Thank you very much. I'd like to start by introducing myself. Proud and privileged, Dean Banks, to be the CEO here at Ventia. On a personal note, I am originally from the UK, previously worked for Balfour BT, a large infrastructure company in the UK. Prior to that, I worked for a company called Delaroo that made currency, literally, so made money. Prior to that, I ran Massey Ferguson tracks in the UK. Quite a broad depth of different things. Really enjoying my life here in Australia, getting to run a great business, but also to enjoy the great country and the wider ANZ geography that I cover. On a personal basis as well, I've got two grown-up children, three grandchildren, and I support the world's greatest sports team, which is Liverpool Football Club, for anybody who's in any doubt.
In terms of our business, Ventia is a really interesting business in terms of thinking about a brand name that probably not a lot of people know, but something that actually, in terms of your daily life, you probably touch every day. We do have quite a wide remit in terms of 35,000 workforce, split about 50% direct, 50% subcontract community across Australia and New Zealand, circa 400 sites across that, with about 40% of our people working in regional and rural areas. We do really cover the whole landscape of the community. About 75% of our revenue comes from customers. If you think about Ventia, we probably touch you in the morning when you wake up and you switch on the tap because we're probably behind the facilities management for that water company.
When you get on the road network, we do operations and maintenance of major networks across Australia and New Zealand. If you go and visit a hospital or a school, we're probably looking after facilities management for that particular facility. When you get home at night, from a telecommunications perspective, we're probably doing the operations and maintenance of that telecommunications network to support you. We operate in four main segments with different capabilities sitting across these. The largest currently is defense and social infrastructure. We're one of the top five service providers to defense. For defense, we do things ranging from cleaning and catering services, delivering millions of meals a year to military personnel, looking after their bases, but also doing things like facilities management of the base, logistics and warehouse management. We do tailoring for uniforms. We do the full firefighting services across all the bases as well.
Quite a broad range of activities. On the social infrastructure side, looking after all of those assets that I talked about earlier. Infrastructure services is probably a slightly different business that we really break into four segments, which is water and environmental services, where we're looking after and maintaining water assets. I'm today in Sydney, and of course, we would be a partner to Sydney Water. If you look to energy and renewables, which is a really growing opportunity for us, we do everything in terms of making sure we can stabilize energy capability today, but also looking at renewable energy and supporting everything from hydro to wind, etc., through that particular perspective. We do rigs and well services, and we include in that resources where we look after some of the major commodity suppliers of major assets across Australia like Chevron, BP, etc.
In rigs and wells, we do coal seam gas management, making sure that the pipeline is clean and flowing appropriately. It's a slightly different business, but a business that we've enjoyed since acquisition of Broad Spectrum in 2020. Telecommunications is probably the backbone of Ventia as a business. Ventia is still quite a new organization, only actually coming into conception in 2015 and largely built up of acquisition over a period of time until we listed in 2021. Finally, transport, where we are really a niche business, operations and maintenance of major tunnels and highways, really where the key population lives, across the eastern seaboard and beyond. In terms of what I said earlier, we only listed in November 2021, so just coming up to our fourth anniversary as a listed entity. Clearly, we're still maturing as an organization and getting to promote that brand.
I think we've got a reputation in four years for doing what we say we'll do. There are lots of priorities for people considering investment in a business, but one of those obviously is financials. As you can see here, our financials have promoted progressive performance over the period of time, with revenue increasing up 21% since listing, our EBITDA and margin up 24%, and our MPA up 40%. Generally, our business has moved in the right direction. We've seen really good trajectory. I think that is also one of the advantages of being an essential services provider, that even through the COVID period where a lot of the dynamics for industry changed, our requirement to deliver services remained the same and revenue continued to be stable or indeed increase a little bit. I think it's really important as well that we're a portfolio business.
We don't just operate with one capability, and therefore, we do see upsides and downsides across our capabilities, but broadly, consistent revenue flowing through. I think that plays through in terms of when we're looking into our next financial year. We normally start the year with about 85% revenue in hand, and across our portfolio, it does differ by capability. The average tenure with extensions is seven years, which gives us great stability as well as a business. If you look at our focus in terms of strategy, we're really a people business. The way that our people show up each day is really, really important to our organization, and it is the heartbeat of our business.
What we try and attempt to do is redefine service excellence, and we really look at this through three major tenets, the first being customer focus, where given that strategic relationship with the customers over a long tenure, actually one of the things we've got to try and build is trust in the relationship. Even though we've got an average seven-year contract tenure, our renewal rate on contracts is very high, plus 85% over the tenure that we've been listed. I really talk to our people about how they show up, and I talk about celebrity service because the one thing that our people do get to do is interact with our customers, and they are the face of Ventia. We talked about many years ago, probably good to great. I hope we're going to push to celebrity service in every interaction we have.
We really differentiate ourselves by the way our people deliver the service, but also the way that they leave the asset better than when they arrive. In terms of innovation, we really look at innovation in two key assets. Number one being, can we utilize data to be the most informed and therefore make really good decisions? That's important not only for ourselves, but also in terms of collaboration with our client partners. Secondly, can we start to use smarter ways of delivering the services that we do to try and reduce the total cost of asset management, but also extend the life of the asset where possible as well. I saw, Ryan, you were already asking questions about AI.
Clearly, from an innovation perspective, AI is a key consideration and is really changing the dynamics of the way we work today and the way that we work in the future. It is an area that we are really investing in. Finally, sustainability. We want to leave the communities we serve with a positive impact, where they're very appreciative of Ventia turning up to deliver a service. Bear in mind, a lot of our people live in the community. It matters to them that we do the right things in the community. Of course, underlying this, health and safety is our license to operate. With 35,000 people spread over a large geography, we invest in the wellbeing and health and education of our people each and every day. Moving on to our shareholder value proposition.
Since listing, we have largely given 75% of our MPA as a payout in terms of a dividend. Our dividend has significantly increased year on year. The dividend for the half year, we are a calendar year business of 2025, was 10.71%, up 14.5% on the prior year. We partially frank our dividend, increasing it in this period from 80% to 90%. That is because we have some tax credits we need to burn off. In a couple of years, hopefully we will be 100% franked. We can also probably look at our dividend policy. As I said, we've paid out 75% each time since listing. Our policy is 60% to 80%, but probably review that as we move forward. This year we also announced for the first time a market share buyback. We put a $100 million value on that. By the half year, we'd already done $82.5 million.
In terms of positive trajectory for the business, we felt we could. MPA growth. If you look at addressable market, one of the great things about our business is that we're a circa $6 billion business operating in a market that we see a total addressable opportunity of over $80 billion and growing at 4.7% year on year. Historically, we've grown at that single mid-digit to high single digit and taken a bit of market share each time we've come to the market. The great thing about this is that we can really be selective about winning opportunities. For us, it is about quality of revenue rather than quantity of revenue. There's no doubt we could grow quicker.
I think for us, we want to really operate with the right risk consideration and partner with the right clients who have the same values as us and are driven to try and give that better service to the population they serve. There are key tailwinds supporting and underpinning our market opportunity going forward, such that we can see growth to above $100 billion by 2029. The first is defense, which is a key client for us. About 20% of our revenue currently comes from defense. There are real commitments in terms of additional GDP spend in that space, which aligns to us continuing to support the ADF, but also other international military personnel that come here for training activities, et cetera. Generally, our business is good, whatever the market space is in terms of government spending on major capital investment as well.
There are commitments to continuing major capital commitment going forward. If new assets are built, that's good news for Ventia Services Group because they're new assets to operate and maintain. If there is a slowing down of new asset builds, particularly with population growth, we see old assets being further serviced, and therefore that's advantageous to us and gives us that boring reliability in terms of performance moving forward. Energy transition is a big opportunity for ourselves. I think this is an area where we anticipate big expenditure going forward. There is a little bit of slowness for some of those assets to be built, whether that is because of capital legislation, land availability, or just general administration of the activity, but it's definitely happening. It feels almost like a snowball where the energy opportunity is in front of us, but slightly getting pushed away and getting bigger.
Digitization and demand for data, clearly all of us want to be connected every single day, and that is really important to us as an organization. Finally, as I said, population growth. Quite a small population currently, and therefore small increments in terms of net migration really do make a difference. That means more housing, more road networks, more schools, more hospitals, all the assets that we look after as an organization. I suppose to conclude, really our half-year result this year drove us to give confidence in full-year outlook. We originally had guidance of 7% to 10% growth in terms of MPA year on year, and we've increased that guidance to 10% to 12% in our half-year result. We continue to have really good cash generation, above 90% in this period, and I think that illustrates good quality of earnings.
We again delivered over a 90% renewal rate in the period, which means that our customers trust us to be long-term partners, and we performed on the current contracts. A real highlight for us in H1 was we got to a record work-in-hand of over $20.6 billion, with a trajectory by the year end to be over $21 billion, which means if we're going to drive circa $3 billion of revenue in the second half, we need to win more than $3 billion of work in the same period. As I said, in terms of dividends, I would expect us to continue to pay at 75% MPA against our policy of 60% to 80%, and we did do a share buyback increase as I spoke about earlier. Overall, our business is in good health.
Like any business, we look to continuously improve our organization, and I'll probably close there and see if there are any questions from you, good self.
There are, and there's some coming in from the audience as well, so thank you, Dean. Thanks for the insights to Ventia. You outlined your growth prospects, and there's a couple of questions around these things. The first one was maybe in the shorter term, what do you see the opportunities over the next 12 to 24 months?
Yeah, I think from our perspective, the first thing to say is we, as I said, had $20.6 billion of work-in-hand in the first half, which is a record for our business. We've been particularly successful with telecommunications contracts. Telecommunications contracts as well have largely been about 18-month tenure, and we've won big awards with NBN and Telstra in the last eight months at five years, which really gives us stability in that space and over $4 billion of work won. If I look almost at market dynamics for our business, like a set of scales, on one side we've probably got telecommunication and transport customers who are looking for consolidation of supply base and therefore total cost benefit. We've been within that wall. On the second side, we've obviously got energy and defense customers who are probably looking for more providers.
Therefore there's going to be some challenge there in terms of if we've got a majority position, currently maybe it reduces, but where we haven't got a position, maybe we can get a position. We've just got to balance those set of scales. I think for our business across the portfolio, there are definite opportunities as we move forward.
Okay, the larger picture view here, there's a question, and I think you sort of touched on this also, about you are a large business, you've got those major categories in which you operate. Are you looking to merge or acquire with others, and would you go overseas?
In terms of priorities from a strategic perspective, given we've got over $80 billion of opportunity in the market and we only currently take $6 billion, then organic growth is our priority. We do look at inorganic opportunity. We continue to do that. We've done small bolt-ons since listing, four of which, one we did that was mobilized on July 1 this year of a PowerNet asset, which has given us capability we've already got, but in another geography. We will look at adjacencies as well. I think given that we have so much opportunity in the local Australia and New Zealand market, unless there was a real driving dynamic and value proposition, perhaps with the current climate, I couldn't see us going into new geographies in the short term.
I perhaps should have rephrased that question just to include New Zealand, which is actually overseas, so you're already participating offshore.
Yeah.
We had earlier questions around capital management. You've mentioned buybacks. They seem to be a characteristic of a lot of what we see around results time, by companies buying back capital. You also have debt. The question is really, if you're buying back your own shares, what are you using the money for? Are you reducing debt?
Look, I think there's a couple of things in that. Of course, there's always variability in what people think you should do with your finances. I mean, you could clearly pay off debt, you could increase dividends, you could do share buybacks, you could invest in capital, you could invest in M&A. We're quite a capital-light business. Historically, we've been below 1%. We're probably driving more towards 2% on a longer-term perspective. The only real areas of capital that we invest in are for growth. That could be digital, which is obviously a key topic at the minute, and advancing our capability in that space. In terms of hardware, largely for us, it's only rigs and wells and the firefighting fleet that we buy of major capital costs. Therefore, we've got a good financial position, a nice balance sheet.
I think it's just a consideration each time we come through of where are we best to invest in that capital. As I said, paying back debt, returns to shareholders, or further organic growth, inorganic growth.
I guess that's one of the advantages of a company structured with a board of directors. I'm sure that's a topic of conversation around the board table from time to time.
I'm very fortunate I've got a good board, but they do challenge me, you know, particularly on strategy, growth, and also what we do with our capital are always high on their list. Of course, risk considerations to make sure we continue to deliver on the good fundamentals we've built in our time as a listed organization.
Absolutely. A great note to finish on. Thank you, Dean. Thank you very much for joining us today on ASX CEO Connect.
Thank you very much for your time. Thank you, everybody. I look forward to sharing our story updates at future events.
Okay, we've got a couple more questions, which we'll get across to you a little later today.
Super. Thank you very much.