Good morning, everyone. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Rakon's first half 2023 results and business update presentation. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. At which time, if you wish to queue for a verbal question, you will need to press star zero followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to submit a written question on the web, please type your message into the question and answer box. Please note that this conference is being recorded today, Thursday, November 24th, 2022. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speakers today, Sinan Altug, Chief Executive Officer, and Anand Rambhai, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. First, I'll go through key highlights and achievements, then move on to operating performance and market updates. Then we'll walk you through the financial overview, and I will conclude with the summary and outlook before we move on to the Q&A. There's quite a lot of information on these slides, so I will take this as read and cover the key points. This presentation will be available for your perusal moving forward. Key highlights and achievements. We are pleased to be talking with you today about another half year of strong operating performance, where we continued to grow our core business through a challenging period. Starting with financial highlights. Our first half revenue was 2% higher than first half of FY 2022, and it was in line with second half of FY 2022.
As the graph shows, we have maintained last year's revenue increase by growing our core business to offset the revenue reduction of the one-off contracts compared to the same period last year. Our underlying EBITDA is up by 6%. While our operating expenses have increased, our margin has held relatively firm. In addition, we have recorded some foreign exchange gains due to the weakening of the NZD to USD during the period. With the tailwind of these gains, we have now achieved a new record EBITDA for the half year. Despite the higher EBITDA, our net profit after tax is lower by 15%. This was primarily due to a substantially higher tax bill for the half year. Our accumulated tax losses have been used up in FY 2022.
As we previously signaled, we are using our cash flow and cash reserves to self-fund investments in key growth projects and avoid delivery disruptions through higher inventory levels. As a result, our operating cash flow for the period was zero, and our net cash reduced by approximately NZD 5 million, with still NZD 18 million in the bank as of September 30th. Also, notably, during the period, we repaid an existing NZD 10 million debt facility that was established in 2021. Summarizing our half year achievements. We increased our revenue and EBITDA and experienced core business growth across all key markets. As you'll remember, last year, around 21% of our revenue for the same period came from one-off contracts received due to the worldwide chip shortages.
We were confident that the core market demand would grow to backfill the reduction in this one-off revenue. This has proven to be the case for this first half year. We maintained strong margins despite inflationary pressures, while also increasing our delivery capacity and output for our core business products. Having ramped up our manufacturing to deliver the chip shortage revenue at scale last year, we have now transferred that capacity towards our core product portfolio to meet the increased demand. In parallel, we have also registered tangible progress on our strategic projects, which will provide the platform for future growth and value to shareholders, including our new India manufacturing facility, which is now nearing completion. Overall, I'm proud of how our teams are continuing to execute on all fronts globally.
This focus on execution remains at the top of our priorities and is at the heart of our half-year performance. The next few slides look at our core market performance for the half year as well as progress towards our growth strategy that we presented at our annual meeting in August. This slide shows the four key objectives of our growth strategy. At our annual shareholder meeting, we presented a more detailed version showing the focus areas under each objective. We are driving and investing in growth through organic growth initiatives and also exploring strategic acquisitions to accelerate growth through access to markets or technologies. Telecommunications is the largest of our core markets, now representing 55% of our revenue. That's up by 5%, with 5G being a key growth driver.
As the graph shows, we have seen a steady increase in telco revenue. This growth is well balanced across the various parts of the telecommunications infrastructure. Gross margin dollars have increased proportionate to revenue in the first half by also 14%. While the margin percentage is lower than the full year FY 2022, it is in line with the first half of FY 2022. Our market share remains very strong in this market, particularly in some key product categories such as remote radio heads. We are monitoring the demand carefully, considering both the global macroeconomic volatility and potential inventory correction by some customers to reduce their inventory build up over the past 12 months. Having said that, our order book is still strong. It's stronger than its historic levels, and we are still confident about the longer-term outlook.
There are some major new rollouts being announced with aggressive timelines such as the one in India. Space and Defense is our biggest driver of innovation. We have been pleased to see some space programs resuming over the past half year in addition to increased activity in Defense. This is our strongest first half revenue performance for some time, with our margin also improving to 69%, making this our highest gross margin market segment. Looking ahead for Space, we have solid orders into FY 2024. Also we have a steady revenue stream in New Space while we continue to scale for large medium-term opportunities. In Defense, after a relatively low growth period, we are starting to see increased activity and expect this to continue. Moving on to slide 10 to look at positioning.
Our strategic transformation away from low value, high volume products to precision positioning applications is continuing to pay dividends. In this market segment, the revenue grew by 16% against the same period last year. Positioning now represents 19% of our total revenue. The growth was across the board, including agriculture, surveying, emergency beacons, and automotive. We have seen a resurgence in demand for emergency beacon applications where our products dominate with a market share of more than 90%. As with telecommunications, we are carefully monitoring demand. We do see some short-term inventory correction taking place in this segment. Despite this, the outlook for this segment is still very positive, with the market, especially for autonomous applications continuing to grow.
As most of you are aware, we won a large one-off contract from a tier one tech company for a consumer application due to worldwide chip shortages that we delivered throughout FY 2022. This did drive a significant lift in revenue and margin last year. The last portion of that contract was delivered in the first half of this year. We included this slide for consistency with our past reporting. Given that this one-off contract is now completed and this segment is not considered a core business for Rakon, moving forward, we will likely discontinue updates in this segment. Moving on to a quick update on our four key investment areas that are pivotal to our future growth.
Yeah, we previously shared this three-year roadmap of expected milestones for each of these key investment areas, and I'm pleased to report that we're well on track to achieve the FY 2023 milestones as shown on this slide. Starting with an update on our new manufacturing facility in Bengaluru, India. This is the most capital-intensive of our investments. When finished, it will provide a world-class facility providing us with a strong platform to manufacture any of Rakon's high-quality products at low cost. In addition to the ability to extend our product life cycles and scale up as required. Construction is nearing completion. I was in Bengaluru on site last week and was highly impressed with the progress as well as the quality of our new facility. Once the building is complete, we will enter the critical period of the phased live transfer of our manufacturing operations.
We have very detailed transition plans in place, fully focused on business continuity and minimizing customer disruption. We're working very closely with our customers around product qualifications and have also been building substantial buffer stocks to ensure we continue to supply our customers' throughputs. Overall, we are on time and on budget. There remain many risks and challenges ahead, so we are keeping tight governance over the project. We have also registered tangible progress towards our milestones on the other three key investment areas. There is quite a bit of detail on this slide, but maybe highlighting one for each. We have a new significant semiconductor chip due for release within the fiscal year, attracting substantial customer interest. We are building real momentum in our XMEMS nanotechnology-based products with a number of products out in the market already generating revenue at strong margins.
We are growing our presence in the New Space ecosystem and are excited to be aboard a planned in-orbit demonstration mission in early 2023. This will be a baseline for a large constellation the following year. I'll now hand over to Anand for a financial overview.
Thanks, Sinan. I'll now run you through the key financials starting with slide 17. This slide shows a five-year view with the bars for each year split into first half and second half periods. Some of the key things to note are as follows. Starting on the top left, total revenue has been on an upward trajectory for the last five years, but the half year just passed, revenue is 2% higher, with growth in core business offsetting the lower one-off chip shortage business. On the bottom left, margin dollars broadly follows the positive revenue trend. In the last period, margin dollars are similar to the same period last year, and margin percentage is slightly lower due to the product mix. For example, there was higher revenue growth out of our India telecom business, which is at lower margins.
On the right-hand side, the five-year trend for underlying EBITDA and net profit after tax is shown. In more recent years, how the higher revenues and margins have combined with relatively fixed cost base to result in increased earnings. For the current period, EBITDA is NZD 28 million, NZD 1.7 million higher than the same period last year, and net profit, NZD 2.5 million lower. As noted, net profit after tax was impacted because New Zealand's tax losses were used up in FY 2022. I'll now move to the next slide. Okay. Firstly, focusing on the green bars, this slide explains the movement from last year's NZD 18.9 million net profit on the left to this year's NZD 16 million net profit in the middle, and then how that ends up in the NZD 28 million EBITDA achieved for the period.
The key things that impacted net profit were, firstly, in the previous comparable period, there was a foreign exchange loss, and in the first half of this year, there was a foreign exchange gain. The difference between these is what you're seeing in the first two blue bars. The main driver of the gain during the period was the lower NZD/USD exchange rate impacting Rakon's significant revenues in US dollars. The average rate during the period was 11% lower than the same period last year, meaning that there's a positive P&L impact from US dollar sales where hedging was not at a 100%. The closing US dollar rate at September 30 was also 19% lower than at March this year, which caused a revaluation gain from the translation of our US dollar bank accounts into New Zealand dollars at September 30.
Some of these gains were realized and some unrealized. The unrealized gains will reverse where the exchange rate trends higher. Moving to the other significant movements. Timemaker's profits in the second gray column were down NZD 1.6 million. Rakon is a 37% shareholder in Timemaker, which is the world's largest crystal blank manufacturer. Timemaker supplies raw materials to Rakon, but mainly supplies into the consumer electronics market. In the six-month period, Timemaker has seen a slowdown in shipments as demand for consumer electronics is lower post-COVID and supply chains reduce inventories. Next, operating expenses was NZD 3.7 million higher.
This increase was driven by a combination of inflation, labor shortages, and planned investments in the growth initiatives such as semiconductor chip design teams in New Zealand and U.K., product development for the New Space LEO satellites, and long-term share schemes to retain critical skills within the business. Next, income tax expense is NZD 5.9 million higher than the comparable period due to the New Zealand tax losses being used up. These movements result in a profit of NZD 16 million for the six-month period. The section on the right of the graph shows the adjustments made to net profit to arrive at the reported underlying EBITDA of NZD 28 million, the major items being depreciation and tax. I'll move to slide 19.
This waterfall chart shows how the NZD 16 million profit for the period ends up in the NZD 5 million movement in overall net cash since March 31. One point to note is that the reported cash flows in New Zealand dollars are again affected by the significant decline in the NZD/USD exchange rate during the six months. This exchange rate movement explains the negative NZD 6.2 million debtors movement in the gray bar and a positive NZD 6.3 million bank account revaluation shown by the blue bar on the right. You will note the largest use of cash during the period is the additional inventory purchase. This was mainly to support the ramp-up of XMEMS volumes, growing demand for our key products, to mitigate supply chain risks, and in preparation for the move between factories in India.
Other uses of cash include the continued construction of new factory in India, lease payments, and CapEx. CapEx included higher spend in New Zealand for increased capacity and on equipment to further develop the XMEMS nanotechnology manufacturing. Overall net cash was NZD 18.4 million, NZD 4.8 million lower than March. We'll now move to slide 20. Right. This table on the left is for reference, with line items already explained in the commentary so far. On the right shows our current hedging status. The hedging program we have in place seeks to remove P&L volatility through using derivatives, which could be deliverable over the next 24 months. For the key NZD/USD currency exposure, hedging in place covers 95%-100% of exposures in 2023 and 35%-40% of exposures in 2024.
I'll now pass back to Sinan for a summary and outlook.
Thanks, Anand. To conclude, I'll summarize what we have covered today and follow with some other comments. Despite a number of headwinds, it has been a strong first half with a solid EBITDA performance highlighted by the continued revenue growth we have achieved across all of our core markets. We have stayed close to our customers and have continued to deliver through some testing times. This has been an important factor in maintaining strong margins under inflationary pressures. We have also increased our capacity to meet demand from our core market products. We are continuing to invest in key growth projects that support our long-term strategy. During the period, we repaid an existing NZD 10 million debt facility, and we are self-funding our investments from our own cash flow.
We are maintaining a tight governance around our investments to ensure the money is well invested. We are reporting progress on all fronts. Now looking ahead at the full year and beyond. As we announced this morning, we have updated our FY 2023 guidance to an EBITDA range of NZD 38 million-NZD 44 million. While our first half EBITDA is well over half of this number, I'd like to reiterate that there continue to be significant macroeconomic volatility in addition to risk around exchange rates, cost inflation, labor shortages. We also have substantial operational risks, such as the transfer of our manufacturing to our new India facility. After careful modeling and assessment of these risks on aggregate, we have landed on this guidance range, which represents a tightening of the bottom end and the reiteration of the top end.
Looking forward, our order book is still strong compared to our historic levels, but we are also mindful of the potential dampening of demand due to macroeconomic uncertainty as well as inventory correction of customers. Consequently, we are monitoring this closely and staying very close to our customers. We will continue to actively manage our operating costs and risks. We have many challenges in front of us requiring continuous risk monitoring, management, and navigation. We will maintain our laser focus on the milestones for our key organic growth projects, and in parallel, we will continue to explore and assess inorganic opportunities such as potential acquisitions that could accelerate our growth. ESG hasn't been covered in this presentation, but it continues to be a major focus area for us. We're registering tangible progress on our reporting framework. We'll provide more detail at the end of our fiscal year.
Finally, I want to reiterate that despite many challenges in front of us, we remain very confident in achieving our long-term ambitions. Over the years, Rakon has developed the resilience to withstand changing market conditions and our strategic pillars of high-growth, high-value core markets, strong customer partnerships, technology innovation, and flexible and scalable operations have us well positioned for success. I hope this has been an enlightening update. I'll now hand it back to the operator who is opening the floor for questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. For anyone wishing to ask a verbal question on the teleconference, you may register a question by pressing zero one on your telephone keypad and then wait for your name to be announced. For anyone wishing to ask a question on the web, please type your question into the question and answer box. There may be a slight delay and brief silence while participants register and names are collected. Once again, for those on the audio conference, please press zero one on your telephone to ask a question, and those on the web, please type your questions into the question and answer box. Our first question comes from the line of James Lindsay, Forsyth Barr. Your line is now open.
Good morning, gentlemen, and thank you for the update and congratulations on the result. Three questions, if I may. Just with regard to, you know, you mentioned some supply chain inventory correction and the operating conditions. Maybe just if you're able to expand out on the comments you've made there, just with regard to, you know, there has been some slowing on the consumer side, which, you know, thankfully you've been able to avoid. Secondly, just with regard to the inventory build, I was wondering if you could just fill us in a little bit more with regard to how much of the inventory is associated with the Indian facility and sort of how long if that will come off over time, over the next year or so.
Finally, just with regard to, yeah, sort of related to the first question. With regard to the slowdown in consumer, has there been any flow on effect into pricing in your more industrial slash infrastructure markets? Thanks so much.
Thank you, James. Starting with the first one first. That was related to the inventory connection or potential inventory correction by our customers. When I say that, I'm referring to the fact that in the past 12 to 18 months, quite, you know, there was a lot of supply chain issues. Like us, our customers had also put a lot of inventory in place so as not to disrupt their deliveries to their customers. With that, we are seeing some level of correction in the sense that they realize, some of them realize that, "Well, okay, based on our outlook, we may have a bit more than what we need right now," so going towards a rescheduling of some of the orders.
I must emphasize that this is not the dominating factor for us at all. Also to maybe combine this with your third question, the consumer of our business is actually now coming down to a subset of our precision positioning markets and going down as well. In that market, when you look at our overall business, the core markets that we participate, like telecom infrastructure, space and defense, the impact of that has not yet been material. Having said that, again, it's really volatile. We are watching it on a daily basis. We are staying very close to the customers. Anand, maybe you can take the second question.
Yeah. James, just on the inventory question around India. Yeah, the India inventory has grown over the last six months and even before that. There are a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, one is, also as you will have seen, the India volumes and revenue out of the India factory is actually where a lot of the growth has been in terms of revenue this half-year period. To support that growth, the inventory has naturally gone up. That's the first point. The second point is on top of that, India has been building inventory ahead of the factory move. From this point in time, we expect, and India has provided plans that the inventory will trend downwards from here.
We've already seen some of that happen in the first month, in October month. You know, we've got reasonable targets to get down to by the end of March 2023, and then they feel like they will get back to a normalized level during the next financial year after that. Yeah, it's encouraging. Inventory is a big focus for us, and we're conscious that we want to make sure we're managing it that accurately.
Just to add, James, to the reduction target that Anand mentioned for India is valid for our New Zealand as well as our French businesses as well. We're targeting to reduce inventory moving forward for all business units.
Thanks so much. Actually, just two sort of follow-up questions, if I may. Just one, you mentioned with regard to the Indian facility, so thanks so much for all the extra detail there as well. Could one of you just talk through the customer qualification of the products and the sort of time frames associated with that? Then, just on XMEMS, and again, thanks for the extra detail. Just about where capacity is versus plan and if you've got any comments with regard to where that will go in a few years' time.
Okay. With regards to India and customer qualifications, as I mentioned, we are nearing completion of the factory and the customer qualifications will start as soon as we transfer the manufacturing into the new building. This being a live move, meaning we are already running a full factory in India, and we are transferring. We don't have two sets of the same CapEx. We are transferring some of the products and some of the equipment in stages from the existing factory to the new factory. That's why it's challenging. Having said that, I think we have quite a detailed plan, as I mentioned. Our target at the moment is to complete all of customer qualifications also within the first half of the next fiscal year as well.
We will get up and running in high volume in the new factory prior to that. Also maybe to add additional color, what we are doing is that initially we are closing our cleanroom facility and moving that as the first step. We have actually in the past months, created a buffer, as Anand mentioned, for our crystal. We will use that crystal while we continue to manufacture our products in the existing facility until we stabilize the new cleanroom in the new factory. All of this is to happen by the end of this fiscal year. That was your question one, James. For XMEMS, sorry, were you asking about the future outlook?
Yes. Just as far as, where, capacity, production is and, yeah, sort of, your view in the next couple of years about how that will grow.
As we said before, we are expecting a lot out of our XMEMS nanotechnology because the products that we put our XMEMS nanotechnology-based crystals into, they have excellent performance. They are considerably smaller than their comparative products and provide substantially better performance. We are continuing on that investment into capacity as well. We are still on the path to get to high volume products or high volume capacity on many of the products. It has got a little slower than we were hoping due to some of the CapEx delays that we have endured in the last year and in the last half year as well. It's still going mostly on track.
Great. Thanks very much.
Thank you for your questions. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question on the audio conference, please press zero one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. Our next question is from the line of Richard Burton, Forsyth Barr. Your line is now open. Apologies, Richard's line has disconnected from the Q&A queue. Richard, if you would like to ask your question, please press zero one again for me, please. Thank you. Richard, your line is now open.
Sorry about that. I was on mute. A good result. Just one thing that I think that might help clarify your presentation is that when you look at the underlying EBITDA, if you had another color, which was the one-off stuff that came from these special orders, it'd be a lot easier to see where the rest of the business is moving. Might just make it less confusing.
Thanks for the input, Richard. I think given that the one-offs are running out and the big major contract has already completed, we chose not to identify them moving forward. We are not planning to, but we will be happy to provide you the numbers that went into this half year.
Thank you. Richard's line has disconnected again. Our next question is from Jason Hamilton.
Hi, guys. Hopefully you can hear me.
Yeah.
Just a couple of questions from me, and maybe I can help Richard out. If I look at the guidance implied for the second half of sort of NZD 10 million-NZD 16 million versus the NZD 28 million you've just done, and just bear with me for a second. If I take off the NZD 8 million of FX gains in the first half, so you're down to NZD 20 million, and that may or may not repeat in the second. Then you take off, and I've just taken the gross margin percentage and applied it to the revenue from that contract and that segment in the first half and sort of getting sort of NZD 5.5 million. You get down to sort of NZD 14 million implied for the second half on a normalized basis, and obviously the guidance is NZD 10 million-NZD 16 million.
I guess first question is that sort of math reasonably accurate? Secondly, just be interested to understand like that lowering, like the NZD 10 million, like why you think that's possible in the second half. It just feels like a really weak number potentially to me versus what you've just delivered and pretty positive result and obviously some pretty positive momentum across most of the divisions as well.
Yeah. I'll put in a couple of points to this, Jason, and I might wanna add some comments. Yeah, I think your logic is correct. We've, you know, had a bit of a tailwind from the FX gains. Some of them are realized, which will stay there for the year, effectively. Some of them are unrealized, which will, you know, potentially reverse if the exchange rate moves back up again to where it was at the end of March, just about. There's that aspect. Therefore, you can't just take off the NZD 8 million and then double what's left. That's one thing. The second point is that, you know, we're expecting this buildup of increase in cost because of inflation that's coming gradually. That is, we're gonna have a full six months of that coming up.
That's gonna impact particularly what's happening in our operating costs, but also in our manufacturing costs. For example, our gas and electricity prices have significantly increased. Also, we've, you know, we're conscious of the risks out there, particularly around macroeconomic risks, but also around our own internal risks with the India factory. We're just conscious that we wanna make sure that we cover those in any, in providing any guidance.
Yeah, I was going to mention the same core in that.
Okay, cool. That's right. That's fine. The second one is just, can you give an update on Thinxtra? Just let us know what's happening there. I mean, obviously you talked about IPOs historically. Just be interesting to know what, A, what's happened to the valuation, and B, what plans there are for that investment.
Thinxtra, we've had a couple of sessions with them over the last six months, year. They're trucking along. They've got a refreshed management team in there, a new CEO, plus some other members just appointed. They're targeting their eventual IPO in the future. You know, when we invested in this business, we expected there to be synergies with our products and their products and markets as well. Those synergies didn't eventuate, and therefore we essentially froze our level of investment. Going forward, the intent is for not for us to invest anything further into Thinxtra at this stage, but we, you know, look forward to potentially the future gains from success of that business in the next two years. That's kind of where we see it.
In terms of the valuation, what we've done in terms of our valuation of how much we hold in Thinxtra, which is about 7%, we've taken a view because time has passed. Our valuation was based on a couple of different methodologies, with probabilities. And over the passing of time, the forecast which they gave us, which formed the basis of one of those methods, starts to become a bit old. So we, you know, have to look at it and go, "Well, how relevant are these forecasts anymore given that, you know, they're old pre-COVID, potentially some of them as well?" So we've taken a view to be a bit more conservative and just trim down the value of that investment. It doesn't affect the profit and loss. Any change just goes straight to the equity.
Yeah. Cool. All right. Thank you for that.
Thank you for your questions. The next question is from Mike Daniel. Mike, your line is now open. The next question is from Mike Daniel. Mike, you may be muted on your phone. We'll move on to the next question from Kevin Ascott from Ironic Investments . Kevin, your line is open.
Thanks, well done, guys, on the result. I guess there's a lot of focus on India and the construction of the factory and everything else, but I guess what's lacking is sort of the financial effect of India and how that's gonna flow through in subsequent years. The previous gentleman sort of mentioned the increased capacity, but is there sort of information or summary that you can provide around sort of the total investment that you're actually making in India, the perhaps the potential increased capacity around revenue, and also the margin effect on how that's gonna flow through in the future, and also the sort of the change in the configuration of the current business through the increased capacity in India?
Mm-hmm. You know, it is a significant investment that you're actually making, and, from a shareholder's perspective, we haven't actually seen any financial return information on that investment and how that's gonna affect sort of the future returns to the business.
Yeah, Kevin, we had, in terms of the costing of the project, I think we gave some level of detail at our ASM. You're right, we have not yet given a clear indication as to what's expected moving forward. We have given some dimensions of it. What we are intending to do is to provide further detail at the end of our fiscal year as we finish the project and as we have a clear path to the long-range plan that ties into India. Just for your information, we are currently working towards also product transfers from New Zealand and France into our future India facility as well. As I said, we have done it future-proof so that we're able to build any of our product portfolio in India.
We will provide more detail in terms of also the margin gains that we're looking at and et cetera, but that is going to be at the end of the fiscal year. At least that's what we had planned for.
Okay. Sinan. No, that's fine. I guess it is lacking in terms of, you know, I'm not sure what the total investment is, can you provide that to us now or, you know, roughly an estimate?
I think that was on one of the slides. It's NZD 12 million-NZD 14 million.
Okay. Yeah. No, that's fine. I guess it's the bigger picture also that needs to be revealed and that hasn't been shown to the shareholders. I'm sure it's all within your internal plans, but knowing that at some time in the future and I guess, as it's up and running, some more information on that would be helpful.
Yep, agreed. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Thank you. I'll return to Mike Daniel. Mike, if you do still have a question, your line is now open.
Thank you. I had two questions. The first one was banking arrangements. You mentioned you paid the NZD 10 million odd to that private equity firm. I can't remember its name. What is there to replace it? Have you arranged facilities with ASB, so you've got lots of money to pay some dividends?
Yeah. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, We've effectively that previous facility was a drawn down facility, so it was costing us money to have that, in terms of interest, which if we had it today, it'd be even worse. What we've done is we've replaced that with a on-call overdraft facility with our current bank. Yes, we've got access to funds should we need it. As you can see from that, we're in a overall net cash position.
Yeah. Second question. You said that Thinxtra have targeted a IPO date. What's the target?
I think that that's their, you know, decisions in terms of publicizing what those timeframes are, Mike. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be right for us to divulge.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Mike, I think we would look at that as being a long-term aspiration really at this point, not with an exact date or targets that we're in a position to disclose.
I mean, there's no harm in asking, because, you know, there's considerable value there, which I think shareholders are probably would be quite looking forward to sharing in any cash distribution. If you could find the target date. I know that there were the merchant bank who's supposed to be IPOing it, but I mean, they've been forecasting an IPO for seems like half a century, but it's not really. It's only about five years. Really, you guys, I think you guys owe it on behalf of investors of, in Rakon to find out what is going to happen with it.
Just to give you some assurance, Mike, Anand and I will be in Australia meeting them next week.
Well, good. Will you ask the question?
Yes, of course. That will be one of the questions. Again, we would follow their lead on what they are in a position to publicly disclose, but we will provide you as much information as we can.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you. We have no further audio questions at this time. We will now address questions submitted on the web.
We have a question from Mark Ashcroft. He's asking, what impact, if any, will the U.S. chip controls that have been introduced in relation to China have on Rakon?
Right. Mark, when you look at the chip controls that were just recently announced, they will probably continue to have the same impact that they did in the prior year. With regards to. The impact on us is not on the consumer side that many companies see because we don't participate in that business. That's not core. On the telecom infrastructure, you would see from our half year numbers that there is a slight shift from Asia to U.S. in terms of percentage revenue and its origin. That is due to some slight adjustment that we had seen in the first half year from some of the large Chinese telecom infrastructure customers. Having said that, they have plans. They have big plans. These are really big players. They will continue to be big players.
From our side, there could be other secondary and tertiary effects that may come back to impact our business. Right now, it's hard to say. Right now, we would say that there isn't an immediate major impact, but that can change.
Mark Ashcroft is also interested in whether there are greater synergies available in working closely with Rocket Lab, given our mutual New Zealand context.
Yes, absolutely. We have actually recently in the past maybe six months, we have established also a high-level connection with Rocket Lab, exchanging ideas. We would like to synergize more, not only for individual product or customer relationship, but partnership as well, because of the fact that as you highlighted, we are two Kiwi companies that have very high space aspirations. Yes, the answer to that is a definitive positive, yes.
Tony Morgan has a number of questions about products. Can we explain the significance of the Niku chips and also the significance of the three products that we've released over the half year and the benefit to us?
Niku is our next generation chip. You will remember, our Pluto and our Pluto+ . We still have substantial business that relate to Pluto and Pluto+ . That was our previous generation of TCXO, Temperature-Controlled Crystal Oscillator. Niku is the next generation chip that has substantially better performance. In the same package, in the same product, we can achieve substantially better performance attributes, and that is opening doors for us in a number of applications. I will refrain from giving too many technical details on this call, but it is actually You could consider it as a better version of our Pluto+ and Pluto chipsets, which has been wildly successful for Rakon.
Tony is also interested in the likelihood of LEO contracts in Europe and elsewhere in around the globe, the U.S., China, et cetera, given their very significant.
Yeah. If you look at our current Low Earth Orbit business, or let me say New Space business in general, because it's not entirely Low Earth Orbit, some of them are Medium Earth Orbit as well, but that's considered New Space. When you look at it, actually, we don't have a singular tie into the European geography. We do have somewhat of an upper hand, an advantage of being local in Europe, and we are very close with the agencies, space agencies in Europe that actually play a part in forming the ecosystem. Having said that, you have seen, for instance, the Mars Perseverance rover. That was a NASA project, and we had two products in that one as well.
That was not New Space, but from our side, our space as well as our New Space business is going across geographies. There are other geographies also in Far East where they have substantial New Space aspirations as well. I would include China, for instance, as one, India as another one, where they are looking at significant constellations. I could perhaps say that most of the large communications operators globally are looking at the feasibility of putting up their own satellite constellation. Yes, from our side, rather than Europe only, we are looking at all geographies. I want to add, though, that as we had disclosed before, market access, especially in the U.S., is still a definite plus for us. That is one of the reasons that we are looking at and exploring inorganic growth opportunities in the U.S.
The motivation is this very reason.
Just one more question from Tony about products. Interested in the small cell rollout in the USA, whether it's started or is still somewhere away, also whether O-RAN is creating opportunities.
Right. The small cell rollout has started for quite a while in USA and elsewhere. That is a market where we have... If you look at the whole telecom infrastructure, that's one of the areas where we have substantial dominance. It has started. That rollout has started a number of years ago. I could say in frequency control products, we are the primary supplier. Now, the other part of the same question was, Maureen?
It's about O-RAN.
O-RAN, yes. For O-RAN, it has, the market pickup has been slower than what the supporters of O-RAN had been advocating in the past. Having said that, there are two very large worldwide operators that have very highly banked on O-RAN deployments. They have done pilots, which we have participated either as a single supplier or the primary supplier, and they're looking at rolling those out quite soon. We'll keep you abreast. Yes, it has the take of the market has been slower than expected, but the outlook is going to be quite substantial. We're banking on all horses, if you will. Whatever the architecture is, wherever it is, we want to be right in the middle of it driving.
Robert Macauley has a question, a topical question. Has the Russian invasion affected the company in any way?
Robert, I think we answered this before. The answer has not changed in any material manner. Not really is the answer. We had stopped our sales into Russia at the early days of the conflict, but that was very small sales for us anyway, and not, nothing defense related at all. It was positioning applications. There isn't any material impact on the company.
Another question again from Tony Morgan is regarding an investor day. Are we planning an investor day in the future?
We've got a comprehensive investor relations calendar, and part of that is an investor day. We target it once a year for that. We haven't had one this year. We are planning one for next year. We're just working out the logistics and timing and when is the most appropriate window.
Tony Morgan, you and all investors are most welcome to visit us anytime as well, like we have extended to you before.
There's a question I understand on the audio line from Richard.
Thank you. Richard, your line is now open.
I've got two questions. One was following on from Mike asking about dividends, that you're building a large facility in India that you own, and up until now, you've rented a factory. Do you intend to sell the factory and just rent it and, you know, that would be good source of cash and increase your return on capital, might give you an opportunity to pay a dividend? The other question was, you'd said a while ago that you were looking at making an acquisition in the United States of some company that with synergies that would give you a, make it easier for you, I guess, to deal with some of the American departments that often require people to have, an onboard, business. Is there any progress in that?
The first question, just to clarify, Richard, the current facility that we have is leased. We did not own that. The new facility, on the other hand, is one that we own. That has already proven to be quite an accretive investment on its own. Coming back, there isn't, we won't have an old factory to sell because that is a lease anyways. The second question.
U.S.
Yes, the U.S., M&A opportunities. As I mentioned, we are still in an exploratory phase. The motivation and the reasoning that was behind our declaration is still valid, very much so. We want to make it right. We want to make it so that everything is in the green. We're taking our time, still exploring the opportunities thus far. That initiative is very much alive internally.
There is a further question from Tony Morgan, explaining cash flow hedges and how they roll through into the FY 2023.
Yes, I'll just take that one. We're reasonably highly hedged through 2023, in terms of our NZD/USD , exposure. We've, you know, most recently, we've taken additional cover with the historically low, rates for the US dollar. It means that, as noted on the slide, we're pretty much locked in for a rate of $0.65 for that 12-month period.
There are no more online questions.
Okay.
We have no further audio questions.
Great. Well, thank you for all the questions. I'll hand it back to you, James.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That does conclude today's conference. Thank you all for attending. You may disconnect.