Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Fevara plc four-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the Executive Management Team from Fevara plc.
Josh, good morning, sir.
Good morning. Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for this presentation. We hope it's helpful for you and provides you with some good insight about Fevara, the recent changes, and the way forward. My name is Josh Hoopes. I'm the CEO of Fevara. I've been with the business coming up on almost two years now. Previously, I spent around 10+ years with Associated British Foods in various roles across their sugar business and agricultural business. We'll hand over to Gavin to introduce himself as well.
Thank you, Josh. So I'm Gavin Manson. I'm the Chief Financial Officer. I joined just over two years ago, having previously spent the previous eight years as Chief Financial and Operating Officer of Electra Private Equity. And before that, a number of PLCs, predominantly in situations of change and turnaround.
Thanks, Gavin. So the agenda for today and what we'd like to share is shown here on the screen. We'll first give you an overview of Fevara, particularly for those who are less familiar with it. We'll spend a little bit of time explaining who we are and what we do. Gavin then will talk us through the FY 2025 full-year financial results. We'll then come back and give you a deeper dive into our operational and strategic review, followed by a brief summary and an outlook looking forward, after which we're very happy to take questions as well. In terms of who is Fevara, who are we? Some of you may know us as Carr's Group plc, our previous company name.
Carr's Group has a long history, a long heritage, starting back many, many years ago with biscuits and then expanded significantly to cover multiple different industries like flour milling, agricultural trade, and the supplement business that we are today. As the business has then divested and become more focused in on the agricultural supplement space, we thought it was a great opportunity to rebrand and refresh the position of the business and how we describe ourselves and present ourselves externally. And so a couple of months ago, we did that. We rebranded the business to Fevara. And you can see here on the screen how that name is derived. It comes from the old English word, feo, which translates into cattle as wealth or cattle as prosperity, combined with the Latin word vara, meaning straight and true.
We think this is a great combination of words demonstrating what we are, as our purpose is really about helping livestock farmers be prosperous and profitable. What we do, for those who are, again, less familiar with the business, we are an agricultural supplement business. We manufacture, we develop, and we distribute and sell specialist supplement products for cattle, sheep, and horses, particularly livestock that is primarily on grass or pasture, extensive farming systems. Our core product is the feed lick. This is a dehydrated molasses block where we take molasses, remove the water, and then add vitamins, minerals, protein, and special ingredients that becomes a very, very convenient and very, very effective product for animals to be supplemented on pasture. We then also have a bagged mineral product line.
We manufacture this in Scotland out of our Scotland business, and the business we've recently announced our intention to acquire in Brazil. This is also their core business. And then we have a third product category, boluses, which is also a supplement. It's a product that is inserted into the stomach of the animal, remains there for three-to-six months, and slowly releases trace elements into the animal, again, as they're on grass and grazing. These are our three major product categories, with the feed lick being our core business, the major revenue and profit driver of our business. Our mission and our purpose is, as I described, we focus significantly on developing research-backed supplements for livestock on grass, really empowering those extensive farmers to have high productivity, good valuable products that help them get a return on investment with their animals and their farming businesses.
Our vision is to be the global expert in this space in extensive livestock supplementation and really be the specialist who has the best product range and the best knowledge and the best research to support this particular subsegment of agriculture. So to do that, our strategy is three pillars. The first is about improving our operating margin. The second is about delivering profitable commercial growth. And the third is about expanding into new growth geographies and growth markets. And we'll expand on each of these three pillars later on in the presentation. As a summary of our financial year just gone, 2025, it was a year of transformation, significant progress in implementing our strategy for this business. So with that, we're pleased to announce our revenue increased 4.1% versus the previous year and on a constant foreign exchange basis, 5.7%.
We're even more proud and pleased to announce that our group adjusted operating profit increased by 69%, and that's really a combination of initiatives with improving the margin of our products, the cost profile of the business, as well as growth in volume in those core products. That flows then into adjusted earnings per share increase of 69%, and within that, some significant strategic milestones, which included successfully disposing of the engineering business for GBP 75 million, returning GBP 70 million of that to our shareholders via a tender offer. We also made significant operational progress, including the closure of our factory near Bury St Edmunds, producing boluses and moving that to an outsource provider in France, as well as the closure and sale of our assets in New York State, which was Afgritech, a commodity dairy feed business.
To support us commercially, we've engaged on some new commercial relationships and strategic opportunities, two of those primarily being the bolus production with Vétalis, a French specialist in bolus manufacturing and technology, and reshaping our commercial position in New Zealand from an owned and employed distribution in that country to an export model with Seales Winslow, which added profit and volume growth for us in that market. And then post-period ends, a couple of other large events, the completion of a new group banking facility with HSBC. This is really to support our business growth and the opportunities going forward. And then the announcement to enter into an agreement to acquire Macal, which is our first entry into the strategically important Brazilian market and counterbalancing our business with Northern and Southern Hemisphere revenue and business presence. So that's a quick walk through the highlights.
I'll hand over now to Gavin, who can talk you through the detail on the financial review.
Thank you, Josh. Sorry, you both pressed the button at the same time. As Josh said, the results as a whole for the year were very satisfying for us in that they demonstrated that we had delivered what we set out to deliver this time last year, both in terms of financial results and also the strategic initiatives that we were targeting at the start of the year. So revenue overall grew 4.1%, with 8.4% coming from Europe and the U.S. flat on a reported basis, but just under 3% growth on a constant exchange rate basis. And in terms of profitability, the U.K. and Europe grew just under 67%, so a very strong performance, and the U.S. was a small growth of 0.3%. I think it's worth drawing attention to the fact that the controlled operations in both geographies outperformed the joint ventures quite significantly.
In light of the relatively recent arrival of both Josh and myself, our focus in the early part of our tenure has been on the internal operations and what we can control most directly. We have recognized that the joint venture performance has been dilutive to us, and now that we have done a lot of the things that we needed to do in the short term in terms of taking out control of the dilutive aspects of the business, we're taking a more active role in the joint ventures, and we hope that in future years, the joint ventures won't be dilutive to growth. Something else to note here is the central costs. They are down somewhat year on year. That is reflective of a strategic initiative, basically in line with the simplification of the business to reduce central costs significantly.
The timing of the central cost reduction, or the timing of the major elements of the central cost reduction in FY 2025, was that they were relatively late in the year due to the timing of the engineering disposal. Our run rate central costs at the moment are about 35% down on where they were this time last year. So whilst the improvement reflected in FY 2025 doesn't appear all that material, we are where we want to be in terms of the delivery of central cost savings. I think in terms of what does the P&L actually mean, in FY 2024, we had an EBIT margin of just under 3%. In FY 2025, that has improved to just under 5%. We are very focused on growing that EBIT margin. We're very focused on where we have investment programs on return on capital employed.
Our medium-term objective is to get the EBIT margin firstly into double digits above 10%, with medium-term progression to 12% and 15%. As we expand on the business, we think these opportunities are very deliverable. In terms of cash during the course of the year, essentially the cash movements are dominated, unsurprisingly, by the sale of most of the engineering division, bringing in GBP 69 million, broadly speaking, and obviously the tender offer where we return GBP 70 million to shareholders. The other two bars in between the two biggest ones reflect GBP 6 million of cash coming in through the disposal of non-productive properties. We have been disposed of most of our properties last year. There are three still being disposed of currently.
And we anticipate that through them and one or two other things will bring in around about GBP 6 million of non-trading cash during the course of FY 2026. The outpayment of GBP 4.5 million, described as a pension escrow account, is almost the end of our process to de-risk our defined benefit pension scheme. So we have completed the buy-in process. So in other words, the assets of the pension scheme have been replaced by an insurance policy that exactly meets the anticipated requirements of the scheme going forward. We have still to complete the buyout phase where the insurance company will contract with the individual members of the scheme rather than with the company. There is still some risk during that process, largely through data cleansing and the resolution of any issues that come from that. So we have put GBP 4.5 million into an escrow account jointly with the trustees.
You'll see when we get to the balance sheet that we do anticipate some of that being required, but equally, we anticipate that the company, we hope, will get some of that cash back. The other thing I would draw attention to in this slide is the working capital improvement. That's an area of focus for us as we take the business forward. We are a seasonal business, and there are quite significant benefits available to us for managing the working capital, particularly during the peak periods. And that will free up significant capital for other things going forward. One of our strategic focuses is management of adjusting items. And for those of you who have known Carr's in recent years, will be very aware that we've had some very significant adjusting items in recent years. This year, the adjusting items, the net position of the adjusting items is positive.
That's primarily through the profit and the sale of the engineering businesses and also the profit and the sale of the investment properties that I referred to. We do have some restructuring costs in FY 2024 again, but I would classify them as very positive restructuring costs, and they arise through the process to disposal of the loss-making business in New York State that Josh referred to that we sold in October of last year, and the reorganization, restructuring of our New Zealand operations, and the closure of the Animax site and the transfer of that to third-party manufacturing, all of which have positive year-on-year benefits that are not fully reflected in FY 2025, so I think whilst we are continuing to implement some strategic initiatives, you can be confident that it's a strategic focus to avoid repetition of material adjusting items going forward and to improve the quality of our earnings.
Touch on earnings per share and dividends. In this respect, we see, similarly to many other aspects of the business, we see FY 2025 as a reset of the business. Clearly, the engineering disposal and the tender offer were very material in terms of the scale of the business. And as I mentioned, in recent years, the company has had significant adjusting items, which has meant that over the period, we've maintained dividends whilst actually making bottom-line losses in recent years. So this is the first year for some time that we're making a positive profit at the bottom line. But we also believe that having reset the business and being focused on profitable growth going forward, we have reset the dividend policy as well. So we are in FY 2025, we're just under 2x cover, and it's our objective to target cover of at least 2x going forward.
We think there is significant opportunity to grow that as we grow the business. Looking at our balance sheet, the things I would highlight here are that the trading balance sheet is pretty stable. Other than the working capital improvements that I mentioned, we have assets held for sale in the balance sheet value at 1.5. As I mentioned, we comprise three investment properties. They also comprise the last engineering business, so Chirton Engineering, which was an oil and gas-focused business and wasn't included in the sale earlier in the year that was focused on nuclear engineering businesses. We are intending to have the Chirton business disposed of by the end of this financial year just to improve our focus on the core business going forward. I also mentioned earlier the pension position. We have GBP 4.5 million on deposit in the escrow account for the pension scheme.
As I said, we anticipate some of that being utilized, but as things stand at the moment, the anticipation is that GBP 1.7 million of that will not be utilized. But it has to be said that the quantification of that is somewhat out of our control, and hopefully, we will get cash back before the end of the financial year. In terms of cash, at the end of the year, we have GBP 2.6 million net cash. As Josh mentioned earlier, in October, we signed a new facility with HSBC that gives us GBP 20 million of facilities. That's for a three-year term that's extendable by two further one-year periods. There's also a further uncommitted facility of GBP 10 million should we need it. So whilst that gives us some significant borrowing capacity, I think you should also be aware that in terms of leverage, we intend to be relatively conservative.
We, broadly speaking, are going to keep our leverage within one time. I think, however, that that does give us a good opportunity for expansion. I think we'll come on to cover that the realistic opportunity we see for profit expansion is to go from EBITDA of roughly five, where we are at the moment, to the generation of five million from each of U.K. and Europe and the U.S., and then in due course, five million from Brazil as well. That really is the context of having facilities at that sort of level. Finally, corporate simplification, most of which we've touched on already, and this really is, as I tend to describe it, the decluttering of the business that has been sort of left behind from our more complex historical structure. We are resolving the pension scheme. We're well through that process.
We're divesting our final investment properties. We'll be divesting Chirton in due course, and we'll continue to reduce the central costs as well, appropriately for a business of our scale. And with that, I'll hand back to Josh to delve into a little bit more of the operational aspects of the business.
Thanks, Gavin. So we'll now take a few minutes and talk you through how the business is set up today with its footprint and position, and then the strategic pillars that we see taking this business forward, as Gavin alluded to, our ambition to generate five million EBIT from U.K., Europe, five million EBIT from the U.S., and five from Brazil over the medium term. So who we are, our geographical footprint as of today, you'll see on this map various different colors and squares. The orange colors denote where we have wholly owned operational sites. The light blue indicates where we have a 50% joint venture-owned site, and then the white dot where we have strategic distribution and manufacturing relationships. So you can see on the map, as it's presented today, we have two wholly owned manufacturing sites in the U.K.
One of those is for the bagged mineral product category, Scotmin, based in Scotland. The second is for our low-moisture block, Crystalyx product range in Silloth in Cumbria, and then moving to the U.S., we have two wholly owned low-moisture block manufacturing facilities, one in South Dakota and one in Oklahoma, and then two further 50% owned joint venture low-moisture block manufacturing sites, one in Tennessee and one in Iowa, and then you see down in Brazil, the dot indicating the agreement to acquire Macal in Mato Grosso do Sul State in Brazil, which is a bagged mineral, powder mineral manufacturing site. As we alluded to earlier, we now have a dedicated distribution partner in New Zealand and a dedicated outsourcing and bolus technology partner in France as well.
That gives you the landscape of our business, our operational footprint, and where we sit today as an international livestock supplement specialist. We are optimistic about the global growth potential of the business. Part of that is because of the strengths of our product and technology and team, and it's also because we see strong underlying market fundamentals. What these charts show and indicate is the global livestock populations of cattle, sheep, and goats. What you can see is over various different time horizons, five years, 10 years, and 20 years, a steady upward climb. As a business today, and as we look back on that map that we just presented, we currently participate in about 15% of the global cattle market, which gives us a significant additional market to enter into and generate revenue and growth from.
And we're optimistic about this because, as you can see on this slide, the underlying global market continues to grow and is forecast and expected to grow in line with population growth and rising affluence. So to execute on that and to deliver the growth to our shareholders and stakeholders, our strategy are three distinct pillars. The first is about improving our operating margin. This is required and involved to shift away from low-margin commodity-based products. So some of the more traditional agricultural commodities that you will see, where their revenue goes up and down quite dramatically or volatile as commodity prices go up and down, we took a deliberate and strategic step to move away from this type of business, which, again, was part of the rationale for the closure and sale of the business in New York, which fell into that category.
We've also, over the last 18 months, taken significant strides to improve our operational capability and focus across the sites, as well as introduce a cost improvement plan to be driving both efficiency and cost profile to generate an improved margin across the portfolio of the business. The second pillar is about profitable commercial growth. We have branded products that give us the opportunity to focus on differentiating those. Some of our products include patents around the ingredients, as well as the manufacturing process for our core low-moisture block. This allows us to have a competitive advantage to set ourselves from competition. And in order to deliver volume improvement and market share gains, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K., we've reinvigorated that commercial capability and sales capability, as well as marketing resource.
That then allows us to leverage the branded products and intellectual property we have in these markets, but also take that into markets further afield. Which leads us to the third strategic pillar, which is about expanding into these new growth markets. Our first steps there were to reorganize ourselves in New Zealand and turn that into a profitable market for us as an export market, and then targeted entry into what we see as large growing and very good opportunity markets like Brazil. To go into a little bit more detail under each of those three pillars and give you some of the highlights from each of those over the last financial year. Under the operating margin, as we've alluded to earlier, one of our first actions was to close and sell the assets of the commodity dairy feed business in New York.
Following that, in July, we also closed our U.K. bolus manufacturing site to move to a specialist production facility in France. Supporting our core wholly owned assets in the U.K. and the U.S., we made some leadership change and adjustments to our site in Oklahoma, which had been providing some financial struggles in performance and growth over the last 12 months. So we took a decision to adjust how that was being managed, as well as introduce a capital and manufacturing excellence program into that site, which we're now pleased to see towards the end of last financial year and certainly into the first quarter of this year, great benefits and gains coming from those actions. And then in the U.K., a similar approach of integrating what were three sites is now two sites into a single operational leadership, driving cost control and efficiency improvements.
Underpinning all of this, we've introduced a greater focus and emphasis into our procurement initiatives. We think that there's, again, further margin improvement to come through buying better, leveraging not only our own purchases, but joint venture purchasing books as well. And we see this as an ongoing area of focus for us in the coming 12-18 months. Moving on into the profitable commercial growth, one of the key initiatives here in terms of focusing on the branded differentiated product range that we have was strengthening our marketing capability with the focus of farm-level demand generation. In most geographies, we do not sell direct to farm. We sell via a merchant or dealer distributor network.
However, because it is a branded product, there's great opportunity for us to embark in partnership marketing and farm-level demand generation and drive footfall into their stores and depots, asking for our product based on the research and evidence that sits behind it to prove its quality and the return that the farmer gets from using it. To also support that product development, we've initiated a global new product development program. The business has a long history and legacy of very good and compelling research under the Crystalyx and SmartLic low-moisture block product brands in the U.S. and the U.K. Over 40 different university trials covering various species and products, countries across U.K., U.S., Germany, New Zealand, essentially globally. We think that there's a great legacy of research to build on.
And so we've initiated new research to strengthen that and give further evidence as to how our products perform and why the brand is strong. To then execute on that marketing and product development in the U.K., it was a separate commercial team essentially representing the three different product lines that was integrated through the course of last financial year. We've seen great benefits from doing that, going to our customers with a unified product portfolio and working with them to drive volume and market share gains. By doing that, we've seen positive progress, and we expect to see further progress from doing that. As I mentioned a moment ago, in the U.S., our two wholly owned sites, the site in the north, performed very strong last year, as Gavin mentioned in the financial results.
Our site in Oklahoma struggled through the year, and so we took further commercial steps to strengthen it commercially with change in some of our key account managers there, as well as deploying some additional senior business development resource, which we're also really pleased to see that gain momentum at the end of last financial year, and for the first quarter of this new financial year, September, October, November just gone, we're really pleased to have seen 20%+ volume growth out of that site on a year-on-year basis, so certainly seeing progress being made where that focus has been applied, and then on the innovation side, the partnership with Vétalis and the opportunity to collaborate with them allowed us the opportunity to redesign and upgrade and improve our bolus range, and we're pleased that that product has now gone live into the market over the last few weeks.
Initial reception from the customers has been very positive. The last pillar about expanding into new extensive and grazing-based geographies, as we've mentioned a couple of times now, our New Zealand model historically had high costs with employees and logistical commitments there. Those have been now concluded and removed. Our first year of trading with Seales Winslow, we did see a significant volume increase and done at a much improved cost base and delivering an overall improvement in margin for us for that territory. It now becomes a profitable market and segment for us. Strategically important, a huge amount of effort and work from the team over the last 12 months as we've prepared our entry into the Brazilian market. We can now talk a little bit more about that with these following two slides.
So to facilitate that entry, we recently announced the agreement to acquire Macal. Macal is a mineral supplement manufacturing business based in Mato Grosso do Sul, one of the highest cattle density states in Brazil. It comes with a very strong management team, a very good regional brand with very strong technical sales capability. It will be accretive to us on a return on capital employed basis and as well as an EBITDA and cash generation basis. It's a profitable business and we think gives us a great foundation to build on to create a full-scale supplement business across Brazil. So how we do that is illustrated in this slide. You'll see there's four particular elements to the plan. And if I draw your attention to the map on the right-hand side, what this illustrates is the darker colored states are where the higher density cattle exist across Brazil.
To give you a sense of the quantum of scale in the U.S., there's roughly around 30 million head of beef cattle, our particular segment of livestock in the U.S., and to support them with a low-moisture lick or low-moisture tub product, our core product category, there's 15+ manufacturing sites supporting that 30 million head of cattle. As we look at the Brazilian market today, there's 200 million head of cattle in Brazil, significantly larger than the U.S., and as it stands today, there's one low-moisture block manufacturing site currently in operation with a competitor in Brazil, so we see large-scale opportunity, and we think the timing is very, very good for us to create a footprint in Brazil with a full-scale supplement offer, so our expansion plan and strategy is to enter as we have through low-risk M&A, buying cash-accretive positive businesses.
We have also recruited three highly skilled local Brazilian staff who have worked in the agriculture industry, but more specifically within the low-moisture block product category in Brazil. One of those has been appointed as our country manager. So in addition to the management team that comes with the Macal acquisition, we've also introduced a global leadership structure or, sorry, a country leadership structure in Brazil to support these plans. And so the further plans include construction of our own low-moisture block facility. We plan to take no operational risk in doing this. It will be the same manufacturing facility that we've built several times and in recent years in the U.S., taking that operations footprint and blueprint into Brazil.
The intention is to build it near the São Paulo state where there's a high density of molasses and sugar manufacturing, which is our key raw material ingredient, and positioning it in that quadrant of those high-density cattle states just northeast and west of São Paulo, where we then have a hub-and-spoke distribution model for that product to enter into those markets. To launch and set the product, we also plan to tailor it. There is a slight adaptation required in the recipe of the product to match the soil, grass, and genetics of Brazil. We'll do this as we have done in other markets around the world through working with local universities to do the trial work so that we have evidence to take to our customers and farmers, showing them the efficacy of the product and helping us come to market with that.
The likely timing of this is, as we expect, over the next 12 months to have a planned, built, and commissioned and begin commencing sale of low-moisture block in the first instance through Macal as a key distributor of that product, particularly from Mato Grosso do Sul, and underpinning these three strategic pillars, as the business has reshaped itself and become a more focused specialist business, we took the opportunity also to refresh and focus our ESG framework, and so we've just recently reset and launched that new framework with the three pillars underneath it: people, production, and product.
And you'll see the key focus areas here with the major imperative for us being on health and safety, workplace harm, supporting our people, ensuring that we're sourcing responsibly and minimizing our operational footprint, as well as, as always, prioritizing feed safety, feed quality, and delivering products that are evidence-based, supporting productive and sustainable livestock practices. So that takes us through the operational review and strategic pillars. And so just to summarize and to give you a sense of outlook, for us, this has been a year of transformation, a year of change. We are incredibly optimistic of the future and incredibly proud of what was achieved during last financial year. We think this strategy is designed to deliver a sustained growth and sustained value creation for our shareholders and stakeholders.
And so as we look at what's been achieved last year, in particular the post-period-end events as well, we're optimistic about the runway that's been created. And in terms of the first quarter of this year, we are trading in line with the market expectations, which built within those was further margin improvement, volume growth, which we are seeing through the first quarter and continue to expect to see over the short and medium term. So that now concludes the formal part of the presentation. And so we'll just hand back to the moderator and happy to take any questions from here as well.
Perfect. Josh, Gavin, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen.
But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboards. Josh, Gavin, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this morning. And thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. But guys, at this point, if I may just hand back to you to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. And if I pick up from you at the end, that'd be great.
Thank you. Great. No, thank you for the questions. We'll work our way through these.
So the first question relates to the cost of the recent changes in U.K. National Insurance rates. And so I'll hand over to Gavin to answer that for you.
Yep. Thank you, Josh. That's a relatively short one to answer because the additional cost was just below GBP 70,000 per year of the combined impact of National Insurance and minimum wage. Okay. There's a further question with this one around the cost of President Trump's tariffs and what's occurred over the last 12 months there. The short answer with this one is we typically are sourcing in the U.S., in particular, we source nearly all of our ingredients locally, and we sell nearly all of our product domestically. So there's been no material impact to the tariff changes. And in terms of affecting our U.K. European business, a similar approach.
I think what it has affected and what has happened is the market expectation of the U.S. beef cycle was that it would go back into a herd rebuilding phase during calendar year 2025, early into 2026. The U.S. beef cycle is cyclical, and what I think has happened is some of the uncertainty and cost of importing beef into the U.S. because of the tariffs has actually meant the beef price has sustained incredibly high levels, which has disincentivized farmers to begin to rebuild herds. I think the indirect impact of those Trump tariffs is a delay in a herd rebuild for the U.S., which for us means less animals to supplement. Obviously, we're hopeful for that cycle to turn into positive cattle number rebuilding. That would be a benefit to our business.
But as it stands at the moment, our focus is on market share growth in that country to generate our growth.
A further question for you, Gavin. We have a question here about the analyst estimates of target price for Fevara. Indication and comments on those would be helpful, perhaps with future revenues.
Yeah. Thank you. So I think as the questioner expected, we can't comment on the analyst forecast specifically. They're independent forecasts. I think what we can just draw your attention to are the various initiatives that we've discussed earlier around improving our operating margins, growing commercially, and moving into new geographies. And while it is a medium-term ambition, I would reiterate our objective of getting to a position where we generate GBP 5 million of profits in each of three continental sectors.
There's another question that follows along well with that.
It asks what proportion of our future growth is expected to come from volume expansion versus price and mix improvement. I'll perhaps give a thought on that, Gavin, and you can add. I think it will be a blended approach. As we look at the three strategic pillars of the business, we think that there is still significant improvement on the cost side of our business, the margin in terms of production efficiency, procurement, and pricing margin flow through. We see a chunk from the U.K. and U.S. to still come through this year from that element. Volume growth as well. We see our market shares across the U.K. and the U.S. are not sufficiently large that there isn't headroom for us to grow there.
And as we look at the market sizes of where we sit today, a combined market share growth of 1% in the U.S. and U.K. combined is worth about GBP 1 million of profit to us. And so as you can kind of see the quantums, if we grow our market share 3%, 4%, 5%, that will also have a material impact on our business. And so that's another focus of how we see the future growth to come, which then obviously Brazil being a third pillar with a very different runway of a growing large market with underpenetrated products. I think, Gavin, maybe if you want to add anything.
I think what I would add there was that we see a relatively short-term runway from our existing businesses and our existing products to generating GBP 5 million from each of our two Northern Hemisphere markets.
That's with the resources that we have currently, but in terms of the opportunities for new products or M&A that Josh mentioned, there are consolidation opportunities potentially in North America and also moving up the value chain in terms of products that we can see through these well-developed distribution channels. In Brazil, in the short to medium term, our focus is on developing our distribution, developing our new products, but then once again, that will leave us in a position where we have distribution targeting a market with 200 million cattle. That gives all sorts of opportunities for longer-term commercial growth.
Maybe just staying on the commercial growth pillar and the market share of our existing markets today, there's a question here against the backdrop of declining farming sector in the U.K.: how are we ensuring we continue to take market share?
I'd probably just point to a couple of comments on that. It's correct to say the U.S. beef market went down around 1% during calendar year 2025. The U.K. beef and sheep market went down significantly more, 3%-4% actually in population, livestock population numbers. As Gavin showed in the results, we were able, and particularly in our core Crystalyx business, to grow our volume double digits despite that backdrop of a declining sector. There's been lots going on in U.K. farming, which I'm sure everyone is aware of, that's created a slightly more negative sentiment than in years past. Traditionally, the market has been on a slight decline for many, many years. There was a sharp uptick in that decline in recent years with some of the political and structural changes that occurred, plus the volatility that came after the Ukraine invasion.
Our medium-term view is we expect the U.K. and Europe to kind of go back to more of that traditional stable, slight declining environment. But within here, we still see opportunity to gain market share and expect to do so as a key part of our growth pillar. Again, probably with the growth theme, a next question that's come in is how scalable is the current operating model as we expand into new geographies and how quickly do we expect to introduce our higher margin branded products to Brazil? So I would say that the model is very investable and scalable. So how we operate in the U.K. and the U.S. is we manufacture those products, and they are distributed through a dealer, distributor, or merchant network. But it's certainly a value-add manufacturing process. It's not priced on a cost-plus model as some traditional agricultural products are.
And what that means is we look at the profile of our business. The return on capital employed of those assets is significantly high and cash generative. So to redeploy that investment into a new geography, the Brazilian market, we think that it will also be sufficiently cash generative and high-returning to be accretive overall for the business. The introduction to Brazil will be slightly different in Mato Grosso do Sul, where we've acquired direct-to-farm distribution. And so it will be slotted into their product category. And Brazil will most likely be a combination of direct-to-farm through wholly owned distribution in certain states and then through a dealer-distributor type model as we do elsewhere, where we don't have our own sales team on the ground selling a full supplement range.
But to introduce that product, as I mentioned earlier, we expect around 12 months to commission the factory and at the same time do the university trial work to give us the evidence to bring it to life and get it moving. Another question on that theme, I think of route to market and scalability. What are the advantages of using strategic manufacturing distribution partnerships in the region that we have? And do we see the opportunity for additional partnerships? And if so, in which geography? I think the advantage is we are specialists in low moisture blocks, that product category, the manufacturing capability for it. We're the only ones who manufacture that product in more than one country globally. And we have more factories manufacturing that product than anybody else. So that is certainly our specialty.
It is profitable and helpful for us, though, to have other products to sell to our customers, and this is where the strategic partnerships come in. Vétalis is a specialist in the bolus technology space and manufacturing space. Their manufacturing was significantly higher scale than our subscale wholly owned site near Bury St Edmunds, and so for us, it's really about improving our margin and cost base and simplifying our business commercially. In terms of additional partnerships and additional geographies, if you turn into the pack, perhaps if it's still on the screen, I'll turn actually into the appendix. There's a lot more information in the appendix about the global markets. If we turn and look at this slide, this talks about other addressable markets where we see high growth in cattle numbers and large cattle populations.
Over the short term, our focus is Brazil as our first priority and developing and driving the growth there. In the medium term, we think there's actually further additional markets which could be serviced as export markets like we do in New Zealand out of an existing manufacturing site or perhaps further physical local operational presence over the medium term. With that, there's another question here, Gavin. Will the banking facilities for Brazil expansion or maybe buyouts or both, what effect will those have on EBIT if it were to happen? Perhaps you can comment on that one.
Yeah. So certainly, I would say that the banking facilities give us the ability to invest in Brazil to the extent that we need to. But equally, you'll have noted that the consideration for the acquisition of Macal was GBP five million.
Earlier, I mentioned that we're intending to bring in GBP 6 million of non-trading cash hopefully over the course of this financial year. The banking facilities give us flexibility for future to be unconstrained in terms of capital and obviously an efficient route of achieving that through capital allocation. The question goes on to ask, will we buy out the JVs utilizing the facility? I think our view at the moment is, and I think it's relatively unlikely to change, is that there are more effective utilizations of capital than buying out the JVs. We have the ability to influence the performance of these JVs. It's just something that hasn't been the focus within the business over recent years, but is now increasingly so. I don't think we'll be using the facilities for that.
Okay.
I think the last question here that I can see on the screen is really about the long-term opportunity for Fevara and Brazil. I'll probably expand that to the long-term opportunity for Fevara in general. Brazil specifically, it's a growing market, already an existing very large market. You can see again on the screen the various sides of the market and give you a sense of the profit we're generating from the Northern Hemisphere, from our presence in the U.K., Germany, U.S. We see significant upside in Brazil. Certainly, as the U.S. has withdrawn its production capacity, Brazil has filled that gap globally with sales into the Middle East and China. The external perspective is that it will continue to grow in the coming years. We think establishing our presence there gives us a long runway for growth.
But as Gavin has said, and as we've spoken about here, we think there's also still upside and growth to be had in our Northern Hemisphere markets today. And that's really where our focus comes under those three pillars. And so we expect to see further margin improvement, further volume growth, and certainly a long runway of opportunity in the Southern Hemisphere as we apply our technology and our products into that exciting market. So I think that's all the questions. So for me, it's a thank you, everyone, for joining and appreciate the questions and appreciate the interest. And we are, as I said, and as Gavin has said, really enthusiastic and positive about Fevara as a business and the opportunity that it creates for growth.
Perfect.
Josh, Gavin, if I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time there and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning, and of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended, but apart from that, guys, thank you very much indeed for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This won't take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Fevara plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation.
That now concludes today's session, so good afternoon to you all. Thank you.