Another virtual investor webinar hosted by NZX. Thanks a lot for joining us. My name is Doug Bray. I'm with the Capital Markets Origination team in Wellington. For those of you that aren't familiar with the format, we've got three listed companies here to present today. Each company will have 15 minutes, and then it'll be followed by about five minutes of Q&A. You can enter your questions on the chat function in the webcam, and feel free to fire away on questions and we'll try and get to as many as we can. What we don't get to, we'll send out via email so you get your answers. Hopefully that is self-explanatory. To get into it today, we have the three companies we have are Steel & Tube. We've got Mark, is it Malpass?
I'm sorry. Malpass. Yep. The CEO of Steel & Tube. We've got Todd Hunter from Turners Automotive and Jason Bull from Vital Limited. We will get started with Steel & Tube. Mark, I'll just give a little introduction. Steel & Tube was formed in 1953 and is one of the leading providers of steel solutions in New Zealand. Mark joined Steel & Tube as an independent director in 2017 and became the permanent CEO in 2018. Mark, thanks for joining us. With that, I will turn it over to you.
Thank you, Doug. Okay. Well, look, welcome, and thanks for joining me. I look forward to talking to you about Steel & Tube, our growth strategy, and opportunities for our company. Our purpose is simple: To make life easy for our customers needing steel solutions. Our goal is to be the best in the sector, the preferred choice of steel products and solutions, a rewarding place to work, and an attractive investment for our shareholders. We do this by investing in the things that matter: Our people, our customers, digital innovation, operational excellence, quality, health, and safety. We've got a great team leading our company, passionate people who are focused on delivering the best solutions and experiences for our customers.
Excuse me. Oh, there you go.
You can see that okay?
We can, yep.
Yeah. Good. Steel & Tube operates through two divisions, our distribution and infrastructure division. Distribution is where we source products from preferred mills and distribute them through our national network. We have a significant amount of procurement scale that enables us to buy well and then sell in smaller quantities. The infrastructure division is where we process products before sale. This is typically on a contract basis. For example, that includes things like steel, products that are created to an engineer or an architect specifications. Roofing and composite deck floor systems are through to large reinforcing assemblies, for infrastructure projects such as bridges, tunnels, wind farms. The key competitive advantage we have is our ability to cross-sell our extensive offer and leverage our national footprint.
You can see from our range that we offer New Zealand's most comprehensive range of steel products, services, and solutions. We operate in all of the key sectors more than any of our competitors. Importantly, we've identified growth targeted sectors that we are supplying products that both strengthen our core offer and also capture high-value growth within those sectors. Steel is one of the world's most sustainable and essential building products. It's permanent, it's forever reusable, and mostly recycled substance on the planet. On a cradle-to-cradle basis, steel's environmental performance compares very favorably to other materials such as concrete and timber. In New Zealand, it's estimated that 85% of steel from demolition sites is actually returned to steel mills for recycling. For many construction and manufacturing applications, steel is really the only choice.
As we saw in the Canterbury rebuild, steel is the optimal choice for construction materials. It builds faster, it's less disruption, it's flexible, extends building life, and has minimal waste and generates optimal thermal performance. Our strategic goals are clear. Our forward strategy is a strong operating platform and the capacity to invest in growth. Our goals are fourfold: To position Steel & Tube as a preferred supplier for steel products and solutions. To increase Steel & Tube's valuation by growing our existing offer and through programmatic small M&A in adjacent sectors. To also deliver increasing returns and value for our shareholders. To create sustainable, excuse me, a sustainable long-term business that adds value and is positive for our people, our customers, our shareholders, and of course, the planet.
The slide you should be on there is strategic pathways, Doug.
I think we're one ahead. I think the slide you're showing is one ahead. There you go.
Okay, great. Our overall goal is to deliver, you know, gross margin improvement, and we're concentrating our efforts on two key pathways, continuing to strengthen our core foundation and investing in high-value products, services, and sectors. Continuing to strengthen our core involves building a business foundation or building on that foundation that's in place. For example, best-in-class customer service, our industry-leading digital platform, cross-selling a wider range of products and services, and operational efficiencies. Investing in high-value products and services sectors is about focusing on and extending what we can offer to our customers. This includes adjacent materials and value-added services. While our primary focus is organic growth, we also are considering opportunities via programmatic M&A in adjacent sectors. We're obviously very mindful of the investment that shareholders make in the company and do not believe in growth for growth's sake.
Instead, we have a very disciplined approach to investment and new opportunities to ensure that we will deliver financial and strategic value. As you can see on this slide, there are a number of strategic initiatives underway, and each of these will deliver increasingly increasing contributions as they come to fruition. In the last two years, we've been able to expand our plate processing offer and have also acquired Kiwi Pipe and Fittings and Fasteners NZ. Plate processing is a high value category with strong demand, providing attractive returns. It builds on our existing product offer, and we have a solid forward workload in place. Kiwi Pipe and Fittings specializes in the fire and water reticulation products area and is performing very well, as is Fasteners NZ.
We're introducing new products across both of those ranges and expanding the geographies in which those companies are participating in. Our most recent initiative has been the entry into the aluminum market from February this year, and this is targeted towards a select range of high demand, high value products and largely servicing our existing customers. This product diversification provides us with scale. It increases our customer share of wallet and has been immediately accretive from an earnings perspective. Initial demand has been really pleasing, and we've also received additional shipments to meet further demand. These new strategic investments now account for about 7.5% of our distribution division's earnings. Following the successful conclusion of our five-year turnaround program, the financial year 2022 demonstrated the value of our strategy.
We also saw, you know, strong and resilient financial performance and shareholder value carry through into the first half of this 2023 financial year. Our ESG metrics, as you can see on the chart here, all continue to improve across customer satisfaction, employee safety and employee engagement, and we exceed industry benchmarks across all of those metrics. The cyclone and flooding events this year have been devastating, of course, for our people, communities and business across the North Island. The government have estimated that the rebuild cost will be between NZD 9 billion and NZD 14.5 billion, with around half of that related to public infrastructure, so bridges, roads, rail links, power substations and the like. In addition, there's an estimated 4,000 new houses plus repair work to damage for residential properties.
Steel is an essential construction material, and Steel & Tube have the capability and capacity as well as the expertise to deliver innovative solutions to assist with the rebuild, rebuilding the vital assets and homes that's gonna be required. In terms of operating conditions, the tightening macroeconomic conditions are impacting demand for steel, along with the weather events that we saw in January and February and this week in Auckland, of course. There are very positive macro trends that will help drive demand over the medium to long term. Residential construction has softened. Robust demand and an undersupply, particularly in the social housing area, underpin long-term growth in this sector. We also see a positive trajectory, forecasted forward for commercial construction, infrastructure and manufacturing. You can see on the chart that we're very well diversified and are not limited to one particular sector.
In terms of outlook, we're actively managing the current market, you know, challenges. We see the medium-to-long-term outlook as positive for our company. There are significant opportunities for our business across infrastructure and distribution. We have a healthy pipeline in place. We continue to assess opportunities that complement our existing business and provide growth pathways. We have a strong balance sheet and a substantial bank facility in place to fund growth and take advantage of opportunities. Today, we provided an update on trading conditions, April year-to-date performance, as well as guidance on the 2023 financial year, which concludes on June 30. We continue to perform well against the backdrop of a tightening economic conditions and the weather events earlier in the year. Our revenues have continued to grow, driven by the elevated international steel pricing.
Higher input prices and cost pressures have impacted on our margins. We've built a resilient platform exhibited by a significant reduction of our net debt and a reduction in inventory positions. We've also shown very solid underlying cash generation. Given the changes in the operating environment, the second half 2023 financial year expected to be, or volumes, excuse me, are expected to be 10%-15% less than the first half of the financial year.
We're forecasting the 2023 financial full year on a normalized EBIT basis of earnings between NZD 28 million and NZD 32 million and normalized EBITDA of between NZD 48 million and NZD 52 million. We have a track record of effectively navigating changes through economic cycles. We're undertaking a comprehensive cost-out program which is focused on about NZD 5 million of costs coming out in the full, you know, 2024 financial year. As a result of that program, we're expecting to be able to keep our 2024 cost structure in line with our 2023 financial cost structure. It's the last chart. Investing in Steel & Tube. Steel & Tube. We're nimble and strongly positioned to take advantage of the market and sector opportunities that we have ahead of us.
As noted earlier, we have a strong track record of effectively navigating changes in the economic cycle. We're delivering attractive shareholder returns and value, and we have a clear forward strategy with growth opportunities. We're looking forward to adding value to our shareholders, and we don't believe the current share price really reflects the potential demonstrated by our business. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to taking questions.
All right. Thank you, Mark. We do have a few questions coming in. I don't know if we'll get to all of them, but they tend to be around the announcement today, not so much the earnings. Looking into the future and, and areas that if macro conditions continue to kind of weaken and how do you anticipate the future and, and some of the things you can do to offset those, I guess, weaknesses in the economy? You talked about the acquisition opportunities and all that. What do you see for the future or big focus points?
Yeah. Look, I mean, we're certainly seeing some softening in construction, particularly residential construction activity. As I mentioned, there is also some underlying support, you know, in the larger scale construction, commercial construction areas. Very large infrastructure build programs. You know, the government have announced a strong five year pipeline, which we're very exposed to. Also manufacturing is a key part of our business model. You know, it's over 40% of our sector. If you look out over the long term, manufacturing is usually quite a stable, you know, steady part of our sector. You're seeing internationally as well, some good stability and growth in the manufacturing areas.
Overall, we see certainly there'll be some shorter term, volume impacts that we're seeing in the, in the residential, construction activity calling, but we do see medium to longer term, a strong pipeline ahead. I guess the focus for us is really keeping, you know, particularly in a recessionary environment, really the two things that matter are managing debt. You know, we've been actively working over the last 12 months to manage down our net debt to, as we announced this morning, to a low level at about NZD 9 million, I think at close of April. Also, the second thing that really matters is cost structure.
We've worked really hard, you know, over the past five years actually, but certainly, more recently, just to ensure that we keep, you know, find ways to offset inflation. We believe going forward into the next financial year, we have locked in some changes that will enable us to offset inflation going forward. Those are the two things that really matter. For us, it's focusing in on, you know, gross margin dollars per ton, hunting, opportunities for improving those gross margin dollars per ton. We're doing that through both organically, through a lot of the digital conversions that we've done have enabled us to, you know, lower cost to serve, but also find opportunities within our existing sector, increasing share of wallet.
Of course, building on those, you know, smaller M&A projects that we've done over the last 12, 24 months that we're now expanding through our network that are helping to drive those gross margins.
Mark, great answer. Thank you very much. There are a few more questions. We'll send them through. Appreciate you taking the time to join us and put the slides together. Very informative. Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you, Doug.
Again, if you have any more questions, fire them through. Even if we get to other presenters, we will get everyone answers. Now we will move on to our second company and presenter. We have Todd Hunter from Turners Automotive. Todd is the CEO of Turners Automotive Group and has been with them since 2006, I believe. Took over the CEO role of the entire group in 2016. Turners is New Zealand's largest auction house and vendor of secondhand cars, trucks, and machinery. With that, I will turn it over to you, Todd, and we'll be back for questions later.
Great. Great. Thanks, Doug. Can you see my screen okay? Just wanted to check on that.
It looks good here on the front page.
Great. Thank you very much. I'll just start with a quick history of the group. A lot of heritage in the Turners Automotive Group dating back to the old Turners Auctions business and the Turners Car Auctions division, which started in 1967. I've been with the business since 2006. I started with Turners Auctions and took over as Group CEO, as Doug said, late 2016. Really the shape of the group now is really the merging of the old Dorchester Finance business and Turners Auctions, which happened in 2014. The way we think about the group is sort of four key divisions.
The Automotive Retail division, the Turners Cars business, and Tina, I'm sure a lot of people have seen recently, which is the largest buyer and seller of used cars in New Zealand, trucks and machinery. We also sell a lot of damaged vehicles for the insurance industry as well. The consumer finance business, Oxford, which is originating loans out of our own auto retail division, but also originating loans through third-party dealers and brokers as well. We have an insurance business which largely underwrites mechanical breakdown insurance. And we do resell comprehensive motor vehicle insurance, but that is not a product that we underwrite. We resell a Vero product there. The last division in the business is a credit management debt collection business, which does contingent debt collection. We don't purchase debt.
We only collect on a contingent basis. Our big customers there are the banks here in New Zealand, large government agencies like ACC. We do quite a lot of work for SMEs, both in New Zealand and Australia. Obviously, your core parts of the business are auto retail, finance, and insurance, are very sort of dependent and operate around the used car ecosystem. There's a lot of sort of interrelationship between auto retail, finance, and insurance, with finance and insurance originating both the sale of insurance policies and finance contracts through our own auto re-retail division. I think we've built up a really strong track record of performance. Just looking at the business performance in sort of three year blocks with dividends and profits.
Yeah, obviously there was a sort of a bit of recovery from the Dorchester business back in the sort of 2010, 2011 period. Business was quite acquisitive during FY14 to FY16. I'd say in that middle period, there was a lot of consolidation and simplification, which often follows a high acquisition period. Then we've really been very focused around executing our organic growth strategy. The growth that we've seen really from FY17 through to FY23 is all delivered out of organic growth. So we're very proud of the fact that we've been able to achieve the growth that we have out of our own resources. We operate to a very simple formula in this business.
We talk about this a lot internally, that if we provide a quality environment for our people and quality customer experiences, we should deliver a quality outcome for our shareholders. I think one of the sort of secret sauces in this business, and probably something we don't talk enough about, is the strong culture and sort of ownership ethic that our people have in this business. We have over 700 people. We have extremely high engagement scores. As a leadership team in this business right through from me, right through the organization, this is something that we talk about and focus on a lot. I think we see scores that reflect that energy and effort that we put into this. We have launched an employee share scheme over the last year. We've had just under half the team take up that offer.
It's an interest-free loan, that gets them an amount of shares over three years. We plan on rolling that out every year, I'm very confident that we'll see that 50% proportion grow from here. In terms of our customer experience, we are fortunate and have earned the right to operate off a platform of trust. You can see here that we've won the Most Trusted Used Vehicle Dealership award four years running. I think this again, is one of our key competitive advantages. Operating off a platform of trust in a market that generally stands for the absolute opposite of that is a very strong place to operate from and is only continuing to gather strength. We're delivering good returns for our shareholders.
We pay a quarterly dividend, which is definitely different from most businesses. We pay out 60%-70% of after-tax profits. Yeah, we're in line for a NZD 0.23 payout this year with NZD 0.16 already declared of that 23. I'll skip over the results and just focus on the segments and give you a quick update here. The car market has been interesting. As you can see from the bar graph, transactions have definitely been coming off. That is the total New Zealand market of used cars bought and sold. One of the key drivers of that reduction, particularly over the last couple of years, has been the introduction of the Clean Car Standard and the Clean Car Discount.
These are the government regulations, introduced with the objective of helping to clean up the New Zealand vehicle fleet. The impact of it is that less used imports are coming into the country. That has definitely put quite a constraint around supply. That's made it difficult for fringe operators to continue to operate in the market. We've seen registered dealer numbers decline. They're declining at about 1% a month at the moment, but down, you know, almost 20% from their peak in 2017. We see that as a good thing for our business. The strong get stronger. Yeah, definitely a good position for us to be in.
Demand is certainly shifting out of those higher price points and into the lower value price point segments, as a result of the sort of economic conditions. In a market that's going down, you'll notice the red line, which is our sales, is going up. We're very pleased with the market share gains we've made and the fact that we are growing the numbers of cars that we are selling in a market that's gone back by 10% over the last year. In auto, we're really pleased with the new branches that we've rolled out. We've got a great pipeline developing of both new locations and upsized existing locations. That pipeline is really filling out very nicely from our perspective.
You can see that chart there, which I think is just a really interesting reflection on our sort of ownership in this used car category. The red line being searches for Turners Cars, and the blue line being searches for used cars. Turners Cars searches have now overtaken used cars, which is really pleasing from us from an ownership in this category point of view. One of the big opportunities that I think is we want people to really understand, though, is just the number of cars that we are still selling through our wholesale auction channel that we are looking to shift into our retail consumer channel. Nearly half of the cars we sell are still down the auction lane and are still being bought by dealers. A large portion of those are the lease cars, ex-lease cars.
We've got a big opportunity to help them shift those sales into our retail channels, try and get those cars sold to end users, where we will sell them for more money, but also create the opportunity to write a finance contract and attach an insurance policy to those sales. Seen really good uplift in our damaged vehicle sales as well. The results of the weather events, but also just the aging fleet in New Zealand. As it gets older, there are just more cars being written off as they become uneconomic to repair. We are seeing damaged vehicle numbers continuing to increase year-on-year. In our finance division, growth has certainly become a secondary priority for us. We think the right thing to do is focus on quality and our margins.
Pricing has been a real area that we've concentrated hard on. We've pushed through 12 price increases to our base rate over the last sort of 18 months or so as the OCR has lifted. As you can see from that graph there, that is the average Centrix Credit score by half over the last six or so years. You can see the effort that we've put in to improving the quality in our loan book, and that is what is gonna stand the test of the changing economic conditions. I think we're in a very good position in that we are not reliant just on finance revenues in this business.
We've got an auto business performing very, very well, insurance business that's going well, and that just provides the opportunity for us to be a bit more conservative about the way that we're running our finance book. I think this is the right time to be conservative and just tune back the risks that we're taking. Arrears still tracking really well. You know, very marginally up on March last year, but significantly below where we see the wider auto loan portfolio arrears numbers. 2.6% for us plays 5.4% for the wider auto loan portfolio, which really does reflect the focus we've put on quality. In the insurance division, we've been very, you know, focused on risk pricing and our digital distribution.
Claims ratios, you know, continue to just drop away, which is a reflection of the risk pricing that we've put in place, but also, the claims frequency dropping back. I think that is just a result of people driving less, whether it's, they're working from home more or they're driving less because of, cost of living and cost of fuel. The other interesting point I wanted to make was that particularly the last few years have really proven out that we have no catastrophe risk across this portfolio. Both through the pandemic and, the more recent weather events, we've seen no spike in claims, as a result of those events. You know, we're really pleased with how this, broader portfolio is performing.
In credit management, really the message I wanted people to understand here is that times are getting better for EC Credit Control and the debt collection business. Debt load's on the rise. You can see from this chart here from Centrix that consumer arrears across the market are increasing. We're now back to pre-pandemic levels. The trend is certainly up. Our expectation and what we're hearing from the customers that we deal with, the banks and government departments and the SME business, is that those customers are getting more active around collecting their debts, and they've got more debts to collect. Things are going to certainly improve for our credit management division. In terms of outlook, we are super conscious about the challenges.
On that list of five, I would say we've put in a number of good initiatives to mitigate the bottom three. We certainly are outperforming the market in terms of car sales. I think we've adjusted our stock and kind of positioning it for where demand is. That's great from our perspective. The interest rate environment is what it is. That is having some impact on our margins and in our finance company. As soon as we hit peak OCR and are out the other side, we'll see margins expanding within the finance division. I think we're in a good position, but certainly aware of the challenges ahead of us. Guidance-wise, we issued new guidance in March.
To let people know that we would be ahead of last year's record result, posting another record result this year. We've had, you know, very good March result. You know, in terms of the new financial year, very strong April results. Seeing, you know, super performance out of our auto business. You know, arrears performing at expected levels. Finance have certainly recovered well from the typical seasonal Christmas spike. The insurance and credit businesses are performing strongly as well. Just a few key messages to finish up with. Yeah, we are producing robust and reliable earnings. I think this business is demonstrating some real resilience in an environment that is certainly challenging. We're continuing to grow market share in our auto retail segment.
This branch expansion strategy and shifting sales out of that wholesale auction channel into retail are definitely delivering the good growth for us. Just wanna remind people about just how resilient this used car market is. Even though it's down, you know, we still have over 900,000 transactions every year, of which we have less than 10% of that market. And we have a very old vehicle fleet in New Zealand, so one in five cars is over 20 years old. You know, there are a big cohort of cars that need replacing, you know, in the short to medium term. You know, we feel very confident about future growth across the Turners business. Doug, I'll hand back to you for a quick Q&A.
Cool. Thanks, Todd. I'll, there's a few questions on different topics, and I'll just start with a segue maybe on the last one about the aging fleet of cars. In terms of replacing more future, are you, what are you seeing in terms of demand for electric vehicles, in New Zealand and what the consumers are kinda looking at there?
I mean the challenge in used electric vehicles is actually sourcing them. The main channel market for sourcing those is Japan. Japan have a very low number of electric vehicle sales. Roughly they sell four million cars a year, and I think less than 1% are, so, you know, 40 odd thousand EVs are sold each year in Japan. Just a very hard thing to source at this stage. I mean, I think we'll see the fleet transition, but it's gonna be at a much slower rate than probably the commentators make out.
Yeah. getting back to the kind of some of the challenges that have been in terms of inflation, consumer spending, weather events in particular, how have you guys, had the cyclone impact you? You guys sound like you made it through that very well. Was that, something that was planned in advance or how did, how did that work?
Well, I guess we were very fortunate that none of our branches or our people were impacted significantly. We had a period where the Napier branch was obviously shut down, and the EC Credit office, which is based here, was impacted. No, no damage. I mean, we are probably a net beneficiary of those events in that we have sold a large number of flood damaged cars here in Auckland and we're working through, you know, numbers in the Hawke's Bay and Gisborne as well. We've probably sold, you know, over 4,000 damaged vehicles here in Auckland. Obviously there's a benefit in terms of replacement for those cars as well. Yeah, we've been working hard to support our insurance customers.
We take on extra store. It's just been, you know, quite a logistical challenge. Our team have done a magnificent job of helping them.
Nice. Thank you. Last question. I think we do have some more that we'll send to you afterwards, but it's been a theme of the outperforming on the car sales, and then you mentioned, your focus has been on your organic growth strategy. I mean, can you talk more about that organic growth or that strategy and how it's kinda led to some of the success?
Sure. I mean, our organic growth is largely kind of centered on two things, and one is really beefing up our capability in vehicle sourcing and vehicle sourcing domestically. We're importing very few cars now from Japan. We're buying a large number of cars locally and, you know, effectively recycling those into the used car pool. Opening and being in more places, and that becomes critical to this vehicle sourcing strategy. It's very much a service. When people come and sell their car to us, they are leveraging a service that we can offer, and the closer we are to customers, the more likely they are to use us. That branch expansion strategy, the focus on vehicle sourcing has been, you know, critical to the, to the growth that we've seen in auto retail in particular.
Nice. well, Todd, thank you very much. Appreciate you, also putting together the slides and taking the time, to go over things, with us today. Thank you.
No problem. Thanks, Doug.
Our last presenter today, and again, if you have more questions for Todd, or Mark, please fire them away and we'll get the answers back to you. Last presenter today will be Vital Limited, and we've got Jason Bull, the CEO. Vital provides fundamental infrastructure and communications services that are vital to New Zealand. Jason has his background held a number of senior positions across the telecoms, logistics sectors, and actually CFO of Vital in 2016 and is now the CEO. Jason, thanks for joining us, and I will turn it over to you.
There we go. I'm unmuted. Can you see the screen there okay?
Yep, all good.
Excellent. Thanks, all. I've been on board with Vital since 2016, as Dave said, and assumed the CEO role literally one year ago, April last year. I'm gonna take you through basically a bit of a snapshot of, you know, who are Vital, what do we do, what are our assets, kind of the growth path through that, a little bit around financial performance and where to from here. At a glance, Vital, which was formerly known as TeamTalk and is CityLink is also 100% owned by Vital. We rebranded several years ago of one arm. A couple of our key assets that we are. Vital owns and operates fiber infrastructure across Auckland and Wellington CBDs.
What does that sort of mean? We're within. Our target is more through business, not residential as such. We're in sort of around 550, 600 buildings around Wellington, anywhere from sort of the Wellington Airport out through Seaview and Petone and through the CBD. In Auckland, we've got a skinnier network up through the CBD there. We're also, you know, the largest commercial provider of nationwide radio communications in New Zealand. You could call that LMR or Land Mobile Radio. We've got sites across. We've got several sort of networks there, analog, digital, private networks. You know, those networks are across 2, 300 sites across New Zealand. That's another key part of the business.
We also provide managed services to the likes of customers such as Powerco and so forth. We see them as relatively attractive network assets. You know, the cost is sunk into these. We have done a significant amount of capital investment over the past three or four years on both sides. In Wellington, we spent a lot of money undergrounding our fiber, updating the electronics on the side of that. You know, for those of you who've been following us and looking at our spend, our capital expenditure has been significantly higher as a % of revenue over the last three or four years. I'll touch on that shortly, but that's decreasing significantly. Also in the radio space, we built a new digital radio network, you know.
You know, in that space, that just provides a lot more features, man down safety features and so forth. In that space. We've really gone through, I guess, if I looked at my six years in the company, you know, we moved on with, we sold an asset called Farmside. We're a bit of focused on capital management. Did a capital raise several years ago now to enable building the new assets, you know. We've really transitioned from sort of the capital side of things into, you know, the build. Now we're really shifting into network utilization, driving growth, go to market, you know. How do we succeed in actually driving more customers onto our networks and optimizing the cost to serve?
A big focus on what I would call free cash flow. I'll talk about that shortly on the next slide or two. We've also undergone a little bit of a change, obviously, in the last year or two. We've had a new board. We've got John McMahon came on in August as our new Chair. Our board now is reduced down to four directors. I came on obviously, well, in the CEO role 12 months ago as well. You know, it's a big effort for ourselves to just reset. You know, we're holding ourselves accountable for sure. We've published some turnaround metrics for, you know, this year, FY23, and also FY24. We certainly reaffirmed our FY23 metrics when we were releasing our half year results a couple of months ago.
The path to growth here, and just to break these into two sort of areas, fiber and radio. I've mentioned we've built. What's important to us, if I take the fiber space is, you know, is developing and implementing our channel strategy there. When I look at fiber, it would be, you know, roughly 70% of our revenue through fiber is what we call through channel. Such customers as us selling through, say, a 2degrees, a Spark, a Phoenix, a Cello, those sort of businesses who then sell on to the very end customer. Our big focus is in that space to get the growth. What's really required there is we were a little bit behind the eight ball with how to make that process of procurement and fulfillment as easy as possible.
We've spent a lot of effort in the last 12 months removing the barriers for the customer. A lot of investment at the moment around web portals, APIs, maps and all that, and provisioning and so forth in the background, and spending a lot of time with our channel partners and listening to them. Because we are Our key kind of competitors in this, in this space are the Choruses, and the Vectors, for example. We are here. We've got the ability to utilize what I would call our competitive advantages. You know, I'm a non-regulated entity. You know, I can set commercial pricing. I've got the advantage of having my own, you know, team driving around in their vans around Wellington.
You know, we're agile and dynamic as a business, and intimate and close with our customers. To make all this happen, we've been investing not significantly at all, but just being very smart in how we invest in sales and marketing capability. That's why I mentioned the portals and that sort of side. We are aggressively targeting growth. You can sit there in a way and look at fiber, a little bit of a commoditized product, and maybe a saturated market. There's a lot of market share that we can take, and we don't need to take a lot of market share to move the dial in our business.
You know, you're talking around our fiber space, when you look at our reports and so forth, it's NZD 9 million-NZD 10 million of annualized revenue. The advantage there is, you know, putting onto our network, cost of acquisition is very much little because, you know, we've obviously sunk the fiber in. There's not really too much cost of acquisition of new business. It's just smart about how we, how we target getting some more market share and the new stuff. Also just being smart on, you know, we've effectively lowered our cost to serve on this network and significantly more on the radio side, which we'll get to shortly. Really it's, it's a new circuit, new circuit game.
It's, you know, win the business, make it easy for our customers, and away we go. It transitions to margins. If I take the radio space, you know, we are, you know, the largest commercial radio network in New Zealand. The strategy here is, you know, we've got a lot of customers in the space. Now, our competitors in this area have been more probably regional players. So we've really worked hard recently on a wholesale, sort of wholesale channel, play in this space as well. What that is some of the regional dealers out there have very intimate relationships with end customers. The goal here again is market share.
We're seeing some early positive signs of this where let's utilize, you know, let's utilize Vital's network as the network of choice that we can wholesale through to the dealers who then on-sell to the customers. They can, you know, I can utilize and fulfill the capacity that I have on my network. The dealers and the market entrants don't build their networks as well and compete against each other. Good for cash flow for them and also good for just business in that space. We're seeing success. We've signed up sort of 15-18 wholesale agreements around the country. I think in the half year results, you know, we'd seen through, you know, we'd probably acquired, say, 500 new connections through this sort of strategy. Again, it's being smart.
We're very much what I see as our strengths is around being a network operator in fiber and in radio. How we then, you know, the key then is in how do we successfully utilize the ecosystems out there, channel partners and so forth, to work on our behalf, to motivate and incentivize them, but to fill our networks up, which is fundamentally a sunk cost. One of the other big pieces of work we've done is lowering what I call is our cost to serve on radio networks. When you're across 300 or 400 high sites around the country and so forth, it can get quite expensive.
We're now seeing the benefits of recent capital investments over the last few years is obviously with more modern technology out there is dropping, you know, the cost of ongoing reactive maintenance and so forth. We've optimized the network, so we're on less sites and so forth. What we're seeing is at the last half year results, we were 15% year-on-year reduction in OpEx costs, which is sustainable ongoing, and there's more fine-tuning taking place in that. For context, that equates to about, we've taken about NZD 3 million out of the business on an annualized basis over the last couple of years. You know, there's a little bit more space for us to go there.
Another area where we're seeing is a bit of a sweet spot in the business is our utilities customer base. When I talk about utilities, I'm talking about, say, power companies, you know, be it regional councils and so forth. The Powerco's, the Unisons, Wellington Electricity, who are all very good customers of ours, and leveraging the growth in the space there. You know, again, we also have, complementing the radio and fiber, is effectively some microwave networks around the, around the country, which we use, one, for internal, internally to move back all the data around the networks. Two, we actually on-sell some of that as well. We sort of see utilities as a strong space where we can link up the fiber, the radio, the managed services. We have a 24/7 NOC.
We have capability in our business across design, RFI, a lot of technical engineer is, engineering field management skills, and so forth. Utilizing that base. We're pretty clear on what our path to growth is, and it's leveraging the wholesale channel model, but not taking our eye off what I'd call key direct customers, such as some of those, utilities that I mentioned. Turnaround metrics and financials. We published these, late last year, I think it was, or during the AGM. We also published our first half year results a couple of months ago. One thing I will call out just on our financials, we talk about Adjusted EBITDA and adjusted profit. Something that impacts our financials quite a lot is the good old classic accounting standard, IFRS 16, the accounting for leases.
This is much more of a reflection of actually true, you know, free cash flows, true EBITDA that, you know, most investors would be comfortable with. If we looked at our outlook this year, the FY 23, you know, with the adjusted EBITDA of NZD 5.8 million-NZD 6.5 million, you know, we've reaffirmed that side of things. Look, we came off a tough year last year for some of those. I mean, we took some rather solid and significant impairments, and our underlying loss last year would have been, you know, a couple of million New Zealand dollars. This year we've turned it around significantly. We're on target to achieve these Adjusted EBITDA numbers. It's a relatively solid percentage. Looking and returning to profit after last year.
I think importantly is, you know, managing our debt profile. At this stage, free cash flow is the mantra around this business. You know, stabilize the revenue, get our sort of strategies working there. We're certainly optimizing our cost base. I mentioned briefly capital expenditure. Capital expenditure, we've taken that from, or two years ago, I think it was about NZD 8.2 million for the year. You know, this year we're gonna be around the NZD 4 million mark. You can see how that now is decreasing significantly. We expect that to fall further in future years as the capital expenditure we undertook over the last three to four years really was a catch up over a lack of investment from some earlier years.
Actually, the capital investment that's gone in, it's got long asset life cycles. It's not like that's a regular amount that needs to continue to happen. Something else which is pretty solid, I mean, recurring revenue in our space is give or take roughly 90% of our ongoing revenue. I mentioned before that we've, you know, have 15% out in operating cost savings. You know, we are getting the benefits and seeing the first connections under our sort of radio wholesale model and CapEx I mentioned. You know, so we're very focused on our operational turnaround plan. You know, FY 2023 is a couple of months to go. Yeah, as I said, we've reaffirmed that sort of guidance and range and holding ourselves pretty much accountable to that.
I think really, in a nutshell, looking ahead, look, it's positive. We've had a modest recovery in the first half. We're pretty happy about that at this stage. There's more we can do. There's good early signs out there of the turnaround. The current reset strategies, you know, it is all about positive free cash flow. We've heard earlier about the impact of, you know, interest. You know, interest is starting to hurt us a little bit now compared to obviously where we were 12 months ago. Our management plan here is with free cash flow in the certainly in the short term is to focus on that debt reduction and de-leverage the balance sheet more. Our wireless channel strategy, which is the radio side, that is absolutely underway.
As I mentioned, the 15 or 18 wholesale agreements we got signed up and seeing some of the first connections come on board. We're well underway with our reset of our, what I call our wired strategy or the fiber strategy and making some good progress in that space. Yeah, our FY 2023 was reaffirmed, as we said. That's where we're at. The other big, I think the subtle change in the business as well, which I think is incredibly important and we're all pretty proud of here, is that, you know, our Officevibe or our culture, we've really swung that around and we've, you know, we use a metric out there called Officevibe the tool, and we've turned that around a net 40 points in just the last 12 months, which is significant.
You know, underpinning the success of all the other change really is having the people on board. It's not just our own staff, you know, it's our channel partners, it's our key service providers, be it your Downers and Ventia's, our technology partners, be it your Nokia's and your Tait's and your Motorola's. We're all sort of in this together and working, working well together. No one wants to read the disclaimer really. I could pause it there.
Thank you, Jason. That was fantastic. Yeah, we'll skip the disclaimer. A lot of questions coming in about the new radio network. You talked, I guess just talk a little bit more about that, some of the, I guess, opportunities in leasing capacity. You mentioned some of the success with the 15 so far. Where do you see that going and how much more opportunity is there within that, within that set?
Well, look, I think when you look at the market out there in LMR or radio, you know, there's obviously been some threats. There's threats with 4G and LTE, your cellular coming through and so forth a little bit. However, there's still a strong demand for LMR radio. The play there really is this wholesale play where effectively our network becomes more the network of choice across the business and the other smaller players who had some networks out there that are aged, instead of them replacing that, they're actually clipping onto ours and we use that sales channel through. There's absolutely growth there. I think you know that where I talk about the 500 sort of connections, that's sort of up around probably your Waikato Taranaki region.
You know, there's certainly more that can be done. There's certainly headroom in there to grow capacity there without much more, say, capital investment to allow that.
Yep. A question came in, I'm not totally familiar, but how does the recent announcement by Vodafone and Starlink impact the radio business?
Yeah. Interesting, isn't it? Well, Starlink, there's always a place to play for Starlink.
Yeah.
What we see with this at the moment. Starlink There's a place for Starlink, absolutely. Initially I think with that coming in, it's gonna be I think it's text initially and maybe voice and so forth later on. Something with the radio space is LMR. Voice is still the king on that space.
Mm.
Also it's that criticality. If I look at Starlink, it's gonna be a good product, but I think what we offer is, again, we're offering a service above that. If you're talking about some of the microwave, resiliency or secondary, connectivity we provide to say, DHBs and so forth, it's also backed up by a 24/7 network operations center and SLAs attached to it. It's more that, let's say a business-grade carrier, emergency services grade. You know, Starlink's something we absolutely watch. You know, it could put a little bit of a strain on some of our business, but it's also something we can leverage as well.
you know, we're still pretty confident about where we sit in our networks and having probably a subtle differentiator of value to it as opposed to, say, the maybe the One New Zealand sort of residential consumer play.
Yeah. Thank you, Jason. A great presentation and thanks for the answers and thank you very much for putting the slides together and joining us. Really appreciate it. Just say to the viewers out there, again, feel free to send more questions in. We'll also send a link out if you wanna watch this again, the presentations. Thanks to everyone for joining us and again, to our three companies. We appreciate you taking the time and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks.