Good morning, everyone. Just stand back from that mic there. Good to meet all of you today. Great to see a lot of you here face-to-face for this interim results for Aspen. I made a promise to Pravin that I wouldn't smile because finance people aren't allowed to smile, but it's gonna be very difficult for me today 'cause we are really presenting some exciting results. I'm really proud to be the person out presenting these results today and also to acknowledge all the hard work, you know, over many years to culminate in the results we're presenting to you today. Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy the presentation.
I think just to draw your attention to the disclaimer and the restatement slides. Just would take those for noting, and you can read them in your own time. Then I think we'll kick straight into the presentation. You'll recall from our meeting at investor presentation that we had in December 2020. Seems like a very long time ago, but at that presentation, we did guide the market that we were gonna be targeting to shape our business in a shape where our earnings would exceed our EBITDA growth and our EBITDA growth would exceed our sales growth. I thought I'd put the pyramid shape on the screen just to give sense of what that shape would look like just from a subliminal perspective.
I'm very proud to say that we are delivering on this commitment, and you'll see that coming through in all the results that I'll present to you today. I'll take you through all my key insights now. I've got about nine key insights. Really just little things that I think will, you'll see, will with those themes be prevalent throughout the detailed financials. I thought it'd be better just to take you through these themes up front, and then once you get into the heavy financial nuts and bolts, these themes will come hitting you and they'll resonate with you, and you'll be able to come back to the themes that I'm putting on the screen.
Just to put the point out that we measure our business in constant exchange rates. All of my comments will be in constant exchange rate. As Stephen always says, if you're running a business in Europe and you're earning euros, if the rand strengthens against the euro, the Europeans won't be able to deliver more sales. They can only deliver the same euro growth. That's how we measure our teams, and that's how we measure our group performance and our management performance. All my comments will be around a constant exchange rate. Kicking into the insights, I think sticking with the good shape, and I'm very pleased to announce that Aspen is in good shape and we lean. We've got robust gross margins.
We've kept our expenses in control. We've in fact reduced our expenses by 2%. Those in the face of an increasing sales growth of 10% have given us very strong leverage for our EBITDA growth, and put us in a really good position. You can see from December 2020, our reshaping plans are starting to be realized. That shape, the pyramid shape that you saw on the first slide, is taking shape, and that's our sort of guiding pattern going forward. Very importantly, we are delivering on our organic sales growth targets. If you recall back again to the 2020 presentation, we guided that we'd be growing our base turnovers in our segments between 3%-7%.
If I can just take you through the segments that make that up. Commercial pharma growing at 5%, and that's an increasing trend over prior year increases. Our manufacturing business is growing at 30%. That does include what we call finished dose form transaction-related sales. Just to remind you what that is, those are the sales in terms of supply commitments relating to the European thrombosis disposal and the Japanese business disposals, in terms of which we had an obligation to supply those vendors with product for a fixed contract term post-disposal. They are supplied at no or low gross margin and do distort our numbers.
When we're looking at our base performance, we always exclude them from our sales growth and from our margin growth to give you what our base operational performance is looking like. Stripping that out, our manufacturing is still showing a very healthy growth of 10%. Again, an increasing trend if you go back to prior year base growth performances on manufacturing. Then if you throw it all together and you say, "What is our overall base growing at?" If you take manufacturing, commercial pharma, you strip out the FDF transactional revenue, and you also strip out, if you remember, we did have dilution from the Europe oncology portfolio. We also do strip that out when we look at our base growth.
If you exclude those two elements, our base growth is at 7%. Again, a very impressive growth and as you can see, right at the top end of our guidance, which was 3%-7%, growing at 7%. Again, an increasing trend, and I think Stephen will show you some of the historical comparators against that 7% in his presentation. Gross margins. Yeah, I mean, as you say, sales is vanity, but you've got to bank the profit. We're very pleased to show that our gross margins have improved over this half, despite all the challenging headwinds of pricing pressure and selling price pressure in the market, cost inflation, which is an ever-increasing challenge.
We've been able to grow all of our gross margins, again, when you exclude the FDF TRS revenue across all of our segments. I'll take you through some more detailed analysis in later slides, but really a pleasing performance. Coming back to this, the pyramid. We've also been able to achieve double-digit growth in normalized EBITDA and normalized headline earnings. Also the double-digit growth not only in constant exchange rate, we've also managed to achieve it in reported. Really proud achievement. From an EBITDA perspective, we've grown our normalized EBITDA by 15%. Perhaps just to put that in perspective so you can sort of see the journey that we've taken. If you look back to FY 2020, the year ending 2020, our EBITDA growth was only 1%.
If you go back a further year to FY 2020, June 2020, our growth was 3%. So three, one, 15. You can see quite a quantum leap in our EBITDA growth, and that coming back to the shape that we wanna put into our business going forward. Also, just to alert you that these. The rand has strengthened over this period relative to the comparable period. That has had a 5% dilution, which you can see in the EBITDA growth year of 15, and our reported growth is at 10%. We will unpack a little bit of that in later slides. Also, I think for a lot of people been waiting for returns to start showing some daylight, and we really.
This half is, if we annualize our return on invested capital, this half has shown an improving trend over the last two years, so we're very pleased to see that improving trend. That's really a culmination or combination of both a very strong EBITDA margin at 29.5%. It is our highest over the last five years. I didn't go back prior to that, but certainly over the last five years, it is the highest. Then also our capacity fill strategy has started to gain momentum. Those two combined are really starting to drive the return on investment. We're really proud to be able to show that to you today. However, it hasn't all been plain sailing. Our manufacturing operations have had a really tough first half.
They've had to endure the brunt of COVID. I mean, in terms of shifts. One person getting sick, the whole shift has to go off. We've had to work in alternating shifts. Absenteeism has been at an absolute high. I think with Omicron before people knew what the impact of Omicron was, you know, there was quite a lot of contact and isolation that we had to comply, and that really played havoc with our factories' efficiencies. Not only the factories, but the people that supply those, the suppliers that supply those factories with components and materials all had the same challenges. All of those really culminated in a really tough performance. Notwithstanding that, if you go back to the first slide, we grew our manufacturing 10%.
Still a commendable performance, but I think, now that we've hopefully into a more normalized COVID period in the second half, we do see that, manufacturing will show a stepped improvement in the second half and contribute further to the EBITDA growth in this half too. Coupled to that, our South African operations were hit both by COVID. If you remember when we first announced Omicron in South Africa, the all the flights were delayed, et cetera, so people weren't able to fly in, and technicians couldn't fly into our facility in Gqeberha. Couldn't get materials in. So they had that challenge, plus the normal COVID challenge. Then on top of that, if you recall, we did.
I think we did disclose it in our financials in June that our facility in India at Alphamed had a fire and it stopped operations. We had embarked on a strategy of moving a lot of our small-scale production to Alphamed to decomplexify our Gqeberha production lines. With the fire, we had to realign all of those products back to our South African business. That also then impeded our ability to supply South African commercial pharma business. On our South African commercial pharma sales, they were also indirectly impacted by the supply constraints and the COVID impacts in our South African operations.
Notwithstanding then, and then Stephen will take you through that later, they still grew their turnover at 6%, but we could've, I think we could've gone double-digit on our South African business had we had all the supply that we wanted. On the inventory side, you'll see it in our cash flows and our working capital. We have increased our inventory investment this half. This was really deliberately done to ensure that we have sustainable commercial supply to our end markets. Just going back to the COVID impacts, we did anticipate a lot of shortages in the market, so we stockpiled on strategic materials, critical materials.
Things like glass syringes, we were able to get just under a year's supply of glass syringes because of the shortage of glass, driven by both COVID because of the demand for vials and also just generally from supply constraints in China. All those initiatives we've been able to get our stock levels at a point that we can ensure sustainable supply to our customers going forward. It does crimp your first half free cash flow. You know, I'd rather have that challenge and then make sure that the patients are getting their medicine into the future. You know, we're quite comfortable with our investment in inventory.
We'll see it being unpacked in later slides when we get to our working capital. We do have a very seasonal cycle, and we're quite comfortable that the working capital cycle will reduce in the second half. We're still targeting to achieve more than 100% cash conversion rate over the full year period. I won't steal too much thunder on this one, but I have to be a little bit excited. We have got this exciting development that's gonna really enhance our future prospects, and that's the signature of the conclusion of the Aspenovax agreement. Really proud and momentous moment for Aspen, for Africa and its people in their drive to improve vaccine self-sufficiency for the continent.
We're really, really proud, and we're also very grateful to Johnson & Johnson and all the efforts that they've put into it collaboratively to help us get to this step. Stephen will cover that element in a lot of detail in his part of the presentation. The last insight that I'd like to take you through really is that we've managed to get to a point where our balance sheet is now in a very strong position to support growth. Our leverage ratios are well below our targeted level, our internal targeted levels, which are conservative. This gives us stability for capital allocation decisions.
It gives us flexibility in looking at acquisitions, potential share buybacks, dividend policy, and the like, and gives us some headroom for all of those thoughts and strategies. In addition, you also would have read in the results that we've concluded our deal for the sale of a portfolio of products in our South African business to Acino, which is a Swiss-based company. That was done with proceeds of ZAR 1.8 billion. We did do that at a very healthy profit. That'll also certainly help us going forward in our strategic growth. Then obviously, the obvious benefit of the lower borrowings and the strong balance sheet is our finance cost, and you'll see that leverage coming through in the normalized headline earnings growth. Right.
I think then just to flip to some of the overall highlights. On the revenue, you can see we've grown double-digit in CER 10%, and a really commendable performance. On the normalized EBITDA, we've grown at 15% in constant exchange rate and 10% in reported. If you go back to what I said, double digits in both reported and constant exchange rate, and a step improvement as you remember from the prior two financial years. This is really my proudest bar chart. You can see there, if you look from left to right, the EBITDA margin in 2020.
That was before we were supplying product to Viatris in terms of the FDF commitments, supply commitments. We were running at around 28.6% EBITDA margin. With the advent of the Viatris, which was embedded in FY 2021's numbers for, I think, seven months, that margin dropped down to 26.3%. Now with even with Viatris embedded fully in our six-month results, we've still managed to achieve an EBITDA margin of 29.5%. If you recall back again to December 2020, when we rebased our margins to say, what would our margin look like in the new shape with all the disposals done and with a full supply to Viatris and Sandoz in terms of FDF, that base margin was 25.8%.
Quite a nice jump from 25.8%, where we started and where we thought we would be for a while, to the point where we are now, 29.5%. On the normalized earnings, that you can see that steps up from the normalized EBITDA. The 15% grows up to 26% in constant exchange rate, and the main lever there is the lower borrowing costs giving rise to lower financing costs. Quite a nice step benefit on that. Then last, on the borrowings, if you go back to last year this time, we've dropped our borrowings by 30%. Quite a significant drop in borrowings. You will note that from June to December, our borrowings have jumped up about ZAR 3 billion. And that,
We did alert you in the commentary to what are the drivers there, but the drivers are including a weaker closing rand rate. It's about a ZAR 1 billion impact. That's really just because the rand got weaker. We know that it's now stronger again. That one is out of our control. We've also had to make some deferred consideration payments in terms of prior deals of about ZAR 1.8 billion. You'll also see in the results, we've put some quite detailed disclosure in there around what is our future cash outflow from these deferred considerations. The net cash flow outflow going forward is only ZAR half a billion. This one point eight is really the sort of final big lump of cash we expect to go out from deferred considerations.
We declared dividends in this half of ZAR 1.2 billion. So just to give you some color to that. I thought I'd quickly show you our currency mix. This table, just to give you time to sort of settle and understand the numbers. It's comparing our first half currency mix for our top currencies, which make up more than 50% of our profit. Comparing this first half to the full year last year, and then on the right, it's just showing the exchange rates of last year's first half versus this year's first half, and you can see the rand strengthening against all the currencies.
You can see just at an overall level there is always a lot of swing between the euro and the ZAR and the USD, and those are the ones that are in circles. You can see that the Australian dollar and Chinese remain relatively constant. Those do shift around, I mean, I wouldn't put a stake and say, "Aspen's running at X% on euro," because as the regional performance changes, so that mix will change. You know, for example, if you take the vaccine business, the turnover is all in euro, but the costs are all in ZAR. Your costs sit in the ZAR bucket and your revenue.
All of those mixes do impact these things. When you throw all of that into the pot, and you look at this first half, it's at around, as we mentioned before, about a 5% dilution effect between constant and reported rate. We did an exercise. It's probably in the history books now, but we did an exercise where we took the exchange rates to the end of February for the two months, and we said, "What is that rate compared to our first half rate and versus last year's half?" Based upon that, it looked like our second half performance is gonna be very much aligned between CER and reported.
Yeah, obviously with the advent of geopolitical tensions and the volatility that's caused since March, you know that volatility could play some impact on that judgment call we've made. But we're pretty comfortable that if rates stabilize, we should see a lot more alignment in the second half with a caveat on the ruble. Onto our normalized EBITDA income statement, I'll just walk you through the structure here again. Here we're comparing our first half normalized EBITDA to last year's first half when reported. We then show the percentage change reported, followed by the constant exchange rate reported. Working your way down the income statements, we're starting with revenue.
The gross profit does include depreciation, so we do measure our businesses with depreciation embedded in our gross margin percentage, and then we add back depreciation to get to EBITDA at the bottom. In terms of revenue, I'm not gonna cover that at all, but we've grown 4% reported, 10% CER, and Stephen will cover that in his section when he goes through all the segmental analysis. I'll start on the gross margin. You'll see that at total gross margin level, we've had a slight dilution in our gross margin percentage, and that's driven by two factors. The one is the FDF supply being there for a full 6 months. Last year, we only had 1 month of FDF transaction supply.
The second factor is that our mix of manufacturing relative to the overall basket has increased from 22%. So 22% was manufacturing last year, and this year we've got manufacturing makes up 26% of our total revenue base, so that's also caused some of the dilution. So if you strip out the FDF element, and you look at the underlying gross margins across manufacturing and regional and sterile brands, they have all improved. So we're very comfortable that we run a very. We've reported a very strong gross margin percentage, which puts us in a good place given the inflationary waves on the horizon.
Very pleased to announce on expenses, we've managed to come in at around 22% of sales, percentage of sales relative to last year, which was at 25%. That has been through a lot of focus. At Aspen, our philosophy is return on investment, so we treat every cent as our own from the top down, and we really put a lot of effort into containing our expenses in anticipation of inflation coming down the road. That we're really proud to announce that percentage for this half. You can see the impact of strong margins and declining expenses then gives you that kick on your EBITDA margin percentage at 29.5% versus last year of 27.9.
That gives rise to a 15% increase in EBITDA in constant exchange and 10% in reported. Right. Just to quickly go through the gross margin percentages just on a trending basis. There's a lot to absorb on this chart, and I think you've all got copies of the details, so I'll just take you through the high level trends. If you look at the top two bar graphs, the one on the left is the regional brands, one on the right is the Sterile Focused Brands. Those are the two segments making up commercial pharma. You can see both have shown a steady improvement relative to the last year, first and second halves, and full year numbers of the prior year. That's a function of both focused portfolio mix.
We've done a lot of work on looking at our portfolios and what the right mix is and what the right products are to focus on. Also we've been able to enjoy some supply cost savings through efficiencies in our facilities. Those two together have driven the improving profile. This is notwithstanding, if you recall, we've had some pressure on our Naropin in China, which has put us under pricing pressure there. We've also still got some residual, the last residual impact of the oncology price cuts in the previous half, first half. Notwithstanding those two headwinds, we've still managed to show a very strong gross margin profile going forward. On the manufacturing side, if we look at the shaded, it's the bottom left.
If we look at the shaded part of those bar charts, which is the numbers which exclude the FDF TRS or transaction sales, as we know they distort the margins. You can see also quite a nice trend over the halves. This half we ended at 26.8% versus last year's half one of 24.6%. A really good improvement. That's notwithstanding, if you go back to one of my themes, that we've had a really tough first half in manufacturing. You know, once the manufacturing engines kicks on full steam, we should see that margin ticking up, hopefully closer to the 30% mark over time. Right. We've always got to talk about tax, because tax is another big expense and tax falls right through to the bottom line.
We do manage our taxes very carefully and in a very compliant manner, and that's one of the areas that receive a lot of focus given that we're a multinational group. You can see just this if the two lines here, the top line is our what we call our total tax rate. That's the one you'll see in the income statement when you do the math. The one below that is our tax rate on our normalized profits. You will see that we have had an uptick in this half up to 17.7% versus FY 2021 of 16.9%. That's predominantly a result of an increased mix towards our manufacturing.
Our manufacturing obviously contributing more to profits in this half, and we see that tax rate being maintained for the balance of this financial year. Just to summarize all of that into our normalized headline earnings bridge. At the top you'll see the 21%, that's the growth in reported versus the prior year, normalized earnings this year to prior year. The 26% growth is our constant exchange rate. Then you can see again the 5% dilution that I've been mentioning. The key drivers of our normalized headline earnings growth, driven heavily by the EBITDA, the ZAR 758 million. That as you saw, was a combination of improved good sales growth, improved gross margin profile, and controlled expenses.
The other big kicker has been on the net financing costs, as a consequence of our lower debt levels. We've had some dilution from a tax perspective. In that 221%, around ZAR 60 million of that is because of the higher tax rate relative on the profits. That gives you the components making up our normalized headline earnings growth if you put all of those together. On to working capital, my favorite topic. It's really an area that we focus on heavily, and we look at it both ways. We want to make sure that we're investing wisely in working capital, at the same time making sure that we manage our cash flows efficiently.
Just to give you a sense, we ended up for the half year, our working capital ended up at just under ZAR 17.4 billion with a heavy weighting. You can see a lot of our weighting of our investment is sitting in manufacturing at 63%. If you cast your eye to the left to the line graphs, we've got two line graphs there. The one is our working capital percentage of revenue, all inclusive. The green line underneath that is the same ratio, but obviously excluding Aspen Oss, which has a much longer production cycle relative to the rest of our business. We always look at both ratios when measuring ourselves against our competitors and ourselves.
Comparing this half to last year's half one, you can see there is a slight uptick in that ratio, 44 last year to 45, 35%-38%. That is driven mainly by the investment which I spoke about early on in terms of strategic inventory to ensure supply to the market going forward. If you look to the middle, you'll see, wow, look at that middle, June 2021, that dropped down. That is a normal cycle for Aspen. We do have a very seasonal working capital cycle, and always second half, you always see the ratio improving. I don't think it'll be any different this second half.
We see the second half ratio improving, and we also see the benefit of increased or better manufacturing output, better manufacturing sales, also depleting our stock levels in the second half. We should see a step drop in that percentage in half two. On to operating cash flow. If I just cast your eyes to the cash flow table on the right. The first line, the cash operating profit, you can see we've grown that at 9%. That's pretty much in line with our EBITDA growth. On a working capital, that's, you can see we've invested ZAR 2.3 billion this half versus ZAR 1.4 billion. I've covered that already in terms of inventory investment and the working capital seasonality.
You can see quite a nice pullback down the page there on the net financing costs, which have dropped by 56%. If you look at cash generated from operating activities, it's relatively flat at 1%. However, recall last year we had 5 months of discontinued cash flows in our numbers. If you strip that out and you just look at our continuing business, we've shown a 26% increase in cash flow relative to last year, which is pretty much in line with our earnings growth. On the left-hand side on the bar chart, the little saw teeth there really give you the sense of how each. It compares the cash flow ratio for each half.
You can see in the first half of every year, we're always below 100%, and the second half you're always above 100%. If you look at the green line, which is a twelve-month rolling average of our cash flow ratio, we're consistently above 100%. We've, as I said to you earlier on, we'll target to again exceed 100% cash conversion over the twelve months. On to CapEx. CapEx has been a really tough period in terms of projects. I think COVID has impacted us quite significantly since 2020 when we had the first wave. The negative of that is all of our projects to drive efficiencies have all been delayed and keep moving to future financial years.
That's just really just to give you that background. You can see in 2020 and 2021, we spent ZAR 2 billion. We did anticipate in both those years to spend more than that, but we get this domino effect of COVID delaying your projects. No different in this half, particularly with Omicron being you know, a lot of panic around it at first. You can see our CapEx spend in this half was only ZAR 726 million, and that was heavily impacted by delays because of COVID. We do anticipate to catch up that underspend in the second half. Our planned guided spend for this year is around ZAR 2.3 billion for FY 2022.
Embedded in that ZAR 2.3 billion, if you recall, we had the fire at Alphamed in India, and that factory has had to be rehabilitated. That's gonna cost somewhere in the region of ZAR 200 million or thereabouts. It is actually cash neutral because we will get a payout from insurance for that rehabilitation. Unfortunately, obviously the CapEx sits in the cash flow, and the insurance benefit will sit in the income statement, I think under other income. They're two different elements. That's cash neutral. If you take that off, then you're at ZAR 2.1 billion. If you remember, we have started to embark on our vaccine CapEx expansion strategy, and that also has been embedded in these numbers.
If you then look at FY 2023, our planned CapEx, the green part of that bar, is still planned to be around ZAR 1.6 billion. On top of that, we have put in another ZAR 800 million for potential CapEx on related to the sterile capacity strategy expansion. On the IP development CapEx, I haven't put a bar chart in here, but the guidance last time was around ZAR 1 billion for this year, and we're on target for that. It's heavily weighted towards digitalization projects, and those are driven. The key projects in there are driven towards improving manufacturing and supply chain efficiency, so we will see good benefits coming out of those in future years. On to borrowings. Just thought we'd go back one year.
FY 2020 borrowings were sitting at ZAR 35.2 billion. At the end of this half, we're sitting at ZAR 19.3 billion. 18 months later, ZAR 16 billion less borrowings. You can see what that does to your income statement. We're really in good shape. If you look at FY 2021, you'll see that the makeup of the borrowings is very much current weighted. If you recall the term debt at that point, we had a term debt which was due for repayment in June 2022. When we published the June 2021 accounts, it was all sitting in current borrowings, and then we did extend that term to June 2023, which has then moved it back into non-current borrowings.
If you look at our half one profile of debt, you'll see it's very much weighted to non-current again. If you look at that non-current portion, it's just under ZAR 20 billion. There's around ZAR 10 billion of that that relates to our DFC funding that we got last year. That's only due for repayment, I think, from March 2024 onwards on an amortized basis. The other ZAR 10 billion, the bulk of that will be part of a refinancing initiative, which we hope to complete by the end of this calendar year.
I'd also just like to draw your attention, and I think it has been published in our accounts, but just to draw your attention, we do have a loan owing between Aspen Oss and Merck of EUR 188 million. This is due in September 2023. In terms of our term debt facilities, this is not part of the borrowings. It is something just to alert you to that we will be. That is a loan that is due for payment in September 2023. I think on the future, you might be asking, what does H2 look like for borrowings?
We see borrowings being heavily benefited from the seasonal working capital cycle, which you'll recall from our working capital and operating cash flow slides. It's also going to benefit from improved manufacturing performance. As you remember, the manufacturing is a heavily weighted part of our business, so when that segment starts to perform, it generates, you know, the cash benefit is immense because of the fixed costs embedded in there. We've also got the proceeds from Acino of ZAR 1.8 billion. As we sit here now, the rand is quite strong, and most of our debt, 80% of our debt is in euro.
I think those three factors combined with good operating performance, we should see a strong benefit to borrowings in the second half. If you cast your eyes right to the bottom, our effective interest rate. We're in a healthy position. If you strip out the costs that we had to pay in terms of extending the term loan debt from June 2022 to 2023, that 3.47% in H1 2022 is about 3.2%, so there is a nice declining trend on interest. However, we understand that there's another wave of interest increases coming in the future and we're not. We obviously are aware of all of that and, as most companies are.
Fortunately, if you remember, because we're quite weighted, we're 80% weighted to the Euro, we have got quite a strong buffer against future interest rate hikes because a large portion of our debt is fixed at zero-based interest in euro. The other, the floating element, although it's floating, given the negative interest rate position of euro rates, it'll be quite a while before they break the 0% barrier, probably between 18 and 24 months. We think we're quite well positioned to buffer ourselves against interest rate hikes in the short to medium term.
What I thought I would do then is just end this slide going back to those nine themes that we spoke about at the start, just so you can sort of go back to. I hope going through the presentation that all of these themes have been coming through and you've been able to identify with each of them as we've gone through the detailed financial numbers. Thank you for your time for listening to me. I'll now hand over to Stephen to take you through the performance review and the prospects section.
Johnny.
Thank you, Stephen.
Okay.
It's green. Great. Thank you.
Well done, Sean. Nice, hope your first performance, and I hope all your results are as pleasant to produce and to announce as those. Well done and thanks everyone. It's been a very strong performance, and if you just saw the numbers on a standalone basis, you'd say, "Well, that's great." Earnings up by such big percentages and all of those good things that one looks for. As I was talking earlier to some of the team here, what's gone on below the surface is scary. It's not easy managing a business in these times, particularly manufacturing businesses. It's not often. I can't remember ever where I've seen the developed markets with higher inflation rates currently than developing markets.
The world's in a bit of turmoil. What I'll do in performance is we'll talk a little bit about, you know, Aspen. We've got simple philosophies in life. We like to have balance in life, and we like to have balance in our business. We try and mix what we do commercially with what we do for society as well. Our business is clearly reshaped and on track. We've had good growth, which Sean's taken you through, and we've got it across all our business. These are things we strive for. These are things people who've been following us will know we've been working and saying, "This is where we're gonna get to," and we're getting there. Got a strong balance sheet.
We've got fantastic capacities, and hopefully it'll be better understood when I talk a bit on. Then, of course, we at the forefront of equitable access. I don't think there's too many companies that are as committed and delivering, not talking, delivering equitable access. We've had a massive contribution to COVID. We're a small company by global multinational standards, but when you look at what we contribute to society and to the world, very proud of what we've done across COVID. Aspenovax is definitely the crowning glory. I think of all the things that we've ever done in Aspen, this must rate right up there as one of the really big things, and we're excited with what Aspenovax will and should bring to Aspen.
I'm gonna speak a little bit about our capacities because for us, they're capacities that we put a lot of effort in five, six years ago to build these capacities and capabilities. Wasn't always apparent to everyone what we were doing and where it was going, but I'm going to. It's becoming clearer and hopefully bring it into focus for all of you now. We see ourselves, of course, across all of ESG, but we really see ourselves as a capital S in ESG, and particularly with what we try and achieve for Africa. We were the first company, as you know, to bring out an ARV. We then...
with multi-drug resistant TB into Africa, and we've had over 1 million patients a month for HIV and AIDS with on antiretrovirals for years and years and years. We've made over 180 million doses for Africa. Not all of them are in patients' arms yet, but I'll point out to you, that's about as many doses the whole of Africa has received to date. That's a massive contribution from Aspen. We've made contributions globally in dexamethasone and anesthetics, particularly in the European environment, where it was particularly desperate. Aspenovax for us is something that I can't tell you how excited the whole of Africa is by Aspenovax. The support we've had, the ambition. Africa has stood absolutely united behind us.
I must have been in. I don't know whether it's World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, World Economic Forum, World Bank. Anything with world on, Aspen is there, and we've got such fantastic support from all of Africa. Then these capacities. We told you we could make anesthetics in the facilities and that's what we were going to do. But these don't discount what Aspen does with multinationals. If you've followed Aspen over the years, we've shown you all those nice pictures where we show manufacturing has been a platform for our relationships with multinationals. We pivoted very quickly into vaccines, into a COVID vaccine. We produced a COVID vaccine in six months. That is incredible. Normally, a vaccine takes a couple of years.
We got it out in six months with J&J, so we were able to pivot our capabilities into vaccines and we can take those same capacities and same capabilities, we can move to insulins, we can move into oncology, we can move into narcotics, and of course, it's there for anesthetics. This base, when you look at this, and I like the little stepping stones. When you see this, understand that Aspenovax is a demonstration of some of the capacities and capabilities we have, and you should expect more. In terms of revenue growth, great. We've had organic growth across all the regions.
Internally, we measure ourselves and our performance, which we put in our investor presentation. We say, "What have we achieved internally?" We make a couple adjustments for oncology and for the manufacturing related transactions. Then you'll see, although we've shown a constant exchange rate growth of 10%, our internal measure is that we believe we've got a 7% growth. Sean took you through the numbers, but the adjustments which show manufacturing at 10% and commercial pharma at 6%. It's always nice when every cylinder's firing, and a very important part of what Aspen business is about is how we deliver this organic growth. In terms of our business, we've got regional brands. These are brands that are big in the regions, and they separated from our Steriles. Another...
been another very good performance from these regional brands, particularly led by Australian business, and I'll talk a little bit more about how they achieved that. Interesting, though, out of here, is that when Oncology was in the prior period and at a higher price, it was the last period, this time last year where it was. If we take it out, you'll see Europe has declined at 10%. If we make an adjustment for Oncology, which we will have in the next half and forever going forward, Europe actually grew at 7%. I think this is really showing the advantage of a narrower focus, and a team being able to manage what they've got in front of them.
Australia has grown its OTC portfolio, and we have had tremendous struggles with our Africa and Middle East business. Sean's taken you through the struggles in South Africa, and they've done very well. It's been quite hard managing even third-party suppliers for anesthetics, glass, many glass manufacturers. Many manufacturers won't even make ampoules anymore. They say, "No, we're making vials for the COVID vaccine." You know this. On top of all of the COVID pressures, you've had real demand for glass and vaccines. Part of the reason we were so desperate to stock up with whatever we can that's got glass in it. LATAM just keeps chugging along. For those of you that's been watching it just keeps on growing. We've very strong, good team in Latin America, and they just keep producing.
The Sterile space was. I did guide you last year that you could expect this maybe to fall a bit and might not grow because it had grown so much in the prior period. We thought a lot of that was COVID-related, and it was, but it's continued to perform. That's in spite of having some fairly strong stock-outs in some of the lines around the anesthetics. Europe in the prior period had a really very strong performance in the Sterile business and it continued to grow. I think that was a very good sign for us in terms of really getting on top of that region. The supply chains, I'll talk to you a bit more about COVID.
It's been a problem for us in so many respects. Asia we also guided that although we knew volume-based pricing would impact one of our products in China, we felt we had such good momentum across the whole portfolio that we would continue to see growth in spite of volume-based pricing. We are. We've seen 11% growth there. A nice strong performance across both Steriles and regional brands. You know, when we talk about it I was on, was it TV or radio last night, and someone said to me, "You talk about really battling in manufacturing, and you're up 30%. So what are you really saying?" Actually, we did battle.
We did battle because we sort of know what was going on underneath it to keep it open. You make certain adjustments. Clearly, this has been a fantastic area for Aspen if you look at it on a relative basis. It didn't meet our internal expectations and targets. The COVID vaccine was important for Aspen. It's been a good contributor to Finished Dose Form. When we look at the API, because API is down here, both the chemical and biochemical, the API business is quite a simple business. You really almost know your turnover in advance because your turnover's contracted. You've got clients that say, "We want to buy 10 kilograms from you." It takes a long time to make.
It's not a month-to-month thing. Your orders are underpinned by contractual commitments. Those clients saying, "Please don't send it to us now because we can't get that component because we can't get it out of a Chinese port." We are saying, "Sorry, we can't deliver stuff to you because we've got people sick. And we couldn't make what we were supposed to make because the production shifts were down." It's been very, very tricky to manage. The reason we feel confident is we know we have the orders in hand. We know what we have to do.
We expect, although we're down at the half on our API businesses, we expect to be not only up in the second half, but actually up and growing that business by the end of this year. That would make a pretty big impact to the growth rate in this business. If you take, if you adjust as Sean did for manufacturing, showed it's 10%, imagine having your API business growing as well. This has got very strong weighting to the second half. Also, it carries a lot of stock and working capital. By growing in the second half, you reduce your stocks, your working capital and cash flow improves as well.
We're targeting a very strong half here, and very happy to be able to say, "Listen, we've got quite a bit of COVID turnover in here as well, about ZAR 800 million." Okay, that's the performance at a revenue level. I'm just gonna talk to you a little bit about our strategy, just remind you what we really said. Couple of key points. We talk about organic growth. This is the most important growth that, in my opinion, any business can have. You've got to deliver organic growth of your base business. Then we've got a capacity fill. We've built all of this capacity for anesthetics, but we've got a lot more capacity. It was simple, because if you built for one, it cost one.
If you build for 10, it costs 3, because you had a footprint. It's like putting extra room into your house rather than. There's a lot of foundations set up. There's a real opportunity with available capacity, and the capacity is relevant and needed. There are acquisitive opportunities. Aspen hasn't made any acquisitions that I can think of in the recent. So everything you're seeing here, even the growth rates, we'd actually divested things. We haven't made adjustments for those. So our growth rate's a little bit higher. There's acquisitive opportunities that we look at all the time, and improving financial metrics, which is what we wanted to show, particularly on earnings, and Sean took you through his pyramid or triangle. Then the steer our build.
You know, this is the stepping stone to our future growth opportunities. This is probably. If I had to pick one slide, this is the most important slide for me in terms of how I look at the business. It's how is our organic business growing? What is the base business doing? It's quite interesting when you look at the slide and you look at us in terms of global pharma. If you look at big multinationals, they've got their new chemical entities in an area, and they show you how they're growing. Then they've got their products that are post-patent. They might call them established brands, post-patent products, and those are declining or tend to decline. We've been quite good.
We are trying to identify those products that are declining in their portfolios, and we say, "Listen, hey, can we acquire some of these products and do something different too?" Because look, if they're declining at 5% and we can show it growing at 5%, everyone can do a discounted cash flow and say, "Oh, 5% decline, da da." We've got to look at it and say, "We're gonna put a bit more expense behind it," but if we can turn it into 5%+, you've got that asset is now worth more than double what you've paid for it. So this is very important to us, and I think this is the differentiator in our model compared to anyone else's that I've really seen in global pharma, is our ability to manage post-patent products and to show this organic growth. We've had...
Well, I've been here for over two decades, so we've had over 20 years here. We've really only had a period of a hiccup in this. This has been sort of consistent within Aspen. Our hiccup was around about 2017, 2018, 2019, around about that period. Oops. To be candid, that was yes. I did a Gus. And that was really a Thrombosis impact on the business. It was almost like you'd take. I went through a past presentation. We'd show you results without Thrombosis. We've taken it out, and you're starting to see this important base business. Does it just grow because it grows? No, we do things. We add little products to it. If it's a cream, we bring out a tablet or a drop. We just continually tweak.
It's interesting, we've got what we call an OTX strategy, which really is a novel approach. It's you take products that are OTC in nature, and you detail them behind the doctors. These doctors recommend them, and the products get credibility with the pharmacist because they see they script it. I just wanna show you in our regional brands business, which is a lot in South Africa and Australia, what we've achieved. In Australia, we've tried to reshape this portfolio. Of course, there is some tailwinds because OTCs were down in the prior year from COVID, but nothing like this, nothing like this growth rate. Australia is a problematic market from a pricing perspective. You've got a single buyer, government generally, and so that's why we reshaped our business heavily because we felt in the generic business we were on a treadmill.
We were fixing our costs, and someone just kept bringing our price down. That's why we exited it. What I want to show you is that we are at 40% of our brands in Australia, regional brands, are now OTC brands, and they're not impacted by pricing. This is quite important for us, it's not impacted. You'll see some top brands in there that. We're category leaders in these particular markets, and that's from detailing. We take the same strategy, and we've put it into our South African market, which has also grown at 25%. You know, pain was a market that Aspen really didn't have a good place in. It was a big market. It was completely actually dominated by Adcock Ingram for all the years that I remembered.
Now Mybulen is the leading brand in that category. We did things like Stilpane, we changed the taste. We did taste masking. We actually haven't got enough capacity for how much Stilpane Syrup we're selling. I mean, we're talking about selling, if we had demand, if we could make everything we wanted to make today, over 600,000 bottles of Stilpane Syrup a month. It's growing, and it's growing at 42%. Products like Hyospasmol, when you think about brand leaders in that market, it's Buscopan and things like that. Here we've got a category share of over 49%, so good work there. This is a very nice product. This is an iron product.
Takeda had it in South Africa for Vifor, and Vifor have moved this and the other products to Aspen in both South Africa and Australia. We took it from negative growth rates into positive, and we've got pretty good market share in that category already in iron. Just some very practical examples just to show you of some of the key brands and how they're performing, and strategies we do to keep pushing our base business. We spoke about our capacity. We spoke about getting to ZAR 2.3 billion in capacity contribution by the year 2024. We guided there, of which ZAR 1.5 billion was gonna come from filling half our capacity and ZAR 800 million from anesthetic savings. We've combined that number.
We no longer talk internally about each because quite often they use the same line. If you put a COVID vaccine on a line, you are going to displace an anesthetic saving because it would stay with the third party. We've got to look and weigh up, is this an opportunity deferred versus an opportunity lost? We look at that number as one. We're on track to get to ZAR 2.3 billion. In fact, we expect to get half of it in this year. It's gonna be weighted towards the second half. We've had. I can't tell you that it's gone exactly to plan, because it hasn't. It's come in different areas.
The impacts in our facilities in Gqeberha have been quicker than in our facilities, for example, the impacts we've had in some of our European facilities, NDB in particular. A lot of COVID impacts. What you've got up there is a growth in the absentee rate, and that's the number of heads. We've got about 600- 700 people in the facility. Can you imagine in December having an absentee rate of 150? That's one in four people. You know, that's half in a lab, half on a line. It's just very hard to keep your doors open and to do it. There's no way on a line you wanna bring a new product on, but you need to make a risky step.
You say to yourself, "Well, what do you do?" Just like the API business, we focus on the operations. Everything else can follow. Let's just deliver the products that we have to deliver now. We had spoken to you in the last presentation about hoping to have contracts that we thought were fairly advanced, and we hoped to sign 80 million doses in France. I'm happy to tell you they have been contracted. Some will fall in 2022, and we'd hope to get the majority in calendar year 2023. We've shifted that out a year, given the challenges that we've faced. Some have shifted out, some have come a lot sooner. But on balance, we're on track to deliver the savings that we had suggested.
What is interesting is that only related to half our capacity fill. We're pretty comfortable that the rest of the capacity will be utilized. We're starting to see a lot of inquiries or very interesting inquiries. Really, people are gonna. I know the next question is, when are you gonna fill that extra capacity? A lot of it's gonna depend on COVID outcomes. I mean, you know, Aspenovax tomorrow, we get an order for 100, 200 million, whatever number of doses, that's gonna be a quicker capacity fill. But also, you know, more COVID, another Omicron variant, et cetera, it's really having an impact on both capital projects and ability to fill. We've done well to keep on track here.
In terms of acquisitions are important to Aspen, and have been very important, and something I think that we've done pretty well. You know, a lot of people say, "Oh, acquisitive companies, you know, always mess up," and all that. I hear you. I like to think that the management in Aspen have got skin in the game. We're not doing this to move on to the next venture. I also remind you that there are people that do acquisitions pretty skillfully around there. There's a whole private equity world out there that does pretty well out of acquisitions. I don't like these general pictures or general comments around acquisitive, et cetera. We are a strongly acquisitive company, and the acquisitions we've made, we've paid for with cash, never with shares.
Those acquisitions are now fully paid for now, and look at the business that we've got now and the growth prospects we've got. What are we looking for here? Are we looking to do a major transaction? Look, what's on our radar at the moment is Rebif. We spent a lot of time getting Aspenovax backed. I can't tell you, it's been incredibly time consuming. It's been the huge focus area here. This goes beyond signing a transaction. It's getting the regulatory parts right. There's a whole host of things we had to do. Our focus here is really around brands, portfolios of brands. To say, "Look, we've done all of this work to build this geographic footprint manufacturing.
How do we use both?" We're looking at opportunities, and there are opportunities in Latin America to be able to plug into a very successful team. In Africa, there are many people who are saying, "Can we put our business together with you? How do we leverage this footprint you've got across emerging markets in Africa and the credibility that you have there?" Australia, we've shown. You've seen now how well they are doing in the sort of OTX space, and that's clearly gonna be an area that we want to build and grow on. The sterile opportunities, they are really diverse opportunities. Multinationals, non-multinational companies, and many of them are linked to how they could plug into both our manufacture and our geographic footprint.
That emerging market footprint is something that is of interest to many. You know, we all know the COVID challenges, and Sean highlighted some of them, so I'm not going to repeat what you already know. They really fall in three buckets. They affected productivity. You've seen a graph on that. They affected costs, and cost is a key issue. Then there's supply, because you simply couldn't get stock. When you could get stock, you maybe bought more than you could just to get it. Just to give you some anecdotal stories, you know, if you take some of our facilities, you know, take a sterile facility, you need a filter each time. Just to get that filter, you know, we sometimes couldn't get them. Then you're borrowing from neighbors, literally, you know.
Hello, GSK, have you got filters for us?" "Yes." They're phoning us too. We were actually sharing as an industry to keep our factories running. Those are the things that bubble under the surface behind numbers there. Of course, Omicron was South Africa specific initially, so that was a bit messy because no one was flying in here. These shortages and the glass shortages put quite a bit of pressure on our anesthetic business, particularly through our third parties. Just a few little charts underneath there. You know, you see things like the containers going up 1,000%. You got aluminum at 130%. What has aluminum got to do with pharmaceuticals? Well, you know, when you take your pills out of those. What's that? They've got aluminum there.
There's plastics, and there's a lot of things obviously in plastic in pharmaceuticals. Even the pallets in your warehouse, where the timber price goes up by 125%. The COVID impacts to productivity are profound. We've gone through it again and again, but it really was the fundamental reason for withdrawal from the API divestiture process. Guys, eyes on the prize. Let's deliver the numbers. You can't go there declining and battling to run your business and try and run a process. That was the fundamental reason for the withdrawal from a process. We've had challenges, and I don't have to tell you that these challenges I'm talking about are before Russia and Ukraine. This was before.
Now, I mean, I don't have to tell you, we're in the middle of it. This energy crisis is a big issue even before the issues we had in Russia and Ukraine. We all sit and say, "Eskom give you a 1 year. This was your tariff for the year." We sort of got that out of our gas pricing and that in Europe. What's happened in our German facility, we get weekly energy price updates. That is what it's getting to. Of course, this is causing a fundamental inflation. They're talking about European inflation between 6%-8%. That's very big. Those are very big increases in inflation. Of course, ultimately, that's got to somehow impact salaries and wages.
These are the challenges that we are dealing with in the business because it's hard to work out the duration. Is this temporary? Is it a spike that goes up and down? Then you've got to look and say, "Where can we pass on these increases?" Because we work in a regulated world for many of our products. I know the OTCs might not be, and you might be in the tender world with anesthetics. We're not as exposed as many other pharma companies. I think this is a world problem. I'm sure there are gonna be people telling you a lot bigger issues. I think this is something that we.
If you say, "What keeps you awake at night, what do you worry about?" It's the inflation that's coming through across these across the world, just from COVID, and I was hoping it would pass through. Certainly Ukraine, Russia is a major issue here and something we've got to watch very closely. The last thing on performance, I think, was the financial metrics. We had a base target of 25.8% in 2020, and we wanna measure ourselves against things. We had 29.5. That was a little ahead of our even our internal expectations. We've grown EBITDA more than revenue, HEPS more than EBITDA, all the things that we promised in that presentation. We hope to have a leverage ratio below three times.
You know, we sitting with probably close to ZAR 1 billion a month, and ZAR 19 billion of debt. That's gonna come down quite a bit in the second half. There's a lot of headroom. That's our performance. It's a really proud performance. I've got to thank all the people in Aspen who have worked so hard to deliver under extreme circumstances. If you see the head of operations and she's sitting here, she's got her hands full. Every day is a new challenge. It's got a lot going on, but we managing them. Every day is a new day. Let's talk about sterile capacity. It really is a valuable and strategic capacity.
When you look at new chemical entities that are being developed, they're generally oncology and almost all of them are in a sterile space. Ironically, that sterile space and the value sits in prefill syringes and preservative-free blow-fill-seal. So when you go to a blow-fill-seal, even an anesthetic, you know, you can get it in a big syringe and you can push out to five patients. They like it in a blow-fill-seal because it's got no preservatives in. One shot, throw it away. These are capacities we have at NDB. I see NDB's capacities as very valuable within Aspen. We've got a quality, diverse sterile capacity. This quality is a critical area because when you're dealing in steriles, you can't afford to make any mistakes at all.
This is very important to the multinationals that we partner. We've had headwinds in past years, and then we've now had some tailwinds. You know, our manufacture in Africa has been absolutely catapulted onto the global stage. That's what people talk about everywhere, whether it's Pfizer on a screen or AstraZeneca. They anyway, World Trade, they're talking about Aspen's capacity. We've got some additional vial capacity that'll come on next year. We're hoping to be by within the next few months up to about 35 million doses a month, and we will probably increase that by another 250-300 million in a year's time. This is just needed for our anesthetics and vial products. Remember when we first built our capacity and specified it was for anesthetics.
At the moment, we're not making any anesthetics on our vial lines. I think this is probably something that's probably our most profound statement and one I'm gonna remind you of, I hope, in time to come. I think that this investment in our sterile capacity will prove defining for our growth prospects in Aspen. We wouldn't have Aspenovax if we didn't have these capacities. That's the easiest way to say it. It's also needed for anesthetics and some of the other opportunities. The one thing that is frustrating, but in a way it's a barrier to entry, is that the transition periods of taking a product, moving it onto a line, and then getting global regulatory approvals take a very, very long time. When you get contracts in, they're hard to...
They're hard to lose, but bringing them in takes time. We're getting so many more business opportunities and inquiries. They are around areas like oncology, insulin. This is quite an exciting period for Aspen to be able to contribute further. If we look at our base business, because the base business that I told you is absolutely fundamental and probably the single biggest focus area. We've got challenges in this business that we see and we say, "What are these challenges?" Well, we've spoken about COVID, and we've also spoken about the knock-on in Russia and Ukraine. When you look at Russia, just so that we quantify what this impact is to Aspen, because we actually had a great business in Russia. A lot of investment, a lot of reps.
No fixed assets, no factories, but a really good team there. Those sales of ZAR 1 billion were at the exchange rate before. Now I can't look every day, the exchange rate changes. At one time, I worked at ZAR 1 billion of sales in Russia. At the old exchange rate is worth ZAR 400 million today. It's a. If I just go back to where it was, say, in the first half, we did about ZAR 500 million in sales there. Our return, it was on the lower end of our returns, because it had largely the thrombosis portfolio in there, closer to 20% and 30%, and roughly 2% of the business. It was almost 2% all the way down.
If you want to make adjustments, you should maybe look at a 2% factor of all the EBITs and gross profits and all of those things. That's it. I can't make any calls on that business going forward. The bigger issue is not Russia. I mean, it's very sad to lose 2% of your business. Not gonna push Aspen off the edge of a cliff or anything. Sad to lose it too. For me, the bigger issue is the impact this has on exacerbating really increasing inflation rates. That's what I think we should be. That's what we as a company look at more closely. We've got volume-based pricing in China. We really are in a race to register our products against volume-based pricing.
Very happy to say we've launched EMLA. It's in the market. Ovestin's to follow, and there's a pipeline to follow. It's a juggling act to get there quickly enough. But we've got good management, a strong team in there now, and we're going, it's going well. But there's always risks. In Australia, there was talk of further unilateral price decreases, which might impact in 2023. We wait to understand what that might be. Sean's taken you through the fact that we've had a fire in our facility which has certainly impacted our South African growth and our new product launches, sadly, as well. We hope to be back online in August of this year.
In terms of tailwinds, well, you've got to, you know, it's like turning a big steam engine around. When you've got momentum on your base business, it's a good position to be in. It's a really good position to have growing margins because that's all the work that we've done into fixing factories, fixing portfolios. It's something that you can't ignore and are very important going into potential headwinds around inflation. Aspenovax could drive a very material income stream for Aspen. Maybe we can try and cover some of those points just now. But it's important. We have a nice pipeline to support. We've got no blockbuster new chemical entities, but we've got nothing going off our tail. We've got a very safe business, if you want to call it that.
It's a lot of products, but we don't have any single product that would expose us. We do have a single product that could really make it a really big number. I mean, Aspenovax, even with just half performance, would be the largest product we've ever had in Aspen. And this pipeline, these little tweaks we do is what really helps sustain our growth rates, because, you know, you're always discontinuing products, divesting a few here or there. To keep that growth rate momentum, you need that in there. We've got great capacities. It's starting to add to our profitability already. It will continue to add to profitability over the next few years. That's something we also look at closely.
These approaches that we are getting from vaccine companies in steriles who want to leverage our distribution footprint. This is something that is probably our most exciting development internally that we look at. It is what now's gonna be what's next for us on this platform. I want to talk to you a little about Aspenovax. I know everyone's wanted. I've had all the questions I get is Aspenovax. I think this graph, this map tells it all. That's the world. The greens are the people that have had 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%. That's where people have had less than 10% in red, and orange is less than 20%. You can't help but notice it's all in Africa.
The media are happy to say the developed world took all their vaccines, and that's it. That is a reality. That's true. They did. But what the media don't point out as aggressively is that actually COVAX was meant to support that developing world, and COVAX relied almost exclusively on Indian manufacture. It's not about developed world or developing world. It's about having manufacturing capability, and there is no manufacturing capability of any quantum besides Aspen's on the continent. To be able to produce this, and that is why there's such a push to get African manufacture. Aspen's regional manufacturing, you might have seen our announcements, all the people that have commented on the manufacture, they are the aid agencies for people with COVAX, AVAT, all the buyers, multilateral buyers are excited to have the capacity.
Now, that's important. Now, how many vaccines can you sell? Well, Africa has got 1.3 billion people. Their target was to get to 900 million people. Given a boost, even if it's only one, because why bother? Why bother if you're in the world vaccinating Africa? Besides how you get a few bad headlines and all that. Well, actually, you better vaccinate Africa because we don't want to get. Where's your worst variant gonna come from? It's gonna come from the unvaccinated, and it's gonna come from those that are immunocompromised. Africa's the least vaccinated and got the most immunocompromised people. So if you want to stop this pandemic, you've got to deal with the problem in the middle. That's, you know, if we look at it, there's 900 million people times two, 1.8 billion.
In theory, you'd wanna give 1.8 billion doses. Only 200 million, less than 200 million doses have been given. Now, whether you get to 70% is another story we don't know. There's a big gap that's needed to be filled here. When we look at how we got here, we committed ourselves to sterile manufacturing. J&J came, inspected. They saw what they trusted it. They came with technology transfer support. We moved a vaccine within six months, we had it, and we were recognized as the top contributor to J&J. One, in moving it the fastest, and two, having the largest output. It became apparent to us that we really needed our own vaccine.
We needed as a continent to be able to say, "This is our vaccine, and we control where it goes and how it's sold." We were very fortunate in that having performed for J&J, and they saw the value as well, they worked together with us. We signed an agreement this month. If we had an order tomorrow for Aspenovax, because the next thing is we need to get an order from somebody. You can't get an order until you've got a product, and we had a product yesterday. It was a Tuesday. If we could get a multilateral order tomorrow, we are hopeful that we could get something out by June 2022. That's our hopeful path for Aspenovax.
The next question everyone's gonna ask me is what are the financial outcomes? Well, you know, we're gonna look to these governments, AVAT, COVAX, for volumes ordered. I think, you know, the multilaterals are the ones with the sort of big volume buying power here. What are we gonna sell the product for? Well, it's gonna sell for somewhere between $5-$10. That's the sort of range that these are selling at most of them. What is the cost per dose? We've got a formula-based arrangement because J&J sell us the drug substance, and it will be very influenced by the yields that we do.
When we look at the volumes, we think there's gonna be some short-term volumes for Africa, definitely, as I showed you on that map earlier, to turn that red into green. There's quite a bit of work gonna be needed just to stimulate demand because Africa's been without vaccines. They say, "Well, why do I need a vaccine?" Governments haven't pushed the vaccines because there's not any interest to push vaccines. They haven't got supply. There's a need to stimulate demand and there's administration across a lot of these health areas that also needs some work on. The vaccines are pretty important to us because if you think about what we've done, we built all these sterile factories.
We put all the costs in because you got to put people behind the lines, 100 people here, 200 people there. They're all sitting there and you're not generating even revenue, but they're generating costs. That is what's called an under recovery. Now, you start putting vaccines in, they start absorbing those costs in there, and so that will have a very positive impact on our absolute margins in manufacture. Just having more volume means that our base manufacturing margins get increased. Instead of having to allocate 10 to this product and none to this, you now say, "I can put five and five." Suddenly your whole, your base manufacturing business margins go up. We hopeful and obviously everything's gonna depend on what price we set it at and how we get the yields.
We are hopeful that our GP percentage on Aspenovax will be incremental to those increased overall base margins. I've been speaking quite a bit about this, and I'm sorry if I'm sounding repetitive, but Aspenovax is an enabler for us. It's contributed to global equity. It's really given people a sense of our capabilities and expertise. Many of you would be really proud to hear how people talk about us on a global stage.
I mean, we have people like President Macron, Angela Merkel, and they say, "No, it's that Aspen company in Africa, they're incredible with what they're doing." J&J talking to global markets saying, "This is the company that just takes things on and does it so brilliantly." It's given us a profile that we couldn't have got ourselves in this timeframe that we've got it in. It's certainly accelerated our plans. As I've told you, there's an opportunity now to extend this further across many of the other different dosage forms. When we look at people who want to partner us, many of them are sitting saying, "I've got this product, but I only could sell this COVID vaccine.
I've got these other products for diseases, but I've got no ability to sell them because I was just a developer and governments bought my COVID vaccine. How do we do this? It's given us an opportunity across all our platforms. To the extent that we get orders for Aspenovax, and these are profitable to us, it really is our commitment to try and increase capacity and improve a vaccine pipeline within Aspen. Those are areas we'd really like to be able to utilize this, if we get some gains out of this, to be able to put it back into creating a capacity and a broader capacity and capability. That really aligns with what I told you. We like to be all-rounders in Aspen.
That aligns with our belief, purpose to improve health and quality of life for patients. An important little chart there. In summary, thank you very much for listening, and I must say it's very nice to actually be here in person. It's been a challenging but a really rewarding period operationally. We're doing meaningful returns. I think that our decision to go into sterile manufacture, when I think back in time and think what we had and what could have happened if we just stayed in a generic space, I think that we invested ahead of the curve. We've got really good products.
We obviously have selected products well, generally, from the ones we've presented, and they're showing good margins and the retention of margins in difficult times, and in fact, expansion of margins. Aspen will be impacted by relative exchange rates. As Sean said, he expects H2. At the moment, H2 could be in line with the prior year, so you might see your actual reported growth more in line with your constant exchange rate growth. Of course, the ruble is gonna be an exception. I mean, it's Russia is going to be problematic there.
We've got challenges to operations, and we've got inflationary pressures that we have to manage day to day and are managing, and we're trying to play what's in front of us, and every day is a new day, literally in the world for all of us and for Aspen too. We've got some acquisitive opportunities under review. With Aspenovax behind us, there are some that advanced, and I think you should expect that maybe we do one or two things in this next period before we speak to you the next time. When we look at our business, our commercial business has performed well, but there's some adjustments that I think you need to consider for H2. One, the divestment of products out of the South African business was about ZAR 300 million.
I, you know, don't know. I'm not gonna give you advice on what to pencil in for Russia and Ukraine, et cetera, but my sense is I wouldn't be penciling in too much. A great first half from commercial pharma, but we expect maybe a slight shift in balance. We see the manufacturing expected to be a much stronger H2, and Aspenovax could also, with a bit of luck, contribute to this half. Let's not assume that happens. We expect the manufacturing maybe to compensate for some of the headwinds that commercial might feel in H2. We've got operating cash flow conversion in Aspen. It's always been a standout feature in Aspen, and we're targeting more than 100% operating cash flow conversion. That means some.
We expect some significant cash inflows in the second half of the year. You know, I always get nervous to talk at half time. Some of you follow sport. Many things happen between half time and full time. If we have a look at where we are, if we sustain where we are, if we replicate H1 and H2, which is what we're hoping to achieve, and I go back to where we started this process in 2013, we really had a similar amount of debt. The similar amount of debt. If you take debt, it can push your earnings up, but you've got this debt. You've got this debt burden there. With looking at a like for like, we'd have doubled the size of our business. Now we've
We've only got a foundation, really. I think this is a foundation that we can really grow off. If we get H2 in line with H1, it will be the highest net HEPS per share in our history. This is not discontinuing, continuing, all those fancy accounting terms. Very simply, we're going to be in a good position there. I think the only obstruction for us between then and now is what might happen politically across the world. For those that know Aspen and followed us, you know, at the end of the day, to get second half, we're gonna need to execute. That means there's really no time to rest and, for those of you know, no chance to rust.
That's our story. An exciting time, and thank you for taking the time to listen to us. A lot of work to do, a lot of work has been done, and thank you once again to our teams that have put tremendous effort into getting us into this strong position. Thank you. Paula, is it? Are we gonna do questions?
We'll take our first question from Anuja Joshi from Absa. How much of your capacity you plan to dedicate for Aspenovax versus other vaccines in 2022 and 2023?
I think where we are now is that until we bring our next line on, which will be out February, March of next year, almost all our capacities would be dedicated to both the J&J and Aspenovax vaccine. So that would be about, probably about 35 million units a month. That split would depend on you know, we don't have any orders for Aspenovax, so it would depend on the orders we get to Aspenovax, what happens to the J&J volumes, et cetera, together, and that's something we would be working together with J&J through. There just isn't enough capacity to bring on any other anesthetics or any other new products right now. We're trying to stay focused. Eyes on the prize, Kitty.
Right. The next question comes from Siphelele Mdudu from Matrix Fund Managers. Well done on a good set of results. How are you managing cost inflation? Are you able to pass through some of these input costs shown in slide 33, given SEP in S.A.? And the second part of this question is: What are your plans to offset these inflationary pressures?
Yeah. We're trying to understand what these are. Are these prolonged? Because we've been through. I think it was in 2008. The world's faced similar challenges around oil pricing and energy prices around about then. It was a spike, and it was gonna go to 200 a barrel and 300 a barrel, and it came back down. You've just gotta be careful that you don't adjust things for a permanent change. What we are looking at internally is, yes, we do have portfolios, because some of them are tender-based. As I said, some are our anesthetics or our sterile portfolios. You know, regulated price increases are not always easy to achieve. Fortunately, a lot of our manufacturing business, you can pass on some of these.
We, before we go to the simple thing, which is passing on, we're trying to understand how to manage the situation. What is your base business? What are your base costs? In Europe, we have had 1%-2% or 0%-2% inflation, and we would like to try and keep our increases to that level and rather pay a one-off benefit or say to... We understand because you can't say to people who live in an 8% inflation environment who has two percent. We might have to say, "Here is a COVID allowance or an allowance for this period," and just understand how this pans out. It's a very dynamic and a very fluid situation. We are fortunate in that, you know, we're in a period of margin expansion and operating costs.
We don't want to be taking all the hard work we've done to get all these synergies and great results to spend it all within inflation. Ultimately, it will. Some of it will have to be passed on if it stays at these levels. That's for sure.
Right. The next question comes from Luresha Chetty from Ashburton Investments. CapEx in FY 2023 includes ZAR 800 million for potential sterile production. Can you comment on where this capacity will be added? Will this be vaccine specific or general sterile capacity? And how many additional doses will be achieved with this CapEx?
Yeah. I think we're looking. We're waiting. The reason Sean put it up there, he's a bit cautious. We're waiting to see where Aspenovax volumes come, how sustainable they are, and some of these new opportunities that we're looking at, what that might mean. I think the likely spend is around about. You know, Gqeberha facility. Sean, I think it's what your spend's in Gqeberha. It's to understand the opportunities. It would be that we'll pull the trigger when we understand the opportunities.
All right. We'll take one more question online before we pass on to the floor. We have our next question from Etienne Roux from Truffle Asset Management. Three questions. Could you please elaborate on the impact that a weak euro versus U.S. dollar will have on your margins? I'll take that first question.
A weak euro versus USD. Let's just talk about a weak euro, full stop. Aspen has a lot of sales in euros, because we tend to sell a lot of our manufacturing. Our API sales tend to be in euros. We also have a lot of costs in euros. We have a lot of factories in Europe, and we have a lot of costs as well. I think we're relatively neutral. Sean, you'll be better to answer that one. We're relatively neutral in euros. Against the dollar, where it's problematic is when we also sell. We don't sell a lot into the U.S., but what we do sell is around APIs, which would be positive because you tend to have a euro cost against a USD cost.
The USD, let's be clear on it. It's more than just a euro impact. The USD is a currency that one uses across many raw materials. Businesses are run. You know, if you want to import APIs into South Africa from India, they don't give you in rupees, they charge you in U.S. dollars. Understand the U.S. Dollar is an important currency. Obviously, a strengthening rand has been incredibly strong, you might even have an increase in margins in South Africa. I don't know that a euro USD is a massive influence to us. A lot of our heparin, mind you, is imported in the basis in US dollars. I think we're relatively neutral on U.S.
If the Australian dollar is strong, if the Chinese renminbi is strong, that's positive for our results because they don't have a lot of their own currency costs against it.
All right. The next question is: What cost inflation can we expect for selling and administrative expenses going forward, given the 2% decline in CER in H1? Is there more cost savings to come?
Yeah, there are more cost savings to come. You know, these things, you know, you just don't fix them in a short space. There are more cost savings to come. We'd have to balance it up with what might happen with inflation. I think you've got to weigh that operating expense decrease. Also look at in terms of a 10% increase in your sales. You know, there's some things that are variable you can't change. You know, 10% more in moving trucks and variables. Those savings are achieved in spite of having increased turnover and increased variable costs. There is more to come. I think there's more operating costs to come. I'm not gonna give you an overall absolute percentage right now because I actually don't.
I'm not prepared to go out on a limb just yet on what that inflationary increase might look like on the balance of the expenses.
Okay. The last question: What happens with the fill and finish contracts given the Aspenovax license?
Yeah. The fill and finish contracts we talked don't impact Aspenovax. They'll be talking largely about our French facility, which is a pre-filled syringe facility. We just don't have capacity for extra work to be able to offer extra work in our PE facilities. We also at some stage want to bring our own anesthetics across there as well. The contracts are signed, as I said, in France, and those we've used about 80 million. We signed up for 80 million, but we could go up to as high as 200 million in that facility. So let's just say it's 80 of 200 million.
All right. That's it from our
Good.
To online attendees. We'll pass it on to questions in the room, if there are any.
Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you all for attending. It's such a pleasure to be here in person. Hopefully we build from here, business-wise and audience-wise. It's good. Thank you everyone. Cheers. Thank you.