Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Transurban Group full year 2022 results call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There'll be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Scott Charlton, CEO. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you, and thanks, everyone, for joining us for Transurban's 2022 full year results briefing. Today, I'm joined by our CFO, Michelle Jablko, and we'd like to take you through the presentation we've lodged with the ASX this morning. Our Head of Investor Relations, Hannah Higgins, is on the call with us. Of course, her and the team will be available should you have any follow-up questions over the next period of time. Hopefully, the presentation is fairly short this morning. It should take only about 20-25 minutes, and then we'll have some time for questions. Before I start the formal part of the presentation, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we're gathered today.
Those of you that are in Sydney and do drive through WestConnex and through that St Peters interchange, you may have noticed the artwork at the entry to the final stage of the WestConnex tunnel. It's been created by the Bidjigal artists, which are the traditional owners of the land in that area. That artwork is just one example of how we use our assets to demonstrate respect to the indigenous people and their ongoing connection to the land in our local communities. Okay, now turning over to slide four, which is the highlights slide. While traffic was broadly flat year-on-year, we were pleased to see traffic volumes grow as the year progressed. The fourth quarter saw traffic levels reaching a new all-time high and exceed pre-pandemic levels.
This was a result of both new asset capacity and people returning to moving around our cities and including more travel to the airports. In the current macro environment of rising inflation and interest rates, the business is well-positioned, with approximately 70% of our assets having toll escalations linked to CPI or greater, which provides a built-in buffer, obviously, in this environment. Now in FY 2022, proportional toll revenue grew by almost 6% and free cash by approximately 20%. Around 98% of our debt book is fully hedged, which gives us low exposure to near-term interest rate increases given the size of our book. Actually, during FY 2022, we continued to strengthen the balance sheet and we refinanced over AUD 3.4 billion of debt at attractive rates.
Actually, we lowered our average cost of debt, including the latest refinancing that was just done on WestConnex. We have an exciting pipeline of development opportunities and a strong balance sheet to fund those near-term opportunities as well. Now, our FY 2022 distribution of AUD 0.41 per Stapled Security was 122% covered by Free Cash, including Capital Releases. This included a final distribution of AUD 0.26 for the six months ended 30th June, which we announced back in June. We do anticipate or forecast or expect our distribution for FY 2023 will be AUD 0.53 per security, which is approximately 30% higher than FY 2022, reflecting both an uplift in traffic performance and the benefit of CPI-linked price escalations.
Just for clarification, the underlying free cash flow we expect obviously in FY 2023 is higher than that of 2019, and we do anticipate subject to market conditions of approximately having AUD 0.10 of Capital Releases, AUD 0.10 per share of Capital Releases on top of that as well to fund those opportunities that we'll discuss going forward. Turning quickly to slide five. That's just a recap of our strategy statement. You've seen that since I think Investor Day or the half day. Highlights the three elements that are key to our long-term success, which is obviously listening and understanding what matters to all of our stakeholders, using that to create innovative road transport solutions, and then ultimately becoming the partner of choice for both governments and our strategic partners.
On slide six, we just wanted to remind everyone of Transurban's investment proposition. Given we've been dealing with crisis and some other things for a while, we thought it was good to go back to some of the basics. By delivering on our strategy, our business has expanded into five markets. We've grown from eight assets to a portfolio of 21, which are used by more than 2.4 million trips a day on our assets. Over the past decade, we've maintained an average concession life of more than 28 years through disciplined investment in new assets and enhancements. Currently, we have approximately seven development projects in progress. As I talked about on the opening slide, our inflation-linked toll escalations and debt hedging position us well in the near term for rising interest rates.
Going forward, our experience in asset development, delivery, and operations will be supported by the continued investment we've made in data and technology, allowing us to continue to deliver innovative road transport solutions alongside our partners. We are confident that these core fundamentals of our assets will support traffic growth over both the medium and long term, allowing us to deliver on our investment proposition, which is building that long-term value while balancing growing distribution payments to security holders and efficiently funding future opportunities. Now, I know, again, on slide seven, one of the major topics is the inflation and interest rates. If we move to slide seven on, again, on how we are positioned in this macro environment and positioned well, as we said. We talked about some of this at the Investor Day.
Again, our inflation-linked toll escalations, coupled with our hedging profile, actually provide a net benefit in the near term, inflationary environment. We saw some benefit in this last financial year, but the majority of the benefit of the increases in the higher CPI numbers that are now incorporated into our base toll prices will flow through in future years, including FY 2023. As the chart shows, the benefit of a 1% increase in CPI is likely to be greater than the cost impact of a 1% higher interest rates in the near term, given that, again, approximately 70% of our revenue is CPI linked, and that we've managed our debt book to give us a lower exposure to current market rates.
I think just to comment on the outlook, obviously, there's some forecasts out there of inflation, you know, reaching the high sevens, I think being made by the government forecasts for the end of the year. We have seen the long-term bond rates come off a bit. Hopefully what we'll see is a short, sharp adjustment, and then we'll go back to long-term trends. Obviously, that embedded inflation will flow through long term into Transurban's revenue streams. Turning now to traffic. As I mentioned earlier, we're seeing traffic growth in all our markets, and this chart clearly shows.
After extended periods of restrictions, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, early in this financial year, traffic levels have rebounded with 2.4 million trips a day in quarter four, again exceeding the same period in FY 2019. We're seeing that particularly continue on through into August. This is particularly evident on those assets connecting to the airports and some CBD related activity. As we said before, and if you look at some of our different reports and our mobility report and why people travel, which I'll talk about in a little bit. Again, CBD is important, but that is not the majority of our travel. It's not CBD related. Large vehicle traffic continues to be steady across the year, in part due to the continued and growing e-commerce demand.
Sydney's traffic performance did benefit from some of the new assets, including NorthConnex and the M8 and M5 East, along with some of the broader economic recovery. Now, Melbourne's traffic levels are starting to improve, and they improved in the second half with the Western Link supporting increased airport activity around that precinct. In Brisbane, traffic growth has been steady with positive trends in commuter and discretionary travel. In North America, we have also seen some improvement with traffic on the 95 Express Lanes, in particular in Northern Virginia. If you look at some of the pricing data and other data, that we've released, we see both traffic and price strength in the Express Lanes and the A25 in Canada exceeding FY 2019 levels. We expect traffic to return to long-term growth trends over time.
While near-term traffic performance will remain sensitive to government restrictions to health issues that again have the potential to restrict people moving around, but hopefully we're past that period. Again, we had seen some of this come into play in recent weeks. We did see some impacts from the Omicron variant and flu in July during the peak of winter. Overall traffic is holding up well, particularly given the additional impact of severe weather in Sydney in July. Again, as I said, signs in August are positive and we're hitting all-time high numbers for further recovery. A bit of insights into what we're seeing on the traffic. If I move to slide 9 and some of our insights from our mobility trend research.
Firstly, airport travel, and as anyone has been to an airport recently can attest, people are certainly traveling again. International flights in Australia, again, have doubled since the start of 2022 and are forecast again to double, by December of this year. We've seen that in some of our airport-related corridors, such as Western Link on CityLink. Again, as you can see, they're benefiting on the chart on the bottom of the left of the slide, which shows an increase in traffic corresponding with the higher airport passenger volumes. In our most recent mobility trends research, we found that travel to the airport was the most common reason actually for using toll roads in Australia. Again, it's on a, I guess, on an ad hoc basis, when people need to go to the airport, but an interesting finding, again, from the research.
We're also starting to see people form a degree of consistency in some of their working and travel habits. As many of you would know, we've been conducting research since the start of the pandemic to understand changes in the way people are living, working, and moving around our cities. Our latest research conducted between June and July surveyed more than 5,000 people across both our Australian and North American markets. Now, this research showed most people are traveling to the workplace on an average at least three days a week, which is consistent with our previous findings, and the average applies equally to city workers and others. I think that's important.
A lot of people talk about CBD office occupancy, but the majority of workers work outside of the CBD and around our roads and industrial precincts and other employment hubs around the city. Now in Australia, respondents say they expected to work an average of 1.7 days a week from home. That number varies from a low of 1.5 in Brisbane and a high of 2.1 in Canada. That number has remained sort of fairly consistent from our previous findings. Our most recent findings indicate, though there's been a significant increase in the availability of flexible work hours since the start of the pandemic, with more than 70% of Australian respondents reporting having access to flexible start and finish times, which compares to about 37% last year.
This increased flexibility appears to be having an impact on the way people decide to travel to their workplace, 'cause we have found, and we look on slide 10 now, around one in four respondents say they have changed their primary mode of transport to get to work or study since the pandemic started. For most people, that's meant switching to private vehicles over public transport. This chart shows a significant shift of up to 34 percentage points to private mode, depending on the city. The preference for private vehicles has been playing out since the start of the pandemic. Initially, the result of public health measures, but it now appears that some people have changed their routines as a result of increased flexible working practices.
Again, for example, someone who took the train or bus to work five days a week pre-pandemic may now choose to drive three days a week at a time that better suits their lifestyle. You can find the full version of our latest mobility trends report on the Digital Insights Hub on our website. If we look at slide 11, another positive trend that followed us all the way through COVID and coming out the other side is the e-commerce and online shopping. In Australia, four in every five households shopped online last year, and 93% plan to maintain or increase that habit this calendar year. Our assets provide crucial connectivity for vehicles traveling between these distribution centers, airports, and ports. In FY 2022, around 128 million large vehicle trips were taken on our roads.
This slide shows in Sydney, for example, the close proximity of our roads to parcel processing centers and the post codes with the highest levels of online shopping. If I move to slide 12 then to talk about some of our customer experience, the compelling value proposition of our roads is also evident in the growth of our customer base, which has more than quadrupled in the past decade to almost 9 million customers. Travel time savings are a key value driver. In FY22, even during the pandemic, customers saved approximately 325,000 hours each workday compared to alternative routes. Our recent mobility trends research found that nearly 50% respondents rated travel time reliability as the top factor when they make their transport choice.
We provide services such as our 24/7 incident response, which clear the majority of incidents within 15 minutes and help keep our roads running smoothly. This year, we also launched travel alerts on our Linkt app to share live information with our customers about disruptions on our roads. Interesting, in Northern Virginia, safety was ranked as the most important factor in choosing a transport option in the recent research. We continue to identify and implement initiatives to enhance our road safety. On our roads this year, we achieved a Road Injury Crash Index of 3.78, which is close to the lowest we've ever achieved and significantly below our target. This index tracks the number of serious injury crashes per 100 million vehicle kilometers traveled on our roads.
We give some more data on slide 13 to some of our customer base. Our recent mobility trends research looked into why actually people use the toll roads. You can see from the chart on the left, the reasons are very diverse. Only 14% of respondents use toll roads primarily for commuting, and the most frequent reason for choosing a road are airport or holiday related, with 76% saying that toll roads provide a direct way to reach their destination. Most of our customers use toll roads infrequently, and that's reflected in their spending patterns, with more than 80% of our Australian customers spending less than AUD 10 on average a week on tolls. Tolls represent approximately 1% of the average Australian monthly household expenditure.
Our research also showed that most people do not or only occasionally consider the price of petrol when they're actually going on short trips or commuting. This is something we've observed over the years and reflects the resilience of our assets despite significant fluctuations in fuel prices. We've provided an example of CityLink to show traffic recovering, continuing despite rising fuel costs on that slide. However, we also recognize that rising costs, including petrol, do impact our customers, so we've encouraged our Link customers to take advantage of our fuel discounts offered through our partnership with Shell Coles Express. Now all up, our fuel discount program so far has saved customers more than AUD 3 million. This year, we've also added to our Linkt Assist program for people facing financial hardship by joining the One Stop One Story Hub pilot program in Australia.
This hub allows customers to access hardship support for multiple essential services via a single point of contact. Just wanna cover some of our ESG highlights, but we have our full corporate report and outlines all our sustainability and ESG outcomes, and encourage you to look at that as well. If I look at slide 14, alongside our long-term target of net zero emissions, we are targeting a 50% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030. This obviously represents mostly our fuel and electricity use. Despite the growth in our business, we remain on track to meet our target, and we've achieved a significant 46% reduction this year through the use of renewable electricity.
Two-thirds of our electricity needs are now being sourced from renewables, and we have renewable power agreements in place for all of our Australian markets, and we're exploring our different options for the greater Washington area. While our customers' greenhouse gas emissions are not formally within our control, we acknowledge their impact on the environment. We have a number of activities underway to promote driving efficiently and to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles. Moving on to slide 15 and just an update on our pipeline. This has been fairly consistent. You can see we have a range of opportunities from enhancements to our own assets, to acquisitions, potential acquisitions, and large-scale greenfield projects. The development opportunities span the next decade, and we will assess each in our usually disciplined way. Obviously, if other opportunities present themselves within our strategy, we will consider those.
However, in the near term, the projects are largely weighted toward enhancements or expansion projects on our existing assets. Now, there's a lot of detail on the markets. I'll just make a couple of highlights in relation to Sydney on slide 17. Again, we've included in each of our markets traffic performance, travel time savings, and key business activities throughout the year. A few callouts, particularly in the development area. In Sydney, the M7, M12 integration delivery project, as we have discussed, has progressed to the third stage of the New South Wales Government's Unsolicited Proposal project, and that's continuing to move forward.
We've also made good construction progress on the M4-M5 Link in Sydney, which is a key connector for WestConnex, and expect that to open early next year. If I move to slide 19 in Melbourne, during the year, we commenced tunneling on the West Gate Tunnel. The tunnels are now approximately 42% complete and tracking well. I was out there on Tuesday. It's an amazing site. Everything is just progressing at pace now, and a lot of activity, and it's just going to transform the road network in Melbourne. Just a fantastic project. Further updates on both of these projects, sorry, WestConnex and West Gate, have been provided in some of the supplementary information.
In relation to Brisbane, population growth in Southeast Queensland is the highest of any region in Australia, again, providing a favorable backdrop for a continued expansion and opportunities in Brisbane. We continue to progress those discussions with the government partners that may alleviate existing congestion and also congestion associated with this population growth and preparing the city and the region for the Brisbane 2032 Olympics. In North America, construction has progressed and started on Project NEXT and progressing on Fredericksburg Extension, and we're pleased that our proposed enhancements to the 95 Express Lanes at Seminary Road and Opitz Boulevard have now reached financial close.
On the Maryland Express Lanes, there have been some delays to the final step of the environmental review process, meaning that we're currently working with the Maryland Department of Transportation on an updated timeline to reach financial close on that project, and we continue to progress discussions with our client. At this point, I'll now pass over to Michelle, who will talk through our financial results for the period. Over to you, Michelle.
Thanks, Scott, and good morning, everyone. As Scott has said, we think we're well set up to deliver distribution growth for security holders, into the future. We're seeing traffic recovery, and we have embedded CPI-linked escalations across 68% of revenue as well as a strong balance sheet. Despite the impact of COVID restrictions in our biggest markets in the first half of last year, we saw a strong rebound in traffic in the second half, supported by our new assets, increased movement around the cities, and a return to business and leisure travel, which resulted in traffic finishing only slightly behind the prior year. EBITDA grew year-on-year, benefiting from embedded price escalations and new assets.
The strength of our current position gives us the confidence to continue to invest in our business, ensuring that we're in a good position to take advantage of our future growth opportunities, adding longer term value and growing distributions for our security holders. Let me now take you through some of the detail. I'll start with free cash and distribution outcomes on slide 28. Our full year distribution of AUD 0.41 per security was 122% covered by free cash and approximately 12% higher than in FY 2021. Total free cash was AUD 1.5 billion. This included AUD 355 million in capital releases from WestConnex and NorthConnex during the year. Excluding capital releases, our free cash was around AUD 1.2 billion, up 17.6% year-on-year.
We grew distributions for security holders and retained most of our capital releases to reinvest in our growth pipeline. The next slide provides an overview of our statutory result. The main difference between this year's statutory result and last year's was the one-off profit we recorded in FY 2021 on the Transurban Chesapeake transaction. This was partly offset by non-cash movements in derivative valuations. Moving now to our proportional results on slide 30, which give you a better sense of our underlying business trends. Proportional EBITDA was AUD 1.9 billion, 3.5% higher than the prior year. Within this, like for like toll revenue was up AUD 103 million, despite average daily traffic being slightly lower for the year. This demonstrates CPI-linked or fixed price escalations in our Australian markets and improved pricing on our North American express lanes.
We expect to see further CPI escalations come through in the near term, with March and June inflation announcements taking effect during the course of FY 2023. Costs for the year were higher as we continue to invest in our business. We're confident that this was the right approach despite COVID impacts on traffic. I'll cover this in further detail on the next slide. We also benefited from new assets. Last year, we sold 50% of our Transurban Chesapeake assets, using some of the funds from this transaction to acquire a larger share of WestConnex. We can see the benefit of these transactions coming through in our results, with new assets contributing AUD 75 million to EBITDA. EBITDA was up 3.5%, with future EBITDA likely to benefit from improved traffic, full year annualization of our greater interest in WestConnex, and CPI benefits.
If I take us now to costs on slide 31, as I said, costs increased this year as we continue to invest in our business. Overall costs increased by 10.9%, consistent with comments we made at the first half. We've split the cost increases on the slide to separate out accounting related items and transaction costs, which contributed about 40% of the overall increase. The main driver here was the change in accounting requirements that reclassified spend that has traditionally been capitalized, such as cloud-based technology projects. Partly offsetting this was a net benefit from power purchase arrangements that we put in place for the majority of our Australian energy requirements. Excluding accounting and transaction cost impacts, we increased operational costs by 6.3%. This includes the rephasing of some future maintenance activities to earlier periods and higher insurance premiums.
Importantly, we also continue to make focused investment in the business to support recent and future growth. This investment includes supporting the growth in assets we've had in recent years, and areas like data analytics, cyber security, customer experience, and more scalable and flexible tolling platforms. We believe this was the right approach even through the pandemic, as it puts us in a better position to support future growth. If you move now to slide 32, I've included some considerations as you think about costs into FY 2023. We do expect costs to increase again this year, but that should be more than offset by revenue from traffic growth, new assets, and embedded price increases. Looking at the cost increases, there are three key reasons for this. Firstly, our operational costs will go up as we continue to invest in capabilities to support the future growth of the business.
For example, this includes further investment in customer experience, tolling platforms, and cyber security. More of this will go to OpEx instead of CapEx, given the type of spend. Secondly, with traffic improving, we expect an increase in volume-related costs, and we'll have a full year of costs associated with the additional ownership of WestConnex and the opening of Stage 3A. Volume-related costs and new assets are expected to add around 5% growth to the cost base in FY 2023. Again, more than offset by the corresponding revenue benefits. Thirdly, we have a number of potential development projects where we take costs to OpEx in the early stages. The cost here will ultimately depend on decisions that are made throughout the year.
While new assets and projects do add costs, making this investment now allows us to continue to grow the business and realize value over the longer term. Slide 33 shows our EBITDA margin outcome for the year. Margins at the group level were just under 69%, with these being impacted by government-mandated COVID restrictions in our two biggest markets. We can see the improvement in margins to over 71% in the second half as traffic in those markets improved. CityLink margins grew to 84% in the second half, and Sydney margins to 80%. The Brisbane margin was slightly lower in the second half due to high maintenance provisions as a result of a decision to bring forward some planned maintenance activity. In North America, proportional margins improved as traffic and the average price on the express lanes improved, particularly on the 95 Express Lanes.
The 50% sale of Transurban Chesapeake also benefited margins as the higher margin A25 became a larger proportion of our North American earnings. Moving now to funding on slide 34, our balance sheet is in good shape. Firstly, as you can see, we're well set up for a higher interest rate environment. We've been actively managing our portfolio with a through the cycle view, bringing forward refinancing activity and locking in pricing when rates were lower. We were able to reduce our average cost of debt slightly over the year, and almost all of our debt is hedged, providing protection from rate rises in the near term. Of course, we will eventually see the impact of rising rates, but this will happen slowly. As Scott has said, in the meantime, we'll see revenue benefits from our inflation-linked toll escalations.
The second callout on this slide is that we're well-positioned to support future growth. We successfully completed the acquisition of an increased interest in WestConnex during the year. To fund this, we used around half of the proceeds we received last year on the sale of 50% of Transurban Chesapeake, as well as new equity raised with strong support from our security holders. Using only around half of the Transurban Chesapeake proceeds has us well positioned to support future growth. We have a strong corporate liquidity position of AUD 3.9 billion, or just under AUD 3.1 billion after the final distribution is paid later this month. This, combined with future capital releases, sets us up well as we go forward. You can see this in more detail if you move to slide 35.
Here you can see that we're well-placed to fund our committed project pipeline with additional liquidity headroom. We've previously flagged that we expected to receive around AUD 2.3 billion in Capital Releases between FY 2022 and FY 2025. This expectation has not changed. So far, we've received AUD 355 million of the AUD 2.3 billion, with around AUD 1.9 billion expected to come over the next two years. This gives us around AUD 5 billion in corporate liquidity to fund our committed capital, with around AUD 2 billion of additional liquidity headroom. We've also provided some information on this slide on our upcoming refinancing, with most of the debt to be refinanced already above our average cost of debt.
Our balance sheet position and our through the cycle approach should help support distribution growth and has given us the confidence to continue to invest in our business for the longer term. We know that near-term distribution growth is very important for our security holders. On slide 36, we set out our guidance that we expect our FY 2023 distribution to be AUD 0.53 per security, which is approximately 30% higher than FY 2022. This is of course dependent on traffic continuing to recover throughout the year, without significant unanticipated disruptions and subject to broader macroeconomic factors and the timing of distributions from subsidiaries. Similar to FY 2022, we expect that the 2023 distribution will include a small component of Capital Releases to minimize the dilution from the WestConnex capital raising, and this has been factored into the guidance.
I stand back from our financial performance for the year, our business is in good shape to support distribution growth and create long-term value for security holders. We expect distributions to be AUD 0.53 per security in the coming year. Our prudent through the cycle balance sheet management and embedded CPI-linked price escalations position us well in a rising inflation and interest rate environment. We've built a balance sheet that gives us the flexibility to support our capital commitments with additional liquidity headroom for further growth opportunities. Thank you, and I'll now hand back to Scott.
Great. Thanks, Michelle. Looking now to the future in slide 39, you would also see that our Chair, Lindsay Maxsted, has said he will not stand for re-election at the upcoming AGM. Lindsay has now served on the Transurban Board for more than 14 years, and over that time, that business has grown almost sevenfold, adding 14 new assets in the last decade and paying more than AUD 11 billion in distributions to security holders. I know that Lindsay will be greatly missed by the executives and myself. I'd also like to welcome our new Chair, Craig Drummond, to the Transurban chairmanship. He joined the Board in July last year. He's got very extensive experience in financial and regulated service industries, and you'll see some more detail on Craig's background, but I'm sure most people know Craig.
I'm really looking forward to working with Craig as well as the board and continue to execute on our existing Transurban strategy of delivering road transport solutions, again, to create long-term value for our stakeholders and growing our distributions. Just summarizing on the outlook page on 40, we've covered most of these points, but looking forward, our business is well set up to benefit from growth in traffic and inflation-linked toll escalations, as we are protected from rise in near-term interest rates, and we have a robust balance sheet will allow us to continue to invest in sustainable growth for our business.
We're seeing that growth in traffic and over the last few months reaching all-time highs for the Transurban Group, and we expect traffic to continue to recover, particularly coming into the summer and warmer months as we move out of this last phase or this current phase of Omicron. As always, we'll continue to balance this investment that we have with our growth and distribution for our security holders. As we've talked about, the total distribution in FY 2023 will be AUD 0.53 or forecast to be AUD 0.53 per share, which is again 30% higher than our FY 2022 distribution.
Going back to what I said, just to make it clear, the underlying free cash flow is above that in 2019, and we still have subject to market conditions on top of that, approximately AUD 0.10 per share in capital releases that we will use to put back into the business to create future growth and long-term value for our shareholders. Finally, I'd like to thank particularly the team at Transurban through another year that's had its challenges, but we're sitting in a very good position at this point in time to take advantage of all the hard work over the last couple of years. Of course, I'd like to thank our security holders who supported us so much and for everyone who's attended the call today.
Now we will open up to questions, please.
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're using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Justin Barratt from CLSA. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Thanks very much for your time. My first question just comes in relation to costs. Appreciate the commentary that costs should further increase into 2023. I was just wondering, is it still reasonable to expect some margin expansion across your different geographies and the group level on, I guess, sort of 2H 2022 levels?
Thanks, Justin. Thanks for the question. I'll let Michelle answer that question, but we do anticipate an expansion over time, but go ahead.
Yeah. Justin, yes, we do. As we noted on the cost slide, there are some costs, particularly around early stage development spend that we'll make decisions on during the year. Yes, we are expecting some margin expansion on the second half margin.
Yeah, it's, you know, it's an interesting thing as well, is we continue to invest in particularly, you know, in customer and technology and other things that add cash flow and add benefit to the bottom line. They may not be at an 80% margin level, but they continue to add cash. We'll do things that continue to create value and distributions. We do expect over the longer term, yeah, margin expansions.
Fantastic. Thank you. Just appreciate the disclosure on slide 44, the distributions from non-100%-owned entities. I just wanted to try and make sure that I understand too. AUD 97 million, I assume that that's some backdated distributions from, I guess the COVID impact periods. Is it fair to say that they will shrink quite considerably into FY 2023? Or are you saying that the delayed one quarter NorthWestern Roads Group and the WestConnex M4, M5-M8, M5E distributions can be expected into FY 2023?
Justin, it's probably more the former. The driver of the timing increases.
Sure.
As you say, was distributions that had not been paid out in the prior year, particularly Transurban Chesapeake. There had also been some holdback of reserves and other things at WestConnex. You don't expect those to repeat in the coming year. There will be some small differences on some other assets, US assets, for example, the ED. We didn't pay out distributions in 2022, just given the COVID restrictions there, but we are expecting some return to distributions for the ED. Yes, I think your first premise was right. That timing difference should come down quite a bit.
Great. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Andre Fromyhr from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hello, good morning. Just maybe starting with the traffic and customer behavior, and appreciate all the data that you've shared from the recent research that you've performed. I'd love to get your sense of to what extent we're still in a sort of recovery state, on the path to a new normal of customer behavior, or to what extent should we start to interpret some things as structural changes? For example, you know, Melbourne still being down 7.5% in the fourth quarter, versus pre-COVID, does that feel like the new baseline or is there still recovery to play out?
Oh, thanks, Andre. A good question. Look, we still think, again, going back to long-term trend lines, so we still think there's some recovery to play out. Again, those cities that had longer lockdown periods, you see, it's taken longer to recover. You know, for those of you who spend any time in the Melbourne CBD, you'll still see that there's recovery to be had there. Obviously, the airports aren't back to full operation or capacity, so we still think there's recovery. You know, again, as we've talked many times, there's long term trends here about working at home, e-commerce and other things like that, and some of those are playing out. Again, we think all those long-term trend lines mean more kilometers being driven. There's still some recovery to be had.
I mean, you can see it. We're just, you know, if you go back, just a few months to January, February, you know, dealing with the latest round of Omicron and other things, particularly in Sydney. You know, and we still have the government in Victoria talking about if, you know, in certain instances still, if you can work from home, work from home. Now, you know, that will reverse obviously over time. Yes, there's still some recovery to play out. The thing that's balancing out that is obviously the trend away from public transport. That will move back more toward public transport over time, but the same will occur that more people, we believe, will come back to the offices.
I don't know, you can see on a regular basis now, certain large corporations talking about, I'm not sure the right word is mandating, but suggesting or looking to have their employees come back into the office. Again, partly it's recovery, but being supported well in the short term through some of these other trends and move away from public transport.
Okay. My next question is probably about the Capital Releases. I guess you've reiterated the overall size over the medium term with AUD 1.9 billion remaining. That's the scale of Capital Releases has been sort of held in your guidance for some time. To what extent is that sensitive to the interest rate environment? Obviously rates were lower when you initially talked about that scale of Capital Releases. Is there any sensitivity there?
I'll let Michelle answer, but you know, when you have to deal with treasury people, they're always very conservative. I'll let Michelle answer the question.
The reason we haven't changed our guidance on that is even as we've seen and we expect rates to go up, is to Scott's point, we take a fairly conservative view when we set it, so we had some buffer in there. We're still very comfortable.
Again, but even if you look at the long-term bond rates and where they've come off, the margins, liquidity, it's still, you know, can still be a fairly attractive market. Yeah, at this point we don't have concerns.
We keep achieving them and actually better than we.
Yeah, we keep achieving it better than we forecast. I mean, the big underlying issue, Andre, is what will the traffic be doing at the time. Obviously we're in a good position now with the recovery, the cash flow, but if for some reason, you know, something happens in relation to government restrictions, but that doesn't look like they'll be the case going forward.
Okay. Then just one slightly more detailed question on that and the role of the WestConnex capital releases in FY 2023. To what extent have you sort of got an idea of the scale of those already? In which case if the underlying free cash flow performance is better you could be lifting that. You could, you know, distribute higher than the 53. Or does the opportunity to use the WestConnex releases provide a bit of a buffer. If you perform better, you use less of the capital releases. If you perform worse, you use a bit more. Like, do you understand the dynamic I'm talking about?
Yeah, yeah. I completely understand the question. First of all, I'll just make it clear, the board's given distribution guidance of AUD 0.53. That's the board's guidance. Clearly, you know, we'll see how the operations go during the year. Obviously, you know, we hope we do better. History in Transurban, you know, other than market conditions outside of control, we've usually done at least a little bit better. We hope to do better. The issue with the capital releases, as I said, you know, we have subject to market conditions, roughly around AUD 0.10 per share of capital releases. Michelle can talk about where, you know, they're likely to potentially come from.
That decision, at the end of the day, will come from the board looking at the underlying performance of the company, what we've got to do in delivering the pipeline. Their guidance at this point is AUD 0.53. There certainly is plenty of flexibility with the capital releases and other things for the board to consider. That will be something they do next year. I don't know, Michelle, do you wanna talk about where it's coming from with WestConnex or other?
Yeah. I mean, I think in the near term it is more WestConnex. Over time there'll be some more out of NorthConnex and also, a little bit in Queensland and then Transurban Chesapeake over time. Scott, it's probably worth just going back to the distribution policy. As we stated in the presentation, the way we think about the distribution right now is it's underlying free cash and then, conscious of the WestConnex, capital raising and the dilution. We say we'll use a little bit of that to support the dilution. The reason it was set that way is you sort of look at the pipeline of opportunity we have, and it makes sense to reinvest those capital releases into the business.
If the Capital Releases end up being a bit more, then that just becomes a question for the board at the time.
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Andre.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Owen Birrell from RBC. Please go ahead.
Hi. Hi, guys. I might just draw a little bit further on that distribution guidance. I mean, AUD 0.53 looks like in simple terms, two times what you delivered as the final or in the second half of 2022. In terms of the distribution that you're getting from non-100% owned entities, it sounds like there's a bit of, or quite a considerable degree of discretion by those entities to pay. Are there any particular assets where you expect the distribution to be significantly lower or softer than what you saw in the second half?
Again, I'll let Michelle answer. There's not the discretion to pay. I mean, I appreciate that in your minds it might have been a long time ago that COVID and all this happened, but that, you know, it was just a year ago that, and particularly for Sydney and Omicron, that Sydney traffic was, you know, looking terrible and the city was shut down. You know, and then to Michelle's point, the timing of then the distributions follow behind that. Having to deal with those consequences. There's no issue with getting the distributions out. It's just we have a fairly conservative capital and balance sheet management philosophy. One thing is we have very strategically aligned partners as well who have their own reasons to distribute the cash as well.
I think very much aligned and no reason other than if it's a development opportunity to retain the cash. But we were in some pretty, you know, again, looking at potentially extraordinary circumstances, but I don't know if you wanna comment on the timing.
I think the discretion is more about the timing of it. Whether it's in 2023 or, you know, gets pushed out if something, you know, changed the views. That's why we make the point in the presentation. In terms of what we're expecting from the different assets, you sort of have normal just performance driven increases as traffic improves in some of them. I mentioned in response to an earlier question that we won't expect the repeat of some of the timing benefits or particularly in Transurban Chesapeake, and there'll be a small offset of that probably in the Eastern Distributor.
Yeah. Can I just ask on the Eastern Distributor, the comment there about transitioning to paying tax and amortization payments, how much can we expect that Eastern Distributor distribution to be impacted by both of those things?
We have started paying tax and amortizing it, and we didn't pay a distribution out of the ED in 2022. You sort of expect in terms of total Transurban Group, you know, it's probably about a cent of our distribution roughly.
Okay. Can I just ask a second question on the cost consideration?
Yeah.
You made a comment around early stage costs being expensed. Just wondering if you can give us an estimate of the kind of what sort of magnitude of early stage costs you are expecting to expense or you're budgeting to expense in FY 2023? I guess how much can that deviate, sort of high-low?
Talk about where it is. There's the M7, M12 project. There's work, as Scott mentioned, in terms of Brisbane, and there's work going on in the US around Maryland and some other potential projects there. The reason we haven't given a number is it will depend on decisions made through the year, but it, you know, it could be in the order of AUD 30 million-AUD 50 million, depending on the decisions.
Yeah. The other thing that's changed though a bit is, as you would see with the development projects and some of the things over the last few years, the issue of getting to financial close, getting the right construction project, getting the right due diligence done, getting the right sort of structure done to make sure in this environment, with this construction market and other things, that we get the right outcome, so we don't have any issues going forward. It just takes more upfront costs. Now, the value of these projects, the long-term creation, you know, it's significant value to the company, but we're just having to spend a bit more in this current environment to make sure we get everything right.
That's right. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Owen.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Paul Butler from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks very much for the presentation. Look, sorry to rehash things, but I just wanted to clarify. I wasn't 100% clear, 'cause I think, Scott, early in the presentation you were talking about holding onto some of the capital for, you know, future projects. I just wasn't clear whether you were talking about just hanging on to the capital from capital releases excluding from WestConnex or whether you were also including that some of the underlying cash flow from 100% owned assets.
No, it could potentially be some of both, but we would be able to show you where that's coming from. If for instance, we decide with the M7 that it's more efficient to use the existing cash to do the construction, but we would show you where that was and what capital would've come out. We're just looking at how we most efficiently use the capital, Paul, but we'd still be paying out, you know, the free cash flow, and plus the amount of, I guess, dilution for the WestConnex no matter what the case, as Michelle said.
On top of that, like for this year, we've got another AUD 0.10 per share of Capital Releases to put back into the company. That's what I was talking about. Sorry if that confused it a little bit.
Okay. The AUD 0.10, where's that coming from?
It's mostly, I think Michelle said, mostly WestConnex.
That's.
Great.
That's well progressed and should happen. I'm looking at the treasurer, should happen sooner rather than later. He's laughing, so that's a good sign.
Right. That AUD 0.10, is that the proportion of the capital release that will go to fund the AUD 0.53 dividend?
No.
No.
No, that's on top of that.
The way I think, remember when we did the WestConnex transaction. We got additional capital releases just because we own more of WestConnex. We said we'd use a little bit of that for the first couple of years to offset the dilution. We've effectively already got that with the capital releases we've done. I would think that the capital release that's coming up in 2023 is essentially to go back into the growth pipeline.
Right. 'Cause I mean, what I'm trying to do is take the AUD 0.53 of div guidance and then try and figure out what that means in terms of, you know, what you're implying about free cash generation.
Yeah, I appreciate that, and I guess we can't be all that specific, but let's just say it's almost all free cash, Paul, would be the expectation.
If you look at the small amount that we used in 2022 for the dilution, that's a fairly you know, good indicator, give or take a bit.
Again.
Oh, okay.
I understand why people might be disappointed, but we're coming out of COVID. There has been a lot of volatility over the last two years, and obviously giving full year guidance, when the last two years we've not been able to give guidance, we think is pretty strong. It's a 30% increase plus then the Capital Releases. I can understand why people are disappointed, but you can also understand why the company might be looking at it on the conservative side, you know, potentially on the conservative side, given that we're coming out of the sort of COVID period.
Okay. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Suraj Nebhani from Citi. Please go ahead.
Morning everyone. Thanks for the presentation. Just a couple of quick ones. Maybe one for Michelle. Can you clarify, you know, the average cost of debt for FY 2022 borrowing for 3.5%, but where does the cost of new debt sit today if you were to refinance any debt?
Just to understand your question, you're talking specifically in the U.S.?
No, I think.
Oh, just talk-
He's saying where is it?
Oh, where-
Refinancing, what would the new cost of debt be?
On average.
Look, you know, as Scott said, we tend to try and take a conservative view and beat it. We did refinancing at WestConnex just in the last couple of weeks, and again, the all-in cost of that ended up below our average cost. It's probably a bit more doing it today, but then, you know, we've got a team that works really hard at trying to
Yeah, I think, again, the last lot of financing was below four. I think, sorry, just thank you for your question. I think the, also the answer to the question depends on where we see value for money, where we need to shape the portfolio, you know. It depends on term and liquidity.
Yeah.
There's just so many different factors. I mean, sometimes we have to replace our working capital. Some of it might be working capital, and that's got a very low number on it. Some we may look to go the U.S. long term for some portions.
Yeah.
of WestConnex. I don't think your average is gonna be much different. Might be above our average cost of debt, but it's not gonna be. It's not gonna move the portfolio.
Yeah. I'd expect the average comes up a little bit, but.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Thanks for that. I guess the other one is on the asset enhancement projects that you announced in the U.S., so Seminary Road and Opitz Boulevard. Is there any sense of CapEx around these two?
Yeah, it's fairly.
They're pretty small.
Yeah, in the 100, you know, probably AUD 100 million.
Yes.
Together, so they're pretty small.
I guess the other thing that what you mentioned was that over the future it's probably more enhancement projects that will take up majority of the pipeline apart from a couple of large projects. I guess where do you see the next wave of opportunities? Is it mostly in Australia or offshore?
Yeah, look, you know, as to the In the short term, they're in the enhancement projects, like hopefully in Queensland, the enhancement projects there, as we said. If you look at that slide 15, you know, Gateway, Logan, hopefully we've got M7, M12, which will be running, you know, M4 and M5 other projects we've already committed to. Those are the ones that really come in the next five years. We will always, you know, if it fits strategy, we're always watching a few things that are not on this list that may become available, that fit into our strategy and make sense and we can create long-term value with. You know, we've always been optimistic on the US, but it can be difficult. But we keep a watching brief on several of the markets.
It's been difficult to find the exact opportunities that we need. You know, we're making good progress in Montreal and hopefully a future enhancement there. I'd like to say, you know, more in the US, but then there's what the governments decide to do with things like Western Harbour Tunnel and other things in the future that we keep watching. It's hard to say. We just see plenty of opportunities both just being created from our existing pipeline, but in the markets that we operate. Usually it's not necessarily a shortage of opportunity, it's more just making sure we have the right resource to execute and make sure we execute correctly.
Thanks. Maybe just one final one. Looking ahead, obviously, you know, construction costs are rising as well, and interest rates, you know, have increased significantly. Is that impacting the required returns that you're using in your feasibilities for projects going forward?
Yeah. Again, we take a long-term view on the cycle. I mean, the construction costs will be what the construction costs will be when we lock in the deal with the government, whatever the returns we need for our projects or whatever. The construction cost is important 'cause whether it makes value for money and project's viable and other things is obviously very key. Once we lock in the construction costs, that really shouldn't be the issue. The interest rate cycle, again, when we do an investment, we are investing over, you know, 30, 40, 50+ years. We always assume roughly the interest rates and inflation go back to long-term averages. We're still below those long-term averages. We do take that into account.
It doesn't change really our long-term view. Each project is specific, and we look at the risk return of each project. Clearly we need to find value for our security holders, not only in the long-term value, but make sure that we don't disrupt the growth and distribution too much by just creating all long-term value. We need to make sure we create distribution growth as well.
Yeah. Thanks for that.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Cameron McDonald from E&P. Please go ahead.
Well, hi, Scott. Hi, Michelle. Can I just back up over the DPS guidance just for clarity, please? When we go back and look at the WestConnex acquisition of the additional stake, you said there was AUD 600 million worth of additional capital releases that you're expecting to get out of that through to FY 2025. That's about AUD 0.195 a share. You've just distributed AUD 0.02 this year in FY 2022, and Michelle's just guided to another AUD 0.02 or thereabout in FY 2023. Are we expecting, you know, another sort of eight odd cents or seven odd cents of distributions in 2024 and 2025, given that that would then absorb the 600?
Um-
Well, now, look. Sorry. I'll answer at a high level, and then Michelle can talk about the details. The answer, Cameron, is we said we'd use some of that to do dilution. We won't use all of that. Obviously anything in the future like that is the board's discretion on how they apply it. We said we'd use some of it. We didn't say we'd use all of it.
Yeah. That's right. We said the bulk of it would actually go back as reinvestment into the business, and we'd use a small amount.
Yeah.
As you've seen us do.
I don't think you'll see us using much more than what we're looking at is around that 2-3 cents a year.
Yeah. Yes, you're right in your math that there is more capital releases.
There is more, yeah.
to come from WestConnex.
Okay, thank you. Can I just also ask, given that, you know, you've been rising or raising tolls with inflation, are you seeing any elasticity of demand, sort of kicking in, given that you've been, you know, this is the first real time we've seen tolls rise with this sort of magnitude in a long time?
The answer is no, we haven't. Probably the bigger sensitive issue is the rising fuel price, which, you know, when fuel jumps that much, you know, you see for, you know, a short period of time, a couple of days, maybe some changes, but then it comes right back fairly quick. If you look again at our mobility research and our data, not only does it play out in our traffic modeling and how we look at it through our modeling, but then how it comes back to the surveys that commuting and short trips are not that much affected by the price of petrol. Long-term trips are affected by petrol prices and tolls.
While tolls, particularly in a low inflation environment, rising at higher than inflation with some of the embedded floors and tolls, seem to be a bigger issue than the tolls rising at inflation, which seem to be at the lower end, if you look at some of our surveys, at the lower end of the issues that our customers are dealing with when you consider the price of petrol, electricity price, groceries. That's a long way of saying no, we're not seeing any issue in elasticity or demand with the increase in toll.
Okay. Last question, just, you know, recently New South Wales government tolling review came out and I'll paraphrase that basically said, yes, you should renegotiate tolls. Yeah, clearly, I mean, I think you'd be happy to renegotiate and with the government if there was some sort of commercial outcome. Can you make some comment around that, please?
Oh, look, we've been saying for a long time that, you know, we're willing to engage with the government and look at a more efficient way to do the tolling for better network outcomes and better customer outcomes. Again, we've also said for a very long time we can be no worse off from a securityholder's point of view. You know, happy to look at all different ways of accomplishing that objective, but that's something for government policy and, you know, happy to work with any of the governments to try and achieve that objective.
In regards to the tolling inquiry, again, people get a chance to see the document we submitted, and it's actually a really good document on the value that we add, particularly to the New South Wales network and the tolling inquiry. You know, the recommendations that came out, and I think it was 14 of them, were almost identical to the same recommendations that came out three years earlier and on almost every tolling inquiry. You know, it's, and we agree with the vast bulk and majority of it. But, you know, tolling policy is up to the government and we're willing to engage whenever they're prepared to.
Thank you.
Thanks, Kevin.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Charlton for closing remarks.
Great. Well, thank you, everyone. I know it's another busy reporting day. I think next year, hopefully we'll try and come on a little bit earlier in the season. Thanks everyone for your interest. Those follow-up questions, please talk to Hannah and the investor relations team. Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll get around to seeing the majority of you. Appreciate your interest and your time, and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.