Hello everyone, and welcome to Xaar 2025 full year results. Captions are enabled on Zoom. However, these are automatic and can sometimes contain errors. If you would like to ask a question as part of our Q&A later, you can submit a question by using the Q&A function in Zoom. You can also use the raise h and function, and we will invite you to unmute to ask your question in person. For those of you in the room, please raise your hand and wait for a microphone. I will now hand over to John Mills, Chief Executive Officer.
Hi. Good morning. Yes, you said my name is John Mills. I'm CEO of Xaar, and I'm joined today by Paul James, who's our CFO. Today I'd like to take you through our full year results. I'm pleased to report that revenue for the group was up by 12%. This was largely driven by strong growth within the Printhead group of 22%. One of the key contributors there was the commercialization of the wax printing for jewelry, where we saw substantial growth in that market. To underpin, we still retain the discipline of maintaining the margins and driving margin growth in the business, both through stock turns and through yield and other improvements.
As we grow the business, it's really important that we support customers in our regions, and that's why we've established an Asian hub in China to help supply the system components that we'll talk a little more about later on in the presentation, along with the ability to actually demonstrate our capabilities within that region. Xaar is we have many competitors, and they are typically large Japanese corporates with a huge scale and reach. One of the key questions to understand is why do we win? Why does Xaar win in this incredibly competitive environment? The real answer to that is that we have a unique capability, unique architecture of the printhead. What that does is it allows us to print fluids that nobody else can print.
That breadth of window of operation is the thing that allows us to move into new industrial markets with increased uptime and increased performance. That technology is actually protected in several different ways. Firstly, we have over 147 patents, which give us global protection on the IP. Also we have embedded in 32 years of manufacturing a lot of process know-how in how to manufacture those printheads. The other, increasingly important is actually the applications engineering. How do we actually use the printheads in the application itself? You combine all of that together, we feel our technology is very well protected. What all of that enables is for us to actually deliver to the end user a capability that doesn't exist with any of the competitors.
That will allow them to switch analog processes that were previously unable to be switched to digital, now to be able to use digital print, which gives the obvious benefits of reduction in cost, waste, and energy. All of that really delivers significant value to the end user. Now before I go into the details of the business model and how we go to market, I just want to hand over to Paul to take you through the financials.
Okay. Thank you, John. I'm very pleased to report something of a classic year. It can be characterized as a year of growth, investment, and in one part of our group, turnaround. We have seen significant growth in many printhead segments, stabilization where there has been a decline, and in the group's U.S. business, something of a turnaround under new management. Overall, group revenue is up 12% year-on-year at GBP 60.1 million, driven by Printhead revenue growth of 22%. Megnajet was slightly up at 2% and EPS in the United States down 10%, but we expect to return to growth there in 2026. Adjusted before tax comes in at GBP 0.8 million, beating consensus by 8%, a small but significant victory.
Similarly, although net cash is down year-on-year at GBP 4.9 million, we exceeded consensus by several hundred thousand pounds. This result was driven by enhanced levels of investment year-on-year, as well as the decision to buy shares to help avoid dilution at their inexpensive versus strategic value. We are now starting to report on free cash flow this year and going forward as a key alternative performance measure. This outcome will mainly be driven by trading performance and the choices we make supporting the business in the most efficient way possible, as well as investing in growth. Now let's look at the divisional detail. Of the three divisions, Printhead is the standout in terms of both scale and performance. Revenue is up 22% year-on-year, but within the detail are some even more impressive results.
What I call pure printhead sales are actually up 27%, and Printbar sales up 31%. Smaller categories such as ink and system components also show significant double-digit percent growth or smaller scale. This growth is driven by new segments, and John will talk more about that later. I will highlight that after years of decline, the ceramics market seems to be stabilizing. This means a headwind with which we have lived with for a long time and served as a constraint on growth is likely to have dissipated. What is also pleasing to report is the improvement in gross margin performance with an increase of 300 basis points, 3 percentage points to 40% in Printhead.
This improvement in profitability is even more stark at adjusted profit before tax level, highlighting a key attribute of Xaar, the operational gearing benefit of increased volume provided we keep a lid on costs. Of the 22% increase in revenue, well over half of this is due to volume. The rest, a combination of mix and pricing. Now, I would describe Megnajet as broadly flat year-over-year, but it provides an important role in supporting other parts of the group with its key technologies and inter-group sales were sharply up. EPS revenue is down. It's driven by the unexpected end of a multi-year contract and the lack of a credible business pipeline at the outset of last year.
However, new management have focused on turning around the business, dealing with certain seemingly intractable issues, including the need to restructure the business and take costs out of product. This largely explains how they grew gross margin profitability despite the decline in revenue. Indeed, the watch words for EPS are project execution, a fatter pipeline, and better business discipline. If we now turn to the group income statement, you'll see, first of all, the 300 basis points improvement in gross margin driven by volume growth. Operating expenditure, or OpEx, has increased at a rate of 11%, but this is to do with rebuilding capability and having the right skills and resources in place to drive and indeed cope with significant growth. Now let's have a look at cash flow.
We are inaugurating free cash flow as a key alternative performance measure to look at from now on, and it's worthy of some commentary. Working capital is broadly flat year-over-year within the context of a sharply expanding business. Inventory is a particular area of focus for management after several years of holding elevated levels. Management is now focused on long-term year-over-year improvement in stock turn, a continuous improvement, if you like, and I would consider an increase of half a stock turn a year as the very minimum we should deliver. As for capital expenditure, the big ticket items include investing in additional capacity to turn around delivery of holistic solutions more quickly and an additional capability to demonstrate our technology to customers.
We've also had to swallow some increases in lease amounts across our estate on renewals that were largely completed at the back end of 2024. Now with that, I'll hand back to John.
Great. Thanks, Paul. One of the key things that has been a real change around in Xaar has been really the execution of our strategy. Our strategy is really to focus on the areas where we have a unique competitive advantage, and that is being able to print fluids that no one else can print. This competitive advantage that we have can be exploited across multiple markets. Historically, Xaar has been very strong in a single market, dominated that market for a period of time. That market has gone away and then resulted in a reduction in revenue. Going forward, we have a much broader application base. We now have 21 separate markets where we have multiple customers in the majority of those markets.
Having seen that, one of the key strategies is to make sure that we have a broad base of applications so that we have increased resilience in the business, and we're not relying on any individual market. Therefore, in terms of execution, our strategy here is to basically go through each of those markets and find a key account, and we will support that account to make sure that customer gets to market. Once that customer has got to market and has actually demonstrated capability and market growth within their sector, what we found is that actually their competitors will then come to us to actually understand how that they can access our technology.
That Halo account effect has been really positive, and we've seen that particularly in the wax printing, where we now have a number of the major OEMs globally coming to us mainly because of the work that we've done with the first. We'll continue to make R&D and develop new technologies to support this differentiation and increase in the support of our customers. Increasingly, having the ability to support our customers in different geographical regions is also very important, and we'll continue to do that. In terms of access and go to market, this is really the thing I would really like everybody to understand the challenges that we have faced over the last five years.
We sell a component into an OEM, so somebody who makes equipment, and then they will sell that equipment to an end user who will then use that equipment to do some form of printing or coating. We also sell to user developer integrators, so these are people who buy our heads, and they develop a solution for them, for themselves. These companies, they have a journey to go through using our technology. That starts off with actually developing a fluid, developing ink. Most of them, because they now have the opportunity to have an ink that's much higher viscosity, much higher pigment loading, there is a piece of work that needs to be done to develop that fluid.
That can take six months, 18 months elapsed time. Once they have that fluid, they'll start developing a machine, and that machine development can take several years. Once they have that machine, they then need to start commercializing and working with their end users, which then requires an element of the industry accepting this new solution. Now, that whole journey can take anywhere between one and five years. What we find is that what we need to do is to find ways to reduce that timeframe. If we can get our customers to market more quickly and more reliably, then we will see less attrition of customers that approach us in the front end that actually deliver revenue.
The revenue growth that you've actually seen in 2024 was actually down to relationships that we started four years ago. The revenue growth that we hope to see this year will have been based on the relationships that we developed several years ago. Once we've actually developed those applications, we look into some of the key ones. The key ones that we talked about previously, jewellery wax. That's now commercialized in the market. We've seen substantial growth in revenue with jewellery and wax. EV battery and automotive coatings, the OEMs have launched the product. We're now in the kinda customer accreditation phase, and it really depends on how quickly that market grows. In desktop 3D, we're pre-launch.
If you actually were to google the CJ 270 , you'll see there's a lot more on social media ahead of the launch which we expect to be in the near future. One of the key messages from this is that it's very difficult for us to actually predict the timing of the commercialization because we sell a component to an OEM who sells it to an end user and we have to try and guess with the OEM how the market will respond and how quickly they will develop their product. Over the last few years, there's been some times where our estimates of when things have launched have been incorrect.
We're gonna not avoid giving you specific dates on those things, but you understand how challenging it is to get that right. I think the other key message to get across here is that I don't think anybody should invest in Xaar for any specific application. The key thing here is that there are 21 application areas, and there are multiple customers in each one. It's the portfolio of those which will incrementally add revenue over the years and give us much more robustness against any individual market going into decline.
In terms of getting the customer to market more quickly, if you're developing a machine, then typically it's not just about the printhead, you need to develop an ink system, electronics, software, and then you need to put it all together in a printer. A lot of our customers don't have those capabilities, and if left to their own devices, it could take them five, six, seven years to do all of those things. Over the last few years with partnerships and through developing our own solutions, we're now able to offer a new partner a range of complementary products which shorten their time to market.
All the way through from having electronics and fluids and ink systems to a fully integrated printbar or print engine where they literally just plug it into their line and turn it on. Increasingly, we're actually seeing people asking for a fully turnkey solution in the market. One of the things we are very proud of is that our support is actually now being recognized by our customers and by the rest of the market as being world-leading in support. What does that actually mean in terms of the different market sectors? As Paul's mentioned, the legacy business that we've had and has been in decline for many years, that fails to be stabilized in there, and it's come down quite substantially.
The real star of the show really is the 3D printing and advanced manufacturing. We see that's the area where the biggest growth in the future will be 'cause many of the applications that are in the pipeline fall into that 3D printing and advanced manufacturing. Packaging and textiles has had a good year. It's a relatively small number. That may go backwards a little before it goes forwards over the next period of time. Really, it's in the 3D printing advanced manufacturing that we should see the most growth. In summary, we are really focused on delivering a differentiated offering. We're not trying to compete with our competitors head-on.
It's all about competing where we have a clear value proposition of printing fluids that no one else can print. We're pleased that our legacy markets have now stabilized so that the new growth, the new revenue that's coming through will be visible in the top line. We see operational opportunities within the business to improve margins and to support our customers around the different regions. We feel quite confident, ourselves and the board feel confident about the future of the business despite the challenges that seem to be present in the world at the moment. With that, thank you for your attention and open up to questions in the room before we go to questions online.
Yeah. Morning, guys. This is Henry Carver from Singer . Just a couple, please from me. First of all, on ceramics, obviously it looks like that's now stabilized and, you know, a long sort of story going back there. Just wondered if, you know, how you're looking at it now going forwards, and is it set to recover? Sort of if you could give any sort of details on how you see the, I guess it's, you know, related to Chinese construction as much as anything else, but any sort of color around where you see that going from here would be great. And then on the 3D printing and advanced manufacturing, could you just give us a breakdown of that GBP 15 million or whatever. I can't remember what the number was now, up on the screen.
I guess, you know, that's still relatively new markets for you still. We've got ideas of what we think, the potential is there, but if, you know, you've got any new sort of views on that would be great. Thanks.
Great. Good. I think in ceramics the core business, which is actually printing the colors on the tiles, that's really reached the bottom. The view is I don't think that's going to come back strongly for another couple of years. The main reason is that as the volumes decrease, there was a huge number of lines that were actually turned off and the digital print equipment that were on the lines that were turned off suddenly flooded a second-hand market for machines that has kept people buying those machines rather than new machines. Until those get to an age where they need to be replaced by new machines, that's likely not to come back strongly. We think 2027, 2028 is the time that that might start happening.
However, the high viscosity and high pigment loading capabilities, as I was talking about, there are new application areas within ceramics for printing the digital glaze on there. Giving more structural effects on the tile. We're seeing opportunity for growth in ceramics in that digital glaze area, not in the traditional markets that we've been in previously. That might be if we do see any growth in ceramics over the coming years. It's more likely to be within that digital glaze area rather than in the core color of the business.
In terms of the advanced manufacturing, I mean, advanced manufacturing and 3D, the advanced manufacturing is almost infinitely wide in terms of it's pretty much you have any manufacturing process that puts a fluid on a surface, could potentially be a customer. The question was how much of that was wax. What's the breakdown? About 50% of that was wax. The balance was other areas, particularly EV battery, and then some of the other smaller markets, semiconductor. One of the interesting things is that whilst we talked a lot about those four applications, we've had customers launching in conformal coating for PCB. So if you want to make a PCB waterproof or dust proof, you put a coating on top of the PCB.
The same fluid that was used in the battery application actually works really well as a conformal coating. We've seen growth in machines being sold for conformal coating within PCB. That's an application that's kinda happened without really us doing too much because it was off the back of another application in battery that we had supported. I think in the other areas of interest in advanced manufacturing to look out for would be PCB and also semiconductor printing.
Thank you.
Good morning. Thomas Rands from Berenberg. Just a few questions. Three questions, if I may. First one is just on the back of the comments around the ceramics. Is the way you address that kind of glaze element you don't need the new machines to kind of come through? Can you use your printbar as a retrofit, or does it require that kind of bigger CapEx kind of cycle?
No, actually. It's actually quite straightforward, Tom, 'cause the machines that are used for the color, we just replaced the 2002 printhead for the Aquinox head 'cause these glazes are water-based. So it's effectively the same machines that they already have with a different printhead and a slightly different ink system. They're developing machines as we speak, and launches will be at some point in the future. Going to avoid giving any kind of dates of when we think that would happen.
It's an application where, again, the ability to print high viscosity fluids and higher pigment loaded inks differentiates us against the competition so that they can produce much more structural effects on the surface than they can with other printheads.
Okay. Thank you. Second question was on desktop 3D. I know you're not gonna give any timing, but is there any comment you can make about how that development or the iteration of the machine to get it to launch is going? Any comments on how you're working with the customer?
Yeah. I think all of the reasons for the delay are exactly the right thing to do. This is a brand new product in a brand new industry, and ensuring that the customer experience is positive is absolutely paramount. They've built a substantial number of machines that have been tested, and during that testing there were some elements that they wanted to correct. They took the decision to correct them before launching. The machine was actually shown. It's been shown at a couple of trade shows now. The pre-marketing has started ahead of the launch. If you were to Google CJ 270, you can see the marketing material. It was actually shown at a trade show in Hong Kong.
Huge interest in the product. Yes, everything is going forward to plan. The investment that they've made in the launch is significant, but they wanna get it right, and I think that's absolutely the right thing to do.
Understood. Thank you. I see on the slide with your addressable markets legacy versus the kind of new ones, the packaging and textiles I think has increased to GBP 300 million total addressable. What's given you the confidence to increase the size of that market?
Yeah
Given what the numbers we had a few years back?
Yeah. Within textiles printing, we talked about M&R printing on T-shirts, and that's printing on cotton T-shirts, and that's a relatively small part of the market. The bigger market is printing onto polyester blends. Up to now, there is no digital solution for printing directly onto a polyester material. You have to actually print onto a piece of plastic, and then with a glue, and then you iron it onto the polyester. We see opportunities if we can actually produce the solution for printing directly onto polyester using our capability of a broader window of operation for the fluid. Can we actually produce a fluid set that can print directly onto polyester? If we can, that would be quite revolutionary in the market.
So that's why we've increased the opportunity. That's not to say that we've actually solved that problem, but the opportunity will be substantially bigger, if we include in printing onto polyester.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks. Morning, Toby Thorrington from Equity Development. I've got a few questions, please. I'll take your lead, and I wouldn't like to predict how many at this stage. So for John, first of all, could you talk a little bit about regional performance? EMEA and U.S. I think historically have been bigger, and Asia bringing up the rear. Anything to highlight in regional trends during the year?
Yeah. I mean, China is incredibly strong. If you look at the pipeline of activities, significant number of them are within China. A lot of digital printers actually that are sold through Western brands are actually developed and manufactured by Chinese companies. Even though ultimately the person who sells the printer might be a Western brand, we're selling the printhead to a Chinese company. That's. China is very strong. The 3D, batteries, the number of applications we have are all Chinese. What we're seeing is that in the U.S., it's much more a vertically integrated solution where there's much more appetite for printbars and a solution that goes directly onto the piece of equipment so that they're not.
They're less interested in developing the product themselves. I think it's turning into a sort of slightly different markets. China's much more OEM selling printheads and the U.S. selling print bars. Europe actually in the last sort of six months is much more activity we see in Europe with OEMs looking to diversify away from some of the markets that may be a little more volatile. At the moment, notwithstanding the challenges of what's going on, which may curb everyone's enthusiasm, you know, we're fairly optimistic of maintaining a geographical spread. You know, we don't want to get too heavy in any one region. That would be our aim.
Okay. All right. Moving on to resourcing. More markets normally means more R&D effort, more sales and marketing, you know, staffing and both. Can you talk a bit about that? I mean, we can't really see till the annual report comes out, I guess, some of the costs, underlying cost issues. Can you talk about how you're applying in there?
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. You take the story of wax printing. It took three years to develop a machine with Flashforge for wax, and we spent several hundred thousand GBP of our own money supporting Flashforge to get to market, sending engineers, parts, just making sure that we smoothed the way to get them to launch. They launched their machine in April 2024 at a trade show in Turkey. One of their biggest competitors was at the show, saw the quality of the product that was coming off their machine, driven by our heads and the materials that they were printing, and immediately said, "We need to have your head. We can't compete with that print quality." They got to market within five months.
Now they did that for several reasons. One, because they had a machine to copy. Secondly, every time there was a problem with Flashforge, they said, "There's something wrong with your head." I'd spend weeks convincing them it wasn't our head, it was actually their electronics or their software or something. With the second customer, their response is, "What are we doing wrong?" We're straight in, and it's a much more efficient conversation to get them to market. What we see is that the strategy of the Halo account is that for each of those markets, we have a very clear customer who we'll support to get to market.
What we found is that the support required to get the second and third drops off significantly in that area. Supporting customers both technically and commercially is actually much easier as we get more mature in the markets. In terms of sales and product management, we've invested significantly over the last 12 months. We put in quite a lot of additional resources into the business to support that growth.
Okay. Additional heads in both sales and marketing and R&D by the sounds of things.
R&D, sales, product management, and the field support, so quite a significant investment. We'll continue to do that because supporting the customers to get to market quickly is the number one reason why we, you know, will grow the business.
Okay. I have another R&D question, but I take that offline, I think.
Can I just add a couple of points to that? I think it's clear, I'm a relative newcomer to the business, it went through a period of constraint, paring things right back. As I said in my little bit, you know, we are investing now to not only drive growth, but actually cope with it. A lot of the additional heads we're bringing in are in those areas which enable us to take advantage of those opportunities that we now have. I'm very keen. We're currently going through a forecast process at the moment, the regular quarterly forecast update. I'm very keen that when heads come into the business, I challenge that and I say, "Well, what's the return?" Okay. Because I don't want to see margin being impacted.
I have this little image in my head of there's a new head, above him or her is a red bubble, which is the revenue they're gonna bring to that business. We're quite clear-eyed about that sort of thing. R&D, 10% of revenue, I think is the right sort of number to sustain as we go forward. I think the wider question of resourcing, I didn't put it in my bit, but I do want to underline, we signed last week a new revolving credit facility. We've doubled the level of committed funds available to us, so liquidity is substantially more than it has been. That gives us a bit more flexibility.
Okay. All right. A good performance on gross margin. That shouldn't go without comment. Particularly Printhead in the second half. I think I don't know if that was a record high, but I know volumes were stronger in the second half, but the second half Printhead gross margin looked particularly strong. I don't know if there's anything to bring out there particularly?
Well, it's a bit of a complex answer to the question. Naturally you've got enhanced volume, so you've got operating leverage effect. That is a big attribute of the business, right? As volumes increase, that will really give us a big benefit on the bottom line. That's part of it. The pricing strategy, John sort of alluded to that. When we go into a new market with an OEM that's fresh to that market, developing something, pricing's a bit keener. As we develop that market and go to second, third or fourth customer, the pricing goes up. That helps too with margin enhancement too. It's just cost constraint, cost control. We work really hard to take cost out, that's all part of the mix.
Okay, great. Thank you. A few on cash flow, Paul, if you don't mind. Can you help us out with tax guidance for P&L and cash? There's obviously the U.S. settlement as part of that, but if you could give us a bit of a feel for how that what that's gonna look like.
Well, first of all, tax, we have brought forward tax losses in the U.K. I'll probably be long retired before they get used up, so we can deal with that issue. In America, yes, it's the corporate tax rate is the normal tax rate that you would expect to see. There's some deferred tax assets that complicate the matter as would be a normal calculation. Basically, there's nothing too special there. In terms of you know, what we disclosed in October, we said we had detected in some areas some legacy issues, historical issues with regard to indirect taxes. That's now being worked through, and we're now working that through.
The exposure that we talked about in October, which was GBP 3 million-GBP 4 million, we're definitely at the bottom end of that range. That will play out over the next 18-24 months.
Okay. Okay, that's fine. Thank you. Just a couple of questions on inventory and free cash flow, because I think both those were flagged in the presentation.
Yeah.
I hear what you say about reducing inventory turn is the target.
Increasing turn.
I think the consensus revenue forecast for this year is GBP 70 million, so that's +10%. You don't have to comment on that particularly, but if that were hypothetically the case, could you still t ake inventory out, do you think?
This is something I want to be really clear about, right? I'm less obsessed about an absolute number. That's why I keep talking about stock turn. It's about the efficiency of the stock holding we have, given the size of the business that we have. Yes, obviously if the business grows faster than we thought, then that will naturally help us in terms of getting inventory down a bit faster. That's why I focus on stock turn. I think historically, for historical reasons, Xaar did have elevated levels of inventory, okay? It had a very low stock turn, and that's the area I want to focus on, and that's what I said in my little bit, which is that, you know, I won't get out of bed for less than a half a stock turn improvement a year.
That's the bare minimum. I'm hoping for a lot more than that, and that's what we'll focus on.
Right. Okay. All well and good focusing on free cash flow. People normally give targets for what they'd like that number to be as a percentage of, or a conversion number or would you be prepared to give us a number on that?
I'm not extemporizing a target for you, Toby, on stage . It is a new APM for us to talk about, and we will develop that over the next few months. It's perfectly possible, come August, we'll talk a bit more about our view on free cash flow and how that should develop.
I look forward to it. Thank you.
Nice try.
Any more in the room? Are there any questions online?
Thank you, John and Paul. We don't currently have any questions through online, but just as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please use the Q&A function provided in Zoom. You may also raise your hand, and we will invite you to unmute and ask your question in person. We do have a couple of written questions come through. One of them asks, "Do you have the operational capability to increase production if demand grows quicker than expected?
I think in terms of it just depends on the quantum. I think that for the vast majority of applications in the pipeline, the answer is yes. I mean, the peak of the ceramics boom in 2013 left us with significant capacity and a significant cost base, which has been a real burden on the company for the last decade. However, that latent capacity is a real benefit now because as revenue grows, we can actually deliver the revenue growth without significant investment. If something takes off to a level that we hadn't predicted, then it might take us six months to respond to that.
I think that would be a great problem to have and not one that we foresee in the near future.
Thank you very much. Our next question asks, "Is the conflict in the Middle East going to impact Xaar's trading?
That's a tough one because what we saw post-Ukraine was you know inflation goes up, interest rates go up. A lot of capital equipment around the world is actually financed through debt. If that debt becomes more expensive, we see people delaying their purchases of capital equipment. That's how we saw it in sort of 2023, 2024. That could happen again. It really probably is more driven by inflation rather than any constraint on supply at this time. We continue to monitor it. It feels like it's changing almost daily. It's impossible to predict what's gonna happen. We will monitor it closely, and we'll take appropriate actions to minimize any impact if there is any.
Thank you very much. Our last question asks, "You mentioned the success in jewellery wax. Is there scope for broadening that into the industrial casting space?
That's a really good question. Yes, there is. One of the limitations on that technology is that the wax that's currently used for the jewelry is actually very expensive. It's around about GBP 400 per kilogram. And therefore, economically, it's only really viable for precious metals for the jewelry manufacturing. If we could actually find a way of inkjetting a much lower cost wax or standard wax that might be a few pounds per kilogram, then that would open it up to investment casting of all the other materials. In order to jet that cheaper wax, we need to operate at a much higher temperature.
The technical challenge for ourselves is can we develop a printhead that can operate at around about 125 degrees C, so that we can jet this lower wax and lower cost wax. That's one of the key development projects that we have in the business at the moment. If we're successful in producing that printhead, that could extend the opportunity for investment casting with wax, you know, somewhere between 3x-5x what it is today.
Thank you very much. That was our final question. I will now hand back to you both for any closing remarks.
Got one more question in the room. Tom?
Sorry, one. I might ask just two, if that's all right, if we've got time. Sorry. Groans in the room. The comments around capacity utilization and having the spare capacity, how does the new China facility play into that?
Yeah. No, good question. The one of the if you recall on the slide, the attrition rate of projects is quite high. 99% of projects that fail, fail because of something to do with the ink delivery system. We acquired Megnajet so that we could deliver ink delivery systems to our customers. The price point that we can ship ink systems to China was far too high for the Chinese market. What we've done is we've actually established a manufacturing facility in China to deliver ink delivery systems so that we can actually supply our customers with those ink systems. What we're finding now is that we're actually eliminating a significant number of field issues.
That will not only give us a secondary revenue stream, but it will also reduce the time to market and reduce the support burden in particular in that region. We're also looking at how we can utilize that supply chain to further reduce costs within manufacturing in the U.K.. If there are opportunities to look at manufacturing other assembly type items, then we would take that. What's clear is that the core technology will remain in the U.K.
Okay. Thank you. I promise this is the final question. EPS is 25% of revenue. We rarely talk about it. It's on its second or third management change. What is the potential for that business and what changes are happening in this kind of latest round of restructuring, please?
I mean, the challenge with EPS is that it's actually located in a ski village in the middle of Vermont. It's very challenging to actually get the right management team into a business in that location. Having had a couple of goes at doing that, we've now got somebody in running the business that is very high-quality person who, you know, is an industry veteran and has run small businesses and is an entrepreneur himself. We have now got the right quality of person in running the business, and that really is the thing that's transforming the outlook of that business.
The key thing is that that business is the sales cycle for that is around about 6 to 12 months. The revenue that you'll see coming through in H1 of this year was really actually developed, you know, in the second half of last year. The pipeline looks much stronger. The applications are broad, again, broader in there. There was huge emphasis on printing golf balls for a number of years, and I think that the previous management team rested on revenue from that activity. I think the new management team is much more focused on diversification of the opportunity, building the pipeline and ensuring that that revenue continues forward.
Great. Thank you.
Okay. Good. Well, if there's no more questions, I'd just like to thank everybody in the room for coming, and everybody online for their attendance. I wish you all a very good day, and thanks very much.
Thank you.