Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the New Zealand King Salmon Investments Limited full-year results announcement. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question via the phones, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please enter it into the Ask a Question box and click Submit. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Carl Carrington, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the King Salmon final results announcement. In the room with me at the moment is Graeme Tregidga, Chief Commercial Officer; Ben Rodgers, Chief Financial Officer; Grant Lovell, GM of Aquaculture; and Mark Dewdney, Chairman. Just move on to the next. Just got a little technical glitch at the moment with the slide deck.
Okay. So just moving to the results summary. We had a solid return to profitability for the business following a second successful year of the adapted farming model. The GAAP net profit after tax result at NZD 28.5 million and pro forma EBITDA of NZD 24.5 million was on revenue of NZD 187 million. The second half of the year was tougher than the first half as we worked through smaller fish from September to December, which impacted on demand. The smaller fish was a result of the change in the farming model and recovery from the summer mortality event across financial year 2022 and 2023. It highlights the lag effect between decisions and outcomes of the long grow-out cycle for salmon. Very positively, we received the final consent for Blue Endeavour.
From here, we will complete the baseline data monitoring by June 2025 and then immediately commence development of a pilot farm to prove up the open ocean technology before commencing scaling up. The balance sheet remains strong. CapEx for financial year 2025 is forecast at NZD 14 million, excluding the BE pilot. The FY25 CapEx is primarily for business as usual and resiliency and compares to a CapEx spend in FY24 of NZD 6.4 million. The BE pilot is expected to be approximately NZD 15 million, with about half of that incurred in FY25. Focus is strongly on optimizing the core business through continuing to make good choices around markets, market allocation and product mix, and tight cost control so that we can maximise the self-funding component for Blue Endeavour.
Harvest for FY25 is expected to lift to 6,800 to 7,200 metric ton range, and that supports a guidance for FY25 of NZD 26 million-NZD 32 million. We'll move now to the next slide. So just highlighting again here, the revenue at NZD 187 million is a record for the last five years at least, and we can see our geographic spread of sales. New Zealand at 36%. North America remains very strong at 41% and strong growth into Australia at 11%. And there we can see the rest of the world spread across Asia, Japan, a little bit into China, and Europe. We've talked to the GAAP result at NZD 28.5 million and EBITDA at NZD 24.5 million. I'll just hand across to Graeme now to take us through brands.
Okay. Thank you, Carl. Good morning, everybody. In respect to our brands, keeping our brands relevant in our customers' minds remains our core focus. We have continuous engagement with our Ōra King ambassadors, which is a proven strategy to drive awareness through our food service channel. We've taken our Ōra King documentary to the global stage by arranging events in our key markets. Being prudent with our marketing spend has also been a feature. We brought our social media and our digital programs in-house. We've also refreshed our Omega Plus brand programs for both our New Zealand and our China markets. With our Omega strategy, we've also shifted towards specialty outlets. That is, our focus remains in examples like Animates, Petco, PETstock, Pet Direct, etc. To support this strategy, we're engaging in in-store events and our social media activity.
We're proud to have Regal remaining as our number one smoked salmon brand. This is reinforcing our consumer trust in the brand and acknowledgement of our superior taste and quality. Our Regal Epicurean range continues to drive engagement across the targeted younger demographic and contributes to our positive market share growth within that Regal range. Turning attention to our sales performance and our global markets, price increases continue to be required to help offset our increased input cost. Despite this, our global demand continues and remains strong. Our New Zealand markets saw a stronger second half, and as already mentioned, our imported Atlantic range contributed to our growth. North American performance remained strong and outstripped our available supply. Their preference was really for a larger-sized fish.
In the retail sector for North America, our Regal brand continued to perform well, and we've further expanded our distribution across the USA. Within our Japan market, it required quite a sizable price realignment during the first half of the FY2024 year. We're in a rebuilding phase, but we're really encouraged by the results that have been achieved within the second half. Our Asian markets also performed solidly throughout the financial year of 2024. Demand for our larger sizes, again, exceeds the available supply. Overall, Australia performed very strongly for us in FY2024, and this was the largest volume traded in the past five years. Our Regal retail products continue to perform well, and we're extending distribution across the retail chains of Australia. Following price adjustments earlier in the year, the European market has seen a slower recovery.
However, in China, we're strengthening and developing our relationship with our importer partner, China Resources Food Supply Chain, and our supply partnership agreement that was signed in FY 2024. This market prefers larger-sized salmon, and demand for this size range outstripped the available supply. I'll pass over to Grant Lovell, who'll update us on fish performance.
Thanks, Graeme. Yeah, FY2024 saw us fully implement the adopted farming strategy, and we are pleased to report that it has continued to perform well for the second year of reduced mortalities and that has continued on into the start of FY2025. As we work through the year, we did have some slightly smaller fish than ideal in the latter half of FY2024. This was due to some timing issues as we sort of aligned the strategy and will not be repeated in FY2025. Feed costs remain highly volatile for us, and you can see they have continued to increase year on year. However, we are starting to see some signs of this settling down in the market at the moment. I would like to call out the work we're undertaking on thermotolerance.
We have undertaken two years of this now within our breeding program, and this is looking very positive with some clear differences between families, allowing us to implement this into our selections. And we will be undertaking further work on this year with an on-farm trial to determine that the lab work actually is replicated in the ocean. All in all, a positive FY2024 for us. I'll pass over to Ben for sustainability.
Thank you, Grant. Kia ora, koutou, good morning, everybody. Just to reiterate, the environment is incredibly important for us. The environment provides the conditions, and the water provides the lifeblood for our salmon. One of the key initiatives in FY24 has been the undertaking to deliver our first climate-related disclosure. This will be released in May 2024. In order to achieve this, we've had to invest in a carbon reporting tool and done significant work to identify our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. This work will provide us with a baseline to set future carbon-related emission targets. As a company, we are proud to grow a protein that has a comparably low carbon footprint when compared to other land-based proteins. However, we also acknowledge both the need and the want to do better.
A good example of this is we have invested in a silage plant in FY2024, which is currently in the final stages of commissioning. The intention for this investment is it will remove all, if not a majority, of our waste from landfill in the foreseeable future. In addition to this, we have maintained our four-star BAP certification, which is an independent auditing of our hatcheries, farms, processing plant, and feed operations, with four stars being the highest accreditation the company can obtain. We have also submitted our third modern slavery report. Moving ahead to FY2024 financial performance, consistent with the half-year message, it has been a relatively uneventful year for New Zealand King Salmon given our most recent history.
As Grant mentioned, we have completed the first full year with the revised production model, and both the biological performance of our salmon and the financial performance of the company are continuing to perform in line with our expectations. As Carl mentioned at the start of the presentation, on a GAAP basis, we reported a net profit after tax of NZD 28.5 million. Moving to our preferred measure of performance, pro forma EBITDA, we reported a profit of NZD 24.5 million. Both the GAAP and the pro forma results reflect strong prices. In FY24, we had the benefit of a full year of price increases taken in FY23. As when we take price increases, they can tend to be weighted to the second half of any financial year.
In addition to that, we've continued to focus on our market choices, as covered by Graeme, within the constraints of market concentration risk. We also, as expected, achieved a good reduction in our mortality expenses, which relate to the changes in the production model, as covered by Grant, where we now have a majority of our salmon in the Tory Channel over the summer months. Inflation. Just like everyone else, we haven't been immune from inflationary pressure. Although this has been most evident in our major expense categories being feed and people costs, we have seen pressure right across the supply chain. In acknowledging that, we have seen some areas of relief, one of them being freight.
Although I would highlight that this year's freight cost has also been impacted by the fact we are exporting a greater percentage of our sales when compared to the prior period, with export markets carrying a higher freight cost per kg. As a business, we still remain focused on ways we can sensibly reduce expenditure. In acknowledging this, it is also worth highlighting our corporate overhead run rate is tracking higher than indicated by the full year results. As we have made some deliberate investments in capability, including a new CEO and head of community relationships and communications, we believe these investments will underpin our future successes. Finally, from an EBITDA perspective, it was pleasing to deliver a result within guidance, but we also acknowledge within the delivery of the results, we still see opportunities for improvement.
These earnings improvements are really important as we look at our future growth opportunities and having to have a business which can self-fund a majority of these opportunities. In addition to the above, the GAAP impact result also benefited from an NZD 11 million fair gain on our biological assets as required by the accounting standards, which is a non-cash gain, and NZD 5 million from the early closure of FX contracts, which occurred in FY22. The unwind of these FX contracts will continue to unwind in our GAAP results until the end of FY26.
Moving on to the balance sheet. Following on from the equity raise in FY23, the balance sheet remained strong with net cash on hand at NZD 24 million. The increase in net cash is predominantly driven by the underlying profitability of the business, but also the utilization of tax losses and the underspend of budgeted CapEx.
These cash benefits were offset by an increase in the investment of biological assets and inventory on hand. Biological assets have increased not only due to the fair value adjustment, but also an increase in the biomass at sea, with biomass up 760 metric tonnes or 16% when compared to the prior comparable period. This increase reflects the optimization of the current production model, as Grant talked about earlier, and is expected to translate into a larger harvest. Inventory on hand. Feed on hand increased as a result of switching between our primary and secondary feed suppliers. This change resulted in the feed purchasing arrangement with the secondary supplier moving away from consignment terms, thus increasing the value of feed on hand.
Consistent with FY23, under the new production model, we now have a seasonal uplift in production between October and December, which we refer to as our seasonal harvest. The intention is to freeze down the seasonal fish, which can then be later utilized in our value-added operations, which enable us to maximize the availability of whole fish sales during the year. Unfortunately, in working through the final changes of our production model, we did experience a slightly smaller average fish size over the last quarter of FY24. This impacted export demand and resulted in a slightly larger freeze than we originally expected. The good news is we are not forecasting the same size challenges to repeat in FY25. CapEx also came in under budget due to the delay in projects, which, as Carl mentioned, will result in an increase in CapEx for FY25 due to a component of carryover CapEx.
With that being said, I will hand over to Mr. Lovell to take us through some new exciting projects.
Strategy . Strategy.
I'm sorry. Hand over to Carl to talk to Strategy.
Thanks, Ben. So over the past six months, we've gone back and taken another look at our strategy to make sure we've got the right focus for the coming years. And we start off strategy with thinking about our core purpose. Why do we all come to work every day and really get excited about it? And we've got a revised core purpose, creating a healthier world. And what I particularly like about this purpose is it sits at the intersection of delivering against needs for our consumers and customers, the environment, communities, and regulators. So it's a very holistic purpose. And I'll just start off by walking through each of those areas. So the world needs more healthy, nutritious protein. And it makes absolute sense that aquaculture and salmon should be scaled up to provide more high-value protein given its relatively low environmental footprint, including a lower carbon footprint.
Our business makes a strong, direct contribution to regional employment, creates a ripple of positive impact for many other businesses and groups, and acknowledges that we value the relationships that have helped to achieve the successes we have, such as with customers, industry, government, scientists, and councils. We make an increasingly important contribution to the New Zealand economy. Our exports in financial year 2024 were around NZD 125 million. Blue Endeavour at scale will generate an additional NZD 300 million in exports, which is really important in the context of an export-led recovery for New Zealand. I'll move now to talk about the eight core themes that we are focused on over the coming years. These will be enduring themes, and we obviously have robust plans behind each one of these themes. But just to capture the sentiment of what they are talking about, firstly, we value our people.
That's about recognizing that people make the difference for our business. We recognize the imperative to enable an achievement-oriented culture where teams strive to be the best that they can be. I'll move across to our nurturing healthy relationships, which support our commercial endeavors and our social license. We are committed to developing our relationships across Māori key stakeholders and a wide range of stakeholders. Obviously, customer partnerships and customer communities, such as our Ōra King ambassadors, underpin our brands and sales. Vitally important, we continue to invest in that area. Building a sustainable future reflects our commitment to positive environmental and social outcomes.
We recognize we are constantly evolving and improving our sustainability deliverables. Building a strong foundation is about making our core business robust with a strong focus on resilience, securing productivity gains, and investing in our brands.
Focus on our fish is about improving fish health through R&D and breeding programs with a focus on thermotolerance, smoltification, and feed diets. It is also about growing our supply through the pilot trial of Blue Endeavour and eventual scaling up. Respecting the whole fish is about maximizing the utilization and value of the whole fish. And finally, an excellence in risk management is building a strong culture and capability for risk management across the organization. I'll now move to the guidance. So guidance for this year, for FY25, is NZD 26 million-NZD 32 million. And the board has reconfirmed that dividends will remain on hold for the foreseeable future as we develop our Blue Endeavour project. Move to the next. I'll just hand back to Grant to take us through the Blue Endeavour pilot.
Thanks, Carl. So we are pretty much at the next step of what has been a very long journey. It's taken us approximately 10 years to get to this point. And obviously, we had the final consent granted in February of this year. And yesterday, the board has provided us approval to progress the pilot project, which is very exciting. And I must thank our board, actually, for both the confidence and the commitment to our ongoing growth plans. What we're looking at here is just a very high-level Gantt chart. And I think one of the key aspects around the Blue Endeavour work in the pilot programme that we're doing is this is a walk-before-we-run strategy. We want to be conservative in our implementation and our planning here to ensure that the unknowns become knowns and we're able to rectify and have a successful expansion of the process.
Although we have the final consent granted, there is still plenty to do and lots of water to flow through that channel before we're actually able to put fish to site. We're not allowed to put any infrastructure on site until June 2025. Between now and then, we'll be undertaking an environmental monitoring program. This includes benthic and water column monitoring, as well as marine mammal monitoring and seabird monitoring as well. Once we will need to put fish to sea into the Pelorus in April-May next year, these will be grown inshore. We will grow those fish inshore to approximately one to 1.5 kilograms before we relocate the fish offshore to Blue Endeavour. That will likely occur around October 2025. The first harvest from the pilot plant will be in the following year, August-September 2026.
We're anticipating up to approximately 500 tons of additional growth. And if you flip to the next slide, there, Grant, one of the key aspects is we will be looking to undertake this twice before we scale further. This slide here, if you have a look on the right-hand side, is actually how Blue Endeavour is going to look in the pilot phase. This is actually the pen infrastructure from our supply partner, ScaleAQ. And that render is put into location at the Blue Endeavour site. So two initial pens. And this will be undertaken in a simplified farming model. We'll have two pens and a service vessel. The service vessel will be heading out on a daily basis to undertaking feeding, monitoring, diving activities. And as we come through, we will then tow these fish back into an inshore location for harvest in 2026.
The key aspects that we have to do between now and next year is really around ordering the key infrastructure. That predominantly is the vessel, the pens, and the mooring grid. Those processes and contracts will be undertaken over the coming months with implementation next year. I'll now pass back to Carl.
Thanks, Grant. I'll just summarize up the presentation so far, and then we'll move to questions after this. So FY24 has been a solid year with a return to profitability underpinned by a second successful year of the adapted farming model. And that has continued into the start of FY25. We continue to invest in our adaptation R&D. And I'm encouraged by the early results from the thermotolerance breeding program conducted at Cawthron Institute. And this work is moving to sea evaluation trials. We are focused on fish health and continue to invest in R&D to further reduce mortalities. This remains a big opportunity for King Salmon to improve financial performance and strengthen our social license. Demand for King Salmon at the right sizes exceeds our ability to supply. And the Blue Endeavour consent is extremely good news. However, aquaculture rewards patience and caution.
We will step into open ocean aquaculture in a considered and proven-up manner. We will commence with the pilot farm before committing to full investments required for the scale-up. We are in equal measure cautiously optimistic and excited for the future. We continue to invest in solidifying our core business with our CapEx programme targeted at business-as-usual asset replacements, resilience in the face of climate change, and R&D to improve fish health. The business also continues to evaluate an investment in greenfield processing. This is a 140+ year investment opportunity. We believe a new site will provide sufficient productivity gains to warrant investment based on our current volumes. It becomes mandatory to support the increased volumes associated with any scaling of Blue Endeavour. A decision on a greenfield site will be made during FY25. The guidance for FY25 is NZD 26 million-NZD 32 million.
This reflects the continued improvement in the underlying core operations. On that note, I'll hand over to questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question via the phone, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please type your question into the Ask A Question box. Your first phone question comes from Christian Bell with Jarden. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, team. Just checking you can hear me okay before I start.
Yeah. That's all good, Christian. Go for it.
Cool. Nice one. So firstly, just focusing on the guidance, which is 18% growth at the midpoint driven by 12% higher harvest volumes. Firstly, just what is driving that volume uplift? Are you increasing your feed limit, or is it fish performance-related? Are you able to just provide some color around that?
Yeah. I'll jump in on that one there, Christian. Look, it links to the lag and the slow growth time of fish there. It takes us 24 to 30 months to grow a fish. So when we make a change, it takes a little bit of time for us to be able to optimize that change and come through. So now that we've been operating our new strategy for approximately just under two years, we're in the position that we're able to optimize. So we haven't got any increases in feed discharge coming through, but we will have more feed going into the water to allow more growth. So it's more around ensuring we have fish in the right locations and maximising the farm's potentials that we have.
For the sort of core inshore farming model from FY26, what would be your expected sort of sustainable volume level? Is it still the 6,500?
Based on the current farms that we are operating, we sit in a 6,800 to 7,200 long-term volume. That's based on current feed discharges.
Okay. That's 6,800 to 7,200. FY25, is it sustainable?
Yes, it is.
Okay. Cool. And then I guess the other sort of driver. Oh, and actually, just before I move on, how much of that 6,800 to 7,200 is coming from the Tory versus the other sort of trials and stuff?
Look, the vast majority of that will spend some of its life in the Tory Channel. Obviously, our model results in all fish other than a small amount in the Pelorus Sound spending time in the Tory Channel. But it will sit around that probably about 2,000 to 2,500 tonnes of harvest will occur outside of the Tory Channel. But of that volume only, around 700 or so tonnes would have never spent time in the Tory Channel.
Okay. 700. Okay.
Yeah. Because the.
Yeah. Okay.
Because the Ruakaka and Otanerau, the fish on those two sites spend their first summer down the Tory Channel and are then relocated to the Queen Charlotte farms and are harvested out prior to Christmas. So those two farms become very important for our strategy. They're pretty much an extension of the Tory Channel for us.
Yeah. Okay. So I guess when you sort of announced you were changing the model, there was kind of like a 6,000 plus 500 type simple equation. Is that kind of more like, what, slightly more than 6,000 plus 700 now? Is that one way to think about it?
Yeah. I think the 500 and even the way we're treating the seasonal harvest and a little bit of optimization in time, the seasonal harvest, in essence, for small fish is probably reduced a little bit. And we're utilising some larger earlier entry going through to the Pelorus as well for some slightly larger size. But I think it's more around that 6,300 plus 700 and then a little bit of up and down depending upon the biological performance of each year.
Cool. That's awesome. Thank you for clarifying that. And then the other sort of key driver for guidance, I guess, is price. So I guess how much more room do you think you have to lift overall pricing?
Yeah. Good question, Christian. It's one that comes up all the time that we continually test and try and find that limit. We believe that there is still more room there. Inflation has been. It's not just New Zealand that has had inflation. All of our global markets, our main trading markets, have also suffered that. And their food prices have increased. And that does provide a little bit of a better environment for us to have those negotiations and discussion with customers. So there is some, but there is always going to be a limit to that. We are seeing some of that tension starting to come into the market now as well where people and consumers are making choices. We particularly probably see that a little bit more in the retail space. But in the food service space, we're still seeing very, very strong demand.
It continues as we've probably had a theme that we've had throughout today's presentation, particularly for that larger size, that demand continues to exceed supply. That provides a good environment for having those price discussions.
Then I guess the other sort of element would be for your average price would be optimizing your product and market mix. If you were able to sort of fully optimize your mix, how much more uplift do you think that would provide over your average price in FY 2024?
Ooh.
Too bad.
There's a lot of moving parts into that and answer for that one, Christian. This is also within our strategy. We actually have to shape our markets for the long term as well. Sometimes that might be looking at what is the best choice. The best choice in the very near term or on the day is not a strategy for building brand and building consumer awareness. We do take a longer-term approach to this. But we do have to shape our markets up for five years out and beyond. That's more within our longer-term strategy to ensure that we set up for the best success as Blue Endeavour comes on.
Okay. Yes. So it wouldn't be appropriate for us to assume any significant price or, I guess, average pricing uplifts from mix, I guess, as soon as next year. It's sort of more of an incremental lift over time.
Yeah. Yeah. I think there would probably be more of an approach to take. But it's something, of course, that we are always looking at and testing every day for the range of products that we do have and the markets that we're in, what is the best choice of the product available, the customers who we have, the markets that we trade in. But there's a lot of moving parts.
Okay. I guess that kind of leads me to my next question. EBIT margin was 13.1% this year, I guess, the first full year under the new model with more normal costs. So how much more expansion do you think is possible in terms of EBIT margin, if any? And do you have a target?
Yeah. Hi, Christian. It's Ben here. It's a good question, I guess, if you asked me two years ago and if you said we could deliver NZD 25 million or had a bet in your hand off. But I think even in delivering this number, we still think there's incremental opportunities for improvement. We sort of talked about in Q4, we did have slightly smaller fish, which impacted our export markets. We don't forecast that repeating in FY 2025. That combined with a little bit more fish to sell from optimizing the production models sort of perhaps drive that increase in guidance range. So I think sort of the next focus for the team is to deliver the FY 2025 guidance range, reassess where we think there's opportunities for improvement, and go again. So I think there's always opportunities to do things better in reflection on my 20-odd years here.
We'll keep pushing as far as we can. That drives better cash flow. That cash flow makes these growth projects more obtainable for us.
Okay. Awesome. So I'm guessing the cost base has basically been sized for the new model. And a lot of the sort of improvements have been made this year in terms of mortality and things like that. So I guess in terms of room for further expansion, it really comes down to the speed of, I guess, your average pricing versus underlying cost inflation. And so you probably wouldn't want to assume while there might be sort of some further margin expansion to go. It's not about to go. You're not about to see another massive step up in EBITDA margin anytime soon.
I'd agree with that. I think the things which are more uncertain would be things like if we could completely now affirm thermotolerance and sort of get another step change in mortality, which would essentially give us. Reopen our water space.
That could potentially reopen water space with fallowed. But those things probably still have a little bit of a longer lead time. So they would be sort of outside Blue Endeavour, the key structural changes within the business.
Okay. Awesome. And actually, I guess just in terms of the pilot trial that, I guess, all going well would start from FY26, I guess, once actually you've got the farms on order. What would be the annual running costs for that? Do you need more people? Is there sort of more, I guess, operating costs for getting the boat out there? Because I'd imagine it would be a slight drag over the next few years.
Yeah. So look, we're anticipating that from a pilot scale look, obviously, yes, we will require a few more people to run that. The boat is going to require a crew. So yes. The logic of the Blue Endeavour pilot farm is to approximately break even. It's not designed for it to be something for us that we're going to be making definite value on. Its key aspect is there's a small uplift in volume, but its key aspect is to make sure we are proving the water space, proving the biologicals, and doing the work before we expand and put significant infrastructure into place.
Perfect. Thank you. Sorry, just a couple more questions. This is a short one. On fish performance, what was the actual mortality percentage this year so that we can kind of compare it to what you've done in the past?
Yeah. Look, I think we'll touch base on that one later because, obviously, the old model, the old way of calculating the percentage was a strange scenario. So I'll have to recalculate that and give it to you a little bit later.
Okay. Cool. And then final question. So do you know.
You can see in the graph that it is well under half of where we have been in the last couple of years.
Right. Cool. Thank you. And so, I mean, would it be sensible to basically extrapolate that as half of the mortality percentage from FY 2023?
Yes. I think that's probably yep.
Cool. Then I guess just final question on BAU CapEx this year, NZD 14 million. Can we assume that that goes back to NZD 10 million in FY26?
Yeah. The long-term run rate, Christian, we see is NZD 10 million. You do get a few spikes depending on what we're doing. So things like the PENS are assets which generally last for sort of 20+ years. And I think we do have some PEN replacements coming up. But a long-term average for staying in business would be around NZD 10 million for the business.
Cool. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, guys. That was all from me.
Thanks, Christian.
Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. We'll just pause momentarily for any further phone questions to come through until we move to the webcast questions. There are no further phone questions at this time. I'll hand it back to the room for the webcast questions.
Cool. So the first question on the web questions is, please update on the trading environment and marketing arrangement with the China market. Do you want to take that one, Graeme?
Okay. So the trading environment and the market update. Okay. Well, so earlier this year, and sorry, earlier in FY24, we signed a distribution agreement with our import partner, China Resources Food Supply. And we're still working through that with them for an improving result throughout this year. We've really only re-entered into the China market in late last year. So it's early days for us. What we are seeing in the market there is a really strong performance. They are enjoying having quality protein coming into the market. We anticipate for the future that this is a market that will be providing a very strong demand. They are very quite selective about the size that they're after. Bigger is better in that market. And that has been challenging for us this year with very strong demand for that across all markets for the larger size.
I think in summary in here, it is within our strategy, within our forecast, and within our intentions to significantly grow within the China market. I'm not sure if that is answering all the aspects of that question.
Thank you, Graeme. The second question, is the Blue Endeavour project likely to require another capital raise from shareholders?
I'll take that. So our strategy for funding Blue Endeavour is using cash reserves, firstly. We're generating free cash flow and hence the focus on running the core business as strongly as we can. The more free cash flow we can generate, obviously, the better our capability to fund Blue Endeavour. You'll note we also have no debt on the balance sheet. So we have room for some conservative gearing. And by pushing out the timelines of when the big investments are required, it also gives us more time to build the cash flows required for it. So I think it's tight whether or not an equity raise would be required down the track. We're not saying we need one, but we're not ruling it out either.
That probably provides a flavor that if there is an equity raise required down the track, it's not likely to be particularly substantial. It could be tens of millions NZD. It would be at least five years away. I think that probably answers it.
Cool. That's the end of the questions.
Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for that. We'll sign off now and look forward to seeing you all again at the half-year results. Thank you.
Good. That's concluded our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.