It's my pleasure to welcome you to Omnia's interim results presentation for the six-month period ending 30 September 2025. We're delighted to have you with us this morning, either in the room or online, as we reflect and engage with you on our performance, our key milestones, and just the outlook for our business. Safety is a core value of Omnia, and one of the ways in which we live this value is to solve for proceedings such as this one with a safety moment. This morning, the safety share will be presented to you by my colleague, Rian Nair. Rian is the Executive for Operations at Protea Chemicals. I am not going to delay any further. I'm going to call Rian on, and he will then present our CEO, who will take you into the meat of the meeting. Thank you.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Before we start with the safety moment, just a few housekeeping rules in terms of our evacuation procedure. Firstly, we do not have any emergency drills planned for today. Should you hear an alarm, please treat this as an emergency and evacuate the building. When evacuating the building, briskly walk, do not run to the assembly point that is located in front of our office building. Follow the green exit signs that you see on top of the ceilings to the nearest assembly point. There are two evacuation routes from this room. The primary evacuation route is to my right and at the corner of the building. The secondary route is through the main entrance that you entered into this morning. At the assembly point, go to assembly point zero.
A roll call will be taken by one of our safety representatives, and please wait until the emergency controller has declared the building safe before returning to the building. Please refrain from smoking at any assembly point. Safety is not just a priority. At Omnia, it is a core value. I appreciate the opportunity to stand before you to discuss this important topic. Our safety moment today delves into the permit-to-work system, which is a key pillar in our process safety management culture. A permit-to-work, by definition, is a formal written authorization system used to control hazardous or non-routine work activities. In plant operations, non-routine activities are those that are not covered by a standard operating procedure.
These are commonly experienced during maintenance or breakdown activities, and at the higher levels of risk, hazardous activities include hot work, such as welding, cutting, or grinding, working at heights, confined space entry, excavation work, and high-voltage electrical work. These types of activities, together with failures in permit-to-work systems, have resulted in various global high-profile industrial incidents. The Piper Alpha disaster of 1988, the Texas City refinery explosion of 2005, and the West Fertilizer explosion of 2013 all had an element of inadequate hazard identification and communication. While there are many other simultaneous contributors to these incidents, a robust permit-to-work system could have mitigated some of the risks.
In application, while permit-to-work systems authorize the work to be done, effective permit-to-work systems provide the additional benefits of ensuring proper communication between all parties involved in a job, communication of what was done to make the area safe, which includes isolation and lockout, and also communicating what risks remain after safemaking of the site. It allows for a dynamic risk assessment that's in the field and provides a final opportunity to identify any risks that could have been missed. From personal experience, it also allows a manager to see and understand if everybody performing the job fully understands the safety and risks of the job to be taken. These benefits of a permit-to-work system therefore go beyond just an authorization. The permit-to-work is therefore not just a ticket to ride, but the final step in pre-job risk mitigation.
I urge everyone to apply the methodology not to just industrial applications, but also at home. We have all had to deal with burst geysers, electrical failures, roof repairs, construction, or gas installations at our homes. While I doubt everybody has a permit book at home, it is still possible to follow the core permit-to-work principles. Therefore, whether at home or at work, assess the risks of the job. Ask yourself, what could go wrong? Control the hazards. Has the person isolated electricity? Are they wearing adequate PPE? Communicate with others in the household, especially children, and ensure that they cannot access the area. Finally, verify completion before restoring power or removing any isolation. In conclusion, remember, a permit-to-work is not just paperwork. It's protection. It's the last line of defense before the job begins. Respect it, follow it, and speak up if something is missing.
Safety is everyone's responsibility, whether at work or at home. Thank you for your time, and let's keep safety at the heart of everything that we do. Seelan, over to you.
Thank you, Rian, and good morning and good afternoon to all of our shareholders in the room and online. Thanks for making the time to be here, and thank you for your interest in our company. We also have a number of staff members and board members on the line. Thank you to you as well for your contribution and for all the work you do to make Omnia successful. If I can start, firstly, what is our purpose? We know that businesses that do not have a very clear North Star and purpose are businesses that are not sustainable in the long term. Omnia's purpose is innovating to enhance life and together creating a greener future. How do we do that? There are three core principles that we have built our execution on. The one is innovation.
What you will see through the presentation, when you speak to our customers, when you speak to our partners, when you speak to stakeholders, they will explain to you our science-backed approach to mining and to agriculture. Our investments, our customer solutions, and our business is underpinned by clear R&D, innovation, and innovative solutions to customers. The second thing is sustainability, and Ditebogo again will take us through our sustainability performance. Everything we do, our investments, our current business, and our future investments is underpinned by strong ESG principles. You'll see us invest in and use used oil in our emulsion, and you'll see how our nutriology concept and services actually help farmers use less chemicals, less water, and actually optimize the value of inputs to enhance yields. Finally, we do this with a lot of collaboration and working together.
As a company of 3,800 people in 23 countries, we know that we have to have partners. We have some very strong partners in Canada, in Indonesia, and in our agri-bio business in India, in China, and Brazil. Collaboration is an important part of our business to have our teams, our manufacturing teams, our supply chain teams, our agri teams, our mining teams to an extent, and then our partners, our customers, our service providers, our input providers work together to enhance our purpose of creating a greener future. If I move to the map at hand, which is our results, I think I stand here today delivering yet another very, very strong set of results of the Omnia Group at half year. Half year, as you know, is not our end scorecard.
Half year is really when we are in our deep cycle from cash utilization and for preparing for the planting season. What you will see here is all of our metrics are incredibly strong. Our profits, double-digit growth of 12%, up to ZAR 900 million. This is the strongest profits we have had since the peak of the commodity cycle, which I will show you later, and it is being delivered at a much lower current commodity cycle. We have had our revenue 3% up to ZAR 11.2 billion. Our operating margin is also up at half year. Our EPS is up. Our cash generated is up and a strong cash position of just under ZAR 700 million at half year, no debt again. Our net working capital ratio also improved down to 16%. What caused that? Very strong performance in our mining business.
Our mining business and our agri business, very focused on customer solutions and on doing what's right for the customer. We have a resilient performance in our agriculture segment overall, and Stefan and I will unpack that during the course of the session. Bear in mind that we have had a 60-day shut in this half year. Incredible performance when you think of a 60-day supplier shut to deliver these results. Our teams worked in conjunction, collaborating with our supplier and our customers, and none of our customers, our farmers, or our mines were impacted by this supplier shut. What you see is very, very strong cash generation, strong underlying earnings quality, so BME contributing roughly 63% of our profits today at half year, and yet again, a strong balance sheet, a balance sheet that positions us well and positions us well to grow in the coming period.
Maybe just one other statement to make. This was also delivered with geopolitical changes, uncertainties, and the impacts you've seen on currencies, supply chains, shipping routes, and others. We will come to that a little bit later. Before we get into the meat of the business update, I'm going to hand over to Ditebogo, and she's going to take us through our safety, our ESG, and a little bit on our CSI scorecard. Thank you, Dee.
Good day and good evening to everyone in the room and online. I think, as mentioned, safety is one of our core values. It is critical to our business. We work in a very high-risk environment. This is one of the things that we take very seriously. As a starting point, we are just going to go through our safety performance, but I just want to take a step back to the second half of last year and where we ended up there. We did see a deterioration in our safety performance, and I think this was just a reminder for us to never take your eyes off the ball when it comes to safety. We have a lot of inherent risks in our operations and transport in our manufacturing facilities.
We had a number of things coming at us as well, so we need to be prepared to respond to those. There are also generally just behaviors that we need to manage, encourage, and discourage that contribute to our safety performance. What we're seeing in this first half of the year is a somewhat of a stabilization of our safety performance, but that does mean that there are safety incidents that occurred in this half year that we're not part of. We had seven recordable incidents, and unpacking the incidents, the two main areas where these come from. The first is on the roads, specifically in SADC. We understand that there's infrastructure challenges in our SADC region.
There are extreme weather conditions that have an impact on the road risks, but also just behaviors, whether it's of our own staff, but also third parties that come at us as well. The second part, Seelan mentioned that we had a 60-day shut in our Sasolburg operation, and we've seen that we had incidents that also come from the majority of that period. Shut period is inherently a higher risk. It's a high-risk environment, but shut period is an even higher-risk environment. There is a need for us to just step up our controls, step up our hazard identification, and support our teams during that period. With this said, we have seen an improvement in some areas, specifically in our process safety, and I think this speaks to our engineering and maintenance disciplines and that supporting that.
Secondly, it's just the risk-based safety initiatives that have been implemented following that identification of certain risks and hazards across our business. Looking forward, I think it's just we have been working on this, but we need to continuously focus on the visibility of our leadership on our sites and on the road. It's the management of our vehicles, our driver behaviors, coaching, training, awareness, and also just the general management of our logistics because we do have third-party logistics service providers. We work with a lot of contractors, so it's up to us to manage and influence the management of contractors as they work with us before work starts, as it's happening, and after it's been completed. We continue to focus on leading indicators, so the site inspections and audits, but it doesn't end up at just inspections and audits.
A lot of those come out with actions, and these actions, when worked through and closed out, actually continuously improve or reduce the risks and the management of risk in our operations. Lastly, it's continuously building a learning culture. Every time an incident happens, a near miss is reported. There are learnings that come out of these incidents and near misses, and it's for the management team, for our staff, the people on our sites, the contractors that we work with, to be deliberate and disciplined about learning from those incidents and actually sharing the learnings across different learning platforms. I think lastly, one of the mottos that, as Omnia, we live by is see something, say something, and do something, and it's just continuing to encourage our people to be alert and see what's happening. Say something when they see something happening, but actually do something about it.
I guess that's the excellent part of that. I think lastly, because we have had a serious incident happening to us in one of our facilities over the past week or so, I just want to say, from a safety perspective, thank you to our staff, our leaders, our suppliers, and unions who've shown commitment, responsiveness to safety incidents and emergency situations. We couldn't do it without you. Moving on to our environmental performance, once again, as in I think you'll hear quite a bit of this, our extended shutdown has had an impact on our ESG performance, but I think what we show is our operations are quite resilient that despite this extended shut, our performance is relatively flat.
From a carbon emissions perspective, the carbon intensity of our product shows a slight increase, and this is due to lower production volumes over the period. From an energy perspective, our energy efficiency remains flat. Our renewable energy increased, the use of our renewable energy increased slightly. From a water preservation perspective, our water use efficiency has improved. I think this is also in addition to the shuts. We saw a municipal water shut that we also had to navigate through during this period. The recycling of our water, which is, and this has been impacted predominantly by Sasolburg and the production that was happening, production and shut in Sasolburg, we see a reduction, but what is positive is that across the rest of our site, we're still seeing a positive trend in terms of water recycling.
I think lastly, we continue to contribute to water preservation through the collection and use of waste oil in the production of our emulsion in our BME business. Looking forward, we've got plants running for the second half. We've got phase three of our solar plant that has recently been commissioned. I think what we're seeing is that there's continued stabilization of our ESG performance in the second half of the year. Lastly, the management of our investments, our customers, and stakeholders in general would not be possible without our people. This is why at Omnia, we believe in sharing value that is created with our staff, starting with the employee share scheme that was implemented a number of years ago and continues to vest in tranches over years.
The share scheme has delivered over ZAR 69 million in value to over 3,000 employees globally since it's been launched. I think for us, this is more than just a financial transaction. From a safety perspective, from an operational perspective, we expect ownership from our staff. What this says is we share the outputs of that ownership with our staff as well. Additionally, Seelan is going to be taking us through our strategy and business performance a bit later. It's important for us to invest in the right skills, leadership, and capabilities to be able to execute on that strategy. It's for this reason that we have a range of development programs for our management teams. This is from executive to middle management and our supervisors as well.
We have development programs for our apprentices, graduates, engineers, and bursaries that we share and give out to our staff members to be able to develop themselves. Lastly, we have learnerships for persons living with disabilities, and this is acknowledging that these are more vulnerable members of our societies. Therefore, we support them to be able to actively participate in the economy. Recently, we held a successful leadership conference where we had over 170 of our global leaders just across the road. What this helped us with is just getting insights and getting them to contribute to the strategy, the culture of Omnia. I think we are going to see parts of that result in the business and financial update that we have seen today.
With that in mind, I'm going to hand back over to our Group CEO, Seelan, to take us through the business update.
Thank you, Ditebogo, and thank you to you and your team for all you are doing to keep our people safe and reminding us of our focus on ESG and being able to measure that and deliver towards it. If I step forward for a second, I'm just going to go into the business update and start off by talking about the environment that we have operated in. In this environment, the global complexity of this environment, the risks and the volatility continues to persist. I think what we do know is that the president in the U.S. has given us a lot of changes and forced us to think about not only the primary impacts of tariffs and change, but also the secondary impacts of that. What we've seen is across the world, uncertainty. We've seen commodity prices change, and we've seen currencies fluctuate.
That has been driven by countries becoming more insular, thinking about themselves, and maybe a little bit of polarization of countries thinking about how they can do things together or how they can do things differently. For a business like Omnia, we are in 23 countries. We operate with a global supply chain. We have had to focus heavily on our agility and our strategic optionality to ensure that we can continue to move product around and do that in a way that works for us when there is a disruption. We also have looked at the impacts of tariffs and what that potentially means for our agribio business and our mining business. In all of those instances, it has not changed our capital allocation, and it has not changed what we set out to do. Our business continues to remain fairly resilient to some of these changes.
The currency volatility is something we'll talk about a little bit later, but we have seen the strength of the [Quarter] impacting our business negatively. Having said all of that, we've still performed really well in the current six months. Climate change, wherever you look, climate change is happening and upon us, and we will speak a bit about Brazil and Australia being in drought, and those two segments, results have been muted by the drought position. That has been offset by good volumes and good delivery in our South African business and some additional benefits to our manufacturing and our supply chain. Having said all of that, we've challenged ourselves previously and have said, in spite of all of that, why do we do so well? We do so well because we're in primary sectors.
Both our businesses, agriculture and mining, food production and mineral extraction, both of them are core primary sectors in economies that drive GDP growth, that drive economic growth, that create employment. It has a high degree of resilience and sustainability in those. The mining sector has a strong underpin by the energy transition. We see the demand for certain metals increasing. While there have been challenges in diamonds and others, those have been offset by opportunities in uranium and other metals for the energy transition. From an agriculture perspective, strong demand for our products. We have seen some leveling off of the playing field in Zimbabwe and in Zambia, and you will see some of that come through our results from a positive perspective.
Our agribusiness in Australia, still strong demand for umates and biological products, and you'll see how that business has performed and the outlook around that. If I move to the actual results on a page, maybe before I get there, we put another chart up to show you this volatility and to show you this change, and maybe I'll pick up on a few comments here. The first one is the geopolitical changes. More wars, more disruption, and all that results in changes in shipping routes. It results in changes in demands. It forces us to be more and more agile. You know, for the last few years, we've been focusing on the resilience in our supply chain, the strength of our balance sheet, and the agility of our people. We have performed well under these conditions.
That geopolitical conflict has obviously resulted in the currencies. We brought out a few of the big currencies that impact us. You can see how those currencies have moved. During the reporting period as well, you can see the volatility in there, with the Kwacha being the one that's moved fairly significant during this period. Climate change, I've spoken about, and I won't go through that, but that also requires us to be more resilient in our supply chain, our ability to produce, and our ability to sell in an agile manner. From a population perspective, we positively dispose to urbanization and the need for food security. Obviously, from that perspective, we know that Africa needs to be fed. We can see that as the global political landscape is changing, countries are getting more insular, and they need access to more inputs, and they need those inputs earlier.
They need them at the farm site or in the country earlier because supply chains, logistics are not as reliable as we'd like them to be. Obviously, the demand for critical minerals still continues, and you'll see the performance in our BME business and our mining chemicals business, very strong performance there, outlook also strong. Sustainability, wherever you turn, while currently there's a little bit of a slowdown in focus on ESG, if we look at what's happening in the US, in the long term, Europe and the world will continue to focus on sustainable practices in mining and in agriculture. You know our business is positively disposed to those changes. We try to double-click on a long-term chart of showing our profits at half-year and our profits at full-year.
A number of you who have been following our company for a long time ask about the ammonia price, the commodity prices, the urea prices, and how does our company perform over this. Ten years ago, we often said Omnia is an agriculture company fully correlated to ammonia and urea. What this chart demonstrates to you is how we focused on diversification, one from an earnings perspective and a business perspective, and also from an agility perspective in our supply chain and how that has impacted our earnings. What you see in the current half-year, our earnings are the highest it has ever been. The higher earning than this year was the one at the peak of the commodity cycle in half-year 2023.
Very, very respectable performance, strong performance from an earnings perspective at a low commodity cycle at a time when there is significant currency volatility and also off the back of us having a 60-day shut. Our business was able to navigate that. The movement of having 63% of our earnings coming from mining in the current reporting period also demonstrates the increase in profitability, the diversification benefits, and the move away from maybe just an ammonia price or urea price. What you're seeing here is the execution of our strategy, the change in our business, the allocation and the deallocation of capital actually having real profitability benefits for the Omnia Group. Having said all of that, you know that this is our half-year scorecard. Usually at full-year, our scorecard is where you see the full position of cash and the full position of earnings.
I think this is a very, very strong half-year performance if you contextualize it from 2020 to where we're finding ourselves, considering that we've had such a significant shut. What does the scorecard actually look like? Our revenue is 3% up to ZAR 10.1 billion-ZAR 11.2 billion. Our operating margin is up 8%. Our gross profit down 2% to ZAR 2.4 billion. Our operating profit, I've said already, 12% up to ZAR 900 million. Both earnings per share and headline earnings per share up 13% and 11%. Our return on equity is also up to 12.3%. Our net working capital is down, which is what you want to see, to 16.3%. Our net cash position, very, very respectful, at just below ZAR 700 million.
You know that this is the peak of our planting season, so you'd expect us to be in a low cash position, but we are cash positive. We are not in debt, and you can look further into the facts, and Stefan will get you that around cash generation. I think if I look at this scorecard, a very, very strong financial performance, something that the team can be proud of, and having achieved this with a 60-day shut demonstrates the resilience, the agility, and the performance of our teams. How did each business unit perform? Maybe I'll start with chemicals. A few years ago, we said that we will be restructuring that business. That restructure has gone very well. We've closed a piece of it. The management team have been able to systematically work our way out of the stock positions, convert that to cash.
We're busy exiting some of the land and the properties and the warehouses in that business. There are two pieces of it left. Those two pieces are profitable going forward. It's the bulk trading business and the watercare business. The bulk trading business, we will combine that into our supply chain. I think we will not worry about that going forward. Our watercare business, at the end of last year, we said that business is out for sale, and we will exit it at the appropriate time. That business is doing well. It's profitable. It's secured new customers. There is no need to rush with the sale of that business. What our shareholders will see coming out of the chemical sector is more cash as we exit some of our plants, warehouses, and land that will convert into cash and actually enhance our cash position.
I think the chemical sector has now reduced. That has impacted our GP a little bit, and Stefan can talk about that later. I think being managed according to model and the strategy execution being executed very well by the team in place in that business. From a mining perspective, our mining business continues to grow. Great volumes in SADC, great growth in our mining chemicals business. Yet again, we see BME margins up, profits up, and a very strong outlook. The mining business was impacted negatively by the currency movement in Zambia. In spite of that, you're still seeing this growth. Good progress made on projects to mobilize in Canada and Australia. I am very pleased with the performance and the outlook of that business. From an agriculture perspective, agriculture as well, margins are fairly resilient.
Obviously, our agriculture now, our agriculture segment has the manufacturing and supply chain shut in it. It has benefited from a very strong performance in AgriSA. AgriSA has had good agronomy conditions and good volumes in the first half of the year. The team in that business has done incredibly well. Zimbabwe and Zambia have settled. We had quite a difficult time there last year. We put in some new management, and the new management have done well to stabilize that business, to get those businesses back to profitability, and to start relooking, which we have told you, at the operating model in those businesses. From a Umates and an international perspective, strong export sales of Umates internationally, and those have been offset by the droughts in Brazil and some of the droughts in Australia.
When you look at the detail of our international agribusiness, we will separate that for you in a detailed pack, but you will see that play out. Overall, strong strategy execution in the group, profits ZAR 900 million, group margin at 8%, strong volumes in agri and in mining. I think a very strong performance in spite of the shut. What that has led to is good cash generation and a strong balance sheet again. We can talk about that a bit later. Just talking about our manufacturing and supply chain, I think I must emphasize at this point that our manufacturing complex, our supply chain, the bulk of it, which is in Sasolburg, is incredibly important to us. This operation of ours is of world-class standards. We have got the largest nitric acid plants in the country.
We have got the highest output production capabilities, and we have the most modern plant in the country, our nitric acid-2 plant. We have been investing systematically over the last five years in rail wagons where we have a fleet of over 220 of them. They're well maintained. They're working currently. Jacques can tell you where they are and what they're moving. We have got an incredible team of engineers and leadership, some of them in this room or in this building and a large chunk of them on the plant. Our Sasolburg facility is value-adding. It's a competitive advantage for us, and it is something that we will continue to invest in and delivers value to our mining business, to our agribusiness, and a chunk of trade ammonia derivative sales that we've delivered out of that. We've invested in road tankers.
You see a picture of some of those, which also enhance our redundancy of supply if we have challenges with our local supplier or if we have challenges with the trains and being moved around the country. We have invested in our reliability. We have used the opportunity of this big shut to actually upgrade some of our control systems on our nitric acid plant. Our most senior engineer teaches me this weekend of how we can use that to diagnose issues sooner and actually run our plants better and enhance reliability. This facility of ours is core. This facility is not for sale. It is something we will invest in, and it is something that enhances our competitiveness and enhances our ability to be agile and to diversify our earnings and optimize the value of the nitrogen molecules through ammonia into mining and into agri.
Obviously, we have the great flexibility to be all the way into the customer, selling to the customer, but also selling on a B2B basis to some intermediaries who then sell to customers. We have continued to invest in solar. You probably saw that in one of the bullets in Ditebogo slides, another 5-megawatt plant that we put in. I think it is fascinating to see the amount of solar that we have in this facility and also our reverse osmosis plant. We had a challenge in that plant in the last six months, so we did not get as much throughput through it, a little bit of a shut and then a little bit of a repair that we needed to do. A great facility, world-class facility that we have that enhances our competitiveness. How did that flow into working capital for us? A very respectable performance of working capital.
We increased our stock positions a little bit to prepare for the shut, a little bit for slightly higher prices. We provided our supply chain team with the flexibility to take certain positions on the right side of buying early. All of that has worked positively for us, some of it in this half-year, some of it still to come. As you can see, working capital, well managed, also good use of supply chain finance and receivables well under control. I feel that the team has really progressed in terms of working capital management. If we go back to 2018, 2019, where we were having a working capital draw of ZAR 1.8 billion, ZAR 1.5 billion, you can see that our working capital draw is significantly different.
We have changed the profile of working capital and cash generated at Omnia sustainably now for a number of years. Let's talk a bit about capital. We are just systematically going through sort of profits, working capital, and now capital, cash, cash, cash, because we want to make sure that at the end of the day, we are focusing carefully on investing and cash. Again, very, very disciplined in terms of our capital allocation. Managing our cash well, taking our cash and investing in our current core business to protect it, taking our cash and investing in businesses for growth. You are seeing growth coming through our earnings, investing in our mining business globally and our Umates business in terms of enhancing our distribution in the US and others and capital in sustainability like the solar farm.
Having done all of that, when we look at what is available at the end, continuing to declare very strong dividends and a special dividend last year and also buying back shares. In total, since we launched the share buyback program, we bought back 5.7 million shares at an average share price of ZAR 62. We can talk about that a little bit later, and Glen or Stefan can unpack that. I am going to hand over to Stefan now, who is going to do a deep dive into the financial results per division and also the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. Thank you, Stefan.
Thank you, Seelan. Good morning to all our shareholders, our board members, our staff, and to all our other stakeholders in the room as well.
Maybe just before we jump into some of the details of the financial numbers, just a quick update on the Sasol matter. We're nearing now the final stages of the ADR process. There was a lot of engagement with the Sasol team over the last couple of months, and the teams are working tightly to close that back as quickly as possible. Maybe from an overview point of view is that, as Seelan mentioned, the group delivered a strong financial performance for the half year, again, demonstrating our ability to navigate all the external pressures, as Seelan highlighted. The teams maintained the reliability of supply to our customers while demonstrating this effective working capital management. You can see how that profile has changed over the last couple of years.
This result then reflects in the solid cash generation across the business, taking into account normally Omnia's biggest chunk of cash gets generated in the second half as we unwind the summer planting into the SADC region. That resulted in a strong balance sheet. Jumping into some of the details, revenue increased by 3%. That was driven by the higher volumes in our agriculture SA front-facing business as well, also supported by pricing dynamics in that business, and then the volume growth in mining and that portfolio diversification across our core businesses. That growth was offset by the restructuring of our chemicals business, as Seelan highlighted it. That reduction in chemicals was ZAR 440 million for the half year. From a gross profit point of view, gross profit decreased by 2% to the ZAR 2.4 billion level.
That was due to the rationalization of the chemical segment. That came out of the gross profit, as well as the extended supplier shutdowns, which affected specifically the production volumes and the cost recoveries during the quarter, during quarter one of FY2026. From a distribution and admin expenses point of view, that decreased 9% relative to the comparative period, again, due to the restructure of the chemicals that comes out of the base. That was close to ZAR 100 million that comes out of the base, as well as some ones-off costs that was baked into the prior that related to restructuring costs, site losses, and some regulatory costs in West Africa. From a net other operating income in that line specifically, that includes the movements in forex. Seelan highlights it, some of the currencies already.
There's also fair value adjustments relative to derivatives, as well as our insurance shell captive and also non-core asset sales that gets baked into that line. From impairment losses of financial assets, that relates to our ECL provisions. You can see that is lower relative to the comparative period. In the comparative period, the rest of Africa, specifically in our agriculture segment, was negatively affected. This year our net profit on investments, that relates to our Indonesia joint venture in our mining business. The half-year result was impacted by some regulatory challenges in the local environment, which affected three of the customers over the period. If I look at it from an operating profit point of view, a really strong operating profit growth.
We can see double-digit growth up 12% to the ZAR 900 million level, and then the operating margin up to 8%, which gets us into the bottom end of our group target range. The net finance expenses increased relative to the comparative period, and that was threefold. Firstly, the high use of the supply chain finance platform to support the increase in our inventory as we lead up for the summer planting season as well. There was a lower number of interest earned on cash balances, taking into account the prior year started with a higher cash balance that was carried over. That was partially also for higher interest earned on debtors, mostly in agriculture Zambia. If I maybe just cast your mind back to the year-end number, there was a bit of carryover debtor, specifically in agriculture Zambia.
A lot of those collections have played out in this half of the year, and that resulted in higher interest income earned on those debtors. From an effective tax rate point of view, our effective tax rate is at 36%, which is at an elevated level. That is mainly due to a deferred tax liability that was raised in agriculture Zambia, and that is on the unrealized foreign currency gain due to the movement in the Kwacha relative to the US dollar. That resulted in an increase of 3.8% to the effective tax rate. In the prior year, we also had an elevated level due to the Zimra matter that was closed out in the prior year. That resulted in the prior year also being elevated by 4.6% from an effective tax rate point of view.
That resulted in this robust delivery of earnings per share and headline earnings per share, which was up 13% and 11%, respectively. Maybe jumping into some of the detail, specifically if we could start off with agriculture, South Africa. We've seen increased fertilizer sales in our front-facing business. That demand was underpinned by the favorable economic conditions that we've seen played out across the region. That was further supported by our unique meteorology model, which is sales stream stripe opposite our customer base. There was also further support by the change in pricing dynamics relative to the comparative period, and the revenue overall grew by 13%. You can see the profits and the margins were adversely impacted by the extended shutdowns. That resulted, obviously, in production volumes as well as cost recoveries for the current period being negatively impacted relative to the prior period.
If I maybe just adjust for the potential impact relative to the comparative period, our operating profit would have increased by just more than 10% relative to the comparative period, just to indicate some of the impacts there. Despite this, we've seen increased demand playing out from our customer base. That resulted over the extended shut, the teams planned for strategic inventory management. That was really well managed through our manufacturing and supply chain to ensure security of supply to our customers. If you look at the rest of Africa, the prior year was obviously a disappointing performance for us. There was a lot of improvement and operating model changes implemented in the rest of Africa. You can see an improved performance, increase in revenue, as well as in profitability. That was also driven by better economic and economic conditions across the region.
The prior year, there was an extended drought, obviously playing out specifically in Zambia. That also affected the electricity supply in the country. In our current six months in our Zambia business specifically, we've seen higher commercial sales driven by our sales teams. Our performance was also further enhanced by the currency movement, specifically the Zambia Kwacha strengthening against the US dollar. In our Zimbabwe operations, in the prior period as well, we embarked on a restructure specifically in that business. In the current six months, you can see the benefits coming through. The Zimbabwe business got a lower cost base. Specifically, we've also seen increased volumes more opposite the high-value crops, and that's your export crops out of Zimbabwe, mostly in the tobacco space.
Lastly, to close out the rest of Africa, we're also nearing our completion on the restructure in our Mozambique, as well as in our Kenya operations. If I look at the international business, specifically, as Seelan mentioned, from an agriculture international point of view, we've seen rising global demand for sustainable farming practices. That supported our higher export volumes. We've seen a significant increase in our export volumes out of our More Wool production facility in Australia. That is to new as well as our existing customer base. This was offset, as Seelan highlighted, due to a significant drought specifically playing out across Australia, which reduced the volumes across that region, specifically on the local side.
In Brazil, the first quarter of our financial year saw a bit of an overhang of the adverse weather conditions, also the drought playing out there, which affected the country's economic conditions. The team has done well, specifically in Brazil, to maintain stable volumes and a stronger performance towards the latter part of this half year. In the US, we continue to mobilize. We can see that there is more front-facing business coming online. We saw an increase in sale volumes over the last four months. Maybe just bear in mind the US peak season is towards the latter end of our financial year. If I just step forward to our mining business, and if I am going to start with South Africa, across our mining business, we have seen increased in revenues as well as profitability and margins.
Specifically in South Africa business, we've seen a strong performance in a challenging environment, which was influenced by trade volatility. We've seen the impact of commodity prices and some operational challenges at some of our customers. We've seen from a blasting solutions or explosive business, high sales volume coming across the region, and that's due to contract renewals as well as extensions, which is really pleasing. That showed then continued profit and margin growth, which was further supported by cost efficiencies out of our South African business. From an international point of view, we've seen growth coming out of the Zambia region as well as Mali in West Africa. We've seen new contract wins in Namibia in the blasting solution side as well as the metallurgy or our chemical side.
We've seen operating profit growth across the international business, which was supported by product margin mix coming out of the different regions. We've seen the negative impact of the strengthening of the Kwacha, specifically in our mining business, which functional currency is Kwacha based, and that negatively affected our mining operations. In Indonesia, I spoke about the line on the income statement, the challenges from a regulatory point of view, which affected those three customers, resulted in a fairly flat performance throughout the operation. We've seen continued progress in the integration, and we can still see growth coming out of that markets going forward. From a Canada and Australia point of view, we continue to mobilize. For our shareholders, just to take note that that mobilization cost gets baked into the cost base, which is the earnings is yet to come in future reporting periods.
That is in line with our execution of our growth strategy from a mining international point of view. Maybe just to close out from a metallurgy point of view, we've seen a strong performance by our metallurgy point of view, which was supported by the growth out of Namibia, as well as the ammonia derivative sales, which can support our integrated manufacturing and supply chain capabilities. Maybe just to close out the segments from a chemical point of view, the chemicals restructure continues to execute in line with our strategy to streamline the business. We can see from a working capital point of view, there is a release of capital coming out of the business. The restructure is expected to be completed by the end of this financial year.
We also saw in our water care business, which is an asset currently out for sale, we have seen new contract wins in that business. Our bulk profitable business, our bulk trade profitable business, is currently being integrated into the group's integrated manufacturing and supply chain capabilities. Our focus remains on scaling that profitable bulk trade business to drive sustainable returns going forward. If I maybe just jump into some of the details from a balance sheet point of view, our financial position remains strong. That is reflecting our disciplined capital and working capital and cash management approach. Total assets increased by 3%. That was driven by the elevated inventory levels to support the earlier planting season in South Africa and across SADC in Zambia as well.
We can see the working capital release on a net basis from the restructuring of chemicals, which contributed ZAR 184 million release relative to the comparative period. Our net cash position is slightly lower to the prior period. That was due to the prior period having higher opening balances. Maybe just cast your mind back two or three cycles. The last two cycles included shareholder distributions, ordinary and special distributions. The third cycle only included an ordinary shareholder distribution, which affected our higher opening balance in the comparative period. Arrangements associated using the equity method on that line, maybe just, that is the profits from the Indonesia JV, as well as other assets relating to the chemicals, which is out for sale. It is recorded in that line. Other assets increased primarily due to the chemicals assets that are classified as out for sale.
From a liability point of view, we've seen an increase by 7%, driven by the increase in supply chain tables to support our higher inventory for our upcoming season. From an equity point of view, equity remains stable with earnings offset by the shareholder distributions, the ordinary and special distributions in the current half year. Overall, the networking capital decreased by 5%, which is a really strong performance relative to the comparative period. Our return on average equity increased by 4% to 12.3%. Maybe just to close out from a cash flow point of view, we've seen cash generated from operations increased from our strong performance throughout all our businesses that contributed to a solid cash balance. Our networking capital, including our supply chain finance variables, we've seen an investment of ZAR 360 million, which is low compared to the prior year of ZAR 530 million.
If you compare the pricing dynamics as well, we have increased inventory and the pricing dynamics in the current environment was also at elevated levels compared to the comparative period. Cash flow from operating activities includes a reduction in tax payments, cash payments. The prior year's expense included a higher provisional tax payment in Zambia, as well as the closeout on the Zimra matter, as discussed under the effective tax rate. The investing cash flows mainly relate to the organic and growth topics, as Seelan previously highlighted, and the proceeds from the sale of non-core assets. The restricted cash was just the release of a cash balance in the DRC that was lifted during the current period. From a finance activities point of view, that includes the repurchase of the treasury share.
In the current environment, there was less shares repurchased for the share repurchase program relative to the comparative period. The lower supply chain finance payables, that is just due to procurement timing differences in the prior season. It was at a later stage, the ramp-up of the procurement. At this half year, we started ramping up earlier for the summer planting season. Overall, this resulted in a solid cash position, which is driving our strong financial position. Maybe just from my side, a big thank you, obviously, to all the finance team and the business teams to get us into this space. I also thank the board and Seelan for their support. I'll maybe just add on to Seelan to close out.
Thank you, Stephan.
I think we must recognize that there's no way the volume of work, the result, and the production of all these slides and documentation can be achieved without the finance team and yourself. Yet again, another strong production of result and strong results. There are two sections left for me to complete. The first one is really just to talk about our strategy and where will our future growth come from. A few slides on outlook, and then we will go into Q&A. If I just focus on our strategy for a second, we've been focused on disciplined execution and global growth. We have been focusing on diversifying our business, ensuring resilience and agility, and doing that in three spaces.
The first one is to protect and grow our core SADC business, enhancing our customer value proposition underpinned by innovation and sustainability, and ensuring that the efficiency and our production facility in Sasolburg is leveraged further. I think what you see today is after a 60-day shut. Obviously, after a shut, what you will find is that the production facilities of our suppliers and ourselves will work a lot better. These shuts come around every three, five, ten years. After a shut like this, we will have significantly enhanced reliability from our supplier and from ourselves. I mean, what we've already seen is that our teams have been able to pay back at least 20 days of that production already, which you will see coming through going forward.
We will continue to optimize and enhance the efficiency of our supply chain, grow our share in the agriculture market, and leverage our competitive value proposition in SADC. We have two businesses that are our growth factors, barring the business in SADC, which you see continues to grow. That is our mining business. BME will continue to invest in its customer propositions and access the new markets that we have invested in: Indonesia, Australia, Canada. Our agribio business, which is an incredible asset for us, operating in a different market with higher margins and a higher demand, will also continue to diversify our business and enhance our profitability. The balance sheet that Stefan spoke about and our strong cash position also provides us with a lot of optionality for growth to explore selected investments and M&A that will be good for our shareholders.
That will all be based on sound values, safety, doing what's right for the environment, and a high-performing team. It's not possible to deliver double-digit growth in the markets we operate in without our team performing really well, in some instances having to do things very different to what they did yesterday or the year before. I spoke a bit about innovation and technology. If you look at our products, all of our products are not the traditional products you will find in agriculture or mining, but the products that are based on sound principles and innovation. We will do that in a very disciplined way and be very disciplined with capital. Our track record of distributing cash back to shareholders by way of dividends and buybacks, you will be able to see that and monitor us on that.
In terms of our plants, and I know we spoke a lot about the supplier shut, this is a huge competitive strength and advantage for us. The outlook for our delivery, our reliability, and our capacities have actually been enhanced. There is one issue I want to raise on this slide. A few years ago, you know that what we produced and what we bought, we largely sold through BME and our agriculture business. We then said we have got some capacity in our plant, and we would like to enhance our sales through on a wholesale basis into the mining sector. That we did by building an ammonia derivatives business. On a prior slide, we showed how that business has grown over the years and is now a key part of profitability.
If I were to suck my thumb and just sketch a picture for you, it's probably taken the place of what Protea Chemicals was or could have been a few years ago. We then said there is additional capacity in our plant that we can also potentially use from our supply chain and our plant and consider some bulk trading. For now, what you're seeing on the slide, the second block on the right from the bottom is another business called bulk trading. That's a business where we will take the bulk trading piece of Protea, combine that with the bulk trading of our supply chain, where we can benefit from pricing and logistics, and actually back to back use that to enter into a new profit market or generator for us.
We know in 10 or 15 years ago that you can get that wrong if you don't have back-to-back sales. Our mandate to our team is to ensure that any contract or any purchase that you've made is back-to-back out with a customer on the other side. I'm very, very positive about unlocking further value from our manufacturing and supply chain, optimizing costs, optimizing productivity, strategic procurement, leveraging our supply chain to access new markets, and optimizing our supply chain, not just locally, but also a little bit more on a global basis from an end perspective and to think about how we can grow our partnerships from a supply chain perspective and collaborate with others that will allow us to be stronger. If we just go into SADC a little bit, what we do know is we have the strongest brand in agriculture.
Our agriculture business is driving a huge amount of food production across SADC. Our products are known to be the best in the market. Our nutriology concept, our agronomists, and our ability to add real value to the farm, reduce risk, and enhance output is something that we stand for. We're able to demonstrate that year on year with science and with data. We put out a little chart here to show the growth in specialty volume. You know that if you are we're not just a fertilizer sales company. We're a company that sells holistic solutions. Our distribution and sales team have been doing an incredible job to grow specialty products, to optimize the value our farmers get. We've got the largest soil testing lab in SADC. We test over 500,000 soil samples. The picture on the right is a generated picture.
The color of the land, of all those different colors, is actually the soil map that our systems generate to help farmers see where to plant, what to plant, and what the soil conditions are relative to the output and the yield. We have a strong distribution footprint in Zambia and in SADC with our supply chain and our manufacturing plant in Sasolburg. We will continue to innovate. We will continue to play a role in these markets and grow and strengthen our position to enable food security. I think what you see is as our SADC business maybe last year did not deliver what we wanted to. This year, our SADC business comes back on scale. Our agri SA business delivers more than what we expected. The diversification of the business, the resilience of the business, and the competitive moat of the business remains heavily intact.
This business is also generating more cash than it did five or ten years ago, which puts us on this great footing to be able to grow and expand and return cash to shareholders based on our distribution model. If we move to agriculture international, this business, you know we've been growing and expanding. It's got a higher profit margin than a traditional NPK business. It also has a higher KGAR. We put out a KGAR number there of 14% from 2022 to 2025. The business is lumpy. It takes time to foster long relationships with TPAC, with Mosaic, with other distributors in Brazil and the US and the Middle East. As those come online, you see the step change in this business's profitability. While we had good volumes out of Brazil and Australia, we believe there's still a lot more to come.
The business's moat is still very secure. The pipeline is very strong in terms of new markets and new opportunities. The testing and the interest in this business continues to be very high. It's low capital, and it's positioned to deliver strong cash for us and continue to diversify our earnings both geographically from a currency perspective and between a traditional agri business and an agribio business, which trades on much higher multiples than a traditional agri business. Obviously, our mining sector is a key growth factor for us. BME has earned the right to win globally. We've won contracts locally and on the African continent and globally. The demand for critical minerals continues. The demand to have more sustainable emulsion product and bigger blasts and more complex blasts continue to enhance profitability of mines. BME is well positioned for that.
You have seen the growth in this business, and we've put out a five-year trajectory here as well. A strong KGAR, 41%. If I look forward, if I look at the contracts we've secured, if I look at where this business is going, there's significant potential in the BME business. As the Omnia Group, we've got behind this business. We've restructured some of our teams to support Ralph and the team and fully engaged and fully involved to unlock further value in this business. These are the areas we're focusing on in the mining business. Our Indonesian joint venture is doing well. It's strong. We've had a number of strategic engagements over the last few weeks. The opportunities in that area continue to excite us.
Indonesia wants to play a big role in the energy required for big data and AI that's going to be needed in China. I think that's going to drive some of the metals and some of the mining market in Indonesia in the medium term. From a Canadian perspective, our plants have been commissioned. The detonators are coming out. Our investments are doing well. I think what we want to see is those detonators being sold to our partner, Consbec, and to third parties, and then to be sold to other parts, to other customers in that region of the world. We are so positive about the Canadian JV. We also have commissioned the capital deployment for Hifex BioPlant in Canada. That plant has been built in Stockholm and is currently on the water to Canada. That plant will add to our value proposition for customers.
It will add to the future sustainability of mining in that region. It will be the first Hifex Bio plant in Canada. We have significant interest from customers to be involved in that plant. From an Australian perspective, our Axis plant has also been commissioned. We've been investing in our people and our team there. Both the Canadian business and the Australian business is still in investment state. As soon as we see that those businesses go to profitability, you'll see another step change in the BME delivery to our group. Finally, coming back to the African continent, it's a continent that we've been winning on. There's been good contract wins in Namibia in the uranium space. From a mining chemical space, you've seen that we've created a BME metallurgy brand. We've moved that business under the head of BME as well.
We've enhanced some of the key members in that business. I'm really pleased to see the traction that business is getting, the new contract wins and others that have come from that space. What we do know is that global explosives companies trade on higher multiples than agri companies. The left of the slide shows recent transactions. A number of those might not be listed. The right slide shows some of the listed companies that are reference points. If you look at our business, how it's been systematically changing the fabric of our profits from agri to mining, with now 60-odd % of our profits coming from mining, what you see is that we are well placed as a compelling value unlock opportunity to partner and to continue to grow our business as our mining business grows.
We believe that the mining sector offers an attractive space for us to grow and to unlock value for our shareholders going forward. We obviously say shippingly at the bottom that Omnia is fairly undervalued in the global context. We are hoping all of you shareholders see that and buy more Omnia shares going forward. If I move to Outlook, from a margin perspective, we have been heavily focused on the margins. Let me see if I go back with it. It fixes it. No, it does. Heavily focused on margins in our group. While BME at year-end was slightly above the target range, we have not adjusted the margins yet. We will relook at that at year-end. Stefan and I will see if there is any change we need to do there.
We believe that with a growth in agri and a good outlook, we probably will end up with agri now getting closer into margin guidance. We need to continue to focus on growing our agri segment, our agri bio business, getting more efficient around our manufacturing and supply chain. Hopefully, that margin will also start to lift going forward. We've also just gotten down a return on equity number, removing Protea Chemicals. However, what you do know at half-year, our return on equity numbers are usually slightly higher than year-end. That is probably driven by the denominator of the cash at year-end. We've generated a lot of cash at year-ends and paid quite significant dividends thereafter. Those dividends get paid out in the first half of the next year. Obviously, what you can see is an upward trajectory.
We still would like more from a return on equity perspective, but this is just a half-year number. In terms of what we're focusing on is increasing our operating margins, increasing and optimizing our asset turn, and then obviously disciplined capital allocation. What you've seen from this management team is that we've been very prudent with the way we've spent money. We have invested in sustainability. We have invested in certain plants and investments across the world, but we've also disinvested from assets and businesses that haven't performed the way we would have liked them to. We've shown you this slide before, which is really a view of how we will unlock value. We're progressing well against this. You see some of this coming through as an example in SADC, where we've enhanced some of our management there. That management has stabilized the business.
You can see that business tracking more to our model, more to what we've expected. Obviously, I've mentioned some of the other spaces, but we can discuss a little bit more of this in the one-on-one meetings or through some Q&A if you'd like that. From an outlook perspective, we're very, very pleased with the current set of results. We think it's a strong, strong set of results, a strong cash generation, and a strong end balance sheet position for half-year for Omnia. We're positive about the outlook in the second half. As Stefan said, the second half is where all our action happens. We're in the midst of a very strong planting season in SADC at the moment. We have continued to see good contract wins in our mining business and our mining chemicals business.
Globally, all of our investments are in place to unlock and deliver significant value. We did not speak a lot today about our hydrogen peroxide investment, Hifex Bio. For any of you who would like more information on that, we are more than happy to share that. We think we have got a gem of an investment there. We own 10% of the business, and we have had sole or just under and sole distribution rights in certain territories. We think that hydrogen peroxide emulsion is going to revolutionize the mining explosives industry in the medium to long term. It is really great to see our BME business and our explosives engineers standing at the forefront of that innovation and of that change. From an agriculture perspective, I think we have spoken at length about the local manufacturing supply chain, but we do see additional value being unlocked out of SADC.
I think the discipline and the way that team is managing that business gives me a great sense of comfort. We're seeing the stock positions. Remember, when we closed the year-end, we had a slightly larger stock position in SADC. We're seeing the team dealing with that. We're seeing the debtors flowing into cash, which is all good signs to demonstrate that that business is being managed to model the way we'd like it to be. From a chemicals perspective, I think there's not much of a story there, but what we promised is what we're delivering. You will see some cash flow out of the chemicals business. At the right time, we'll make an announcement about the water care business. There is no rush in doing that. I think there isn't anything about chemicals that is substantial and significant impact in the Omnia Group.
The big four businesses, mining and agri, are strong, great customer value propositions, winning in front of the customers, generating cash, and performing strongly from a growth perspective. They have driven the 12% double-digit growth in operating profit and the strong cash that has been generated. If we just talk about a little bit more of our shareholder returns and distribution, and maybe I'll start with the proposition. We operate in primary sectors. Diversification and international growth of our company is clearly going to come from mining and the agri bio business to very strong customer value propositions. We've got some more to do on operational excellence. There's areas where costs have come out. There's areas where costs can still come out. There may be costs have gone in.
I think overall, as a management team, we're fairly frugal on costs, and we don't just take costs out at the expense of a customer proposition. Our cash generation is strong, and it's been another six months of strong cash generation. I think it'll give you a lot of comfort to show how we navigate commodity prices, how we navigate shifts, how we navigate disruption. I think strong credibility from that perspective. Obviously, at year-end, we take all of this and we put it into a melting pot and the board has a look at it, and you've seen a very attractive dividend yield. We will continue to manage cash prudently, and you will continue to be rewarded for your patience and your investment. If we think of cash, there's dividends, there's special dividends, and there's share buybacks.
Thank you to the shareholders who have voted for the buybacks. At each half-year, we show you what we've done and how those have played out. I think a very strong value proposition. What you do need to know is that we, as a management team, work very hard every day to ensure that Omnia is successful, that Omnia makes a profound impact in the markets it operates in, and we do that in a sustainable, safe way. The team now has a track record of doing that for a number of years and have demonstrated delivery in different conditions. That is always not easy. Sometimes we also have our own arm wrestles as a team, and high performance comes with some arm wrestles, but I think we all know about that. I am going to pause there.
Thank you to all of our people on the webcast. I think we've just got a number of people who've listened in. Thank you. I see a number of familiar names. If you do have any questions or any comments, you know where to get hold of us. I think we will open—thank you to all of you for coming here. We will open up for Q&A now. There is a number of Omnia management available that will also be able to answer the questions. Thank you. Do we maybe have any questions in the room first? Any questions on the—
Yeah, we just have two questions from John Aaron at SPG Securities. The first one is asking for just a bit more detail on what is being done to mitigate the impact of the extended supplier shutdowns.
The second question focuses on—he's asking if you could elaborate on how head office and elimination costs reduced by 20% and if this is sustainable.
Great. Thank you, John. I think the first thing to say is the shutdown has happened. What you're seeing is the impact of the shutdown in the result. Going forward, what you will see is the upside of an extended maintenance shut of both our supplier, a number of our supplier components or component plants, and our plant. I think from my perspective, the way we mitigated that was by ensuring we had additional storage, by optimizing our ammonia supply from both our local provider who went on shut, but also our trains and our storage in Richards Bay. I think last year sometime we announced that we commissioned another 5,000-liter AM storage tank.
Our supply chain folk managed this with our customers, our internal businesses, and others. I am not sure if any of the management team would like to add anything to that. The shut is behind us. If anything, I think Stefan whispered a number, but if we did not have the shut, our results would have even been better than what it currently is. The second question, just repeat that for me.
Can you elaborate on how head office and elimination costs reduced by 20% and if this is sustainable?
I am going to ask Stefan to maybe—there are a few moving parts in that number.
For sure. I hope you are going to hear me. I think, first of all, from a cost point of view, there remains a big focus on costs throughout all our operations, not just at a head office level.
You can see that playing out in our operating margins. Over the last couple of years, specifically in that line item, head office and eliminations, we've seen a lot of one source coming through that number as well. Maybe closer to the current year, the biggest driver in the current year was our legacy AX system that gets upgraded to D365. The legacy system was capitalized, and there was amortization and depreciation coming through, which in the current period, as we upgrade, is non-recurring. That resulted in, obviously, some of the reduction that you can see coming through there. Also, the D365, as we start rolling it out, all those costs are high expense. It's not capitalized going forward as well. The second one then is there was certain costs that was also directly allocated to the business unit, certain of those costs.
I think as we step forward and we move forward, I think we're moving now to a more sustainable level, specifically on that head office and elimination life. Thank you.
That's all from our end.
O kay, thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for your time. I'm sure we will have a cup of tea for all of you here. If you could, welcome to join us. Thank you.