Okay. We'll watch out for what we have here.
Paul, Richard, unfortunately, we've run out of time. We'll have to leave it there. Thank you once again for coming back and joining us. And we will now leave Melbourne, or I'm assuming that's where Paul and Richard are, and we'll head over to WA. We have Michael Shirley, CEO of Veris, and Steve Harding, CFO of Veris, joining us. Good morning, gentlemen.
Hi, Mark. How are you?
Very well, Michael. If you want to bring up your slides, Michael, I'll let you know when I can see them. Steve, good morning.
Morning, Mark.
Yeah, I can see the cover slide now, Michael. You can take it away whenever you're ready.
Great. Thanks very much, Mark. And thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. And I am joining you from Melbourne, Mark, and Steve's joining us from Perth, nice and early. So to get underway, look, 2025 has been an exciting year in our transformation journey in Veris. The original strategic premise behind Veris was to become a national surveying business. And since we and the new leadership team have embarked on this transformation of Veris, it's been a really fragmented industry, and we decided that that model alone would not succeed. We developed our strategy to be a differentiated spatial data business, and we're positioned to leverage our spatial data capability to provide really high-value solutions. The application of digital twins, spatial data, AI, are a unique proposition that we bring to the market from the base of our surveying and spatial expertise.
Veris are really targeting that growing need for value from digital innovation in the infrastructure sector, and we think we're starting to make really strong progress in going forward. Today, I'm not going to go through all of our capabilities in detail. We've touched on that many times. Suffice to say, our national position and our depth of capability position us really strongly at the top end of the market. Our alliance with Wumara is a really authentic opportunity to build our indigenous capability and our market position across where we operate nationally. We've got a really significant market in front of us at the moment with our strategic positioning. The addressable market is more than AUD 1 billion, and we approach that with a strong differentiated proposition. We have a unique capability with spatial data to provide actionable insights that create value for our clients.
And our capabilities now allow us to advise clients on their digital transformation and support them to embrace emerging technologies. Our professional services strategy means we're focusing on quality key clients with a high-value proposition and repeatable workload. And we're working hard to build strong relationships and trust with those clients. Our approach is based on value, not the cheapest price, and we continue to deliver margin and not just chasing value. Our investment in the last few years has been to develop technology, capability, including AI and some of our platform development that really allows us to solve problems and create value with these strong clients we've got. In the early years, our strategy was to save the business, and from there, we wanted to build a strong and sustainable base for growth.
And now we've moved from rebuilding the business to stabilizing the business, and we've got that stable base with organic growth, and we're now in the position to accelerate the transformation of Veris. And this has leveraged our digital differentiation using our digital solutions and our approaches to provide actionable insights. Our strategy is anchored still in that spatial data capabilities, and we're really focused on building value, not low-margin revenue. We've expanded from that low-margin, high-volume work to a high-margin, value-based model, and we're now broadening our revenue growth through some different streams out of our digital solutions that have come to market over the last year or so. This year's FY25 has been really a year of significant progress, and I just wanted to touch on some of the highlights.
We've continued strong organic revenue growth, over AUD 97 million of revenue this year, and importantly, that's delivered a AUD 2 million profit, which has allowed us to pay a dividend to our shareholders. This dividend is a 55% payout ratio and a significant return for shareholders, and demonstrating the strategy execution and focus on profit, we'll continue to improve our gross profit margin up from 32% last year to over 36% this year. We've been cash-generating for the year with our net cash growing, even though we've used some cash on our Spatial Vision acquisition and our share buyback, and our digital and spatial revenue has grown to more than 25%, which is up from 17% last year. This growth really shows the progress of our transformation, and the overall outlook is really strong.
We've got a committed workload of over AUD 65 million, and in the last three years, we've delivered over AUD 3.2 million in returns to shareholders in capital management initiatives, and we've done this while transforming the business in a really unstable economy. There have been some really key outcomes for us that we wanted to touch on for this year. First of all, is our Spatial Vision acquisition has been a great demonstration. It's the first of our acquisitions since the rebuilding of the business, and it's shown our ability to accelerate our Digital Advisory capability. It's positioned us into some new areas in the market and delivered strength early on in the integration, which has been great to see. Our digital strategy is really gaining some momentum, and we've had a strong uptake of some of our products like RoadSiDe, Digital Urbanism, and Vantage.
Now we've got new solutions like BridgeSiDe coming to market, which we think will commercialize significantly over the upcoming period. We've expanded our consulting and advisory capabilities across the lifecycle of a range of big projects, and we've been able to build our environmental skills, our digital advisory skill sets, and that's really positioning the business as a strategic partner adding high-quality, high-value advice to our clients. We've continued to really shift the business away from these small projects, transactional outlook in world, and we're really focused on building larger projects, more complex projects with our key clients. You see that this year with a 50% uplift in the average value of our new projects. We're winning bigger, more complex, multidisciplinary projects, and we're seeing that translate through in the numbers this year. We understand that Veris really is fundamentally a people-based business.
Our people are core to our innovation and the solutions we develop and deliver with our clients. And we've really transformed our employee experience over the year, investing in strong talent, investing in our internal development programs, and you see that through things like our award-winning graduate development program and the work that's doing in developing talent, bringing it into the business. About 14 months ago, we went through a big operational restructure in the business, really getting efficiency and simplicity into our operating model and letting us focus in the areas of growth in the market and areas we can pivot towards. We've seen that really help us in efficiency this year, and you see that benefit coming through and allowed us to really accelerate the growth and transformation of the business.
So now I'll hand over to Steve, and Steve will give some update on some more of the financial details.
Thanks, Michael. As we outlined earlier, the execution of our digital advisory and consulting strategy is resulting in our operating model increasingly evolving to focus on client engagements, where we have a point of difference in our data capture, storage, analytics, and insights. If we look at our P&L summary, the important point to take away from this slide is that while our revenue increased a solid 5% from the prior year, more importantly was the continued improvement in the quality of our revenue, which has continued to increase year on year. This has led to continuing improvements in our project gross profit margins. When the current management team took control of Veris in FY 2020, these project margins across the business were an average of 24%.
Our focus on project management disciplines has seen those increase successively year on year to now being in excess of 36.5% in FY 2025.
This has been in large part an outcome of our deliberate strategy of targeting these larger nationally based key clients and the larger multidisciplinary project work that these clients require our solutions to deliver. In addition to the margin growth delivered from the better quality revenues, our more efficient operating model implemented following the organizational restructure undertaken in the second half of FY24 has also delivered cost constraint, which has contributed to a strong turnaround in profitability. The AUD 2 million PBT result represents more than AUD 6 million in improvement at the bottom line.
If we flick to the next slide, Michael, through the use of our data-driven analytic solutions and platforms, we're disrupting traditional industry methodologies, which in turn are driving more efficient, insightful, and valuable uses of the data that we capture.
These solutions move us away from a commoditized, highly competitive landscape that then in turn create more value-adding opportunities. As I touched on just now, this strategy has seen us continue to generate improved gross profit margins year on year. We've underpinned the development of our skill set in digital and spatial analytics through a deliberate investment in talent and technology that is shaping new opportunities in our markets. As we've invested in building out our internal skill sets and technology over the last four years, we've seen this translate into continued growth in the proportion of revenue generated by a digital and spatial team. The growth in this digital and spatial revenue has been supplemented by the acquisition of Spatial Vision in the second half of FY25 that Michael touched on earlier.
This has increased our revenue from our DNS service offering from 17% in FY24 to in excess of 25% in FY25. The higher returns that are following are allowing us to fund further investment in the development of our digital-based advisory capabilities and solutions, which are then flowing through to higher bottom line EBIT and PBT margins. Importantly, from our shareholders' perspective, our better quality revenue and stronger project margins that we've just discussed are also translating into improved operating cash flow and a stronger cash balance across the year. Our increase in cash has been driven by a focus on delivery of these higher margin projects, crystallization of working capital through continuing to focus on our WIP and debtor balances, a focus on cross-control, and also minimizing our CapEx requirements via the continued efficiency gains driven by the utilization and mobilization of our equipment across our national platform.
This was particularly pleasing in terms of our cash balance, taking into account the cash that we outlaid for the Spatial Vision acquisition and the continued reduction in hire purchase liabilities, as well as the ongoing on-market share buyback that also occurred throughout the year. With the declaration of a full-year fully franked FY25 dividend, once it's been paid, the business will have returned in excess of AUD 3.2 million to shareholders over the last three years via dividends and the ongoing on-market share buyback. Importantly, also continuing to build on our robust capital base positions us strongly to pursue further strategic M&A initiatives that complement our digital and professional services strategy. We'll continue to be active in this space, but as always, we'll remain highly selective in anything we choose to progress. Thanks, Michael. I'll hand back to you now.
Thanks, Steve, and appreciate those details. So if we look now at our outlook and our pipeline, I've touched already on that backlog of over AUD 65 million, but the overall outlook is really strong. We've also got a weighted pipeline in excess of AUD 190 million, and this gives everyone confidence about the outlook and the revenue growth for the business. It's underpinned by some really strong project wins, most recently highlighted by the Suburban Rail Loop project in Victoria that we announced, and there's been numerous digital and spatial transformational projects that we've announced through the year, showing that shift and mix in the projects that we have in the business. The former Spatial Vision team have really helped grow our government client base and have expanded a number of those key opportunities we have in the business into different sectors.
We continue to really focus on margin growth and not chasing revenue for revenue's sake, and you see the outcome of this through the improved returns to shareholders and sustainable, profitable growth, which is good for us and continuing to evolve over time in the business. If you look now, I won't walk through all of our markets in detail today, but a couple of points to make here is the scale of the markets we're operating in. So all of these are showing significant ongoing compound annual growth. The addressable market for us in terms of work that actually Veris can do is significant across all of these sectors.
You can see opportunities across defense and government and utilities and some of the water sector that are big opportunities for us, and we've really targeted ourselves with groups of high-profile blue-chip clients in sectors that are growing and going forward, which has been a key element of our strategy. We've now been able to start leveraging these advisory skills and digital and spatial capabilities in digital solutions into these parts of the market, which has been a strength for us. If we think about the summary then, if we look back through the year, not only have we grown the revenue of the business organically, we've done that and returned the business to profitability. After an outlier last year, we've been able to deliver AUD 2 million profit before tax to the business.
Considering the ongoing transformation in the business, we think this is a really strong result. As Steve's touched on in a bit more detail, we've both used our cash for things like acquisition and share buyback to really accelerate our strategic execution. In doing that, we've also had our organic cash growth through operations has meant that our cash balance has continued to grow, which shows the robust nature of the operating model we've built. We continue to really invest in the business, and it's in a couple of areas. We have our digital platforms that we're continuing to grow and take to market, and I think that's built out different levels of revenue stream for us. We're also building out high-demand skill sets, building new talent in the business, and that integrated service offering, and that's positioning us for long-term sustainable growth as a business.
You can see the success of our overall strategic pivot in our digital strategy so that through the ongoing growth in our digital spatial revenue mix, going from what was single figures percentage a number of years ago, 17% last year to over 25% of our revenue this year. It's really shown the transformation in the business, but also the opportunity that there are for Veris as we continue along this strategic path. We've continued to grow our margin year on year, and that really showing the areas we're moving the business into, the scale of the projects, as I touched on before, the nature of those high margin, and the shift in the services we're providing. That ongoing margin growth gives us strength in the business, and it's showing how the execution is continuing to work really well for us.
And finally, that comes together with our confidence and our ability to pay our shareholders a dividend. That dividend is significant as a percentage of our returns for the year. We see this as a point of returning the business to strength and ongoing growth going forward. So overall, we think FY25 has been a strong year for the business and one that's demonstrated our strategic execution, the base of the business we've built, and the opportunities for us going forward. And that creates significant growth and significant confidence for us in where we'll take the business going forward. So that's the formal presentation for now, Mark. So happy to take any questions or discussions you might have.
Yeah, thanks, Michael. We got a good few questions coming in there while yourself and Steve are talking, but I'm just going to take one that was emailed into me beforehand because they couldn't join us. They're going to watch us back on YouTube on Monday. Just around, and it links into one of the questions that's in here on potential M&A. The question is, it's funny enough here on Coffee Microcaps, we've had RemSense present, Pointerra present, Aerometrex present, Rocket DNA present, and they're all talking about digital twins and this kind of digital spatial work, I would say. Maybe just a comment on, are you guys all competitors? Is everybody operating in different verticals? And further on the M&A point, is there scope for consolidation within the industry? I mean, these are just listed players. I'm sure there's another long line of unlisted operators in this space.
Yeah, look, it's an interesting question, Mark, and I sort of think there's a couple of elements in that question I'll answer first. So first of all, a number of the parties and others out there that you mentioned and others that you haven't mentioned, we partner with and we work with because in many cases, there are areas where we have complementary rather than overlapping skill sets or positions in the market, and there are opportunities to work together or take those skill offerings into areas that we might want to do with our clients. I think from an M&A perspective, from our perspective, we sit here with a really strong balance sheet, organically growing profitable business, and our ability to leverage that up through mergers and acquisitions is really strong. Some of the other smaller players, I'd look at that and say there should be room for consolidation.
One of the challenges of being a smaller business is how quickly can we execute on our strategy and how quickly can we capture the market that's in front of us. We understand there's a big market in front of us. We understand also that those markets, particularly in the digital transformation sense, change really quickly. They evolve really quickly. We've got to move quickly into those market spaces, and at Veris, we're able to do that at the moment because of scale and profitability. As we're able to align acquisitions to help us accelerate on that, we're going to do that as effectively as we can. A couple of key things for us, though, is we understand with the history of the business, prior to Steve and I, we can't afford for our acquisitions not to work.
Spatial Vision is a great example of a business that was aligned. It added to us strategically, and we see it being accretive really quickly this year. That's a good thing for our shareholders and our investors. It accelerates strategy and gives them return. What we're looking at now is other acquisitions at the moment that help us do that, help us build out the model, both in our digital strategy and our professional services space. We've got a good pipeline of acquisitions there for us at the moment. We're working really hard on those, but we're focused on good returns for our shareholders, accelerating our strategy, and we're not looking to just take costs out of business. We're looking for accretive acquisitions that deliver on big synergies going forward.
You mentioned there the split between the divisions, the digital and the consulting, and that's one of the questions here. Veris has had a goal of, it says, driving digital share of revenue to be equal to historical segments, plus minus a third. Is this still the case, or can digital revenue continue to grow as a share of revenue beyond the kind of medium-term target of a third?
Yeah. Look, I would say that we said sort of a couple of years ago that we wanted that digital spatial revenue to be equal to some of the traditional components of engineering survey and property survey, and we're getting effectively into that space at the moment. You look, our engineering survey and our digital and spatial businesses are about the same scale in terms of revenue now. That's a great demonstration of where we want to be. We now see the opportunity to accelerate beyond that, and we see the growth coming in our consulting and advisory business, and one of the key differences for us is we're not a digital-only business. We have that advisory and consulting part of the business that feeds the digital part, and the digital business feeds into that as well because it provides that differentiator.
So we're lucky in the sense we see growth in both elements of that, Mark. We see that take us forward. We see that the position we're in now is we'll continue to grow out that digital and spatial revenue. What we're really seeing now is some of those different revenue streams coming out of our digital solutions, be it some of the analytics-based revenue, some of the managed services, and other areas that you'll see significant growth on over the next couple of years.
Yeah, that leads nicely into the next question here. Can you give us an idea on which one of your products is the real growth driver at the moment and which one is emerging as a future growth product? I don't know if that's the BridgeSight product that's kind of still at the launch or maybe one that has been launched and is looking really promising from early client feedback.
Yeah. Look, I might touch on a couple of elements there. So we have RoadSiTE is probably our most advanced of those digital solutions. It's targeted to a really big road condition market that's out there, and we've won significant projects in the last year based on our ability to provide that platform and that interface. And we've done that in the traditional road sector, but also the renewable sector around infrastructure development and also for government. So I think that is out there, and we're starting to see significant traditional revenue coming out of that and now these other revenue streams. I think BridgeSight is the newest to the market. It's a significant opportunity. There's tens of thousands of bridges in Australia. They're a managed asset.
If we can do that more quickly, more efficiently, and more accurately for the asset owners, there's a huge scale opportunity, and that's where we're positioned with a pretty unique proposition there. And then Vantage and Photo Navigator are smaller in scale in terms of each assignment, but their ability to scale up through the property market and into other sectors has been really significant. They've probably accelerated more quickly than we thought they would in the last six months. And so we're comfortable that all four will be active for us in the market over the next 12 months, Mark.
Yeah. I mean, I know New South Wales government, State government, we've got a big project on all kind of regional bridges right across the state, big upgrading going on there. But as you say, that's like a managed asset that has to not just get the upgrade, it has to be looked after even after the upgrade. One maybe for Steve, since he did help early there in WA, back in the early days while coming on here. Steve, margins, we've seen them tick up very nicely since the new management has come in.
How should we kind of think about a sustainable margin, a target margin over the kind of long term as the repositioning kind of winds down and we get into a more of a kind of a steady state operation? I don't know if that's at the GP level, the EBITDA level, PBT level, whichever one.
Yeah, thanks, Mark. Look, I guess we're reluctant to sort of give sort of formal hard target numbers out there at this stage given the sort of evolutions continuing as we see the sort of continued proportion of revenues driven by the solutions and the analytic platforms. Then we think they're at significantly higher margins. So we'll see that blend coming through more and more so over the next couple of years. So I guess I'd categorize it to say, look, we've had a really good turnaround this year. We've driven sort of the bottom line margin to a couple of 2%. We're not satisfied with that, and we think there's opportunity and scope to continue building on that. And we'd look over the sort of the medium term to drive that further north into the sort of the mid single digits.
And from there, it's really about the continued uptake and building on some of the advisory sort of capabilities that are really driving that higher margin flowing through as well. So I'd sort of probably leave it at that for now rather than give sort of formal numbers, but that's certainly the aspiration and the target we're driving through internally.
Okay. And obviously, it depends on the mix within the segments as well, the revenue that comes through the various divisions also going to impact that. Michael, maybe one last one. We've still got time to put in. I touched on there in my intro to Steve's question, the repositioning. Do you feel like that is kind of complete now, and it's now for yourself and Steve and the broader management team to now it's really about pushing the growth levers within the business and driving new business development rather than trying to fix the business to get it into a state of, okay, now we can grow it? Do you feel like that kind of part of the Veris story is now complete and it's now more of a growth story rather than a turnaround story?
Yeah, that fix is a pretty interesting word, Mark, and I think that's probably a pretty apt word for where we started, and I think now we're able to.
I'm trying to be politically correct here.
Yeah, no, you're doing really well, and I'll try and do the same. Look, I think that the base of the business is really strong and stable now. You think about it, the areas we're in in our property surveying business, they're strong, they're growing, they're profitable. We're repositioning our engineering survey so then they're not chasing volume and they're getting good margin. And the suburban railway win was really transformative in the sense of how they could go to market. Having that base lets us accelerate the broader transformation, and that is the consulting and advisory growth, which is high margin advisory work at the top level with clients, and then this digital transformation. And we're able now to fund that growth and that transformation off the base of the business.
And the further down that track we get, as Steve touches on, more of that margin comes back to the business. More of those transformational digital solutions revenue types come in as well. I think we have moved past the fixing. We're in the transforming, growing, differentiation part of our strategy now. Many people have said to us, "Gee, you've done the hard work." Actually, I think transforming and growing and really differentiating the business is harder than fixing because it's now about taking those managed risks, trying different products in the market, and doing that at scale and a pace, which is the interesting opportunity in front of us. I think we've got some good people who are pursuing that really effectively at the moment, and we're all pretty confident that we'll see the progress they'll make.
Michael, we're actually bang on time, so we'll leave it there. Thank you very much, and thanks for Steve for joining us as well this morning. And yeah, hopefully, we can get you back in at a later stage in FY26.
Thanks for the time, and thanks for everyone's interest. See you, Mark.
Yeah, thanks, Michael. Thanks, Steve, and we'll quickly move on to our next presenter. I'm delighted to be welcoming back Sam Budiselik from Cash Converters. Sam, good morning.
Hi, Mark. How are you going?
Good. Sam, if you want to pull up the results deck, I'll let you know when I can see us on screen here.
Let me do that.