Thank you everyone for being part of this morning's call. You know, it was only in June last year that we took Trajan to IPO, and that was after 9 years of consistent expansion and growth. We went to IPO because we felt that with additional capital, we could really start to realize the potential of this business. We went to the market.
We provided solid guidance around what we thought the underlying business would achieve in terms of revenue and profitability throughout fiscal 2021 and then fiscal 2022. We also highlighted that we would take the majority of the funds raised at IPO and deploy them into our active M&A pipeline. Well, here we are a year later. We've performed as we said we would. We've invested over AUD 130 million in our M&A program in the last 12 months.
As we sit here today, Trajan is more than double the size that it was when we went to IPO. This is a story of a plan, execution of a plan, and delivery of the outcomes. It's about our vision becoming a reality. We've taken the business now to a very different scale. We've expanded our customer set. It's a broader range of customers that we're now servicing.
You'll see in this morning's presentation that we are getting traction now around the technology adoption through the significant pipeline of new technologies that we've had under development.
We've delivered on each of the financial metrics that we had forecast. We're not done. There is more to come. Here are the key bullet points. We've seen revenue in the last 12 months grow by over 40% to reach AUD 107.6 million.
The good news behind that is that again, it's so broad. There's underlying organic growth of just under 11%, still running at that strong double-digit rate. That organic growth is across multiple customers, multiple jurisdictions, and also a very broad range of applications. If we look at the performance in just the half year of the acquisitions that came on board, they have also successfully integrated into Trajan and over-delivered, both in terms of revenue and in terms of EBITDA contribution.
Normalized EBITDA came in strongly at AUD 12 and a half million. Again, a combination of us being able to manage the business through a whole range of headwinds that the world has been experiencing, but also that strong underlying consistent performance of the Trajan business and the solid contribution of the new acquisitions that we've brought on board.
You'll see here the other key point is our margin expansion, again, tracked spot on with where we had forecasted it would be, and that's at that 41.9%. The key operational highlights now to talk about is that let's remember that Trajan already completed 7 acquisitions before the start of this fiscal year.
This makes 11 that we now have under our belt. I think our track record there is very strong in terms of successfully being able to identify businesses that synergistically align with us, but also can be brought under our umbrella in a way that respects culture, that realizes the benefits over a period of time.
Four key acquisitions in this last 12 months, but also a strategic and quite important investment in Forth in the UK, taking us a lot closer to society and the deployment of scientific measurement to the consumer. You'll see me today also touch briefly on microsampling, because microsampling is key to our long-term vision of the decentralization of healthcare, and if you like, in many ways, health equity, making measurement and science available more broadly.
Hummingbird, our miniaturized instrumentation platform, has also made good progress in the last 12 months. Just to recap here, if we look at this table on the left-hand side, I just wanted to highlight what we said at prospectus just over a year ago. We gave guidance at the time in terms of FY21, FY22 revenues, and also normalized EBITDA for those two fiscal years.
If you look at the actual results, we're within a very low single-digit percentage of where we said we would be. The next table down, we can look at the acquisitions that have come on board, what we expected based on the track record of those acquisitions prior to becoming part of Trajan.
Again, they have delivered in line with what we expected. In fact, a little bit better than what we thought would happen in that first period of time under the Trajan belt. In the lower part of the table here, the guidance that we updated back in February around our revenue range and also the guidance that we provided in February and again in June around our profitability. You can see that the normalized EBITDA has delivered in line with those projections. What's my message here?
My message is that we are a business that plans and executes, I think, quite methodically. While we are at times confronted with volatility and headwinds, like many of these issues that are highlighted on the right-hand side of this screen, we are a strong management and leadership team that's able to look at those adverse, if you like, evolving type conditions and mitigate risk and be able to maneuver in ways to retain our performance trajectory.
Now we're confident and pleased to be updating our outlook for this fiscal year. We think in this fiscal year 2023 that we're now looking at revenues heading up towards AUD 160 million. An expected normalized EBITDA range between AUD 21 million and AUD 25 million. I'll repeat what I said at the opening. I mean, that is this fiscal year right now.
Right now, we are running at a rate that is around double where we were just over a year ago. We have truly changed scale in terms of the enterprise and the activities and the growth of the business. If we get into a little bit more details here around revenue and normalized EBITDA, you can see the revenue trajectory on the left-hand side.
It shows the actuals for the last three years and our forecast range for this current year. Don't forget, there's another six or seven years before that showed a similar trend in terms of consistent growth since the inception of Trajan back in 2011.
When we look at the 107.6 million, I highlighted earlier that around 22.7 of that was contributed by the acquisitions, and the rest is the organic growth that's still running at around about that 11% number. If you look at the % gross margin, the expansion has been tracking as we had hoped and expected.
When you look at our fiscal 2023 projection, that's really a result of us assuming we land roughly in the midpoint of that revenue range. If that was the outcome, roughly where we think that margin would land. On the right-hand side, again, you can see the trajectory around normalized EBITDA.
Importantly, when you look at the percent EBITDA margin trajectory, what we've done is looked at the midpoint of our projection and roughly where we think that would land if we achieve the midpoint of that range. The takeaway message on both of these screens is progress, growth, in line with our expectation and in line with the execution of our strategic plans.
If we look at the segment analysis, analytical grew around 15%. Around a third of that growth was related to acquisitions. We have put a small portion of the LEAP PAL Parts business into that analytical segment. On the right-hand side, you can see the significant growth in the life sciences area, and that's largely due to the fact that the majority of the acquisitions in this fiscal year fell into that segment.
If you look at the gross margin trajectory on the analytical side, you'll see that it's been holding steady. As you can imagine, that steady number is actually the outcome of some pretty strong opposing forces.
We saw costs escalate quite significantly in the fiscal year, and we also saw a little bit of a dilution of margin because of some of the LPP products that went into that segment reporting. You might have seen in some of the notes already that the conflict in the Ukraine detracted around AUD 0.6 million in revenue from the analytical portfolio, and that revenue was also at a healthy margin.
On the flip side, we've seen now the benefit of growing sales through the existing infrastructure and the sort of margin expansion we would expect from that, and we're starting to see some of the benefits of Project Neptune play out here. Right-hand side, the growth in the margin, the businesses that we've acquired running at a significantly higher margin than the pre-existing life sciences solution business.
From a segment perspective, again, the sorts of trajectories that we had expected and some nice healthy progress in terms of gross margin performance. Let me just spend a few minutes in getting into an operational update here. One of the things that is important to us is how we behave as a global business. I think most of the audience here understands that the vast majority of Trajan's customers and businesses is not located in Australia.
Over the last year, we've seen our presence, our footprint, our staff, become increasingly located close to customer. It was just over five years ago that we set ourselves a goal that by about now, more than half of our staff should be outside of Australia, closer to our customers. In this fiscal year, it was a significant milestone to see us go through that barrier. It's now only around 45% of staff that are located here in Australia.
Importantly, we're heading towards 150 staff in the U.S., which is our largest market and now starting to have some real critical mass there close to our major customers. You can see the growth in our Malaysian operations, and we're really pleased with how that's been progressing.
Of course, we can see in Europe with the Axel Semrau acquisition, the numbers increasing significantly there in Germany. We are truly a global organization, not just in terms of our customers and revenue, but now increasingly in terms of where we are, where our teams are located. If we look at these acquisitions in a little bit more detail, there's a good news story tied to each one of these.
Axel Semrau came on board in November of last year, and in many ways, it's been a light touch from our perspective in terms of the integration of that business into Trajan. That has been very supportive in terms of providing the team with the backing, the support, the guidance that's needed in some cases. In many ways, that's helped them to expand their growth rate.
Their order book reached record levels in this fiscal year. We have invested now in a new warehouse facility located next to the existing Axel Semrau facilities. We see that being used in the future, not just for Axel Semrau, but for the broader Trajan Group located within the European zone. Axel Semrau now is working more effectively in Asia, and the Trajan Japan organization is now partnering with them strongly.
We've recently appointed a business lead into the Malaysian area, to start to expand growth of the business in Southeast Asia. I think that highlights as well that our Malaysian facility isn't just about excellence in assembly and manufacturing, but increasingly will become a Southeast Asian hub for the business. Neoteryx. What a start. Incredibly pleased with the rapid progress we've made there.
This is the team that has led the adoption of microsampling around the world. The pivot that we've done with Neoteryx is, instead of just being product focused, to be technique focused. What we mean by that is that we're quickly establishing a position as being the go-to organization for microsampling tools.
With Neoteryx came the Mitra device. We've now taken our hemaPEN device, our microbiopsy device, and merged them all into the Neoteryx organization, making California head office for microsampling and also the center of activity around how we drive adoption in microsampling.
That commercial activity has now been accelerating across that group. They are already integrated into our global ERP system, and something we were able to bring forward quite quickly was to take their assembly operations and start to relocate those too into our Penang, Malaysia facility.
This week, we are now producing commercial Neoteryx Mitra devices in Trajan's operation in Penang. That, again, is a pretty impressive achievement given the short amount of time that Neoteryx has been part of the group. With LEAP PAL Parts, we've seen a nice extension of the customer set into the group that they were servicing.
We are now rapidly progressing towards site consolidation in North Carolina. We have two sites at the moment. One was the LEAP PAL Parts site, the other was the LEAP Technologies site. We've identified a new location where we'll be consolidating the two operations together, and we're already starting to see some of the benefits of flowing Trajan manufactured product alongside the LEAP Parts business into their customer set, and that we think will continue to expand in this fiscal year.
Of course, with a few days to spare at the end of the fiscal year, we acquired CRS. By November, our goal is that we will see globalization of the supply paths to market for that business. We're rapidly working on integrating the full product line into Trajan Asia, Trajan Europe, so that we're able to provide growth for that key business as well.
The takeaway here is, how have these acquired businesses performed under Trajan in the first six months or so? The answer is as planned, if not better than planned, and very pleased with the progress we've been making with the group.
Some of the key other points around operations. Project Neptune has started to deliver gains, and you'll see in the numbers, we invested about AUD half a million in this fiscal year. The investment is accelerating.
We successfully appointed a new regulatory resource in the US, based in Massachusetts, with significant background and experience working with the FDA. We've made some great progress already in terms of understanding some of the limitations that the Neoteryx business may have had in particular around FDA approvals and registrations.
We're quite confident of addressing some of those issues. The other point I wanted to make here was that it was very pleasing this year to see the business out of Bethel, Connecticut, emerge with around 21% growth.
I was asked last year, of all the acquisitions that we made, were there any that concerned me? I did share the concern that last year, after about 2.5 years, we weren't seeing the growth out of Bethel that we had expected, that it remained relatively flat.
Well, I'm very pleased to say that in the last year we've seen that change and now running at quite a significant growth rate out of that facility. Of course, that flows into gross margin expansion benefits because we've always known that the operation there has been underutilized, and this growth allows us to start to see the benefits of leveraging that capacity.
From a new technologies perspective, briefly, I wanted to touch on Hummingbird. Hummingbird is portable instrumentation technology that Trajan has developed. We see it having two key areas of application. One is in pharma, and we've continued to work with a major customer in the U.S. around those pharma applications. The second has been an emerging application in the environmental segment.
You can see the instrument here located literally on the back of a truck, down in Tasmania, where it was doing some work, detecting forever pollutants in water samples. We're seeing similar work done here in Melbourne, utilizing the system to detect forever pollutants in soil samples.
The results are proving to be quite impressive. Ahead of us now we have the challenge around how we take this product to full-blown commercialization. It's not going to contribute significantly in the next year or so, but we think it is a product range that over the next three to five years has quite significant growth potential. I now just wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about microsampling. I emphasized microsampling at the half year report out.
The reason I do that is because our vision of personalized preventative data-based healthcare is absolutely dependent on the broad adoption of remote sampling, taking analytically credible samples outside of the clinical setting.
What we've seen, particularly since the arrival of COVID, is that the attitude, the paradigm around the utilization of at home measurement or at home testing, or indeed at home sampling or out of the clinic sampling, has changed significantly. That works in our favor in terms of driving the adoption of microsampling.
We saw orders perform as we expected in the first six months since acquisition, but we're now seeing this commercial team secure orders for the hemaPEN device. We're seeing the order rate accelerating as we go into fiscal 2023.
To give you an example, there is around a dozen pharmaceutical drug trials happening, sponsored by large pharma, utilizing Trajan's microsampling devices right now. We have a range of proposals that seem to be growing as well around in pharmacy use, at home use, companion diagnostics, direct to consumer digital health, companions, utilization in pediatrics and the monitoring of infectious diseases and so forth.
As the capabilities of microsampling are becoming increasingly evident, we're seeing the inquiries accelerate as well. Now, the next sentence, training completed this month for in-space use. That means exactly what it says, and it'll make, I see, quite an interesting story that we recently did conduct training for the use of some of our microsampling tools in orbit, to be utilized in a zero gravity environment to allow sampling in that situation.
I don't think it's gonna be a huge market any time soon, but again, it starts to highlight, once you can sample in these ways, you start to consider all different types of approaches that can be taken. We've seen the commercialization now of microsampling, our microsampling tools with a partner in the US for looking at biomonitoring or what we call environmental exposure.
Pretty soon you're going to see the full range of Trajan's microsampling products hit the market under a brand new website and under a consistent Neoteryx brand. Neoteryx is gonna be our identity. It's going to be our flagship brand for driving microsampling. This slide here, my second last one, again, I wanted to highlight because you'll hear more news about this very soon.
This is a key partnership we've been conducting here in Melbourne with the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. They have worked on, and we've been working with them since 2019, an artificial intelligence tool to assess the cardiovascular risk from serum or blood samples. This tool measures hundreds of biomarkers in blood and applying smart learning and smart algorithms, able to take that data and start to become predictive about cardiovascular risk.
Actually calculating a number that we refer to now as metabolic age. The combination of that technology in partnership with Trajan really now allows us now to start to demonstrate our vision in reality.
What I mean by that is that the lab that we have here in Melbourne, that has been part of our extraordinary investment in commercialization of new technologies, is combining our microsampling tools, our lab automation products, our expertise now in method development, to be able to create a streamlined process to work with these samples and to generate the output, to generate the data. As we progress towards a medical laboratory certification, we intend to complete this solution and take it from research only, which is what it is today, to a registered diagnostic.
That operation, all of these activities again, has been made possible by going to IPO just over a year ago, and by the additional access we've had to capital through the IPO process that has allowed us to invest in those areas that we saw, just like this, where we see the potential to accelerate our growth and to realize our vision.
The last slide, you may have noticed that we quietly launched a new endeavor, a new initiative called MonitorYou. MonitorYou is Trajan's first step towards providing access to scientific data that relates to human health and human well-being to the consumer. Our first steps in this space has been to start to work with a business to business type model around corporate well-being. We've also been working with our own teams.
Indeed, it speaks to, I think, the investment and the dedication of the Trajan team here, that around 30 or 40 staff already, under our ethics guidelines, have been participants in the development of this new platform.
You can go and have a look for yourself at MonitorYou.com, but it's all supporting our trajectory towards progressing our medical laboratory accreditation here in Melbourne, which is primarily around demonstrating and driving the global commercial adoption of microsampling technologies.
That's my final slide there. I do wanna wrap up by saying that, you know, Trajan is very much not just about Stephen and the management team, but now about 660 people around the world. Most of you probably haven't met most of those team members, but they are a very impressive group.
The vast majority of them are dedicated to our mission and motivated by what it is that we're delivering around the world. I'm incredibly proud of them and incredibly thankful to them because it's their efforts, their dedication, and their skills and expertise that has allowed us to achieve what I think is quite an impressive list of outcomes in our first year as a public company.
One of the things that you can notice about Trajan is that we have some of the, I would say, most talented and experienced people across the industry, and they choose to be part of this team really because of who we are and our true purpose-driven, vision-driven, culture and strategy as we execute around the world.
If nothing else, it is the talent that we have that gives me increasing confidence about what lies ahead with Trajan. Thank you everyone for being part of the call today. Thank you for listening and very happy to take a few questions.
Thanks, Stephen. I'd now like to 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: How are the supply chain challenges you experienced in June re capital items being resolved? Have you recognized these revenues?
One of the things that we highlighted as we approached the end of fiscal 2022 was that in putting together our complete workflow solutions, what we referred to as our capital equipment business, we were being delayed in realizing revenue because of the delays in the supply chain.
Seeing some of our electronics suppliers, some of the component, even some of the instrument suppliers to us, pushing out significantly. Items that were once delivered in 4-6 weeks, taking 16-18 weeks.
The answer to the question I think has two components to it. One is that those systems that were delayed, we realized in the fiscal year what we thought we would, and we are completing those installations as we go into fiscal 2023 of the ones that we couldn't realize before the end of the fiscal year.
The good news is that the order pipeline has continued to remain strong, so we still see the stream of orders coming in for our capital equipment businesses. At the same time, the supply chain delays are still there, so we are still seeing us taking longer to realize the full cycle between receiving an order, being able to configure and commission a system, and then deliver to a customer and realize and recognize that revenue.
I'm hopeful that by the time we get to the end of this fiscal year, those supply chain issues will start to heighten up a bit, and we'll be able to see the order book reduce a bit back to its normal historical levels. At the moment it's purely a timing issue and nothing else. It's not hindering our progress and clearly it's not hampering our growth.
Thanks, Stephen. Our next question. With increasing costs of running a business, have we increased our product prices? If so, how are customers accepting them and how are we placed in the market competition?
Yeah, thanks, Amy. That's a great question. You would have seen in the presentation that in the analytical portfolio, gross margin percentage stayed the same as the prior year, and that was the outcome of those competing forces, the cost escalations that we saw, offset by some of the initiatives that we've had underway, particularly Project Neptune. We implemented a price increase across the board very late in the fiscal year in June. In these numbers for fiscal 2022, there really is no benefit being realized from that price increase.
I'm pleased to say that the increase has rolled out without any major disruption, and the vast majority of customers have been quite understanding and can see that what Trajan has done, in quite a transparent way, has been to execute a necessary price increase to offset some of those headwinds that we've been experiencing with cost escalations. We expect in fiscal 2023 that we'll be able to continue to offset those cost increases through the pricing actions that have already been taken.
Thanks, Stephen. The guidance range of AUD 150 million-AUD 150 million, what does this guidance assume in terms of organic growth for the base business?
We're continuing to assume high single-digit growth in the organic business. I should highlight that projection for fiscal 2023 does not include any assumptions around any further acquisitions. This trajectory that we're on right now, we believe will land us at those numbers based on the business that's at hand today.
You referenced some accelerated investment in your manufacturing facilities in FY23. Can you tell us what the quantum of that incremental investment is for FY23?
I might refer to Alister to speak to that a little bit. What I meant by that really was around the investment in the Malaysian activities and the investment in Project Neptune. The cost structures for Project Neptune and the level of capital equipment investment we're expecting there has been outlined previously, and we can refer back to that.
It was around, as I recall, AUD 2.7 million or so over the three-year period, and we're continuing to pursue that plan. The overall investment into the Malaysian facility isn't as capital intensive. It's more around the continuous growth of the team there. You can see that we have grown from around, as I recall, 80-odd staff at the beginning of the fiscal year to around 130 now.
We think we'll hold that number, roughly, for the remainder of this fiscal year. Alister, I don't know if you want to comment any further on that question around ongoing investment in the manufacturing expansion.
No. Looks like nothing specific. That's a good summation.
Thank you.
Thank you. You only completed the CRS acquisition two months ago, but can you give us an assessment of how the business is performing so far?
Like the other acquisitions, it's performing to plan as we expected. We've had a good first couple of months in terms of Trajan getting more deeply involved and getting to know CRS and vice versa. There's a lot of activities there that we consider to be best practice in what they do.
The customer set has welcomed the emerging of CRS into the Trajan Group and the performance of the business. You know, I think the headline I can give you is, as per plan. No, no shocks or surprises there. Indeed, I'm quietly confident about how it will continue to grow and expand once we truly globalize the pathways to market through the Trajan Group.
Thanks, Stephen. Are there any plans to provide returns to shareholders as you are now profitable?
We have no plans at the present time for starting a dividend program. I think you can see that we remain hungry and motivated to continue to invest the funds we have available in growth. We still see enormous opportunities in front of us to continue to expand and to grow.
For the foreseeable future, that's exactly what we'll be doing. I think majority of shareholders are supportive in that direction, that we have the potential to deliver impact around the world on scale. I think we have the potential to grow Trajan into some scale of significant mass around the world, and that's what I would like to continue to do.
Thanks, Stephen. Just a reminder, if you do wish to ask a question, please type it in the Q&A panel below. Our next question is, why did you downgrade EBITDA guidance two weeks before the end of the year, only to beat the top end and match the bottom end of the original guidance?
Well, I can't say I'm surprised by that question. As everyone knows, we wanted to do a capital raise to support the acquisition of CRS prior to the end of the fiscal year. We want to make sure that we cleansed the market, that we provided the market with a refreshed view of where we thought we would sit.
We want to make sure that guidance was conservative. We certainly did not want to overstate our position as we were going to the market to raise funds for that acquisition. We're very pleased that things played out as they did, and we were still able to deliver to our original guidance from the half-year report. That's really the story behind that.
The last thing we ever wanna do is overpromise and underdeliver, and we certainly didn't want to, so close to the end of the fiscal year, get it wrong, in terms of overestimating where we might land at the end of the year.