Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Trajan's half year results investor webinar for H1 FY23, the period ending 31st December 2022. Please note all participants are currently in listen-only mode. Today's webinar will feature a presentation from Trajan's CEO and Managing Director, Mr. Stephen Tomisich, and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Alister Hodges, followed by a Q&A. If you do wish to ask a question, you can type it into the Q&A panel at the bottom of your screen at any time. Investors were also invited to submit questions ahead of time when registering for the webinar. Please note we will hold on all questions until the conclusion of the presentation. I would now like to hand over to Stephen Tomisich, CEO and Managing Director of Trajan.
Thanks, Amy, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining this morning's call. This is the fourth report out of Trajan's earnings result since we listed in mid-2021. You'll find today, just like the previous three occasions, that we're delivering results that align with or better than the guidance that we had provided. Indeed, this is Trajan's 11th year of consecutive growth. When we look at the growth in the half that's just been completed, there is some really rewarding characteristics about that achievement. First of all, that the recent acquisitions that we've made have all contributed at where we expected, if not a bit better than what we had anticipated. Underneath that, we're running at an accelerated organic growth rate of the existing business of in excess of 18% per annum.
When I look across the business and operations, every single one of Trajan's operating business units also delivered growth over the quarter. In fact, if you consider the half and where we are today, just by every metric you can look at, Trajan now is more than twice the scale that it was when we went to IPO just 20 months ago at $ 1.70. If we think about our balance sheet, what you'll see in the half is that we've reduced net debt by nearly 30%, almost $ 12 million, and that the cash position has been rebuilt to be in excess of $ 20 million. A strong half, and we're looking forward to delivering on top of that as we go into the second half of this financial year.
The first thing I need to do is say thank you to the Trajan team around the world. This achievement, these results, they're not about me. They're about a group of almost 700 people around the world who are aligned around this vision. You know, this is who we are. It is about delivering products, services that benefit people, that have an impact. Our business philosophy is when you do that, you achieve the financial rewards. We do that in a way that observes our values. At Trajan, values aren't something that's just written on a wall or some sort of slogan or motto. They are the way that we judge our behaviors every day, and indeed, they are the way that we make decisions every day about who we are and what we do.
Sometimes I'm asked about the degree of difficulty in terms of cultural alignment when we acquire new businesses. One of the most grounding aspects that you can refer to when thinking about culture and alignment is values. If you're able to have common values across an organization, that builds culture, it builds momentum, and I think that's demonstrated in the way that Trajan has continued to grow and expand over its 11-year journey thus far. Just a reminder about who we are. We are truly a global developer and manufacturer of these analytical and science products. I've seen on a few investor sites us being referred to as a distributor. We are not a distributor. There is deep IP in the products we design and develop, and indeed, there is IP in the way we manufacture those products around the world.
We are incredibly focused on these three market segments: biological, food, and environmental. Why? Because those areas are the ones that have the potential to most greatly impact human wellbeing. As we focus on those segments, what we are most concerned about is the quality of analytical data. How do you design products, automated workflows, solutions that deliver data that has value, that is reliable, that is increasingly accurate and has integrity? Because if we're heading towards a world of personalized, preventative, data-based healthcare, then it's the importance of the underlying data that can't be overestimated.
We're really pleased to continue to collaborate with our large customers around the world, whether they be our large OEM partners or indeed the emerging group of large pharma, food science, environmental customers around the world that with us develop better solutions every day to the applications in these 4 areas of focus. Just a reminder about our scale. Over 8,000 products around the world, over 1,000 customers. We have operations now in 6 different regions, 7 different manufacturing sites. I think sometimes this is one of the things that perhaps is overlooked in terms of the robustness and resilience of the Trajan business. We're not a one-trick pony. We have a diverse range of products and services across a diverse range of markets, a diverse range of customers.
The common theme is the continued focus on what makes a difference, what is going to deliver better answers in biological, food, and environmental analysis. Onto the numbers. We look at the revenue. We burst through the $80 million mark in the first half of this financial year. That is more than what we did in the entire year prior to listing. About 83% growth on the comparable period. Really pleasing to see not a slowing, but actually an acceleration of our underlying organic growth rate at 18.6% on the pre-acquisition business. If we think about the business that was in place before the four recent acquisitions, that business is continuing to go from strength to strength.
EBITDA more than doubled over the prior reporting period 115%, 115.9% growth at $ 10.3 million. We saw in the half the progression of our gross margin. In the first quarter, we were still playing catch up with some of the increased cost inputs that we saw. Certainly in the second quarter, the rollout of some of our pricing actions, that taking traction now sees the gross margin expansion continuing on the trajectory that we saw prior to some of those cost increases. Pleased to see that continuing. We expect that to continue on into the, into the second half.
On the back of that, you'll see today that we're going to up our guidance both for revenue and EBITDA as we go into towards completing this financial year. You'll see in the numbers strong cash generation, good position in terms of rebuilding the cash balance, strong reduction in net debt, and increasing contribution from the four acquisitions that we completed since the IPO. We're also managing really well, some of the other areas that were challenging through this period of no doubt, disruption and volatility for many businesses around the world. I think we have a really talented and experienced management team that is great at foreseeing some of those challenges, putting in place the right type of risk mitigation strategies. We look at the snapshot on the right-hand side.
You can clearly see, you know, the global regions from which we derive our revenue and the mix of revenue in terms of the capital equipment versus consumables. Of course, I'm sure you'll note that, in terms of the split between the segments, the life science segment is rapidly approaching half of the business here. We go on to look about the upgrade. We're now increasing our expectations for the full year to be $ 155, $ 165 in terms of revenue, and have proportionately also increased the outlook for the profitability and the full year contribution. We see ongoing strong demand from our existing customers. We are seeing expansion into new customer sets. I often speak about best in class.
What that refers to is, as we look at each area of specialization, each of the product portfolios where we aim to be best practice, we can see the translation of that achievement into gains in market share. That's what's underpinning some of that organic growth. It wasn't so much in some of the mature product lines. It was certainly in some of the updated, some of the higher technology product lines where we are now, in our view, best in class. Of course, we've seen global trends towards things like data-led decision making, towards laboratory automation. Our automation businesses, our workflow automation strategies are playing out strongly, both in Germany through the Axel Semrau acquisition and also through the Trajan's automation business.
I've mentioned already the way that we've looked and mitigated many of the challenges, the cost inputs that we saw attacking the business over the last year or so. I've mentioned down the bottom of this slide, the highly experienced leadership team. It serves as a good reminder that Trajan has a very strong and experienced team of leaders around the world with really hundreds of years of experience in this industry amongst us. We weren't a startup that we're trying to learn about the world in which we operate. So many of the leaders in Trajan have come out of the industry with great depth and great experience. That I think, is what allows us to run this business in a very disciplined and methodical way. I'm going to talk briefly about the acquisitions.
I know there's always interest in how are they going. I'll remind people that the four acquisitions that we completed post IPO from our world, they're really acquisitions eight through 11 over the whole Trajan journey. These acquisitions complete the first 11 that we've made. What you can see on the right-hand side is what we expect, and that is our focus initially is on customer retention, ensuring the revenue streams continue on. Then we look down the track of how we realize synergy, both top line and bottom line. Really pleased to see that we're achieving those expectations in each one of those acquisitions that we took on over the last year or so. In the numbers you've got there, the almost $32 million in the first half from that set of acquisitions and a strong contribution to EBITDA.
Just as you look at those numbers, no doubt some people will do some ratios. Remember, we're still running the microsampling or Neoteryx business at a marginal loss. From there, you can calculate the strong contribution of the other three businesses in terms of accretive profit contribution and expanding and growing. From there, I'll hand over to Alister, the CFO, to talk you through a few slides on the financials, and then we'll open up for Q&A. Oh, I forgot this slide here. Sorry. Just a couple of points here. Operationally, the Project Neptune is continuing on. This is where we're driving increased automation, particularly in our Australian operation. At Penang and the Malaysian team are continuing to grow, and we're progressing well there.
Commercialization of new products and the development of the portfolio, we're pleased with the progress we're making in that regard. The M&A program remains active. Our funnel remains active. We still have opportunities out there that we can see on our horizon. I'm also just calling out there that the level of our activity in terms of collaborations for commercialization and technology development also continue to grow and develop across the business. I've got ahead of myself there, Alister. Apologies, but over to you.
No problem. Thanks, Stephen. As suggested there, we can see a strong result driven by continued top-line growth. Stephen suggested 18.6% organic growth over the prior comparative period. On the left-hand graph on the slide here, we can see the gross margin improvement is to continue in the second half, driven by pricing actions which have been implemented. We have observed an improvement in the gross margin in the second quarter, being greater than the gross margins for the full financial year of FY 2022, and expect this trend to continue into the second half. The right-hand graph there on the slide, we can see that normalized EBITDA margin for the first half was 12.9%, an increase over the full year FY 2022 of 11.7%. This growth is expected to continue into the second half.
Again, just repeating Stephen's point, the revenue and EBITDA guidance has been upgraded for the full year. Moving to the next slide, we can see that there's no changes in the underlying business conditions in major markets or customer relationships. Trajan continues to benefit from global trends towards automation, personalized care, data-led decision-making, and preventative technologies. We see increasing contribution from acquisitions since IPO. In the analytical products segment, acquired businesses contributed $ 11.4 million in revenues, or 26% of the total revenues for the period. In the Life Science Solution segment, acquired businesses contributed $ 20.3 million in revenues, or 55% of the segment revenues for the period. Moving to the next slide, we can see strong cash conversion of normalized EBITDA to operating cash flow ratio of 1.2 times for the half.
The reduction in net debt by $12 million and $42 million maturing in 2022 to $30 million at December 2022. Cash and cash equivalence balance is at $ 21.1 million, an increase of $ 7.9 million over June 2022. Thanks, Steven.
Thanks, Alister. Amy, I'll hand the chair back to you for Q&A.
Thanks, Stephen. With that, we will now open up the webinar to questions. If you do wish to ask a question, please type it in the Q&A panel below. Our first question is, congratulations on the strong results, Stephen. You called out the improvement of gross profit margin in Q2, from the graphs presented, it looks like gross profit margin will also be much stronger in H2. Are you confident you can continue to enable margin expansion? Secondly, what parts of the business will help you achieve this?
Thanks, Amy. Good question, of course. Yeah, our confidence remains strong. We can see the programs are still in place and executing well around margin expansion. There are multiple factors that play into that. One, of course, is the relocation of some of the Australian-based activity into our Penang operations. We're starting to see benefits from increased automation in the Australian operations as well. The other factor that plays out strongly as we grow and leverage existing infrastructure is the diluting impact of the indirect overheads. If we look at our operations in Connecticut, strong double-digit growth out of that facility in the half and across pretty much the same cost structure.
You know, that's in line with what we expected, that we would see with Trajan already having in place the infrastructure to scale a business to another level, that we would realize margin gains as we saw the top line grow.
Thanks, Stephen. Given the continued consolidation in the industry and Trajan's current share price, do you see yourselves as a target, and have you been approached?
Okay, how do I answer that question? I was asked that question last week as well. I guess if you look at the ASX and you see that Trajan has no comps, well, there's a reason for that. If you look at the valuations of our peers on U.S. markets, it's pretty confronting at the moment if you look at the way that Trajan's being valued. Maybe there's a non-answer to your question, Amy.
Thanks, Stephen. Given the scale of the business now, are you considering different funding options? Are you comfortable with the current level of leverage?
Okay. If we look at the Trajan journey, we've utilized different ways of funding appropriate for our scale and our stage of growth. We go way back to year dot. You know, it was mortgaging the house. If we went to the next level, we actually utilized debt as factoring out of the U.K. We went to really a standard banking arrangement and have a great partnership with our current commercial bank. No doubt we're now reaching another level of scale, and there are many other vehicles available once you get to this type of scale in terms of how you fund future growth.
I'm very confident in our ability to tap into those sources of funding and don't see funding as being a limiting factor as we think about the next scale of growth.
Thanks, Stephen. Agilent recently advised the market it had achieved 11% growth, Thermo Fisher, 15%. Granted, you're working on a lower base, but the revenue growth is tracking very strongly. What are your three big bets?
Well, I would reply to that by saying, we're a business that tends not to make big bets. The strength of the Trajan business is the diversity of the product portfolio, the diversity of markets we address, the diversity of customers around the world. I would argue that our continuous growth over 11 years is testimony to that strength in diversity. By the same token, there are no doubt, some of the portfolios where we see large potential, particularly around the automation of workflows. Right now, we're quite focused on how we accelerate growth in our automated workflows for clinical, for pharma, biopharma, for food safety, and for environmental. Of course, continue to be pleased with the rate that we see the interest growing and the uptake in the microsampling world.
Thanks, Stephen. What do you believe is your current total addressable market and serviceable addressable market now and in 10 years time?
The way I often answer that question is if you look at the scale of some of our customers, they're 100, 200 times the scale of Trajan. If we want to look at the scale of the chromatography mass spectrometry automation market, that's almost a $20 billion US market or a $ 25 billion-$26 billion in Australian dollar terms market. We're sitting here at a relatively small scale of, you know, $ 150 million-$ 160 million of revenue. I don't see us having any limiting factors in terms of the customers, the markets, the opportunities that lie in front of us. Really, the only limiting factor in us, in my view, I should qualify, in my view, in terms of the rate of growth, is us.
Is our capacity to fund and to service the growth.
Thanks, Stephen. Do you envision a move to a licensing revenue model, SaaS, et cetera, et cetera, for your direct-to-consumer products at some stage?
Another good question. As we've seen each stage of our product portfolio head more towards the consumer, we have those conversations inside of Trajan. Are there different pathways to market, different revenue realization models we should be considering? We go back to our vision first, though. We ask ourselves, "How can we deliver the greatest impact?" I don't think the greatest impact is about creating a bottleneck with all revenues coming through a particular model at Trajan, but rather how we, if you like, build, create, and then multiply our solutions. A great example is if you look at our solution for food safety in an application called MOSH/MOAH, which is complicated, but it's all about mineral contamination of food substances, and it's a technology that was developed at Axel Semrau.
We could have considered a model where we would have our own lab and, you know, license out and so forth, but instead, we've created the end-to-end workflow, and now there's around 200 labs in the world running that workflow, delivering that impact. Our model is first of all going to be B2B because that's what causes the most rapid adoption and delivers the greatest impact. After that, B2C, to the extent that we wanna demonstrate or service the customers directly. That's the way that we're constantly looking at it. It is a great question because we're always re-evaluating, are we using the right pathway to market models?
Thanks, Stephen. Do you envision to create and sell your own in-house developed direct-to-consumer products, or do you plan to acquire 100% of the direct-to-consumer companies you have recently invested in over time?
Okay. That's referring to our just under 10% holding we have of Forth with Life, which is a direct-to-consumer business based in the UK. We have a seat at the board in that operation. Really, that's been about us learning about that direct-to-consumer model. The way that you approach marketing, the way you approach value delivery, the way you interact and work with those customers. We're happy where we're sitting right now in terms of making those observations and learning about that world. I don't see us going directly into that world in the near future, but I will continue to make the comment that as the Trajan portfolio grows and expands, we do see ourselves continue to go up the value chain. Ultimately, I think that ends up somewhere close to the consumer.
Thank you. Do you plan to invest more and grow your software product offerings?
To the extent that they allow us to automate workflows and to the extent that they allow us to process and understand analytical data. If you look at our investment in Axel Semrau, one of the jewels in the package there is the CHRONOS software, which allows us to grow and develop smart sequential control of laboratory workflows. If you look at our recent acquisition of HDExaminer, that's all about how do we interpret and gather mass spectrometry data as it applies to the HDX technique, which is all about understanding protein dynamics. To the extent that we can couple those types of capabilities, smart sequential laboratory operations that allow a higher level of data interpretation, that's where we foresee continued investment in the software world.
Thank you. There was a recent article in The Australian newspaper regarding collaborations with Australian universities. What collaborations are happening offshore, and what should the company and investors expect from these collaborations in the near and long term?
Yeah, we were really pleased with that article. It highlighted that I think only CSL was ahead of us in terms of number of papers published from collaborations with academia here in Australia. We do have global collaborations happening as well. There are examples like a number of collaborations in Canada around mass spectrometry, great collaborations in Germany around food safety. What should investors expect? Well, there's a couple of themes there. One is that it allows us to accelerate candidate technologies. It allows us to leverage resources, and particularly state-of-the-art technology and expertise in each of these areas that would be prohibitive for us to invest in ourselves to explore future investment opportunities, and then to look at how you take some of those underlying technologies to proof of principle, proofs of concepts. That's point one.
Point 2, a number of these collaborative groups are ideal for then assisting us in the next stages of commercialization. How you then bring those products into a commercial offering and take them to the global market. I would expect as a shareholder, and I think as an organization, what we expect is that the output from those sorts of collaborations continues to drive the expansion of the portfolio into higher value products and services, specifically aligned with those key application areas. Really, you know, in these half year results, particularly in the underlying organic growth, you can see that already playing out because the growth came from some of those higher value product portfolios.
Thanks, Steven. The company has made a number of acquisitions over the past couple of years. The acquired businesses require a lot of effort to integrate, both from a business process and a cultural point of view. On the other side, the company is highly leveraged to the extent that it has become a non-compliant with certain debt obligations, which is a concern for me as a shareholder. My questions are, I'll go through them one by one, I would like to better understand the measures that have been implemented to integrate the acquired businesses.
Just some of the points that were made there in the question itself. I know that covenant situation that we reported the full-year result was of concern to some investors. I'll just reiterate that was a series of events that coincided that triggered that to happen at that point in time. We did not expect that to be a situation that would continue on, and it was a situation that was certainly not driven by any underlying weakness or fall over in the business itself. You can see in the half-year results, we're way beyond any concern about that sort of condition now. If we move on to the next part of the question.
In terms of acquiring businesses and integrating them, there's a couple of things I can comment to there. First of all, that we've developed what I think our track record demonstrates is a really successful integration model. We've made 11 acquisitions thus far, and we've put our hand on our heart and say, you know, our hit rate is extraordinarily high. You have to go back and say, "Well, why is that?" Well, I think reason number one is that we do place a lot of importance on culture and making sure that we come along, we're respectful of the culture of the organization that's become part of the Trajan family. We don't go in in a mad rush and turn things upside down. Secondly, when we look at integration, we focus first of all on the positives. What are the revenue synergies?
What are the customer synergies? How does 1 plus 1 equal more than 2? By doing that, you create a positive vibe about the integration of the new business into the Trajan corporation as a whole. We also have a key set of metrics that we use to see how the acquisition is tracking compared to what we expect. That set of metrics now goes up to board level. It's things like technology integration, customer retention, revenue growth, and of course, then flows into things like plans around cost or back office type synergies and so forth. So, I remain, you know, quite confident about our approach to integration.
I'll remind people again that our acquisition model, our M&A model is quite different, I believe, to the norm, in that in most cases, these are businesses and companies and people that we know. I'll go back to my earlier comment. Across the leadership group in Trajan, there are hundreds of years of experience in this industry. When you're doing that and executing an M&A program where it's not competitive, that it is triggered by us and it's done at a pace that we determine, you've got the right starting points in terms of a successful outcome. Hopefully that addresses the question, Amy.
Thanks, Stephen. The second question was what measures have been put in place to drive operational execution?
When it comes to the M&A program operation execution, we then channel that down to the operating business units. If you look at Trajan as a whole, you might think, okay, there's 4 acquisitions, how are they going to work on all 4 at the same time? The reality is that each of those acquired businesses fit into one of the Trajan business units. It's the leaders of those business units that operationally then integrate that new part. Of course, we have the back office teams that are concerned about the accounting and ERP and logistics and so forth. We do those sequentially, sort of one at a time, to deliver the benefits of the scale as well.
Again, within the operation, we have a pretty well-tuned model about how we go about integrating new businesses into the Trajan Group.
Thanks, Stephen. What does organic revenue growth look like adjusted for price rises and FX?
If you look at FX, there was a tailwind in the first half. On a constant currency basis, we still grew organically at 14%, which is still above the rate that we were reporting earlier. Price rises really didn't come into play significantly until the second quarter, there's only a point or 2 at most in terms of the impact of price rises in that growth in the first half.
Thank you. Please provide an update on Project Neptune. At IPO, this was to provide almost $3 million of gross profit improvement. Is this still on track?
The short answer is yes, it's still on track. As I sit here at our head office, over the other side of the building, newly built automated equipment is starting to be commissioned and developed on the shop floor. The transition of some of the remaining activities from Melbourne into Penang is progressing successfully. I think everybody knows that it's one of those programs where there is investment up front, and you do have to maintain redundancy and duplication for a period of time until you realize the real benefit. It's one of those J-curve, hockey stick, type scenarios that you have with that program. I will highlight, though, that there was an excellent execution by the group in the half just completed with the relocation of the Neoteryx microsampling production out of Los Angeles into Penang.
In very quick measure, the team was able to establish the capability in Penang, staff it, set up the production infrastructure, transition the technology, not miss a beat, and now seamlessly supply the microsampling range out of the Penang facility. That was pretty impressive work that was done by the operations team. You can see in that first half that in the first quarter, we were running both operations in parallel, then once we got ahead of the demand curve, we were able to then shut down the operation in Los Angeles for the production of those products.
Thank you. Congrats on the results, Stephen and Alister. Could you please give us a flavor, if possible, on the type of new customers called out?
What we're seeing there is new customers tied into some of our new businesses. A great example is if we look at our precision nanobore tubing. We developed that with the driver being, how can we ensure the integrity and the impact of that tubing that's used for moving incredibly small amounts of liquid around, mainly in chromatography and mass spectrometry systems. What we saw happen in the half, and it was starting to happen really just at the last part of last financial year, is that other sectors have picked up on the benefits of that precision tubing as well, sectors like genomics and also in flow cytometry. We've been seeing a growing customer set there.
If I look at things like our microbiopsy device, it looks like we're on track this year that just in a trial sense, we'll ship something like 5,000 devices. They're being used in fields like parasitic infections, looking at allergic reactions, even looking in some areas at personalized, customized cosmetics research. We're seeing that expansion. If I look at pharma and some of our solutions there, an expanding set of customers in that sector too. It's really pleasing to see that the new customers are really being brought about by the growth and expansion, the strategic expansion of the product line into those areas that we have targeted.
Thank you. Stephen, when we look at the guidance, the implied second half EBITDA is very strong. Is this largely a function of the contribution from price rises impacting EBITDA in the second half? Is there any other seasonality we should be aware of?
There's not a big seasonality factor, although we do tend to see the second half being stronger than the first. We will see the ongoing benefit of the pricing actions of the ongoing underlying growth rate from the top line flowing through to the bottom line, the continued leverage of the facilities, continued Project Neptune progress, and so forth. That's how we land at that projection. If you look at half on half and the trend that we're seeing, you can see that it lines up pretty well with what you would expect.
Was the increase in CapEx mainly attributed to your German warehouse?
Yeah, that's certainly a factor there. That's been an investment in that property that we see becoming a core part of infrastructure and the expansion of our European operations. That was the major factor. There's been CapEx obviously ongoing with other parts of the business as normal, but the investment in the German facility was a significant part of that.
Thank you. Couple of housekeeping questions. Tax rate looks low at 21%. What should we model longer term? Secondly, strong cash conversion this half. Longer term, should we expect it to be 100% cash flow conversion?
I'm very pleased to pass those questions on taxations over to, Alister.
Thanks, Stephen. With the tax rate, yep, we're expecting a lower tax rate going forward, modeling around that 20-21% is probably appropriate. Regarding the cash flow conversion, our expectation is that we should maintain the current levels. I wouldn't be so suggestive to say it's gonna grow at this point in time. I'm reasonably conservative, I'd say it would be more of a maintain the current profile.
Thank you. You mentioned large OEM partners. Can you speak to growth seen through those channels?
Look, I think the best way to get an answer to that question is to simply look at the public report outs of the major players in our industry. It's, it's well known those major players are companies like the Danaher Group, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Agilent Technologies, PerkinElmer Corporation, The Waters Corporation, Shimadzu Corporation. Of course, they're publicly listed. Their information is available, and you can, you can see the sort of growth rates that they're achieving.
Thank you. Can you provide an update on Hummingbird, please?
Yes, pleased to do that. The Hummingbird, which is our portable modular separation science system, HPLC system, we continue to work well with large pharma in the U.S. Hummingbird continues to achieve its goals and is getting positive feedback from our U.S. pharma customers. Indeed, to the extent that they're using the tool across a broader range of areas. Here in Melbourne, indeed, we worked and have been working closely with Environmental Consulting Group, who have demonstrated the utility of Hummingbird to go out on site and look at PFAS, PFOS. That's, this is the polyfluorinated compounds contamination in soil here in Melbourne. We're now thinking about what is the next stage of scale-up of the Hummingbird platform. Very pleased with the progress we've been making there.
Thank you. Alister, a strong cash flow result in the first half. There was around an $4 million benefit in the first half from working capital. Aside from this, anything else we should be aware of here? Should we expect a similarly strong result in the second half?
Look, our focus is always on working capital. You're right. There was a generation, a positive generation of cash out of working capital. One of the focuses that we have moving forward is relates to inventory, the level of inventory within the business. At the moment, we are mindful of the inventory levels at around $ 30 million at a group level are relatively high. It is an area of focus for us. Into the future, my expectation is that that will come off, and that's an area of focus for us. I think that it's appropriate to feel that we'll generate further working capital, if you like, cash, out of reduction in inventory into the future.
You know, and just on that question, Amy, I would just remind people that for the nine years of Trajan's existence prior to IPO, we ran this business on cash. That, we didn't seek any external investors, any external capital, and became, I think, you know, quite competent at how we manage cash, how we leverage cash when we need it, how we reinvest it when it's appropriate. Now as we're existing in the public world, it's no different in terms of our approach and our, I believe, our capacity and capability to manage cash in a way that's appropriate to support the ongoing growth of the business.
Thank you both. In the context of acquisitions, what controls have been established to ensure full compliance with current contracts?
Do you wanna take that one, Alister?
Contracts in relation to customers or legal contracts in general? I think that during our due diligence process, we identify what those major contracts and what the major obligations are, and then post-merger, we monitor what those conditions are and as part of the post-merger integration process.
Thank you. Can you please provide an update on supply chains and backlogs?
Yeah, we've seen some improvement there, and we expect to see continued improvement. In the capital equipment business, we're still carrying a bit more inventory than what we would have liked. I'll highlight that the order book, the order income for the automation businesses continues to be strong. We're seeing improvements in terms of the delay times are lessening, the availability of product is improving and we're hopeful that we'll see that trend continue now as we go into the second half.
Thank you. Is the current debt arrangement fully compliant, or are you still in negotiations with the commercial bank?
Let me repeat. That was a point in time when that non-compliance existed, and that point in time coincided with our end of year and therefore obliged the ASX to report it out. We are in full compliance.
Thank you, Stephen. What are the second half CapEx intentions? What was the $ 3.5 million CapEx spend in the first half?
Give that one to you, Alister.
I think we've sort of already answered the question in a way. Certainly more half, around half that first half CapEx was explained by the acquisition of the warehouse at Axel Semrau. I think that the underlying level of CapEx expenditure within the business will be maintained at first half levels.
Thank you. What efforts have you undertaken to globalize the shareholder basis?
That's a good question. I'm heading off to the U.S. in March. I have a full day in New York meeting with potential future investors. That should be fun. We would certainly like to see expansion of our investor base into parts of the world where our customers are and perhaps where our business is more mainstream. That I think would help all shareholders. We're looking for ways as to how we expand that interest and involvement of offshore investment into Trajan.
Thanks, Steven. There are no further questions. This brings us to the conclusion of the Q&A session and to Trajan's half year results investor webcast for H1 FY23, the period ending 31st December 2022. Thank you all for joining us this morning. Have a great day.
Thanks, Amy. Thank you, everyone.