Good morning, everyone. By way of introduction, my name is Nerina Bodasing. I'm the Group Executive for IR and Comms for Omnia. I just want to extend a very warm welcome to all of you to our 2025 Financial Year-End Presentation. As you know, safety is a core value for Omnia. Before we start any of our meetings or any major event, we always have a safety share. I would like to welcome Ditebogo Malatsi, our Executive for Shape and Sustainability, to provide us with a safety share.
Good morning, and thank you, Nerina. Several countries across the world actually observe Safety Month in the month of June. The purpose of this is to raise awareness around the importance of safety in the workplace, at home, and on the road. One of the key themes and practices, really, for the Safety Month is emergency preparedness. Emergency preparedness is the plan to keep yourself, your teams, your community, and your family even safe during unexpected events. These can be natural disasters. These can be fires and medical emergencies that can happen in the home. Just being prepared helps us in instances to be able to save lives, to reduce injuries where injuries happen, and basically to just be able to return to normal as quick as possible. Some of the key elements of emergency preparedness planning, firstly, is know your risks.
What are the types of emergencies that can affect your area or your families? For example, if you've got people in your families that have certain medical conditions, you need to be able to plan around that. Being able to stay informed with your local authorities, credible news agencies about some of the weather-related, accident-related, incident-related incidents in your area. The second part is developing an emergency plan that can be communicated with your teams and family. What's important here is just writing it down so that anyone in your family has easy access to the plan should anything happen. This plan should include evacuation routes and assembly points. Basically, how does someone get out if there's an issue, and where do they go? Secondly, roles and responsibilities. Who does what in case of an emergency? The communication method.
Who do you contact, and how do you contact them? If there were an emergency in your home, would your children know who to contact if you are not able to? Lastly, just the basic medical assistance or first-aid protocols. Thirdly, build a small emergency kit. This can include things as small as drinking water, first aid, fire extinguishers, and important documents such as IDs and insurance documents. These are the things that you'd need to deal with, for example, your insurance providers in case of a fire. Bring it back home. Similarly, Omnia does have an emergency preparedness plan in place. We do not have a safety drill that is planned for today. Should you hear an alarm inside the building, it means there is an emergency. First of all, please do remain calm and walk briskly towards your emergency exit.
We've got two for this room. The first one is to my right, just down the hall. The second is the entrance door where you came in this morning. Please walk towards your assembly point. The assembly point for this room is zero, so there is a pole that has a zero written on it outside. Just wait there for roll call to be taken. Please refrain from smoking when you are at the assembly point. Once roll call has been taken and the emergency controller has declared the building safe to come back in, it's only at that point when you can come back in. Thank you, and back to you, Nerina.
Thank you, Di, and thank you for those important words. With that, let's move on to the main part of our program, the results presentation. The agenda for today is as follows. Our CEO, Seelan Gobalsamy, is going to begin the presentation and give you a high-level overview of the results. Ditebogo will then take us through our safety and ESG performance. Stephan Serfontein, our Finance Director, will take us through the details of the financials. Finally, Seelan will return and share our strategic outlook and will open the floor to Q&A. I will now hand over to Seelan.
Thanks. Thank you, Nerina. Good morning, everybody. Good morning to our board members online, all of you in the room, our shareholders, our management that are listening in, and other stakeholders. I really appreciate you coming. Ditebogo mentioned the safety drill, but we were planning for snow today in Johannesburg. Thank goodness there is no snow outside, and the weather is doing its part. Today, we are just going to talk through our results. I think I am sharing with you another strong set of results that I think the team can be proud of. It demonstrates our focus and our resilience. No company is strong without a very clear purpose. The first point I just wanted to raise is just to remind all of you what our purpose is: innovating to enhance life and together creating a greener future.
Our company is underpinned by strong, strong ESG principles and three things that underpin some of our results and also underpin what we're going to be doing going forward is innovation, sustainability, and collaboration. If I just pause a little bit on innovation, you'll see a number of our customer value propositions in the deck. What we talk about is underpinned by our teams working together to do things differently. We do things differently not only in our support functions like supply chain and finance and others, but we also do things differently right at the front end with our customers. You see that with the way we think about the solutions we sell to farmers, focused heavily on yield enhancement, focused heavily on nutrient and water use efficiency.
Similarly, in our mining business, if you look at our detonators, if you look at the predictive analysis tools we have around fragmentation and how the pile is fragmented, also, if you look at the used oil we're using in our emulsions, hugely underpinned by innovation. Added to that, we know that the world needs food, and the world needs mineral extraction. That is a big part of how we think about why we do what we do. Our plants, our products, and our solutions have a huge underpin of lower CO2 emissions, water use efficiency, and also the ability to do things better for the environment. We will talk a little bit about that. Finally, all of this cannot be done without people. Our people need to collaborate. They need to collaborate with each other. They need to collaborate with our suppliers.
They need to collaborate with our customers. A large chunk of our growth, which you'll see has come through and coming through in our mining business, is around us having partners. Where has that landed us today? We put out a set of results that really shows the continuation of our strategy execution. It shows that what we said we would do five years ago is still being done. It is being done in an environment that has changed, in an environment that is continuously changing. It is also done in a way that's focused on disciplined capital management and disciplined execution. We show very, very strong cash generation and a strong distribution to shareholders. Our outstanding performer is our mining segment. Our mining segment has shown CAGR over the last five years of 41% growth.
Our mining segment today equates to 60% of the overall business of Omnia. Our mining segment is the largest segment in our group and continues to grow. We also show some very strong volumes in our agri-SA business and volume growth in our agri-international business. You will see how that has enhanced our profits and our margins in both those businesses. Unfortunately, we've had significant headwinds in the rest of Africa in agriculture. The accelerated restructuring in Protea has detracted from our results. We've got one-off costs of circa ZAR 100 million in our earnings relating to Protea. You will see a loss that has come through out of the rest of Africa, our agriculture business.
Having said all of that, what you see is strong earnings being generated, disciplined cash flow, a very, very strong working capital position, a strong balance sheet, again, a net cash position, then dividend distribution to shareholders. Our revenue, 3% up. Cash generation, ZAR 2.5 billion. Our net cash balance at the end of the year, ZAR 1.8 billion. Our working capital at 15% to revenue, a very, very strong performance. We can talk a little bit about the detail in there. There is still more to come. Then capital return to shareholders and ordinary dividend of ZAR 4.00 a share, a special dividend of ZAR 2.75. That is on top of us having bought back shares during the year. This strong performance is underpinned by our two core operations.
I think if those of you who have been following Omnia for a number of years, you would know that we've streamlined the balance sheet. We've come out of non-core investments like Umongo. We disinvested from Oro Agri. Later on, I'll show you a few other smaller disinvestments we've made. We've focused our business around mining and agriculture. We've taken away all of the peripherals. Today, you will see the changes we've made in Protea Chemicals. Both these two core businesses have delivered incredible results for us. Our mining business, underpinned by volume growth and contract wins, we've seen volume growth not only in South Africa but also in SADC. Great profits out of West Africa. Our joint venture in Indonesia continues to do what it set out to do. Our mining chemicals business is also adding to the growth in the mining sector.
We've got some contract wins in Namibia with some of the uranium mines there. We can go into a little bit more detail of that in the Q&A. Our mining business is above its target margin guidance at 12.4%. I'm sure a lot of you will ask me later, are we going to change that guidance range? Our profits at ZAR 1.13 billion. From an agriculture perspective, our agriculture business remains incredibly strong. We've got good customer propositions there. In South Africa, our Head of Sales and Marketing has been able to secure incredible volumes. We continue to move the market into specialties, more value-added solutions that enhance crop yield for the farmers. We also do that in a more sustainable way by using less water, less chemicals, less nutrients. We continue to see that favorable outlook in agronomic conditions locally and in the rest of SADC.
I've already said that, obviously, the rest of Africa detracted from this result. You'll see strong performance from our business in Australia again. Volumes up, margins up, and profits up. That business continues to do what we planned it to do over prior years. I'm going to pause here and just hand over to Ditebogo again just to talk to you about our ESG indicators and safety. Thank you.
Thanks, Seelan. I think just starting with safety in mind. From an Omnia perspective, last year, we had, I think, one of our best safety performance outcomes. This is measured predominantly using our recordable case rate. What we have seen this year is it has not been a great year for us. As a management team, we are disappointed by this movement. This movement has predominantly been in the agriculture and manufacturing segments. I think looking forward, collectively, the management team has had several engagements on this over the past couple of months.
I think some of the key focus areas is, firstly, just having our management be able to be visible and felt and present on our facilities, just leading from the front, reminding our people why safety is so important, because we want our people to come to work and go home in the same conditions back to their families. We'll be focusing a lot on reducing what we call avoidable incidents. Because of the conditions of our road, a lot of the climate change impacts, there's a lot of things that come at us, and we need to be able to respond to those. Where things are avoidable, where incidents are as a result of people's behaviors, we've committed to working harder to actually reduce those.
Because while, as you see from the international benchmarking, we may be comparable or thereabouts, from our own standards, we're choosing not to accept this because we say we are committed to zero harm and need to show in our results as well. What's important is all of this will be underpinned and continues to be underpinned by our values and the behaviors that we subscribe to. This is ensuring that we've got safe practices and standards in our facilities. This is ensuring that we encourage our staff members to have an open dialogue, to speak up, and to share their concerns and ideas around our operations, which obviously has an impact on our safety. Lastly, it's just acting responsibly because that is what we do. It's important to do that. We're not doing it for the safety performance.
We're doing it because we have a lot of people in our communities and in our facilities that we care about. Moving on to our environmental performance, we've shared these slides for a number of years now. What we're seeing is Omnia remains committed to improving our greenhouse gas emissions. We're seeing the intensity outcomes improving year on year as well. This is predominantly due to the continued servicing of our tertiary abatement systems, specifically in our nitric acid plants, and the increased use of renewable energy in our facilities. From a renewable solar energy perspective specifically, we're seeing an increase from year on year. This is predominantly due to the phase I and phase II solar plants that are at our Sasolburg facility. What you do not see here is that over and above the solar energy, we generate our own electricity from our Triveni.
That increases our total renewable and self-generated energy to over 35,000 MWh . Lastly, one of the utilities that are critical for our own operations, our productions, is water. The trick with that is that it is also a basic human right. We, as an organization, have continued to focus on the use, treatment, and reuse of water in our facilities to ensure that we have water that is left clean for communities. Over and above that, we are also using used oil in our emulsion products. What that does is ensures that used oil, essentially waste oil that could have ended up in potable water, is used in our production facilities, is taken out of the environment, leaving potential for contamination of water reduced. Looking forward, last year, we introduced our refreshed ESG strategy.
I think in the past couple of months or years or so, we've seen globally a number of countries, a number of companies that have been going back on their ESG commitments. What we've done is saying ESG is integral to our organization. It's integral to what we do. Omnia has been on a sustainability journey for over 10 years. This is not new to us. What we have done is said we have focused on our ESG initiatives predominantly in our manufacturing facilities. Last year, we went and we refreshed our strategy to look across our full value chain. We went a step further to say we've actually seen that we have met a lot of our environmental targets. We're actually going to extend our environmental targets and set more stringent targets for ourselves leading to 2030.
While you see on the slides that majority of the targets that are up here are linked to environmental initiatives, we do have other targets in our social and in our governance, not government, to ensure that we actually have ESG targets across the full scale of ESG. What's important to note is, whereas in the past, like I said, our ESG targets were focused predominantly in our manufacturing facilities, we are actively now setting targets and looking to collaborate with upstream our suppliers, downstream our customers, to ensure that collectively we can actually enhance our ESG outcomes. In summary, if you were to ask us what our ESG program, its ESG targets are looking at now, it's improving efficiency. It's focusing on circularity. It's collaborating with our suppliers, our customers, and our communities.
I'm going to hand back over to Seelan to give us our business update.
Thank you, Ditebogo. I think if we think about sustainability and ESG, Omnia can be incredibly proud of itself. We've been focusing heavily on this. A lot of the investments we've made over the years in solar, in reverse osmosis water, in our trains, in our actual production facilities has helped us immensely. You'll see some of that coming through one or two of the slides a little bit later. If I press ahead and let's just talk a little bit about the environment. The one thing I didn't want to do is give you a picture of Mr. Donald Trump on this slide. We kept it quite wordy. In essence, what you do know is we operate in a very complex global world. There's an immense amount of uncertainty. There's an immense amount of volatility.
When we talk internally, we discipline ourselves to think very carefully about when we act and when we do things and when we respond and how we respond. I think this challenging operating environment continues to be that for us. I just wanted to pick out a few themes. The first one is the geopolitical tension has increased volatility in various of the markets and countries we operate. We saw some of that in Mozambique. We see a change in terms of U.S. aid and tariffs across the world. Ultimately, what we are seeing is a world that we all know as a global village. When we studied, we were told it is a global village and a global supply chain. We are now seeing it is more of a high level of protectionism and it is more local village.
You need to be able to do it yourself, whether it's from a water or an energy perspective. You also need to have your inputs, your fertilizer, your explosives close to your customers. That has impacted the way we think about things and the way we do things. I've mentioned the geopolitical issues in Zambia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. What you've also seen is significant impacts due to climate change, drought that impacted electricity supply in Zambia, and also the issues of disruption, port disruption, and others that we've seen in Mozambique that have actually impacted supply chain all the way into the entire SADC region. Rainfall and climate change also is heavier and more excessive. Often the rain is harsher than what you've seen, and often the drought is a little bit worse than what we've seen previously. This talks directly to Omnia's customer value propositions.
Our value propositions are out there to help farmers and help mines do things better, do bigger blasts, do more complicated blasts, use less water, enhance crop health, respond to some of the issues that are faced from a climate perspective. We also have some supporting dynamics. Often when we do these slides, it's all bad news. We challenged ourselves and said there are some supporting dynamics. We operate in these primary sectors of agriculture and mining. What we know is that the sectors we operate in are positively disposed to food security. There's a high demand for that. Most countries cannot feed themselves. They need to import food. From a mining perspective, we know that population growth, urbanization, the need for certain metals is not going to go away. We're seeing the positive impacts of that in our business.
What we also know is there's a high need for a strong ESG underpinned business. All of our propositions at the front end are focused to reduce water, reduce clean oil, to be able to do more complex blasts, to enhance fragmentation, and from a nutriology perspective, to enhance the yield for our customers. Last year, I visited one of our farms, and I was absolutely amazed to see the Omnia agronomist on the farm look at the yields and actually see how we enhanced the tonnage of EBOS that was delivered in that farm so substantially. What did that all land up with? With that backdrop, predominantly negative, how did our company perform? What you're seeing is solid cash being generated and the quality of our earnings being higher. 60% of our business is now explosives.
Our explosives business has grown by 41% CAGR over the last five years. That brings in a much higher quality of earnings, much higher and faster turn of working capital, and a business that is less correlated to commodity prices. Our revenue, 3% up. Our gross margin, 3% up. Our operating profit, fairly flat, taking into account that we've got ZAR 100 million of once-off restructuring costs related to Protea in there. We have seen significant headwinds in SADC. Our operating margin down to 7.4%. That would have been 7.9% if we did not put in the Protea restructure cost. Our headline earnings per share up 2%. I think where that has landed us, before I go there, our return on equity, 10.9%. We can also discuss that a little bit later so you can see the impact that some of our restructure cost has had there.
Our working capital, very good disciplined working capital management yet again. We've got two items of additional working capital in. We've put in more working capital for a massive Sasol shut that's underway in Sasolburg and some additional working capital stuck in Zambia. Even with that, our working capital is 15% to revenue and probably the best it's been in a number of years. A strong net cash position of just under ZAR 1.8 billion, ZAR 2.4 billion of cash generated for the year. That resulted in the board declaring an ordinary dividend of ZAR 4, sorry, which is ZAR 0.25 higher than last year. I think the increase in the ordinary dividend demonstrates the quality earnings, and it demonstrates our confidence in the earnings and cash generation where the business is at. Added to that is a special dividend of ZAR 2.75.
I think we can talk further about that in terms of our capital allocation a little bit later. How did we achieve that? We've said before that there's a few things we look at in our company: margins, working capital, capital, and cash generation. From a profitability perspective, and maybe I'll start with chemicals, Protea has been a perennial challenge for us. Probably for two decades, Omnia has really battled with this asset. We've seen it ebb and flow in terms of profitability. In the current period, what we did was we accelerated the restructuring in that business. We split the business into three pieces: a piece that we unfortunately had to close down from a people perspective and an infrastructure perspective, and then a piece of the business that we will keep and will be profitable going forward.
That business will probably make circa ZAR 100 million profit in coming years for us. That business we will keep, and we will probably synergize it with one of our businesses internally. A third business, which we are now holding for sale, we have disclosed it that way in our results. We will dispose of that in the coming months. That is the Protea story. We have got a chunk of restructure costs, ZAR 100 million in our result this year. I think you will see us speak a little bit less about the Protea business going forward because post this restructure, our challenge will be behind us. Our mining business, by far, the star performance in our portfolio, the mining business, strong, strong execution again. It assists with the diversification of Omnia to be more correlated to explosives.
A number of new contract wins that the team have been able to sign up, contract renewals as well. Strong growth in South Africa, the rest of Africa, West Africa, significant growth out of Namibia from the chemical side. While we've still got mobilization costs in Canada and Australia, the business delivers the CAGR operating profit growth that we're showing. Obviously, from a margin perspective, 12.4%. So ahead of its margin guidance. From an agriculture perspective, we've seen very strong growth in agriculture South Africa. Near record volumes, the continuous move to speciality, good margins. I think our agronomists and our sales teams have done very well in South Africa. We also saw very strong performance in Australia and Brazil. You'll see that segment when Stephan puts it up later has shown very nice growth margins, strong and profitability strong.
We have got two large off-takers in India and China that has driven the volumes as we expected. What detracted from this segment is the rest of Africa. We've had weak performances in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. You'll see us when Stephan puts up his slide and we show the detail. You'll see us actually print a loss of ZAR 62 million in agriculture SA. Having said all of that, the strong performance in our SA business, the strong performance in our manufacturing and supply chain, and the strong performance in our international business has offset some of the challenges in agri. Overall, our operations are strong. Overall, our margins maybe can be a little bit better if some of these once-offs are not there, but they're within range. We will talk a little bit later about the guidance going forward.
I think we can be incredibly proud to see the resilience of the team when you look at the disruptions that have happened last year. We have fulfilled all of our customer commitments and more. We have been impacted, but we have not been negatively impacted from a customer perspective with any of the port logistics supply chain disruptions that you've seen in the market. I think our disciplined capital allocation, cash management, and our sticking to our capital framework is also something that we've done quite religiously in the last while. If I just step one step further into the detail, the first part of our delivery is our supply chain and our manufacturer. I think we told you a few years ago that we will set up an additional revenue or profit generator from that perspective.
Our third-party ammonia derivative sales have been on the increase. You can see that they are roughly four times up of where they were in 2020, 2021. A lot of that business, the team has also been able to convert it to contractual business, which is more sustainable for us. It really shows you the strength of our plants, the strength of our production facilities, the strength of our ammonia supply chain, and the strength and the reliability of our throughput. We have also focused heavily on utility spend and costs. Ditebogo mentioned our solar plant. We generated 20 MWh of capacity in the current year. Our folk in Sasolburg have been very heavily focused on how can we reduce cost and increase efficiency. Reliable supply has given us a lot of strategic optionality.
When the ports are challenged or when the trains are challenged, we also have introduced trucks to move ammonia around. That has been a help for us. We have also built more storage capacity. I think we mentioned at half year, we were building a 5,000 L, if I got that right, AN storage tank. That tank is there. I can tell you how much is in it, but let me not say that. It helped a lot with the disruptions and being able to supply the market as needed. For a number of years, we spoke about how do we manage price and input cost risk. You know that our business is impacted by the cost and input prices of ammonia. We have other commodities that impact us.
On the front end, you've got some crop prices and metals prices that impact our farmers and our mines. What you're seeing here, and we did one chart or a picture that takes us all the way back to 2020, you see that our business continues to deliver strong profits, strong cash generation, strong margins through low commodity prices, increasing commodity prices, decreasing commodity prices, and now what we'll probably call a fairly flat 12 months of commodity prices. When we sized up the block, the half year and full year, what you can see is the level of volatility during that time. Even though the prices were flat, our supply chain folk and our finance team and our treasury teams had to be very, very diligent on when they buy, when they produce, when they sell, how much they store.
More and more efficiency is got into that process. You see this performance being driven by, one, an increase in the diversification between agri and mining. Our mining business gets bigger, reduces some of our risk in terms of commodities on the agri side. You also see our plant throughput increasing. We are selling not only to BME, but we are also selling to other mining businesses. That is coming from our Sasolburg plant and our strong supply chain. I suppose a few other things that drove the decorrelation to pure commodity prices is the growth in the biostimulants business out of Australia. A lot of effort is being put into demand and supply management. When do we buy, when do we produce, when do we sell?
Our teams, I think, have got to a point where we are highly confident about our agility and our ability to win in that space. We are showing you a picture of one of the ships that bring ammonia to the Richards Bay port. This is a real example of a ship that we contract in to bring ammonia for us. It then gets offloaded in Richards Bay into a tank, and it then gets put into our trains and brought up to Sasolburg to make the fertilizer and the explosives that we use. The second part of our business is a big second part of a big driver of our result is our working capital. There is not a lot to say here, but to say working capital is still very well managed on a very disciplined basis.
I said earlier that there are two areas where we increased working capital. The one is for a major shut that's happening. The second is we have had working capital stuck a little bit due to some of the issues we faced in our Zambian business. That's probably circa ZAR 200 million. If that wasn't there, our working capital would have even performed better than this. Very, very strong performance again on working capital and another year of very disciplined management of working capital and cash. It's probably worth a note to say when you get all the way into the detail, you're going to see that our data collections were strong and well managed. We continue to use supply chain finance very effectively to manage our working capital going forward. Overall, from a capital perspective, also a bit boring. We're very disciplined on capital.
I think if I go back to 2019 when I joined the company, a strong balance sheet is often criticized. Folks say, "Well, why don't you take all your money and your war chest and go and buy something?" That leads often to the wrong decisions by management teams. We continuously remind ourselves of our capital framework, and we continuously tell ourselves, and we tell you that when we think of acquisitions, when we think of M&A, we will be very disciplined with the way we go about doing that. I think what you've seen is all of our investments have been partnerships, joint ventures, and done in a very disciplined way. Where there's surplus capital, we've been returning that to shareholders via ordinary, special, and share buybacks. We do not often talk about what we do not do, but there are often transactions we look at.
If they do not meet our hurdles, if they do not meet our strategic fit, we will not just do them to spend capital. I think we have demonstrated an immense amount of discipline from a capital perspective. We then said, "Let's just give you a bit of a view of what we have done," because every year you see bits and pieces of what we have done in terms of capital. Just a quick reminder, if we start at the bottom, we have been on a disposal of non-core assets and focusing the business on agriculture and mining. You saw us exit Umongo, the petrochemicals business, which was a joint venture between us and Chevron. You saw us let go of Oro Agri to focus purely on the businesses we understood. We also got rid of some other non-core assets or underperforming assets circa ZAR 300 million. We then invested.
If I go to the top of the slide, we invested CapEx to protect our business. Over the last five years, circa ZAR 1 billion into maintenance CapEx, into different infrastructure builds in our businesses, into our core. We also put in some growth CapEx. We grew our distribution in our agri business, and we invested in a number of plants globally in our mining business. Two detonator plants in Canada, emulsion plants. We are now building a Hypex Bio plant in Canada. We went into a little bit more bold expansion. We invested in certain joint ventures and partnerships. The one with [Conzbeck] in Canada, which we put some money into, and the one in Indonesia with MNK, which we allocated some funds to.
Last year, you saw us buy roughly a 10% stake in Hypex Bio, which is a hydrogen peroxide green explosives business based in Stockholm. If any of you are really interested in that and you Google and you see what they've been up to, they've been making significant progress in Europe around doing more and more blasts. We are busy building a hydrogen peroxide emulsion plant in Canada with them now. Just in terms of how we are thinking about capital going forward, we will continue to be disciplined. We will continue to look for projects that are closely aligned with our core, mining and agriculture. We will continue to protect our core and grow our mining business internationally and invest in our agri-bio business globally. You will not find us doing anything generally outside of that.
We're not going to be buying a packaging business, and we're not going to be buying an aeroplane. It'll all be focused on agriculture and protecting our core, investing in mining globally, and investing in distribution for our agri-bio business. I'm going to hand over to Stephan, who's going to do the finance update now. Thanks, Stephan.
Thanks, Seelan. Good morning to our board members, our shareholders, our staff from around the world, as well as all the other stakeholders in the room as well. Maybe just a quick update on the Search matter before we jump into the exciting stuff of the financial numbers. We are busy closing out. We are in the final stages of the ADR process, as previously communicated. We were aimed to resolve the matter. If that cannot be done during the ADR process, then the appeal process will resume. We will keep our shareholders updated on the matter. Maybe just a quick overview, just linking on to what Seelan was mentioning. I do believe the group delivered a strong financial performance for 2025. It just emphasizes our ability to navigate through these external pressures effectively. We maintained reliability of supply to our customers. Seelan touched on the effective working capital management.
That put us in a very strong financial position and a very strong generating cash position throughout the financial year. If I look through the line items, revenue increased by 3%. That was driven by the robust performance in our mining segment and well supported also by our agriculture business, even though it was at lower average commodity prices relative to the comparative period across the SADC region. From a gross profit point of view, we have seen an increase of 6% up to ZAR 5.1 billion. Again, that was driven by the two core businesses. In the SADC region, even though we referred to less, more stable commodity prices, if we zoom in a bit, as Seelan has touched on, over the last year, commodity prices still moved some of our key inputs more than 50% throughout the year.
The gross profit margin, which is quite pleasing, increased to 22.5%. That was driven by the higher throughput through our manufacturing facilities. The margin was also boosted by our mining production efficiencies. I'll touch on that a bit later. Maybe just to remind our shareholders, there was a drop in quarter one of our previous financial year as the commodity prices came down sharply, which really affected our results in 2024. From a distribution and admin expenses, that increased by 6.7% relative to the comparative period. Seelan touched on the restructuring cost of the chemicals business. If I maybe just isolate it for the restructuring cost, the admin and distribution expenses would have been up 4.1% relative to the comparative period.
Moving further down the income statement, if we look at the net other operating income and expenses, that includes on the expenses side, forex losses that came through our accounts. Specifically in the SADC region, we have seen a sharp decline in Zambia, in the Kwacha, due to the drought that really affected the electricity supply. On the income side, we have seen gains coming through our shell captive, which we use for our insurance program, as well as the sale of non-core assets. The impairment losses of financial assets mostly relate to the ECL provisions, specifically in Zambia, that I will maybe just touch on a bit later. The share of net profit of investment, the bulk of that relates to our JV in the mining space in Indonesia.
Really strong performance for our team as we see growth in that area, just taking into account the comparative period only included 10 months relative to full year performance. That resulted in the operating profit in the year being stable at the ZAR 1.7 billion level. If I adjusted for the chemicals restructure, that would have been increased close to the ZAR 1.8 billion level. That will then result in an increase of about 5.6%. If we look at the operating margin, the operating margin reduced to 7.4% relative to the comparative period. If I just adjusted for the restructure cost, that would have been at the bottom end of our guidance range at the 7.9% level. From a net finance expense point of view, the increase in the net finance expense was actually driven by a reduction in net finance income on a net basis.
That was driven by finance income on debtors, specifically in agriculture, Zambia, as well as in SA. On the expense side, the increased use of the supply chain facility also increased the expense. From an effective tax rate point of view, the effective tax rate at 31.6% was in line with the prior year's 31.7%. In our investor deck, we have added additional disclosures for our shareholders that there was still a lot of moving parts moving the effective rate, even though on the face value, it seems to be fairly in line with the comparative period. That all resulted in diluted HEPS, as Seelan mentioned, being up by 2% to ZAR 7.04 relative to the ZAR 6.91 in the comparative period. Maybe jump into some of the details. If we can start off with agriculture first. In agriculture SA, we have seen increased fertilizer sales.
That was underpinned by our meteorology model driven by the teams. We've also seen favorable economic conditions playing out across the region, even though, as I mentioned, at about lower average commodity selling prices. We've seen strong margin extraction by the team, which was also supported by our integrated manufacturing and supply chain capability. The team has done really well in effectively managing our price risk. If you take into account some of these commodities, still moved more than 50% within our relative financial year. If I look at the rest of Africa, as Seelan mentioned earlier, it was a disappointing performance for us in the rest of Africa. We've seen revenue and margins reduced. A couple of factors resulting into that. We've seen the severe drought across the region. We've seen social-political challenges, specifically also in Mozambique, played out.
The severe drought in Zambia resulted in the electricity constraints that really drove down the devaluation or depreciation in the Zambian Kwacha, which resulted in forex losses coming through our accounts. That also furthermore resulted in increased ECL provisions due to delayed customer payments affected across the region. The teams are making really good progress in implementing the operating model changes in the region to ensure we set up the business favorably going forward. If I look at our agriculture international business, this is our business in Australia or our agri-bio business. We have seen revenue and operating profit increased, a really strong performance in volumes, export volumes out of Australia. That is due to new contracts, some of the key ones into China, as well as recovery of two key customers, as previously mentioned in our results.
In addition to the export volumes, we've also seen really strong domestic volumes in Australia, which confirmed the trend for sustainable farming practices for the use of the biostimulants products. In Brazil, we've seen a severe drought in Brazil. It's the worst in the last 70 years playing out in Brazil. We've seen resilient volumes by our Brazilian team, which just sustained the demand from our customers. However, the drought affected again the local currency, or the Brazilian real. That was due to the weight on investor confidence across that region. In the U.S., as we mentioned, we continue to invest in our distribution capability to ensure support for our long-term international growth strategy. A really strong performance by our agri-bio business. From a mining point of view, very, very strong performance from mining across both regions, local and international.
Specifically, if we touch on SA first, we've seen a robust performance by the business, taking into account there were macroeconomic challenges. There were adverse weather conditions affecting the business, as well as the sustained infrastructure challenges that the business faced across the region. The revenue and profit growth came from new business, as well as contract extensions, as well as product mix across the product range in SA. Furthermore, we've seen the margins were boosted by our production efficiencies. That was supported also by our ESG drive by the increased use of used oil in our emulsions. On the international side, we've seen strong volumes and margin growth across the businesses, specifically in SADC into Zambia, as well as into Namibia. That came through our blasting solutions business, as well as our metallurgy business, previously our mining chemicals business.
In the international space, we have also seen contributions from Indonesia, as well as West Africa, really boosting our results, which was slightly offset by the loss of a surface contract mine in Canada. BME Metallurgy was also strongly supported by our ammonia derivative sales from our Sasolburg facilities. Overall, we also made real good progress in the development costs in Australia and Canada. Lastly, in the chemical space, as Seelan already touched on, we have accelerated the restructuring in the chemical space, resulting in the ZAR 99 million restructuring cost. The disposal of the non-core assets is underway. We have added additional disclosures on the profitable water care business, as well as other assets that are held for sale, as disclosed in our financial results. Maybe just moving forward to our financial position.
The financial position remained strong for the group due to the disciplined working capital management, as well as cash generation. If you look at the total assets, the total assets are down lower year on year by 2%. The most notable changes to highlight there is the reduction in trade receivables, which came across all our segments, supporting our cash generation. We have seen increased inventory. Seelan already touched some of the shutdown of the key supplier to ensure we have put in strategic stock to ensure security of supply to our customers. In agriculture, Africa, we have also shifted our supply chain route from Beira into Walvis Bay, resulting in road logistic challenges, specifically out of Walvis Bay, which increased the inventory position at the end. We have seen the lower cash position on the balance sheet just year on year relative to the comparative year.
are maybe just two points to note as the current year included a special dividend cash flow, which was not in FY 2024. In FY 2024, we also had a working capital release of ZAR 603 million with a small capital draw in the current year. We have seen excellent working capital management, as we mentioned, a favorable ratio of 15%. Maybe just something else to call out is in other assets, as I mentioned, is the asset classified that is held for sale, which is mostly coming through the restructuring of the chemicals business. Maybe touching on the cash flow, the cash generated from operations remained strong, which contributed to our solid cash position. Our net working capital, including our supply chain finance, which gets disclosed on a separate line in our cash flow statement.
We've added just the additional disclosure on the slide for the working capital, resulting in a small capital draw in the current year relative to a big release in the prior year. The finance expense, as previously explained, increased due to the lower interest earned on debtor accounts in SA, as well as in Africa. From a tax expense point of view, the tax cash flow expense includes the ZIMRA matter, as we've disclosed to our shareholders at [Darthia] as well. Looking at the investing cash flows, that relates to our organic and growth capital. As we spent throughout the year, we don't starve our plants of any capital. The restricted cash balance relates to FICA requirement in the DRC, which has been resolved since year end.
Also, maybe just to note, the prior year included capital flows for our MNK JV, as well as our Hypex Bio investment. From a financing activity point of view, the treasury shares, their related cash flow relates to our share repurchase program, as well as the shares procured for our staff share schemes. The dividend flows is the current year includes the special dividend flow relative to an ordinary one in the comparative period. Thank you. I'll maybe just hand it over to Seelan for the closer.
Thank you. Thank you, Stephan. And thank you to you and the finance team for the incredible work to continuously move the results a little bit earlier. I know that puts a little bit of pressure on our auditors sitting next to us in the audience as well. But thank you to you as well for everything you do, [Tega]. Thank you. If we change gears a little bit and just talk about the future and what's next, from a strategy perspective, we will continue with our disciplined focus on executing what we said we would go out and do. There we said we would protect and grow our core. We will continue to scale and grow our mining business globally. We will build out the distribution of our agri-bio business in the selected markets we are operating in.
is a lot more we can do on all three of these businesses, all three of these thrusts. In the outlook slide at the end, we will attach a little bit of values, monetary values to that. In setting out with this global growth path, we need to ensure that it is underpinned by very strong values in our company. We also need—I mean, we all know that we cannot do this without people. We need to keep investing in our people and driving a performance culture. Our strategy will also be underpinned by a high degree of sustainability. I think broadly, if I look at where we are and our compares to some of our peers globally and locally, I think we have done incredibly well and maybe even a little bit ahead of where the pack is.
We also want to have what we do underpinned by technology and innovation. I think there our customer-focused teams have got some very good propositions that they have that is focused on that. I think finally, this disciplined capital allocation, we will continue on that path. You will not find us deviating from what we say, and you will not find us deviating from the disciplined execution path we've been on. We will be a purpose-driven organization, and we will be focused on long-term shareholder value. In some instances, you might find us not taking as much risk as you want, or you might find us doing things in a very considered way. We will focus on the long term, and we will ensure that we manage our company for long-term sustainable shareholder value.
We will unlock more value from our manufacturing and supply chain. We do not think it is all out. We think there is still a lot more we can do. Our teams, we put out this slide previously. Our teams have done some really good work in optimizing working capital, optimizing production. Every time I spend a bit of time with our engineers and I walk our plants and we talk about the detail, it just fascinates me how much more we can do. We have a lot of focus to optimize our plants, increase the agility of our supply chain, focus on having our plants being more reliable, more efficient, getting more throughput through it. We have not put out a slide with where we are in throughput, but we can still do more.
We want to leverage our supply chain, our strong, call it broadly, ZAR 23 billion supply chain to actually generate more value for us. We want to optimize our purchasing, optimize our terms, and we will continue to do that while we reduce emissions and build a more sustainable business going forward. From an agriculture perspective, we know that we are absolute leaders in agriculture from a regional perspective. Our teams on the ground in South Africa, our teams on the ground in Zimbabwe, in Zambia, and others have incredible technologies and a huge amount of value to add to increase yield. Our Head of Sales and Marketing will continue to do what is right for farmers and move them towards more specialty, more science-based, more research-based solutions to maximize water use efficiency and nutrient efficiency, but also continue to create the world-class agriculture sector we have in SADC.
I'm not going to do justice to some of the detail in the slide because I want to leave a bit of time for Q&A at the end. We'll continue to invest and be a strong, strong regional player from a nutriology perspective and an agriculture perspective locally and in SADC. Globally, you know and you've seen over and over that our agri-bio business has got great propositions. We see that the operating margin has increased. What we did on the slide on the right, if you take out some of our development costs, we've got some development costs in the U.S. now, distribution people that we've brought in, that margin even increases further. It is a very strong business, a very strong moat around the customer value proposition there with strong margins. We will continue to grow that.
We will think deeply about a strategic partner that will allow us to access greater distribution. What we've done to access the Chinese market and the Indian market has now paid strong dividends for us. Our exports are 46%, about 2/3, maybe 3/4 of that is really going into India and China. It is having the impact we expect. We'd really like it to grow faster, and we'd really like this growth to be unlocked a little bit quicker than it is. Having said that, this is a fast-growing market. We've done a chunk of research now in the U.S. to see what the uptake is in this space. Brazil, which has been a huge gainer from some of the disruption that Mr. Donald Trump has put in place, has been a huge uptaker of biostimulants.
If you just look at the massive impact Brazil is having on food exports to the rest of the world, a lot of that is driven by enhanced yield and farmers doing more with less. There is a great moat around this business, and we will keep investing and growing in it and looking for partnerships from a distribution perspective, but also strategic partnerships that can help us do more. If we come to our big story, the mining segment, BME has demonstrated its right to win. We are seeing this business win locally. We have seen this business win from a chemicals perspective, and we are seeing the business win globally. It wins globally against big global providers like we will show you on the next slide, and it wins locally against local competitors.
We will continue to invest in BME, and we'll continue to drive its growth from a global perspective. The CAGR of 41%, we had a staff session before this, and one of the managers asked me, "Seelan, how sustainable is that, and can it go up?" and we unpacked that in a little bit of detail. We believe there's still an immense amount of legs in BME to grow and do better. I think what we do know, a lot of our mobilization costs is sitting in this 41% CAGR. We haven't taken the mobilization costs and showed you what the CAGR would be without it. As soon as more of our countries or more of our plants deliver profit and the mobilization costs go out, you will see another increase in profitability from this business.
We have invested in Hypex Bio, and we think that is a great investment for us in the medium and long term. We certainly have not got any revenue or profits coming from it yet, but we think that also strategically positions BME in a different space. We have got a track record of partnerships, so we will continue looking for partnerships like the ones we have done in Canada and Indonesia. I am sure over the coming years, you will see us do a few more of those in a very disciplined fashion across the world. Obviously, this business delivers lower cyclicality risk, faster cash conversion cycles, and it changes the complexion of Omnia. It does not change it from green to red yet, but what it does do, it changes the complexion of our earnings to have 60% of our earnings more correlated to a different risk factor.
Just talking about the specific initiatives across the world, these are our joint ventures which you're aware of. Maybe I'll touch on Canada. In Canada, we've built two detonator plants and a Hypex Bio plant. We have still got mobilization costs in there, and we will, in the coming period, see that turn to profits. Obviously, Indonesia, you've seen that in our results. Indonesia is going well. The integration is good. There are six new contracts that have been signed there, and the progress is very pleasing. Australia, we've invested in infrastructure. We've got some more people there. While the AXXIS plant is cold commissioned, we still have to turn that business into revenue and profits going forward. Still upside from that.
Having said that about those three regions, there are still huge, huge opportunities on the African continent, Namibia, and further south in South Africa that we can still unlock. We see our business and our management teams doing an incredible job to do that. We will consider value-appreciative M&A. Where there are projects that look like they can enhance BME's value proposition, that they can enhance BME's distribution capability, we will look at those and we will explore those in a very considered manner going forward. Just to give you a sense why we believe there is strong value to be unlocked here, on the left of the slide, we put a chunk of recent explosives businesses that have traded. You can see the EV/EBITDA multiples that they traded on. On the right-hand side of the slide, I am assuming it is the same way for you guys.
On the right-hand side of the slide, we put a few of the listed explosives companies. They are not many, but we put Orica, Dyno, EPC, Enaex, and the two Indian companies up there. You can get a sense of what multiples they trade on. I think the overall context of the slide is to say that mining is an incredibly attractive sector for us with strong fundamentals. What you are seeing is that Omnia BME is incredibly undervalued in the global context. As we grow our revenue and our business globally, what you will see is that value being unlocked going forward. Yeah. Then just in terms of outlook, and we are almost done, margins and performance. We said broadly this is something very important to us.
We all get, as far as a big part of our KPIs, is on margins and growing that and all the concepts we're speaking about here, networking capital, ROE, and others. So BME, obviously, in its margin guidance ahead of it, Agri slightly below, but if you take out some of the challenges in SADC, Agri probably also there or thereabout. And the group broadly within its margin guidance. I guess the question, I'm sure you're going to ask, are we going to change the margin guidance and increase it? We probably will, but not right now. I think we've got some one-offs with Protea, and then Agri, SADC, that has been a bit of a headwind. So that will settle through in the current year.
Next year, we'll look at revising the margin guidance, maybe taking the bottom away and increasing the top a little bit, which we've done a few years ago. I think Stephan did that. I think our margin guidance still holds. From a return on equity, a nice smooth increase. However, what we do know is that chemicals is in this result. If you take chemicals out, there'll be an uptick. If you also make an adjustment or try to normalize a little bit for SADC, there will be an uptick. I think we're still targeting to increase our return on equity further. Obviously, what are we going to do to achieve all of that? Increased returns will happen with increased margins. We will have to also increase our asset turn.
You see the emphasis on our plants, on our supply chain, on our working capital, and obviously, very disciplined capital allocation. We often talk in our capital allocation committee, it's not just about allocating and spending money. It's also about removing money and saying, "We will not spend money on such," or, "We will not continue in a business as this one if it's not delivering the required ROE," or if a project or a country or a product is not delivering the ROE. We took a stab at giving you a view of what enhancements can still come. We previously did this based on margins, and this time, the team did this based on profits.
We said, "If we look at what benefit can we still unlock in the business, and where could that be?" We put out a slide just showing you a view of a three-, four-, five-year profit unlock per segment. Obviously, in chemicals, what we're saying is you will not see the loss coming through, and you will see some profit coming through. So a swing, mining, a view of that, Agri, a view of that, and then a CAGR over that period. Just to also tell you that what we put out here is not just a dream and a vision. There are some clear plans underneath it that we are working on to deliver it. Some of that will go better than planned. Some of that will not go as planned.
Overall, what you can see is a very credible outlook in terms of earnings enhancements, which will increase our return on capital, but also increase our profitability. From an outlook perspective, I think chemicals, we've boxed that. We've split it into three. The restructures happened. There's still a chunk of asset sales, working capital, and cash that will be unlocked from that. None of that's in the current period. In the next period, the cash that will be unlocked from the chemicals restructuring will start coming through. It's not in the current period. In the current period is cost. There will be a release of working capital and cash generated. From an agriculture perspective, we're still quite cautious on Africa, but we've got a strong team that we've put in place there, and we've got certain different distribution models in different countries.
Agri Bio, we're very positive on that, and you'll see that will continue. Obviously, from a mining perspective, that's our key thrust. We're demonstrating the value that we can unlock there, and we will hopefully continue to have implemented some of these customer wins that we've secured and continue to grow not only in South Africa, Namibia, and Southern Africa, but also West Africa, East Africa, in Zambia, and then in the different countries we've chosen across the world. I think a very strong outlook for mining for our group. Just to close out on a little bit of a shareholder slide, why should you consider us? We operate in primary sectors. Mining and agriculture, we know, has a high degree of resilience. Our mining business, as that grows, it diversifies our share. It makes us more correlated to a different sector.
We've got a track record now of operational excellence. We focus on delivery, and sometimes that is, I mean, delivering is hard. Our management team can be very proud of themselves for their hard work and commitment to do what they do. We've got this great integrated manufacturing complex of new plants, sustainable plants, well-maintained plants. We've got some great solutions in nutriology in our biostimulants business and in mining. What we've got is a track record of generating strong cash and cash flow, a strong balance sheet, strong and well-managed working capital cycles. What we're showing now, if you take whatever a five-year horizon, a very strong dividend payout. All of that together creates some form of shareholder return, and you can choose whichever you want to.
One of our very smart team members yesterday said, "If you take a 12-month period, it's this number." I said, "You can choose whichever number you want and then find it on the period." Overall, very strong shareholder returns over the period. Maybe I'm going to pause there and just say thank you to all of you for attending, and a big thank you to all of the team members at Omnia. We've got 3,800 people. Our people work 24/7 across the world. Our plants never stop. Our trains never stop. Unfortunately, they do stop due to cable theft, but they should not be stopping. Our trucks never stop, and our people never stop.
Thank you to the 3,800-odd people across our businesses, our plants that work night and day, in the cold, in the heat, in the dark, in the sun to deliver all of this. You are really our true heroes. Thank you to all of you for attending the roadshow, and thank you for your interest in our company. We will open up for questions. There is a microphone. I am going to happily pass some of the questions on to the management team as well, if that is okay.
Sure. Afternoon. [Detouras Tolle] from SPG Securities. I would like to congratulate you, Seelan, and the team. You often maintain your earnings or grow them despite the macro environment. I do have a few questions, actually. I would like to start with the chemicals business. I know it is not relevant, but I am just thinking from a modelling perspective and just overall.
Looking at the chemicals business, it looks like you're going to unwind working capital in this financial year, right? You're going to sell the unprofitable parts of the chemicals business. You're going to make about ZAR 200 million or so. Do you think we'll see this come as an additional distribution to shareholders? That's the first question. Also in the chemicals business, it looks like when I looked at the restructured and unrestructured, the past two years that you have, it's about ZAR 1 billion in revenue and a 5%-6% operating margin. Is that the sustainable way we should be thinking of the business?
Then a third one, just to throw it out there just for Stephan, if you could explain the impact of the Pillar Two tax model and its potential impact on your effective tax rate and working capital. Lastly, I just want to think about strategy. Often the biggest question that I get about Omnia, right, is what's next? We've always seen the slides about the turnaround and the resilience and the continued growth. I guess the question is what now? Because it's definitely turned around. Like you said, is there just more areas for efficiency and where? Or is Slide 18 alluding to some M&A?
Thanks for that. I think on the chemicals business, you're right in saying that currently the chemicals business has got cost in the current year.
What you are going to see next year is a cash unlock of working capital and an asset sale, potentially. Added to that, there will also be some sites, some land and operational sites that we will dispose of. It will have a positive cash impact in the future year. Whether that is now going to correlate to a special dividend or not, I will leave that to your imagination. I think the second point was really the piece that is left. That is the bulk trading business. What could we model in for a revenue and a margin on that? I will maybe ask Glen or Stephan to talk about that. I think it is early to state exactly where that is going to end, but we have a view of that, and we have a view of how we are seeing that. Do one of you want to answer that now quickly?
Glen, do you want to go?
Take that. With the mic. Morning, and thanks for the question too. In the disclosure, we actually broke out the piece that we're keeping, so the bulk trading business. We showed that last year, that business made ZAR 51 million of operating profit. That is the piece we're keeping. We think we can grow and do better in that business, but that is the core piece. I mean, the other piece that is being sold outside of the pieces that are closing is still a profitable business. If that sale is delayed, you are actually getting profits at least of the same magnitude as that coming in. If we sell it, there will also be gain on sale and the rest there. Hope that helps.
I think chemicals will not, when it's out the system, it will not detract from our operating margin. If that's where you're going, it'll be in that chemicals operating margin guidance range, if not a bit better, because that was with some loss-making in as well. I think, Stephan, on the Pillar Two tax model, I don't know if you want to answer that or?
Is this one on? Can I? To maybe just specifically on the Pillar Two tax. Obviously, we've added a bit of disclosure on it. You will see it in our financials as well. The impact was small at this stage where we are. It's going to be just less than ZAR 10 million, the impact of Pillar Two. Some of them, the safe harbor rules still need to be actually worked out. There's still legislation on that.
That needs to be in play by the end of March next year as we actually submit that.
Yeah. I mean, I think if I just try and summarize our growth story because you're alluding to something, I think we're very clear that there's a chunk of growth we can still unlock out of our core business. That is out of our agri business and out of our SADC business and out of our mining local business. I think where we're pointing to is the growth out of our mining business globally. That is a step change of value unlock. That can be done, one, by just growing our mining business day on day the way it is. If our mining business continues with a 40% CAGR growth for the next four or five years, you'll get some of that.
That could also be unlocked by some M&A, some bolt-on M&A like we've done with [Conzbeck], MNK, and then maybe something we'd do in another country. That can also be unlocked with something much bigger than that. That is what we're showing in that slide. I guess for us, we're sticking to our netting and growing our business, working through our joint ventures that we've invested in, and then exploring what else is out there, what is moving. Often you will only hear about what we've executed on. What you don't hear is what we've looked at and we haven't executed. I've said this before. That's quite a powerful statement to make because it demonstrates discipline.
It demonstrates our board's discipline and our management's discipline not to just execute on an M&A transaction because we have a strong balance sheet or because we believe it's the right thing to do. We must only do it if we fundamentally believe it's aligned with our strategy, it's the right returns, it's the right price, it's something we can manage, it's something we can take forward. I think we have looked at various projects during this financial year and last financial year. Should we find the right project, we will consider doing something within our disciplined capital allocation. I think the growth story of Omnia going forward is in its mining business. That's where we see the growth.
I think what is so strong about that is that we've done a 41% CAGR growth in the last five years, and we're now telling you that's where we're pointing to for growth going forward. Exactly how that growth unlocks, I think it could be one or a combination of a few of these options that I've put out. Obviously, there's the slide with what has happened globally in the explosives and how they traded and how that played out. Thank you. Everyone's pointing.
It's David Fraser from Peregrine Capital. First of all, kudos to you and your team. I think it's been a fantastic five years, five and a half billion of capital returned to shareholders. It's now mean feet, and certainly the cyclicality we've had in this business over 25 years seems to have been smoothed out. Congratulations.
I think it's not an accident that you are a significant shareholder in this business. I think it's fantastic to see a CEO running a business focused on shareholder returns. My question relates to the Sasol shutdown, obviously a big risk for your business. I mean, where exactly are we in the timeline there? If that shutdown is extended, how much kind of wriggle room have you built up into your stock provisioning as far as should there be any sort of delay in bringing that plant back?
Thanks, David. I think just to go back, I think the kudos must actually go to all of you that helped us. In the room today, we've got one specific individual who had to basically underwrite the ZAR 6.8 billion of debt we had at the time. I think he took a quarter of that.
We should maybe acknowledge your presence, Andrew. A lot of our shareholders and our debt providers and people like yourself have walked a long journey with us. Thank you to all of you for the trust and faith in us. Coming to Sasol, and I have all the experts here, but I will give you the two minutes before they come in. We have a very complex shut, firstly, that we have done. We have shut both our plants at once. They are both brought up already. They have shut and maintained and are going, both nitric acid plants. Sasol have gone through a very complex shut themselves. They have done a steam shut and an ammonia shut. The steam shut has ended, and the steam is back. Added to that, unfortunately, we had a, I want to say a cat, but it is not a cat. It is a, what is it?
A servet. Go into one of the substations of Eskom and trip it. While Sasol was in its shut, everything came down. Kudos to our engineers and the response teams to get all of that going. Currently, where we stand is the ammonia system of Sasol is back online, and the ammonia is coming through the pipe as we speak. I was told that late last night through a WhatsApp. What we have done to prepare for that, we have obviously got our trains that have been moving around. I spent quite a few days in Sasolburg over the last few months, and they are there and they are working. We have increased our storage capacity on AN, so we have got some storage capacity. Our teams have planned for this.
I guess if you're asking me what's the risk now of them not coming up, I think it's reduced quite significantly. Things always go wrong, so something can trip or break or whatever. I think our supply chain teams and our manufacturing teams are on top of it, and they've done a brilliant job. Now, David, having said all of that, there's another problem. We currently don't have water in Sasolburg. There's no water. We haven't had water for a week.
Oh, how long?
A week, maybe. We're currently trucking in 70 trucks a day of water to keep our plants going. Our teams have bladders set up and had to set them up. I'm incredibly proud of the resilience of our teams and how they planned for all of this. This was all planned for, from our perspective, last year, I think, and we continue.
We continue to produce fertilizer. Our trucks are continuing to send out explosives. These are the things we do not talk about. When you see the one macro headwind of infrastructure challenges, this is a real example of what is actually happening today as we sit here. I think we are confident that we are okay from that perspective. Have I covered it? You are shaking your head. Okay. The more clever engineers have said, "I have covered it."
I see Simon Sylvester from Rezco. Could you maybe just talk a little bit about your African agricultural business? Because it is obviously a mix of restructuring and macro that we are seeing in that loss that you have disclosed. Could you maybe talk about what that business looks like going forward and just try to help me size it from a revenue, operating profits perspective?
Okay.
I'll talk about it just from an overall perspective, and maybe Stephan or Glen want to size it. Broadly, you've got Mozambique in there. Mozambique last year was an absolute challenge with the social-political issues and the disruption. The port failed, so we couldn't get product through Beira. We had to bring it through Walvis. I think their outlook is pretty negative, and we probably will be very cautious about putting product into Mozambique and trading in there. The second one you've got is Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is closely aligned with us from an AN perspective, and we've got quite a significant—when I say significant presence, maybe not in terms of assets, but we're quite important to the agriculture space there. We've got some people there. We've restructured that business.
The gentleman sitting behind you, Peter Swart, can give you a bit more detail, maybe over tea, what he's done and how he's managing that. The big one is Zambia. Zambia had a lot of headwind against it. It had the drought. It had a massive supply chain disruption because the product now could not come from Beira. It had to come from Walvis, and that hurt us from a working capital perspective, even though our working capital is good. What we also had was some data write-offs that came through where, with a drought, customers could not sell. They were caught on the wrong side of the commodity prices. We have had to provide for some of that via ECLs and others. In terms of outlook and sizing that, I do not know if one of you want to?
Yeah.
I think if I look at the rest of Africa business, the two main components that really affected the business, as we mentioned, are the currency depreciation that affected that, and the ECL provisions. Now, the ECL provisions go hand in hand in the sense that due to the drought and the constraints there, everything shifted a bit later. That resulted in later collections over a year-end period. The impact there, and you will see the disclosures in the financial statements as well. Just on the ECL side, the impact was about ZAR 66 million on the ECL. That was quite a significant impact. On the currency as well, you will see it is actually north of ZAR 30 million impact as well overall year on year.
If I think about the business going forward, you will see over the last two years, there is an atone of the commodity price that drives the top line. You will see that we're sitting at about ZAR 2.5 billion where that business was driving. We do expect that to continue along those lines. Peter and the team are looking at specifically Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and he's already implemented some of the restructuring to mitigate that risk. I think sustainably going forward, that business, we want to put it on a bar of profitability in a sense that needs to be between ZAR 80 million-ZAR 120 million at the ZAR 2.5 billion level going forward.
Rowan. Rowan.
Is this on?
Yes.
Oh, sorry. Thanks, Steven. It's Rowan Goeller from Chronux Research. Two questions on the mining side.
Firstly, in South Africa, you're winning market share. Now, is this because of security of supply or because of certain characteristics maybe that your product has relative to your competitors? Secondly, in Canada, you say you lost a project. Was that a [Conzbeck] project? How big was that project in your life in Canada? Thanks.
Maybe, Ralf, you can maybe do the Canada one. Let me just answer the mining one locally. We have one contract and market share locally. I think when we think about our mining market share, we've got to think about what we sell via BME, but also what we sell via the ammonia derivative sales. We are also supplying other businesses like BME. There, Rowan, it is happening specifically because of the security of our manufacturer and our supply chain.
You could even have a business that has a nitric acid plant locally that is maybe not able to have consistent supply. We had that chart with the contract sales. What they would do is take a base amount of contracted volumes from us because we have got more redundancy and more security of supply, and then use their plant to top up as and when. There is both happening. We do not really give you a split of how much of it is the ammonia derivative sales, but we show you how that is growing. That is happening due to supply chain and manufacturing security of supply. BME is also winning contracts. Ralf can maybe talk through that in SADC and then Canada.
Thanks for that, Seelan. Good morning.
In SADC and in South Africa, yes, obviously the supply chain security is key for our customers, but there are obviously many, many other aspects that play a role. It is the quality of products. It is the people on the ground. It is organic growth in contracts where we are. It is technology provision and so forth. It is a whole host of things that play a role in winning contracts, but also in keeping contracts. From a Canada perspective, I just want to say we are in mining, so it is a competitive environment, and we do not ever like losing a contract, but we win some contracts and we lose some contracts. Now, as far as the Canada contract goes, we lost the contract on commercial terms and on pricing, on unsustainable pricing at the end of the day.
In a sense, it is a good story and a bad story that we did not lose the contract because of our practicalities or our products or our quality or ability to supply the customer. Yes, that customer was still in a ramping up phase. We were not at the high volumes that we wanted to be at, and we lost that contract on a commercial basis. Does it affect our Canada business going forward? It was to be said that it was not part of our initial strategy for our Canada business to enter surface mining. All our strategy in Canada was based on underground mining and detonator sales. This surface contract basically came from the side. Will it impact our Canada strategy going forward? No, it will not.
Obviously, it would have been nice to keep the contract because it would have probably taken us to profitability a little bit quicker. But we are focusing on executing our strategy, and that was on underground, excuse me, and detonators, and opening not only Canada, but the whole North American market based on those products and those plants that we are commissioning now. I do not know if that is—
Thanks. Thanks, Ralf.
There are just a couple of questions online.
That is what I am—okay, you have got them. I was trying to work out who has got the online questions.
The first three questions are from Bianca Travel at OIG.
She's asked, "Can you give us an indication of the magnitude of any further restructuring costs within the chemical segment?" Further to that, "Please provide guidance on the split of these costs between H1 and H2 and FY 2026." The next question, "What needs to happen in the agriculture segment, both through external factors and internally, for it to reach its margin targets of between 9%-12%? Will the external factors or internal changes have a bigger impact on margin expansion?" The final question from Bianca is, "Could you elaborate on how the ammonia pricing has impacted operating costs and margins within the agri and chemical segment, and how do you see this evolving going forward?" The last question we had from Khalid was, "Why was the special dividend less than last year?" That's it from online.
Thanks very much.
I think in terms of the restructure cost, there is still a bit of restructure cost that will come through in the current financial year. I think the team have got some flexibility of when and how to do that. I do not think we have been exactly where it will be in the first half or the second half. We have not disclosed exactly how much that is. I think the key thing for us is that the business will be in profitability going forward in FY 2027. Just in terms of agri's margin guidance, if I were to split whether we would get into guidance quicker due to macro factors or internal factors, I would say we will very easily get into the guidance range by just doing one or two things that are in our control.
Because if you were to look at us making a loss in SADC of ZAR 61 million, and maybe we could have made a profit of ZAR 100 million or ZAR 150 million, that's already—that in itself will take us to the guidance range. I think the work being done now in Agri SA, Agri International, and in MOS, it's within our control to get us into the guidance range. I think what you will see is you will see environments where there will be tailwind in the agri business. You saw that where commodity prices are up, where soft commodity prices are up, and that could have a bigger tailwind. I think what we focus on is what's in our control, and the guidance we put out to you, guidances we can deliver, that we must deliver a little bit in spite of some of the macros.
I think the issue around the ammonia pricing, I think what we've been trying to do is show you how we've decorrelated the business. To just purely correlate us to ammonia price would probably not be the right thing. The first issue is the diversification between agri and mining. I think you see the mining segment go. Probably the best slide to look at would be the sort of half-year bars and just to talk through that. The ammonia price is important to us. It does have an impact on our business, but we've got more levers to pull now to manage that. You see us doing that with that slide. We can maybe take that question offline and discuss it a little bit further.
I think your last question was, "Should we retract the special dividend and not pay it?" I guess if you—and our board had fairly robust discussions about this. The dividend fits into our capital allocation plan. If you say we've got a pot of money, the first thing we use that money for is to protect our core, to grow our business, and to look at the projects we've got in sight. We've put whatever we need for that away. Park the fact that we've got debt and all of those things. Just let's ignore that for a second. We say we've got some money left over. Let's make sure the ordinary dividend is proper. Obviously, what we're doing is we're increasing that because we're saying the quality of our earnings is higher when we've done that.
We still had some money. Maybe we could say, "Just keep it for a rainy day," or alternatively, "Use it to buy back shares or pay a special dividend." The buyback shares in our company, we have been buying back shares. We have told you that, and you see some of the numbers, but it is quite slow. Liquidity is maybe not where we would like it to be, and we do it in a very structured way. We have kept some money there, and we said we still have some money. That is how we got to the special. Could the special have been ZAR 0.50 more? Probably. Could the special have been ZAR 0.50 less? Probably. Eventually, we landed at the special where it is. I think what it demonstrates is the discipline.
I think whenever we've paid special dividends, it's special. We've said as well, "It's never absolute science." I think what the team have also done is they've looked very carefully at the cash generation. We've paid—if you look at the total distribution, it correlates exactly to cash generation. It's not as if we're paying out—we haven't paid out any of—to us asking about any cash coming out of Protea in future years. We haven't paid that out via special now. This is based on how we've performed last year.
We have an additional question from Robert at Rezco. What are the longer-term steady-state targeted ROEs on the global business?
Okay. We don't have an ROE target per business. I think generally, if you take the 11, there was a slide, the second last slide, where we took the 11 and we made some adjustments to it.
I think it went to 12.9. 12.9 is probably what we should have done if we did not have some of the one-offs. If you say, "Where could we go?" the way to model that would be to take the earnings chart, which was the chart just before that, where we showed projections of earnings in three years' time. I think then you will get to a very credible number of ROE. I do not want to put the number out. I do not know if you two guys want to—do you want to? I mean, you could model it from the—
That is it from online. Thanks, Seelan.
Thank you. Okay. Thank you, everyone, for coming. I really appreciate you coming here and braving the traffic and the bottles and the interest in our company. Thank you to all of you online for listening.
If there are any questions, please email us or phone or message, and we will respond. You do know you have a very strong management team here that are fully committed to running the company, growing shareholder returns, and David keeping Sasolburg going through whatever comes at us, whether it be a cat, a cable theft, or a shut. We will do the best we can to keep everything growing and moving forward. Thank you very much.