Thanks, Ben. Terribly sorry for being a few minutes late this morning. Tech issues at my end. Welcome, everybody. I'd like to just start off by going through a graph we've been using lately to show what's been happening at VEEM and what our trends are. As we've talked about, this is our slow year in between contracts. We had a record year the year before, in 2024, which makes it obviously a bit more apparent, but the trend is still upwards, and we expect that to continue in the future.
Thank you, Mark. I'll just go through the highlights here. Revenue for FY 2025 was $68.6 million, EBITDA of $9.2 million, net profit after tax of $3 million, and operating cash flow of $4.3 million. Next, we'll have the executive summary, which Mark will just take you through.
Okay, so we had a stronger second half, and the profitability was there, and the turnover went up more. We had a slower start to the year. We had some new contracts coming through, which is a bit of a learning cost on that. We also caught up on the backlog on propellers. It was a little bit slower in the first half than the second half. The cash flow seemed to be fine. We have $4.3 million from last financial year, and the cash flow from operations was up 39% on the first half. Looking at the defense side of the business, we're in between contracts with ASC on the refit program, and there is other work we do in defense, and primarily offshore ships were very busy in the second half, which lifted our defense revenue.
We expect the ASC work to come back in 2026, and it'll be heavily weighted towards the back half of the year. Their whole refit program has been moved backwards, unfortunately, for them and for us. The demand will come when they start placing orders for the next refit at the end, around December, I believe, is what will occur. We're set to have a really busy second half. The propulsion revenue was $35 million, including shaft lines. We're doing a few more shaft lines now, which is valuable, and we're sort of consolidating on that, which was, of course, a record year, and we had more capacity and more capacity coming. We sold 13 gyros, and it was a little bit less than the previous year, but that was a record year due to Strategic Marine ordering a great deal and accelerating a whole order program.
We managed to sell a reasonable amount of gyros, but the good part of it was very wide, very diverse. We also spent around $3.9 million in capital and development during the year.
Thank you, Mark. I'll take you through the financial results now. As Mark has talked about, this was an in-between year for ASC, which was the major contributor to the reduction in revenue. That reduced $9.6 million. This is normal and part of the cyclical nature of that contract. Pleasingly, we've signed the extension for six years and $65 million, which previously I haven't been happy to disclose, but we've been able to disclose this time around. EBITDA was $9.2 million with profit before tax of $3.1 million and profit after tax of $3 million. Propellers remained robust as new work was won and increased scope from existing clients subsequent to the backlog of FY 2024 being cleared allowed FY 2025 to be relatively stable compared to FY 2024. Engineered products and services, excluding defense, increased to $16.7 million, taking up some of the space and capacity left by defense.
Really, this financial year has been a tale of two halves. We've seen revenue up 4%, but most importantly, the cost reduction measures we put in at the end of calendar year 2024 have come through. We're seeing their EBITDA improve up 36%, and we're also seeing their net profit after tax actually double over the half year. In terms of balance sheet, we had cash on hand of $1.8 million, undrawn facilities of $3 million, and during the period, we increased our overdraft by $0.6 million to $4 million. That was in the first half and increased our trade facility by $1.1 million in the second half, and that's to gear up for FY 2026. Cash flows were $4.3 million from cash flow from operations, $1.7 million from investing, and $2.3 million from financing.
Pleasingly, a second half with greater EBITDA and greater profit generation meant cash flows from operations were actually up 40% in the second half. We currently have $3 million in undrawn facilities between the trade facility and the overdraft at the end of the financial year. I'll now hand over back to Mark, who will give you an overview of the operations.
Thanks, Tito. If you look at the, let's call it, this is a breakdown of what we did over the last year from half to half. As you can see, propulsion is still pretty busy. There's some defense work we did in the second half and also bedding down the new Volvo contracts. I mean, it's a bit of learning, and the GPs on that work was perhaps a little lower than our traditional mix initially, and then it builds up as we get the routine down pat. Great to see defense and ASC was a bit of the real helper on this one. As I said, ASC fell right back for this until the next refit comes on board. I mentioned gyrostabilizer before. Engineered products and services, it's pretty standard, and it does just continue to flow through every year. There's nothing special there for us, really.
The hollow bar was reasonably good. It's just pretty standard. Looking a bit deeper into propulsion, we had a record year in 2024. We've got more capacity now, which is terrific to have. It's important we can deal with any that comes up. I do note that of the top 10 superyacht builders globally, we're now supplying half of them, which is a bit of a step up. We found we won another big superyacht builder out of the Asian region, which was really impressive. There is quite a bit of work down there that we can chase on the more sophisticated boats, which is great. Of course, we're continuing to include more robotics and tooling as we learn more. It's important for us to stay on this automation curve. Australia is a very expensive country to manufacture anything, getting more and more so.
The more robotics, the more automation we have, then the more competitive we're going to be. We continue to do that. We've also been expanding our offerings to shaft lines, which takes time to set up our supply chain on this, but we have done it. We have won some of those contracts, which is represented in our turnover in propulsion. That'll continue to grow. All our aim is to sell a shaft line with the propeller. You're selling a propeller, it's not much effort to sell a shaft line to go with it. There are two to three times the value of the propeller is the value of the shaft line. We're pretty keen, and that's starting to gather momentum now that our supply chains have been established.
The Sharrow agreement, we changed it during this last financial year, and we're Sharrow taking the lead, and we manufacture for them on this first stage. It doesn't change our agreement at all, but it just means in the first stage, having Sharrow much closer to the customer is a really efficient way of doing it. We meet with Sharrow weekly. We've had regular updates from Greg. They've got an enormous amount of work going on at the moment in the United States with the new facilities they're building, the restructuring that's going on. That has, I think, had an impact on them because we've really had very little to do with Sharrow in this financial year. We're certainly hoping that as they get more organized, they will provide that through to us so we can then manufacture. We still have our agreement in place.
As they develop that, they have had some more significant results on their smaller ranges since we last spoke. They've now found that the maneuverability of vessels with the Sharrow on it has been significantly enhanced, which means when they're turning, they're taking evasive action, the speed of the vessel doesn't decline anywhere near as much as a conventional propeller. That's something really interesting we hadn't considered. Of course, we know the acoustic levels are much less. They are certainly progressing. What we're looking for our market, of course, is the fuel efficiency carbon footprint, which is still, they're still developing. We're still, their calculations are showing they're getting some advantages in some areas, but not right across the range that they're looking for. We'll continue to work with them.
Of course, we're springboarding on all the testing we've been doing on our vessel to continue to develop our own range of products as well. That's the sort of look ahead for us. Expansion facilities are underway. We've got another 1,000 square meters going in and additional capacity of three machines that we'll, I'll explain as we get to defense. They've primarily been backed by the Department of Defense. We have been fortunate to receive some grants for some of these machines, partial grants, I should say. It is because the primary focus of these machines is the differing defense requirements for specialist propellers and other components. I can't really go into those details, but they are allowed to be used for normal commercial work, which is great from our perspective. That's what they're for. Some of the programs that we're now working on, these are necessary.
These machines have to be, for instance, segregated, isolated, and only accessible by certain people when they're being used for this critical work. Overall, defense, you know, we're looking at gearing up at the moment. We know all about ASC. They had a wonderful announcement recently. Very fortunately for us, they were able to, ASC did the, they were the main driver of the release. They were actually, in the release, said there's $65 million over six years, which is approximately correct. I think it'll be a little more as the boats are aging, of course. In previous times, we haven't been able to release any sort of quantifiable monetary information on that. We're just not given permission. This is for us quite pleasing because it gives all the investment community a greater understanding of what this contract represents to us. We also are working on this demonstrator blade.
We've been talking about this with BAE Systems. It's a Kongsberg designed propeller. We've done stage one. We've actually completed stage two in terms of the physical verification. We've been going through the final security clearances. These are the highest level of security of propellers that we've seen, that they have to be manufactured in great privacy. We're now just going through all of the security clearances we need. We're just about there. Now it's just going, our approvals going through review. We hope that over the short term, the next few months, we'll have all the accreditation in place to be able to finalize a tender and contract on the first pair of propellers that we can manufacture. There's actually more than just Hunter. Hunter's got six boats. There's 42 of these vessels being built globally. Only two people globally are qualified, and VEEM is one of them.
What we're hoping to do is to springboard onto the global supply chain on these. We currently, from a physical manufacturing perspective, probably have our nose in front in terms of accuracy and compliance. We're hoping that will put us in a good stead to win more of these. It's about a couple of million dollars a boat for that. We think this is going to become quite a good ongoing work. The beauty of this though is it springboards onto other work for defense-related, for Kongsberg generally, where they are looking for suppliers for their products into the U.S. defense market and for other commercial projects as they don't manufacture these things themselves. We've got some opportunities there which we've been tendering on. That's really, I think, a terrific outcome.
You'll notice yesterday we had to do a release on the HII pilot program, which is for the Virginia-class submarines and for the aircraft carrier programs. We wanted to wait a little bit on this because we wanted to have an order before we came back to the market because there's so many concrete to work on. Even if it's a toe in the water contract, it does signify that we're there and we're producing and it will grow from there. The government and HII were ahead of us and they were quite insistent that they went to market. We had to do so. We've qualified at a higher level than the other people mentioned and the requirements of what we're doing is a little more intense and a higher level of secrecy. We got through that.
We're now just waiting for the early tenders to come through and I do suspect it will be toe in the water job first but perhaps we could be manufacturing something for them before the end of the first half but it will be small and once they've got the toe in the water they can grow from there. Remembering they want to double their submarine output, they are having difficulty obtaining the type of work that we do in the U.S. I think that is we can expect that to be quite promising in what we do so we're pretty excited about that. We mentioned the grants on the machines and we expect that the involvement of just being in the defense sector now will enable us to win more working from related companies that need the security clearance.
A pretty good example is that there's a missile program coming into Australia in 2027. We're going through early stage talking to these people. The fact we've gone through all these programs of security puts us in good stead that we're already part of the way down that road. Also, we find that Austal Ships, a fantastic local company, were heavily involved in their extended Cape-c lass. They have landing barges coming, one of which requires propulsion of our nature and also the replacement for the Anzac frigates, the new Japanese one that has propellers as well. There might be an opportunity if they're built here for us to be able to provide those training content for that, which is terrific. Gyros, again, we're seeing last year was a great breadth of customers, not quite as high, but it has helped us.
It shows that our market penetration is growing, which is terrific. We have launched our Mark II with a five-year warranty that addressed all of the little bits and pieces that we found in the market, including a couple of strange ones. We had half of the fleet at that stage supplying way less water than was specified, like running your car with its radiator half full. You're not going to go far. We found that and we've upgraded to compensate for that and change. I think the thing acceptance was from us to say, look, a lot of our customers are going to be recalcitrant, so you're not going to change your customers. The best idea is to compensate. It was a pretty small job to significantly increase our cooling capacity to allow those sort of circumstances in the gyro still to run.
Even as something as simple as people sending power down a [POE] cable, an internet cable to our gyro, which wreaks havoc on all your electronics. Some very strange things that you wouldn't think that a professional shipbuilder would allow to occur, unfortunately does from time to time. That addresses all those little items that we found. They're out there now. What we've noticed very pleasingly is we're up to about 60 odd units that are out there and running a little over, and our warranty claims are diminishing every year. This last Northern Summer was our quietest Northern Summer we've had since it was released. We're very pleased and it's exhibiting all the right trends. That's very pleasing. We still expect that to be the biggest part of our business. Now we've got the very robust unit that we've got.
I think you will start to see that greater sales volume that we're looking for. Engineered products and services, what can I say? We've been doing it since 1968. It all works well. We've got our forever pipe range of pipes. It just keeps on keeping on for us, and we'll continue to meet that market need for as long as it's out there. We saw the investment of $3.9 million in plant and equipment, capital engineering. We're putting in additional robotics in our propeller processes and some new robots to extend our capacity and the product development, including gyro and shaft lines. The gyro side of things, we've actually got some more technology we've been working on, which is coming down the pipeline now, which is patented, or the application for patent has been applied. It will transform our gyro to being a no-schedule maintenance unit.
It'll tuck down under the deck, and they won't really look at it for, in fact, on superyachts, probably close to the life of the vessel. It really is a bit of a game changer for us. It's important for us to be looking for that ultimate product. It's got to be better every day to make sure that we're going to be remaining the market leaders in what we do. Going forward, defense, we've got to look forward to ASC, HII , and the Hunter Class , and then later in the track missile program. Of course, in between all that, the Kongsberg additional work, the Austal additional work that comes. These are really significant naval projects for us. If you look at doubling the U.S.
submarine program, it means instead of being, you know, the Collins class is $12 million worth of valves for perhaps a submarine, the American ones are over double the size. Some of them are three times the size. You can understand the amount of complex castings that they require. They are complex. Complex materials, which we are very experienced at, but very few people in the world now in the Western world are experienced in these types of metals. The foundry industry has been declining throughout the Western world. The propulsion side, look, we believe that propellers have been really quite strong. We are monitoring currently the impact of the U.S. tariffs. That's pretty unclear at the moment, and that will become more clear over the next few months.
As you're aware, there's a tariff, then it's reduced, then it's increased, then it's reduced, and that can wreak havoc on customers buying superyachts or bringing components in to build boats, even into the U.S. We're watching that really closely. However, we are continuing to grow and expand what we actually do, and there are several larger opportunities available for us that we're pursuing for OEMs. By building this new facility, it actually enables us to deal with whatever comes along our way. We have been still keeping an eye on new locations. There's been, we still think there's a pull or a demand in the U.S. or Europe as our next phase of expansion. As it unfolds, we'll know more about that. The shaft line one is something that we are still pursuing vigorously, and we see that as being a growth area for us as well.
It takes a little bit of time to do the design work and the supply chain development work, but it's all happening. A gyro, the Mark II has been fantastic, and we'll continue to bring new technology, and we expect to continue to grow. We're still the only player in the big space. There's still increasing growth in the lower space where it's almost standard in the U.S., for instance, on boats over about 40 ft. It's a fantastic product that works very, very well. The traditional engineering demand, we continue to do, continue to make money. Going forward, we've got this, we've got a traditional slower first half, and it will be a slower first half because we've got all this big stuff in the back half, and we're simply waiting to get on with it.
It should, I think it's the brightest future that VEEM has seen in its history to have such strong areas in propulsion, defense, and gyros, which makes us extremely excited.
Thank you, Mark. We'll give to Ben to do a Q&A.
Yeah, thank you, Mark and Tino. Just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please do so via the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. First question coming through here is, VEEM's been a consistent payer of small dividends. Can you explain the thinking of not declaring a final dividend?
Sure, I'm happy to take that. As Mark has just alluded to in his final remarks there, we have a lot of work that's coming down the track, especially defense. We've recently announced the ASC contract just yesterday, HII supplier status, and Hunter is nearing completion. We see that as work coming down the future that we're getting ready for. When those contracts start up, they're not quite self-funding, but the funding mechanism is very advantageous because they're large contracts which we get large deposits for. There's cash up front to get that going. As Mark talked about for things like Hunter, HII, there's been work we're doing in the interim to gear up, to get ready, to qualify. We've just seen we had a good half, a second half. Increased profitability, i ncreased cash flow. We've decided after we've paid the dividend in the first half to maintain that cash to get us to that point of the new contracts and to get ready for them.
Thank you, Tino. When do you expect to get an indication from Sharrow on how the test propellers are performing?
Really interesting. They have fed back on the ones, the few that we've done, and they have performed, their customers very happy. We're a little mystified as to why they haven't been able to give us more designs to manufacture. As Tito was saying, there's a lot of work been going on, and I think they've just been strung on resources with all the changing in their organization. Greg has explained that to us, and he assures us that more are coming down the track. All we can do is talk and continue to urge them on in their good work. We can't wait just for Sharrow to come, hence why we've been doing our own development of our own shaft lines. We've developed a new range of proprietary high-tensile alloys, which we've already been testing as our vessel is already set up for this with Lloyds on board.
We've been able to, even on our first prototypes, we've demonstrated a 6% increase in efficiency over our existing best quality bronze propellers. The second prototypes will reveal even more than that. What we're doing quietly behind the scenes is developing, further developing our traditional monoblock propellers, which is our staple, and the shaft lines to go with it. We believe we can produce significant increases in fuel efficiency and decreases in carbon footprint, which the market are desperate for. That's our primary focus. We believe that the SHARROW propeller will, I guess, become the bookend of that when they can get their development to the stage we can just manufacture. We're seeing a little bit frustrating from our perspective, but we understand when you have groundbreaking technology, it takes time for it to be sorted and to develop internally.
You always believe that it can be done quicker than what it actually can be done. I think our gyros are even a testimony to that, that it takes longer than what you think it will. I'm sure SHARROW will be a great success. We have got our foot on that product. When they are able to do that, then we will be the main beneficiary of that development. The board's adopted the view that we just need to be patient and supportive and encourage them. With our weekly meetings, we continue to encourage and provide any information we can and do whatever we can for them.
Thank you, Mark. Another question on Sharrow. Given the delay in the partnership, would it be fair to say the delivery of 75 vessels started back in March will be pushed back?
Yeah, I must confess that when Greg said that, we all thought, we'll have to wait and see. They hadn't supplied many to that point. I've got to reinforce that's Greg's words. We were so keen. I would have been so pleased if he was able to do that. That hasn't eventuated. We did ask him on that. He just explained that they were having difficulty getting the designs they wanted in the research team, and they were making significant progress but hadn't got to that stage.
Thank you. Can you talk about the impact of U.S. tariffs on VEEM and whether this is positive or negative relative to your competitors?
Okay. Really mixed bag for VEEM. Everyone's had a bit of an increase in raw propellers, the price of the propellers because of the tariffs. Some countries more than us, but no one less than us. That's a positive. We see particularly the U.S. market to be good. It doesn't affect us. The rest of the world doesn't matter. However, in America, if they're building boats, all the product coming in to build those boats, the ones the product comes from overseas, is now more expensive. I don't think that per se is perhaps a problem. The real problem occurs with the customers, and this is the unknown. How many people are putting off ordering a boat until the tariff equation has been settled? How many boat builders can reliably predict the purchase price until they've all been settled?
We're starting to see now confusion with some of the boat builders. We've got clients that are not sure. They're now saying, look, maybe I'll just wait till we find out a bit more about the tariffs to find out what they're going to settle down to be. In some cases, it could change the size of the boat that they buy because they may not have the funds, you know, to be able to put to that if the price goes up by that tariff amount. If it's 15% now, it might be 25% next month. I think we're starting to see some of these questions coming through. It doesn't affect us from a competitive nature, but the customers are changing right at the top end. We're watching all that space very, very carefully. I'm trying to see what the impact of that is.
Thank you. What is the anticipated CapEx for the group in FY 2026, assuming no significant new contract wins?
Assuming no significant contract wins, we already assume Hunter, HII, and ASC. HII, very little in terms of meaningful revenue in FY 2026. That's more the small work that Mark talked about. In terms of ASC, definitely a big FY second half, 2026. In terms of Hunter, we expect that once we complete the qualification, then we'll have an order and begin. As Mark has said, there's many boats out there, so that could ramp up or it could be slow. It's difficult to say without any significant CapEx, without any significant contracts because we're already assuming some growth and more certainly in the second half and even more in FY 2027. We don't have any additional significant CapEx outside of the three machines which Mark has spoken about, which are coming, as well as a 3D sand printer, which we also have government funding for.
That, along with the extension, which is being funded by the landlord, is the major CapEx that's going to happen. For us, in terms of cash flow, we'll finance those machines as we always have. Because three of the four items we're getting have grant funding attached, we'll actually end up in a net positive cash flow position all up once all that's done, they arrive, the financing is settled, and the grant funding is received.
Thank you, Tino. What does the expansion in propulsion look like, and in what predicted timeframe? Is there any known or identified headwinds here?
I can start perhaps in terms of the physical side of things. The expansion is ongoing, and we expect that to be completed around the new year. The machines are timed to arrive at a similar time in the new year. In terms of moving in and commissioning machines, that's a second half thing. In terms of product, I'll leave that to Mark.
The capacity that we're putting gives us the capability of moving up probably between $7 million and $10 million a year in extra propellers. You've got to have a demand for that, but it gives us that capacity. Whether that is tied up in defense work or commercial work is yet to be seen, depending on what the Department of Defense requires. They will be obviously the first priority for that, and we'll know.
Propulsion, we've seen a big uptick because of a lot of the Volvo work, which is going extremely well. We had fantastic feedback on the smaller propellers that we took on board, which was called the P-series for us, and the first trials and feedback have been spectacular. The problem with these smaller ones are previously made being hand profiled out of low-cost countries, and the complexities that create for the Volvo Penta was significant and for the users was significant because the propellers not being machined meant that they weren't matched, which meant the performance of the vessel from product from side to side on the vessel was varied quite a lot. That's been tremendous. We're waiting to see how that fleshes out for the full range. There are some further opportunities in the defense-related monoblock, and we've seen some bigger tenders we've placed in that space.
I don't know with the tariff side of things with Trump how that's going to play out. Saying do we expect big growth in this or small growth in this is pretty hard to pick at the moment. What we're doing is making sure we cover as much of the market as possible to make sure we're continuing to grow and we'll have the capacity to be able to meet any growth requirements we've got.
Thank you, Mark and Tino. That concludes the Q&A segment of this webinar. I'll now hand back to Mark for closing comments.
It's been a great year. Thanks, Ben. It was lower than last year as expected. The big thing is actually lining up all the defense work and contracts that are going forward. I think that's really positive for VEEM. We'll continue, obviously, of course, developing other products, which are very large and very exciting. I think the big thing is we're very proud of what we've been able to achieve. Not many companies can do what we do. To be able to move into the U.S. defense space is extraordinary for a company from Perth. To also be involved in the Hunter Class and beyond in the Type 26 frigates globally, I think that's incredibly exciting for us. These are some of the most accurate propellers that have ever been made, and they're six meters in diameter when they're finished.
To be involved in that project for us is extremely exciting as well. It's onwards and upwards from here, although we can see that it's going to be very much the lighter first half and a very strong second half and a much stronger 2027.