Good morning, everyone. My name is Nerina Bodasing, and I would like to welcome you to Omnia's financial results for the six months ended 30th September 2024. Before we begin proceedings, I'd just like to provide you with some housekeeping rules. Our bathrooms are located at the exit of this room to your right, and in case of emergency, please kindly walk calmly through our entrance and into the parking area where our safety officials will provide you with further guidance. As you know, safety is a key priority for Omnia, and I would therefore like to call upon Mxolisi Siwundla, who is our lead for strategy, to come and share a safety moment.
Good morning, everyone in the room, and good afternoon and good evening to those watching us from across the world. Before I start with the safety moment, I just want to share that no one was harmed in the preparation of these results, whether physically, mentally, psychologically, or otherwise. It was often very hard work that went into it. You'll notice we're now publishing results two weeks earlier than in the past, so there was lots of robust engagement. But again, we met our commitment of zero harm. But today, I want to check in on safety, on sleep. We know that Omnia is quite a high-performance environment. You see it in the work ethic of our colleagues. You'll see it in the results that Stephan and Seelan are going to take you through. And often, high performance comes with sacrifice, and that sacrifice is sometimes on sleep.
But I just want to remind you today that often, when you're very fatigued, it's more productive and more safe to spend an hour sleeping than an hour continuing to work. And of course, you can find lots of advice on the internet around what you can do to increase the quality of your sleep, including exercising daily, getting sun exposure, eating healthily, and all those things. But if you are like my son, who turns seven months old today, maybe you can get yourself a sleepy sheep with white noise that will help you with your quality sleep. Thank you.
Thank you, Mx. On to today's agenda. Seelan Gobalsamy, our CEO, will take you through the group's performance for the past six months. Ditebogo Malatsi, our Executive for Safety and Sustainability, will take you through our safety and ESG performance. And Stephan Serfontein, our Finance Director, will take you through the details on the financials. Seelan will then conclude and open the floor to questions. I will now hand over to Seelan.
Thank you, Nerina and Mx. We owe you a thank you for that great safety moment. It's something that's very important and something we can all learn from. Thank you very much. Good morning to all of you in the room, and good day to all of you on the line dialing in. Thank you for attending our half-year results. It's a privilege to be standing here and presenting them again and thank you to all the finance teams and the management teams who worked so hard over the weekends and the evenings to get the results out. I think you were saying 10 days sooner, so the benchmark is set, so we'll go 10 days sooner the next time round. I can see our auditors frowning, but let me start by saying no company will be successful and sustainable without a deep purpose.
So we start all of our presentations speaking about safety and speaking about our purpose. I think it seemed important for us to keep reminding all of you and reminding ourselves of our purpose. We aspire to food security, mineral extraction, which drives economic growth and drives life globally. And we do that in a sustainable way to make sure we leave the planet and the world a better place and do it in a way that's safe. And no fertilizer, no explosives, or no chemicals is more important to us than someone's harm, any laceration, or any fatality. We would happily stop any of our plants, not make profit, to ensure that our people are safe and what we do is done the right way for the environment and for all of our stakeholders.
So if we just step back and tell you our north and where we've been going as a business, this slide has not changed from year-end. This is our half-year slide, and we debated whether we change it or not, and we decided not to. In essence, our business has been on a journey for the last few years to stabilize and fix, and that's long gone and behind us. And now we've been focusing on protecting our businesses, growing our businesses, enhancing our diversification, investing in our value propositions. And what we're going to show you today is really some of the benefits of that and how that has resulted in us growing our earnings, enhancing our resilience, and benefiting from this diversification, agile, and more robust processes we've got in our business.
We've done that in a way that has been underpinned by a very disciplined capital allocation and a very disciplined capital framework. You will hold us to account when you look at our working capital, our capital spend, our cash generation, and the strength of our balance sheet, which we'll get to a little bit later. I think it's very pleasing to see how our international businesses have performed and how our Agri and our Mining business have delivered in a very complex, volatile macro environment. What has all of this resulted in is a decrease in our RCRs, and I don't think we will ever sit and say we've arrived from a safety perspective. We always have a lot more to do there. We saw our revenue up 5%, just under ZAR 11 billion. Our operating profit up 17% to ZAR 802 million.
Our working capital slightly down, while our volumes and our stock levels are up, and a very strong cash balance at half-year. For those of you who know the company for a long time, you know that half-year is generally when we have a higher working capital and a higher cash draw. So it's very pleasing to see the cash balance where it is. How was that performed, or how was that delivered? Where did this performance come from? A very, very strong performance from our Mining business. I think you're seeing again the story of our Mining business growing, growing locally and growing globally. You see that benefit coming through, enhancing our diversification and our ability to deliver in different volatile, changing environments.
What we're also showing is some very strong volumes from our South African agriculture business, and our agriculture business also benefiting from a relatively stable commodity price environment relative to the prior year. Very strong performance in that South African business. I guess that's been offset a little bit by significant headwinds in our agriculture SADC business, and Stephan will talk a little bit about that later. It's been lifted by some of the value generated in our AgriBio business. Overall, our Chemicals, our Protea business still performs below our expectations and behind plan. Obviously, that's a much smaller part of our group as we've been refocusing our attention onto mining and agriculture. What you will also see is the continued discipline around capital and cash management and a very strong balance sheet as we go into the second half of the year.
So I'm going to pause there. Ditebogo is going to take us through our safety and ESG slides, and then I will come back to give you a bit more detail. Thank you.
Thank you, Seelan. And good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everybody that I haven't seen yet. So Seelan shared our purpose, and from a safety and ESG perspective, our North Star remains zero harm. And this is saying that we want to care for our people and protect our people. We want to protect the planet. And from a governance perspective, it's doing the right thing. So that's really the sum of our safety and ESG strategy. From a performance perspective, we use two measures to see how we're doing from a safety perspective. We have what we call our recordable case rate, and this essentially measures the recordable injuries in our environment. A good performance here is zero because, like I said, we don't want to hurt anybody. The second being what we call our FER, which is fires, explosions, and releases.
This is a measure of our process safety performance. This essentially speaks to the effective management of our manufacturing operations and engineering standards. What we see is that overall, Omnia's performance has improved both from an RCR and FER perspective. We do recognize, however, that there has been a bit of a regression in our agriculture business. A lot of this is due to safety incidents that we experienced in the first half in Agri RSA and SADC. The majority of this is concerned specifically around road safety. A lot of this is the result of severe weather conditions, some of the challenging infrastructures that we need to work through, and general behavior of road users. With this said, what the management team is saying is we remain committed to zero harm.
And what we've done in the first half of the year as well is gone back to the board to say our RCR limit, so that is the cap, is 0.35 for the business. This is also built into our short-term and long-term incentives. In order for us to show commitment for continuous improvement, we've reduced this limit from 0.35 to 0.25. So I guess moving forward, our management team has to focus on continuously improving the way that we work, the way that our people show up in order to ensure that we don't have any injuries on our sites. From a protecting the planet perspective, we operate in primary sectors and have positive impacts on people. But our operations can also have a negative impact on the environment, and we realize that.
We have, over the past three years, three to 10 years, invested in a range of technologies to ensure that we retain security of clean air, water, and access to energy for our communities, and you see this in the results that we're showing here with our carbon intensity over the years improving, the output from our solar generation improving, and the water that we recycle and reuse in our processes as well improving, and we continue to find new and different ways of actually reusing water in our operations. From a mining perspective, we've got our used oil that we collect and reuse in our mulching. The impact of that is that you've got used oil that could have potentially gone to contaminate drinking water for communities.
Just to put it into perspective, that 18 ML, each liter of oil, has the potential of polluting up to 1 million L of water. I think that's just to say, from a water perspective, and we know what an issue it's been. I mean, in Joburg, in the past week alone, it's been such a big issue. We need to do as much as we can, and we continue to invest to do as much as we can to reuse water in our operations. Lastly, in addition to the protection of our people from a safety perspective and the protection of the environment, we've also invested in and continue to invest in the development and the growth of our people. We have had several programs that help us identify talent from university students. We bring them in as interns and graduates.
We also have leadership and development programs all the way from our junior management to executive management. What this helps us with is ensuring that our purpose, our values, our behaviors, the way that we do things is consistent across our different leadership levels. On the top left-hand corner there, what we've done this year, or we did three years ago, is say that we want our staff members to participate in the value that they help us to create for our customers, help us to create for other stakeholders. About three years ago, over time, the shares were allocated to all members of staff. The rand shares were allocated to all members of staff. This year, the first portion of that actually vested with ZAR 45 million being shared with our staff members.
And this is just testament to Omnia saying, "We do the right thing. When we commit, we actually execute." I think we do know that there's been a number of staff share schemes that don't end well. And I think this is a feather in the cap of Omnia, its management and its staff, to say, "A, we've been able to increase value for our stakeholders, increase value for our shareholders, but also give back to the employees that show up every day and help us with this value." And then I'm going to hand back over to Seelan to give us our business update before we go to our financial section.
Thanks, Ditebogo, and thank you to you and your team for all the hard work and effort you put into making sure we do what we do in a responsible, a caring, and a careful way. It's a very important part of our business to make sure that what we do is done responsibly. Thank you.
So coming back to our results, if I just start off by sharing a little bit of the macro environment we operated in, I think the last six months remained an environment which was complex, an environment which was plagued with a chunk of uncertainty, and an environment which forced us to continue on our drive of being agile, of thinking about how we invest our capital, our working capital, our stock, and how we manage our business differently to the way we managed it in the last six months or the six months prior to that. We entered this year knowing that there were a number of elections happening across the world, and we expected things to impact us in various ways. We also knew that the commodity cycle had gone through a massive uplift.
It then had some significant declines in the last periods, and we now entered into a cycle which was relatively stable and flat compared to the prior year, and we needed to perform and ensure we deliver and grow in that environment. More locally in SADC, SADC was plagued by a very significant drought, some significant social-political issues, and some very deep currency fluctuations and challenges, and you'll see the impact of that in our businesses, and we'll tell you how we dealt with that as well. Climate change, I guess, was not just in SADC, but we also saw a drought in Brazil, which we had to agilely consider and think about how we operate there, and we saw more positive agronomic conditions in South Africa, and we'll talk a little bit about that later. Climate change will certainly be with us going forward.
So we know that we will have to continuously enhance the redundancy in our supply chain, improve our infrastructure and our ability to move product around, and to enhance some of our storage facilities, which you'll see some of the investments we've made. And I guess that then leads me right into the infrastructure issues we faced in South Africa and the rest of the continent. Ditebogo spoke a little bit about water. So we've got a few initiatives on the go there. You would recognize that a few years ago, when we saw the issues of Eskom coming, we invested in some of our solar plants, and there's another phase of that being done now. But we've also invested in rail wagons, road transport, and had to change the way we think about stock management and input. And you'll see a chunk of that coming through.
I guess the main impact of this is what you're seeing is that Omnia continues to deliver in volatile, changing commodity and macro environments. We've built strong resilience in our company. And the diversification between our agri and our Mining business, coupled with our international diversification of having businesses in SADC, West Africa, South Africa, Indonesia, Canada, our AgriBio business brings another level of diversity, which ensures that as these commodity prices have changed, you see us continuously deliver our GPs and continuously deliver our OPs. It's testament to the hard work and the efforts of our teams, the investments we've made in our supply chain and our manufacturing, and I guess the very deliberate capital allocation decisions we made to where we put our capital and where we don't put our capital. So I think a very pleasing performance in a tough backdrop. What did we deliver?
I said earlier, revenue up 5% to just under ZAR 11 billion, gross profit up 15% to just under ZAR 2.5 billion, operating profit up 17% to ZAR 802 million. Our operating margin up, a good performance at a half-year level, obviously. There's still another six months to come. Our headline earnings per share is two measures there, roughly up 2%. Stephan will talk a bit further in a chunk of detail about a number of these indicators. Our net cash position very strong at half-year, and that's after paying the ordinary and the special dividend we did, which came through in this period. Working capital very well managed. Our return on equity, slightly lower than the half-year period last year. We've got a slide on that, and we can talk about that a little bit later.
From a margin perspective, and I think when we look at our performance as a management team, there's certain key indicators that we look at and we judge ourselves by. And a lot of those indicators are the same indicators we talked to you about. So margin is one of them. And I'll start maybe with the part that we're not so proud of. Our Chemicals business still faces significant headwinds and performs below our expectation. I think what is pleasing is our Chemicals business is a much smaller part of the overall Omnia Group. So Chemicals revenue is about ZAR 1 billion in the ZAR 11 billion turnover. So Chemicals has a chunk of restructure costs in there, which is taken into a loss. However, we still believe that that business needs more restructure. That business will still face significant headwinds in the South African environment.
That sector is plagued by a number of manufacturers that haven't got going yet, and I was saying earlier this morning to our team, we would really like the positivity we're seeing from the government of national unity to actually make its way into the manufacturing sector, to make its way into investment, to make its way into employment, and then we will see the uplift in this manufacturing Chemicals business. I guess our other two core businesses, so those are the businesses where we've been allocating capital to, the businesses we've been focusing on, the businesses that have been growing. Our other two businesses perform very strongly. I will go into the details of both. Our Mining business, by far, the star performer, growing locally and internationally, growing from a chemicals perspective and an explosives perspective.
And a lot of the investments we've made over the years in our partnerships abroad taking a very good flight. Strong contract wins, and Stephan will talk about that a little bit later. So we've won new contracts in Indonesia. We've won new contracts in South Africa that have started coming through, but actually will come through in the second half, and the full annual benefit will be in the business next year. And we've seen some incredible contract wins and growth out of mining chemicals in Namibia. So very, very strong performance in our Mining business, and we'll talk a little bit further about that just now. From an agriculture perspective, there are three stories to tell there, and we're going to give you a bit more disclosure a little later. Let me start with the furthest one, our humates business and our business in Australia and Brazil.
The humates business has picked up back to normality. It's grown in volumes by 15%. We'll show you that half-year on half-year just now. Our SADC business, our agriculture business in SADC has performed very badly. It's been significantly impacted by the drought, currency, and regulatory issues in Zimbabwe and a number of the territories, Zambia, Mozambique, and others, and our South African business has performed incredibly well, so good volumes in South Africa, nice uptick in profits in South Africa. And I guess when I speak again, I can hear this diversification benefit of having different territories and different businesses come out, so even though we had the SADC business face significant headwinds and we had the Chemicals business perform below expectations, our Agri segment rises in margin and rises in profit, and our group margin goes up at half-year.
Half-year is obviously not. We don't tap ourselves on the back for our half-year performance, but I guess what it's showing is our ability to deliver and the robust management of our business during this period. If I press forward, so just to give you a little bit more detail then into our manufacturing capabilities, very, very strong performances in our plants. We show you volumes, good volumes in our nitric acid plants. Most of you know those are the plants where the ammonia starts, goes in, and then it goes into fertilizer and explosives eventually. Good ammonia derivative sales again, and this is a business we started a few years ago to sell some of our ammonia derivative products into the explosives market locally and globally.
Great performance there, and we're showing you over a five-year period, we've gone from 100 units- 371 units, and in this half-year, we've already done 194 units of value. So great support by our supply chain, our manufacturing teams, and our plants. And we see this in actual customer wins in our business where customers see and understand the redundancy of our supply, and that has been converted into long-term offtake agreements and long-term sales for our BME business. We also have to watch our utility spend because I think if you look at your, I'm not sure how many of you look at your bills at home for electricity and water and others, and it's quite a big part of our expenses nowadays.
So our team have to look very carefully on the efficiency of our utility spend, the projects we've got underway to build solar, reverse osmosis, and the efficiency of our plants, and we measure various items there, the water use efficiency, the energy use efficiency, and Ditebogo spoke in a bit about that, and our ability to use used oil instead of clean oil, which is also better for the environment, it's better for our customers, and it's better for our cost base. The other KPI we look at is our net working capital, and yet again, our net working capital is being managed to model. What we see here is a reduction in working capital in our Agri business and an increase in working capital in our Mining business due to the growth, and we're pretty pleased with the performance there.
Our working capital has done what it's done, while our stock and our volume of stock that we're holding has gone up a little bit. And you'd remember last year this time, we held a lot less stock because we had a different view of commodity prices. And I think what this speaks to is the incredible capability of our supply demand planning teams to work out when to buy, when to produce, and how much we need to have to sell. Our head of sales and marketing for Agri often uses the phrase, "We're living more and more hand-to-mouth." And I guess hand-to-mouth means our working capital comes down. It causes a little bit more gray hairs or baldness for all of us, but it demonstrates our ability to be agile. It demonstrates our ability to understand, forecast, and predict what the environment would do and look like.
Just around capital itself, so all of these factors actually impact cash. Our margin is our cash profits. Our working capital can be a big problem in cash if we get that wrong. I guess capital itself, we've put a very clear, firm, robust capital allocation plan, and you'll be pleased to see that this never changes. We do this in a very disciplined manner when we assess projects, when we assess distribution. What we did do at year-end was declare an ordinary and a special dividend, and we continue to generate strong cash, and we continue to deploy that cash very effectively in a very responsible way, and we will show you a little bit more about that just now. I'm going to hand over to Stephan, and he's going to just double-click into the results itself.
So we'll walk through the income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement, and each business unit, how it's performed, and then I'll come back and touch on some of our growth factors. I'll go a little bit deeper into cash and a little bit deeper into the outlook for the coming period. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Seelan. Good morning to all our board members, shareholders, and I think all our stakeholders from around the world. Maybe just before we jump into the financial numbers, just a quick update on the SARS matter. Since we reported as at the end of June, so we're still busy with the ADR process, but we're nearing the completion of the ADR process, and if we can't find a mutual agreement in the ADR process, that will result in other considerations in the form of the MAP process, which is under the double tax agreement, as well as adjudicating by the courts, but we'll keep our shareholders updated on the developments.
Maybe just on the numbers, just before we jump into the details, if I look holistically at the numbers, Seelan touched on it, the strong performance for the half-year, driven by the robust volume growth, as we can see coming out of our Mining business. Also, strong volume growth from our Agriculture SA business. However, I suppose this performance was negatively impacted by the rest of Africa. Our shareholders will see we've added some additional disclosures on our segments, as well as our Chemicals businesses, which negatively affected our results. But overall, notwithstanding that, if I look at all of it baked in, still the operating profit grew by 17%, which is still supported by the operational efficiencies coming through, as well as enhanced margins.
Then if I maybe just jump into some of the details more specifically, revenue was up 5%, driven by the higher contribution from the mining side as well as the chemical side. What we can see from a gross profit point of view, gross profit was up 15%, and that was due to the strong volume support on sales in Agri SA, and that's in line in connection with a relatively stable price environment. Shareholders maybe just in the comparative period, we had a significant decline in quarter one of the prior period on commodity prices that really affected the gross profits coming through the business. We can also see there was support from production efficiencies coming out of Mining RSA, and we spoke about the robust performance in Mining International.
Then maybe just further down in the income statement, distribution and admin expenses, the increase there is mainly due to investment in people and infrastructure to support our operational growth, mostly in our Mining International segment. And we've also seen some restructuring costs, site loads, and recruiting costs, as Seelan touched on, coming through our African businesses. The net operating other income increased, mostly due to foreign exchange movements and fair value adjustments coming through our cell captive on the insurance side. And then on the net impairment losses on the financial assets, that's mostly due to the movement in our ECL adjustments or expected credit loss adjustments, and that's coming from our Agri businesses in Africa due to the challenges in their operating environment.
The shared profits from investments, that's from our Indonesia joint venture, and we've seen the prior period only included four months, but we've seen nice growth coming out of that venture in Indonesia, and I'll touch on it with new contracts coming in as well. From a net finance expense point of view, relative to smaller income in the comparative period, that's twofold, mostly due to the high use of supply chain finance to support the higher inventory levels, as Seelan mentioned already, as well as reduced trade receivables incomes from the lower trading activity in the agriculture Africa businesses.
From an effective tax rate point of view, you will see the effective tax rate for the six months relative to the prior six months increased from 30% to just over 35%, and that's mainly due to the recognition of a provision we gave to our shareholders a bit more disclosure at the end on the ZIMRA matter. We provided an accrual for that, and that resulted in a 4.6 impact in the effective tax rate. Overall, a really strong performance for the six months. If we maybe just dive into some of the more details, specifically in agriculture firstly, agriculture SA, we've seen a significant increase in the profitability, and that was supported by the strong volume performance, which was offset by slightly lower prices we've seen in the South African environment.
The profitability, as I mentioned, is due to the relatively stable commodity price environment compared to the comparative period where we saw a sharp decline in commodity price in quarter one of FY 2024. We've also seen, through our manufacturing and supply chain which supported these increased volumes, efficiencies which assisted in improving margin extraction and also production recoveries relative to our comparative period. If you look at the rest of Africa, as we disclose it now in our segment, Seelan touched on it, a disappointing performance across the region. That is due to the drought playing out across Zimbabwe, Zambia, as well as into Mozambique as well. We've also, due to some of those challenges, de-risked some of the supply chain by moving that into South Africa as well as into Namibia.
And then, as we also mentioned in our market collateral, we're also implementing operating model changes to be more agile in our African environment due to these challenges that our businesses face. From an Agriculture International point of view, a really strong performance coming out of Australia. We've seen increased volumes, as Seelan mentioned, on the humates side. We've taken into account the prior period. We had operational challenges at some of our key customers. That has been restored now as well. Quite pleasing to see we've got also new customers coming on board, specifically in China, which, a big chunk of that we'll only see coming through in the second half as well as into the years to follow after that. On the Australian and on the local side, we've also seen increased domestic growth, benefited from our increased distribution footprint in the region.
Overall, if we look at the strong performance out of Australia, that was offset by some of the challenges faced specifically in Brazil. We've seen in Brazil that the worst or severe drought that they've seen in the last 70 years, which negatively affected selling prices, as well as resulted in additional currency fluctuations playing out within Brazil, which negatively affected our selling prices. We also keep on mobilizing into the U.S., similar to what we've spoke to you last time around as well, as we maintain the U.S. as being a key growth area for this humate business. Then I suppose stepping forward to the mining side, really the pillar of our success, thought of our results. Just before I jump into the results, again, maintaining world-class RTR rate of zero, specifically within the Mining business.
A strong performance coming out of South Africa with revenue up, as well as operating profit being up. That was due to production efficiencies also, which assisted the margin increase, and we keep on capacitating that business for supporting the international growth as well. We spoke about also securing new contracts and contract wins in that business. Internationally, we've seen operating profits and margins up in excess of 25%. There was strong revenue growth and margin growth, as I mentioned. That's coming from our SADC operations into Namibia, as well as into Zambia and others, as well as at BME Metallurgy. That's previously our mining chemicals business, the rebranded business. That's seen a strong growth into the uranium side of the business. In West Africa, our margins improved as well as a result of the optimization efforts. In Indonesia, we still securing contracts.
All of those contracts have been seeded into the JV. We've also secured three new or additional contracts, and it's great to see how that venture is really starting to take shape. Canada negatively impacted the result in the mining side due to some frost challenges at a surface mining contract, but we continue to build infrastructure in Canada with our non-electric detonators plant in country, as it remains a key focus area for growth in our Mining business and maybe just touch on closing off the mining side with BME Metallurgy. As I mentioned, we've seen increased volumes throughout that business, the growth in the uranium side, as well as increased volumes on the ammonia derivative sales then maybe just closing out our segments, the chemical side. As we've already touched on, the segment Chemicals side had a disappointing performance for the six months.
They continue to face challenges from the macro environment point of view, as well as the subdued manufacturing demand. We've seen increases in sales volumes coming through the six months, and during the six months, we've also incurred certain restructuring costs, which actually resulted in the Chemical segment ending on operating loss for the six months. But the management teams remained focused on the efficiency drives, the cost drives, and the acceleration of the turnaround plan to restore the business for profitability. Then if we step forward to the balance sheet, still a strong financial position overall for the Omnia Group. The assets decreased slightly by 1%, most notably the lower cash balance. We've paid ZAR 1.2 billion in ordinary and special dividends during the six-month period, and we've also increased our inventory. So we had higher inventory stock levels offsetting that cash flow.
Maybe just something to note. I spoke earlier about the supply chain finance. We've increased the supply chain finance as well to balance the cash management in supporting the higher inventory levels. From a liability point of view, an increase by 5% overall from a liability point of view. As I mentioned, that's due to the increased supply chain finance that we use across the business to support the higher inventory levels. The equity overall decreased by 1%. That was due to the ordinary and special dividend payments that offset, obviously, the profitability generated during the period, as well as the continuation of the share repurchase program. And then maybe just stepping forward to the cash flows. If I look at the operating activities, first of all, cash generated from ops increased to ZAR 1.2 billion for the six-month period. Then we furthermore invested ZAR 530 million into working capital.
Just maybe some perspective into the higher inventory levels. As we mentioned, the comparative period, there was a delay in building up stock and buying and investing into inventory due to the declining commodity cycle that we've seen to manage the commodity price risk. Then from a finance expense point of view, as I mentioned earlier, that's due to the higher supply chain finance to manage the cash flow balance with high inventory levels as well. If we look at the investing cash flows, we continue to invest in our operations into our core businesses. We're investing in more reliability into our manufacturing capabilities and supply chain, and we're also adding intermediate storage capacity to manage additional risks. From an ESG projects point of view, maybe the key one to call out there is the increase in our solar capacity at Sasolburg as well.
Our international growth businesses, we continue to execute in investing in our international growth businesses. That's into Canada, Indonesia, and Australia. We also invest in certain SADC regions, mostly in our Mining International business due to new contract wins as well. Maybe just lastly, from a financing point of view, the biggest one to call out there, the outflows from a financing point of view, is due to the ordinary and special dividend payments to the amount of ZAR 1.2 billion during the six-month period, which was obviously significantly more double compared to the prior period. Still, if I look at it overall, a strong financial position for the Omnia Group and a good cash flow position as well and cash balance to support our future growth opportunities. I'll maybe just hand it back to Seelan for the more exciting growth opportunities.
Yeah, thank you, Stephan, and congratulations again for getting the results out so many days ahead of last year. I mean, if I were to just summarize the half year and then we look forward, I think what you're seeing is an incredibly strong performance of our business, underpinned by our disciplined capital allocation, the diversification of our earnings, and really the strategy that we're executing to do things in this disciplined manner, delivering the benefits we expected. I'm now going to talk about what's next, so when we did this presentation earlier this morning, I felt it was quite short.
We keep taking the delivery of the last six months as, even though it's quite good, we don't talk enough about it, and now we start talking about what's coming, what's the next six months going to look like, and where are we investing and what have we invested to continue on this growth trajectory, and then also what is worrying us, where are the areas where we have to do some more work, or we have to sharpen our pencils, or we have to get things a little bit better, so if I move forward, where will more growth come from, and what are we doing over the next six months, and how are we thinking about the environment and our business?
I think the first thing we will do is we will continue to invest in our core to ensure reliability to our customers, both in agriculture and in mining, and the team's done a few of these already. We've put an additional six road tankers on the ground to move ammonia around, and I think what you know and remember, we put out that supply chain chart of how ammonia moves. What we know is if there's a supply chain disruption and something goes wrong, it takes the plants down for a while, and we've been very deliberate about ensuring that our plants stay up, and we have redundancy of ammonia supply, so we continue to do that. Jacques and the team have created new rail roads, if I can call it that, paths of moving the tankers around.
But we've also invested in some road tankers, and we've invested in an additional 20 rail wagons. What Francois and Hein and the team have done in Sasolburg, they've built another ammonium nitrate storage tank. It's being built now, and it should be completed soon. That tank doubles our storage of AN on site. So it enhances our redundancy. It ensures if ammonia at some point is disrupted, we have got downstream product that we can use to keep our downstream plants going. So further diversification and a further focus on the customers. And I think what we've been able to see is how our manufacturing and supply chain have converted these investments into real revenue and real profit when you looked at the value we generated out of ammonia derivative supply and the growth in our Mining business and the volume growth in our agribusiness in SA.
Then just from an AgriBio perspective, our AgriBio business has got its volumes back on track. So you saw a decreasing level of volumes last year, and this half has been the strongest half we've had from a humates sales ever. It's a little bit visually difficult to see, but if you take the 90 and the 105, we've done very well. So our key customer in India is back on track, and our sales into China has also done well for us. So we see more demand coming up here, and I think what's more pleasing is that these sales have been generated at the higher GP and OP margins that that business and those products drive.
The team is currently continuing tests in the Middle East with a partner there and in various places across the world, and we see as those lumpy sales take place, we see the volumes uptick coming through. I guess, as Stephan has said, when you look at the Agri International segment, the segment is brought down a little bit by what's happened in Brazil. So I guess if you take away some of these headwinds and some of these once-offs, you get to a true performance of the underlying business of Omnia, which is growing the volumes, the sales, the customers being lifted with the margins, the GPs and the OPs going up as well. So we still have a very strong pipeline. We also have the U.S. mobilization costs in here. So as the U.S. moves to profitability, that will also see another uplift in this business.
Then the star performer of the six months, and I guess the star performer of the growth, which will come in the future six months and the future years, I can see Ralf starting to shake a little bit, is our explosives business. So the Mining segment has been a business that we've been heavily focused on. We believe we have the right to win in that segment, and we see us win customers across the world and locally. You haven't seen the uptick yet of the local customers in the South African results. That will still come through in future period, but you're seeing it in the global results. We show you a chart of showing how the mining profits have grown over the last few years, significantly increasing. And I guess at this half year, our mining profits is showing the same trajectory and showing the same growth.
We have some significant contract wins in the chemical side of our business. We have local wins. We have three new contracts in Indonesia coming online, and we still have investments and costs in the business in Australia and in Canada, and as those costs or the revenue comes online, those businesses will move to profitability and will be another uptick on our Mining business. We see our Mining business being the business that gives us the right to win globally, and we will continue to expand and grow this business globally. We said in our Capital Markets Day that these businesses command much higher multiples than a traditional agriculture business, and we believe we've got a lot more road to travel in the Mining business. What have we done to achieve that growth? Firstly, we've polished up the BME brand a little bit, just enhanced the look and feel.
What we've started doing is talking about having a few businesses under the explosives banner. So we moved Protea Mining Chemicals and rebranded that into BME Metallurgy. That business was always disclosed in the Mining segment, though. It was just called Protea. We've rebranded it now and moved the folks into BME. We will look at select opportunities for taking that business with BME globally. We obviously have very strong margins, and maybe you're going to ask me, should we up the margin guidance, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. We will also continue to grow the footprint of BME globally. We're seeing some additional growth coming out of our venture with MNK in Indonesia. We have got a non-electric plant commissioned and placed in Canada.
I think it's important to note that our local partner there will take a large chunk of that offtake as that plant continues, so we see some upside there. We've spoken to you previously about Hypex Bio and our investment in Hypex Bio. We also are busy building the Hypex Bio BME plant in Canada, and we believe that will be our first commercial sales of the product in the BME family, and we continue to invest in Australia with some infrastructure, detonator plants, and MMUs there. I think what you can see is both Canada and Australia still to turn to higher profitability and will lift our results further. What we start pointing to is additional global opportunities. We've had folk approach us as their preferred partner to do things with them globally, and it emphasizes BME's right to win and its global competitive position in explosives.
We continue to explore certain selected new territories where we can joint venture, where we can partner, and where we can grow this Mining business out further. Very, very exciting. I think what we've been doing is not only enhancing the resources in BME, but also enhancing our knowledge of the global explosives market and how we do this in a very considered, responsible way. If I move to Outlook in terms of our medium-term guidance, I think what you're seeing is while our companies performed incredibly well in the first six months, we did face some headwinds. We still believe that these margin guidance make sense. Where we've got businesses below them, we believe we will get them back to where they should be. I think Protea is becoming a less significant part of our group, and we've always said that it's not core.
Agri and Mining are our big core segments, and that's where we're focusing our mind and our attention. We believe this margin guidance still holds water in the medium term. As a management team, we have to be focused on the actions we drive to deliver this. The next slide just talks through a little bit of the actions and gives you a bit of sense, and it's not complete science. This is a little bit of how we're thinking about what we can still do to unlock more margin. Maybe we'll get it a little bit wrong. Maybe a bit more margin will get unlocked in one segment versus another.
But I think it's very, very important for us as a team to have projects and initiatives ongoing that actually enhances our productivity, enhances our efficiency, and ensures growth, not just from within, but also from new customers, new markets, new products. And I'm absolutely pleased to say that our management team have a track record of doing that if we just think of the ammonia derivative sales. And one of the indicators that we also look at very carefully is our return on equity. And we asked Glen and Stephan to do us a chart, which you're seeing here, and then to also just give us a few pointers of what are the things and what are the various initiatives we have on the go that will enhance the return on equity. We fundamentally believe that our return on equity will improve.
There are certain things in the denominator and the numerator that we can chat about, and some of that improvement will come through just with time, but some of that improvement will also come through with some of the very disciplined actions we've got in terms of revenue and profit growth and enhancing our asset efficiency, asset turn, and managing our balance sheet better. I think what we do know is we've been managing our balance sheet very responsibly, and we'll continue to do that. And that has resulted in us not having the highest return on equity that you can get. Then just a little bit further on the outlook, and I'll start with Chemicals. I think we still believe Chemicals will have a challenging outlook for the next six months.
I think we need an uplift in the manufacturing sector, and we need some additional restructure in that business, which is happening. From an agriculture perspective, we're positive about our international business and the level of activity and the sales in our AgriBio space. Clearly, Brazil will normalize at some point, and a drought don't stay forever. So whenever our SADC or our Brazil business was hit with a drought, that will normalize, and you will see some uplift coming there. From a SADC perspective, we're still cautious about SADC. I think you've got challenges in Mozambique at the moment. You've got currency issues and challenges in Zimbabwe, and you've got a very significant drought that's played out. So I think we will be conservative in SADC. The team has already done a very, very good job of reducing our exposure in SADC.
So while you see we didn't make as much money as we would have normally made there, what we did do is also reduce our exposure and not put in stock and put in capital. So very deliberate action there. I think we probably will continue doing some of that until we see the environment changing. From a South African perspective, though, we are a lot more optimistic. I think the agronomic conditions are good. The rain has arrived, and our volumes and our sales are good. But I've got our head of sales and marketing here, and if I'm too positive, he'll take his when we say feet on the farm, it's not a feet, it's a boot on the farm. He'll take his boot off and give me a little bash on my head.
So, there’s always risks, and there’s always issues, but I think we are a lot more positive about South Africa from an agriculture perspective. And then if I think of what’s also in the agriculture segment is our manufacturing and supply chain. And I think there we’ve got a huge amount of projects on the go and some more upside that we can unlock from that. I think our star performer, our Mining business, we are very optimistic about the Mining business. We’ve got a number of contract wins that are yet to come in. We’ve got a number of opportunities across the world that we are exploring. And I think the strength of the Mining business positions our group very well to win not only locally but also globally. I’ve mentioned contract wins in the Chemicals business, but also contract wins in the explosives business.
Then, just to close off in terms of our value proposition, Dr. Eboka said this morning, we operate in primary sectors, so we're exposed to food security, mineral extraction. Both those things drive economic growth across large parts of the world. So you always have governments and countries keen to be involved in that and make a lot of commitments in those spaces. So as agriculture does what it does and mining does what it does, we benefit from that. I think what we're demonstrating yet again today, which is a follow-on from our capital markets day, is the significance of BME in our diversification and our growth. Omnia is much more than just a fertilizer company or an agriculture company. We are a fertilizer company and an agriculture company of incredible significance, but we are also an explosives company of incredible significance.
We have by far got the best agriculture, and I'm saying this with the liberty of saying it, Mr. Strydom, and hopefully you'll agree with me, in Africa. We also have an incredible asset in BME, an explosives company that's winning globally. Today we show you some of that growth. We show you the benefits, and we see how that diversification helps lift Omnia's performance. While we perform well in agriculture, we perform even better as a group because of BME. We've still got work to do around some operational excellence. We show you the things we do and the things we do well, but we also tell you there are things we can do better. We've got a number of pioneering technologies. We've got great agriculture innovation laboratories and solutions for farmers that enhance yield and reduce risk.
But we've got similar from a BME perspective to enhance fragmentation, to reduce cost, to have a better ESG footprint, and to really partner with our mining customers all the way from supply chain to breaking the rock on the mine, making sure that those mines don't stop. They have redundancy of explosive supply. They have redundancy into that supply chain and can understand what is needed from a rail, from a ship, from a storage, from a manufacturing, and right all the way to the magazines and the MMUs that are pumping the explosives. We show some very, very strong competitive advantage. Underpinning all of that is our strong balance sheet. And for someone like myself, I will remember five or six years ago when our company needed to do a rights issue.
And what I can point to now is a very, very disciplined management team and organization that has been cash generative, paying strong dividend, managing the balance sheet well, and focused on delivering profits in rising commodity cycles, falling commodity cycles, stable commodity cycles, having macro headwinds in times when there's tailwinds, show you the benefit of those tailwinds coming out, and you see that in an attractive dividend yield coming through. And a very different company to what we were previously, which was purely an agriculture business, but now a business that's diversified between Agri and Mining, a business that's diversified locally, SADC, and globally, and a business that's very focused on growing and returning value to shareholders. So maybe I can pause there and stop for any questions. And I'm not sure who's got. I know there were some questions on the line.
Should we take the ones on the line first?
Thank you, Seelan. We have a couple of questions from Rajay Ambekar with Excelsia Capital. The first question. In the prior year, approximately 60% of operating profit came in the second half. Can we expect similar seasonality for the full year?
Yeah, I think, I mean, what we're pointing to in terms of the first half, we're showing our business does perform differently over the two halves. So it's never one-sided. I think generally we show something wrong. Is everything okay? Yeah, generally we show more value in the second half because the second half is when the big agriculture season has happened. But having said that, what we're pointing to is a positive outlook for our mining sector, a positive outlook for Agri South Africa, and a more cautious outlook for Chemicals, which is obviously the smaller part of our business and Agri SADC.
Thank you, Seelan. The next question, also from Rajay. Do you expect Agri Rest of Africa inventory to normalize upwards?
I mean, I want to say is I think the Agri Africa performance was not pleasing in the six months. I think what we will see is the performance improving a bit in the second half. So I don't think we've seen a very bad performance with the drought and the headwinds and things that it's had there. I think from an inventory perspective, though, we make very deliberate decisions around where we put our stock and our inventory. I don't think you will see an uptick in inventory in SADC agriculture. I think if anything, you will see a decrease in inventory in the second half of the year. I hope I'm understanding the angle of that question thoroughly. If not, you can email me and we can discuss it afterwards.
Thank you, Seelan. The next one from Rajay. What are the savings expected from the restructuring in Chemicals? And then linked to that, what environment will support a 3%-4% margin?
Yeah, so I mean, Chemicals is becoming a less significant business for us. And I think we've been saying that over the years is that it's less core. I think we still have an infrastructure that is bigger than our needs. So that is a plant, warehouse, and production type infrastructure. So there's a chunk of cost we can take out, and the team is busy doing that. I think when that's taken out, you will see a little bit of a normalization of the profits. You still will see some cost coming with that. So I don't think any reorganization or any sale of warehouse or thing might come with some costs. I think what we actually want to see is the manufacturing sector of South Africa lift.
So as you see the manufacturing sector lift, you will see Chemicals have a better delivery from a profit perspective. So by that, I mean you need manufacturers to start manufacturing more so we can supply the base chemicals and the inputs into those manufacturing processes. And ultimately, if I get maybe a little bit more controversial, you want more products made in South Africa, you want more employment in South Africa, and you want more production facilities in South Africa and SADC. That would cause a business like Protea Chemicals to lift.
Thank you. The next question from Rajay again. Please explain the abnormal provision raised that affected the tax rate, SARS, and expected cash flow from it.
Okay. I'll have Stephan maybe answer that one. Can we take another one or two questions and we can do you have more there?
There's a couple of return on equity. Do you want to take those?
Okay. Then let's take do you have any related to return on equity or the tax? Okay. Do you mind if you ask yours now and Stephan can deal with it all the tax if there's another tax question?
Thank you. Congratulations on the result. I must say the margin expansion has been quite impressive. I've actually got three questions. The first is around security of your supply chain and infrastructure. The second will be around the tax rate and the effective tax rate. And lastly, it'll be just the Chemicals business. So first off, ammonia markets are well supplied at all times, right? But at the moment, it seems like there seems to be regional supply disruptions. I see you guys investing in doubling your AN capacity. I'm just wondering now, are these signs that things could get worse or is this building up business resiliency or investment or is there something else at play? And just lastly, what other investments would you have to make to ensure security of supply?
Secondly, the effective tax rate, I understand with the whole ZIMRA debacle has picked up the effective tax rate. I just want to understand how to think of the effective tax rate for the full year and going forward. And then lastly, with the Chemicals business, I know it's irrelevant, but ZAR 20 million is quite significant to the margin. So how much do you think you're going to land at for the full year and how much is it going to be going forward if there is going to be any other expenditure on restructuring? Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks for those. Let me deal with the supply chain one and then Stephan can deal with the tax and then I'll close with the chemicals one. Just on the supply chain, we have secured a fairly significant local customer, which has just started in the last month of the financial year or of the half year and will continue. So what our supply and manufacturing team have done is we don't see an outlook of maybe some heavy disruption which you're worrying about. We're more saying we're going to have more significant offtake and we want more redundancy of supply for those customers. And that's why we've done what we wanted to do. What it also does for us is it allows if there is a disruption and you saw right in saying it's usually a local disruption.
So it's usually either our local supplier of ammonia or it's the rail infrastructure that gets disrupted. So there's a lot of, Jacques often says, there's lots of ammonia, but the ammonia is at the wrong places. So we've realized that when those disruptions do take place and maybe they're a day or two or our local producer has a challenge or the rail has a challenge, we don't want to switch off our plants. We want to have more capacity to keep the downstream plants going. So that's why the extra storage. The extra storage is not there for darker, gloomier days. It's there because we can see some very strong sunlight coming and we want to make sure that we supply those customers with a level of security that they expect from BME and they expect from the Omnia Group.
The strength of our business has been our manufacturing and our supply chain. So yes, it is. Why did you win that contract? I mean, firstly, what the mining customers want is strong supply and they want us to be able to supply consistently. And I think our supply chain and manufacturing business has been very strong and arguably the strongest locally. But I think having said that, customers will never give BME business if they're not globally competitive, safe, and have got value propositions that are market-leading. So those will be the two things why we would win contracts. I don't know, Ralf, if you want to add in there or Jacques.
No, I think it's absolutely right that from a today's customer perspective, from today's customer perspective for mining, the mines are looking at a combination of things. First of all, they look at the basics: safety records, the people, the trust, the quality of products, the technology that we bring, and so forth. Then what goes quite high up the rank and ladder in mining is supply chain security, absolutely. What we also see is a change in mines. They want to deal with not two or three or four contractors. They want to deal with one throughout their value chain. So all of those things culminate into winning. You cannot be weak at one. You've got to be strong at all. And this contributed to this win.
Yeah, thank you. I think what was odd, and I said this before, a number of global mining houses have given all their work to one supplier. And locally in South Africa, we tended to split between a number of suppliers. And I guess what's happening now is the suppliers with the strongest supply chain are the ones that are winning. Should we move to the tax questions, Stephan?
Is this one on?
Maybe just specifically on the tax provision, as was highlighted. So that made a significant impact on the effective rate, the 4.6%. Let me just give some color on that. That is due to it all being almost lumped in the six months, if I can call it that, so if we look at over the year, maybe just back to this question, that will be substantially watered down if you look at it over the full year, the 4.6% impact, and if you look at our effective tax rate and our guidance, so we'll be on the top end of our guidance range, which we normally aim for the tax rate, but because it's provided within only the six months period, the 4.6% is obviously a big number in the overall effective tax rate.
Maybe just I think there was also just linked to the question was the cash flow. Maybe just to give also some color on the cash flow. 60% of the cash flow has already been baked into the cash flows at half year. So there's not a significant amount of cash flow that still needs to come. There's only about 40% of those cash flows still need to flow into the second half. Yeah. Specifically on the tax. The question was the cash flow and the quantum of the 4.6?
I think then maybe just on the Chemicals business, at this point, we still have plans to restructure and reorganize that business. We also have plans to run the business a little bit differently. So we are busy working through all of that. And if you say, "Well, what would be a normalized run rate for chemicals and when will we get there?" I think we would like a normalized run rate of probably R100 million or maybe a little bit more than that. But if I don't think we're going to get there in the next 6 months- 12 months, I think it's going to take a bit more time because we still have some more restructuring to do.
What I am comforted, though, is I think if I look at our overall group, while you're writing saying ZAR 20 million loss is ZAR 20 million, it's a big number. Overall, the Omnia Group will continue to grow and will continue to offset that from other revenue and other profit that we will make across the group. But I think what we do show you is we show you areas in all the segments that have performed well, but also areas in the segments that can perform better. We do continue to look for a responsible partner for the business.
And should we find the right partner for that business, we will also execute on that in the coming periods. But what we can't do is we can't leave the business putting an immense drag on the group. And we will take the pain that comes with the restructurings that we've done. We've done some of it, and there's more coming.
Okay. Who wants to go first? Can you pass the microphone back?
Good morning, Seelan. Bruce Williamson, Integral Asset Management. Yeah. Thank you to you and your team for the opportunity to have a live presentation. That's great. Two questions, please. On the mining explosive side, which are the two commodities that have contributed most to revenue, and is that also a contribution to operating profit? And in Australia, which state have you targeted your investment, or is it states? And again, are there any commodities that you are targeting there?
Yeah. Ralf, do you want to maybe answer that? I think from a commodities exposure perspective, we put out a wheel of commodity exposures. I don't think we've done it in this half. So we can do that and always upload it if need be. But we're fairly diversified around the different commodities. But maybe let me let Ralf chat through that.
Yeah. So from an explosives portfolio perspective, it is the bulk emulsions and the electronic detonators, which are the two commodities that contribute most to our revenue. What we did see in this six months now is that the product mix has changed quite a bit. So we sold more electronic detonators in relation to emulsion, and that contributed to an uptick in the margins that you see. From an Australian perspective,
Maybe just talk about the metals. So our exposure to coal, gold, iron ore, and others.
Yeah. So we're fairly diversified from a mineral commodity perspective. We see that our exposure to coal is actually decreasing. About 12 months, 18 months ago, we were exposed between 16% and 17% to coal. That has dipped to about 14%-15% now. And the other 85% is really made up through a nice diversification between iron ore, platinum, copper, nickel, manganese, and so forth. And we are driving quite hard towards more exposure towards the critical minerals and battery minerals in Central Africa specifically.
Maybe Bruce, if I can just add before you go to the next point. So we see some growth in Namibia with some of the uranium mines there. I think locally we've got some growth in the Northern Cape with some of those iron ore mines there, and globally, it's quite diverse, so globally, there's gold. There's quite a few, as Ralph says. Our Chemicals business is also growing in the right minerals for the future. Australia and what we're doing and where.
Canada, Australia, and so forth, there's quite a nice possibility for exposure to critical minerals as well. There was an Australia question. I just want to answer that one from an Australian state-specific perspective. So we are building an electronic detonator plant in Western Australia. As most of you know, Western Australia is the most where most of the mining takes place. About 70% of Australian mining takes place in that state. We're building a, or we're almost complete in building an electronic detonator plant in Kalgoorlie, which is, as most of you know, the hub of the gold sector in Australia. And in close proximity, I'm talking about 1,000 km or so from Pilbara, which is the iron ore sector in Australia.
And then in the east of Australia, we are building a little bit more. We're building explosive plants. But that has to do that there's a whole host of tier two miners in Australia on the eastern side that are hungry for competition, but also hungry for services and technology, both in the coal, but also in the other metals mines. Our primary focus at this point of time is Western Australia. Eastern Australia also has an opportunity to maybe partner with someone in Australia. As we announced many times before, we are looking still for a partner in Australia. And there's many opportunities there maybe to identify a solid partner and build a business in East Australia. So at this point of time, we are not neglecting the one or the other. We are looking at a few states in Australia to expand it.
Thanks, Ralf.
We have a few more questions on the webcast. Well, most of them relate to return on equity. So I'll just read them together, if that's all right. And then there's one other one from Mark Townsend at Foord. The return on equity ones are from Rajay Ambekar, Excelsia, and then Paul Woodburne at Rozendal. Rajay asked what your return on equity target is and when do you think you can achieve it. That's the first question. The second one from Paul Woodburne.
Management's comment was that this is a very strong performance and the two largest divisions are seemingly at normal profitability. However, the group ROE remains poor at 12% and below costs of equity. Do these operating assets have the ability to generate returns in excess of cost of equity? And what needs to happen for this to occur? Returns historically from 2005- 2015 were closer to 17%-18%. And the last one. What do you think the normal return on equity would be for the two separate divisions being mining and agri? The chemicals has always been a detractor and must be an easy one to increase return on equity if sold or closed.
And there's a last one. There was one other question.
Yes. Not on return on equity, but from Mark Townsend at Foord. I'm a bit confused on the difference between the 76% growth in humates volume, as shown in slide 29, and the comment that GP margins grew, yet international agri sales only grew 10% and operating profit was a disappointing 2% to ZAR 90 million.
Great. Thanks. Thanks very much. So maybe we should start with the last question because we had one of our staff members raise that question and tell us who would ask the question. And he was 100% correct. So maybe Glen, do you want to answer the question because you called the question last night? Thanks for the question.
Thanks, Seelan. Good morning, everyone. So thanks, Michael, for the question. It does jump out at you. Humates volumes increased quite materially. What Stephan did mention was Brazil. So it is a region we sell a fair bit of humates into. The big drought there, plus the currency, did have quite a significant effect on selling prices as well as a bit of a mixed change. So you see a reduced impact on revenue. We don't show GP or disclose GP there, but there was also a significant increase in GP for the division. But as you rightly say, that didn't fully wash through to your OP because of your development costs in the U.S., as well as reduced profitability out of Brazil.
So when you clean that up, you can see the underlying performance is quite strong, and that's what we'd expect to come through going forward.
Thanks, Glen. And thanks for calling the question and the person who was going to ask it. We'll buy you the coffee after lunch. So then if we just go to the questions around ROE, I think the ROE target for us is a very important target. And I think what we've said a few years ago, we're on a journey to get our ROE to where it should be. We've got specific targets in terms of our KPIs around ROE. I'm not sure whether we put those out. We have. We put them out retrospectively. Is that the right word? So you can see those in our integrated report.
And I guess what we're trying to do with the chart on ROE, I don't know if I should go back to that, is just demonstrate to you that we believe that our company can get to a significantly higher ROE than where we are at the moment. And there's a number of those initiatives that we've got underway to achieve that. I guess we have to, or you have to believe that when we say we can increase our plant utilization, we can deliver more from our current asset base, that we can do that. Having said that, that is actually coming from our Sasolburg, our manufacturing assets in Sasolburg, our manufacturing assets in Australia, in the humates business and others. We also believe we can optimize our channels better.
So we do have to sell more. And you see us selling more in mining. We have to sell more in agri, potentially differently in SADC and maybe differently in South Africa. And then I think from the numerator, can we hold our margins? Can we increase our revenue? And can we reduce our costs? And I guess what we're saying is we can. And if we didn't put the slide up and we just were quiet about it, it would tell you that we don't have enough thought or enough initiative in place. What we didn't do is we didn't tell you how much of each of those different pieces because it will never be scientifically correct.
And initially, we're on a journey to firstly get to a cost of capital number or a cost of debt, which we had in the early days, and then get to a cost of capital number. And now we're on a drive with our growth initiatives to get to an ROE that is more acceptable and palatable to everybody. So we firmly believe we can, and that is why we put the slide out. And those are the three portions of it. A little bit of a numerator, a little bit of a denominator, and also optimization of our capital. We have got capital in spaces that are not fully deployed, so not fully getting deployed, but it's not getting the returns we want. We have got capital in underperforming ROE businesses.
We've got a chart that shows us all of that per division, and I guess we also have to manage our costs and the growth in our leverage fairly carefully to improve this picture. I don't know if Stefan or Glenn want to add anything to that. I'm not giving complete chapter and verse. Do you want to add anything?
The only thing that I'd add is that obviously we went through a rights issue in 2019, and that put ZAR 2 billion of equity on the balance sheet, which significantly hurt our returns. So we sit with that burden now. But as was pointed out, I think in the questions as well, those underperforming businesses, as you turn those around and pull capital out of them, potentially, that has a massive impact. Yeah, I think I just said that.
And I think what I've been saying is it's important to give the management time to turn the business around and to grow things. It's important to give some space to do that, but it's also important as I think I'm not sure who said it, but Louis, in the question that came out, there are also areas that we close down if it doesn't meet the return on equity. And I think we've said in one of the slides, I can't remember which one, that we will optimize and consolidate certain countries, certain sites, and certain businesses once they've been given enough time to change. And I think that's an important part of our job at the center is to be prudent with capital allocation and to also be firm to take capital away where we're not meeting the target.
So this is something that's in the forefront of our minds. And I think what's important for us is we don't want to run away from it. As a management team, we want to run towards it. And having said that, if I look at the growth drivers and the diversification of having the mining business, which trades at much higher multiples globally than what our company trades at, I think there's significant upside for us to improve our ROE in the coming periods.
Thank you. Seelan. There is one more question on the webcast as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, John.
For the humates business, what's the potential upside there? And are there limits to growth based on your ability to supply?
Yeah. So I think, thanks, John. I think the first thing is the production facility has probably got between 40%-50% capacity. So there's no need to increase that capacity right now. Can someone nod? Yeah. So we've got enough capacity to do that. I guess what we've said is this is a fast-growing sector, but what we can see is it's very lumpy, and it takes time to do all the trials and get the different wholesale customers open. So when we opened Deepak, it was a big uplift. And now we've done something in China with Mosaic. When that opens, you can see it coming through. When we open another one, you'll see that coming through.
So if we need to double that plant capacity, we're not seeing it require more than $20 million or $30 million. It's not a major investment of capital that's needed. And we can see there that the margins and the value generated is much higher than a typical NPK-type agriculture business. So there's still a lot of potential and a lot of legs in that business. I think it's fair to say we talk quite grimly about global macro conditions, but the U.S., as an example, as it goes through what it goes through now, a lot of it stands still. Now we've got development costs. We've got people in the U.S. that need to sell humates. Very little decisions get made when human beings are going through so much disruption.
So it has been a little bit slower than we anticipate, but I think if we look at our pipeline, as I said in that growth slide, our pipeline is very strong in the humate space.
And maybe a follow-up. For the contracts you ran through the JVs in Indonesia and Canada, how do the economic benefits of those contracts flow through? So roughly 50/50. Do you put 50% of the CapEx up, get 50% of the benefit, or is there some other split?
Yeah. It's roughly that, 50/50. There are some areas where if BME is putting in some technology or certain accessories or things, maybe they get a little bit more. And on the other side, if the partner is bringing in the AN, as an example, they'll benefit from a market-related pricing for those sorts of things. Is that about it? No.
Thank you, Seelan. It's the last set of questions from Jesse Armstrong of Fairtree. How many months, if any, of the new SA contracts were included in the half-year? And similarly for Indonesia, when do you expect the Canada and Aussie plants to be up and running and generating revenue?
Yeah. So I mean, I think the local South African contract, very little, if anything, is in the current period. I think maybe there's a few weeks or a month or so, something like that. So that's still coming. In the Indonesia question, I missed. So the Indonesia, also, how many of those new contracts are included in the year? Yeah. There's three new contracts in Indonesia, and they're still coming. So they're not in. And then I guess the profitability and the plants, the detonator plant in Canada is producing, but none of that profit really is in at the moment. And in Australia, that plant is also none of that profit is in at the moment. That's still in cold testing. Is that right?
Yes. Maybe in addition, just a little bit more detail. The plant in Canada is a non-electric plant, which we have hot commissioned about four weeks ago. So we are producing. The first sales came from that plant. Well, the first offtake of the sales in the plant actually go to our partner, who is a civil construction and drill and blast company. That's quite nice for us. They take offtake from that plant. The electronic detonator plant in Canada is cold commissioned and will be commissioned in the next, I would imagine, four weeks or so as well. It's imminent. Then the electronic detonator plant in Australia, which is, as I mentioned, in Western Australia, and it's the first mover plant in Australia.
No one else is assembling electronic detonators in Western Australia. That plant will be hot commissioned now in the next month or two. We are imminently at a point where we will sell out of that plant.
Thank you, Ralf. There are no further questions.
Okay. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for coming. I appreciate you braving the traffic and coming to a face-to-face meeting, which is not normal nowadays. To all of our guests on the line, thanks for listening in, and thanks for your interest in Omnia. Thank you very much.