Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to attend Anton's 2024 annual results announcement. Now, let me walk you through the overall performance in our first half. In our first half, revenue was approximately RMB 2.2 billion, representing an increase of 50% over the same period last year. Profit attributable to equity holders amounted to approximately RMB 106 million, representing an increase of 8.2%. The free cash flow was RMB 197 million , an increase of 15.2% over the same period last year. Now, let me report to you business highlights in the first half. First, orders, revenues grew, hitting a new high in the first half. China market stable, Iraq market surged, global market innovates, digital sales enhanced efficiency. Ongoing business transformation, fueling growth, in traditional and innovation services.
One bid for Iraq's Dhafriyah oil field, unlocking new growth area. Enhanced cash flow management yields results, boosting investor returns. ESG won international certification, became an industry benchmark. In the first half, we achieved a significant growth across the board. New orders exceeded RMB 4.8 billion. While revenues exceeded RMB 2.1 billion, representing a substantial increase compared to the pre-COVID period. This has resulted in the highest first half performance on record. In terms of market development, during the first half, we continued to expand our global oil and gas market presence and effectively promoted customer communications in each market through digital sales channels. In the China market, we maintained our focus on the natural gas and unconventional energy development market. Our revenues remained stable.
In Iraq market, the country has entered a phase of rapid development as our customers expand their production. Anton has secured a series of significant projects, maintaining a high workload and experiencing rapid revenue growth. In other overseas market, we have continued to make new deployments in order to capture business opportunities in fourteen new countries around the world and to cultivate key markets for the future. Meanwhile, our projects in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia have continued to operate smoothly, resulting in a steady revenue growth. In terms of business, Anton has consistently evolved its services from traditional to innovative to total oil field solutions, aligning with its vision of becoming a leading innovative and integrated oil field services provider globally. The geological turnkey projects, led by reservoir geological study, achieved a nearly triple business growth in the first half.
Traditional businesses such as fracturing and drilling also continued to break operational records and gain praise from customers. With the revenue other than the drilling rig services, its business increased by 24%. Innovative businesses also made significant progress in the first half. Integrated oilfield management project in Iraq was renewed for another year. The inspection business expanded successfully into the Southeast Asian market, and domestic natural gas station leasing project saw multiple expansions, resulting in a 17% growth in revenues from innovative business. In May, Anton was successfully in winning the bid for the development rights of Dhafriyah oilfield in Iraq for a period of 25 years. Following the 5+ and the sixth round of bidding. This bidding process marks a significant milestone for Anton's development in Iraq.
For the first time, Anton will act as the operator for the oil field development, providing first-class technical services for the Dhafriyah oil field. This will facilitate the efficient development of the field and will promote the all our services to grow. Since winning the tender, we have completed the first site in observation, finalized the commercial details, and signed the contract initially. In the future, we will continue to make timely report to the capital market on the latest developments of this project. Cash flow operation has consistently been a core focus for Anton. In the first half, we achieved positive results in cash flow operations. Compared to the same period last year, our operating cycle was shortened by 34 to 30 days in the first half, and turnover efficiency continued to improve.
Anton has continued to expand its collaboration with financial institutions and to date has secured coverage from all six major state-owned banks. Further, we took the initiative to repurchase U.S. dollar bond, while increase a portion of its long-term borrowings with the objective of optimizing its debt structure. In the first half and to achieve the growth in net profit and cash flow, we also returned value to investors through a dividend payment of RMB 39 million, and we resumed the dividend policy. Furthermore, we repurchased and canceled a total of 26 million shares from the secondary market, which represents approximately 1% of the company's total share capital. In Anton, we recognize that enhancing investor returns is a long-term endeavor.
Going forward, as our performance grows, we will adopt a more active and proactive approach to market capitalization management, with the aim of rewarding our investors. In the first half, Anton made stable headway in its ESG operations, achieving a listing on the S&P Sustainability Yearbook 2024. This is the inaugural instance of a Chinese oil service company being bestowed with this distinction. Anton is also the only private Chinese oilfield service company won this honor. Furthermore, Anton was chosen once more for China's Best Managed Companies list, which is organized by Deloitte China. Since its establishment, Anton has consistently demonstrated outstanding management and innovative capabilities through multiple industry cycles, as evidenced by this award. Now, turning to the second half, we will focus on the following aspects. First, expand into new global markets, fostering long-term growth points.
Second, upgrade services for green energy chains in new countries. Third, leverage the winning of the Dhafriyah project to further strive for new projects of oil field management. Fourth, fully advance the global transformation, creating a global team. Last, lean operations to enhance profitability and boost shareholder returns. In terms of market development, Anton will continue to pursue a robust global market expansion strategy with a focus on long-term sustainable growth. The Iraqi market demonstrates considerable growth potential and numerous larger scale project opportunities, which will continue to drive the high growth of the entire Anton Group over the next five years. Furthermore, Anton will continue to expand its global reach through digital sales efficiency, exploring new markets, and cultivating growth opportunities. These new markets will serve as a source of long-term sustainable growth for the company. Concurrent with market development, Anton's business will undergo another upgrade.
This will transition the company from an oilfield solution provider to a builder of green energy localized industry in emerging markets, and it will assist small and medium-sized countries in developing the entire natural gas industry chain. The company will provide targeted solutions from development process to transport to consume to let the green energy monetize and promote the economic growth of local. Anton has secured the Iraqi Dhafriyah project, leveraging the comprehensive technology, global service network, and extensive experience in large-scale oilfield management. We will work diligently to facilitate the project's official launch and ensure its subsequent high-efficiency development. Meanwhile, Anton will continue to pioneer a new model of oilfield management, and actively pursue long-term oilfield management projects in Iraq, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
In terms of management, we have moved our headquarters to Dubai. In the future, we will take Dubai as the global headquarters to manage globalized business. And we will continue to promote the OKR work method, a digital driven managed methods, to build a global team to provide robust support for the global business development, to be the truly global leading technical services company. As we look ahead to the second half, we will continue to execute our refined operations with the utmost rigor. This will include the selection of orders and projects, the management of operations, the control of cash flow the financial transformation of our business and securitization of high quality assets. Our goal is to improve our profitability by refining the entire process and to boost shareholder returns. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to present the brief similar summary. Thank you.
[Foreign language] Okay, thanks for Pi Zhifeng's presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session. Please type in your question in the chat box in the right corner of the platform after you completed the authentication. Thanks. [Foreign language] Okay, the first question is about the overseas overseas market development. So judging from the current exploration of the overseas markets, where would be., w hich market would be the focus for the development for the main development focus for the group, and whether the group had found any good opportunities on the new project?
[Foreign language]
Okay, so this question is about the company's market development and the plan for the future's development. So first, judging from the different markets, for China market, it is growing stably. And in Iraqi market, we can expect it would keep a very faster growth trend in the latest five years. For global new emerging markets, w e are actively exploring these new markets globally, and we had been actively communicating with these markets and developing the project opportunities in over 10 countries. And we are keeping researching and finding new market opportunities in these global new emerging countries. And we also expect in these emerging countries, we can also achieve a stable and faster growth in the future five years. And judging from the global macro industry environment, we can see that the global oil and gas development have kept a very active development global-wise.
We also find some new opportunities in some underdeveloped countries. In these countries, we find out that, in fact, they had already found a lot of oil and gas resources, or reservoirs, but affected by different reasons, these kind of resources and reservoirs have not been effectively developed yet. We are considering how to achieve our faster growth from $1 billion to $10 billion. How to achieve this scale growth after five years? We are developing the opportunity to provide green energy development for some countries in localized regions. We can provide some reservoir engineering development and the whole chain industrial chain services to them. Especially we find a very good opportunities on the natural gas development and the whole chain services to them.
So we can help the countries and the local regions to develop the natural gas economically, and help them to develop and processing for natural gas locally. And I should say that Anton had already got this capability to operate in these countries. So for this market opportunities, we can achieve faster growth for Anton, as well as helping the local countries and the local regions to achieve economic resource developments.
[Foreign language]
Okay, so the first part is about our global market exploration and opportunity searching in the global emerging countries. We find the opportunities to help the countries and regions to develop their natural gas resources locally, and to help them to achieve economic development on this. Judging from the company's technical capacity as well as our resources allocation capabilities, we can do these kind of projects very well. On the other side, for this kind of project, some large international oil and gas services companies just didn't put their focus on this kind of services in those countries and regions. But for Anton, it is our advantages to doing this kind of services, and we can achieve mutual development, both for Anton's growth and also for those countries and regions long-term stable developments. So this is the first part.
Secondly, we also find some good market opportunities in some high-end and mature markets in the Middle East countries. For these kind of markets, it is previously mainly covered by the largest four oil field services company, so companies in this region. But currently, we also find some good opportunities in these regions, in markets like in Saudi Arabia and in Kuwait. And we had already got some project opportunities. Although at the current stage, those projects are small in scale, but it is still profitable, and we can start from providing these kind of projects to grow in these markets, and developing our capacities and market influences, and to deeply deploy this kind of markets in the future.
[Foreign language]
For this global new markets development, it is part of our globalized market strategies. So our strategy is to stabilize our services in China market and keep faster growth in the Iraqi market, and also actively deploying the new markets and keep the faster growth in the emerging countries and regions, and that is on the market side. And also on the services and products and services side, we are keep upgrading our products and services at the same time. So we started from providing traditional products and services in the industry, and to further provide comprehensive and general solutions to our customers. And also we are aiming to provide green energy general solutions in localized countries and in the localized industry chains. So that is our overall globalized strategy, combining with our market deployment as well as our products and services upgrading strategies. OK, thanks.
[Foreign language] OK, the next two questions. The first is on the Dhafriyah oilfield project in Iraq, whether there is some key dates expected schedule for these projects, and whether there are expected profits or the oil price that can achieve our revenue and spending balance. The second question is that whether the company had achieved a large orders in the third quarter.
[Foreign language]
OK, first, thanks for your caring about our Dhafriyah oilfield services projects. Yes, for this project, we have very clear timeline for the overall management and project schedule. First, we need to develop some wells for assessment for this region, and we need to achieve some basic production in a regulated timeline. After that, we can take over our investments and share the profits. So we had just completed the initial signature for this contract, and we will keep updating the markets after we had completed the overall legal process for this project contract signing. And about the oil price for achieving profit, because for this project, it is the model is different than traditional services models. So in fact, it is not that affected by the oil price.
The most important thing is firstly to receive our investments back, and then after that, we can share the profits together with our customers. So we expect in the following 25 years, we can keep very stable returns on this project, and that would not be very largely affected by the oil price fluctuation.
[Foreign language ]
The next question about the orders in the third quarter. What we can share is that our order have kept a very good growth trend in the third quarter, just as our chairman just introduced that we had kept a very active market developing in the global new emerging markets. So we can achieve some of these orders confirmation in the third quarter. And for some more long term and larger scale orders, we need more time to confirm these kind of orders in the future. But the trend is definitely very good. We are keeping the very good trend in winning new orders global-wise, and the trend is it would be with a larger scale, and we will, and for these projects, it would provide us with a very good investment returns.
[Foreign language ]
Here is some supplementary from our chairman. First about the Dhafriyah oil field project, so for the oil price, the investor cares. In fact, we had made our overall assessment for this project based on an estimation of the oil price of $50, so if the price would be kept over this $50, we can achieve a good economical return. And for this project, we didn't expect to invest a large, a lot of our own cash. So we would adopt a model of cooperative development with our partners, and we hope we can achieve a positive net cash flow starting from the development of this project. And in fact, because these resources is really good, it is very easy to attract good capital to join us in this project and provide a cooperative development in these oil fields.
About the orders. In fact, for the orders winning, we are keep doing this work for winning the large scale orders. Well, for these large scale orders, we need to wait for a longer time to formally get these projects. But we had already got some of these opportunities, and the projects are already in our pipeline, so we expected to achieve these large orders i n the third quarter or fourth quarter of this year or the first quarter of next year, we have this preparation for these new large orders winning.
[Foreign language] OK, the first question is about TO's share buyback and about its separate listing. Because the company announced that for the shares for the share of TO's repurchase, it's expected it to.
[Foreign language]
First about the project introduction, it, for our arrangement, for the share buyback, our consideration is that judging from the macro capital market environment a nd judging from the market changes, we are expecting that we will delay the overall arrangement for the separate listing. So because we have when we introduce these strategic investors, there are some regulations on the agreement about the TO's listing time schedule, as well as some of these requirements that would increase our financial costs if we cannot meet the schedule. So after our friendly talks with TO's strategic investors, we had achieved our initial agreements on the share repurchase. So by that we will pay back the investments from these strategic investors. But anyway, it will not affect our TO's separate listing plan. We will continue to promote our TO's separate listing.
No matter the works in the Hong Kong or in our China market, all of our team would continue to promoting this listing process to go forward. And so for the with the effects on cash flow or the recognition effects on our results, it would be introduced by our CFO, Mr. Xu.
[Foreign language]
So first on our overall cash flow. In the first half, we had made the payment of our full year dividend, as well as made some U.S. dollar repurchase in the secondary market, and we also arranged some repurchase of our shares in the market. For these three arrangements for the dividend payment, our last pay would be traced back to five years before, and for the U.S. dollar repurchase, we are kept doing in the secondary market. And for the share repurchase, it can be traced back to eight years before, so all of these works had reflected our full confidence and our overall cash flow.
[Foreign language]
For TO's share repurchase. In fact, the investment from our Anton's strategic investors, the cash had been kept independently in Anton's accounts. So the share repurchase would not affect the cash arrangements for the overall group. And you can also see that even we had done our important arrangements on the dividend payment, on the U.S. dollar bond repurchase, as well as the share repurchase in the first half years. Our cash on hand as at the end of the first half had also increased from around RMB 1.58 billion to RMB 1.77 billion from the beginning of this year to the end of the first half. So all of these cash arrangements had been kept in order and effectively.
[Foreign language]
And on our financing arrangements, I should say that no matter it is considered, for the U.S. dollar bond financing or the RMB borrowing, all of our financing channels are currently open to us. And whether we will make a financing plan would be dependent on the interest rate as well as the exchange rate, the current level on these rates, as well as the future trend. So also, our financing work are currently would be combined with our projects, p roject needs, not only in consideration of the cash.
[Foreign language] The question is about the company's plan on the capital market management, whether there would be further share repurchase plan.
[Foreign language]
So in fact, on this point, we are keep following the market situation, and we cares about the investors returns, and we are also keep following whether the market value had a fairly reflected our corporate value. And judging from the current situation, we still think that the market value has not really reflected the fair value of our corporate growth.
[ Foreign language]
And whether we will keep doing the share repurchases in the future, it will depend on, based on how long a time we are talking about. Anyway, our principle is that we will keep following the market changes and to maintain our investors return. So, at the time, if we find that the market value has a very obvious difference comparing with our fair corporate value, if and we will combine our consideration on our cash level on hand, the company will make reasonable arrangements on this share repurchase in the future.
[Foreign language] So whether the management would expect a dividend for the full year of 2024?
[Foreign language]
First about our dividend payment policy. In fact, before 2015, we keep paying dividend to our investors, and our policy is to take 1/3 of our net profit to do this dividend. And from last year on, we are currently resuming our dividend payment policy. And last year we had took out 20% of our net profit to do this dividend.
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
So first on our cash flow management, we had already achieved and formulated a very effective cash flow operation system. In fact, from the past several years, we had successfully solved our debt repayment problem using our own cash from our business operations. We keep a very good cash flow growing trend, and we expect that our free cash flow of the company will keep growing very fast. Anton had been a company with very good cash flow performance.
[Foreign language]
On the aspect of our growth, so if we are operating in a very normal market environment, we can keep a growth rate of over 30%, and judging from the market situation of this year, we can also achieve over 15% of the revenue growth, and we can also keep a growth on this aspect of our profit and free cash flow.
[Foreign language]
In the long term, we are promoting a faster growth for the company. Judging from our orders, reservation, we have already found this faster growing trend.
[Foreign language]
And for the past several years, we had made a lot of our efforts on our market deployment as well as our product and services upgrading. So on this aspect of the market, we have kept a stable development in our matured markets and also keep the faster growing in some overseas markets as well as we have kept a very active developing in some new emerging countries. So, we can also ensure that in each market we can, our project will be profitable. And for this, developing of this markets, it can we can achieve continuous growth. And also on the products and services upgrading, we had started from providing traditional services to customers and to innovative services providing to customers. And we had already made our general solutions on oil field management services very mature.
And now we are standing one step forward, starting to integrate and allocate our industry resources to provide the full industry chain services in some overseas countries. By doing that, we can provide we can create value and help the local in the countries, help the local regions to create values for them as well as for ourselves. We can get larger scale projects, and we are also upgrading to the top of the food chain, and that can help us to make a good control on the price as well as on our costs. So by doing all of these efforts, we can we have well prepared for us for the future's faster growth.
[Foreign language ]
A fter we made all of these efforts, I'm still not satisfied with our current growth rate. I think it is still not fast enough for us to grow. From this year on, we continue to further strengthen our globalization transformation. For myself, I had to spend a lot of time in the Middle East this year. I'm just coming back from Beijing several days before. For all of our management teams, they are also moving forward to Dubai for better supporting of our overseas projects and businesses developments. I believe during this process of our globalized transformation, both our globalized markets and our upgrading of our products and services, as well as our internal management, all of these works can make continuous improvements during this globalized transformation process. Along with the faster growth in our overseas businesses, we hope it can further stimulate our faster growth in the future.