Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the New Zealand King Salmon Investments Limited half-year results announcements. 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 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 enter it into the Ask a Question box and click Submit. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Carl Carrington, CEO. Please go ahead.
Kia ora tatou. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the New Zealand King Salmon half-year results. Joining me on this presentation this morning will be Graeme Tregidga, our GM of Sales and Marketing, and Ben Rogers, our CFO. Usually, we would have Grant Lovell, our GM of Aquaculture, with us. However, Grant is on a well-deserved annual leave break, so the team is just the three of us this morning. I'll turn straight away to the summary of the key outtakes from this morning's presentation. I would characterize the first half-year results as having made solid progress, with the first half GAAP NPAT result of NZD 10.6 million. The changes made to the farming model in FY 2023 have underpinned our supply this year, which has enabled the business to perform in line with expectations.
The GAAP results were positively impacted by a fair value uplift in assets of NZD 4.1 million. That compares to a loss in first half 2023 of NZD 8.3 million, and the continued unwind of an early closeout of FX contracts in FY 2021 of NZD 3.6 million. The first-half pro forma EBITDA profit of NZD 10.7 million compares to a loss last year of NZD 12.7 million. Our rolling twelve-month EBITDA is at NZD 21 million. The mortality reduction is consistent with our expectations following changes to the farming model. First half of this year, mortality cost was at NZD 7.8 million, compared with NZD 22.3 million for the same period year ago. We still see opportunities for further reductions in mortalities over the medium term. We've continued to focus on price and product optimization in the first half, and a strong focus on our cost base remains.
We're also focused on improving our business resilience. If I turn to the balance sheet, the balance sheet remains strong, with net cash on hand at NZD 25.2 million, up from NZD 15.7 million the year before, from 31st of January, with good, positive free cash flow. However, our CapEx is skewed heavily to second half of this year. The full-year CapEx is forecast to be NZD 10.5 million. The first-half CapEx was at NZD 1.6 million. The projects are focused on BAU, asset replacements and increasing resilience. Going forward, our focus remains on optimizing and stabilizing the existing operations, including investments to reduce the volatility of our core earnings. The second focus area is development of our production growth options, including Blue Endeavour.
For guidance, the pro forma EBITDA guidance range has been revised to NZD 23.5 million-NZD 27.5 million, from the previous guidance range of NZD 21 million-NZD 25 million. The FY 2024 full-year expected harvest is at 6,500 tons. Just turning to the operational highlights. For the first half, we had harvested just under 3,000 tons, with a first-half revenue of NZD 92 million. In context, for a six-month period, that is a record result over the past five years. Our sales are primarily to New Zealand, Australia, and North America, which are accounting for 87% of sales. We have just commenced sales to China during the first half of this year, so there will be an uptick in sales into the Asian region as we move forward through the year.
You can see from the tables on the right-hand side, first half-year GAAP NPAT of NZD 11 million, rounded, and pro forma operating EBITDA also at NZD 11 million.
[Foreign language] , it's Graeme here, and just before I get into the brands part of the presentation, I'd just like to offer thanks and recognition to the 450 New Zealand King Salmon team for their dedication and hard work to achieve this result. We'd also like to thank and recognize our customers for their ongoing support for our premium product and their shared passion for fine seafood. We also appreciate our service providers and suppliers to ensure that our product gets to our customers in premium condition, and of course, a special thanks to our shareholders, because we thank you for your ongoing support and belief in what we do....
So in terms of our brands, look, one of the things that we really like to focus on here at New Zealand King Salmon is getting closer to our customers and getting closer to our end users. And we do that by focusing on our engagement within our Ōra King ambassadors, our key chefs in the food service space. It's been challenging to do that over the last few years, and we've created a documentary that we screen globally to tell our story. And I encourage you all here, if you have not seen it, to head to the Ōra King website to view that documentary. We're focusing and aligning our AMP spend with our sales growth and our margin targets that we have in each market.
We've moved our digital and social media programs in-house, and we're focusing on our retail and food service brands to maintain that presence and story to our relevant audience in the most cost-effective way possible. On our Omega Plus pet food range, we are focusing our story, the way we tell our story through digital and social media, and using our ambassador programs there to increase brand presence in both New Zealand and in China. We're focusing our and activating our specialty strategy for Omega Plus, with engaging events and social media activity with key retailers such as Animates. Within Regal, our Regal smoked product remains New Zealand's most preferred smoked salmon brand, proving our consumer trust that they have in our Regal brand. What they like is our exceptional quality and consistency of our range.
Our Regal Epicurean range continues to drive profitability through our target approach towards the younger demographic and directly contributes to our overall positive market share across the Regal range. Turning to sustainability, we continue to progress on our sustainability journey. We recently undertook an industry-wide life cycle assessment, and you can see on the chart on the right that New Zealand King Salmon has a very low footprint, and extremely low when it is compared to other protein. It's also, of course, a very high and nutritious protein. We're committed to reusable and recyclable and compostable packaging right across our business, and we've just completed our submission of our third modern slavery report.
In FY 2023, we achieved a Best Aquaculture Practice 4-star certification, and right now we're working through the completion of that same audit for FY 2024. We're preparing for the incoming Aotearoa New Zealand Climate Standards, which is effective for our current financial year. Turning attention to our sales performance, we're continuing to target price and product optimization. We're focused on supplying our key markets. And right across those, there have been cost increases that we continue, that provide challenges across our business, and we have to pass those on through price increases. Despite that, global demand remains very strong. Our New Zealand sales volumes, however, contracted, and this is mostly in our value-added and smoked lines. However, our imported Atlantic volumes continue to increase as consumers seek a more value offer.
Our North America premium demand continues to perform very strongly, and most of that increase in sales volume is within the food service whole fish category, which is up 25% compared to the same period last year. But, and our Regal-branded products remain and continue to perform well. You can see on the chart there that our Japan, Japan market volumes decreased when we compare to the same period in our financial year of 2023. And it's a continuation of the previous years, which is a result of our price optimization model.
Within Asia, and that excludes our Japan market, as Carl mentioned, we recently have returned to the China market, as well as we had a large contract for smoked product, and that has made a significant uplift in the volume that we've done in the first half of this financial year. In Australia, there's a similar story in Australia. Those cost increases have had to be passed on in the form of price increases. However, we had a significant contract of supply to a key customer, and that has had a significant increase in the volume for Australia in that first half. Continuing that same theme in Europe, of that price increase having to be passed on, and that's proved to be quite challenging for some customers.
But it's all part of our price and product optimization as we target to rebuild all these markets around the globe. And back to you, Carl.
Turning now to the fish performance. The first half of FY 2024 saw the adapted aquaculture model complete its first summer. The model of having the majority of stock in the Tory Channel and out of the warmer water sites over summer has proved successful to date. Would significantly reduce mortality in the first half of FY 2024 compared to previous years. You can see the mortality, biomass table on the right shows the improvement in the context of the past five years' performance. On the table on the right-hand side, on the bottom, you can see that we were not harvesting from Pelorus Sound over the summer period. Harvest volume will be up on FY 2023, but we still have further optimization to undertake, and we expect that we'll see a slight increase again in FY 2025 harvest volumes.
The feed price remains under significant pressure due to raw material ingredients, especially fish oil, which has seen significant increases in price, and we anticipate that will continue for some time with a poor anchovy season expected. Work continues on thermotolerance trials with our breeding stock. The aim is to be able to select and breed a more thermotolerant salmon, but this work is in its early phases, and although it is showing very promising initial results, the gains will become apparent in the medium term, not a near-term initiative.
Thanks, Carl, and [Foreign language] , everybody. As noted in the earlier slides, it has been a relatively uneventful half in New Zealand King Salmon's recent context. Post the change to our production model, the business, including our financial performance, has been consistent with our expectations. On a GAAP basis, we reported a net profit after tax of NZD 10.6 million, and moving to our preferred measure of performance, pro forma EBITDA, New Zealand King Salmon reported a profit of NZD 10.7 million. At NZD 10.7 million, the first half is our best result in the last five years on a like-for-like, February to July, comparative basis. These results reflect the changes to our production model by having a majority of our salmon in the Tory Channel over the summer. Consistent with our expectations, we saw a significant reduction in our mortality expense.
We continue to optimize margin from our available harvest through product and market choices, and we have continued our discipline around operating expenses and capital allocation, focusing on where we can continuously reduce expenditure, increasing our focus on reducing risk and building resiliency across the business, as well as to continue to investigate opportunities for growth, including Blue Endeavour. As Carl mentioned earlier, the GAAP NPAT result also benefited from the fair value gain on our biological assets, as required by accounting standards, and the continued impact of the early close out of our FX contracts, which occurred in the first half of FY 2022, and will continue to unwind in our GAAP results until FY 2026.
Moving to the walk between our first half year results this year and the prior comparable period, as noted earlier, we have benefited from changes to our farming model, which has contributed some additional harvest. The good news here is we also believe there is some further harvest upside to be realized from FY 25. We are still working through the FY 2025 production plan, and we'll provide a further update on this at a later date. We've continued to benefit from choices around products and market choices, in addition to implementing price increases and market in response to cost pressures which have existed right across the supply chain. From a cost perspective, as a business, we continue to focus on these, but we are facing some challenges, specifically with feed, labor, and freight.
Our feed is priced on a raw material basket basis, and although there has been relief in some categories, as Carl mentioned earlier, fish oil continues to remain under pressure connected to the Peruvian anchovy season. Labor costs have been impacted by the strong and playthrough environment. Freight, while it's pleasing, freight is flat compared to the prior period. It's important to note, we have had an increase in sales volume, hence, we are achieving a reduced cost on a per KG basis. This reflects some relief in the cost of freight, however, there are some key destination ports which are still sitting significantly above pre-COVID levels. Mortality, as noticed previously, is significantly down consistent with our changes to the production model.
From a balance sheet perspective, following the equity raise in FY 2023, the balance sheet remains strong, with net cash increasing to NZD 25 million. This was driven by our underlying profitability, a focus on managing working capital, but has also benefited from the timing of CapEx. Associated with the new production model, we now have a seasonal uplift in production between October and December. Last year, the seasonal fish were frozen down and used for input into our smoking products. This has allowed New Zealand King Salmon to maximize whole-food sales during the period. Consistent with fine-tuning our new farming model in aquaculture, we are still looking at how we fine-tune the seasonal harvest balance between realizing it as a fresh product versus freezing it and utilizing it as a smoking input.
As referenced above, the cash balance also benefited from CapEx being skewed towards the second half of the year. We are forecasting CapEx to be around the NZD 10.5 million mark for the FY 2024 year. Looking ahead, as part of the half-year results, we are updating our full year guidance to NZD 23.5 million-NZD 27.5 million. This is up from our original guidance of NZD 21 million-NZD 25 million. The revised guidance represents a strong first half of the year. It's based on our current balance dates. Mortality is generally skewed to the first half of the year, while sales are skewed to the second half of the year. So our second half performance is normally stronger than our first half.
Both the board and management team are focused on improving the underlying performance of the business and delivering a consistent set of results. These are important as they enable us to develop and fund our future growth initiatives. The dividend remains on hold as we develop our future production options and strategies. I will now hand back over to Carl to give an update on Blue Endeavour.
Thanks, Ben. The consent order for Blue Endeavour was issued by the Environment Court on the twentieth of September, just yesterday. This consent requires an 18-month monitoring period before farming can be undertaken at this site. However, we are now awaiting MPI to grant the aquaculture license. We anticipate that process could take 2 months, but we don't anticipate any issues during that stage. Once monitoring is complete, we intend to build a pilot farm on the site to further test the infrastructure and to prove up the business case. We would look to do at least one harvest from a pilot farm before committing to a progressive scaling up, in order to best manage the risk and the risk profile of that investment.
The 18-month monitoring period affords us further time to finalize the key infrastructure requirements that are needed to support Blue Endeavour. It is not just infrastructure on the farm that is needed, but it may also include fresh water infrastructure to ensure the capacity and stability of supply of smolt to sea, and harvest and transport infrastructure to ensure we can move our salmon in the most economic fashion. It will also require processing infrastructure to efficiently handle the increased throughput. All of these investments will be considered as part of our long-term capital investment program. We will provide updates to shareholders on these plans as they are developed over the coming 6-9 months. The performance of the existing business is obviously a critical element in enabling the growth aspirations of the company.
I would just like to acknowledge the tremendous work of all the staff and our customers and shareholders in supporting us to deliver, I think, a very solid first half result, and we look forward to continuing the momentum as we head towards the full year result. Thank you. I'll now move to take 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 question from the phone line comes from Christian Bell with Jarden. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, team. Just firstly, can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear, Christian.
Cool. Thanks, Ben. Yeah, well done on a solid result. I just... My first question relates to, starting with in June, at your ASM, you had sort of provided unaudited EBITDA for the first quarter of NZD 6 million. This first half result employs NZD 5 million in the second quarter, on slightly worse margin. Just what was the reason behind that slight, slight softness versus the first quarter?
Well, yeah, one thing I'd probably pull out, Christian, is we do, during our half year and year-end results, we do a little bit more work over cut-off. We did have some quite large cut-off adjustments in July. We had about NZD 800,000 of EBITDA, which moved from July to the August month. That would probably be the big reason. Like, in terms of performance, we've been tracking to plan, if not slightly above, hence the revision of guidance up. Yeah, there's no concerns or deterioration of performance between Q2 and Q1.
Okay, cool. Are you able to provide, like, the mortality costs split between the first quarter and the second quarter? Just because obviously the first quarter, you would expect more of the mortality, like, you know, a higher weighting of mortality in the first quarter. So are you able to... Do you have that in dollar terms?
I don't have that right in front of me at the moment, but what we probably are starting to see as a business is, mortality is starting to drift further in the year. So I think historically for the business, it would've been January and February, and we probably see it more being March, April, and May as the peak months now. But it's all, you know, can depend on complicated things like weather patterns. But from a mortality perspective, we are tracking towards plan. I can ask them to bring that out for you.
Given that February, March, April is basically as well as the first quarter, do you expense that mortality as it happens in your reporting? Or do you kind of smooth it over the half?
No, yeah, mortality is expensed when incurred.
Like, how does that work then? Like, given that mortality expense in the first quarter should be much higher in this, than it is in the second quarter? Kind of like, what's the kind of, I know you're sort of talking about your cutoff thing before, but if you've got so much more mortality cost in the first quarter than it is in the second quarter, how do you kind of marry that up?
Yeah, well, I think, and I'll try to just scramble and get some numbers, but I think my perspective is probably what mortality traditionally might have been more weighted towards Q1. It's probably been reasonably flat across Q1 and Q2, but I'll just try to pull those out quickly for you now. Yeah, so just in terms of that 7.8, Christian, so it's 4, 4.1 in Q1-
Yeah.
-and 3.6 in Q2, so there's probably-
Got it.
-that might help, but since it's not as big a differentiation as you want. But,
Yeah.
Yeah, sort of the peak months for the year, this year would have been April, May.
Right. Okay. Oh, cool. That's super helpful. Thank you. And then, just on El Niño for this summer, do you have any sort of idea of what kind of impact that could have? Grant's probably the best person to answer that, but he's not here, so are you able to sort of provide some color on that?
Yeah. So, Christian, yes, the temperature forecasts that we get from NIWA and Cawthron, and so on, are indicating that the water temperatures are likely to be a little bit higher than the long run averages. Not necessarily extremely high, but a little bit higher. But the way we're operating is we assume the worst and try to execute accordingly. So we're planning that the water temperatures will be high, and we make sure that we have the fish, as much of the fish out of the warmer waters, prior to the summer really fizzing. So, you know, we do everything we can, and if we get a cooler water temperature, then that's well and good, but we're not planning on that.
I know if Grant was here, he would say, traditionally, El Niños haven't been too bad for us, but it is always, it is always a known to forecast what can eventuate.
Is it fair to say, like, given that it is the Tory Channel, and the Tory Channel was kind of well within the sort of safe temperature zone that you've kind of provided in the past, even if temperatures were to increase by, I don't know, half to a whole degree hotter in the Tory Channel, you should still, really speaking, be within that safe zone?
Yeah, so-
Oh, sorry. Are you okay still there?
This is the conference operator. We've temporarily lost connection with the speaker line. Please continue to hold. The conference will recommence shortly. Thank you for holding. The speaker line is now reconnected, and the conference will recommence. Please go ahead.
Apologies, Christian. I think we had some technical difficulties, but if you can repeat your question, we'll do our best to answer it.
Just, it was just around the—still around the El Niño sort of temperatures. Just in the past, you've sort of indicated that in the Tory, you know, you've sort of... The temperatures there are generally well within the safe zone, which I think is 14 - 18 degrees Celsius, for, you know, for happy salmon. So even if through El—like an extreme El Niño, say, it lifted water temperatures from 0.5 - 1 degree higher than normal, you know, in theory, you should still be within the safe zone. Is that, is that kind of a fair assumption?
Yeah, that's a fair assumption, Christian. That's why we're focused on trying to keep the fish in the Tory Channel over summer and get out of the Pelorus and minimize Queen Charlotte, which will be slightly worse than Tory. That's a fair assumption.
Great. Cool. Thank you. And then if I could just move on to the pricing, sort of, pricing and demand has... You sort of indicated demand's been strong across all your markets, which is, you know, not surprising. But just looking at the export yield, like, so it looked like your pricing was up, or your average pricing was up, mainly driven by the New Zealand market, but it was slightly flatter in the export market. Is that an underlying kind of slowdown, or is that something else like product mix or something like that in the export-
Yeah.
in the export market?
Yeah. Thanks, Christian. It's mostly product mix. There's quite a number of factors that really do come into it when you have customer destination, product mix, and volume. That all come into it between the different markets. But by and large, the price increase, price increases that we've been doing is widespread and across all markets.
... so we try, and this is trying to get them aligned as much as possible. So, yeah, probably about-
Oh, sorry?
No, you go ahead.
Oh, sorry. Are you sort of still confident that you can continue to ratchet up the price going forward, or have you kind of hit a ceiling?
Yeah, look, it's been pretty significant what we've done over the last year. So, you know, like many businesses, we've been impacted by a lot of those cost increases. And we, like everybody, there's a limit to what you can go and do there. There's always a little bit of a fine-tuning that we what we're referring to when we're optimizing the market. So there's probably some things there that we can do for further improvement. But by and large, we see that those significant changes that we have had to do over the past year will certainly be a lot more, perhaps, if they subdued in the future.
I would not see price increases of the magnitude that we've been having to do over the past six months, yeah.
Right. Okay, then, makes sense. Oh, sorry, was it-
Yep, it's-
Sorry, just a couple more questions. Just on the CapEx, NZD 10.5 million, that's a bit higher than your guidance of NZD 6.5 million-NZD 7.5 million. Just wondering, given that it's sort of BAU CapEx, is that a reflection of inflation? And so should we expect similar levels of CapEx required going forward?
Yeah, I think probably a couple of things. Christian, with a new CEO coming on board, I think there's been a bit more focus on risk and resilience, so looking at how we can protect the current earnings, which are important as we look at what we will do in the future. We also have a couple of growth CapEx projects in there. One is looking at essentially how we can remove waste from landfill. So it should hopefully be a good news story, we can talk to about that in the future, which will be a great sustainability outcome, a good cost savings outcome.
But yeah, I think in terms of that stay in business CapEx, I think, yeah, sort of, a little bit of inflation, but I think, yeah, if I said NZD 6-7.5, maybe it's more like NZD 8-9, and then the delta between that will be some growth capital initiatives. So, hopefully expect to see an uplift in earnings from those.
Okay, sweet. And sorry, just you had sold the Waiau freshwater facility, I thought in the first half, but I didn't notice that in your cash flow statement. Is that... So what, what's kind of happening there? Is that coming into the second half time?
Yeah, we recognized that in our year-end accounts. So I think, hopefully, you—I think from memory, if you look at our cash flow at year-end, you'll see proceeds from sales of about NZD 1.5 million. But yeah, that was in our last financial year.
Okay, sweet. And sorry, just one final question, just on Blue Endeavour. So you've got the monitoring period for 12-18 months, and then you would look to do the pilot program. So, in crude terms, like, what, how far away would the first harvest be from the pilot from now?
Potentially four years.
Yeah.
Potentially four years, Christian, because once we get through the monitoring, the step will be to put some infrastructure out there, and we want to actually have the infrastructure sitting out there and make sure that it performs according to design specs, that we don't get any surprises around gear breaking or any failures. So we wanna test that first, and then we will put a small number of fish out there. I'm just pulling a number, maybe 500 tons, but that sort of quantum, so not a large amount of fish, and we want to see how they perform out there. So you're probably talking four years before we actually start, minimum four years, it could be five years, before we start to see any volume coming from there.
Once we're satisfied with the risk profile and the performance of fish, then we will start to progressively ramp it up from there. It's unlikely we're gonna see Blue Endeavour operating at full scale until early 2030s.
And so that's
It's just-
Oh, sorry.
It's just that, you know, aquaculture is one of those businesses that rewards caution and patience, so we need to, we need to make sure that before we start really ramping up the investment profile out there, we have absolute confidence that it will perform as we expect.
Previously, you had sort of indicated that the, the sort of CapEx cost of the pilot program would be roughly about NZD 10 million, so you could easily fund it off your balance sheet, balance sheet without having to, you know, raise extra capital. Is that, is that still the same thinking?
Yeah, well, we don't have a specific quote for it, but definitely think it's south of NZD 10 million. Look, it is something which we see as important to the future of aquaculture in New Zealand, so we could even look at you know, partnerships with even government entities to get that pilot across the line. But you're right, it is definitely something we can afford from the existing balance sheet.
Sweet. Carl, thank you so much for answering my questions. That, that was it from me.
Thanks, Christian.
The next question comes from Margaret Bei with Forsyth Barr. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome, Carl. Just checking you can hear me?
Morning, Margaret.
Yes, we can hear you.
Morning. Oh, thank goodness. All right, quick question from me, I guess, to start off with. You provide a really comprehensive resource consent update with all of your results, and I was wondering if you could maybe quickly talk us through the slide on slide 18, and just any key points and whether there are any risks that you see coming through?
... So this is in regards to the existing consents in Marlborough?
Yeah.
Yeah. Those consents will go through under the National Environmental Standards for Marine Aquaculture, which means that they are not out for public consultation. The consultation is with Iwi and that's basically it. We don't anticipate that there will be any difficulties renewing those consents, but it is a consenting process, so there's always the potential to be surprised. The consenting process for Crail Bay will be underway imminently, and the consenting process for the rest of the sites that expire in 2024 will get away early in 2024. There is always risk with the consenting process, but we're not anticipating that these will be unduly drawn out or controversial in the way that we experienced with Blue Endeavour.
Just to clarify, there wouldn't be any impacts on sort of operations BAU in the meantime, while you wait for those to come through?
No. No impact while we're waiting for those.
Okay, perfect. My next question is a little bit broader. Kyle, given you've had not very long in the role, but hopefully enough to get your feet under the desk, what would you kind of think about as your main priorities? And are they sort of divergent from what the company's been trying to do over the past sort of year in terms of cost rationalizations, optimization and price, that kind of thing? Is there anything else that you wanted to say has gone well or that you want to follow up on?
Yeah, yeah, certainly will. Fortunately, it's not my first rodeo in seafood, so, while I haven't been long in the business, I've sort of come up to speed with it reasonably quickly. I would say it's more a continuation of what they have been doing with more... So I think firstly, I just want to acknowledge that the team has done an exceptionally good job, in my opinion, of managing the market over the last 12, 18 months, with price realization and allocation of product to the right market. So that's been a big plus, and you've seen that turn up in the margins. And also acknowledge the work that has been done on adapting the farming strategies. And one good season is just a data point.
We need to be able to consistently repeat that to have confidence that that strategy is viable for the long term. But all the early indications are it's certainly tracking that way. For me, the bigger, the main change or shift in focus, I think, is a real concentration on building resilience of the business to try and mitigate the potential for shocks to hit our earnings. So there's a lot of investments that we are looking at to try and just to try and strengthen resilience across all parts of the business.
The other area is looking for productivity gains, because, you know, as Christian asked earlier on about pricing going forward, at some point, we have to anticipate that our ability to continue to take price at the rate we have will slow down. That's just a reality of, you know, once you start hitting high price points, there's more risk of substitution from alternative proteins, and Atlantic salmon supply chains will start to normalize, and so on. Whilst we will continue to work on price, we also have to continue to work on our cost structures. We are actively looking for opportunities to improve productivity. In my view, there are plenty of things we can be doing to lift productivity.
Of course, we have to be a little bit careful that we don't over-invest in existing assets, but we're also looking to upgrade to greenfield sites. Once Blue Endeavour volume start to come on, we will need to make some significant investments in our processing facilities. So we're just balancing out how much we invest in productivity today versus keeping our powder dry for a greenfield site. So I think it's more a continuation of the great work that has been done and, balancing that out with some further investment in resilience and productivity.
Thank you for that color. I just wanted to dig a little bit into the comment made around volume growth expected from about FY25. I think you may have touched on in previous updates where this uplift could come from, but could you just remind us, and maybe, if possible, put sort of volumes against initiatives, if there are concrete ones in sort of mind?
Yeah, just probably be a great, great question for Grant if he was here. My sort of color right off you, Margaret, is if an aquaculture sort of, you know, takes about 31 months to grow our salmon, so there's a long lead time between changes we make and outcomes. When we made the change around felling the poorest farms, we had at an, I guess, initial estimate of what we thought the potential harvest of those sites would be. As we get, you know, the benefit of actually putting that through our production model, the aquaculture team are always looking at opportunities to optimize that.
So the additional harvest is just going to come from potentially optimizing our existing farms, which can be compared to things like the size of smolt you put at sea. If you put a bigger smolt at sea, you have a shorter grow-out period, and Grant and team just do a bloody good job at optimizing that. So I think in terms of providing you. I know that's really cryptic, but in terms of providing you an actual tonnage uplift, look, I think it's something which will be reasonable, but we need to work through those production plans, and we'll probably talk more on that at a further update.
Great. Thanks, Ben. I know it's tricky with Grant not being there. That's it for me. Thank you so much.
Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone or type your question into the ask a question box. Your next question is a webcast question from Lawrence Lye, a private investor. This reads: When can we expect dividend to return?
Yeah, thanks for the question, Lawrence. I guess, probably caveat this answer with, aquaculture is a capital-intensive business, and the one thing we're doing as a company is probably, if I'd relate to FY 2023 was, I guess, a major reset of the business. FY 2024 is trying to get back to a steady state performance and also consider what we wanna do for the future. So at the moment, with a new CEO and a chairman, we're just working through a revised strategy, and associated with that strategy, we will be looking at things like dividend policy. So I don't have an answer for you at the moment, but we will update you when we have some further news on that option.
We will obviously be considering that as part of our capital requirements for the future.
Your next webcast question is from Trevor James with Selenium Corporation. This reads: Could you please explain the half year tax provision, tax losses?
Yeah, thanks for the question, Trevor. So we do have an expense there, but we do have carry forward. So my expectation is we will have tax losses to cover us for this financial year, so we won't have a cash tax expense to pay. And we expect to be in a tax paying position next financial year. So we do have tax losses, which are on balance sheet, which we are utilizing at the moment.
Your next webcast question comes from Lawrence Lye, a retail investor. This reads: Do you think the nuclear polluted water being put into the sea by Japan will affect the world's fish farming business?
Yeah, thanks, thanks again for the question, Lawrence. Look, we just, within the last couple of weeks, we just returned from China, and this was indeed very big news in China, where they have gone and banned the importation of Japanese seafood. So yeah, there is some, some impacts that will be felt from this. And naturally, that increases demand for safe, sustainable seafood, and we're in a really good place for that. Outside of that, we've seen very little impact, certainly around in the sales and demand space. And these things have a, have a bit of not gathering much pace and soon blow over.
In terms of that water affecting other aquaculture in the northern hemisphere, there's not a lot in our space around salmon that will be coming out of that region. Doubt whether they'll be having too much impact across where the main producing areas of Norway, Scotland, Ireland, et cetera. So at this stage, it'll be a watch and brief from us. Probably not a huge amount of an impact other than those key markets that are directly affected around China and Japan. So yeah, a slight positive in a way for us, but naturally not a positive of having that in the water.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone or type your question into the ask a question box. You have another question on the phone line. This is from David Oxley with ACC. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and apologies if I missed this because I had to duck away for a couple of minutes when you were asking, answering Margaret's question, but I can't see a feed cost, a feed conversion ratio in any of the pack, and I haven't heard you talk about it to date. Do you happen to know what that number was for the first half and, maybe more importantly, what you see for the full year?
Don't have it off the top of my head, David. But look, I can commit to getting back to you on that number, but I don't... My understanding is it's probably materially consistent with what we saw at the first half of last year.
Okay. That's great. Thank you. And similarly, in terms of the mortality rate, did you have a... Where that's at, at the current point in time? Is it obviously below where we were in the PCP, but is it in line with sort of long run budgeted expectations post the shift to the new model?
Yeah. But, yes, yes, it is. I think even in acknowledging it's sort of in line with the expectations, we do still believe we can do better from a mortality perspective. So I think, Carl talked about a couple of things around obviously investments and bits and pieces like thermal tolerance, but there's other things we can do around, things like seal management and bits and pieces. I know when Grant was talking at, year-end last year, he said in terms of the farming model, he'd give the team a, a pass mark. In terms of, if it was an exam, it, it might be a B-minus, and there's, there's work to do to get the A. So little, little incremental improvements, we can do. So, the team are definitely focused on executing those.
... Okay, thank you. And on the feed cost front, obviously things are continuing to go upwards, sort of half by half. But is there any sense that those feed costs per kg are starting to ease off in terms of the growth rate? For instance, was second quarter similar to first quarter or higher or lower? Where are we at in that regard?
On the whole, I think the first two quarters of our year were broadly flat. But it's within, you get a mix, though. So, within that mix, you see some components coming down and some components going up. So the one which we sort of flagged as a concern for us is fish oil. Fish oil tends to be linked to the Peruvian anchovy season, and they are flagging already that I think the season got delayed due to worries around the amount of fish in the water, and I think there's sort of issues around size. So they wanna hold off till they can grow a little bit more.
Just to give you a little bit of context, if I was to look at fish oil pre-COVID to what we're paying now, it is up 200%.
Hmm. And is there a second half bias to your fish oil purchases at all?
Not, not really. I think, sort of, within your feed basket, there is always an element of fish oil. In terms of feed discharge, I think feed discharge might be slightly higher in the... I think probably Q3 is our peak in terms of feed discharge. But, I wouldn't, I wouldn't see it being materially different to the first half.
That feed discharge is higher in Q3 because that's when we've got the most biomass growth as well.
Correct.
So it just matches that.
Right. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. And just finally, on the feed discharge front, am I right in thinking that in the current FY 2024 year, your feed discharge will be at a sort of relatively elevated level because you are not only growing biomass to hit your harvest targets for this year, but rebuilding biomass that was at relatively low levels at the FY 2023 year end, thanks to the mortality events that went on last year. So all other things being equal, assuming your harvest projections are broadly similar in 2025 relative to 2024, you ought to be discharging less feed in 2025 than you are going to in 2024, to the benefit of your aggregate feed cost number, excluding any further movements in feed costs per kg?
Yeah, that's a really good question, David, and I might actually run that past someone in our aquaculture team. But I think my initial expectations would be FY 2024 will be higher than FY 2023, because we've got more fish in the water, and generally more biomass will consume more food, and bigger fish will consume more food because it'll be larger. But I would expect, and maybe FY 2025 would also be slightly up again on the basis we'll be looking to increase our harvest, which is sort of briefly touched on before, but doesn't give specific numbers around.
Right. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Carrington for closing remarks.
Excellent. Well, thank you very much, everyone, for joining the call. Hopefully, we've provided some insight to our, reasonably, strong, or solid, I think, is how I'll describe it, first half performance, and we look forward to catching up, again, as once we get to our full year results. So, thank you all.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.