Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Reunert's year-end results presentation for the period ending 30 September 2021. I'm Alan Dickson, the Group Chief Executive of Reunert, and together with Nick Thomson, our CFO, we will be presenting our FY 2021 results today. This is a pre-recorded webcast, but we have a live Q&A session immediately after the webcast. If you would like to submit any questions online, please do so on the tab on the left-hand side of your screen, and we'll address them at the end of the webcast. In FY 2021, Reunert delivered a strong operating and financial performance in what was a challenging environment. The financial performance was a material improvement compared to the prior year.
The group benefited from the actions implemented in 2020, which we fully described in last year's year-end presentation, and created the base for this year's performance. The group's companies generally managed the complex and volatile market environment extremely well to deliver good operating performances. The results derived from a good recovery in the electrical engineering segment, led by the circuit breaker company, who delivered a strong performance in both their local and their export markets, and the cable companies, where improved operational efficiencies yielded profitable performances despite the weak electrical infrastructure investment environment continuing. All of the businesses in the ICT segment performed in line with or slightly better than the group's expectations. The interest income at Quince decreased in line with the lower interest rate environment, as expected and as we provided guidance last year.
Pleasingly, improved performances were achieved in all of the other business units in the segment, thereby delivering a segment operating profit slightly ahead of the prior year. The Applied Electronics segment, however, had a challenging year as export activity dropped on the back of COVID-19 related inability to travel internationally and secure new orders, as well as long delays in the securing of export permits from the appropriate authorities. Within Reunert, our strategy centers on expanding the geographic footprint and adding new diversified revenue streams to our traditional companies while scaling our new growth businesses. Pleasingly, again, this year, we saw progress on all three elements of our strategy. Our key growth businesses of renewable energy, last-mile broadband connectivity, and +OneX all continued their positive growth trajectories.
Within the ICT segment, the diversified revenue streams at Nashua and the communications cluster, as well as the diversified revenue streams at circuit breakers in the electrical engineering segment, all grew strongly and are material contributors to the results of each of these businesses. Our overall geographic expansion struggled this year as applied electronics had the unusually low order intake on the back of those COVID-19 induced factors. Importantly, however, and boding well for the future, the electrical engineering segment did particularly well with more than 34% of the segment's revenue coming from our international ventures. Perhaps the most important thing in 2021 was the shareholder returns improved markedly. Our key metrics include total cash returned to shareholders, which this year increased by 32% over the prior year.
We returned ZAR 103 million to shareholders through share buybacks and augmented those buybacks with an 8% increase in dividends, yielding a total cash return to shareholders during the year of ZAR 547 million. Importantly, the quality of the earnings improved this year, as evidenced by the recovery in our return on capital employed, which increased to 14.5%. While total shareholder return is perhaps not the best metric this year, it is at least pleasing to see the extent of the recovery during FY 2021, where we had a 75% increase in TSR during the year.
Nick will cover the detailed financial numbers, but just to touch on some key highlights that were delivered during the year. These include our revenue increasing by 19% to ZAR 9.6 billion, while segment operating profit, which is perhaps the most accurate measure of the underlying business performance, increased by 14% to ZAR 986 million this year. Those two results enabled us to increase the final dividend by 8% to ZAR 2.07 per share and a total of ZAR 2.97 per share for the year. Despite these positive results, the operating environment, however, remained challenging this year and impeded the full recovery of the group to our pre-COVID-19 results. These challenges may seem a little distant, but were all material in nature and were centered on three key areas group-wide this year.
The first of those was COVID-19, which once again impacted both our local and our international markets. In South Africa, we had over 140 work days or 40% of the days available to us of our financial year that we either had a level three or a level four lockdown. In addition to there being no material improvement in the hospitality, leisure, and tourism markets, the lockdown three and the lockdown four levels weakened the general activity in our local markets and impacted both our operations and our employees. Despite high levels of workplace health and safety during, particularly during the second and the third waves, we had a material impact on our infection rates, and tragically 16 employees succumbed to the effects of COVID-19 during this year.
On top of this tragedy, the weakened economic activity had the most significant impact on our ICT segment, where we have over 50,000 customers located across all of the market verticals and led to an estimated ZAR 220 million reduction in revenue in this segment this year. Pleasingly, however, our employees are embracing the vaccination drive. As we stand here today, over 55% of them have now been vaccinated, and this should impact and minimize the impact of a fourth wave when it comes. From a business point of view, what's equally important is that we have witnessed good recovery in some of the SMME markets that we service. Outside of those hospitality, leisure, and tourism markets, they have largely returned to normal, and we have seen significantly increased market activity in those SMME markets.
Perhaps, however, the biggest business impact of COVID-19 during FY 2021 was the severe impact it had on the export order intake in our Applied Electronics segment. We have had extensive travel bans on South Africans and the inability to travel internationally for ourselves and our own business development people, as well as COVID-induced lockdowns inside of our key geographies, resulted in a significant slowdown in the receipt of new export orders that we were able to take onto our books this year. Several of our businesses had a material reduction in those order books. In addition, some of the order books that we had taken and we had on hand, we were unable to deliver those as the appropriate local authorities did not issue the export permits we required to enable us to conclude those sales despite having manufactured the product.
These challenges in the Applied Electronics segment resulted in lost revenues in excess of ZAR 350 million and resulted in the segment's operating profit falling well below our expectations and the normal levels that we would expect from this segment. Importantly and pleasingly, international travel has now recommenced, and our business development teams have been able to meaningfully engage once again with our clients, and the demand for our products has been proven and led to several large orders being secured. We enter FY 2022 with an outstanding order book of ZAR 1.2 billion, and I'll give some more detail on the breakdown of those orders in the segment presentation a little bit later on. The last group-wide challenge that we had during the course of FY 2021 was the global supply chain, which negatively impacted our businesses.
Two key matters, the first of which was the well-documented international electronic chip shortage, which impacted us at Reunert as well. The impact was both sudden and dramatic. Where component lead times were normally six weeks, and that's what we would do our planning on, they extended out to, in many cases, 52 weeks, and this extension took place almost overnight. This impacted our electronic manufacturing in both the Electrical Engineering segment and the Applied Electronics segment. In addition to the challenges that we had in our own manufacturing, Ricoh, which is the primary OEM that supplies Nashua with its products, suffered from this electronic chip shortage as well, and they were unable to finish and fulfill Nashua's product requirements in the fourth quarter of FY 2021.
The second supply chain matter for ourselves was that the inbound and outbound logistics were significantly disrupted during the course of this year. The availability of ships and containers reduced, and the complexity of managing incoming raw materials and outgoing deliveries became increasingly more challenging during the course of this year. These complexities were augmented by a material increase in the costs. Where pre-COVID, a container was costing us in the order of around $1,500 to be delivered, it now costs us around $10,000. In order to try and address these, we have centralized the procurement of electronic components across the group and accessed new supply channels and have made good progress in securing the components that we need to do the manufacturing, both in our Electrical Engineering and our Applied Electronics businesses.
At Nashua, the supply chain still remains a little bit disrupted, and we expect this disruption to continue during the first half of the new financial year. In order to create a buffer for the businesses in this complex supply chain environment, we increased our investment into working capital. Unfortunately, we believe that these supply chain challenges are likely to be present for the entire of FY 2022, and so the unwind of some of this working capital might take some time, and we anticipate that it's likely to remain in place throughout the bulk of FY 2022. Today, I'd like to provide three updates on our strategy execution during FY 2021. The first two cover the success that we're having in scaling our key growth markets, and the third is an update on a key enabler of our business inside of South Africa.
The first growth market that I'd like to talk about is our renewable energy market, in which the environment in which we operate improved significantly during FY 2021. We have been speaking about the expected acceleration to the embedded generation market for quite some time now, and pleasingly this year, the cap on the limit of embedded generation that needs a NERSA-issued license was lifted from the historic 1 MW cap to 100 MW. This directly benefits the key target market of Terra Firma Solutions, whose area of strength sits in solar plants between 500 KW and 10 MW. We have seen an almost immediate market reaction to the lifting of this cap, and coupled to the continued regular Eskom load-shedding that we continue to experience and an uncertain electricity price from Eskom and the municipalities looking forward, has resulted to this embedded generation market continuing to accelerate.
In addition to that, the utility scale renewable energy market was also given a boost this year with the release of Bid Window 5 of the REIPPP Program. As these projects achieve financial close, the balance of plant that will come from the installation of these plants will flow into our electrical engineering businesses, and we expect some of this product to flow towards the end of this financial year. Importantly for us, the government has also indicated that Bid Window 6 of the REIPPP Program will be released in January 2022. As we had from Bid Windows 1 to 4, we hope that once again, we will see a consistent utility scale pipeline developing over the next number of years, which will increase the base load of that balance of plant products that will flow into our electrical engineering businesses.
In summary, within this renewable energy market, the dynamics have continued to be positive and increasingly positive, and Reunert will benefit from this, both in our renewable energy businesses as well as our electrical engineering businesses. Within renewable energy, specifically, Reunert entered this market about five years ago, and we have steadily built our capability to the point now where we are positioned to benefit from the following parts of the renewable energy value chain. Through Terra Firma Solutions, we are one of the largest EPC players in the embedded generation solar market, and we possess a highly efficient company that is currently recognized as a market leader within that business segment. Secondly, we are building the ownership of a portfolio of solar assets through what we call our build, own, and operate or BOO assets, and we continue to invest actively into those markets.
This market is accelerating, and we can see in the graph in the top right-hand corner of the slide where we have been increasing our asset ownership by 144% per annum over the last three years. This acceleration will continue in the years ahead as we have actively sourced funding to enable ourselves to provide and inject debt funding into these solar assets, and we will continue to actively invest into the buildup of these solar asset ownerships within this embedded generation market. In addition to that we have under Terra Firma Solutions, we have augmented that asset portfolio with the launch of Lumika during the course of this year.
Lumika is a business, as we described in June of this year, which we have a joint venture with our European partners, A.P. Møller Capital, and this vehicle will be used to enter into the commercial and industrial space in South Africa and will own assets in Africa in that C&I space. Thirdly, at BlueNova, we own a company that produces and manufactures high performance, ultra-reliable South African manufactured renewable storage solutions. Increasingly in new renewable energy plants today, they will need to be augmented by storage to balance the grid and to offset periods of low or variable renewable energy generation. We expect this market to accelerate and to drive the overall growth of our storage business. Finally, we are increasing our investment into energy control.
To date, this is primarily through our IoT platform and the products that we've released over the last couple of years, which we call the Astute range. This will expand, and we are continuing to invest into this market as the liberalization of energy generation continues and will require an increasing amount of energy control and energy management in the future. Our renewable energy market position has improved in FY 2021, and we are well-positioned to continue to see growth from our renewable energy investments across several fronts, both in South Africa and Africa.
The next key area where we are allocating capital is to traditionally what we've called the fourth cluster in our ICT segment, which we launched last year and officially named our solutions and system integration cluster. This cluster today houses the asset called +OneX, which provides end-to-end solutions to enable enterprises to evolve their legacy ICT systems to latest best-in-class solutions, thereby enabling and facilitating their operational excellence. This year has been an active year for +OneX as we augmented the existing managed services and unified communications capabilities that they had with the addition of three key acquisitions. The first of those is a cloud services capability. The second was a digital media and data consulting. Just after year-end, we completed it with an application and software development capability.
These increased capabilities have enabled the launch of optimization as a service, and the success of +OneX in their first year is evidenced by the contracts secured with large telecommunications, petrochemical, and financial services customers. Reunert is and always has been a proudly South African company, and we have leading black economic empowerment credentials. Our current relationship with our strategic BEE partner expires in March 2022, and as a result of that, we are restructuring the deal in line with the latest BBBEE legislation and to be fully compliant with the DTIC's explanatory memorandum on the ownership of collective enterprises. The new structure materially increases the participation of broad-based participants in Reunert's ownership, and we have done this by including our staff in the ownership of Reunert with a 4.5% equity stake, which will be enabled through an ESOP.
In addition to that, we have increased the ownership of our Rebatona Educational Trust, which provides for the education of underprivileged black females. These two vehicles have resulted in an increase in black and black woman ownership in Reunert and meaningfully includes our employees in the future growth and success of Reunert. We are confident that the restructured deal, together with our operational BEE partners, which we still have at company level, will enhance our BBBEE credentials and maintain our market-leading position with our South African customers. A SENS detailing the changes we are intending to make was issued yesterday, and the circular containing the more detailed elements of the transaction is expected to be issued before calendar year-end to enable shareholders to consider the structure prior to seeking their approval at the AGM in February 2022.
Good afternoon to all our webcast participants, and thank you for your attendance. Starting first with the caveats, as you may have noticed from the preliminary condensed consolidated financial statements published yesterday on our website, there have been various restatements made in these financial statements. Most important is these restatements do not arise to correct any errors or omissions from prior years, nor are there any changes in accounting policies. Rather, they have been made to bring our reporting in line with developments in IFRS and guidance from regulatory authorities, and particularly from the JSE's latest proactive monitoring report published in November 2021.
The major restatements we have made are in the statement of profit or loss, which is now based on the principle that all items of income and expenditure, excluding dividend income, finance cost, and taxation, result from the benefits and risks associated with the group's businesses and therefore form part of operating profit. Accordingly, only items that are required by IFRS to be disclosed on the face of the statement of profit or loss are now so disclosed. However, users will be able to extract from note three to these financial statements and from the segmental analysis, all items included in operating profit, as well as those expenses requiring specific disclosure. Turning now to the results themselves. By way of a backdrop to these results, I would like to share with you the two key economic metrics we track and how they have developed in 2021.
Management uses these metrics to assess the group's various business units' performance against the prevailing market conditions. These are GDP growth, which is reflective of the expected growth in our ICT segment, and gross domestic fixed investment, which is a leading indicator for both our electrical engineering segment and for the local revenue expectations for our applied electronics segment. In our 2021 financial year, GDP started to recover from the ravages of COVID-19 and the consequential hard lockdowns, increasing between October 2020 and September 2021 by 4.1%. However, this is still 1.9% below the September 2019 absolute GDP level. Unfortunately, gross domestic fixed investment is still at an extremely low level, representing only 13% of GDP compared to the 20% of GDP it represented in the last period of high growth in South Africa.
According to the Econometrix Quarterly Economic Outlook, published in November 2021, this is the lowest level ever. This helps to explain why many of the group's businesses are still operating at output levels of around 80%-85% of the pre-COVID-19 output levels. Very positively against these subdued broad economic indicators, Reunert achieved a 19% increase in revenue in 2021. As you can see from the table on the right-hand side of the slide, the entire increase in group revenue has resulted from the recovery in the electrical engineering segment. This recovery is because of, firstly, an outstanding sales performance in both the local and export markets by the circuit breaker business, and secondly, from a substantial improvement in revenue generation by our energy power cable businesses.
This increase in revenue from the energy power cables businesses is as a result of both improved volume throughput and higher commodity prices. ZAMEFA, our Zambian energy power cable operations revenue, benefited from more working capital being available due to the reduction in the arrear VAT claims settled by the Zambian fiscus in 2020, and was therefore able to increase its throughput. African Cables throughput volumes improved by 41% compared to 2020, in part due to there being no industrial action in 2021, as against the lost quarter in 2020 due to the strike, as well as a general increase in the demand for energy cables. However, there was still limited high voltage project revenue in 2021, but pleasingly, there are increasing positive indications that high voltage projects will start to return in 2022.
Revenue in this segment also increased due to the pass-through of the substantially higher metal prices, with September on September, copper and aluminum prices being up 25% and 46% respectively. Turning to the ICT segment, its revenue was in line with the prior year. There were downward pressures on revenue, firstly due to the strengthening of the rand against the euro during the year, which resulted in lower average selling prices for our office automation business, and then a fire at a Chinese chip manufacturer resulted in a sharp reduction in the availability of stock for entry-level MFPs, which resulted in lower unit sales in the office equipment business in the last quarter of 2021.
These factors were compounded by reduced demand across our businesses in this segment from the hospitality, tourism, and education sectors of our customer base, as these sectors are among the most impacted businesses due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. These downward pressures were all offset by positive growth in SkyWire, the growth in complementary business in office automation, and the growth in the +OneX unified communication business, resulting in the ICT revenue being flat overall. The applied electronics segment's revenue was severely impacted by three of the four key issues outlined by Alan in his overview, being the COVID local and international lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the timeous obtaining of export permits from the authorities.
The consequential impact of these factors was a substantial reduction in the contribution of exports to the segment's revenue, which impact was offset by the growth in the renewables and local logistics businesses, which overall has resulted in only a modest decline in the segment's revenue, but has resulted in a significant reduction in segment profitability. Alan will explain this further as he goes through the segmental performance. The benefit of the increased revenue in the electrical engineering segment, combined with the steps taken to rightsize the cost basis at several of this segment's businesses in 2020, resulted in a large increase in this segment's operating profit in 2021.
This increase in segment operating profit, combined with there being no impairment of goodwill in the current year as against the ZAR 75 million impairment against goodwill taken in 2020, and there being no repeat of the ZAR 20 million loss on disposal of a subsidiary that occurred in the prior year, as well as the benefit of a net ZAR 65 million remeasurement gain in the current year, resulted in operating profit before the impairment of financial assets improving by 32% from ZAR 794 million in 2020 to ZAR 1,051 million in 2021. The next line on the statement of profit or loss is the line on financial impairments.
At Quince, the hard work put into systems improvements to manage credit risk and the focus on collections, combined with an improving credit environment, positively resulted in a ZAR 29 million release from the ECL against the rental book, as against the credit write-off and increase in ECL, which totaled ZAR 586 million in the prior year. This is one of the major improvements on the prior year. This release is supported by the improving probability of default, which was 3.5% pre-COVID, 11.5% at March 2020 at the start of the first hard COVID lockdown, and has now improved to 5.6% at the end of the 2021 financial year.
The ECL against the rental book now stands at ZAR 152 million or 5.8% of the rental book as compared to 7.5% in 2020. In the statement of profit or loss, the release of ZAR 29 million from the Quince ECL was partially offset by an increase in credit losses and ECL increases against trade receivables, resulting in a net financial asset impairment of ZAR 1 million in the statement of profit or loss.
These factors together have resulted in a final operating profit of ZAR 1.05 billion, compared to ZAR 208 million generated in the previous year. The share of profit from associates and joint ventures has increased over the prior year, in part due to our telecom cable business being at breakeven in 2021 versus the large loss it contributed in the prior year, and due to the group's half share in the benefit of a put and call in the group's new joint venture with A.P. Møller Capital, Lumika. For this JV to acquire 65% of Terra Firma, the group's solar renewable business amounting to ZAR 26 million. When we get to the next slide, I will explain the consequence of this put and call.
Suffice to say that the entries in Lumika are equal and opposite to what is accounted for in Reunert. As the group owns 50% of Lumika, we enjoy or suffer 50% of what they account for. In this case, we enjoyed a ZAR 26 million remeasurement gain. Due to the matters discussed, basic earnings per share reflect a very substantial increase to ZAR 4.83 from ZAR 0.29 of the prior year. Moving to the next slide. In order to help analysts and shareholders in their assessment of the group's earnings, we have set out to summarize reconciliation of segmental operating profit to the statutory operating profit. This is extracted from the segmental analysis in the condensed financial statements.
Segmental operating profit is the level at which Alan and I, as Group CEO and CFO, assess the ongoing development in the performance of our various business units as against the overall performance of the group. This is because segmental operating profit is before items such as impairments, fair value remeasurements, and gains and losses on disposals which make assessing performance against the prior year difficult. The reconciliation reflects a pleasing 14% improvement in segment profit over the segment profit of the prior year. In this reconciliation, there are two key numbers not already discussed. The impairment of goodwill, property, plant, and equipment, which relates to the damage of a solar plant during the year. This is important not due to the amount disclosed of ZAR 1 million in the current year, but because the comparative in the prior year is ZAR 79 million.
Very positively, based on our formal assessments, as required by IAS 36, there was no need to impair any of the group's assets in the current year. Secondly, the fair value gain of ZAR 65 million in the current year. There are three elements in this remeasurement gain. The first element is a remeasurement gain of ZAR 103 million. In the past, Reunert has accounted for our investment in the Zimbabwean cable manufacturer, CAFCA, at fair value through profit or loss at a value of nil. This was because despite owning 70% of the company, we did not control the board, so we could not consolidate our investment in terms of IAS 27.
As we had less than 20% of the board positions and could not, due to the construct of the memorandums, MOI, impose new board appointments, we did not equity account for this investment under IAS 28 either, as we lacked significant influence. Lastly, due to the restrictive conditions in Zimbabwe that the company operates under, we were unable to enjoy the benefit of any dividends paid, so there was no cash flow to value, nor any indication that we could realize the investment for value. Accordingly, historically, we've held this business at a nil fair value through profit or loss. In the current year, we have accepted two unsolicited offers for some of our shareholding and shortly after the year-end, concluded a third unsolicited sale.
The impact of these sales was to reduce our holding from 70%- 44% by the year-end and to 28% today. Accordingly, we have revalued our residual holding in CAFCA to be in line with the values these offers represented. This has resulted in a remeasurement gain of ZAR 103 million through profit or loss, of which ZAR 27 million was realized in cash before the year-end and a further ZAR 29 million after year-end. The second element in the net remeasurement gain of ZAR 65 million relates to ZAR 13 million in contingent purchase considerations from unmet criteria being released. The third remeasurement relates to the contractual arrangements in the new joint venture we entered into with A.P. Møller.
As part of this arrangement, Reunert sold an initial 25% interest in Terra Firma Solutions to the joint venture and contractually agreed to sell the group's residual 65% interest via a put and call that can be exercised after the third anniversary of the initial transaction. In terms of IAS 32, as the put and call offer a fixed number of shares, but for a variable consideration, because the agreed consideration is in U.S. dollars, the put and call have to be valued and accounted for as derivative instruments. The valuation of these derivatives has given rise in Reunert's books to a call option derivative liability of ZAR 92 million and a put option derivative asset of ZAR 41 million and a remeasurement loss of ZAR 51 million in the statement of profit and loss. Turning now to the statement of financial position.
Pleasingly, there were no non-financial asset impairments impacting the carrying value of the group's assets in 2021. You will notice under non-current assets and liabilities, a derivative asset of ZAR 41 million and a derivative liability of ZAR 92 million being the carrying value of the put and call we've just discussed. Under non-current assets, the ZAR 76 million carrying value of CAFCA, which is held as investment at fair value through profit and loss. Beyond these items, the key movements are in the area of working capital, which we will deal with through the statement of cash flows. What is important is that the group's financial position remains robust, with no gearing on a net cash basis, and the group continues to have significant unutilized credit facilities, ensuring a position of strong liquidity. Turning to the slide on the group's cash flow.
Starting on the right-hand side of the cash flow cascade, the group generated cash from operations of just under ZAR 1.2 billion. Of this, ZAR 200 million was consumed in working capital, largely due to the following factors. The revenue recovery in electrical engineering, which led to an increase in receivables, the higher commodity prices, which result in higher stock values, the need to increase strategic stock levels due to COVID-related supply chain delays, and finally, delays in obtaining export permits, which increased finished goods stock levels. The next material number in the cascade is the ZAR 272 million paid to the fiscus in 2021 in respect of income tax. These movements resulted in ZAR 600 million being generated in free cash flow after sustaining capital expenditure of ZAR 42 million.
Due to the sale of a part of the Quince book, the proceeds and disposal of CAFCA, and some property, plant, and equipment, largely from the disposal of a building, the group generated a positive ZAR 137 million from investing activities. During the year, the group bought back just over 2 million of its own shares to the value of ZAR 105 million and settled ZAR 73 million in respect to the property right of use liabilities. However, it also raised ZAR 47 million against various solar plants it has built under build, own, and operate arrangements. This resulted in a net outflow from financing activities of ZAR 136 million. The overall result of these various cash flow movements is that the group generated ZAR 411 million before dividend payments.
As can be seen on the left-hand side of the slide, this ZAR 411 million approximated the dividends paid of ZAR 428 million during the year, resulting in a minor reduction in net cash on hand from the ZAR 323 million at the beginning of the year to the ZAR 291 million on hand at the end of the year. My last slide is on the group's capital expenditure for the year. Total expenditure for the year amounted to ZAR 238 million, compared to ZAR 170 million in the prior year, an increase of 40%. This reflects the group's confidence in improving economic circumstances of South Africa. These investments are firmly in line with the group's strategy, whereby ZAR 30 million was spent on the circuit breaker plant to ensure sufficient, reliable capacity to support its growth.
In addition, a further ZAR 18 million was spent on the initial phases of the development of our circuit breaker's new smart energy management offering. The group continued to expand its broadband connectivity offering by investing a further ZAR 27 million in SkyWire's network backbone. ZAR 81 million was spent on investing in the group's renewable energy strategy through ongoing investment into solar assets, as compared to ZAR 40 million in the prior year. An additional ZAR 29 million was incurred on development expenditure in the development of our next-generation Reutech radios and cryptology. These investments reflect the group's confidence in these growth businesses and confirm our strategy of pursuing a combination of organic and acquisitive growth. In conclusion, the group's segmental operating profit reflects a pleasing increase of 14% on the prior year.
After the corporate level activity, we have generated a substantial increase in operating profit from ZAR 208 million in 2020 to ZAR 1,051 million in 2021, and earnings per share have increased to ZAR 4.83 from ZAR 0.29 in the prior year. In addition, we've continued to invest in line with our strategy and to maintain a strong balance sheet and good cash generation, all of which has resulted in an improvement in our return on capital employed from 3% in 2020 to 14.5% in the current year. With that, I will hand you back to Alan to take us through the segmental information and prospects. Thank you.
Nick has already discussed the reason for the movement in segmental revenues, so I will focus on the segment operating profit and the underlying reasons behind each segment's performance. The electrical engineering segment's result yielded a segment operating profit of ZAR 373 million, a significant improvement over the prior year. The result was driven by an excellent circuit breaker performance and a significant turnaround in all of the cable businesses. Within those cable businesses, they benefited from the actions that we implemented last year, where we rationalized the cost base to the expected production volumes that we were anticipating to take place going forward, and the actions that we took to reduce the impact of foreign exchange movements on our Zambia operations at ZAMEFA.
You can see in the graph on the bottom side of the slide here, that the volumes at the cable plants have increased slightly. This is more to do with the fact that there was no labor unrest at African Cables this year, where we had significant last year, rather than any material improvement in the overall electrical infrastructure environment. Optical fiber volumes have, however, improved slightly, the substantial improvement in the profit performance at the cable plants came primarily from operational efficiencies, where there was a significant improvement that was made under new leadership. In Zambia, the liquidity position remained largely unchanged, and we received no further payment on the outstanding government debt, which remained at around ZAR 93 million throughout the year.
Despite this, the company performed well and generated an operating profit, which was further boosted as the Kwacha gained against the U.S. dollar after the national elections in August and resulted in a ZAR 39 million FOREX gain in the company. As we committed last year, we have sold down our stake in the Zimbabwean cable company, decreasing our ownership from 70%- 44% before year-end, and by another 16% post year-end to leave us now with an ownership of 28%, which is at a level at which we expect to remain in the medium term. The proceeds from those sales were ZAR 56 million. In Zambia, a peaceful election was held and a change of government took place in August 2021.
These positive political changes in Zambia include the new government's commitment to strong governance and a business-supportive macroeconomic policy, and we believe these commitments are likely to lead to a steady improvement in Zambia's general economic environment in the years ahead. To this end, we have paused our corporate actions at ZAMEFA, pending greater clarity on the impact of the government's stated objectives. At the circuit breaker business, their strategic efforts continued to yield the desired financial performance, and the company had an excellent year, both locally and internationally. Their key focus for the past number of years has been to leverage off their historic efforts internationally and to significantly increase their exports. As we have shared over the past few years, there has been a steady increase in their R&D investment, and the new product launches have supported their business development efforts around the world.
Through these, they have successfully acquired new OEM customers, primarily in the U.S. market, and they have opened new markets where we weren't present historically, both in Australia and other targeted export markets that we have pursued. These efforts have yielded a strong export volume increase in FY 2021, and these additional volumes have assisted in improving the factory efficiencies. In the local market, the company also did well as home refurbishments drove the market demand and the company increased its share of this sector of the market. The local volumes remained consistent year-on-year, which was pleasing given the generally weak investment environment in which they operated in South Africa. To support the South African market, we described historically that we have launched the smart energy control range last year, and this year increased that product portfolio further.
The uptake has been strong, and we now have nearly 20,000 devices that have been sold, and you can see how quickly the growth is continuing if you look at the graph at the bottom of the slide. All of those devices reside on our IoT platform. We continue to invest further in energy control, and we expect it to form an increasingly important part of our circuit breaker business as the liberalization of the energy generation market continues and renewable energy converges with the traditional methodology of generation and distribution of electricity. The ICT segment had a solid year, with segment operating profits slightly ahead of last year at ZAR 608 million.
Although this appears to be a relatively flat performance, the contribution from the finance cluster decreased to the lower interest environment, and as we provided guidance last year, resulted in slightly lower year-on-year returns within the finance cluster. Quince, despite the structural reduction in profit, performed well, and together with the good performances across all of the other businesses within the segment, resulted in a segment profit that we were pleased with. As described in the strategy section, +OneX is scaling its operations both through acquisition and organically. The business had a good first year, with the brand really gaining some strong traction during the course of that year or this year. Our enterprise customers and those that we have secured will increase the track record of +OneX and enable bigger and more complex contracts to be targeted in the future.
Perhaps most pleasing is that the business increased its revenue by more than 21% in its first year, which underpins our assessment that it remains a key growth driver of this segment looking forward. Within the finance cluster, another good year was had. The book decreased to ZAR 2.5 billion as we sold off the legacy PanSolutions book, and the further decrease was caused by lower discounting, which was as a result of those stock outs that I described in Nashua in the final quarter of the year. Overall, that credit environment continued to remain tight, but the new Quince management has focused on the franchise channel and improved collections were experienced throughout the year.
The enhancements that we made to the enterprise control environment were all implemented this year and improved both the credit monitoring and the oversight of the business. The performance of the book and the improved credit environment allowed for a release of ZAR 29 million worth of estimated credit losses. The rest of the book remains well-provisioned against any future bad debts that we may suffer. At Nashua, the market demand in several key verticals remains materially impacted by COVID-19. Despite this, the volumes of our traditional sales have returned to 90% of those pre-COVID levels. Importantly, to augment that traditional business, the key strategy to become a total workspace provider continues to gather momentum, which is evidenced by the number of customers who now buy multiple product sets from Nashua, increasing up to 30% this year.
The franchisor's channel sales of those complementary products and services increased materially again this year by over 18%. If we look over the past four years since the strategy was first implemented, the franchise channel has now had a CAGR increase in these new product sales of 25% per annum over those four years. Within the communications cluster, we had another good year, although the market activity was also negatively impacted in those same market verticals as we had at Nashua. They also had the added challenge of the ongoing load shedding, which shuts down customer sites, and we lose minutes to put over our voice network whilst that load shedding takes place. As a result of those two dynamics, the traditional customer base that we have, those minutes have only recovered to 80% of the pre-COVID levels.
Importantly, and really pleasingly, new voice deals and new customers that we bring onto the network continue to be secured at record levels, and this year, the total customers that reside on our network exceeded 22,000 customers. Together with these new customers that came in and the traditional base that we've had, the total minutes that were carried by our network were 96% of the prior year. Similar to the other key strategy and the other success that we've had around the segment, ECN's strategy to diversify their revenues continues to yield positive results, and their diversified revenues now contribute 15% of the total company revenue and are all annuity in nature. That minute volume that we have, coupled to these improved complementary sales, delivered another growth year for ECN.
Our last-mile broadband connectivities provider, SkyWire, continues to benefit from the strong market demand for high-quality broadband connections, and they continued their investment into new geographies to expand their national network. This year, we invested in 28 new towers that were installed across 24 new regions, and that assisted in a further 16% growth in the annuity income being delivered by SkyWire. I have already described the core reasons for the tough environment in which the Applied Electronics segment operated this year. The disproportionate decrease in segment operating profit, where we saw a decrease of 63% based to a revenue dropping by only 5%, is primarily caused due to the product mix that was sold during the course of this year.
Our lack of high-margin export sales were greatly reduced this year and replaced by lower-margin sales in some of the other businesses that did have exports during the course of the year. In addition to that, the July riots had a significant impact on our renewable energy businesses. Due to damage on sites that we were participating on or paused projects, we lost around 6 weeks worth of installation revenue over that period, as many recite sites were required to be repaired before we could return onto site and continue with the work. In addition to that, we incurred insurance losses at those businesses, and by year-end, we had to incur the cost of the losses but were not able to get the benefit of the insurance as those losses had not been acknowledged by Sasria.
However, and pleasingly, as we look forward to the new year, the segment is in a much improved order position. Our efforts, once international travel was permitted, yielded rapid results, with our key businesses receiving several excellent contracts since we were able to travel since July of this year. The orders that we currently have are ZAR 1.2 billion, and most of these are unaffected by the permit issues that plagued us during the course of last year. Of this order book, over ZAR 700 million has been received since travel was permitted in the period between July and October of this year.
If we dig into that ZAR 1.2 billion a little bit deeper, we find that our fuse business is fully loaded for the second half of this year, and good orders have been received in both our radar business and in our Omnigo business. Supporting these improved export order books, we also have a fully loaded Terra Firma Solutions for the first half of the year, and the renewable energy business is expected to deliver a very strong performance, resulting in a much improved FY 2022 for the segment. As we look forward to next year, Reunert expects to continue to steadily improve its financial performance in this financial year. The electrical engineering and the ICT segments are expected to experience moderately improved market conditions on the back of improved renewable energy infrastructure investment and a steadily improving South African economy.
The strength of the underlying businesses in these segments position them well to continue to grow in such economic environments. As described, our export order books have also significantly improved, and this, together with our renewable energy, will support a much improved Applied Electronics segment performance in FY 2022. The group's first half, however, is going to face some pressure as the metal industry strike action that took place in October has already impacted our Electrical Engineering businesses and the new export orders that we have taken in the Applied Electronics have a normal startup execution period that limits the amount of contribution that we will get from them also in the first half of the year. However, both of these.
Sorry, both of these impacts are both temporary and unlikely to affect the expected full year performance of the group as we build up momentum through the second half of the year. While we recognize that there are challenges and uncertainty that still continues, primarily due to COVID-19 and the fourth wave that we anticipate, as well as the global supply chain, that those challenges remain. Our key growth markets of renewable energy, our exports, and our solutions and systems integration clusters also continue to represent a strong underpin to our growth aspirations. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of the recorded session and Nick and I will now take any questions that you have in the live Q&A session. Thank you for your attention here today, and we appreciate your support. Thank you.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q&A session after the prerecorded webcast. On the call today you've got myself, Alan Dickson, the Chief Executive of Reunert, and also Nick Thomson, our CFO. We also have on the line Karen Smith, who's the Investor Manager for Reunert, and who most of you, I'm sure, are familiar. We'd like to thank you all for your time today. Just to remind you that if you do have any questions for us, please type them into the area provided and we will answer them. We've just got one question that's come up so far from Miran Rajaratnam from MIBFA. His question is: How big are the different segments from a revenue point of view within the ICT segment? We've got what we call four clusters within the ICT segment.
We have Total Workspace Provider, which houses Nashua. We have Business Communications, which houses ECN and SkyWire. We have our Finance cluster, which houses Quince. We have the Solutions and Systems Integration cluster, which houses +OneX. Broadly within Reunert, when we define a cluster, our aspiration is that that cluster has at least ZAR 100 million worth of operating profit that sits within that cluster. Within the Total Workspace Provider, Finance and Business Communications, all of their operating profit exceeds that aspiration already. In the case of the Solutions and Systems Integration cluster, because it was only launched last year, we are yet and still on the way to grow up towards that. In terms of those clusters, the Total Workspace Provider is still the largest. Finance is the second largest. Business Communications is the third largest.
Because I indicated each of those in excess of that aspiration that we have, and then the solutions and systems integration being the smallest. Thanks and welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the additional questions. There are two additional questions that have come in. The first from Paul Bosman at Granate Asset Management. His question is: How much true surplus capacity do we have in the various cable businesses? I'll hand that over to Nick. Nick will field that one for us, please.
Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for the question. I think what's important is that in cable, which is our biggest cable business, energy park cable business, is running just over 80% of what it was able to deliver in 2019 and 2018. There's at least another 20% of capacity just to get back up to those levels. We were probably running at 80% of capacity on shift basis that we had back then. There's a lot of extra capacity available. That's not to say that we wouldn't have to add in people to execute a capacity. We're talking about physical capacity. Obviously people, because we've right-sized the business, would have to be added in to get us back to those levels.
If one looks at ZAMEFA has got a very big cable operation and we're sort of running probably around 40%-50% of the upper capacity of that business. A lot of their revenues is copper rod. There isn't probably too much surplus capacity in the copper rod without having to turn on more furnaces. In the actual low voltage plant, there's quite considerable capacity that's still available. Again, it would require the adding in of extra people to be able to deliver it.
Thanks, Nick. I think that's maybe just to add on top of that from my side. The machine capacity, we have throttled the capacity in ZAMEFA based on cash flow, so there is a significant somewhere in the order of 50% we'd be able to pick up from versus the machine capacity and what we're utilizing today. As Nick has correctly indicated, we need to bring in new people, and similarly at the power cables plant in South Africa, there's well in excess of 20% of machine capacity. We need to bring people in to do that, and that would typically take us about 6 months to do that. There would not need to be a big capital injection in order to bring that in. It's more around people than it is around equipment.
The third question that we have is from Andrew Vincent, from ClucasGray Asset Management. Andrew has asked, have we rebased our dividend payout ratio post the 2020 crisis, or do we intend increasing payout ratios again? Andrew, we've slightly changed the view in terms of how we look at providing shareholder returns, going forward. Looking at it increasingly from a total cash return to shareholders as opposed to only the dividend cash that we return to shareholders. The reason we're doing that and the reason we articulate is this year we did around about ZAR 100 million worth of share buybacks. If you add that to the dividends that we paid, you come up with that ZAR 547 million, if I remember correctly, that has been returned to shareholders this year.
If you take that as a ratio of total cash returned to shareholders compared to the attributable profit, you'll find a distribution ratio quite similar to where we have historically been. It's our intention to continue with the total cash return to shareholders as being the best metric to look at how we return cash to shareholders as opposed to only dividends going forward. I hope that answers your question there. The fourth question that's come in is from Nick Rogers from Harvard House. His question is, please could you talk through the solar division and the prospects, the sectors involved, and where is the demand coming from? I can certainly do that, Nick. The solar business or the solar division, renewable energy division, is probably more accurate to what we talk about.
The one that I'm going to talk to, because I think it's the asset you're referring to, is what we call Terra Firma Solutions. If you look at that strategy side of our business, that's the first bullet item in there. That's the building and owning of solar assets that we have. In that business, we target what we call embedded generation. That's generation that you typically have on a customer site for the customer's own consumption. It's that business that has lifted the cap from 1 MW up to 100 MW that you can execute without having to get a NERSA license.
It's within that ambit that not only are we going to see a lot of activity in the commercial and industrial space, but that's also the space that the mines are going to inject some of their additional capacity into it. What we really see is, if I can, I'm gonna break it into two key areas for you. It's 10 MW and below, which is really our preferred market and where we are strongest, and that we classify as commercial industrial. In that type of environment, the REITs are big players in there, but so are some of the larger industrial clients as well. Anybody who's got a large footprint or a large factory roof or a large footprint around his operation is a target market for us.
Anybody that consumes anything from 500 kW up to that 10 MW is a market for us. We've been particularly strong in the property environment, but also have some very strong portfolios in the industrial environment as well, where we supply into a suite of customers there. In terms of prospects, the market is very strong at the moment. The pipeline is big, the demand is strong, and we are as busy as we have ever been. I anticipate that will continue, and it's driven by three things in my mind. First of all, the opportunity that you can actually do it yourself.
For any customer that's got an electricity as an ongoing cost in their world, when you've got Eskom on the one side, a municipality in many cases between Eskom and yourself, so in that you have all of your load shedding, and then you have this great uncertainty about the cost that you're going to be taking of electricity going forward. It's a very compelling case in order to actually put some extent of the power that you're going to consume and have it coming from a source that isn't either the municipality or Eskom. As a result of that, we're seeing this very strong demand that we look at at the moment. It's coming from across the board.
You know anybody who's got, like I say, a big roof, some space around them and takes a lot of power are people who are talking to us at the moment. It's quite a strong market growth we anticipate there. We have another question from Paul Bosman. He's asked, could you please talk about the competitive environment in the cable business? Which are the more contested areas, and how do those areas impact profitability? Once again, I'm going to hand that over to Nick.
Thanks, Paul. In sort of my introduction to the finance section of the presentation, I indicated that the key metric for electrical engineering is gross domestic fixed investment. According to Econometrix, that indicator is at an all-time low. That really talks to why even after, you know, nearly 18 months after the start of COVID, we're still only running at about 80% of the output that we had in 2019 before COVID. That means that the whole industry at the moment has got a sort of surfeit of capacity, and therefore the environment is competitive. I think what's also important to say is that the industry tends to be reasonably responsible in terms of setting the prices.
Yes, there has been pricing pressure and obviously margin pressure. Not to the extent that the prices have sort of fallen off the edge of a cliff, and I think that's important. Again, if one looks at the average cable manufacturer, raw material costs are a very large and material component of the ultimate selling price. You can't sell below your raw material costs, so that will always provide an underpin in terms of effectively the pricing. When one looks at the market, the market has moved and changed. A few years ago, we would've sold sort of 60% at least of our product directly to the end customer in terms of larger orders, which would've been for bigger cable, longer lengths.
That would've been in your utility sector or your mining sector, and even your industrial, sort of customers like that. However, increasingly the general market, which basically buys cable from us, holds the stock, cuts it to length in terms of smaller projects and then distributes it to the smaller projects, that is nowadays just under 60% of our total throughput from African Cables. That means that the market shape has changed. That means that the end projects are typically smaller and being executed by smaller contractors rather than being done in-house by the utilities. That's obviously had an impact on throughput. It's about servicing the general market, it's about servicing those wholesalers.
To do that, you have to be very reliable in terms of supply. You've gotta be able to respond to their demand quickly. Because they have to finance the trade receivable book and also the stock holding, the margins tend to be somewhat tighter than they would be if you were to sell thicker, longer, bigger lengths of cable directly to your end large project consumer. So the market, as I say, is under pressure from a throughput perspective, you know, as we start to see investment in the infrastructure so that pressure should start not necessarily to ease, it'll always be competitive, but the throughput volumes should start to improve.
Thanks, Nick. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions. I hope we've been able to answer the questions that have come through, and I thank you for your interest in the questions we've got. It's always a little bit difficult to sort of talk to a screen and try and answer these things. To the extent we haven't answered the question in the way that you would like or to the detail that you would like, are there any other questions that you haven't had the opportunity to ask today? Please just drop Karen an email, and we'll either set up a further engagement with yourselves, or we'll answer a question to you in a more complete way if that would help.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you once again for your attention and your support today. We wish you well, and keep well. We'll see you out there in the market. Thank you very much, everybody, and good afternoon.