently carrying on their balance sheet. Again, we have had to sort of impair those down AUD 1.8 million, which made our operating expenses AUD 175.9 for the year, which is a 5.6% increase on the previous year. Obviously the previous year there was an adjustment for a fair value loss of circa AUD 10 million that was included there as well.
Take all that into account, I think the headline number is the EBITDA statutory of 31.7. The adjusted EBITDA, taking into account backing up those transactions, AUD 44.7. So a 13.9% increase for the year, which again, I think just the focus on the business and how we are running both the personal injury and the class action business to get such a quite an impressive increase outside of that issue. Our net profit after tax, obviously the bottom line on a statutory basis, AUD 6.7 million, taking into account the adjusting items and the tax effect of those items, that actual adjusted amount is AUD 15.8 million against AUD 9.7 adjusted for last year. So a 62.9% increase, which is, again, a terrific result. Underneath that, we have got earnings per share statutory 5.74 against an adjusted 11.19, an 87% increase on last year.
Quite a good result with the exception of that legacy matter, which has had, obviously, a substantial impact. But I think we'd consider that a one-off type scenario. Move to slide five. This gives you sort of a snapshot on the adjusted basis, which basically just covers all the numbers I went through, AUD 220 revenue, AUD 44.7 adjusted EBITDA. Operating cash flow AUD 19 million. That was stable for the year. There is some WIP that was built up, which we didn't build off during the year, which would've been nice to build off and increase the cash flow. Also there were some investments, as Carolyn Barker mentioned, in Emerging Technology and some of our operating costs to get in front of where we need to be from an Emerging Technology perspective.
Move to slide six. It's a two-segment business that Shine Justice has, personal injury, obviously, and class actions.
Personal injury side had some good growth during the year, both in revenue, EBITDA, whilst maintaining its cost base and class actions, again, grew during the year on an adjusted basis. Obviously, unadjusted it made a loss. For personal injury, EBITDA AUD 36.6 million, up 18.4% on last year's number. That's off the base of AUD 181 million worth of revenue, which is up from AUD 166 million in the previous year. Current sort of footprint, there's 47 personal injury offices around Australia and New Zealand and the U.S., with around 540+ personal injury staff. It's around 8.5% of the market share according to the last IBISWorld report, which was back in 2025. Which still means for us, which is the focus, there's still 73% of the market share outside the top three PI firms.
Still a lot of market share out there that Shine Justice can go up and try and increase its percentage. Class actions sit on the adjusted EBITDA of AUD 8.2 million, which was up from last year of AUD 7.7 million. So a good increase. There has been investment in class actions during the year in investigation work. So it's obviously work we do, we don't recognize it as revenue until such time as it reaches a test of being an active funded matter. So we did have a build-up of WIP on the class action side, which we're hoping once we start to file some of these cases this year to release into the both the P&L, and we'll get funded cash flows for them.
Currently, the class actions team operating out of six Shine Justice offices across Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S., and there's 100+ staff in the team.
There's an intention to grow that as we get more of these matters through the pipeline, both domestically and through the international mass tort space. Moving to slide seven. Just some high-level commentary on the results and what drove those results. As I said, adjusted revenue up 7.8% to AUD 220.4 million. Personal injury was a big part of that. What we saw during the year was we're getting more legal work per fee earner out of our teams, which is great. The headcount that we'd budgeted for last year, we didn't actually achieve, but it was offset by that increase in legal work per fee earner. So that's a really good outcome and something that we're pushing to continue through FY 2027. Class actions, similar vein, a lot of work done on the legal work per fee earner. They also increased.
But some of that is investigation work, which, as I said, we do not recognize any of that until such time as we can file it and have it funded and have lead plaintiffs and all sorts of things. Another positive during the year is staff turnover reduced. It was significantly higher than where it is at the moment 24 months ago, I think, when I joined. But the team have worked really hard at that retention, keeping staff, changing the way we do things, and just making sure that Shine is a place that people want to come and work at. And positively as well on that staff retention front, we have a lot of people that have left Shine, that have been good leavers have wanted to come back, and they are coming back, probably more than what we actually anticipated.
As I said, earnings recovery, so net profit after tax up adjusted compared to last year, adjusted NPAT up compared to last year. And the basic EPS is also more or less double than what it was last year as well. So really good outcome on the adjusted basis. Spoke briefly about cash generation. There were some positives underneath the sort of flat headline number, being the fees billed during the year for personal injury were higher than last year, and we were seeing higher values per matter than what we were last year as well. So, some of those lower quantum matters, we are sort of, I guess, working in a different way to get better outcomes. Effective class actions improve their fees billed during the year based off the number of resolutions that occurred and settlements that occurred during the year.
And there is a couple more of those that are pushed into FY 2027, which will hopefully resolve and settle, and we get paid for in the next six months. Just put a comment there about towards normalized earnings. We do not really like to report adjusted numbers, and we will only do so where they are material one-off events. But I think we dealt with the fair value loss of the fair consideration last year. We have unfortunately had this AUD 13 million impact this year, which we have called out. But it is our goal to, I guess, get the business in a position where the numbers are the numbers that we are reporting on. It is a stable business that is growing, and hopefully just reporting normalized earnings, which is a goal of mine.
That being said, I will hand over to Carolyn now to go through slide nine.
Thank you, Marc. Great CFO over here. Thank you. All right. I want to go into personal injury and also class actions. We will get more detail. So you will see on slide nine, we call it our personal injury scorecard. Here are the numbers, AUD 180.9 million in revenue. EBITDA for that segment, AUD 36.6 million. Throughout the year, throughout the 12 months, 4,000 clients have been compensated. So we settled the matter, and we paid their money for the wrongs that befell them during the period that we had their file. The client is at the heart of everything we do at Shine, so we delight in these numbers. They are important to us. Damages secured for the year, AUD 800 million plus. And then, of course, we have got to replenish the cabinet the whole time, so 5,900 new files were opened during the period.
As mentioned before, we are one of the largest PI practices in Australia. We have a national scale. You will see through various reports there are varying numbers of our office numbers, meaning the number of offices that we have. That is because we have adopted a forward-looking and as flexible as one can be property strategy for our business right through Australia. We are in cap cities as you know, we are in regional centers. Some would say a few rural, none remote as yet. However, what we are doing is if we see a demographic shift or there is a focus in an area that we know that we can respond to and help people in need, then we will go there, but we will use a more flexible office location and outsource strategy. This is not a pin drop. I am not talking about that.
It is about how we can have a presence in these areas, and that is important. You can see in the table on the pack to the left, there is the statutory PI revenue and EBITDA trend. Again, statutory because we want to show it in that way given this presentation. So we have increased to AUD 180.9 million. We did that because we continued with our disciplined approach. We have had success in turning around some of the business areas, the jurisdictions and matter types that needed to have some special care, and we have done that, particularly in Victoria. It is a great success story for us. We have been there for 21 years. It is hugely important as part of our whole, and the Victorian team there have done outstanding work for our clients and for the PI practice in the state of Victoria.
We have said before, we have improved efficiency in the legal work by upping the legal work per fee earner and the recovery rates, and we have the highest fees billed on record in our company in FY 2026. We continued to really assiduously acquire new files, good quality new files for specific branches in 2026. We are going to be far more assertive about that in 2027, and that will be talked about later in the forward-looking files. Then, of course, Marc talked about our lower turnover. This has been two years of a really focused, holistic approach to our staff, their wellbeing, and their connection engagement with Shine. We are thrilled that we have so many of our staff return. That was an overt program. So we meant to reconnect with our good leaders, and we are so thrilled that they are back.
Lisa Flynn is the Chief Legal Officer of PI and class actions. So I believe she is listening today. We, though, have a Head of Class Actions in Craig Allsopp, who is doing an outstanding job in that segment of the business. He leads practice leaders across the East Coast of Australia for what we call domestic class actions, and he and his people also work with him privately on that. Now, the Chief Financial Officer has just pointed out that I have finger fumbled one of the slides. So I am going to let it go though, because people can read that. It talks about our upside opportunity in our deep pipeline. But I want to go to our class action scorecard. So the slide, just so I have marked everyone around, the slide is 11. That is where I am. Good, I hope you are too out there.
Okay, so continuing on that slide. Our first class action was one in New Zealand, and it was for Hino. That's a real breakthrough. We have six in-principle settlement agreements reached for over AUD 219 million. That's going to be an inflow. We have greater focus on investigation to filing velocity, so moving the matters through more quickly. We have tighter portfolio governance. Craig Allsopp's office of the Head of Class Actions has been supplemented by some more specialist staff, especially looking at prospects to investigation to filing matters. That's to really drive domestic class actions. So we want to make sure that that continues to be driving along with PI as the engine of our Australian business. Then when we move to what we're doing with international mass torts, that will help us out there incredibly. Okay. So, let's move to slide 12.
Where I talked about just before the upside opportunity in the deep pipeline, we've got 48 matters open. I've talked about pipeline momentum. We've talked about the adjusted revenue, and we have talked about portfolio funding in the half. Now, portfolio funding is our term for looking internationally for funding opportunities. We were successful, and we did report this in the half, of securing a AUD 40 million funding arrangement with an international funder to drive our talc Australia matter forward, and that's being actively worked on at the moment. So with portfolio funding, we are talking to a number of funders who will look at matters that we have on hand and will help us with additional funding from different and separate sources to actually really drive our business.
What we're showing here is that we have a deep pipeline so we can flow those matters into that type of funding regime. Also I'd like to point out that we are diversified across a number of class action sectors. So we're not just dependent on one or 2. You can see those on the right side, a little chart there. We're across environmental, medical, very good work in First Nations and social justice. That's a real key, heartfelt area for us. Consumer, employment, shareholder, a lot of people in shareholder, so are we, and financial services, so are we in that area. But our diversification helps us manage our concentration risk. So, let's move to the next slide, number 13. Talked earlier about IMT or international mass torts, and this is where we sit at the moment. We have a U.S.A. hub. It's a hub and spoke model.
The hub is in the U.S.A., it's in New York. That hub finds, works with, defines sorts funding for, and then exports, that's our term again, to our IF international spokes. IF international spokes, if you're sitting from a U.S. hub perspective, would be to Australia. We already have a very mature, well-functioning class actions business. So as well as domestic class actions, we will be looking and are looking at internationally funded spoke class actions. That's our terminology. Just thought I'd explain it a little bit more. The same with New Zealand. We're already in New Zealand and we have developed a class actions business there and it was thrilling to get our first successful resolution there with Hino. Then our Asia spoke. Asia spoke is Thailand.
We have an office in Thailand, we have employees in Thailand, and we are working up cases in investigation in Thailand. There are plans to make this even more broad in years to come, and we will tell you about that. We will be able to perhaps share some other news in the half about that. Just repeating that Simon Morrison has moved from managing director to executive director and the head of IMT, International Mass Torts. He is running that for the business, Shine Justice, and there is no stopping Simon. Moving to the next slide. It is about strategy and growth, and everybody is talking about AI. We prefer to talk about emerging technology. AI is a subset, but emerging technologies are larger than, bigger than AI. It all is important that organizations get a grip on all of this.
Our roadmap, which we shared previously, was a three-year roadmap. We said in FY 2025 that we are going to set the foundations and to figure out what was going on. Everybody did in the world, actually, from a corporate perspective. We created the Emerging Technology Center so that activity could happen all around the business, but we had clear sight on what that activity was, so that we can then bring it into a channel which allows us to determine how we might replicate or how we might fail fast, typical stuff. In that year, we put the infrastructure in place, and there was an investment to do so.
The years that we are talking about now, FY 2026, we informed you all that it was a proof of concept year, that we were not going to go big solution, huge activity in mainstream systems, et cetera, that claim they could solve the world with their AI plugins. We said we were going to look at proof of concept throughout our business, throughout the jurisdictions, throughout the matter types, and throughout the supporting business services inputs. That is what we have done. We have noticed improved productivity. We have insights, and we have our operational efficiency, but that is yet to come through in the results. That will be through 2027 and 2028. 2027 is the acceleration year, where we will get sustainable productivity and service improvements that we can quantify. The maturity of 2028, it is embedded, it is done.
We will continue to evolve as the industry does, but we have got a total grasp of it. The other half of the page that talks about where we are now is really giving some color to the FY 2026 year. We have got the Emerging Technology Center. We have put in AI guardrails and a governance structure, which is incredibly important. We are looking at agentic and automation platforms. We have created our own agents where they impact our business. We are very happy with where we are in this regard. Our client intake platform continues to be Salesforce, and we are utilizing Agentforce, the extension, the AI and other automation extension of Salesforce, and that is linking to other systems and other agents and connectors in the business. We are getting our data in very good order, and it is going into a foundational data platform.
We're a Microsoft shop. We're using Microsoft Fabric, and that project is very well advanced. We have good, clean data so we can get good, clean reporting at the desktop happening as we accelerate in FY 2027. Then just to mention our people platform, that is not agentic, but it is a new platform that will help fuel all of these activities. Hence we call it the Emerging Technology Center because it has these input skins. Okay, Marc, we're up to 16, if I've got the slide number right. Over to you.
Thank you, Carolyn. Slide 16 is just a very high-level summary of the balance sheet position, as we sit at 30 June. The net assets position, AUD 260 million, little bit down on last year. Obviously, that takes into account the legacy issue we spoke about earlier. Cash equivalents down for the year from AUD 18.1 million to AUD 12.5 million. Again, probably an investment in the emerging technologies, and some other IT platforms there, as well as the investment in IMT matters, as well as some class actions, which will come to be realized as cash in 2027 and beyond. Net debt increased slightly on FY 2025. I think that net debt should hopefully reduce as we go forward. This increase is due, in some part, to the movement of a final tranche of disbursement funding, loan disbursements that we were carrying into our core debt stack.
Even though that's increased the debt, there's definitely an interest saving on the back end of that. Obviously, net work in progress I spoke about earlier, pretty flat on where we're at. But the focus for 2027 is to definitely, as much as we love file intake, which we need, to build some of that off as well. Looking forward to that through FY 2027. Just a couple of other comments there. The group has AUD 119.7 million of financing facilities available. We've got headroom at the moment of AUD 41.4 million. Our majority of facilities run to March 2028, so there's still plenty of time before we need to renew those. Importantly, the group complied with all our banking covenants during the year. Franking credits are still available, which is good. That supports the continuation of franked dividends.
As you would've seen, the company has declared a dividend for the year. Net debt, said, yeah, increased a bit. But hopefully, as we increase the work in progress being realized as fees, we'll start to actually reduce that a little bit going forward. On slide 17, I spoke then around the dividends. A AUD 0.025 fully franked final dividend being declared for the year, payable in October. Again, I think that's representative of the board's commitment to return value where we can to shareholders. Takes the total dividend for the FY 2026 year to AUD 0.04 per share. You mentioned the franking credits earlier, and in total, thus far, the company has bought back AUD 3.8 million of shares. That was in the scheme up to September 2025.
We didn't actually acquire any in the scheme that was started in October 2025, just due to the balancing of the capital requirements with some of the investment we've done during the year. The capital allocation framework there just called out the growth investment. We have invested in the Emerging Technology Center, international expansion. We did buy some personal injury files, which we're looking to continue to do more of. As I said, it's that balance against growth of the business versus the returns to shareholders. With that, I'll hand back to Carolyn to do the strategy and growth and the outlook.
All right. Let's go straight to FY 2027 outlook in the orange box. We are continuing to have momentum in our personal injury segment. We are going to build on our improved legwork per C&A. We are going to look at containing our write-offs just in the way that we look at how we manage the conduct of the matter, the file, as it goes through. We've got more disciplined focus on that. It has always had focus, but this has been really a point for us to concentrate on, and we have. We've done very well in fees billed year to previous years. That will continue. We are obviously sort out the kind our resolution quantum is going to continue to be very, very strong. We'll continue to pursue acquisitions, as both Marc and I have alluded to, and they must align, though, to a strategic plan.
It's very easy to buy files and businesses that don't add value to the extent that we want them to, but we are going to have a stronger focus on that in 2027. Class actions is focusing or will focus on filing more matters and increasing investigation to filing velocity, that we've got the processes, the people, the systems now in place better to do that. In our domestic class actions, continue to see it as the engine with PI to be the sort of the business sits atop that as we then focus on our international mass torts strategy so that we can give Simon the time and the space to really make great leaps and bounds in that area.
Our international mass torts hub, remember that's in the U.S.A., in New York, is going to continue to source and develop matters for Australia and New Zealand and Thailand, and there will be other jurisdictions that we're looking at in 2027. I must mention, we also have a personal injury law firm in the state of Arizona that allows an alternative business structure to be set up, ABS. Even though we're a law firm, we're considered to be an ABS in that state. We have an active PI business that has now been stood up. It has staff, it has files, it has outcomes. It is a good little business, and that is managed, if you like, in the bulk of our PI activity by Lisa Flynn as CLO, but of course, within the American jurisdiction. When I say managed, I should say administratively supported.
It is managed totally independently, of course, in the U.S. But we can use our systems to help support administratively. We delivered growth in 2026. We did have that one-off transaction that has been talked about quite a few times. That shows how well we did underpinning in 2026. We are expecting to see growth again in both personal injury and class actions and in profitability, alongside an increase in group cash flow. That is where we end up. I must finish by talking about, it has been our 50th year this year. Kept it till last. Shine 50 is the banner under which we operate that whole year, this whole year, calendar 2026 of operations. We have had external outreach. We have had stakeholder and staff interaction.
We have had tours around regional and rural and remote areas with a little car that we have kitted out called the Shine Mobile.
It might sound a bit funny and interesting saying this in a presentation to the market, but we cannot let our 50th year go by. We started in 1976, in Toowoomba, from humble beginnings, through the East Coast, through Australia, and now internationally in our calendar and financial 2026 year. We are very proud of that as a company and a firm. With that in mind, we will look at taking questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Tom Tweedie with MA Moelis Australia. Please go ahead.
Good morning, team. Well done on the result, and thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple from me. Just on the outlook, you have obviously called out an expected increase in group cash flow. I just want to narrow down on PI, just given it is a little bit more predictable. Should we be thinking that cash flow sort of grows with segment profitability? Or is Emerging Technology going to mean a faster WIP conversion, and maybe we see a step change in the cash conversion versus segment profitability there within PI?
Thanks, Tom. On the PI side, obviously, there's a few competing priorities, for want of a better word, at the moment, being we want to grow the business. That file acquisition opportunity that we want to really push harder on will obviously consume cash if we can identify files that we want to acquire. But generally, growth in PI should lead to higher fees billed and more cash in the door. I guess we've just got to remember, some of the work we've done to sharpen focus and execution, these matters are long-tail matters. We're also looking at velocity, trying to get velocity in, so matters closing out earlier. Some of the actions we're taking now will show through, maybe not all in this FY 2027, but definitely FY 2028 and beyond. You'll see the benefit of that from a cash perspective.
From the Emerging Technology Center side of things, we have not banked or baked any upside from a revenue/cash perspective into our books for FY 2027. Referring back to the roadmap, we sort of started in FY 2025, developed the Emerging Technology Center in FY 2026, and have some really good things in our minds and also starting to actually become reality. We'll try and push those out in FY 2027, and again, FY 2028 should start to see some benefit from that, but it won't happen in FY 2027. But at a point in time, I think most companies worldwide that are dealing with emerging technology and the commercial realities of what the outputs of that are, at a point in time, it has to be either efficiency savings, which means we can push more files through, or other benefits that come from it.
Appreciate that. Thanks. Second question is just on class actions, again, on the cash conversion. You called out the AUD 40 million of funding from an external funder. I'm just trying to get a sense of the cash benefits of the external funding from that AUD 40 million for FY 2027. Is that expected to materially drive operating cash conversion just because you're not carrying the matter yourselves? Secondly, with the pipeline of other matters you want to move into an external funding mechanism, can you just step us through the benefits across the business there from a cash perspective that you expect?
Yeah. I won't give you dollar values, but just theoretically, which is what we're actually seeing come through. The AUD 40 million we announced back in February, obviously that's not AUD 40 million dropped in our bank account and off you go. So we're drawing down on that amount each month as we go through the matter. The matter, obviously, again, is expected to last a couple of years, so that funding will last along that same timeframe as well. Class actions in general, we're still carrying some old matters where Shine had fully funded or Shine had partially funded, and in some cases, we're still funding those ourselves to get to the settlement of the matter. But every new matter that we're bringing online, the ideal scenario for Shine is if it's one that we want funded, go out and get funding for it.
We've obviously got the carry that we normally keep on all those class actions that get returned to us at the end of the matter. But the idea is that we get all funded matters moving forward. So we're still in that sort of 50/60 bucket where we've got old matters we're trying to resolve and finalize and get our investment back, which could be sizable from those, as well as getting that fluid monthly, quarterly cash flow coming in from new matters that we're running and that are funded. So it's a bit of both. So you'll see an uptick in 2027 from the class actions fees because we're moving to that. You'll also probably see some settlements come in, which gives us a little bit of an uplift in cash because of getting the WIP back from the previous two years or three years.
You've still got that sort of unevenness coming through, but each year moving forward now, it should flatten a bit, a lot more, which I know will make me happy knowing that we've got all funded matters that are fairly stable. Then at the end, you still get these uplifts where you're successful on either a GCO basis or there's an uplifting component.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thanks, Tom.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Peter Drew with Carter Bar Securities. Please go ahead.
Morning. Thanks for the presentation. Just a question on the outlook. You've guided to revenue growth across PI and class actions. I'm just wondering, PI grew at 8% fairly consistently through FY 2026. Is that sort of high single-digit level achievable in FY 2027?
Yeah, we think so. As I said, there's a number of parts to the PI strategy being our growth branches and footprint increases that we've done. We've actually stepped back away from some areas which weren't performing that well for us. Obviously the big part is the file acquisitions and how heavily we can get into that. Look, I think there's still growth there for sure, around that same level, comfortable with. It will depend on some of those other factors as to whether or not we can push it up higher in 2027. It'll get there eventually. To go and acquire files is not a process you can do in a month or two months. It sometimes takes a bit longer. It just depends what opportunities we can capitalize on, and when.
Yeah, thanks, Marc. Just on class actions, just curious, what sort of growth are you thinking you can achieve there? I'm just looking at the sort of number of class actions actually filed is fairly flat or sort of down actually year-on-year. So I'm just wondering where the growth's coming from, and then within that question, with the IMT strategy, has that actually contributed any revenue to date? What's the thinking in terms of contribution for 2027?
Thanks. I'll at least start at your last part of your question. The IMT strategy and what it's contributed, it has. I mean, obviously Simon's been in the States now for a couple of years, on and off. He splits his time between Australia and the States. There are matters that he has sourced from the States that he's pushed into Australia. There's definitely opportunity for others that we're looking at for New Zealand and as we said, Thailand. There's a contribution there for FY 2026. It's by no means material or what it can be in the future. Again, the whole point of the IMT strategy was to get cases that were run and won or run and looked like being won in the U.S., bring them out to other locations where we can run them off the same information, the same evidence and whatnot.
There is upside. We continually are working on IMT and sourcing that for Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand and other places. These are not domestic class actions on the lower end, which could be an AUD 20 million or AUD 30 million settlement. These are quite material and large cases that are run in the U.S., and we're hoping we can monetize that in all those different regions as well.
Just the growth piece in the class action business, what's going to drive the revenue growth this year?
Well, again, there's a fair amount of WIP locked up that is not yet able to be recognized due to the accounting standards and whatever, so the investigation WIP. There's a lot of that that should come out in FY 2027, which we funded matters that we can recognize the WIP and then start to be paid the fees for. There are still a lot of matters in class actions domestically in New Zealand and Thailand individually. That's where the growth has come from. I think from the class action side of things, we have spent a lot of time in 2026 working on some of these IMT matters and getting those worked up. The class actions team is looking at expanding resource-wise. We're looking at how best to go and track talent in that team.
Once we get that in, obviously we can run more matters. So it is that balance of fuel the dream. As you build it, they will come.
Yeah.
We know there is work there. We know we can grow it. We just need to go find the matters which we have got and then get them funded, and away we go.
Yeah. Right. So it sounds like you have already got a fair bit of kind of revenue growth already baked in.
Well, there is an amount in investigation WIP, which once we tick all the boxes to be able to recognize it from an accounting standard point of view, we will hit the pay now. Obviously as we do that, we have got to go and find more investigations and work through the pipeline. So I guess that is maybe a different way of saying it is, ideally you want investigations to be run to then convert into matters, to go get funding, and then you are away. Run the matter, settle the matter, and just have that pipeline continually flowing. I think we have made steps towards that in 2026, and we will continue to push that in 2027. I think in 2026 we also then focused on the IMT side and getting some of those matters ready to run as well.
They've had a really good year, the class actions team, in the work they've done. Unfortunately, the financials with what's happened probably aren't completely reflective of that. But again, I think it puts us in a really good position for 2027 and beyond.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Marc. Then just the last one. Just in terms of cash conversion, just generally, if I look at your operating cash to EBITDA was sort of around 42%-43%. What should we be thinking in terms of conversion for 2027?
Again, I won't give you a number, but improvement.
An improvement on that?
Yeah. In 2026, we did invest in Emerging Technologies, and we probably spent some money on, not a lot, but some money on Emerging Technologies, more so than we will in other years because we're in that investigative phase. I think we've got our plan now and know where we want to get to. So that should help, but also just the conversion from what we've done. More efficient legal services, the legal work per fee earner increasing, getting more out of the cost base I guess as well. So it'll definitely improve as we move forward, yeah.
Yeah. Great. Thanks very much.
No worries. Thanks, Peter.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Ms. Barker for closing remarks.
Thank you everyone. Much appreciated. We will remain open to your further queries. John George is on tap to talk to you as he usually does around this time. We can answer those queries outside of this meeting. We really thank you very much, and we will be talking to you formally again at the half coming up. Thank you.
Thank you all.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.