Hello, everyone. I'm Ross Taylor, CEO of Fletcher Building. I'd just like to welcome you all here to our investor day. It's actually, I must say, really, really nice to have real people in a real room. It's been when we look back, it was 2019 or three years ago, we actually had our last in real life investor day. I think it's a real sign we're moving on from COVID. Hopefully, that continues because I think it's the energy is much better and hopefully you see that as we go through today. This morning, I hope you enjoyed the expo. I know we froze you a little bit down there, but this room's nice and warm, so hopefully you're warming up here.
It'd be good if you got around the various booths because I think they're a good showcase for some of the interesting stuff we're actually going to be talking about today. Beyond that, I think the whole day we've got is quite exciting. This morning, in this upcoming hybrid in-person and online session, we'll outline our medium-term plans for Fletcher Building. Through this, you're going to hear from a number of our executives as we talk through these plans in some detail. Our online participants will then leave us, and for those of you who are here in person, we hope that you'll be joining us on the site tours around our Auckland-based operations. These will be held both this afternoon and tomorrow morning and will bring to life some of the things we're talking about through our presentations today.
After the tours, there'll be an opportunity to join us for drinks and nibbles back here at this venue this evening. All through the day, there's going to be lots of opportunities to talk with the broader leadership team. They'll be on the buses, at the various sites, and at the cocktail function here this evening. Back in 2018, we laid out the medium-term targets we're aiming for, and pleasingly, we have delivered against these. Today's presentations are all about our plans from here, what our strategy and focus areas are, how we intend to keep driving operational performance, what we're doing to grow the business, and importantly, what our new medium-term targets are.
In order to try and get the balance of enough detail versus length of presentation right, not all the divisions or functional areas will be presenting today. Where there's no specific presentation, Bevan and I will look to cover this at a high level when we speak. Following each presenter, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions for around ten minutes. For those in the room, hold up your hand for a microphone, and so those online can hear the questions, and one of the team will bring you a microphone. For those watching online, you can make use of the functionality on our microsite and ask questions via the Q&A tab. These will be then read out in the room. If we don't get to some questions due to time constraints, we'll follow up with answers tomorrow morning.
Following today, all these presentations will be available on our website. Okay. While many of you will be very familiar with who Fletcher Building is and what it does, I still thought it'd be useful to step back and provide a high-level overview before getting into where we're taking the business from here. Over the last four years, we've repositioned Fletcher Building, and it's now a scaled New Zealand and Australia in-country manufacturer of building products with complementary distribution, development, and construction businesses. In New Zealand, we have around 9,000 people generating NZD 6.5 billion in revenue and around NZD 635 million in EBIT. In Australia, we have around 4,500 people generating close to AUD 3 billion of revenue and AUD 115 million in EBIT.
Just over half of our revenue is exposed to the residential markets, with the balance being relatively evenly split between infrastructure and commercial sectors. Our assets are generally now well invested, cost competitive, and well-positioned in their respective markets. This sets us up nicely for the next leg of our journey. However, before we get into our future, I wanted to talk to the present challenges we're experiencing in the New Zealand plasterboard market. When the New Zealand construction markets came out of COVID lockdowns in October last year, a number of shortages of building materials started to appear. Concerns from customers mounted, and these concerns quickly spilled over into plasterboard, where we saw order volumes more than double over the November 2021 to January 2022 period.
We initially met this surge by drawing down on our contingency stocks, but the high levels of orders did not abate, and we had to move to an allocation model with our merchant customers. This was critical as it gave our merchant customers certainty of supplies and allowed them to better communicate lead times with their end customers. As we've worked to clear this surge in orders, it's led to shortages in the New Zealand market. We are working to alleviate this in many ways, running our plants continuously, reconfiguring our factories to achieve extra volumes, and continuing to source additional supplies internationally. These moves will see an additional 10% of volumes available in the market by July this year. With this, we'd expect the plasterboard market to return to equilibrium again by around the end of September or October 2022.
In the interim, we'll put in place an emergency allocation process through PlaceMakers and other merchants to allow them to deal with any hardship issues their smaller customers may be experiencing. Importantly, our new North Island plasterboard plant in Tauriko is on schedule to open in May 2023. This new plant will add an additional 30% of plasterboard capacity to the New Zealand market, easily supporting existing demand and providing us with a significant future capacity and further expansion opportunities beyond that. Now as we look forward, the same vision, purpose, and strategic focus areas will continue to underpin the next steps of our journey. Our five strategic themes are working for us, and they remain unchanged as we look forward. Getting everyone home safely each and every day. Delivering the best possible solutions and services to our customers.
Keeping our costs under control and our operations efficient. Keep pushing to ensure all our business' economic performance are in their respective industry top quartiles. Fostering a culture and skill set that allows us to embrace sustainability, innovation, and disruption, and hence drive growth. We are confident this strategy can deliver further upside from here and position us well for solid through-the-cycle performance. Our FY 2022 results will land as per our guidance at the half year. EBIT at circa NZD 750 million. Second half margins around 9.5%, and ROFEs around 18%. As we look into the medium term, we remain confident we have a strong pipeline of growth opportunities, either in adjacencies or higher margin products. We're not done yet in Australia. We're targeting a further 200-300 basis points of improvement.
As we clear the legacy projects, we'll benefit from a smaller, more focused, and more profitable construction business. All this will be underpinned by a relentless focus on improving both our customer outcomes and ongoing operational efficiencies. Based on this, our targets here over the medium term for the overall group are to improve our overall margins by a further 100-200 basis points. This will see profits lift by a further NZD 150 million-NZD 300 million. Through this, we remain confident we can keep our ROFEs above our 15% target. We think the volumes of work put in place across our markets will remain pretty solid over the next 12-18 months, as the residential backlog still has to be worked through and the infrastructure and commercial markets look strong.
Bevan's gonna cover this in a bit more detail later. What we're less certain about is the market conditions 18-24 months out. Our crystal ball is just not that good. That said, after all the work we've done on our operational disciplines over the last few years, we are confident we can achieve through-the-cycle outcomes of around 9%-10% EBIT margins and ROFEs at or around 15%. Our confidence in our outlook is underpinned by what is now a proven and capable leadership team. This slide highlights the strength and depth of our operational chief executives. All this team have significant industry experience in New Zealand, have either worked around the world or have a strong understanding of global trends and best practice, and have proven themselves in their roles at Fletcher Building.
This team have all made significant individual contributions and have been integral in delivering the repositioning of Fletcher Building over the last four years. It's a similar story with our corporate team. They all have significant domain experience, significant global experience and perspectives, and are proven performers within Fletcher Building. Putting an operational and corporate team together with these attributes has been critical to our journey to date and will remain so for the long-term aspirations. This outward focus and global perspective is critical. We have scale positions in countries that are far away from the Northern Hemisphere markets, and as such, our big opportunity is to stay globally aware, understand the trends and disruptions that are occurring overseas, and then apply them to our markets ahead of local and global competition. We have a leadership team that can very ably do this.
The importance of our people extends well beyond just the executive leadership team. Like the chief executives, we have a very strong and experienced group of general managers leading each of our businesses. This slide shows a couple of important metrics. Engagement across our general managers has been steadily rising with the turnaround of Fletcher Building over the last four years. We now have a highly engaged group of general managers that are both committed to and excited about our future growth plans. Importantly, we're now also seeing engagement improvements across our entire workforce after the dip we experienced through a tough FY 2021. Beyond this, we remain very focused on improving diversity and fostering an inclusive culture. We've noted on the slide the progress we're making on increasing the percentage of females in operational roles and in closing our pay parity gaps.
Having a bit of trouble with my slides here. My clicking is not perfect. I'll now briefly go through each of our five strategy focus areas and provide some tangible evidence of the progress we're making. We have and will continue to put an enormous amount of effort into getting each and every one of our employees and contractors home safely at the end of each and every day. This effort has been led by our leaders. To ensure they have the right tools and skills to do this, we've trained all 2,300 of our broader leadership team over the last two years. They've also been out in the field doing many risk containment sweeps, and this is where we actively look for areas to improve what we're doing ahead of accidents occurring.
The success of these efforts is really starting to show, with injury rates falling materially and over 90% of our sites and four businesses now injury-free for the entire year. There remains much to do here, but we're making really good progress towards our goal of no injuries in our business. We talk about the importance of our customer in many places. It's in our purpose, it's in our five strategic focus areas, and we have it front and center, as one of our four core values. It gets this emphasis because we recognize we need to have the right culture, the right operational systems, the right products and services, and be super reliable and easy to deal with. To be truly world-class across all of our businesses, we have much to do, but we're making really good progress.
We've maintained our net promoter score of 37, despite all of the COVID and supply chain challenges over the last two years. We now have over 190,000 of our customers using our online or omni-channel services. This has seen our online sales achieve an annual run rate now of over NZD 500 million, and this is up from nil just three years ago. We continue to invest to improve our customer promises, our customer outcomes, improve our systems, and to improve our data analytics. The momentum we now have in this space sets us up really well to make some major footsteps forward in our customer service and outcomes into the future. We have materially and permanently moved the dial on our operational cost structures and efficiencies.
This has been achieved over the last three years working across a number of dimensions. You know, just simply getting the excess costs out, the consolidation of many of our manufacturing sites, distribution centers across our business, and this has allowed us to get cost structures competitive and sustainable. Getting our basic disciplines fit for purpose, such as pricing, productivity, and quality. It does not stop here. In fact, it clearly never stops. We'll continue to invest to ensure we're fighting fit and competitive, and there'll be further benefits as our digital and automation plans mature, and we'll continue to drive and focus on our base operational skills and disciplines. It's for this reason, this strategic goal remains one of our ongoing focus areas. With our cost structures in better shape, we've been working on getting all of our businesses performing in the top quartile of their respective sectors.
We don't benchmark this just locally, we do it on a global basis. This is very important as it keeps us outwardly focused and looking around the world for best practice. It also makes us more aware of what might disrupt us in our home markets in the future. This graphic is a simplistic view using EBIT margins of the benchmark, and it shows each of our divisions and the progress they're making. I'd make a couple of observations. All of our businesses have improved over the last three years. Our New Zealand building products, concrete, and residential divisions are performing in their industry top quartiles. Our New Zealand distribution division is well on its way, and our Australian and construction divisions have made very strong improvements, but there's obviously work to do.
This is a good guide to the opportunity that remains in front of us and why we're pointing to further overall margin improvements over the next few years. We're very confident that if we lean in on the sustainability, innovation, and disruption trends around the world, that there'll be significant growth opportunities available to us. In sustainability, we're making good progress across carbon, waste, water, and pivoting our manufacturing to only sustainable products. We're actively looking outwards through our, both our business leadership teams and the central innovation team. Through this, we've met with many international companies and over 300 startups and disruptors over the last three years. We do this to ensure we understand the key trends and have an opportunity to cherry-pick the best of these ideas for implementation in our own markets.
This has translated to a compelling suite of growth opportunities that will allow us to enter adjacencies, disrupt markets, and enhance both our products and service offerings. These opportunities are predominantly organic, and we anticipate we'll invest around NZD 500 million over the next three years. Importantly, we're targeting ROIC for these investments above 15%. It's for all these reasons that we're confident our strategy positions us well to drive shareholder value in the short and longer term. We expect to see solid growth into FY 2023, as we do not anticipate any further lockdowns or large disruptions. We continue to have both plans and runway to drive further margin improvements above what we're achieving now. We have an established pipeline of future growth opportunities that will start to mature over the next two to three years.
Our balance sheet and financial position is strong, and we intend to keep it that way. Our operating approach and scale in-country presence positions us well to both take advantage of and deal with the global trends affecting our sectors. I'll now hand over to Bevan, who'll dig into each of these themes in a bit more detail before we move into the divisional presentations.
Good morning, everyone. As Ross has just laid out, our focus at Fletcher Building has and continues to be building a sustainably better business through the cycle. In FY 2022, we'll deliver EBIT of around NZD 750 million. Our second half margins will be around 9.5%. These targets are consistent both with our guidance earlier this year and also with the targets we set out in 2018. While this delivery is being pleasing, we are firmly focused on building the next stage of our performance and growth. In the near term, our FY 2023 target is to deliver at least NZD 100 million of further EBIT uplift. Our key assumptions for this target are laid out on the slide, and importantly, I'd highlight we assume a broadly flat market in FY 2023 compared to the volumes we're seeing right now.
We do also assume that softening house prices in New Zealand will mean that the margins in our residential development business are about 10 percentage points lower, 30% this year versus 20% or thereabout next year. I'll touch further on the market in a moment. The past 4 years has seen our businesses lift margins by more than 200 basis points. While market conditions have been supportive, this uplift has come principally from tackling the fundamentals of our business. We've taken out more than NZD 250 million of fixed cost. We've rationalized our footprints. We've invested in more efficient manufacturing. We've embedded better pricing disciplines, and we've exited some low-margin categories whilst pushing further into higher margin ones. The benefits of this work are shown in more detail here.
The figures are for the products and distribution divisions, which represent about 85% of our revenue. On the left-hand side, we see the impact of the improved pricing and the push into higher margin categories, with gross margins expanding more than 70 basis points across the period despite significant cost inflation. We are continuing to see inflation running between 5% and 10% across the business. Importantly, we're also seeing good recovery of these costs through price, and we're confident that that will continue. On the right-hand side, we see the benefit of the cost and efficiency work, with overhead costs now around 140 basis points lower as a percentage of revenue. Importantly, our work in this space has led to a more variabilized cost base, and therefore greater flex for the businesses to adjust to any future changes in market conditions.
As we look to the medium term, we do consider there remains significant further opportunity to lift the profitability of the group. As Ross has said, we see potential to lift margins by between 100 and 200 basis points, assuming current levels of market activity, and to deliver sustainably 9%-10% margins through the cycle. How will we do this? Well, there are three key drivers. 50-100 basis points of this invest improvement will come from investment in the growth of our higher margin New Zealand businesses. 25-50 basis points from the next leg of performance in Australia, and similarly, 25-50 basis points from a more focused and profitable construction business. Now, a key question on everyone's minds is what is mid-cycle levels of activity? I'll tell you what we have assumed.
Across all of the sectors that we participate in, both residential and non-residential in New Zealand and Australia, we see mid-cycle in aggregate around 10%-15% below current levels of activity. In New Zealand residential, importantly, about 15%-20% below. I'd note that this mid-cycle assumption refers to work done, not to consents, with clearly consenting in New Zealand residential running well above current levels of activity. I'll return to this again in a moment. On page 22, we touch briefly on our construction business, and while not a focus of our investor day to day, it is well-placed to deliver improved EBIT in line with our target of 3%-5% margins.
We're well and truly focused on the roading, marine, airports, and water sectors in New Zealand, where gross margins are healthier and where there's a strong future pipeline of investment. Our order book is currently NZD 3.1 billion and with a vastly improved risk and margin profile. Our work won in recent years has been predominantly in smaller work packages, enterprise models, alliance contracts, and maintenance contracts. Importantly, the work we've won in the larger infrastructure projects is exclusively under alliance models, where our risk is capped at our project margin. Finally, here, to build on Ross's point, we have just two of our legacy projects to complete, being the Pūhoi to Warkworth Motorway and the International Convention Centre. Returning to the primary drivers of our future performance and growth, we outline on the next three pages our investment strategy.
Firstly, what we call our base CapEx envelope is NZD 200 million-NZD 250 million of investment per year on a combination of maintenance CapEx and our investments in digital efficiency and sustainability. After a period of elevated investment to get our core operations efficient, our maintenance CapEx is now well-aligned with underlying depreciation. Our acceleration of investments in our backbone systems, our digital connections into customers' ecosystems, and a lower carbon Fletcher Building is a critical part of our strategy, which the team will bring to life today. Another key theme we will see today is our investment in the growth of the business over the medium term. We call this our above-base CapEx. As Ross has said, we currently have a pipeline of NZD 500 million of planned growth investment over the next three years.
These investments are almost all organic, and they are targeted on the New Zealand market in product and network adjacencies around our current businesses. Importantly, they are not primarily focused on capacity expansion. With the only real example of this being our investment in our glass wool insulation plant, where due to a code change in the New Zealand Building Code, we expect this market to roughly double in size. You'll see Hamish, Nick, and Bruce add further color to these growth investments today. Now target 15% sustainable ROEs and therefore around NZD 75 million of EBIT at mid-cycle levels of activity. The third leg of our investment strategy is in Steve's residential development business, and here we adopt in a disciplined approach to investments.
We target through the cycle EBIT margins of 15%-20%+ and returns above the group target, while also maintaining a sensible limit on our total capital invested in the business. Steve will talk later this morning about how we are scaling the development business within these financial guardrails and how our business model sets us up well to do so. We believe the value add of our development model is evidenced not just by the strong margins and returns that this business has consistently delivered, but also by a recent independent valuation of the land portfolio, which we completed in the past month. At present, we have around 5,500 units under our control, which is a mix of raw land under development, and finished sections.
The independent valuation of this portfolio on an as is basis is between NZD 350 million and NZD 400 million higher than book value or roughly 2x the book value of that land. Clearly, this embedded value gives us flex and a degree of resilience for both margins and returns in our residential business over the next 2-3 years. As we turn to balance sheet and returns profiles more generally, the group will continue to operate with relatively conservative balance sheet metrics. In 2018, we reset our leverage range to a lower setting of 1x-2x and will exit FY 2022 at around 0.7x-0.8x levered. Looking ahead and inclusive of the growth investments we're making, we expect to continue to operate at the lower end of this range.
Our approach is to maintain strong balance sheet settings, which provide the group with resilience and with headroom through an economic cycle. Turning to page 27, our return on funds, as Ross had said, will be around 18% this year and with a group target of sustainably delivering more than 15%. We've been pleased to return to strong dividend payments over the past 18 months, including the full imputation of the interim dividends in FY 2022. The board expects to declare a final FY 2022 dividend commensurate with the performance of the business this year, and we do expect to continue imputation for New Zealand tax purposes in the medium term. Finally here, I'd note that we have completed our on-market buyback, repurchasing and canceling 5% of our issued capital within the NZD 300 million envelope.
I'd note finally that our approach to capital management will remain consistent with recent years, and as we move materially below the lower end of our target range, we will consider additional shareholder distributions. These shareholder returns have been underpinned by robust cash flows in the business. Underlying cash flows over the past four years have totaled around NZD 2.5 billion, with FY 2022 cash lower as previously signaled for two key reasons. Firstly, a drawdown on stocks in FY 2021, and secondly, an investment in inventory and target areas to ensure supply chain resilience and customer service levels this year. We do expect that working capital levels in FY 2023 will stabilize. To close the group presentation this morning, I'd like to touch on the market outlook.
Presently, we're seeing trading volumes continue to be strong, with demand outstripping capacity to build in a number of areas, and particularly in New Zealand residential. We estimate that the current consenting levels in this sector of around 50,000 per year are between 20% and 30% above the industry capacity to build. It's our expectation that this backlog of residential activity in New Zealand and also in Australia, as well as a solid pipeline of non-residential work, is likely to support robust market volumes over the next 12 and potentially the next 18 months. Our FY 2023 earnings guidance, as I've said, is therefore based on a broadly flat market in FY 2023. Looking further ahead to FY 2024 and beyond, global factors mean the market outlook does have a heightened degree of uncertainty.
In this environment, our primary focus is on our core operating disciplines and our strength of balance sheet settings, with a particular focus on pricing to recover cost inflation, tight control of overhead costs, and maintaining a leverage ratio at the lower end of our target range. In addition to this operational focus, we've recently completed a piece of work with Deloitte Access Economics looking at how changes in key economic variables could impact activity in our market sectors. We did this for two reasons. Firstly, to provide a sense check on the standard economic forecast we use. Secondly, to develop a more robust sense of how major macro movements could impact the group's operating environment and to ensure we are well-placed to respond.
Deloitte's approach was to look at the movements in key economic variables noted on this slide, for example, inflation, house prices, and public and private investment, and the correlation between those and the level of activity in our markets over the past 30 years. Deloitte was able to establish very strong correlations across all sectors with the chart here showing one example, being New Zealand Residential. Deloitte then used these models and their forecasts for those key economic variables to provide an assessment of where our markets are likely to go. They provided a base case as well as a plausible upside and downside. I am pleased, especially for the sell side. We do have the full Deloitte report available for you. I'll just touch on the next 3 pages on their forecasts and how that compares to current activity.
We see here the forecast for non-residential activity in New Zealand and Australia, with historical and Deloitte forecasts shown by the columns and with the line showing the standard economic forecast out of BIS Oxford Economics and Infometrics. I note that all these are expressed in constant prices, therefore real rather than nominal terms, and therefore an indicator of market volume. For non-residential activity in New Zealand and Australia, Deloitte's base case is well-aligned to those of the other forecasts and is expected to remain robust over the medium term at or above current levels. I'll note that these sectors do represent around 50% of Fletcher Building's end market exposure. In Australian residential, which is about a fifth of our market exposure, current activity levels in FY 2022 are sitting at around the average of the past five years.
Deloitte's base case is for the market to operate at more or less those levels through to FY 25, while BIS Oxford Economics are more bullish, pointing to growth over this period. Turning finally to New Zealand residential, Deloitte's forecast is for a slight decline in FY 23, with the backlog of consents supporting work over this period, consistent with our own expectations. A softening from FY 24 is expected to result in an overall drop of around 10% versus current levels by FY 25. While Infometrics are also pointing to a broadly flat FY 23, you can see they do have a more bearish view for the outer years. Importantly and finally here, I'd make two points.
With New Zealand residential consents running at around 50,000, I'd highlight the recent work by Stats NZ, showing that the proportion of consents canceled historically, i.e. not translating to work done, has historically been in a range of 2%-7%. Therefore, if this were to even double across the current consenting of 50,000, it would remain well above the current industry capacity to build of around 35,000 new homes per year. Secondly, I'd emphasize the point that our mid-cycle assumption for New Zealand residential and supporting those 9%-10% sustainable margins is a market around 15%-20% below our current levels. In summary, and to conclude, we consider the business is well set up to deliver on the next phase of our performance and growth.
We see opportunities to grow margins between 100 and 200 basis points at current levels of market activity and sustainably deliver 9%-10%. We'll invest for growth in accretive segments. We're focused on organic opportunities in New Zealand. This, together with the next leg of performance in construction and in Australia, will move us to those margin levels. We do acknowledge the heightened environment of market uncertainty at this point, and while we expect market d-conditions to remain supportive over the next 12-18 months, we're in a good position to manage any softening in the medium term. In that respect, the strength of our in-country positions, the disciplines in our businesses on price, cost, and therefore margin management, and our strong balance sheet mean we are well-placed to sustainably build a better business through the cycle.
With that, Ross and I would welcome your questions, either from in the room or via the web chat. I would just note, if you've got specific questions for the divisions, you'll have the opportunity to ask those to the team in just a moment.
Thanks very much. Simon Thackray from Jefferies. Thanks for the presentation, guys. Pricing discipline was a key feature, you know, of the improvement we've seen over the last few years. To what degree can you talk a little bit more about that pricing discipline and how it manifests itself? Because we have been capacity constrained. There has been very strong demand. Therefore, theoretically, the ability to pass through costs and to take price has been easier. In the event you talk about the scenario of a downturn, how does that pricing discipline manifest itself so that you can continue to recover costs?
Yeah. Look, the way I'd talk to that is that.
Certainly it's a bit easier now, but even when we've had tailwinds like that in our markets, if you go back through 2017, 2018, the markets weren't dire at all, and we were ceding margins. If you recall, over those periods, we were having margin compression because we just didn't have our pricing disciplines right. What we did, and a lot of what we've done is actually real fundamentals. You know, it's really baked it in, the disciplines in our business, and we push elasticity a lot. You know, I push price and see where it moves. We've actually thought about which are our profitable products. We've got much better, what I call product segmentation, understanding where we make money, where we don't, so we get the emphasis right. Just the ability not to leak price.
You know, quite often we put price in and then leak it out through rebates and the like. It's the business is fundamentally run differently now. Our pricing strategies are better. If I think of PlaceMakers, you know, what are the products you've got to match price on? What's your secondary set of products where people don't look as much, and what's your tertiary set of products which no one really looks at the price and therefore they're just an associated purchase. When we look at what we do in PlaceMakers and across our distribution businesses generally now, we've got that under control where we didn't three or four years ago.
Sure, it's a bit easier, but I am very confident in our ability based on all those basics. We've trained an enormous amount of people in just pricing disciplines as well. We've got systems, training, strategies, you know, in place now, which really set us up well for the future.
Does that mean you've also trained the customers as well to accept? I mean, how have you communicated that? Then second part is, you know, the old concrete division and cement pricing was always the one that would whip us around on a down cycle. What's changed in concrete as well?
Well, I think firstly, by virtue of training your customers to a point, but if you actually. Your strategy is right, they don't necessarily see it because what they're looking at, we've got a better awareness of what our customers are looking at, what they're doing. If we're actually pushing the products which they pay and happily paid higher margins for, that's sort of our own goal if we're not doing it. So there's a bunch of that. Yes, we communicate better and we're more transparent, if that's what you mean by training your customers. I'll leave concrete for when Nick's up here. Good. No, I'm not dodging it. It's just that he's got a whole presentation to do, so I'd really appreciate it if you put him through his paces when he does his presentation.
Hi, morning. I guess, you know, the extra 50-100 basis points of mix from New Zealand, I guess, can we kind of talk about which of the divisions that's kind of coming from and how we kind of get there, and what type of, you know, businesses you're pushing within those divisions?
Looking for even more detail, Lisa. My goodness. The core investments, and Hamish, Nick and Bruce, and Steve will bring it to life. They're across those four divisions. Hamish will talk to our investment in wood fiber-based products. Taupō, for example, will talk to how Steve's sustainably growing his business. If you think, Lisa, that, you know, Hamish is operating at around 14% margins, Steve, we think, will be at 15%-20%, Nick's at sort of 16% margins. You can see we are targeting investments to where we see that they'll be accretive to those. I'll probably let the guys bring those to life further a bit later.
Morning, team. Got a couple of questions. First, the elephant in the room on plasterboard. With your number of pallets that you're getting back as a percentage of what you're sending out, you should have been able to work out what volumes, monthly volumes sitting in trade of plasterboard. Is that now gonna be a problem in terms of shortage of demand coming up in the near future? Second on that one, have you put up prices ahead of inflation on plasterboard since the uptick, and is that gonna be a governmental issue? What does your plasterboard standard pricing look like relative to Australian standard pricing? Can we deal with that first?
Okay. There's a few things there. So if I talk about plasterboard pallets and what's in the market and what's possibly stockpiled, it's probably about 2 million square meters. That's just based on the number of pallets. I mean, it's part of the problem, Grant, not the whole problem. I do expect that to unwind. I think the other thing you're seeing, obviously, is us responding with volume. The merchants are actually bringing some volume in, and the task force obviously has its 20 containers coming as well. I'll leave that alone. Therefore, what I expect is the reason I'm sort of saying, look, this will get back into equilibrium September, October. I'm not sure when. What we.
We've seen it with every building product, 'cause what occurred is through the building cycle through this last financial year, first it was structural timber, then it ended up being insulation. You know, and that then caused the trip over into plasterboard because everyone thought, "Gee, I better grab that as well." What we've seen is it gets shorted for a while, people buy, and then it sort of we have to go into allocations, it calms it down, and then it actually sorts itself out. I'd expect. That's why I'm sort of calling, I think it'll be in equilibrium around then. Yeah, probably there'll be a bit of subdued volumes after that as people work through some of that stockpile. By virtue of it, we're sort of on average for the year, we'll still sell the same volume.
It's just, it gets front-loaded. I don't see any concerns there. In terms of price, I think I've got all your questions. Over the last two years, we've put about 10% price in on plasterboard, about 5%. We've held our costs. There's probably another one to come into the future, but for various reasons, we've sort of been a bit cautious about doing that today. I'm not worried about when we do that. We'll have to do something just 'cause costs are going up through this year. We've just got to get the timing right for obvious reasons. Yeah.
Relative to Australia pricing?
I'll get Hamish to talk to that 'cause I'm just not sure.
All right. My second question, and final one. Can you please connect the slide 15 where you talk about margins on Building products, resi, concrete in the upper quartile distribution almost getting there. That's on 2H margins of 9.5%. You're saying mid-cycle, 9%-10%, similar, and volumes down 15%. How do you reconcile that it's similar?
Firstly, the 9.5% is the Fletcher Building average, so it's a blend of all the businesses. When you then look at, you know, what the margins that building products are making, it's circa 13%-14%, Nick around 15%. Steve's well above that because we've enjoyed the benefit of the sudden price inflation of housing, which got him up to 27% for the first half. When you look at what those businesses would do around the world, and you look at top quartile, that's what gets those businesses in. It's not the Fletcher Building blend. When you look at distribution, it's running around 8%. If you look at the best in class, they're in the 10, 11, 12.
That's why you're seeing distribution just a bit shy of what a Reece might make or a Screwfix might make over in the UK and as we look around the world. It's gotta be by, you know, that's not the same margin for every business. It's what we see as best in class in that sector. You know, construction, I've said a lot, is 3%-5% is pretty good. If we get in that it's a different target for each business, and we're benchmarking against that. When we blend it all together, that's where we get the Fletcher Building margin, which is a blend of all that revenue, and that's why we say, look, we're circa 9.5%-10% now. That's what we think. If we keep moving those with the plans we've got, we should get another 100-200 basis points at the average level out of Fletcher Building.
Morning, everyone. It's Daniel Kang from CLSA. Question for Bevan, if I can, on growth CapEx. Just wondered if you can just provide some color in terms of timing of that NZD 500 million, and also the returns that you're expecting, overall for that NZD 500 million.
Yeah. Be broadly pretty evenly spread across the next three years, probably slightly more weighted to FY 2023. We've got a couple of big projects we're kicking into next year. As we've said, returns, Daniel, 15% at mid-cycle is what the business cases have been done on. We are targeting to do a bit better than that, but we're committing to 15% at mid-cycle.
Ross, Andrew Scott, Morgan Stanley. Just, you're looking to increase the lot or the houses for Steve's business up to 1,400 at a time while, you know, demand will moderate. That makes you an increasing percentage of the market overall. Everything we're seeing at the moment, the channel conflict out there is kind of real. At what point do you get uncomfortable that your building products, PlaceMakers, et cetera, customers are gonna begin to object to you becoming a bigger part of that housing market?
Even at the end of that runway, we're not more than 10%. You know, I'm quite comfortable. We get a lot of feedback. Most of the conversations have been with GJ Gardner, and Grant and the team are very comfortable with what we're doing. We've got a different product offering. You know, we've got completed houses. You come in and you design your house and build it. I'm very comfortable and confident we don't have that issue in front of us.
Steve's got a fair bit in his slide pack to talk about how he's thinking about, you know, the capital that's going in there and the dimensions of it and how the product's positioning. I'm not trying to flick the. I'd really like you to explore that a bit with Steve when he's up here doing his Q&A, 'cause he'll give you a more specific answer after the presentation he does.
Good morning, Marcus Curley from UBS. Just wondered if you could talk a little bit to the differences between the guidance for FY 2023. We say, you know, NZD 100 million +, and the margin guidance medium term of 10.5%-11.5%. If you look at the bottom end of that and assume that applies to next year, you know, you're talking about, you know, NZD 950 million of EBIT, you know, not, you know, NZD 840 million. Could you just talk a little bit about, you know, what the plus means, you know, on the NZD 100 million?
I mean, more than Marcus. You've got two targets there. The 100-200 basis points is a medium-term target. What we're trying to do is progress towards that over call it the next three or four years, and we think we'll make a good step towards that in FY 2023. We think, you know, NZD 100 million is a decent target for next year. The plus means we're trying to do better than that, but we're committing to NZD 100 million. Just importantly, that is with those assumptions that we've laid out. As we sit here today, we think the market volumes are gonna remain robust, but that is probably your key variable in the FY 2023 number.
Just, you know, Yeah, that same slide, you know, mid-cycle, you know, 9-10, you know, and your volumes, let's say, down 15%-20%. You know, the reduction in margin is about 150 basis points. You know, that seems, you know, a good outcome if your volumes are down 15%-20%. Just wondered if you could talk to, you know, how you think you're gonna protect margins, you know, as volumes fall.
Sure. I'd just emphasize the overall mid-cycle is 10%-15% below current, with residential being 15%-20% below Marcus, an important point there. It is all about good management of price, good management of cost, and investing in accretive areas. We've built what Ross and I would describe as a platform of decent performance. We've got confidence in how the businesses are delivering in that kinda core operational area, and we've seen them able to deliver those growth projects as well. It'll be the combination of those three things, Marcus, that we think will drive the uplift.
Morning, Ross and Bevan, Keith Chau from MST. Just want to follow up on Grant's.
Oh, there you are. You're just behind the center.
No, I just want to follow up on Grant's question on price increases for plasterboard versus cost. Given there's a pricing investigation in New Zealand again, seems like a very sensitive topic, particularly with the media witch hunt going on in plasterboard at the moment. Again, is that gonna be a problem? That needs to be resolved from a pricing versus cost perspective for plasterboard?
Look, well, first of all, let's start with plasterboard. I'm quite comfortable with it and so 'cause we've actually only taken 10% over two years. You know, we've done no better than what I call, and we've been very thoughtful about it. We have taken no more price than what our cost increases are, and that's basically what's driving it. Margins haven't moved. I mean, in the end of the day, I think it's a very reasonable thing to be able to defend if that's what you're doing. If I then talk about our overall building products, 'cause it's been the same philosophy. We've got a very little bit of what I call gross margin expansion, but fundamentally, we've only taken, when you look on average, 5%-7% in price across that whole thing.
We're not running any different to inflation. There's variability in that because different things have had to go up more 'cause of input prices and stuff. In the round, if I look at the way we've conducted ourselves through what's been an inflationary market, we're covering inflation, but we're not gouging on the way through. We've got a little bit, but not a lot. I think I can lean to that very comfortably, you know, with whomever wants to talk to me about it, 'cause that's the reality. What you've seen go up, though, I think where it gets noisy, is what trades and builders are offering to clients, as they've got very busy and capacity's been constrained, can be quite different. You know, so don't confuse what we're doing with our building products pricing with what's actually happening in the market.
I think there's two different things going on there.
Okay. Thank you. Second question, and you'll have to pardon my ignorance here. There's a point in the slide pack which talks about 10 trademark royalty-free licenses to allow others to import boards. Can you just give us an explanation of what that actually means?
Yeah. The very simple thing is what we have is in our boards, there's different boards. Some are used for fire, some for moisture, some standard, some go in our bracing system. What we've developed is just a color code so that when inspectors come out, they can just look at those colors and they know that the right board's being used for that. It goes to just ease of builders using it and trades using it, and inspectors being able to confirm the right board's in the right place. You know, there's nothing more than that. What we've just done is we've got a color palette, which we've registered as our color palette because.
What the issue is that people are looking for a little bit of help to get licensed to use our colors so they can use the same color palette for the same type of board. Because of the particular issue, we've said, "Yep, we're happy to do that until Tauriko actually opens," just to help the industry and our customers, which are the merchants predominantly, to actually do that. We've said to the merchants, and we've given 10 licenses. They've been importing it to actually, for those companies to use our color palette to use the same identification.
We've been very happy to do that, and we've just sort of said, "If you use our palette, we don't take responsibility that if it's coming from some of these markets, that the red color's on the right board." Because I think the risk is that won't get controlled well, and therefore you'll have the wrong board in the wrong place because someone will have opportunistically color-coded it, you know, incorrectly. We're having nothing to do with that. Then if companies then wanna have a longer lasting position in New Zealand, then they can actually get their own color palette. There's no. You know, it's simple as that. Just change it, change the colors. It just gives them time to do that as well. I think it's very been very, leaning into the problem and working with our merchant customers. We're out of time. Maybe one more question.
Yes, we are. We are just going to go quickly.
Oh, sorry.
To the web so that our friends online can participate. We have two questions from the web, the first from Peter Wilson. 9%, 9%-10% EBIT margin through the cycle. Does this mean an average of 9%-10% or a minimum of 9%-10% in any one year? Why is this lower than the prior FY 2023 target of around 10%? Thank you.
Sounds like one for you, Bevan.
Good to have you online, Peter. Well, at the top end of that range, we're in line with the target, so I think, you know, that you've got consistency there. It means that at mid-cycle levels of activity or volume, when we hit those, we would expect to be between 9%-10%. It is as simple as it needs to be. Second question's from Oliver Mander from the New Zealand Shareholders' Association. To what extent are you concerned about the recent political involvement surrounding plasterboard and the potential impact on the future operating model?
Firstly, we're very focused in a plasterboard sense of actually focusing on our customers and suppliers. All of our efforts are going into working the factories 24/7, getting the extra volumes in either through our own imports or extra capacity of our plants, and then working with our merchants to help them do that. That's where our efforts are going. You know, we haven't been involved in the task force. We haven't spoken to Megan Woods, so we're not participating in that. We're happy to help the government if they wish, but our focus is all around just getting through this demand surge. As I said, I think we'll be back to equilibrium in the next 2-3 months.
I think, Ross, we're gonna wrap it up there.
Right.
There will be more opportunities to ask questions through the divisional presentations and of course, through the course of the day. The first of those divisional presentations, topically enough, is Hamish McBeath, Building Products. Perfect. I think we're ready.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Hamish McBeath, the Chief Executive of the Building Products division. We'll just start off with a quick snapshot of the Building Products division. We view this in three parts. We talk about products, pipe, and steel. Products contains a number of well-known iconic brands you'll be familiar with, such as Gyprock, Laminex, and Pink Batts. In this part, we have market-leading products such as plasterboard, glass wool, and an extensive range of decorative surfaces and panels. Pipes contains Humes and Iplex. At Humes, we manufacture concrete pipes and precast concrete products.
Iplex is a manufacturer of extruded plastic products and provides a wide product offering across a broad range of sectors. Iplex also has a mobile extrusion capability. Steel is a portfolio of businesses that comes under the Fletcher Steel umbrella. These include wire products, Dimond Structural, and our largest steel business, Easysteel. We also have roofing and reinforcing assets. Through FY 2022, we have held on to our gains from the cost base resets in the prior year, coupled with good pricing disciplines.
New product growth and a steady pipeline of automation has seen our EBIT margin improve to 13.6% in the second half. The medium term demand forecast gives us strong confidence we continue to grow margins to 14%, and we believe that circa 14% level is sustainable into the future. Return on funds has eased due to normalization on inventory levels and further investment in resilient stock. Return on funds will continue to ease over the next few years as our capital investments materialize to the balance sheet, but we should settle in that 16%-17% range. All business units are driving improvements in customer service and engagement. It's been pleasing to see us continue to improve our customer engagement in a difficult supply period.
Further to Ross's earlier comments, I just want to reiterate that we are deeply focused on working through plasterboard supply demands and are working closely with our merchant customers to find different ways to get the board to those smaller builders in those emergency need areas. We're also doing targeted digital investments and are delivering improved customer intimacy, and we will continue to invest in this space. Laminex has been our lead business in e-commerce, but Humes and Dimond are next to develop offers, and that will start to flow through this coming year. Staff engagement has slightly improved through what has been a challenging period for all our teams, and we're very aware of the stresses our people have been over, under in the last 12 and 24 months have put on our people.
Carbon emissions are slightly up as a result of the higher volumes. A number of our larger reduction projects begin to come online in the next financial year with our Pacific Coilcoaters ovens and our new Winstone Wallboards plants delivering significant reductions to the current processes. Those on my tours this afternoon will see an example of the ovens. Our insulation business is trading well. The glass wool plant is running at full capacity currently, and we've been able to make small efficiency gains in the past year to capture more volume. We have also recently announced the merger of our two insulation business, so Tasman Insulation and Forman, into one insulation solutions business called Comfortech, and you'll see that name a lot more in the future as we start to roll it out more broadly.
This new combination will allow us to offer a much broader insulation offering to our customers, and already we're getting good feedback. It's just easier to deal with one. Switching to growth, the new code changes are likely to double glass wool insulation volumes over time, and we will commission a new line to meet these. The new line will be the absolute latest in glass wool manufacturing technology, which produces an exceptional quality batt, and we also deliver a number of sustainability benefits also. By building the new line on the existing site, the current timeline indicates we can complete this project inside two years.
To bridge the volume demand between the new code launch and when our new plant commissions, we're in the final stage of discussions for additional supply from the US with our technical partner to boost available volumes in New Zealand. Laminex New Zealand is delivering good organic growth with a regular product range refreshes and introduction of new products driving higher sales and better margins. We're seeing a solid shift to e-commerce and over 30% of our revenue is now transacted this way. As previously signaled, we've been working through planning for a significant plant upgrade of our existing Taupō particleboard manufacturing site. We are now in the final stages of vendor selection and have commenced consenting applications.
We see good growth in wood fiber panels, and this new hybrid plant will allow us a lot of flexibility to grow within our existing panel offers and also give us the ability to broaden the in-use markets. Wood fiber out insulation is an example of a possible new adjacency for us. We have always had export demand on this plant for existing products which haven't had the capacity. With the new plant, we'll be able to convert what has previously been ad hoc sales into more regular export shipments as well. This is approximately a NZD 230 million investment and will deliver circa NZD 20 million in additional mid-cycle earnings from FY 2027. Just noting we should be commissioning the plant about FY 2026, but it'll probably only be a partial year as we work through for that.
The NZD 20 million is a full year from 2027 on. Oops, she hasn't changed it yet. I've got the same problem Ross got. Here we go. Steel. Steel markets have been very volatile this year with heavily disrupted and tight supply coupled with significant and rapid price escalation. Our teams have responded well to this, and we've been able to maintain competitive service levels. Strong price and product mix focus has improved distribution margins. Investments in steel plate processing has increased capacity and capability allowing for further growth in that space. CSP is in the final stages of a new barrier development which will enable international IP license opportunities. Stage one of our infrared oven conversion at PCC has successfully been completed. One smaller process oven is now fully operational.
The two main ovens will convert in December and January, and this will remove the use of gas within our oven processes, delivering a significant 60% reduction in emissions and a number of operational efficiencies. This year, we've also taken the opportunity to purchase a site next to our Humes facility in Papakura. With the surplus land freed up for our recent Humes upgrade, we now have enough land to facilitate the construction of a world-class steel distribution center. This site will deliver a number of cost and efficiency benefits, and include a big lift in our distribution capacity, which has been an issue for some time. We gain access to the site gradually over the next 24 months, and the purlin manufacturing facility will be completed first, and the balance of site will likely be completed by the end of FY 2025.
On Humes' performance is continuing to improve year-over-year, and I'm pleased to say we have completed our manufacturing consolidation down to 2 pipe locations and 3 precast locations. The Papakura plant upgrade is nearing completion and is on track to be fully commissioned by the end of August this year. This upgrade has automated a number of our existing manufacturing capability and added an additional automated pipe-making process. Once commissioned, our pipe-making capacity will be lifted by around 30%, and we will see a number of efficiency gains and quality improvements. The new processes will also allow for an expanded range and more flexible concrete mix options to take advantage of the increasing range of carbon-reduced concrete mixes becoming available.
From a sales branch network perspective, we have continued to modernize physical branches and have commenced investment in digital solutions program, which will bring increased ability to connect with customers and make us easier to do business with. Two new sales branches opened in FY 2022 and are going well, and a further two branches will open in FY 2023. In closing, the Building Products division is well-positioned for further top-line growth, and we are confident in our plans for margin growth to circa 14%. We maintain a strong focus on modern automated manufacturing plants to continue to drive operational efficiency, and our investment program supports this. We refreshed our new product development focus around two years ago, and we're starting to see the benefits that's coming through. A key focus has been to take our capability and broaden our addressable market.
As mentioned earlier, we will see our return on funds reduce slowly over the coming years as our new investments materialize to the balance sheet, but this should settle at a very healthy 16%-17% range. That completes my presentation, so open to questions. I can probably start off with Grant's one on the. I'm not quite sure, but I can answer in two ways for the Australian. We're normally about. Once again, I talk wholesale. That is an element that, as Ross talked to, it's a bit hard to answer from a wholesale level. We're normally about 15% more expensive than wholesale in Australia as you go through.
We stand behind that on the basis that the board we put out has a number of better qualities. For example, we use less plaster when you install our board than you do our Australian competitors. And also, our delivery service and those elements are significantly superior. So our overall cost of installation is generally cheaper. If you were alluding to what is the price of Australian plaster boards in New Zealand relative to ours at the moment, it's probably at about a 30% premium, is what we've been told by the movers. So Australian wall coming in here now versus our wholesale price. So once again, we're well positioned as we go through from there.
Hi, Hamish. Stephen Hudson from Macquarie. Just on the new plant, how quickly do you think you'll be able to fill that extra 10 million square meters of capacity? Just noting that sort of wallboard penetration in New Zealand seems to have been declining for a number of years. Is there an untapped potential there?
Yeah, absolutely. Bit hard to know at the moment. Probably fill it straight away if the current situation continues on, but we never plan to fill it up as such on opening. What we have planned to do is we're in it now. We see significant growth in those other more external cladding products like Weatherline and Barrierline. At the moment, we can sell as much as we make of those products, and the demand is significant. We can see a lot of growth in that space. Tauriko opening, our plan was always to unleash the capacity to service that particular market. We're also working on some other boards.
There's been a lot of progress in gypsum mixes globally that we've been tapping into from an IP perspective. I won't get bogged down in too much of the technical detail, but we'll be able to produce products on the new plant. Within about a year or so we need to run it and develop it. That will definitely take on some of the fiber cement market that currently exists as well. We've got quite good plans for that once we get through this current demand situation.
Marcus Curley here.
Hi, Marcus.
Could you talk about whether you think, you know, there's any permanent damage to the reputation of the business with the GIB issues, you know, with your customers, and how you're managing that?
Yeah. We're in very close conversation with our customers and our customers' customers. Obviously, we sell to the merchants, but we're very closely connected to the builders in particular. GIB, we pride ourselves on that, and we've won every building suppliers award since 2004. The customer is at our heart. We think we will take a hit as we come through this, but we back our service offer and we will support that. I'm pretty confident we'll get that back fairly quickly. Our offer that we have into the market, no one has ever been able to replicate. The way we service the industry is to reduce their overall cost.
Overall cost of install, overall cost of supply. The fact that we deliver, break it into the rooms next day in normal circumstances, as we go through, we take all that process out of them. We give them all the help in terms of knowing which color boards and all those sort of elements to use in the right place. I'm pretty confident that once we get through this, supply normalizes that, yes, we may have taken a hit on share for a period, but with our new asset coming online, we're gonna be incredibly competitive. You wrap that around our previous award-winning supply options. We've got a few things in the tray I'm not gonna talk about today as well. I'm pretty confident we'll get that share back.
Hamish, are there any material operating costs?
Sorry, just there's a bit blind at the back, sorry.
Are there any material?
It's better.
Operating cost uplifts associated with that new volume and the upgrades to the plants? How will you manage that if volumes don't transpire as you expect?
Yeah. All our modeling is always on mid-cycle for those investments. They are far more efficient, even at mid-cycle, than our existing plants. We've got a lot of our movements here are upgrading assets to the 1960s. Yes, we've done a lot of things to them over the years, but these modern new plants that come in are just significantly more efficient than our, even our modernized older plants. At mid-cycle, we're more efficient. You know, if volume was to drop from now, we would still be more efficient than we with the existing plants. But they do offer significant upside in those higher demand areas. All our work we've done has been on mid-cycle.
If this demand carried through, these new investments would be significantly outperforming what we've sort of made the investment decisions on. Just to give you a flavor of that, the new installation line that we're looking at the moment, we have world-class number of operators on our plant. We have about 8. The new plant will operate with 4. Just to give you a context on double the volume. What happens, actually, in most of our new plants, you see a significant drop in your sort of fixed manufacturing operators and a big shift to more variable distribution because you're.
The good thing is you can drop the variable distribution as volume comes off, and you're sitting with a much lower. Like I call them fixed in terms of your manufacturing operator type scenario. That, it's quite material as you move through these in terms of the new plants. Much greater flexibility in terms of product changes and all those elements.
Hi, Hamish. This is Aishwarya Viswanathan from Bank of America. Very quick question on your focus on digital. Two parts of the question. I was talking to one of your teammates downstairs, and he mentioned that in New Zealand, there's sort of a pushback by the customers to embrace digital, especially say you compare with countries like the UK. Just going forward, do you think there's an incremental opportunity to move into digital and hence increase margins? There's just a second part related with to that is your competition also equally focused on digital investments and there? Thank you.
Yeah. It depends on where you're talking in the market as well. I think, 'cause I'm more B2B and you take someone like Bruce, he can probably talk more about the B2C, and I think there has been a bit of pushback in some of the older builders in the B2C in terms of adapting those sort of changes. In terms of B2B, it's a slower journey than we wanted, which is primarily for my business. This is why we just started with one, with Laminex and really have sort of doubled down on that one to sort of learn as we've gone through in terms of how do you deal with those smaller B2B businesses and what are they looking for.
We've now finished it, and I think I talked before. Yeah, we're up to well over 30% now. Actually, I ran the numbers this morning for digital sales for Laminex, which has given us the confidence on where to target the next businesses. Humes and Roofing are more logical in terms of wanting and us gaining benefit from digital solutions. Roofing, for example, we'll start to get into the automated flashing. It's a pain point. Flashing manufacturer decisions are made 4:00 P.M. today, and they want it 7:00 A.M. tomorrow morning. Anyway, at the moment, we get a lot of hand-drawn stuff faxed. I mean, there's still a fax machine in some places, or emailed or a photo taken in.
That introduces inaccuracies, errors, all those sort of things. It's a very key space where we think we will get a lot of digital benefit from. It is a slow journey. Look, I'll be honest, it has taken much longer than we expected, and a lot of that is really just getting the customers convinced there's a benefit for them, too. Traditionally, once you get them on board and they see it, they do come, and then they start to talk, and then you go get momentum. It's just a slow start, I have to admit. Yeah. Bruce can probably cover off a bit more on the thing. I think it was online ones.
We have one question online from Peter Wilson. What is the estimated CapEx for the new insulation production line? Will it triple existing line? What is the expectation regarding FBU volume growth?
I should have said that actually. Yeah, it's about NZD 150 million. We're just finalizing now as we go through that. It's really we know the plant costs. They're around 100 or 110 of that. The rest is what modifications we have to make to the buildings to fit it on that site. Those going on tour today will see what we're doing. You would have seen from that thing. Look, we expect volumes to double as we go through, and that's just from the changes from H1 to date.
If they go ahead and change the wall elements of the insulation and the core, which we do think they will do in the next year or two, that will add further demand on glass wool and will also introduce more wall solutions, which is why I referred to the Outsulation for the fibrewood panel, which is quite common in Europe, where you have a real thin panel that goes across the outside, which means you don't have to increase the wall frame, and you can get away with your glass wool. It's a sort of a combination of those sort of elements that we're working through to come through. We're well-placed. Volumes should double, and our new plant will have the capacity and the fantastic product that comes off it, we think we'll be able to take a bit of share.
We expect our insulation earnings to at least double, in simple terms. I think that's it. I'm getting nasty red flashes down here. With that, I'll hand over to Bruce McEwen from Distribution, and obviously around today, and I'm on the tours this afternoon if anyone needs to ask me. Thank you.
All right. Morning, everyone, and welcome. Nice to be here in person for a change and not staring down a small screen at you. My name's Bruce McEwen, and I'm gonna spend the next 20 minutes talking about the Distribution division. Like Hamish, I'll leave a chunk of time at the end for questions, so hopefully can answer those and give you a little bit of flavor about where we are, who we are, and where we're going. First up, a quick reminder about the Distribution division. It's comprised of the PlaceMakers branch network, the Mico branch network, and our manufacturing or frame and truss plants. Strong, respective brands delivering market-leading solutions into the market.
We're the leading plumbing and building supplies merchant in the New Zealand market, and our geographic reach has us really well placed to deal with the densification we're seeing in the metro markets here in Auckland and some of the other metros around New Zealand, as well as a good diverse split across the regional or more outside of metro, if you like, around New Zealand. That really what it does is it balances our earnings and risk profiles. Those markets don't always move in the same direction. Over the last 12 months, we've worked really hard with COVID and disruptions. Obviously, the effect it has on our business with closures, et cetera, has been quite significant. We're working very hard with that and, of course, the resultant supply chain disruptions that everyone talks about.
However, what we've continued to do is to make sure that we've continued to focus on investing in the future of the business and also making sure we can service our customer needs as best as possible every day. We've also continued to focus on harnessing what digital and automation technologies can bring to the business. Really our aim is ultimately to create an integrated, digitized, end-to-end supply chain. That's the future we see for Distribution, and ultimately sets the business up for a strong and bright future. Despite the challenge of the last 12 months, our operating disciplines and improved operational performance is gonna see us deliver a strong result for FY22. We'll deliver an EBIT result of around NZD 135 million, and then you'll see our margins expanding.
In the second half, you'll see margins there that are forecast to be 8.7% in the second half. We operate in a highly competitive market. We've got plenty of competitors out there in the merchant space, but our focus has been on generating both sustainable and profitable volume growth, choosing very carefully about where we play and how we play in the market through the solid operating disciplines. In addition, our return on funds or our ROFE, you'll see, has continued to grow up over the 50% mark now, as we really think very carefully about where we deploy capital and how we manage those key elements of working capital usage in our business.
From a non-financial perspective, very pleasing in a period of disruption that we've made and continue to make really solid progress on safety in our business. It's a critical number one value of our business. We've been now four years serious injury-free across our 140 sites in New Zealand. Every year of those last four years, we've continued to make improvements in our TRIFR ratings to the point we're now half of our industry peers, which we're very proud of. With the supply challenge we've seen in the disruptive market, we're very clear on the opportunities we have to lift our customer NPS scores. Certainly, we've seen as we've rolled through, and Ross talked a little bit about this morning, for the last 12-18 months, we've had disruptions in pretty much all categories.
We've seen those demand spikes really exceed supply, and we've had to work through those challenges about where we source alternative products and how we help our customers essentially get to the other side of those challenges. Be it shipping constraints, product availability, and the need for them to continue to meet their deadlines and their customer needs. While the strong performance is partly due to the good operating leverage we're getting, it is a busy market, no doubt, but we're really driving and making sure we get that leverage in a sustainable way. We're doing that through a number of things. First, I've heard the question already, but very disciplined pricing methodologies and making sure that we continue to eat or absorb that cost inflation.
We're investing in our sales capability, making sure that we're very focused on which segments in the market we want to win on and also how we win. We've also worked really hard over the last couple of years around embedding cost reductions into our operating structures of our business, making sure that the business can perform in all market conditions and that we can scale up or down. As the market continues to move and volumes move, we need to make sure that we more variabilize our cost base. The Distribution division is set as 140 points of presence. We've got from Kaitaia in the far north all the way to Invercargill in the deep south. We're deeply embedded in those local communities.
We're very proud of the role and the position that we play in those communities that we operate in. In the coming months, we plan to strengthen that regional reach in New Zealand with the acquisition of the Tumu business. Now, that will add six branches to our operation down the east coast of the North Island, New Zealand, as well as a frame and truss plant. It'll be accretive from day one. We're just in the process at the moment, working through that, the review and approval process with the Commerce Commission, and we expect to get clearance for that in the first half of the new financial year. We've also continued to improve our existing branch network, refurbishing existing branches or putting new branches in place where we see opportunities for growth.
Where we're seeing growth corridors, not just through the peak of the market but through the cycle, and where we see ongoing development, we wanna make sure that we've got network reach into those locations. We've also continued to roll out the PlaceMakers Hub model. You would have heard for those who were involved last year about how we're bringing PlaceMakers branches together and operate them as a hub to drive greater consistency of experience for customers, consistent pricing examples, and also how do we leverage scale. How do you bring those businesses together to really drive scale and efficiency benefits? Within our network, we also have the frame and truss manufacturing business. It's not a part of the business we've talked about a lot in the past.
We have 8 plants across New Zealand, placed from Whangārei down to Dunedin, and those plants produce around 8,000 prefabricated house lots each year. They're really a key conduit to getting the balance of house. A lot of focus we have in distribution is about getting share of wallet or balance of house, making sure we lead with particular products to pick up the remainder. Frame and Truss also provides us with really good insight about customer activity because of the planning nature in which you have to undertake to make that product. What we can see is that the market's busy at the moment, but we're booked out six or eight months. Normally, if we go back to pre-COVID times, we'd be booked out six or eight weeks.
It really just goes to signify how much forward activity we see in the market, and it's real orders that we're talking about rather than forecasts from economists. Over the next couple of years, we're gonna drive a significant automation project through our framing plants, really to drive a paradigm shift in how these operate. The modernization is really important because it drives a number of things. One, it will give us additional capacity, but that capacity is variabilized, enables us to scale as the market moves. It'll be safer, improve quality from a tolerance perspective, and ultimately enable us with automation and new equipment to do and introduce products we don't currently have in the New Zealand market. It's certainly a big change and exciting change for our Frame and Truss business. Now, we've been on the digital journey for probably three years now.
Many of you heard me talk before. I get quite excited about digital. Really, we're very focused on the opportunities that digital offers for a distribution business. In our normal day-to-day lives, we all see it in things like supermarkets, et cetera. You're starting to see that also come into play into the B2B world. Really what it does for us is it enhances our geographic reach. For us, our aim is to create an unmatched digital experience in the New Zealand trade distribution. While the trade industry in New Zealand is pretty analog, you know, we still have customers who will walk in with their orders written on the back of a hand or a piece of GIB, although they probably don't do it on GIB anymore, it's too valuable. We're seeing that will change.
What we've seen from our looking overseas is that that experience will change. When it does start to change, it accelerates. We're starting to see that through our business as well. What we're doing is we're actively taking innovation that we find offshore and using it to disrupt ourselves. This takes us from being a physical analog business with 140 locations open from 6:00 A.M. till 6:00 P.M. to essentially an always on omni-channel experience. Always open and open anywhere, when you want, how you want, through whatever device.
Hopefully, some of you had the chance to see some of the things this morning downstairs, but it's a small sliver of what we're doing around how we're trying to bring a different experience to our customers using digital, using technology, all designed to ease the customer's pain point and make it easier for them to do business and ultimately easier for them to do business with us. We've continued to drive customer adoption. You can see up on the slide there, we've now got around 60% of our trade customers are registered on the tool. Being registered on the tool and using it proficiently, two different things, and it talks a little bit to the point that Hamish was talking about, how do we drive adoption?
What you can see is year to date, we're well over NZD 100 million of sales, and we're now at 7% of our total sales are through digital. If you recall this time last year, I said we'd just hit 2% a month. We've had a five-fold increase inside 12 months. It is happening, and it's starting to accelerate as we've seen with our contemporaries offshore. Our focus, I don't wanna leave you with the impression it's all about dollars and all about how many clicks we get. Our focus is about how we interact with our customers and how we get ourselves into their ecosystem, into their world. That's where things like delivery notifications, really, really important for us, whereby a customer can track their delivery.
They can look on their phone, see what their order is, see what products inside it, and they can actually see it coming down the road, a bit like you'd watch your Uber coming to you. Why is that important? Most of our customers work on multiple sites, and we have a significant volume of deliveries where we get turned back 'cause no one's there. It drives efficiency for the customer, it drives efficiency for us. That's the type of thing we're ultimately looking to do so that essentially we can live in our customer's world, which is primarily on their phone.
Excitingly at Mico, we're about to roll out all the same or similar types of capability for our plumbers, providing them with a whole new level of convenience and experience that they don't receive in the market currently. As we've built our digital customers, not surprisingly, we're starting to collect a lot of data about our customers. We're starting to collect a lot of data about how they behave and what their pricing habits are, what their purchase habits are, sorry. We're really seeing the rich opportunities that that presents for us. Accordingly, we've created a data analytics team, and that team has built the technology to now mine what is a lot of data across a business of our size and really starting to pull out the insights to understand what drives customer behavior.
It's enabling us to move from what I'd call a shotgun or one to many type communication with our customers. Ultimately, will enable us to get to personalization. We'll know who the customer is, what their purchase habits are, and how we can communicate with them. It also enables us to target things like lapsed customers, so somebody who hasn't spent with us for the last two or three weeks or two or three months. Or cross-category promotions, where a customer buys one category and not another. All data we're collecting enabling us to get inside their habits, enabling us to increase that share of wallet. Having done that, we're now getting quite excited about what's possible with AI or artificial intelligence and ultimately, how can we bring external information to start to serve up to our customers to help them. Imagine serving up advanced weather information.
Why is that important? Well, if you're getting delivery of a weather-sensitive product, knowing where that product is going, what the weather's gonna do, and how you can adjust that, all fed automatically without human interaction. Things like predictive analytics. Next stage of build. You've bought this, we know what you're gonna need next. If you buy timber for a deck, guess what? You'll need nails or screws. Price optimization based on customer behavior. You move from that static price to ultimately dynamic pricing, and that's the type of thing we're starting to see, we're about to do in the next 12 months with AI. It's pretty exciting. All designed around maximizing the customer experience and maximizing our share of wallet.
Look, in summary, the distribution division will deliver a strong financial result this year with improving EBIT returns, improving EBIT margin, and an improving and strong ROFE. The strong performance is partly due to a busy market, but we're getting so good operating leverage. Our focus is not about what we achieve in this year; we're very much focused on next year and beyond. How do we drive improved and sustainable performance? How do we do that through disciplined pricing methodology, and how do we continue to take the work we've done, enhance it further to make sure that we can continue to beat cost inflation, which we don't see abating quickly. We'll continue to invest in our customer efficiency programs, and you'll see our digital development take another whole step in the next 12 months.
The key for us is the key strategic initiatives to differentiate us and to grow margins and grow share are now well in place, and we're consistently delivering on those projects. With the ongoing focus on innovation for the benefit of our customers, we're confident that we'll take 0.5%-1% market share over market growth every year consistently. As we look forward, we're confident our EBIT margin expansion, as we differentiate ourselves from the competition, enable us to deliver services that others aren't, we continue to grow margins. With that, I'm conscious of time, I'll wind us up there and open us up for any questions that you might have.
Hi, Bruce. First question. If we spoke two and a half years ago, you were talking about a very competitive industry. We had COVID, and now you're talking about margin expansion again. Do you not see the risk of us going back to that heavy competitiveness as soon as this glut has ended?
I don't think the competitors have left us, Grant. The very competitive industry we had two and a half years ago is just as competitive through COVID and will be just as competitive on the other side. When I talk about sustainable price and sustainable things that we're doing, that's what's driving our EBIT margin expansion. We still have, hard to believe, but in a volume-constrained market, we still have price pressure and competitive pressure pricing every day of the week. That competitive tension that we talked about two and a half years ago has not abated at all.
Thanks. Just back onto Jim.
Excellent. Can't wait.
Do you get any differential treatment from Hamish here, for plasterboard relative to competitors?
Oh, I wish I did.
If you can answer in the same question, does Carters give their own distribution any advantages when we had a wood shortage?
To answer your first question, no. Hamish and the wood products team play what I'd call a very flat Earth approach, that's been tested by the Commerce Commission. I'm sure it'll be tested again by the residential building supplies market study. I would love that to be the case. It's not, unfortunately. Does Carter Holt Harvey wood products give Carters an advantage? I don't know. We obviously talk about that as a customer of Carter Holt. I don't know the answer to that, Grant.
Didn't they just come out in the press a few months back saying that they weren't gonna be giving anybody else, except for their own distribution, any product?
No, that's not correct. They basically are supplying ourselves and the distribution division as the primary customers, is what they said then.
Thanks.
Rohan from Forsyth Barr. Hi, Bruce McEwen. Just three questions. First one on Tumu. The Commerce Commission's draft statement of issues was a bit mixed. What gives you confidence you're gonna get over the line? And two, would you organically into those markets on their own? Second question. Are there any holes in your network, other than this one, that you're kind of looking to fill? And then third one's probably more for Ross and co. You know, given the Commerce Commission's tone of its first statement of issues, and the increased regulatory focus, you know, are acquisitions actually a viable way of building out adjacencies in New Zealand?
Yep. I guess that answers kind of three questions in there. The statement of issues, it's 26 pages long. If you've ever read a statement of issues from the Commerce Commission before, they're not exactly enlightening or exciting documents. They're generally written in the negative. When we look at the core issues that they have raised in those 26 pages, they're primarily around concerns around degradation of service, and degradation of competition. Look, we're very confident in our submission and the information that we'll provide them in this next round of being able to satisfy their concerns there. I think the other piece to put against that is that PlaceMakers has a very small presence on the East Coast of the North Island, so nothing in Gisborne, nothing in Dannevirke, very small in the Hawke's Bay, very small in Masterton.
There's very little overlap, which is why we get confidence in that regard. Do we have holes in the network? Look, this is probably our main hole, which is why that acquisition makes good sense. Are there holes into the future? Yes. When we look at where development is going and where we're likely to go into the future with that, we can see where there will be opportunities, just not yet. What we look to do is make sure we place a network hole, if you like. We look for where it's gonna be, and we look to be there as it starts to open up.
No point being there when no one else is. Are there holes currently other than the Tumu side? Not really. Will there be in the future? Yes, because of development. Your last question, are acquisitions in my space? I'll let Ross answer that later. For the wider Fletcher Building, but in my space, absolutely. Absolutely think they can be done.
Morning, Bruce. Keith from MST Marquee. Just a question on continuing to gain market share. If we speak to your peers or your competitors around market share, you know, the old adage is that PlaceMakers has lost share, you know, maybe in the last 3-4 years prior to COVID, maybe has maintained share at best. I know there's aspirations to continue growing share, but does that ultimately come at CapEx cost, like what you're trying to do on the East Coast of the North Island at the moment? Can you just give us a bit more color on that, please?
Yeah, sure. I think we gotta be very careful when we talk about share. What we're focused on is winning in the targeted segments that we want to win in. The reality is it's very easy to go out and buy share. The problem with that is you deplete your margins really quickly. What our focus is on growing share in our target segments. Macro volume share, yes, it does move. We're not too concerned about that. What we're concerned about is where we wanna lose. Do we need to put more CapEx into the business? Look, we're a CapEx-light business. You can see that in our ROIC returns.
Look, the reason why digital is so important to us is that ultimately we want to be able to do business where our customers are and where they choose to do business. By having digital, it saves us having to put big bricks-and-mortar operations in place. What you'll see over the next five years, probably maybe quicker, is you'll go from a standard bricks and mortar type operation to a true omni. What's bricks and mortar click and collect or traditional merchant through to what is purely delivered on site, which is why things like our delivery fleet are really, really important. If you had the chance to look downstairs, you can see that our delivery fleet is actually an extension of our network, and it's all integrated digitally.
That takes us away from having to put big CapEx in and having to put big boxes in everywhere. Certainly, as the market moves and volume goes, you don't wanna have a lot of embedded cost and big boxes 'cause that hurts.
Do you think your competitors will go down the same path? I mean, omni-channel is something that's becoming a lot more, I guess relevant and important across the globe. One would expect your competitors would be trying to do the same thing.
I would expect so. Look, we certainly started as a laggard. We started behind our competitors. In the last three years, we've caught up to a point where our products are market leading. Will they continue to go in that direction? I'd imagine so. I think they'll need to continue to adjust their business. Are we worried about what they're doing? No. We're worried about where we're going. All righty, I'm getting this big red flashing thing saying you're over time. I'm gonna blame that on Hamish 'cause I think he was over time to start with. I'm around all day, and so please feel free to be able to ask any questions, and we're around tonight. This brings us to the end of the first session, so we're gonna have a short coffee break. We have 10 minutes now.
I'm sure we'll get waved back at about quarter to. When we come back after the break, you'll hear from Nick, you'll hear from Steve, and you'll hear from Dean. Look, enjoy the break and we'll see you back shortly.
All right. Please take back your seat. Kia ora and welcome everybody to the Concrete session. Let us start with a quick overview here on our business. We are New Zealand's leader in sustainable binder and concrete, basically based on three things. First, our leading brands and market positions with a very balanced exposure to the infrastructure, commercial and residential market. Second, our unique footprint and network. Last but not least, our industry-leading capability and highly engaged and motivated teams. Our division covers basically three businesses. First, Firth, leader in ready-mix concrete, masonry and bagged dry concrete. We have Golden Bay, the only local manufacturer of cement and distribution services. Winstone Aggregates, leader in aggregates, recycling, clean fill and transportation services. How are we doing?
Despite the older challenges over the last year, we are glad to share that we have not only delivered solid improvements of profits and returns, but we will also reach our EBIT margin target of 15% ahead of time with an uplift of about 400 basis points since 2019. We achieved this on the back of focused volume growth, strong cost improvement, as well as pricing investment discipline across all three businesses. Our performance improvement is also reflected by our non-financial measures, such as the well below industry average health and safety injury rates, the improved customer net promoter score, the high people engagement, and as you can see, also our further reduced carbon footprint. Where do we go from here?
We have a strong platform for sustainable growth as we drive both. Shown on the left, continuous improvement of our base business, growing the top line as well as improving the bottom line. To your right, capturing future growth opportunities with initiatives across mega trends of innovation, digital, and sustainability. Let me add some more flavor to this and share with you achievements and future plans business by business. Starting with Firth, where we see continuous strong growth. On your left, we are building on our leading concrete products position as we first continue to expand the ready-mix concrete plant and trucking capacity by about 10%. Second, we have extended and optimized masonry production, particularly at our flagship plant at Hunua, increasing capacity by another 5%-10%.
Third, we are scaling our digital customer experience and digital supply chain, now reaching more than 50% of all our ready-mix concrete deliveries. Moving to the left, we see strong demand for low carbon construction solutions, so we are doubling down on this. Our leading low carbon offering by launching EcoMix, mid of financial year 2023. This will be New Zealand's first low carbon concrete at scale, providing a 20%-40% reduced carbon intensity versus the industry baseline. At the same time, we continue to fast scale our smart design solutions, particularly X-Pod, providing an efficient and resource reduced flooring solution. Moving to Golden Bay. Here, the performance improvement is driven by, starting on your left, first, the optimization of our supply chain, upgrading our terminals at New Plymouth and Wellington, increasing shipping capacity by about 5%-10%.
Second, our alternative fuel usage, which is now reaching 50%, excuse me, which means that we have diverted more than 80,000 tons of waste tires and wood from landfill on an annual basis, and also with really attractive value creation. Third, our relentless effort for operational excellence, resulting not only in improved margins, but also now a world-leading CO2 footprint if you measure this per ton of clinker. Looking into the future and to your right, in line with EcoMix in Firth, we will launch EcoSure in Golden Bay by mid of financial year 2023. This will be New Zealand's first low carbon binder at scale, with 30% lower embodied CO2 than the industry baseline, and it will represent more than 80% of Golden Bay sales.
In terms of our waste management offering, we are now targeting 80% coal substitution, providing unique solutions to New Zealand's most pressing waste challenges, and we will also start using waste as alternative raw materials, replacing natural raw materials. Next is Winstone Aggregates. Winstone Aggregates is at the core of our business, and we have ambitious plans to capture growth here as well. Again, starting on your left, we want to further enhance our service offering, leveraging our transport capability with more than 30% of our sales delivered directly to customer sites. Second, increasing capacity at our flagship quarries, like Whitehall, Hunua, and Belmont. Third, relentlessly drive operational excellence across quarries and transportation. To the right, the future growth is driven by extending our circular materials management offer. With first, geographic expansion into the attractive South Island markets.
Second, scale our clean fill and recycling business on the back of a very successful trial this year and more than 800,000 tons of material recycled as clean fill. Summing it up, as you can see, Fletcher Building Concrete offers an attractive growth platform for the future based our strong brands, capabilities, and footprint. We will continue to deliver performance improvement of the base business while capturing future growth opportunities across the mega trends, be it with New Zealand's first mass low carbon binder and concrete or digital customer experience and process optimization or fast-tracking our recycling circular offers and waste management services. With these initiatives in place, we are confident to achieve a further 100 to 200 basis points of margin expansion and above market growth over the short and medium term. Thanks for your attention, and we now open for questions.
Two questions. Could you talk about the pricing dynamics in the market? Would you say that you've followed price behind Holcim or would you be leading price in New Zealand? And secondly, could you talk a little bit about your variable costs in your business? If you did see your reduced volumes, you know, what sort of impact you'd see on margins in your business?
I'll take your first topic about price leadership. I mean, it changes a little bit, right, region by region, projects by projects. What has really driven our leadership in pricing, and I think we are now really the leader here, is that we see more and more customers really eager to have a low carbon solution and a circular solution, as well as valuing the kind of resilience of local manufacturing. This has helped us really to take the leadership role here in pricing, and I would, based on the latest dynamics, say that, yes, we are the leader in pricing here. To your second point on the variable costs, as you will have seen, obviously, coal prices are up, electricity prices are up, and we have a whole suite of actions to that.
I will start with, like, the fuel, thermal fuel first. Obviously, raising our kind of substitution rates of coal from kind of 20-25% to 50% has greatly helped to actually reduce those costs. On the electricity, again, is a whole suite of actions, starting with efficiency gains at the plant. Then we always watch for hedging opportunities in conditions, running the quarries or the mills to optimize based on electricity pricing our operations. We have so far been very successful, as you can see on the margin side, by actually reducing our cost base or at least keeping those cost inflations at bay.
Hi, Nick. Just a couple of quick questions from me. Just on your slag substitution strategy, could you give us a bit of an update on that post the Pozzolan strategy? And also just on clean fill, how large is that at the moment in terms of your, the percentage of your EBIT, and how large could that be in a couple of years' time? Thank you.
Yeah, I'll start with your question on the supplementary cementitious materials. I mean, look, we are really looking at the whole suite of how we can further build our leadership in low carbon binders and concrete, and SCMs is one element of that. We keep on testing all sorts of SCMs as future options, and pozzolans is one of them. But we haven't really found sources in the quantity or quality and with the respective investments required who give us a really good return so far. We keep watching that. We are also looking at slags. However, I would say we have a strong preference for local SCMs based on just the reliability of supply, but also the cost point.
What is the advantage of the solution we are bringing to the market here is that you get the same product with a lower carbon footprint, and you don't have to make any changes to your supply chain or setup at the concrete side. I think that's something customers will value. You had a second question? Sorry, Steve.
On the clean fill.
On the clean fill. Yes. Look, I mean, the clean fill is really integrated into the existing quarry operations. Eight hundred thousand tons is about kind of 10% of our business at the moment. But there is also an opportunity on the back of that really kind of entering recycling because we already have those streams today. You will see also how that really works on the Hunua tour later on today. Sorry, I think you were looking for the kind of share of variable costs. Normally you get about 20% thermal energy, 20% electrical energy, and 20% fixed cost of your labor. Sorry if you were looking for that. That's kind of normal too in the cement industry.
Hi, Nick. It's Daniel Kang from CLSA. Just correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that low-carbon concrete is not really achieving much of a premium at this point. What's your strategy as a market leader to try to bring about what is rightfully should be a premium in the market?
Yeah, look, I mean, we are really watching out which customers value this, and there is a tipping point in this discussion, I think. You know, at the moment, it's a couple of customers who really look for this, and you also see that actually there's customers today who already offset and pay for the CO2 of the embodied carbon of their building. There is some people in New Zealand who actually already do that. So for them, actually, it's a very easy sales pitch for us. But I think that we are close to this tipping point where actually the customer's customers will ask for the embodied carbon, and that's where we will get real traction. In terms of the pricing point, we see it really as a also loyalty factor, not just as a price point per se.
It gives us also a really strong differentiator in terms of employees. I wouldn't underestimate that we are all short on people, and to be really the leader here in terms of circular and carbon is another edge in terms of the resilience of the business at the moment. Any more questions there? No? All right. Thanks very much. I'll now hand over to Dean Fradgley to present on the Australian division.
Good afternoon, everyone. In this session, I'll cover our Australian operations, its performance and outlook. We'll then move to questions. Our ongoing operations in Australia are well-positioned, and we strengthen their performance in core areas, both manufacturing and distribution. Our revenue is circa AUD 3 billion, and the weighting of those sales now leans more to areas such as repairs and maintenance, R&A, which offers a more stable and better earnings profile through the economic cycle. We will deliver a healthy profit increase this year, having navigated our way through COVID disruptions and those floods. We continue to see momentum in performance, and this is evidenced in the EBIT margin run rate on the slide behind me for the second half of this year, approaching that 5% area. That momentum will wash through to our next financial year.
We will achieve a target earnings margin in the range of 5%-7%. We're also making good progress in non-financials areas such as carbon reduction, we're now forecasting to reduce emissions by over 40% by the end of the decade. Employee engagement, I'm pleased to say, has lifted year-on-year, and our safety strategies are working with recordable injuries, again, falling for the fourth consecutive year. Our customer service scores, as measured by Net Promoter Score, taken a bit of a dent as we traveled through those supply chain and labor constraints. We're very focused on the recovery of those KPIs, and I'm pleased to say our DIFOT has improved materially in the last quarter. We will lean in to customer service as we play out the year. We've doubled earnings margins to get back to what I call a firm foundation.
To achieve that, we focused on a few things. Winning in areas for value, categories that provide better returns, and we'll see those on the business unit slide shortly. Our pricing strategies, covered them earlier, including comprehensive training for sales teams. This has lifted gross margins, and we've upskilled over 500 people in this area in terms of technical training and behavioral. Our own brand and private label programs have been well received by the customer. We've optimized and focused our manufacturing assets to products that win in market. There's more to come. We see more opportunity ahead of us. We believe there's another 200-300 basis points of earnings margin to capture. We see this coming from a few areas. Let me just bring those to life. Digital, our ecosystem is expanding. This has been well embraced by our customers.
It's also winning new customers. Our annual sales online now are about NZD 250 million, just to give you a sense of it. Adjacencies through organic expansion, like moving into the vertical wall space with the Laminex Surround that you saw downstairs this morning. Automation, further operational leverage through investments for efficiency as we think about labor constraints and rising labor costs. We remain very cognizant of the cycle, continue to focus on those core segments, those categories that are resilient to any softening of the markets. Now let's look at each business unit. Laminex continues to perform well. The business has doubled its earnings in the last three years and now is what I call a robust platform to deliver double-digit EBIT returns. Continued growth in key categories like decorative, high margin, washing through to the bottom line.
Our pricing disciplines are very strong, and our digital offer, again, is well embedded. It also reduces our cost to serve. We see further upside in Laminex in the medium term through areas such as accelerated growth of NPD, New Product Development. Laminex Surround, as I just mentioned, from zero to over NZD 10 million this year, going to NZD 50 million in the medium term. That displaces traditional commodities, takes us into the vertical, displaces plasterboard and paint. We haven't played in that area before. As I said at the half-year presentation, that product is six times the margin of basic raw MDF board that we sell today.
Haven, our joinery kitchen offer, is now getting a clean run at market. It's a great example of how we're driving organic growth through adjacencies, and it's growing as customers seek more efficient ways to install their jobs, manage their cash flow.
We'll continue to explore alternative fibers like bamboo as well as we travel through it. Just moving on. Laminex, over 10%, nearer to 20% of its revenue now comes from innovation. Its multi-year pipeline of that is strong. That's a good outlook. On the slide behind me, you can see the bamboo-based product board that we've manufactured and sold in market as a test, and we continue to assess the feasibility commercially of that product as a fiber alternative. On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see the location of our Melbourne Haven stores. Four now up and running in market, concentrated in areas of higher R&A, repairs, and maintenance demand. Plumbing distribution and Tradelink. Tradelink continues to improve and will again deliver double-digit EBIT growth this year.
Its earnings margin is now 3% and is set to expand EBIT by another 100 basis points per year. The business is penetrating further into the SME market. That's been its core strategy, a segment that's the most resilient through the economic cycle. Our own brand performance continues to deliver value, especially Oliveri. We've made really good progress on both digital, including B2C and B2B, and this business is now future fit and operating in an omni-channel world. Our multi-year showroom refurbishment program is essentially complete, and this is driving retail sales, which have our highest gross margin in terms of category performance. We will continue to invest in showrooms as it's also a key part of that SME, small medium enterprise customer value proposition.
Our B2C website is now in its second year from 0 to NZD 12 million in year one, and in the short term, we'll double that again this year. Our newly launched B2B digital offer compares well to major competitors and is off to a really good start. As I said before, our own brand sales continue to deliver value, have been very effective in our front-of-wall categories. Successful, we're now taking that to back of wall. We're driving our own brand sales there with things such as the Vulcan hot water, our private label. Again, this benefits gross margin. Fletcher Insulation has accelerated its performance again this year. It's on track for its best EBIT result in many, many years. More importantly, it's now well positioned to expand its earnings further.
The optimization of its footprint, both manufacturing and distribution, has delivered material operational leverage and is well positioned to defend against imports. The shift to and focus on higher margin categories is delivering better returns. The business is now digitally evolved and is future fit. That will continue to attract new customers. We'll continue to land innovation like FirmaSoft, you can see on the slide behind me, opening up a new revenue stream through to big box retailers and a very nice margin. Stramit, that's our rollforming business, sheet and coil. Coil and sheet market this year has been challenged, as you know, by constrained supply, both domestically and internationally.
Despite that, we've made good progress on pricing strategies and really good price effectiveness, which again, as I said at the half year, our gross margin would improve as the year played out, and we've done that, lifting gross margin by about 100 basis points in H2. Our growth in higher margin areas like sheds has been a standout, and this category remains a core focus for future growth. We continue to digitize the business to improve efficiency and strengthen our value propositions as we attract new customers in that omni-channel world. Iplex, the enhanced Iplex strategy is blossoming really well. We'll deliver our highest profits since the days of the coal seam gas boom, which takes us back to 2014. Earnings have continued to grow throughout the year as that strategy has played out.
The balance of a more efficient manufacturing base, plus an expanded master distribution model, has lifted margins. We'll see further profitable growth as we penetrate into a few key areas, like primary demand selling strategies, moving up the specification process, locking in margin with asset owners. Product innovation, lifting margins again, where sustainable solutions like trench-less technology are being now preferred. More automation. We're continuing to invest, ensuring we remain competitive and retain our lowest cost to manufacture mentality. The high-speed foam core lines in Sydney and Melbourne are a great example of this and are performing very well. Just to size it, they provide three times more output than a traditional line. Finally, to close on slide 76, the division I think is well positioned. We've got strong operational discipline and cadence.
The strategy to deliver better quality of returns are working, and that's locking in a more resilient outlook through the cycle. Our levers of growth support a further 200-300 bps in the medium term as we move past the 5% threshold. Let's move to questions. Thank you. Or not. Andrew?
Dean, the Iplex business is sort of ideally positioned as one of the sort of real lead indicator businesses with subdivision and other work it sees. Can you talk about what it's pointing to in the Aussie market, maybe 18 months sort of down the track?
Yeah. Sorry, I lost your first word. Did you pick in the mic, Dee?
Just the Iplex business sort of that leading indicator position.
Thanks, Andrew. Look, that's a good question. Because our order pipeline is pretty encouraging in Iplex. The order book has grown 60% since the start of the year. You guys will know that the infrastructure and civil commitment in Australia is large. More importantly, I think we're now making better quality of earnings in those areas. Demand says yes, pipeline looks good. We're winning both medium and large projects for value, and I think that outlook won't soften in the short term. It's a very good indicator for us.
Just secondly, looking at the ROFE trajectory and where you're expecting to go next year, you sort of be back at that acceptable level, which arguably could let you put your hand out to Ross and ask for some money. What would be the adjacencies or complementary areas that you'd be looking at if you were to look that way?
Thanks, Andrew. Look, first thing, we made a commitment when we formed the division. We'd get our returns, our ROFE to 10%. Sorry, our ROFE to ten. We're getting nearer to 9% this year. We'll exceed 10% next year. Tick. I recognize it's still substandard to growth, so Ross isn't gonna let me off that easily. Can we beat that? I think the answer, hopefully. Let's see, Andrew, sort of the market plays out. I think around, you know, investment and adjacencies, I see this division almost as an acquisition. We've got so much organic ability to grow in areas for value that are all the OpEx or sensible CapEx, and we are investing and supported by group in some of those investments of adjacencies. BlackMax and Iplex being the latest cab off the rank. We've invested in Haven.
We've invested in digital substantially in Tradelink. I think I'm satisfied with the level of investment we've got. I think it's enough to bite off now. If we're in the 5%-7% range next year, which we will be, and we're getting encouragement from our shareholders to maybe go on acquisition, then I'll happily have that problem.
We have a question online from Janelle Morrison. Can you please elaborate on the slide's comment that the division is ahead of ESG targets?
Yes, Janelle. Thank you, and thanks for dialing in. Look, we made a commitment aligned to group that we'll reduce our carbon emissions by 30% by 2030. We've worked really hard as a division, both strategically and tactically to try and exceed that. We think those ESG strategies will continue to change over time, so we're forecasting just to be over around 43% reduction of carbon emissions by 2030.
Just within the plumbing business, I guess how far are we in the gross margin story with private label penetration do you think? We're at 30% currently. Where do you see that going to?
Yeah. Thank you. We made a commitment a few years ago, for those who don't remember. We said in our front of wall it was about 11% and we would look to get it beyond 30%. Luke, our general manager of Tradelink, is here today, so he can give you more details. We're going around 33%-37%. I think the bigger question is what is the confidence and the appetite of our customers to accept own brand? We think we've got a very strong own brand proposition in Tradelink. Luke will tell you, we think there's another 10% of sales participation in front of wall to go there. Again, there's nothing wrong with the same aspiration to go after back of wall. We know it's margin accretive.
A credit to the Tradelink team, where we're in control of the supply chain with our own label. We're seeing a better focus in customer service. Someone's giving me the X, which is our remaining sort of ten minutes, I think. Okay, I'm being pushed. Look, I won't go over. Thanks for listening to me today. I'll hand over to Steve Evans, our CEO of Residential and Development. Thank you very much, everyone.
Thanks, Dean, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Stephen Evans. I'm the Chief Executive of the Residential and Development Division here. This division contains four business units. The biggest is Fletcher Living, which contains our development teams, our house building business, and our apartments business. The remaining businesses are Clever Core, our offsite manufacturing business. Vivid Living, the retirement business that we announced at last year's event. And finally, the Industrial Development business. I'll explain a little bit more about those on subsequent slides. Since we last caught up 12 months ago, the market has just shown how unpredictable it can be. Initially buoyed by the global uplift in house prices that saw our average New Zealand house prices improve by over 20%. We've then been hit by labor shortages, supply chain delays across all products, and some significant cost inflation.
Despite all of this, we're still ending the year in a better margin state than we did last year. Our well-established business in developments have continued to show great results through the year. With several more years to go in areas such as Waiata Shores, Red Beach, Whenuapai, and Stonefields, we continue to have a great baseline which is solid. Add to that development started over the last couple of years and where first houses are now being delivered, we are well set up to deliver into the future. Turning to the next page, the results on this slide reflect a stellar year in FY 2022. Our EBIT for the year will be at record levels despite the drop in residential volume as a result of COVID impacts. Our strategy of investing wisely for the future has meant ROFE and EBIT margin are strong.
It's anticipated that as we move through the cycle, our margins will revert closer to long run averages of around 20%. Equally rewarding for me has been the continued downward trend in TRIFR and a continued increase in our net promoter score. Both are at industry leading levels. Having happy customers is one of the greatest attributes of our business and reflects the track record we have in creating great communities, not just building houses. Behind this is a well-engaged team that has risen to the challenges of the last year. We have a good land bank with over 5,500 home lots in our control, and a considerable amount more which could come through the rezoning of land outside the rural-urban boundary. In looking ahead to FY 2023, we've taken a pragmatic view on the market.
We've seen house prices come off the highs of late calendar 2021, and we're factoring in a further drop in margin as we go through the next 12 months. However, our communities are focused in the most resilient area of the market, where consumer demand is strong, and where the design of our communities continues to attract high levels of customer interest. You'll see that for those that are going on the site visits over the next two days. Our land bank, as I've mentioned before, is strong, and we're only pursuing additional investments where the developments are forecast to meet strict financial thresholds through the cycle. Moving into the residential business specifically, you'll see that we continue to focus on the points in the market where there is the most demand and the most depth.
This market, below NZD 1 million, is where we have over the last 12 months introduced different home typologies to continue to feed this space. Whether these be the Hipster Homes in Waiata or the unit out of unit developments, we are continuing to offer a range of products as attractive as ever. We have also in the last six months introduced some shared equity product into our developments, helping first-time buyers buy houses through an equity sharing package. Our residential business is incredibly well-positioned. As I've noted earlier, this includes through old and new developments in land that we own, sections we buy off others, and a series of partnerships with iwi, local, and national government. As we move into FY 2023, we're also starting on site with LowCO. You may have seen the exhibit downstairs.
That's our housing response to climate change in the form of a house that complies with requirements to limit global warming to less than 1.5 degree increase. This will be both in our standalone and our terrace product and has opened up a number of new product offerings and partnerships with like-minded players. It's our belief that this work will grow in scale over the coming years as we work to provide even greater sustainable homes for New Zealand. Cool. That's better. I've already touched on the growth in the apartments business. However, it's worthwhile talking to a few more successes here. First, we've grown our pipeline to a future delivery of over 1,500 units to develop over the next 5+ years in a similar vein to our residential pipeline.
They're in great locations, including The Hill in Remuera and Northcote and Three Kings, and work is now underway on the construction of the Caldera Apartments at Three Kings, which you'll see this afternoon, of which we're almost 40% sold. At Te Uru Apartments in Hobsonville Point , where we've recently sold our first units. Together with The Aviary Apartments down in Panmure, where all but two units are now sold, we're forecasting 120 apartment completions into FY 2023. We've built an experienced team but continue to take a very prudent view on what we buy, where, and when, such that our financial targets are met. We're also spending a lot of time on driving costs down through clever design, smart procurement, and using innovation to drive down the times of the build process.
As highlighted in last year's Investor Day, we're now underway with our first homes under the Vivid Living brand, and we'll be selling the units for these later this calendar year. The product addresses a significantly underserved part of the market for those that do not or are unable to go into the conventional retirement village. Our offering is significantly differentiated to the established operators, both financially in terms of a lower deferred management fee and a share of the capital gains, but also in terms of the way we're partnered on our technology and the healthcare offering. The Vivid Living business continues to be focused within the many communities which we are planning over the next five to ten years, providing another customer proposition to add to our residential offering.
OSM or off-site manufacture has been an important part of delivering homes in the last year, with the certainty of supply out of Clever Core enabling the Fletcher Living business to deliver its homes. Additionally, we've successfully delivered our first project for Kāinga Ora and shown them the quality, sustainability, and time benefits that Clever Core provides. We're now working on a number of other projects with Kāinga Ora and with other external customers. 2022 has also seen Clever Core help to deliver frames and trusses for the Fletcher Living businesses, assisting them when the market was experiencing severe shortages. A second shift was added during the year to reflect the importance in meeting these customer demands. While increasing SG&A during the year, this additional capacity will again help to deliver the volumes into FY 2023. 2023 should therefore see Clever Core increase its volumes and its productivity and profitability.
The industrial business historically dealt with surplus Fletcher Building land and assets, but it's also responsible for delivering the developments for the need of the wider Fletcher Building, some of which both Bruce and Hamish have talked about earlier. Additionally, we're using our development skill set to secure and navigate the complex rezoning processes for land in Auckland, both for FB and for general development purposes. The industrial business this year has benefited from a number of sales of land in the Australian portfolio. Thank you, Dean. However, it's been the work of the team in securing land, including in Papakura for Fletcher Steel, in Penrose for the new Firth Auckland plant, and in Wellington from Brian Perry and Higgins, which has delivered its true value.
Together with the progression of the raw land we own at Silverdale and at Whenuapai, the coming years for the industrial business will be about continuing to provide sustainable earnings of that circa NZD 25 million per annum with a ROFE of around 15%. Now to cover our land bank, which Bevan touched on in his presentation. We now have approximately 5,600 lots under our control and another circa 2,000 which could be made available as we work through the plan change process within our rural portfolio. The value of our land on our balance sheet is now approximately NZD 400 million, with a buffer of almost 100% to the actual valuations of this land. As Bevan said, that's on a as is where is basis.
Importantly, it values the raw land as just that and ignores the proven history we have of developing this land and extracting further significant profit from it. The other major component of our balance sheet is work in progress. This consists of both development WIP, being the cost of turning the raw land into service sections, and our house building WIP. Together, this sits on our balance sheet at around NZD 300 million and will increase as we build volume and decrease as market conditions change. One of our continual focuses is on how we recycle that capital through faster build times. This is where Clever Core also supports the division.
As I look forward, I believe we're not only well-positioned to provide through the cycle earnings, we're able to flex as the market demands, and when such conditions allow, to grow to our stated target of over 1,500 homes per annum. The division is underpinned by great locations, prudent investment guardrails to support land acquisition, and continuing to deliver communities and quality houses which our customers value. That concludes my presentation, and I'll now open up the room to questions.
Steve, Simon Thackray, Jefferies. Thanks for that. I've got a couple of questions. One, you mentioned something I haven't heard before, which is shared equity with first home buyers. Okay, what does that mean and how much and how much investment and how does that investment work?
Well, the good news is it's not our investment at all. It's actually Kāinga Ora government money. The Kāinga Ora, through the government, have allocated a fairly large sum of money to create a dual ownership option, particularly targeted at first home buyers. If you think first home buyers have continued to see prices increase, what is the way they can go to a bank and say, "Actually, I've only got access to NZD 600,000," for instance, and that's through a shared equity product. The good news is it doesn't take any funds from our balance sheet, and the advantage is it provides a huge opportunity for first home buyers that wasn't otherwise available. It's a product which is used globally very well, particularly in the UK, and we've actually been trying to push the government to introduce more of it into our New Zealand operation.
That's very helpful. Thank you. The second question, just on page 88, your slide of the total volume of residential units taken to profit. That's the projected flow, known flow. How could that change if it's gonna change over the next year or two years?
Well, I think what I've said earlier is that we'll continue to grow the business where the market conditions allow us to do so. What I projected to you guys twelve months ago is we were going to be just short of 1,000 this year. Obviously, with consenting delays, shortage of people within LINZ and the supply chain issues, we haven't got to that figure, and hence the number you see there is about 700. As I go forward, that continues to grow. As the market conditions flex and get better over time, I will still see our position as being that target of 1,500 plus per annum.
Thank you.
Hi, Steve. Rohan from Forsyth Barr again. Just on that comment around sales rates. You know, 12 months ago you said 1,000, six months it was like 150, I think, from memory, and now it's 700. Can you just talk us through the last 12 months and the six months, and the fall off in demand that we've seen and, you know, kind of maybe talk to your build rate completions versus conversions to sales and how that's changed?
It's interesting because you're assuming that the visitation has come off, and I know that in the broader market that has definitely been the case. Look, what we saw in the first six months of FY 2022 was a classic case of FOMO. There was this fear of missing out, so everyone wanted to buy a house because everyone saw the prices going up. We similarly benefited from that scenario. However, what we've got to now is a return to normal. Let's face it, we know what normal is. Normal is hard work from our teams, hard work, particularly from our sales and delivery teams, to make sure the houses are available and that our customers like it.
The good news is we are in great locations providing product into the most deep part of the market, and we're continuing to see good visitation. We've seen, as I touched on in my presentation, a drop-off in terms of the highs of the end of 2021. We're also forecasting prices to come off, costs to go up, which is why I've explained that 10% margin shift.
Just running the numbers on profit per home. It's about NZD 240,000 per home you're making. I think the old track was towards NZD 100,000 profit per home per unit sold. Your next year's target, does that look like NZD 150,000 per home? Does that sound about right? Or are we trending.
You know that I'm not gonna give you that exact information. What I'll say is that we are not at the stage where we're getting the same margins as we did at the end of last calendar year, but we're still getting very attractive markets and very attractive margins. As you see this afternoon and tomorrow for those that go on the site tours, it's about providing a broad range of product into the communities in which we operate, so that we actually have a customer proposition that is to a number of customers. We are going to see a margin shift over the next 12 months. We are going to also see an uplift in our volume, and we think we're in great shape for the next 12 months.
We shouldn't linearly extrapolate the 10% drop in margins on residential to be 240 going down to 150 times the number of units you're gonna do?
I can't possibly tell you how to do your calculations. What I'll say is that we are in great locations, where customers wanna be, and they're valued well. We've got sites that are making much more than that. We've got sites that are not. Actually, many that are actually below that, apart from when we operate in the KiwiBuild price points, which are actually defined. We're continuing to show great margins across our portfolio.
Hey, Steve, it's Daniel from CLSA.
Hi.
On the land bank, just wondering how you're finding the opportunity set in the current environment. In terms of, if home valuations start to ease back, do you expect opportunities to start to rise?
Whenever the market is at this state, there are always going to be opportunities that come up. The things that we need to do is use a very prudent set of investment criteria to say, "Do they suit us given what we think the market's going to be in the future?" There are going to be opportunities. Equally, a lot of the opportunities we have are not necessarily on market opportunities. We source them through a variety of established relationships and established partnerships. Yes, there will be the opportunity. We need to be very careful in terms of what we buy and when.
Are there any particular focus regions?
Auckland and Christchurch. No, I shouldn't be flippant on that. Look, from our point of view, we do see growth, not in the inner city. We think that's the most volatile part of the market and not where we participate. It's where, for instance, we haven't taken apartments into the central city. When you look at the established areas of where our apartments are focused, and also those areas of the urban-rural boundary, the extremities, which have got good fundamentals, well-served by transport or could be well served by transport, there are a continued number of opportunities that'll come through that.
Cool.
Online question.
We have an online question from Jason Hamilton. Not a lot about apartments. Where are you on that?
I thought I did talk a bit about apartments. Look, the apartment pipeline for us is about delivering into FY 2023, those 120 that I talked about through Three Kings, Te Aro, and down in Panmure. As we then go through into the next continued years, what we're going to see is probably a drop-off in FY 2024 because we want to make sure the fundamentals are right before we then start looking at when that market reverts back to a form that is appealing to us, we'll continue to deliver. As I've said, we've now got a pipeline which is over 1,500 units. Most of the apartment spaces that we're operating in are again a continuation of the communities in which we've established.
You'll start to see more apartments in Three Kings. You'll start to see more apartments as we go through some of our well-established communities and where the medium density and high density solutions are starting to come to the fore.
Hi, Steve. Given the change in mix of units taken to profit next year, can you give us a sense of maybe one or both of average sales price change for next year? You know, if you can give us any color on like-for-like changes or average selling price given the mix shift, that would be useful. Thank you.
Look, I think the slide that I presented in terms of FY 2022 in terms of the range remains about the right bell curve that you should be looking at. We continue to see our space as being below the median house price in Auckland. It's where we've continued to deliver. There are going to be opportunities, and Stonefields is a classic example of one of them, where we've got a well-established product and a very deep knowledge of the community, where we'll continue to sell above those price points. I think the easiest way to look at it, if you say here's the proportion in FY 2022 which is below the Auckland average, that's about the same percentage as we look forward.
Hi. Could you give us a guide for what your average build cost, that's ex land, for townhouses are per meter today versus, say, two years ago?
The reality is it's gone up by between 10% and 15%. We will deliver into the market at very competitive rates. If you look back at the terrace housing, we were delivering at around about that NZD 2,500 per sq m-NZD 3,000 per sq m mark. That's gone up over the last 12-18 months.
Cool.
I'm getting a flashing red here, which means that I'm all out of time. Thanks for your questions and I am around obviously for the site tours and to share some sparkling water with you tonight. I'll now hand back to Ross to run through some concluding remarks.
Thanks, Steve. To sum up, I just wanna come back to the slide you've seen a few times today. It's really to make the point again that I think our strategy positions us really well to drive shareholder value, both in the short and the longer term. We expect to see solid profit growth into FY 2023, and we don't anticipate any further COVID lockdowns or major disruptions. We continue to have plans and runway to drive further margin improvements above what we're achieving now. We have an established pipeline of growth opportunities that will start to mature over the next three years. Our balance sheet and financial position is strong, and we intend to keep it that way. Our operating approach and in-country scale presence positions us really well to both take advantage of and deal with global trends affecting our sectors.
Fletcher Building's a great business, and it's staffed by exceptional people. While we've achieved some good things in the last few years, I really think the best is yet to come for us. I thank you all for attending today, and I'll end the online and this presentation now and hand back there, and then I'll do a few housekeeping wrap-up comments for the buses next.