OK, I think we'll get started. I'd like to say good morning to everyone who's joined the webcast today and welcome to Trajan Group Holdings Limited's full-year results for FY 2025, the period ending 30th of June 2025. Please note at this point all participants are currently in listener-only mode. Today's webinar will feature a presentation from Trajan CEO and Managing Director, Mr. Stephen Tomisich, and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Alister Hodges. That will be followed by a Q&A session. If you do wish to ask a question, you can type it into the Q&A panel at the bottom of the screen at any time during the meeting. Investors were also invited to submit questions ahead of time when registering for the webinar. Please note that we will hold all questions until the conclusion of the presentation.
I'd now like to hand over to Stephen Tomisich, our CEO and Managing Director at Trajan.
Thank you, Marie. Thank you, everybody, for joining the call today. Looking forward to sharing with you a review of our fiscal year just completed, fiscal 2025. First of all, I'd just like to be a bit of a recap on Trajan and our journey. Trajan started around 14 years ago when we made our first acquisition. That first acquisition saw us at about $3 million in revenue and around seven people. Today, we're more than 50x that scale in terms of revenue and around 100x that scale in terms of the team that is part of the Trajan organization worldwide. Our beginning and our consistent theme, even today, is to deliver a positive impact on the world.
One of the things that I think we're all really proud of is that we can stand back and look at that 14-year journey and really appreciate the positive impact that we are delivering, whether it's about assisting with drug development in North America, whether it's about pathology diagnostics here in Australia, or even things like ensuring food safety in Europe and in Asia, right down to the ability of all of us around the world to have clean drinking water every day. In all of those areas, Trajan has been playing a role. We play that role by delivering products and services that really underpin the quality of analytical science, science that enables those discoveries to be made, science that allows those measurements to be made, that ensure those safety and health benefits are there to be delivered. We are truly global.
When we look at Trajan's business, we have the three segments. The first segment is our components and consumables business. That's now a $100 million business. It should never be confused as being interpreted as some sort of commodity or disposable type business. It is not that. Our components and consumables business is very focused on what are those devices, what are those parts that interact with the sample that's being analyzed, and how do we optimize the design through precision engineering, manufacture, surface coatings to ensure the integrity of the analytical result. When we look at capital equipment, that's now a global business and about a third of our revenue. That's where we combine our scientists with our engineering capabilities to solve really complex analytical workflows in the laboratory, targeting really difficult analytical work, things like how do you detect toxic components in food samples?
How do you enable better understanding of the behavior of proteins in drug development? Thirdly, our disruptive technologies. There are some really exciting things to report there. We now have a blood microsampling business that is a world leader. There is now a business that is breakeven or better. Alongside that, we have portable technologies that we're developing for what we think comes next in this world of analytical science. If we step right into fiscal 2025 in review, on the left-hand side, revenue is now at a record of $166.5 million. When we look at that performance and we look at the growth of 7.4%, we make a note on the right-hand side that that's despite a $4 million headwind through the loss of one of the key products that we had to a particular customer. The rest of the business grew almost at double-digit rates.
When I talk about growth, it's not related to any one particular product. It is very broad across our portfolio, across our customer set, and also across geographies. EBITDA, profitability performance, up 26% over the prior year, a bit short of where we thought we would land, but nonetheless still in the right trajectory. There is some momentum behind that number as well. The disappointing result potentially is the pro forma gross margin. We will be able to talk a bit more about that. The fundamental cause of that was a significant mix in the channel usage for our capital equipment business. We saw significant growth in our capital equipment business, and it was globalized, but a bit of a mix in terms of direct sales compared to sales through some of our distribution partners around the world.
It was primarily that channel mix that was quite extraordinary last year that caused a bit of a dilution of the margins in capital equipment. When we look at the capital situation, cash has improved. Cash flows still remain strong as we've reported in prior years. We saw a further reduction in our net debt. When I look at our balance sheet now and our debt leverage, we're now back under the multiple of two that we had spoken about publicly and had targeted. We've also made some changes to our financing arrangements, which reclassifies our long-term debt again as non-current. We have additional capacity in those facilities. From a balance sheet point of view, looking forward to what potential growth opportunities lie ahead, we're feeling in quite a robust position once again.
Even though that might suggest some potential M&A activity, another thing that I just want to remind everybody of is even though Trajan has been quite active with our 12 acquisitions over that 14-year journey, we should not forget that today about a third of the revenue that we have is a result of organic growth. You can calculate based on the revenues we acquired that that means our organic growth rate just continues to run at that mid to high single-digit rate. That's the financial snapshot. Alister will be talking in a bit more detail later in the presentation down at the segment level. Another thing I want to touch on briefly is just to revisit Trajan 's business model. Sometimes I feel that our business model is misunderstood, and I hear language like Trajan is a contract manufacturer.
One of the first things to convey here is that that is not the case. We're not a contract manufacturer. Also, there's a misconception about the ratios, if you like, between the amount of business we do through our various channel partners versus the direct business we do with our end customers. Today, the majority of the business that Trajan has around the world through capital equipment and through consumables combined, there is a greater proportion that is direct than that goes through our various partners. Nonetheless, I would like to just point out this graphic of just how our business model works. On the far right-hand side, you can see the four verticals that are our area of focus: clinical, food, pharma, and environmental. One of the things we're constantly doing is looking at what is holding back the analytical workflows in these target areas.
Where is there a need to underpin analytical sensitivity? Where is there potentially a need to improve laboratory productivity? They are the types of developments we look at. We then test and work with customers around concepts and early products, testing some of those advancements. Once we have a product ready to be commercialized, then we're working with our various partners around the world to identify what's the best way to scale that, what's the best way to leverage that underlying new concept, new product development in ways that can deliver the greatest impact in the fastest time frame. That's the role that we play with our various partners around the world. It's another attribute of the Trajan profile that when we look at each of our partners, the vast majority of them have grown with us over the past 10 years as well.
Some key bullet points here, left-hand side on the top, the momentum. As I mentioned, the momentum is there both in terms of the customer mix, the sales across the various product families, but also across the various geographies. Precision manufacturing, there are two key words here. One is that in many of the components and consumables that we produce, a key attribute is around physical precision because that underpins the way the sample is handled and helps to reassure the scientists and the laboratory that the results that are being produced are consistent because of the confidence of that physical precision. Being a manufacturer combined with that says that another unique talent that Trajan has is that through our own in-house IP, through our own production engineering expertise, we then design and manufacture our own production equipment that allows us to scale those products and maintain that physical precision.
That's a difficult thing to do. Top right-hand side, in region for region. This is probably one of the most significant changes over the current year. In the first decade or so of Trajan's journey, one of our fundamental assumptions was around globalization. Everybody would be well tuned into some of the dynamics that are happening at a macroeconomic level now, particularly around the U.S. One of the pivots that we are doing right now is looking at changing that assumption around globalization to really an assumption of polarization and looking at how do we now start to produce in region for region. When I talk to and have dialogue with some of our industry captains around the world, this pivot is quite common that many of us in our industry are looking at now how do we embrace a strategy of in region for region.
Trajan has some advantages here. If I look at our physical footprint, our locations embedded in the U.S., our locations in Asia as well, unlike many companies of our scale, we have that agility and flexibility to be able to utilize that platform to service our customers in the proximity of where those customers reside. That is something that's going to allow us to both mitigate some of the potential threats that the use of tariffs pose in terms of being a negotiating tool, if you like, between trading countries, but also it potentially represents some opportunities for Trajan as well as we leverage that competitive advantage. Along the bottom, it's continuing to touch on the innovation that we roll out really every year.
Something that may not be obvious is that while we have various new product developments and launches, we also have a very broad portfolio where we're constantly engaging in enhancements and extensions of that product portfolio. Financially, again, we would look at our current trajectory. All things being equal, we would be, I think, reasonably bullish going into the next financial year. As you all note, we are being reasonably conservative when we look at the outlook. I'll touch a bit more on that towards the end of the presentation, just given the volatility and the number of uncertainties that exist out there. Some of the key highlights, again, perhaps giving you a good flavor for Trajan's business. Number one, we said that we were going to globalize our capital equipment business. What did that mean? We made an acquisition in North America back about eight years ago.
We made an acquisition in Germany about three years ago. We've put those two businesses together. What we've seen over the last year is a really healthy integration and now the development of a global capital equipment business. That business saw some significant growth into the Asian region. Importantly, we also saw that team develop global service and support strategies and more recently starting to drive some growth in terms of software capabilities. We said that we, on the second point, had some high potential product lines, some of them coming about through the acquisitions that we've made. A good example is our plasma coating technologies that reside in Kentucky in Louisville. That was part of the Chromatography Research Supplies acquisition. We've now seen some significant growth there where we're able to take some of these well plates.
These are plates used for the transport of samples in laboratories, but for very high throughput, high volume type labs. One of the challenges that those labs have at times is that you can lose sensitivity if the surface of those sample transport devices is not inert. We are able to apply a glass-like coating to those plastic plates. That provides an enhanced sensitivity and, of course, also a reliable analytical performance, very much in line with our overall vision and direction. We saw that business grow by about 50% in fiscal 2025. The third point around new product capabilities, we acquired the MS Studio platform from the University of Calgary about a year or so ago. We have now launched the first product out of that suite called HDX Pro.
That allows us to deliver to the scientists a package that provides a far deeper interpretation of mass spectrometry data translating into protein structures. We've received our first order. This is the beginning of a new SaaS software revenue stream for the Trajan business. It was launched at the American Society of Mass Spectrometry Conference a few months back in Baltimore. The interest level was quite robust. There is a suite of customers now on trial for that platform. We've continued our work in delivering product variations and extensions in fiscal 2025. The last point I wanted to touch on was the talent development within Trajan. I think many organizations have been challenged around how do you work with this new environment post-COVID in the office versus at-home type setups.
One of the things that we've embraced is that it's an opportunity to reset the whole relationship between the employer and its staff, its employees. We're pursuing ways to be more of a partner. Things like introducing our volunteering program this last year, which allows staff to have a couple of days a year where they too can contribute to their local communities in line with Trajan's vision and direction. We remain as flexible as possible around working arrangements. When we look over the last three years or so at the retention rate of Trajan staff in every jurisdiction around the world, compared to those countries' averages, Trajan is outperforming by some margin. We have a very talented global team. We consider our team as being partners in the business. I'm incredibly grateful to that team for the contribution that they make every day.
We continue to work as to how do you retain and develop that talent. It's an important part of our initiatives. Now, the last thing I want to touch on from a product and strategic perspective before handing over to Alister to talk down into the financials and the segment detail was the second half of the disruptive technologies. You would have seen last year, disruptive technologies made a loss of $4.9 million, I should say, in fiscal 2024, not fiscal 2025. Fiscal 2024, that improved by $3.4 million. Part of that was that the blood microsampling business reached breakeven and, in fact, started to exceed that expectation. The other part was our portable instrument technology, our modular technology called Versity.
This is where Trajan's been developing what I would call over-the-horizon technology that starts to locate the instrument itself in a modular custom-built form right where the sample needs to be measured. The first area of attack has been in those settings where there are bioreactors. This is happening in pharma in the U.S. It's also happening in the precision fermentation area with alternative food materials. We've done a lot of work over the last year in terms of looking at what the need is and what is the gap between the capability we have right now in these early production models and what's required to take it down the path of commerciality. We're quite confident now that we've clearly identified that gap. We're in the process of the development of those next stage modules.
We would expect to see it progress more towards commerciality as we head towards the end of this current financial year. That's a snapshot again of the Trajan business, some of the key initiatives that we're pursuing. I'll come back again after Alister's gone through the segments just to talk a bit more about the outlook for fiscal 2026. Over to you, Alister.
Thanks, Stephen. As highlighted, the components and consumables segment includes all high-precision products and services. As you can see in the graph, FY 2026 saw net revenue return to the historical growth trajectory. Four-year net revenue at $102.7 million was higher than the prior comparative period by $6.5 million or 6.7%. This result demonstrates growth across many product portfolios compared to FY 2024, despite a decrease of $4 million caused by a lower revenue relating to a specialized biotech syringe, as reported previously. Net revenue growth is supported by the strengths of this segment, including a leadership position and a high level of customer connectivity in key market segments, combined with a broad, diversified product portfolio mix comprising mature products supported by emerging product lines. Pro forma GP margin also increased in line with higher sales volume to 41.6% over the prior comparative period of 41.1%.
Resulting from high net revenue and pro forma GP margin, four-year normalized EBITDA at $34.9 million is up 8.1% over the prior comparative period. This segment is well- positioned to support growth in FY 2026, particularly given Trajan is recognized as a preferred partner by global OEMs, those diversified product portfolio, including emerging product lines, and the in-region for region supply chain model. Turning to the capital equipment segment, this segment includes all robotic workflows, automation systems, related parts, services, and software. Net revenue was up by 4.9% over the prior comparative period to $58.6 million. With the geographical sales shift during the year into more price-sensitive emerging markets where Trajan still utilizes legacy distribution channels, the overall pro forma gross profit margin decreased from 40.2%- 35.1%.
Four-year normalized EBITDA of $3.9 million is consistent with the prior comparative period, explained by higher net revenue generating a lower pro forma gross margin. Moving into FY 2026, gross margin growth within this segment is a key area of focus for management. Moving to disruptive, the disruptive technology segment activity includes miniaturized portable instrumentation, including Versity, and all products and services related to microsampling. Net revenue increased to $5.1 million from $4.9 million in the prior comparative period, with a focus on microsampling customers placing repeat orders. Pro forma gross margin in this segment grew to 57% from 52.7% in the prior comparative period, with higher margin blood microsampling products contributing 59.2% offset by the lower margin early-stage products, which are currently sold for investigative or research use only.
Normalized EBITDA improved by $3.5 million-- $1.5 million over the prior comparative period, reflecting a breakeven result in microsampling for the year and ongoing investment in Versity. Looking at cash flow, operating cash flow grew in FY 2025, driven by a higher normalized EBITDA offset by changes in working capital and non-cash items, particularly unrealized FX movements driven by the appreciation in the euro against the AUD. Inventories increased by $1.2 million during the year to $29.1 million, with continued investment in key areas to support demand signals and future growth opportunities, particularly in the components and consumables segment. Receivables increased due to a higher net revenue. A key advantage of Trajan's level of customer connectivity in key market segments is the high receivables collection rate to terms and very low bad debts. The expected annual rate for maintenance capex is $4 million per annum.
In FY 2025, capex included the asset acquisition of Mass Spec Studio Software, which will complement Trajan's HDX platform. Net debt was reduced by $3.3 million-$29.5 million, improving the net debt-to-equity ratio to 28% and the net debt-to-normalized EBITDA ratio to 1.9x . Finally, later in the financial year, Trajan's long-term debt arrangements were renegotiated, moving to a new debt provider, resulting in a return to the balance sheet disclosure of long-term debt into non-current. Thanks, Steve.
Thanks, Alister. Just to talk a little bit now about the current setting and the Trajan performance. We are a global business. That means that we are producing products in various jurisdictions and shipping in and out of the U.S. to various customers. The arrival of tariffs, the volatility in tariff settings, both by the U.S. and also some retaliatory tariffs by other nations, creates a little bit of a challenge for us. We've also seen some reduced funding in U.S. government agencies, for example, the NIH and the CDC. Some of the capital equipment business is often related to funding that comes through those channels. Nonetheless, the business remains resilient. We've seen this business go through COVID, go through stocking, restocking cycles. We've also seen now, in a similar vein, our ability to respond to some of these challenges.
For example, some of the products that we were producing in one of our U.S. facilities that was servicing our customers, shipping them into China, we've been able, in a matter of eight weeks, to set up and be able to replicate some of those production activities into our Malaysian operation and being able to switch to provide product in region for region for those Chinese customers. We've also seen the ability of us to transfer some of our glass technologies from Australia into the U.S. to service better some of our U.S.-located customers. We're continuing to work now on the evolution of this in-region for region strategy, and we're well- positioned to do that. We are seeing some margin benefit from the deployment of our automation and technology transfers, but we have a way to go there.
I would like to see us improving our gross margins at a faster rate. We also still have scope for further improvement in terms of the productivity that we're realizing out of our Malaysian operations. We have a team focused on that and confident that in the longer term, we will achieve our goals there. I think, as most people know, we went from a greenfield site there to now something like 180 staff on site and have transferred a significant amount of activity into that facility in Penang. Touching briefly on ESG, it's another area where we've been making steady progress. Over the last year, we were able to do the baseline emission measurements for Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3 emissions.
We've been able to make some practical differences in terms of addressing packaging materials, a mix of renewables, energy supply into some of our facilities here in Australia and into Malaysia. We've also been able to do some practical things that are in line with ESG. For example, we noted with one of our major customers that there were some products that we would produce for them where we would scrap them simply based on cosmetic issues. Functionally, they were absolutely fine. We were able to work with that customer to divert those products instead of going into the scrap heap and contributing to waste, to be utilized by them in other ways other than for commercial resale. That really speaks, I think, of our overall approach to ESG.
We're doing it and pursuing an improved sustainability and a reduced footprint, but in ways that are in line with also improving the business. We achieved an EcoVadis score in the 53%, which is a good rating. EcoVadis is becoming really the standard that I'm seeing in our industry. I recently went to a conference in Chicago, and a number of the industry participants would have on their conference booth their ratings from an EcoVadis score perspective. We'll continue to make progress in this current year. It's a background activity that is steadily making progress. As we look at the fiscal year at hand, we're in a strong starting position. I have to say, if all things were normal, it seems like in the Trajan journey, all things are never normal, we'd be sitting here, I think, quite robust and bullish about going into this next financial year.
There are a lot of variables that are playing out, particularly with government funding in the U.S., tariff settings, and whether or not we will see some stabilization of those tariff settings. In that light, as directors of the Trajan board, we had some lengthy conversations about the merits of providing guidance or not in that degree of uncertainty. What we felt was the best thing to do was to certainly indicate that despite all of that volatility, we still have strong confidence in this business and expect to see growth, top line and bottom line growth. The extent to which that may happen, we're quoting some fairly broad ranges here, which are indicative, I would say, of a conservative view of what we would expect to happen this year, taking into account some of that volatility.
That takes us into fiscal 2026, and I think takes us to the end of that presentation. Back to you, Marie. Happy to take any questions that may have come in.
Thanks, Stephen and Alister. I'd like to now open up the webinar to questions. I'll just remind everyone that if you do wish to ask a question, please type it into the Q&A section at the bottom of the Zoom call that you're on. Our first question was a pre-registered one from an investor. It's, how do you see the impact of the U.S.-Australia relationship impacting the business over the next 12 months and the next four years?
A question that I'm sure many business leaders will be grappling with when they have a business that is producing products in either jurisdiction and shipping to the other. The setting right now between Australia and the U.S., compared to many other jurisdictions, seems to be reasonably stable. In the current setting, we are confident to be able to march forward with our business in a relatively unaffected way. Of course, if there was some significant deterioration of that relationship, if, for example, for some reason we saw tariffs escalate for Australia-produced product, then we would need to respond to that. Having said all that, again, I would point to the resilience of our business model in particular. If a worst-case scenario played out there and it was a deterioration between our U.S.
operations and our Malaysian operations, we are in a position to be able to pivot and to be able to offset to a large extent to whatever effect that might have on our business.
Thank you, Stephen. Our next question is, looking at key end markets, are you seeing macro volatility dampen underlying demand? Do you expect global pharma R&D activity levels to improve given outlook for cost of capital?
In the first part, where we're seeing the most uncertainty here at the moment with capital equipment funding is in North America. In those research projects, some of those collaborative projects had some sort of tie-in to government agency funding. In some cases, we can see projects potentially being canceled. In other cases, we can see them being delayed. Nonetheless, when I look at our global opportunity funnel for capital equipment, at the moment, it's still holding up reasonably well. An interesting trend that we are observing is that while that's happening in North America, there is some underlying strength in our pharma business in Europe. I haven't asked Tony if there's a correlation there or a relationship there, but we are certainly seeing some of the weakness in capital equipment in the U.S. being offset by some gaining strength in Europe.
That may indeed be related to some of the funding dynamics as highlighted in the question.
Thank you. Is the in-region for region supply chain repositioning largely complete, and what are the impacts on gross margin in FY 2026 and beyond?
It is not complete, but we have made very significant progress over the last three months. We are looking at each of the jurisdictions and product lines on a case-by-case basis. The audience will know that Malaysia now has a 19% tariff that was imposed at the beginning of this month. That creates a situation where we're looking at to what extent do we uplift further U.S. capability to offset that? To what extent might that cause some minor margin erosion? On what extent would some of that be passed along in terms of pricing to our customers? There's a mix there. One of the things that we would like to see, I'm sure many would like to see, is does this volatility settle down?
It's difficult to say that something is complete when, if we reflect over the last four months or so, the way that tariffs have moved, the way that short-term escalations have been implemented. If we reflect that the U.S.-China situation is still at play, and how might that develop and where might that land? We are continuing to stay very close to this, not doing any knee-jerk type reactions. As we deal with each situation, determining what is the best method to counter the risk that it presents. I'll just remind everyone that we're also looking at in each of these cases, what opportunity does it present for Trajan as well as we start to have that in-region for region capability and closer to some of our end customers?
Thank you. The next one, do you have a debt target for longer term? Are you happy around the 1.9x leverage?
I've mentioned before that our target was to get under a leverage of two. We're there now. I'm comfortable at that sort of level. I can see right now that our requirement or our desire to cause further debt reduction probably isn't as urgent as it was, let's say, a year or two ago. We have additional headspace in our new facilities. I'm feeling pretty robust about the way we'll be able to rebuild that balance sheet, get more favorable funding arrangements in place, and really position us now for what comes next.
How much exposure do you have in large pharma versus small pharma?
A lot of our pharma business is large pharma and the organizations that are adjacent to that, so contract research groups and so forth.
Can you please run through what margin assumptions you make to reach the EBITDA range? Do you forecast a gross margin improvement in FY 2026? What levers do you have there?
We have embedded a modest margin improvement. I would be incredibly disappointed if we didn't see a margin improvement. When you look at the segment detail, the largest contributor to the margin erosion this year was a very significant drop-off in the margin of the capital equipment. That was quite extraordinary because what played out was a complete reversal of our mix between direct sales and sales via our distribution channels. As we project that business into the future, there are two things we're doing about that. One is that we would certainly want to see an uplift again in our direct sales mix. On the margin side itself, we are revisiting the commercial terms we have with many of our distribution partners because it's important that the value share represents the value delivery. In some cases, perhaps that's not set today the way that it should be.
Remember, some of these arrangements came about because of legacy agreements that were in place when Trajan made certain acquisitions. We have a resource working specifically on that initiative. Another thing that many in the audience may be familiar with, it's not unusual for capital equipment businesses when they are at the early stages of growing a business in the emerging markets, you do work with distribution partners. As you get critical mass and you put in place regional service and support, you do start to trend some of those arrangements to being more direct type arrangements. In the long term, I have confidence that we'll address that shortfall. If we look at the components and consumables, we can actually see margin improvement happening there, particularly through some of the automation and the Malaysian activities. It needs to be going another step.
The biggest barrier there at the moment that we will be working on are overheads. If we look at our facilities across the U.S., if we look at this now, grossly underutilized facility that we have here in Melbourne, we now need to look at how do we reset some of that overhead structure and size it appropriately for the business going forward.
I think that last question partly answered this next one. Is there any cost rationalization that could come through on the fixed cost base? What is the timing potential there?
I think the answer to that is that there is some cost rationalization that is possible. We are looking at that, and I expect to achieve some of that in this coming year. At the same time, we are very mindful to not do anything that damages the business and also being very respectful of our team and the organization. If you simply look at our U.S. footprint, for example, we have sites in California, Texas, North Carolina, Connecticut, and Kentucky. Some of those sites are significantly underutilized, and there are various ways that we can go about addressing that that would also result in some cost rationalization as well.
Thank you. This next one, can you please provide some comments on how our competitors are faring in different product segments and where the company is gaining or losing market share? Secondly, are there any areas where you are seeing irrational pricing?
To answer the last question first, we haven't seen any irrational pricing. We are trying to understand how some competitors are dealing with the impost of the arrival of tariff regimes and being mindful of that. If I look at Trajan's market share in our core chromatography consumables, I would definitely say that we have gained some share there. If I look at the rate of growth across the board, it's significant. In some of those emerging areas that are now related more to pharma and clinical applications, and now I'm talking about the components or consumables as part of that, some of those have outstripped market growth rates as well. I think the area of our syringe portfolio is flatter. Our key focus there right now is more on how we ensure that we bed down firmly our production activities in Malaysia where we've achieved those technology transfers.
How do we ensure that we drive down some of our scrap rates, improve some of our quality performance, and really start to see us solidify that foundation, see some of the margin improvement, and then revisit some of the growth trajectory there. Commenting on competitor presence for Trajan sometimes is a little difficult because depending on which product area, we tend to have very different competitors across the board. With the exception of the biotech syringe saga, which we've mentioned at the half year and we touched on again here today, I don't see any particular areas where Trajan has lost any significant market share. We certainly have not lost any key business with any of our key customers.
Thank you, Stephen. Do most of your competitors produce products in the U.S., or are they also going to be hit by tariffs?
It's a combination. Some competitors are outside the U.S., some are in the U.S. Please remember that countries like China, and I don't think it will stop there, have retaliatory tariffs. It's not just about tariffs going into the U.S. Ultimately, it's potentially about tariffs going out of the U.S. into other jurisdictions where those countries decide to put in place retaliatory tariff strategies.
Okay. Looking at one last final one, outlook for operational efficiencies and Project Neptune in FY 2026.
Right. Project Neptune has achieved some significant improvements here in the Ringwood facility. The level of automation now is significant. We still have to translate some of that to financial benefit on scale. The other part of Neptune Part 1 was the transfer of technology into Malaysia. I've spoken quite a bit about that. Neptune Part 2 was always about looking at the global efficiencies and the global footprint. There's a little bit of a reset that's required there because going into that, let's say a year ago with our planning, we still had the underlying assumption of globalization and establishing single centers of excellence or specialization. In many ways, that premise now is no longer valid, that we now need to think about Neptune Stage 2, recognizing the need for duplication in region for region capabilities, alongside the goals of driving productivity improvements.
We've got one further question if we have time for it. Given you are broadly comfortable with the net debt to EBITDA ratio of circa 2x , would you consider buybacks for excess cash as it's generated as opposed to dividends?
One of the key things for us is to think about what is the way to deploy our capital for the best long-term return for shareholders. Both of those ideas are, of course, options, as are further investments in our product portfolio, be it organic or inorganic means. All of those things are on the table for consideration. It's great now to be back in that sort of position and contemplating how the next stages of growth happen, which is potentially a far more robust situation than what we would have been talking about a year or two ago.
Thank you. We have no more final questions. That brings us to the end of the session for today. Thank you, Stephen and Alister. Thank you to everyone who attended the Q&A and Trajan 's full-year investor webcast for FY 2025, for the period ending June 30, 2025. Thank you all for joining us this morning. That concludes the webcast.
Thank you.
Thank you.