I'm Roy Campbell. I have just recently joined Aspen Pharmacare in investor relations. I'm working very closely with Zanele Siwendu and the management team. It's been an exciting journey so far. I do look forward into the future and looking forward to interacting with many of you as I have done over the years. Firstly, to Randani, thank you for hosting us today at your healthcare conference. We at Aspen wish you all the best over the next couple of days. Today we are presenting first half 2026 results. Mr. Stephen Saad will take us through the period under review. Sean Capazorio will take us through the financial highlights. Stephen then will go over the group strategy and the outlook.
We will be taking questions from both the floor and over the webcast. Please submit them if you want, and please just introduce yourself as you do. I know that we'll be seeing a number of you over the next couple of days. Please feel free to get in touch if there's anything that you want to discuss. With that, I'm gonna welcome Mr. Stephen Saad up. Good morning, Stephen.
Thank you. Thank you, Roy. Morning, everyone. Good to be here. Thank you. It's amazing what can change in less than a year. You know, sometimes you need the darkest moments to give us some proper introspection and to shape the and reset where you are and where you're going to. Just to remind you in terms of our reset, there were really three areas that we looked at. The first was... The hardest thing about introspection is being honest. You know? It's the biggest, it's... It doesn't work unless you're incredibly honest with yourselves. When we looked at our business and where we were, there were really, I think, three things that we could see here.
Firstly, we have a commercial pharmaceutical business that we've run for nearly three decades, and it's a great business, and it's grown almost in every single year. It's a relevant business because the volumes also grow, and that there is a requirement for quality medicines in emerging markets, I think is a, is a well-understood concept, and we're well-positioned there. Together with that, we had made big investments and have made big investments in GLP-1s, which we thought was gonna be a big growth area, and we... And that together with the base business that we understand well, gave us a clear indication that we need to keep doing more of what we do in commercial pharma and to make sure the GLP-1s become additive.
We looked at our manufacturing business, we've got great assets, but somehow we just seem to stumble across one macro issue after another. Whether we... You know, this time last year it was tariffs. Tariffs, lost contract, more tariffs go away, tariffs could come back now depending upon how things work. It's a tricky macro environment. Before that, we battled in a regulatory environment. We also battled with COVID. You know, COVID was gonna be this big, and every donor company was gonna pay us $ billions, and it came and went. At a point, you've got to stop saying, "We've been a little unlucky, and our luck will change." I think you need to take matters into your own hands, and it's a painful decision, but you need...
Matters in your own hand means let's get the thing profitable, and let's play what we can see in front of us. Let's just do what we can see in front of us. You'll see a bit of that in the presentation today. Then the final, the final area was dealing with the sum of parts of Aspen. I've never really dealt in those issues with shareholders, but the disjunct between the underlying value of the assets and the share price was so apparent that I felt I had to bring it up to shareholders, which I did in the last presentation.
We had to think about and say, "Well, how do we unlock this value?" You know, to have an underpriced share and to have a whole lot of debt didn't make a whole lot of sense to us. We waiting for the shareholder approval, but by May, we hope that this transaction will be approved. What it does do is it pins a value at an EBITDA level on what we've been telling you that we thought the value of the share, the shares were and the type of multiples that the business in a commercial pharma deserves. It also gives us financial flexibility. It seems crazy to push through this and to push through it and carry debt to carry debt through this whole process with an undervalued share.
I think where we get to, hopefully by the end of May, the approvals is that you have a business that has no debt, has never asked shareholders for a share, an issue, and makes a ton of profit. I don't know how. I don't know how all the formulas work on returns, but to me it seems like an incredible return. There's no money asked for either funders or for from your shareholders. I'll start with that. Sorry, I jump around a bit. Some talk of little subject, and I'll go straight into the presentation. In the presentation, I'm gonna cover the performance under review and just take you through our key or what we're trying to do and what came out of our previous one.
We really want to sustain and accelerate our earnings growth drivers, and we believe there's some big earnings growth drivers in the business. As I've said, in commercial pharma, we've got a sustainable base business, and we've got a GLP-1 rollout. In manufacturing, I remind you we've got a chemical business and a Steriles business. Any profitability that you see or above -$1.7 billion is coming out of the API business. Our Steriles business is losing money, and we'll talk about how we reshape it, and the contracts that are coming in, how they come on, and how we, and how we commercialize them. We'll talk about that, and you will see at the end of this we've got some very strong earnings growth momentum ahead.
In terms of the other part was the sum of parts was to unlock the sum of parts and to also now focus very strongly on free cash flow. What is free cash flow? Well, Aspen's always had very strong operating cash flows. Then we've spent a lot of money on buying assets or building assets and CapEx, and that's impacted our free cash flows. We're in a different cycle now with declining capital expenditure, reduced working capital as we've built all of these assets. We've got earnings, increased earnings. Sean will take you through the triggers for free cash flow. In terms of sum of parts, as I said to you at the beginning, we wanna show you value. We wanna unlock value for shareholders.
We're absolutely clear that even at current valuations, the business is not getting the valuations it could. I understand there's confusion because if you make 101 division and - 10 in another, then you place a multiple on the 90. In our opinion, the - 10 is not something that should have a negative value attached to it. We also think it underappreciates the value of the brand in emerging markets. You'll see the relative growth of our emerging markets relative to our developed markets, for example, like Australia. For the period under review, just to remind you, last year we had really good earnings momentum in commercial pharma.
We had double-digit growth in constant currency. We expect to sustain that growth into this period for this year. You'll see that the GLP-1s, the growth is now becoming evident in our numbers, and it should be increasingly become an increasing share of the Aspen business from here on in. We've managed to get expanded indications on Mounjaro and the KwikPen. Those were quite big add-ons to the product which have accelerated the growth of the product in the South African market. A reshape's is always difficult. We've done 90% of the reshape. It's never certain until it's done. You know, you can see from the restructuring expenses in this half that the majority of it's done.
We've started the insulin contract in South Africa, we expect the approval from the regulator in March. Our contract is not with the regulator. It's with the buyer of the product, the owner of the IP, and so, you know, our contract with them has started. We had the contract dispute. I'm happy to say it's closed, and it really is the last period it will negatively impact earnings. Sean will take you through the swing around in earnings in H2 as a result of having this out of the system. The rand's been incredibly strong from an Aspen perspective in rand results. The relative performance of the rand against our basket of currencies, has quite a big impact on how we perform, I mean, assuming it shifts as much as it has in the past.
The rand, you know, if even if I go back five years, it was stronger today against Australian dollar than it was, and the Euro, than it was five years ago. The rand has been really, really strong for us, and it obviously impacts our results. Sean will take you through the free cash flows. That's all I've got to say about performance for now. I'll come back and talk about strategy, but I'm going to, you know, I'm gonna get Sean up here who's to take you through the next part of the presentation, the financial portion. Welcome, Sean.
Thank you, Stephen. So nice to speak to real people. The last presentation we spoke to a screen and a couple of people. We had to pay them to come and watch us, but they're happily obliged. Nice to see you all here, and thank you for coming. Really appreciate the efforts to be alive, and also welcome to all the people online. Yeah, very pleased to take you through these financial highlights, and, as Aspen, we remain absolutely focused on executing on the strategic priorities that Stephen spoke about at the start, and with a razor focus on unlocking the sum of the parts value that, you know, that underpins our investment case. Those are our real drivers going forward.
If we get to the financial highlights, in this first chart, I've got three bars, the one talking to revenue, normalized EBITDA, and on the far right, normalized headline earnings. If I start with revenue, we ended the period with revenue of around ZAR 21 billion, 4% down relative to the prior. We'll cover the detail a little bit later, but commercial pharma had solid growth for this half, and the decline in the revenue was driven by the manufacturing segment with the loss of the mRNA contract that Stephen spoke about earlier. If we look fast-forward to the middle graph, which is our normalized EBITDA, we came in there at just over ZAR 5 billion, a 13% drop versus last year's ZAR 5.8 billion.
Again, looking under the hood, commercial pharma had positive double-digit EBITDA growth, that decline was driven by the decline in the manufacturing segment. Interestingly, I think you might have read it in our commentary, if you take that ZAR 5.8 billion from last year, the full year EBITDA last year was ZAR 9.6 billion, so we did ZAR 3.8 billion in the second half. That's really underpinning our guidance for a strong second half for H2 2026 compared to the ZAR 3.8 billion, and we've done ZAR 5.1 billion compared to the ZAR 3.8 billion in H2 2025. We're very confident of driving a strong second-half performance in our business, and so we're very happy that we're gonna have a very positive offset in H2 and end the year with positive growth in EBITDA and all the other metrics.
Looking to the right, on our normalized headline earnings, we ended the half year at ZAR 5.75, 21% down on the prior year's ZAR 7.24. I sound like a stuck record, again, the main driver of this was the loss of the contract. You'll also want to know why, you know, why we're sitting at -21% here and 13% on EBITDA. Why is the gap bigger? Well, this is really a mathematical problem because if you look at our depreciation, our amortization, our finance costs, our tax costs, they're all relatively flat to the prior year. Effectively, your EBITDA gap in absolute terms falls all the way through down to earnings and obviously has a bigger impact on percentage decline when you look at it on a percentage of earnings.
The positive to that is obviously in the second half of the year when we have a positive delta to EBITDA, which will then translate to a you know, an expected full year delta positive to EBITDA, you're gonna have the reverse effect where you're gonna see good EBITDA growth but even stronger, and we have guided double-digit normalized earnings growth because of the fact that all of the other metrics below EBITDA are relatively flat or lower than the prior year. This is probably my favorite slide, and I know it's something that we've been putting a lot of focus on. We've, we've had a lot of years of investment, and I think we're now in a, in a, in a, in a cycle of generating strong positive free cash flow.
If we look at the gray shaded bars on the left, my left, that should be your left too, of the screen, I'll just explain the graph. The light blue one is the cash that we generate from operations. The dark blue is our CapEx spend, and the other different color blue is the residual balance, which is our free cash flow. If we look to the first bars there of financial year 2025, we generated just over ZAR 5 billion of cash from operations, but you can see we spent just under ZAR 5 billion on CapEx and very little free cash flow, about ZAR 166 million of free cash flow in FY 2025.
If you go back to the half year last year when we were talking free cash flow, we generated ZAR 1.8 billion of cash from operations, but we spent ZAR 2.6 billion, so we actually had a negative ZAR 0.8 billion of free cash flow last year. Fast-forwarding to this year, we've generated a very, very strong cash flow from operations of ZAR 3.6 billion. You can see quite a significant increase of that ZAR 3.6 billion when you compare it to the ZAR 1.8 billion, and that's notwithstanding that our EBITDA is 13% lower than last year, we've generated more cash. Cash has really been a key driver and focus for us. What are the key things underpinning that cash growth? Obviously a much lower investment in working capital.
We've also reduced our finance cost in cash terms, and we've also managed our tax very, very closely and managed our provisional and tax payments to optimize those as well in compliance with law. If you take all of those together, that's what's driven that big increase in the cash flow from operations. On top of that, we've spent ZAR 1 billion less in CapEx, where we've last year, we spent ZAR 2.6 billion in the half, down to ZAR 1.6 billion this half. If you take the combination of those two, we end up generating just under ZAR 2 billion of free cash flow for the half. A really good achievement, and I know that's something that everybody's been looking for Aspen to start driving. What are the benefits of driving the strong free cash flow?
If you go to the right and look at our net debt, we're also being honest with ourselves here. We've put the net debt there in accounting terms, and we've also put the constant exchange rate net debt so that we don't take the credit for exchange rate movements. If you look at the net debt, we ended the half year at ZAR 28.6 billion. That's down from ZAR 31.2 billion in June 2025. If you had to look at the June 2025 in CER, it's around ZAR 30 billion. Even, even with the exchange rate out, we've generated a reduction in debt, you know, from the ZAR 30 billion down to the ZAR 28.6 billion, and that also includes having funded a dividend of ZAR 0.9 billion in this half as well.
That's a really good achievement for us. That culminated us in ending with a leverage ratio of 3.4x , slightly elevated from FY 2025. I've obviously got some slides later on to talk about the APAC divestment, you won't see this. You won't see much in this bar when we talk to our full year results, assuming that we get completion of the APAC divestment. This net debt will be pretty much eliminated, and we'll certainly talk about it in later slides. If I flick to the next slide, I've got the light blue shaded area on the left is our commercial pharma business, and the gray shaded area is our manufacturing business.
If we look to the left first, Commercial Pharma, I've got a revenue, two revenue bars and EBITDA bars comparing to the prior half. I'm gonna talk CER in this chart because CER is what we measure ourselves on. If we look at revenue, a solid 4% growth in revenue for Commercial Pharma, constant exchange rate. If you look to the right, that 4% revenue growth translates to an 11% growth in constant exchange rate EBITDA growing up to ZAR 4.8 billion. A key driver of that is, and I think we spoke about this in our previous results, our reshaped business in China, where if you remember, we had quite a lot of expenses when we did the combination of the Sandoz and the Aspen business.
We did guide that we, you know, we went through a large reshaping process in China last year, and this is the year we get the benefit of that in both the first half and the second half. That expense saving is a big driver of the EBITDA growth. Underlying that, I know we take it for granted at Aspen, but it's a real achievement, is our gross profit margins in our commercial pharma business have remained very, very stable. With the leverage of expense savings and a stable gross margin, you get the increase in your EBITDA growth.
You can see that our EBITDA margin has grown from 28.3, which is in the shaded block there on the left, increasing to a healthy 29.2% EBITDA to sales ratio for this half. We are very comfortable that's a very stable position that we can continue to drive going forward. On the right-hand side, on the manufacturing, turnover is down 26% in CER and EBITDA down 85%. Again, all impacted by the loss of the mRNA contract. If you look at the EBITDA, we ended the last year half at just under ZAR 1.3 billion, and this year we're coming in at ZAR 0.2 billion.
If you remember last year, we had the benefit of that contract was around ZAR 1.5 billion, and we also then got the settlement that Stephen spoke about in his slide of about ZAR 500 million. If you net those two off, it's around a ZAR 1 billion drop, and that's pretty much what you're seeing in the reduction in our EBITDA in this half one. Just bearing in mind, this is the last half of the impact of this contract, and we will see positive growth going forward. Looking to our group revenue, just to unpack some of the elements there. This chart, what it does is it shows our commercial pharma revenue and our manufacturing revenue and then our group revenue, comparing the half one 2026 to the half one 2025.
If I look at the commercial pharma first, you can see, and I think we've covered this in the previous slide, a nice growth of 4% in the green block. Underneath that, those are all three of our segments, prescription, OTC, and injectables. You can see all in constant exchange rate, all showing positive growth. Obviously, the standout performer there is the injectables at 7%, and that is driven by the very strong demand that we've had for Mounjaro. The other OTC is showing a very healthy growth in prescription, also coming in there with 2% growth. Overall, we're very comfortable with the commercial pharma growth for the half.
I did put FYI, if you take the Asia Pacific region out of our sales growth and you just look at our business without APAC, that growth goes from 4% - 5%, because APAC had a slightly negative revenue growth in the first half of around 2%, I think. Manufacturing, again, they're down 26%, which then impacts the group revenue going down by 4%, and that's all impacted and affected by the loss of that contract in this half. I think moving on to... I'll just explain this table because it is quite a busy table. This is our group EBITDA slide.
In the dark blue, we comparing, we're showing our income statement of revenue and gross profit right down to normalized EBITDA, and we're comparing half one 2026 to half one 2025. We've got the ratios to revenue next to each of those blocks, we talk to the % reported in constant exchange rate. On the far right, there's a separate block there, that's the FY 2025 full year numbers. You'll see, I just wanted to put those down so that you can compare H one 2025 to FY 2025, and you can quite easily see that's the ZAR 3.8 billion that we generated last year in the second half and gives you a sense of what, you know, what growth we're gonna drive in our second half of FY 2026.
Talking to the revenue first, I think we've covered that. We've a 4% decline in revenue driven by the manufacturing, offsetting the commercial pharma. Coming down to gross profit margin, you'll see our gross profit margin for the group has dropped from 47.6%- 45.4%. That drop of 7% in constant exchange rate. Again, if you look at the underlying gross margins, commercial pharma stayed very steady at a gross margin of 58.5%, and that dilution in the group gross margin is driven predominantly by manufacturing. Pleasingly, if we go down to the expense level, we ended the half with expenses of just under ZAR 5.3 billion. Last year our expense base was just around ZAR 5.4 billion, so a 2% reduction in expenses.
I just wanted to point that expenses for Aspen, these are mainly for our commercial pharma business because most of your manufacturing expenses sit in cost of sales, not in expenses. That drop of 2% there is what's driving the commercial pharma EBITDA margin growth. Obviously, when you put the total business together, because of the manufacturing revenue decline, the group expense ratio is elevated up a bit from 24.5%- 25%, but that's just because of the manufacturing revenue decline. Looking at normalized EBITDA, there we've ended the half at just under ZAR 5.1 billion, ZAR 5,053 million, an EBITDA percentage of 24%.
That's down on last year's EBITDA percentage of 26.5% and last year's EBITDA of ZAR 5.8 billion. We look at the sort of moving parts there, again, a commercial farmer, if you remember from that slide I took you through on commercial farmer, they've had a very good increase in EBITDA margin ending at 29.2%. As I've said, we remain confident for that going forward. The drop in the EBITDA margin is driven by the drop in the manufacturing EBITDA. What I, what I'd like to alert you to is if you look at the far right, and you look at FY 2025 full year EBITDA margin, last year we ended the year at 22%.
We're already above last year's full year EBITDA margin, with more growth to come in that margin in the second half as manufacturing lifts in the second half and commercial pharma continues to perform consistently. That, those are all the metrics that underpin our guidance for strong double-digit EBITDA growth in H2 relative to the prior year half. Just moving to a different topic now, and I'm talking now around tax rates. You might say, "Why? Why do I talk about tax rates?" Well, for Aspen tax, we respect tax because tax is what only expense that falls all the way through down to earnings. If you don't manage your tax, it affects your, not just your pre-tax number, it affects your whole income statement.
It's not like an operating expense where you get a tax shield. Tax falls all the way through. We've paid a lot of respect, and we watch it very carefully and making sure we compliant, but at the same time, making sure we manage it in the most optimal way. What this graph does below, it looks at our normalized effective group tax rates from FY 2024 to going through to FY 2025 and then H1 2026. You'll note, and I'll take you through the two different bars in a minute, but you'll note there is quite a stepped increase from 2024 to 2025, and that is a result of the Global Minimum Tax legislation that we took you through in our previous results, and obviously that's now embedded in our base tax rates.
That's the driver of tax increases from 2024 to 2025. What we've also done in this chart is we've shown you the tax rate for total operations, which is the sort of the 22% and the 22.2% for H1 2026. You can see our tax rate is relatively constant this half versus prior. What we've also done is stripped out the APAC business and what is our continuing operations tax rate, and you'll see that jumps up to 22.7 in 2025 and 22.8.
Again, stable year-on-year, but a slight uptick, and that's sort of where we think our tax rate will stabilize going forward, obviously dependent on profit mix and how this global minimum tax is actually implemented when it gets to paying out the actual tax. I think that's all on the tax rate. I'd like to just talk to you about the Aspen APAC divestment and an update there. Just a health warning that these dates I've put you are indicative only, but they're our best guess as on what we know at the moment.
I think these dates are pretty consistent to what we presented when we had our call with all of you, I think in, sure, it feels like a year ago, but I think it was in January sometime. Yeah, based on all our timelines, we expect to publish a circular to shareholders on or before March 20th, which means then we'll have the shareholder vote on or before April 22. Based on the contract, that will give us a completion date for the contract of end of May, and that's when we'll get the cash, the initial proceeds from this transaction.
Then there will be a two or three-month period where we will have some true ups of working capital and all the other adjustments. The big cash flows will happen at the end of May based on these timelines. Looking for those of you who've got a bit of an accounting affiliation, the APAC divestment meets what we call IFRS 5 accounting rules. What does IFRS 5 say? It says if your business segment is material and it has a high probability of being sold, you have to classify it as a discontinued operation. For, so you'll when you look at our results, you'll see that we've got continued and discontinued split all over the place.
It's quite hard, I think, when you look at those results with a cold eye. You'll notice in our commentary, we've put a total operations table there just to help you sort of navigate the old, let's call it the total operations numbers to the continuing and discontinued operations. I think the important point here is that the balance sheet has been stripped down. When you look at the balance sheet for Aspen for the half, you're gonna see our intellectual property going down quite heavily, and that's probably the main one going down because the APAC business had a it was quite rich in intellectual property value. And all of the APAC value is now sitting in one line called Assets Held for Sale, and the net book value sitting there is ZAR 21.8 billion, just under ZAR 22 billion.
From a financial effects perspective, the gross consideration for this deal is AUD 2,370 million. In December, we guided in ZAR that to be just under ZAR 26.5 billion. That was at an exchange rate of 11.05 to the Aussie dollar. As we sit now, if you look at today's exchange rate, we could be well north of ZAR 27 billion plus. Depends on where exchange rates go. There could be a benefit from exchange rate, but we'll wait and see. From a net proceeds perspective, we're expecting net proceeds of over ZAR 25 billion. That's based on the ZAR 26.5 billion. If we get more in range, then the net proceeds will also go up.
Those proceeds will be used primarily to reduce debt. For those, yeah, for those of you that are, you know, gonna want to try and work out what the profit on sale is, I'll just give you one number. The debt that's embedded in the APAC business is around ZAR 1.2 billion. You've gotta subtract that off your ZAR 25 billion before you compare that to your net asset value if you wanna work out a profit on sale, which we will be reporting in the second half of this year should this transaction go through. It'll be somewhere around ZAR 1.8 billion-ZAR 2 billion.
I think that's the range that we would expect to come into our earnings per share in the second half. Impact from a, from an income statement perspective, after-tax profits, the loss that we expect from APAC will be around ZAR 1.75 billion of after-tax profits. That's a number you'll see in the results booklet for the 12 months ending June 2025. We've based this on June 2025 numbers. If you take out, obviously, there's an interest saving that's embedded or interest cost that's embedded in the APAC business itself. If you exclude that, the interest saving for the rest of the Aspen Group, based on the reduction of debt, is around ZAR 1.2 billion pre-tax, which is around ZAR 0.9 billion after tax.
If you net the two, net that off the ZAR 1.75 billion, you get to about ZAR 0.85 billion of after-tax impact net of interest saving for the group, which is an earnings of circa ZAR 1.85. Stephen will talk you through the historic profile of the APAC business, and also will talk you through how we plan to recover our profit gap over the next two years. I thought it'd be quite interesting to show you this now, and then you can see the plan, how we're gonna tackle that gap in the next period. I think it'll be quite good for you to all see that. I think my last slide is just on ESG. It's something that we always focus on.
It's part of our DNA, and we passionate about it. We've got, if you remember, we've got our 16 goals under these four pillars that we published in our integrated report. The four pillars, just to remind you, are patients, our people, society, and the environment. On the patient side, that's probably our key driver or metric for Aspen from a DNA perspective, and that's to increase access to critical medicines in emerging markets. I'm pleased to say at this stage we've had an 8% increase in volumes versus FY 2024 of critical medicines. Some of the callouts here, obviously we've made some good progress in the insulin manufacture that Stephen spoke about earlier on.
We're also making good progress on the serum, Sera and Vaccines, which I think Stephen will give you an update on as well. Our generic GLP-1 strategy will also help us in this patient access bucket. From a people perspective, our goal by 2030 is to get to, equal gender balance. I'm pleased to say that as we sit now, relative to 2020, we're at 32% of women in top leadership positions, and that's an increase from 19% in FY 20. Good progress there. We still gotta get to 50%, by 2030, but we're well on track.
From a societal perspective, our focus is on group ethics and compliance, and our deliverable there was to complete that program by the end of FY 2025, and we've successfully done that and completed that 100%. Very importantly on the environment, our target there is to reduce carbon emissions, Scope 1 and 2, by 50% by 2030. If you look at the gray block, we're around 24% reduction at this stage relative to FY 2020 as our baseline. Some call-outs there. We've increased our renewable energy usage to 19%. With eight manufacturing facilities now using solar panels to supplement the energy. We also started to introduce water stewardship plans at our and we started our facility in Cape Town.
With our partner IFC, which is one of our development funding institutions, they've got expertise in this area, and together we've developed a decarbonization roadmap project at our Korsten facility that we'll then use as a blueprint to drive down our carbon emission going forward. I think some very good progress on our ESG. On that note, I'd like to hand back to Stephen to take you through the more exciting part of the presentation now that we've dealt with all the numbers. Thank you, Stephen.
Thank you. Thank you, Sean. Thanks. Well done, Sean. He's showing a black belt in budgetary control, Sean. Well done. It's impressive. Keep your hands on the cash, Sean. Good. I always say this, you've got to have good partners in business. You get people that can make money, but more important are people that can keep money. Let's deal with a little bit with the group strategy here. The group strategy, my heads-up to you is have a look very carefully at what we see as very strong organic earnings growth, it's capital light. We've expensed the capital. Just bear that in mind when considering how we look at the business going forward. When we look at commercial pharma, this is our base business.
A thousands army of people out in the fields, selling product. We've got great dynamics in our market because we're particularly strong in emerging markets. No matter how they perform, there's always a growing middle class and, you know, often don't have a single- payer. If you go into developed markets, the government may pay for all your medicines, for example. Here, people have to pay out of pocket. They try and buy the best medicine they can as affordably. It's got to be affordable. It's got to have quality. That's where we've focused our business is in terms of branding and quality. We in that sweet spot of continuing volume growth. Across our markets. We've had risks in our base business. We've had risks over the years.
We start in Venezuela, we've had Russia and Ukraine, and we've had a VBP issue in China. We've managed them all, and you'll see from what Sean showed you earlier, we've successfully managed the challenges we've had in China. Our base business is solid. There's no road bumps ahead. It continues to perform. Once again, we're heading for another year of double-digit growth in EBITDA. What we're also gonna show you now is, I know that a lot of people question GLP-1s, will it work, won't it work, et cetera. What you're gonna start to see is evidence of that growth in these numbers too. When we talk, I'm gonna go straight into GLP-1s and our strategy.
When we talk, we're gonna really talk about two key areas and obviously an outlook. One is the Mounjaro performance in South Africa and its rollout into sub-Saharan Africa. Two, the semaglutide. semaglutide is the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. It's a generic opportunity as we see it. The outlook that for GLP-1s. What you see now on this slide is the GLP-1 market in South Africa, its market value is currently at about ZAR 2.2 billion. That represents about a tripling. That market's tripled in 18 months. It's a great category to be in. There's huge unmet demand, it's a business that Mounjaro in particular has performed, has been a key driver in the growth. It was...
We've gone from 21% of the market to 52%. A lot of that's been driven by the new indications, it will be the quickest brand to reach ZAR 1 billion in the South African market. I know I said it was going to get to ZAR 1 billion, and I hope to get to ZAR 1 billion next financial year. We're gonna get to this financial year. We expect to achieve over ZAR 1.3 billion. It's quite hard to pin the number here because every time you pin a number, it goes a little bit higher and higher. It definitely won't be less than ZAR 1.3 billion of sales in this period.
The registration of the KwikPen with, which was the device which moved from a vial, gave us an opportunity now to register the product across Sub-Saharan Africa. We expect registrations from as early as this calendar year. The process can be a little quick in some of the African territories. We think 2026, 2027 will be period of registration of products across Sub-Saharan Africa, we'll get to understand the dynamics of that market as we roll it out. The semaglutide opportunity. semaglutide is effectively a generic launch. Canada is the first market to go off patent of size. We are definitely in the shakeup for an early launch year. What do we say an early launch?
We believe that the first products coming to market will be in Q2, calendar year Q2. May, June might be the earliest products you could get there. That's our best estimate. We hoping to be in the sort of mix towards the end of Q2, Q3 to get registration. It's a process to bringing, commercializing a product, which means you've got to... You get a number that you've got to try and print onto your products quickly enough, and you've got to get your product approved in various provinces. I think that we're comfortable that we've got a really good shot at being part of what in the generic world is called market formation.
That's when the market takes shape and those people with early entrants be, have a larger share to start with. We think we're up there with front runners. Very proud of that opportunity, proud of our teams for getting us there. Probably more important for Aspen is in many of our emerging markets, when you want to register a product, they will say to you, for example, in the Latin American countries, in many of them, "What regulated markets have you got that we can reference your product to?" Getting this registration is great for us and great to have the opportunity in Canada, but also becomes a reference market for us because they want to see that a stringent regulator has approved it, and then they can reference it.
It's very important for us because obviously emerging markets are key for us. It's a sort of a bipolar patent expiry. In general terms, emerging markets start expiring from this year and carry on through till 2027, end of 2027, 2028, and regulated markets tend to start in 2030. It's gonna be very important the sort of scrap in emerging markets, and I think Aspen are really up for it in our key markets. We're in a good position to be rolling out across those markets, particularly with our presence across many of those markets. Sorry, did something out there?
In terms of the sort of outlook for ourselves, well, we've got the Mounjaro rollout in South Africa and hopefully the initiation across sub-Saharan Africa. The demand remains strong. It's growing every month. It's growing every month. We've managed to get a fair bit of stock in, but it is something that we're sort of monitoring almost daily, weekly, trying to understand the off-takes. I've discussed the semaglutide opportunity there. We're very pleased to have a partner like Eli Lilly in terms of pipeline and product. Eli Lilly, you know, we've partnered with many multinationals, but I don't think we've had one with such a strong base product and pipeline of products.
It's a great position to be in. Now that covered our commercial pharma business. I wanna go into manufacturing now. Now, in manufacturing, just to repeat, if you see that we've made ZAR 700 million of profit in manufacturing, understand that we've made ZAR 1 billion somewhere else and we've lost ZAR 1.7 billion in Steriles. Because to get this to break even profitability, we need to cover for the ZAR 1 billion that we lost in the contract, as a first step. When we give you guidance, which we will later, we'll say to you, "Our profitability in manufacturing will be the same as last year or in line with last year." That means we've recovered ZAR 1 billion in this year to cover for the contract loss.
As I said when I opened, we modified our strategy. We modified our strategy to simply address all the issues that we can control. In a world of moving macro environment, I mean, as we sit today, I don't have to tell you how things move around us, we wanted to be in control of as many levers as we could be in control, and we had to address our cost base, and we had to look, and we have to commercialize those contracts we have absolute certainty over. The reshaping is largely complete. You will see the benefits in H2, and you'll see the full benefit in financial year 2027.
Yes, we've had a contract settlement in this period, but it's more than replaced by the annualized savings in financial year 2027, and you'll see it's also covered in the second half of this year. Hard processes are really not easy, painful for an organization, but in the environment we find ourselves in, very absolutely necessary and gives you a lot more control over everything that we do. Having dealt with that, let's talk a little bit about contract commercialization. In terms of contract commercialization, the insulin contract is very material for our South African business. We've got one line. We started it. We ramp up that line. It'll ramp up over the period. We'll have a full impact into financial year 2027.
We're moving on to a second line towards the end of this year. The second line will come on stream for financial year 2027, and we're hoping to build off that base. The facility in France was particularly impacted by tariffs because the Trump administration was saying, "Why are you making anything in Europe? You can't send stuff from Europe to the US. You must make here." A very different approach to vaccines and vaccine registrations impacted that site. Now, we have something called RFQs, which are basically requests for quotes. People come to you and say, "Can you make this product for us?" In that tricky period when we had absolute uncertainty, we had one request the whole year, which was...
So that's why I said to you, "I can't give you any guidance here. I don't know where this is going," et cetera. In the short period we've had in this, in this year, we've already had six. The market's turning a bit for us. It's, we're seeing green shoots there. Happy to say that we've secured additional volumes which would give us about ZAR 300 billion, ZAR 300 million more EBITDA in financial year 2027. It's a great facility. For those of you that visited, it's a great facility, and it's well-positioned, and I'm happy to see some momentum there. Pediatric vaccines, quite a frustrating process in terms of a regulatory and a regulatory environment.
Environments are very tricky in terms of, you know, people are losing funding like WHO, the U.S. pulls funding. It's not always easy to get the timing and the pace right on these. I'm happy to report there's a process here where you need to first get your local country, SAHPRA registration, and then you go to the WHO. We have two products registered with SAHPRA. They'll go to the WHO. PQ is pre-qualifying. It means you go in. Once they pre-qualify you can start tendering. We've got two other products in with the regulators, we expect registration during this calendar year, so over the next nine or 10 months or so. I think the one worth discussing today is Hexa.
Hexa, by implication, has got six different. Deals with whooping cough and polio. It's a very broad vaccine. Six different ingredients to deal with it. We've I'm happy to say that the WHO and SAHPRA, instead of treating us sequentially on this product, in other words, SAHPRA first, then WHO, they're looking at it in parallel. If it works as they propose, we should get registration at a similar time for both. That would be great for Aspen because the tender cycle for Hexa starts in calendar year 2027. We are trying to get this product registered with both SAHPRA and pre-qualified at WHO in this year. To be able to participate in a tender cycle in financial year 2027.
it's been a lot longer process than was initially intimated to us, and there was real urgency around vaccines at a point, particularly around COVID, but that urgency seems to have diminished together with funding for a lot of these type of institutions. we are finally seeing the wheels turning and hopefully we'll be talking about Hexa here in the not too distant future. we've spoken lots of numbers, lots of things, and I think sometimes it's easier just to put it on a very simple table to see where you are and to talk about what we trying to achieve as a group. what you'll see in the red there is we've lost a contract, it cost us ZAR 1 billion. Let's start at the start maybe.
We have ZAR 9.6 billion of EBITDA in financial year 2025, and we lost ZAR 1 billion in a contract, and we divested business in a region which has ZAR 2.6 billion of EBITDA. You start with your ZAR 9.6 billion and now you strip down to ZAR 6 billion. Being the ZAR 1 billion minus ZAR 1 billion, minus ZAR 2.6 billion. That's what the red column says. At the bottom it says, we are ZAR 3.6 billion down off our base. Our intention is to restore this business to its ZAR 9.6 billion of EBITDA by financial year 2027. That means we've got to make back ZAR 3.6 billion. What have we got? We had ZAR 9.6 billion. We lose ZAR 3.6 billion. We've got ZAR 6 billion.
To get to ZAR 9.6 billion, we need 60% growth. Straight EBITDA growth roughly. Of course, in our business, exchange rates are impactful. They're not gonna be that impactful on the absolute picture. Our idea is try and get as much of that back as we can get over the next period. What is, what are we, how does that work? In 2026, we will guide you that we expect our manufacturing revenue to be stable, that means we've made back the ZAR 1 billion we've lost in the contract. Okay? That's what we have to do to get that back. We will guide you that commercial pharma has double-digit growth. Remember now it's double-digit growth for business outside of APAC being the divested business.
You can, you can double up what you see in the first half, and you get to see where you are and you reasonably could have a number of ZAR 0.7 billion. Means we're hoping to get back ZAR 1.7 billion of that in financial, in this financial year, which then leaves us a balance of ZAR 1.9 billion for next year. We've guided you that steriles will get to EBITDA break even or better, and so by deduction, you've got ZAR 0.7 billion more in 2027, and that's driven by, one, annualized savings, but two, in new contracts. Commercial pharma is simply. Now you've got a balance, and your balance is actually the ZAR 1.2 billion that for 2027 that we now have to make up.
How are we gonna make up ZAR 1.2 billion? Where will the components of the ZAR 1.2 billion come from? We start with commercial pharmaceuticals. We've got base organic growth, and we expect GLP-1 growth. We've got South Africa, which is already tracking at a higher cadence in the last month of the month versus the first month. We are hopeful for some launches in sub-Saharan Africa, and we're hopeful for a generic launch, particularly in Canada, should be the most impactful if achieved in financial year 2027. In addition, what is new to us and has recently been completed is we also know we've got an extra ZAR 300 million of EBITDA in our French facility.
Hopefully between all of those, we capture a good portion of the ZAR 1.2 billion. It will give you a sense of where we're tracking to get to. Whatever number we get to, remember this excludes anything out of the divested businesses. You will have a business with EBITDA, very high EBITDA, hopefully approaching ZAR 9.6 billion, and you'll have no debt and probably have cash. So that's the goal for us as a business. I think it's just simple if you get lots of numbers thrown at you, a simple table can assist with that. And so that's our, that's the push for earnings and earnings growth. I wanna come to the sum of parts and the free cash flows.
This unlock, and obviously it's all dependent on approval. This divestment gives us a lot of balance sheet flexibility and we've continue. The base business will continue to drive cash and profitability. Why did we do it? Well, one, I gave you reasons up front, it was a compelling valuation, it leaves us with negligible debt and consequently a lot of balance sheet flexibility. The remaining part of the business is focused on our faster-growing emerging markets. When you look at the growth engines, I've told you, we've spoken about what drives our earnings growth will be manufacturing, which is not in the region, and GLP-1 rollout. Those GLP-1 rollouts are not in this region initially either because the biggest market's Australia, the patent sometime in the 2030s.
We have our growth engines off a smaller base profitability. If you take the multiple that we got here, which is over 11x EBITDA, if you take that multiple and you put it across commercial pharmaceuticals, then, you get, it's way beyond our total market capitalization. For that reason, we believe that the commercial pharma is undervalued. You know, our faster-growing businesses must surely carry a minimum EBITDA of this one. Moving Steriles to a positive EBITDA, when we look at Aspen and people, you see analysts say, "We ascribe an EBITDA to Aspen multiple of 7." As I told you earlier, what that does is it means that there's a negative applied to our Sterile business. We completely disagree with that.
Our sterile business is very valuable. We've got unbelievable assets, and they're valuable. It's not if, but when. What we do is we take the heat out of it by getting them profitable, we don't agree. Everyone's entitled to their own value. I'm not telling you how to value. I'm just telling you we as a management team how we look at it. While there's that disjunct in value, we have to continue to look for opportunities to further unlock value. Doesn't make sense for shareholders if the value remains trapped. We will continue to look for opportunities to unlock value in the business. What drives free cash flow and improving free cash flow is, one, you've got increased earnings coming forward out of organic earnings.
You've got declining CapEx, which Sean has shown you, that decline will maintain. Our growth drivers, the GLP-1s and our manufacturing sterile facilities don't come with extra. We've made these investments in the past, that doesn't drive further CapEx needed for the growth. As you've seen, we need this reduced capital, working capital investment. This is interesting because we want to show you the consequences of what we've divested. Much of this will be in a circular when it comes out, if not all of this. Here's the operational impact of the divestment of APAC. As I said, it's material. The revenues are about ZAR 8 billion, the EBITDA from 2023 was about ZAR 3 billion. It's declined to about 2 point...
Sorry, AUD 3 billion goes to AUD 2.6 billion in 2025. For all intents and purposes, this year it would be about AUD 2.3 billion. Some of that's currency movements in there. The Australian currency has not been strong over that period. The reason I give you AUD 2.3 for this year is that in H1, which we've had, H1 in the region is stronger than H2. Almost all that profit's in commercial pharma, and you'll see it's got good cash flows, but that cash received will be offset against outstanding debt.
What is interesting probably, just to give you a sense of the relative growth of some of the emerging markets to this region, is when you look at the growth rate percentages, and that table, the table at the sort of bottom there, you'll see we reported a 6% growth in EBITDA in reported terms, so that's with currency all in. If we look at it, we achieved operationally, it was 11%. If we take this region out, which is what you'll see at the end of this period, the growth jumps from reported from 6% - 13%, and in constant exchange rate, it goes from 11% - 16%.
If we were showing you these accounts with Australia divested, you would have seen reported earnings growth of 13% growing at a constant exchange rate to 16%. It's, it is material, generates a lot of cash, et cetera, but clearly in these you'll see was a bit dilutive to the overall growth of the business. Now we get to guidance. We had a lot of debates about guidance, whole business, continuing operations, discontinuing. We tried to make it as sort of understandable as we could. If we talk about guidance here, 2026, we expect the commercial pharma business to retain the single-digit growth in revenue, mid-single, and the double-digit constant exchange rate EBITDA growth.
We expect higher margins to persist and will be higher than prior year in commercial pharma. As I discussed earlier, manufacturing we expect to be in line with the prior year, which means we have to recoup. To achieve this, we have to recoup the ZAR 1 billion contribution and we expect to achieve that obviously through the operational improvements across the business. We are absolutely focused on driving a positive financial 2027 to have our Steriles business into a positive EBITDA and cash flows, and a lot of that is the annualized savings, insulin ramp up, and now we've got these increased volumes coming through NDB as well. What does all of that turn into in terms of financial guidance?
We expect double-digit growth in normalized HEPS, which Sean has taken you through. We expect EBITDA to be double, at least double what we achieved in the first half. That's driven, as Sean showed you, by a much stronger second half of this year versus the prior year. We have stronger free cash flows. Our operating cash flows will exceed 100%, and they've traditionally we've done that for decades. There's CapEx reduction, which Sean showed you on his slide, which would continue, and the low working capital investments. Tax is relatively stable, and we... You know, with this transition closed, we would have extinguished our debt in total or nearly all of the debts, in total. Of course, we cannot tell you about currencies.
Two days ago, we would've told you a different story about the dollar currency to today. You know, while there are missiles flying, we are a global business, and we are very impacted by global events as we've seen over the years. With that, I think that's. Is that my last slide? Yeah, that is my last slide. That's our story. Thank you. Thank you for your listening and appreciate, and hopefully there's a fair bit of clarity in what we're doing. If there's one thing you get out, I hope you get out of this, is that we've taken firm control over the controllables and try to decrease uncontrollables in the business. Thanks, Ray.
Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, Sean. Thank you. If we can take some questions from the floor, and then we'll go to the webcast. Lurisha over there, please.
Thanks. Morning, Sean and Stephen. Thank you for the presentation. Sorry, I'm Lurisha Chetty from Ashburton Investments. Just a question on the commercial pharma business. Revenue was obviously quite positively impacted by the GLP-1s commercialization in the South African market. Can you give us a sense of what that growth was ex that number? Maybe further to that, there is talk, as you say, of generics starting to come into emerging markets in 2026 and 2027. How do you see that impacting your GLP-1s business in SA, provided the regulatory authority actually gets around to approving these guys?
The GLP-1 situation in South Africa, it's quite interesting and interesting dynamic because we will have a generic semaglutide in the market as well. The positioning, the Mounjaro patent's a long, long way away. Mounjaro is the most expensive product in the market, much more expensive than the other products, and people buy Mounjaro. The generics come against the second and third products, Ozempic and Wegovy, and they are expected to impact those products. Anybody who wanted to buy a cheaper product would not be buying Mounjaro. They'd buy one of the other branded products because they're cheaper. I firmly believe that the lower priced products will actually bring in completely different set of users. There are a whole lot of people that can't spend ZAR 3,000, ZAR 5,000, ZAR 6,000 a month.
They just can't in the South African environment, in any environment. You're gonna get very different users. I mean, if we get it as affordable as we hope to, you know, this could be something that gets even into the public sector of South Africa. We're really pushing hard on that affordability, but I actually believe there's a completely different patient profile for those two products. Okay. Yes. I listened to you, Mohammed.
Hi, Sean.
I heard you last time. He gave me a hard buddy one-on-one last time. Yeah. I hope you're pleased.
Well, just for everybody else, it's Mohammedhussen Dunat from Mazi Asset Management. Just a question on the balance sheet, which didn't come up on the slides. You indicated the NAV for the APAC business was ZAR 21 billion. In your group equity or your group NAV is ZAR 81 billion. Of that remaining ZAR 60 billion, how do you split that between commercial pharma and manufacturing?
In terms of balance sheet value?
NAV equity.
NAV. Yeah, I think manufacturing's probably... Sure, I'm gonna give it a go, but I think it's... You know, we don't really... 'Cause remember our manufacturing doesn't just service manufacturing, it also services our commercial pharma business. We don't actually go and say, "Well, manufacturing assets only service manufacturing profit and commercial." That split of assets is not just manufacturing. I think it would be probably an unfair number to quote. I think your big assets in manufacturing are in your property, plant, and equipment, and those are probably ZAR 20 billion odd, I would guess.
I think there's like a 60-20-
Cause you've got a lot of IP in the commercial pharma business. Even with the APAC out, you've still got about ZAR 50 billion, I think, of IP. Obviously you've got all your other assets and liabilities sitting in there as well.
Okay. No, that's helpful. I mean, you focus a lot on EBITDA. How much time and attention do you focus on return on invested capital? That has shown a concerning declining trend over many years. Do you look at it separately for the commercial division and the manufacturing division, and the group as a whole, or how do you look at that?
I understand there's a formula. I understand the formula doesn't look good. We understand that internally. You've also gotta understand that Aspen might not fit into every formula model you create because, as I said to you, we haven't taken a cent from shareholders. We've got no debt at the end of all of this. Yet we've created so much value. What is not taken account in any formulas is we do buy and sell businesses. I mean, we're not very different to private equity in a lot of what we do. Within every couple of years, every year, we make some fairly significant divestment sales. What we. I, but the return on invested capital is not acceptable. I absolutely agree with you. Can't argue with you on that.
It is a problem when you lose ZAR 1.7 billion on ZAR 20 billion of assets. Say, just using Sean's numbers. I'm talking about manufacturing. That needs to change. As soon as you change that, then a lot of your formulas change. You will find that this divestment will result in an improvement on the return on invested. Sorry, Sean, this is your section.
Yeah, no.
Are you happy? Okay. Sorry. Will result in improvement on return on invested capital. I agree with you. You know, it's something one has to focus on. I don't think that you should just put a unilateral formula. If we took out of the business, these assets are incubating. It's like taking an R&D business and saying, "Oh, you're not getting a return on these assets." You know? If we don't get a return, then yeah, you're right. If we going from minus 1.7 to 0 to + 1.7, you're gonna get a very different return on those, call 'em manufacturing assets. I know Sean said that they split. That should be good. You get a good sense.
You know, we're also not in the industry where you can buy things at 3x EBITDA or 2x. We just don't have those type of luxuries. When we sell, we also don't sell at those type of luxuries. If you take 11.4-11.5x EBITDA, whatever we achieved in the Australian divestment, you take off the depreciation tax, after tax, put it over what we've got. You see we're getting. The return is high as well. I don't. I think formulas are very important, and they stabilize. I think you've also got to try and understand what the adjustments under that are.
Okay, this will be the last one for me. On that question is what we're trying to understand is the trend in the return on invested capital. Has it been stable for commercial pharma, and has the investment in manufacturing dragged it down? That's what you're trying to understand.
Yes.
If you could give us a split in the assets between the divisions, it would be very helpful for the market to better understand the group and where the value lies.
Yeah, agreed. I hear where you're coming from. It's just we've got split assets. You know, we've got a factory in, say, take South Africa. It makes for our South African business, and it also makes for manufacturing. Look, we could do that exercise for you and we could try and work out how we split that out, Sean. I've committed Sean to that, and we could we can have a look at that.
Somebody's waiting for it.
I'm worried he's gonna sell it before you get it. Okay.
Okay.
Oh, wait. Sorry. There's one behind. Sorry.
Good morning. My name is Meline. I'm from ABSA. I look after the healthcare sector. Aspen's one of my clients. Have a very good relationship with Crispin. I just wanted to know, based on the sale of the APAC business, is the full proceeds going towards, basically reducing your debt, or will be some form of special dividend as well?
I think where we are on this, and I mean, I don't think you have to be Nostradamus to work out what we're telling you. We're saying, "Okay, get the money." We first wanna get the money, put it in the bank, have a look at it for a while. Haven't seen a positive on an Aspen bank account for 30 years, okay? We might just do a little have a glance and see it. Okay, looks quite nice up there. Then to say to ourselves, "Okay, what do you do with the money?" This is something that we'd have to run through the board, but you're asking me, okay? I've got to say to you, I'm telling you that there's a problem with the sum of parts. The value of the company is not represented. The.
it obviously makes sense to give shareholders back money and that's happening. Through a buyback or to buy the shares back, to me that's a logical answer. I've got lots of people on the board who've all got ideas and all much smarter than me on all of these type of things. Just logically, it makes sense. You've got no debt. You're generating a lot of cash. If your share price stays where it is, and you don't believe it represents value, and you can show it in any metrics you want. You just say, "Here's the commercial pharmaceutical business together with the API business, and this is a fair multiple.
Here's the sterile business, which people have put a negative on, but we think is very valuable. You add that together, you'll come to a number, you divide it by the number of shares, and it's very different to your share price. You've got to say to yourself, "Well, you know, it's gotta be something I've got to recommend." We need to be looking at how we return money to shareholders, absolutely. There's another one there. You know, we don't have to make massive acquisitions. If we just focus on what we've got in front of us, we've spent our money. We now need to deliver on the assets we've spent money on, fix all Mohamed's formulas for him, and we grow your business organically.
Why would you want to go and be spending a whole lot of cash when you've got all that growth underneath there?
Hi, Stephen, Steve Meintjes from Abax. I'm just a bit confused. In the first slide, you show Adjusted EBITDA of just over ZAR 5 billion, but then in your guidance, you say you'll at least double the first half normalized EBITDA.
Three-point-eight
... 3.8.
I gave you continuing operations, Steve.
Is that just the continuing? Okay.
That's just continuing. I gave guidance on continuing because it's.
Sure
... you know, if it's gone, it's gone. Just a point made here. We showed you EBITDA of ZAR 5.1 billion for the whole business. That included the APAC divestment.
Mm.
If you take out the number, which is about 1.2 for.
Yeah
... half of the APAC divestment, you'll get to 3.8. That is what we showed you continuing. To me, if I'm sitting in your shoes, Steve, that's what I'm looking at. I'm sitting here, I'm saying, "I've got 3.8 x 2. That's what I've got, and it's debt-free." That's for this year, and you know, I gave you a table of what we hope to achieve for 2027. Okay, cool.
Stephen Saad. There are a couple of questions that have come through, but just in the interest of time, I'm consolidating a few of them speaking about your priorities in terms of capital allocation, and I think that you've just answered that. Zintle from Mazi Asset Management, she wants to know what the insulin contract regulatory approval entails and whether the ZAR 300 million will be this year. I think you did say it was in FY 2027.
That's not to do with insulin, so let's just be clear.
Yeah.
There's an insulin contract that has value, we're hoping that the sales, say, in financial 2027 of insulin could be ZAR 1 billion. We also saying that in independent, that's in our South African facility. In addition to what we've told you, there's a further ZAR 300 million that we expect out of our French facility. That's EBITDA, it's not turnover.
Mm.
That's EBITDA.
Okay. She also wants to know whether you can split out the Mounjaro revenue in South Africa. I don't know if that's something that.
Yeah, we've given guidance of ZAR 1.3 billion, and you sort of can take sort of half, little bit less than half or something like that.
Right. Then I think the last one over here is just in terms of the commercial relationship with Dr. Reddy's in the GLP-1, so.
Yeah. We've very close relationship with Dr. Reddy's. We identified them as a key strategic partner. Aspen has real strengths in peptides. Remember, we've got an API business that deals... Sorry. GLP-1s, what goes into GLP-1s are peptides. And we have real strengths in peptides as a business. We've got a factory that makes peptides, not those particular ones, but makes peptides. We went to see the field of players who had the right active ingredient, and we identified Dr. Reddy's as a key partner for Aspen. We are key partner with them. We, we have access to IP through them, and other things. Yeah, I think, Was the question, did that answer the question?
Mm-hmm.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. I think that's, gonna have to bring the presentation to a close. Thank you very much, for attending this morning and for the participation both here and online. Rendani, thank you very much for having us.
Thank you.