Welcome all to the presentation of Radius Care's half-year results for the half-year period to 30 September 2024. I'll present this morning with our Chief Financial Officer, Jeremy Edmonds, and Executive Chair, Managing Director, Brien Cree. At the end of the presentation, there'll be time for questions, so please let us know, drop us a note, or raise your hand for questions at the end of the presentation. We'll take all questions at once. And the format of this morning: I will give a brief overview of the business for the six-month period, following which Jeremy will provide a deeper dive analysis on the financials. Then Brien and I will talk to our strategy and outlook. So turning to page five, please, of the presentation.
Business highlights.
So as we have indicated in the NZX release, it's been a strong year, strong half-year performance to date, with eight months of the financial year now completed. Our metrics in FY24 and the first half are all up, and highlighted on this page, as you can see, a few of those metrics. In particular, our EBITDA per bed is up 10% from the prior comparable period of $12,000 per bed to around $13,500 per bed, which is a key metric for our business. Our mix and occupancy have also improved, and our occupancy is currently around 93% and has been for the last few months. We also set out that in the period, well, just recently, last month, we completed the majority acquisition of Cibus Catering, which is another step in diversifying our revenue sources, which we'll talk about a bit more later on.
So next slide, six financial highlights. As you can see, not in the financial highlights, but I was losing a game of bowls to John at Matamata Village. In fact, I lost two or three games in a row there, fairly humbling. So we'll move on from the picture on the slide pretty rapidly to some of the financial highlights from the period. As I said, all of our key metrics are up, and this slide calls out several of them: the EBITDA per bed, the underlying EBITDA at NZD 10.6 million, which is, again, the highest EBITDA that we have recorded for a six-month period. And pleasingly, accommodation supplements are now running at a rate of around NZD 11 million a year. A few years ago, that number was around NZD 6 million a year. So that's another pleasing metric from the half-year.
Our available funds from operations, or AFO, and cash flow were both significantly up, and our reported net profit after tax increased by 39%. So all of these metrics, as you can see, increased from a range of between 10% and 39%, very pleasing. And at the same time, our drawn debt reduced by around NZD 3 million, and we have declared a dividend of NZD 0.0065 per share for the period, which will be paid next month. So all of these results stem from our people. This is a massively important slide, not only because you can see John playing Jenga at our lovely Millstream Village at Ashburton, but I particularly wanted to call out the care home managers, the regional managers, and the executive team who are settled, stable, and provide such commercial and care-based focus to our teams of 1,700 people.
It's them who every day have to look after our residents and provide care to vulnerable residents. So they're well-led, and that's a critical success factor in the numbers we've just talked about, and Jeremy will talk more about shortly. And another couple of metrics on this page, as you can see in our staff satisfaction survey, our staff are happy, which is great. Our turnover is reduced. It's now at an all-time low for the company at 23%. That's critical given the nursing problems that the industry faced a couple of years ago that we pivoted out of and came out of probably 12 months earlier than some competitors, or most of our competitors. And our employee net promoter score, or ENPS, has increased by, as you can see, a significant amount, as well as internal hires being significant.
We've hired 60% of management positions internally, which is great to see our people coming through different roles. A critical part of the success of our business is our people. The final slide I want to cover off before I pass on to Jeremy is our certification, so in terms of care home certification, there's a maximum period, and every time you're audited, you'll get either one, two, three, or four-year certification, and as you can see on this slide, a few years ago, we had five care homes with four-year certification. We now have 15, and that is a testament to our team and their improvements and this mantra that we talk about a lot of continuous improvement of our care and to our residents. We're expecting that by year-end, that may be closer to 75%, which we're all very proud of, that the team contributing to that result.
It's worth noting that certification is becoming harder to get. So in a way, our trend is bucking that harder trend of obtaining certification. So again, that's a really pleasing outcome from Rosie and everybody. All of our 1,700 people have contributed to that slide. So that's a brief overview of the business to date for the six months. I'm going to now hand over to Jeremy, and he'll give a deeper dive on some of the financial metrics before Brien and I talk to strategy and then finish off with our outlook. Jeremy.
Thank you, Andrew. And I'm very happy to share some of the highlights behind the main drivers of our strong performance for the first six months of FY25. So starting with our main financial metrics, underlying EBITDA and underlying EBITDA per care bed. For EBITDA, you'll see the strong growth over the last three years and 14% up on the first half of last year, adjusted for the sale of Arran Court, which was one care home that we sold in January of this year. I'll talk more about revenue on the next slide, which was a very strong contributor to both metrics, but it's also worth highlighting the tight cost management that all members of the team have undertaken.
We still have a macro environment where there's some underlying cost pressures on our business and some of our key operating costs, and control of these, combined with revenue growth, contributed to the EBITDA growth. On EBITDA per care bed, now this metric excludes rent so that we can be comparable across leased care homes and owned care homes, and what's really important to note for the NZD 13,400 per care bed, this is just for six months, so the full-year result will be approximately double this result. Again, it's strong revenue growth, mix, and tight cost management across the portfolio that have contributed to this industry-leading result that we're very proud of. Moving on to revenue, so again, adjusted for Arran Court , revenue grew by 7% over the first half of the prior comparable period.
And here, the drivers were, as Andrew had mentioned, occupancy growth and a continued focus on mix towards the higher acuity, higher revenue segment of the portfolio. It's important to note also accommodation supplements were a strong contributor. This is where we get additional revenue for our premium rooms, and it's been an ongoing focus of ours to generate revenue from the premium parts of our portfolio. Then finally, where it all comes together is the dividend. As Andrew mentioned, we're pleased to announce an interim dividend of NZD 0.0065 per share, which will be fully imputed for New Zealand tax residents. This is very much a return to business as usual for dividends, following the significant efforts over the last couple of years that we've put into reducing debt, strengthening our balance sheet, driving cash flow, and improving business performance.
So in terms of an outlook for dividend, we do expect that total dividends for FY 2025 will go back to our dividend policy of somewhere between 50%-70% of AFO for the year.
So with that, I'll hand back to Andrew and Brien to talk about strategy.
Thank you, Jeremy. So as I said, Brien and I will talk to strategy and then outlook, and then open the floor to your questions. So over to you, Brien, for slide 14.
Thank you. So look, I'll just take you through the one slide, this slide 14. There are three key areas for our strategic growth, really, as a company going forward. Firstly, we want to grow scale, and we can achieve this within our core aged care business through leasing care opportunities, and that includes building lease-backs. And this is the best use of capital. It provides the highest level of return. M&A opportunities, we continue to look at M&A opportunities. Brownfield developments, which is the adding of villas to our existing sites. So those villages where we do have room to put in additional villas, that's what we are planning and proceeding with.
And also greenfield developments, where, for example, we have the Belfast project, which is a 100-bed care facility and some 75 villas, which starts. We should be able to start that the middle of FY, well, the middle of calendar year 2025. Secondly, we want to diversify revenue. And so you've seen that we've started doing this. We want to grow the Cibus Catering business. It's a specialist aged care food provider that also has a number of clients from schools through to various levels of aged care. So we want to grow that business with our partners there. We want to grow our Connect. Our Connect is the nursing bureau that we started in 2023, 2023, 2024. That business has grown quite quickly. It has around 150 staff, and it is moving into more in-home care. So we want to expand that business.
We also want to expand the Radius Shop. We've begun sourcing product direct from manufacturers overseas, and we have a plan to expand that online shopping experience for in-home care, basically. For people who are at home, it provides them access to sort of equipment that they require when they're not ready to come into care but do require some sort of support. Additionally, we want to expand into other health services beyond aged care. So what we are looking at there is in-home care. We have gone some long way down the path of providing in-home care, which we do through our Connect. We also are looking at ACC in-home care as we expand out into the community, providing additional services, basically, that are aligned to health.
And the third thing that we have begun working on is templating the Radius Way as a full-system offering for providing aged care. We see this including all our systems and processes, policies, procedures. We're packaging it together to be an offering that other providers will be able to take away and utilize as a standalone product for developing an aged care offering. And we believe there is an international market for this. And that's slide 14.
Thanks, Brien. Yeah, that's very exciting to be part of all of those strengths. And thanks to Brien for presenting that. And it kind of runs nicely into slide 15, the "Why are we different?" slide. And we talked about this at our shareholder meeting in August. But just to reiterate, we often get the question from retail investors, from analysts, "Why are we different? Why can we make NZD 26,000, NZD 27,000 per bed?" And so we just wanted to spend a couple of minutes explaining the points of difference for Radius Care versus, say, other listed operators or other care operators. And we've identified four things, four key points of difference, plus one thing that we are not. So I'll run through those quickly. You can see them on the slide.
Our culture, we have focused commercial and lean teams, as Jeremy was saying, that deliver excellent care to our residents. And I think that's absolutely critical that we employ people through the lens of those key aspects to deliver care to our residents and to lead teams. And we have strong alignment between the executive team and the board. Again, a critical aspect of the Radius Care culture. Our portfolio, we do like to have a vast majority of larger-scale sites, so over 60 beds, because effectively that leads to increased profitability for each of our care homes and an absolutely critical success factor. We also like to cluster our care homes. For instance, in Hamilton, we have four care homes within a very close radius. We can sub out staff and make those care homes far more efficient through the cluster effect of the care homes in various regions.
And also, in relation to our portfolio, we concentrate on the higher-end acuity, so dementia, hospital-level care, psychogeriatric, which are higher-revenue care streams than just rest home care. Thirdly, intellectual property. Our systems, our people, and our processes are all designed to assist the care delivery. And as we've talked about, to be a more commercial-focused organization. And then finally, our brand, our reputation over the last couple of decades through Brien's leadership. Brien, as I always call him, the face of Radius. You'll hear him around about. You'll see him. Everybody knows Brien. And everybody knows the Radius Care quality that has existed for, as I said, a couple of decades now. And it's our job as the custodians to continue on with that. We run strong advertising campaigns to try and show that. And we do have an excellent reputation in care.
Those are the four points of difference. We've noted before what we are not. We're not a retirement village property developer. We're not dependent on the real estate market, which is just as well given the last three years. We don't need to build a certain number of units per year. We're not developers of village units, although we do have four villages and 150 units, which we resell as quickly as possible. We are not dependent on the real estate market. In summary, we're the only listed company with a laser focus on care that is unable to deliver the NZD 26,000-NZD 27,000 per care bed in the sector. We're very proud of these points of difference. Next slide is Cibus. As Brien mentioned and we talked about before, we're really glad to have the Cibus acquisition completed and now own 51%.
We talked about what it provides. They have an excellent record of client service and retention, and as Brien said, we know them well. They've operated their facilities at 10 of our care homes, as well as other care homes and other services, so in the next few months and years, we're seeking to accelerate their growth, both through their service offerings and through the Cibus app, and hopefully, we can bring you more progress as we report every six months on the growth of Cibus moving forward. Now, final slide is the outlook slide. We've talked about the six months to 30 September. We continue strong business momentum nearly eight months into the financial year. 31 March will come up quickly. We look forward to delivering our full-year result then. We've already mentioned at the shareholder meeting that we will be delivering our FY25 metrics.
We'll be ahead of FY24 key metrics, and we reiterate that point today. And additive to that is Cibus, where the Cibus earnings and cash flow will be accretive to our second half financial year to 31 March. So as I said, we look forward to presenting that result to you in May. And thank you all for joining the call today. Thanks, Brien and Jeremy, for co-presenting. It's been a pleasure. And please notify us by way of hands up or a note to the box, and we'll take questions. I see at least one has arrived. So open the floor to questions now. Will, you've got a question? I think we have freed up your microphone to ask direct. You can hear us.
I have. Can you hear me?
Okay. Yeah. Far away.
Yeah. Good morning, guys, and congrats on a very strong result. It's awesome. Good to see. First question just around costs. So cost discipline was obviously pretty impressive in the first half. Can you just talk to some of the specific initiatives that have helped to control those costs? And then secondly, looking into the second half of the year with some of these kind of inflationary pressures subsiding, can you just talk to the outlook for costs heading into the second half of the year?
Yeah. Sure, well, I'll lead, and as always, Jeremy and/or Brien can fill any gaps. I think it's a good call out, particularly in the higher inflation environment we've been through. A couple of things I'd just like to call out. We have a laser focus on our staff costs through our care homes and have maintained that focus, which I think is absolutely critical, and then secondly, we have a lean support office. I think we talked a year or two ago about having cost out at support office. We executed that plan and had NZD 1.3 million cost out initiatives that's now baked into costs. And I think across the board, it comes back to culture a little bit as well. We do watch every dollar that we spend, and we make sure that we're very conscious on costs. So that's a kind of high level.
I mean, I don't think we have anything specific for the second half, but anything Jeremy wanted to add to that?
I think just in general, some of our operating costs like utilities, electricity primarily, and some of the other facility-related costs such as insurance. There was a bit of a hangover from the higher inflationary environment about a year ago where we saw significant upward cost pressure in the first half for some of those costs. For the second half, we see that inflationary pressure easing. Certainly, electricity, as the markets return to normal and we move into the summer months, that will reduce pressure on the second half costs. Insurance, similarly, where the market seems to be returning more back to normal.
Cool. Thanks, guys. And then second one, maybe just about capital management. So how do you think about balancing continuing to pay down debt, but then also looking at other opportunities and developing or other acquisitions like Cibus?
Yeah. Well, look, obviously, debt has been a strong focus to date. We're very pleased that the debt's come down to 72 and a bit more now. We don't want to increase that debt rapidly or in any kind of severe way. But we are looking at capital-like acquisitions in particular. So a lot of the options that Brien talked about around increasing our lease portfolio and some of the other capital-like options, such as being an ACC preferred supplier, won't increase debt material at all, particularly with the increased EBITDA returns of new leases.
Cool. Thank you, and then maybe just final one from me. It's obviously quite a tough environment out there for a lot of other care operators. What are you seeing in terms of opportunities there in terms of other care homes that potentially you could snatch up from people who are doing it a bit tough?
I can answer that. So yeah, there is a lot out there at the moment for sale. I think from our point of view, we are moving the business a little bit away from being dependent on just selling bedrooms. So whilst we are very interested in expanding from the core aged care business side, because that is our core business and will always be our core business, the fact remains that we see a lot of opportunity within the health sector that can be utilized through our national network. So whilst we are mindful of the fact that opportunities will come along, and I mean, in the last few years, we've bought two sites, and they've been very successful. And we will continue to assess existing sites. But it's not our only focus.
With that in mind, we're having a bit of a broad view of the general health market as we move ourselves more to a health services business.
Perfect. Thanks, guys. Appreciate that.
Thanks, Will. Any other questions? I don't think we've seen any noted yet, but we'll keep the line open for another few seconds and then wish you a good Monday. You're calling for last orders? No?
There is one interesting little comment I can make, and it goes towards using Teams for this call. Historically, we've used a phone service which costs us NZD 10,000 a pop. This one's free. So that's a bit of an idea of how Radius works. We look at these things and we go, "Why are we spending NZD 10,000? We can just use Teams." So I hope it's worked out for you guys.
Good call.
Yeah. Feedback, appreciate it, and yeah, that's a really good call out. So look, with that, thank you all for joining the call. We look forward, as I said, to presenting again in May, our full-year result, and appreciate the interest in Radius Care as we move forward with our growth strategy.
Thanks, everyone. Cheers.
Thank you.