Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all of you here, wherever you're dialing from. Thank you for joining us today and your attendance here for the business update for the first half of 2024 of Barramundi Group. Today, I'm joined by my Chief Financial Officer, Vanessa, who will be joining me in updating you all today. It's been a hectic 2024. As you all know, we have been in the midst of a very busy restructuring of the company, as well as we've been very busy effecting the pivot, the operational pivot from Singapore to Brunei. But the delay of this business update was really due to the restructuring of the company. This process, where we had to delay, unfortunately, the annual report for FY 2023, was really to ensure that all the relevant disclosures are captured and that all stakeholders have as fair a disclosure as possible.
As the restructuring process is underway, we are making a good headway in finalizing the scheme of negotiations, sorry, finalizing the scheme negotiations with our creditors, and once we are able to give more updates pertaining to this matter, we will publish this again on Euronext as well as on our website. For today, the updates will be largely operational, and we will include the first half P&L in the appendix. You can download this from the Euronext NewsPoint site, or it's also been uploaded into our barramundi.com website, so I'll start with the progress of our pivot to Brunei, and as you see on the screen, I'm just using this visual aid to help you understand the progress that we've been making.
As you know, we are currently operating our land-based RAS nursery, and you can see that right in the middle of the map under Land RAS One. We have been operating this and consistently been producing fry and fingerling for stocking at sea into our sea nursery, which you can see on the chart here as C1. It's on the bottom left, Pelumpong. I think the cursor is pointing to it. We've been operational since 2021, and we've been consistently, as I mentioned, producing fry and fingerling for stocking there. With the recent SGD 50 million funding that we have received, we have also commenced operations at our deeper sea site, and that's referred to in the bottom of the image as C2. These are the locations of our grow-out cages. I think we've mentioned this before.
This is part of our BG 1.5 project where we stock fish to quickly build our biomass. Currently, we have one cage deployed, and that's been done since June this year. In June, we stocked this large sea cage with close to 110,000 juveniles. The fish are growing well with very high growth rates so far and below norm mortalities, which is good. We obviously believe that this is due to the much deeper water. It's a lot cleaner, and we're quite a distance away from human activities and other farms, as well as maritime traffic in Brunei. These are early days, but we are cautiously optimistic that this batch will hit harvest sizes of 3.5 kg by the end of 2025, sometime around this time next year, slightly earlier than projected.
We have also moved into a land site, reflected as land site, and that's operational, and that's part and parcel of our preparations for more cages to be deployed in C2. This will happen in the new year in 2025, right after the monsoon season is over, so probably around February, we will be moving our assembled cages. They've already been assembled and just waiting to be deployed so that we can have further stockings next year. The two remaining blue markers that you see on this chart, Land RAS Two and Land RAS Three, I'll talk about Land RAS Two first, which is basically the broodstock center and hatchery. Again, this is something that was mentioned before as part of our pivot to Brunei.
We are now currently awaiting the design of the seawater intake, as well as some of the master planning that's on this particular site called Mengsalut. Mengsalut will also be potentially the site where we will look to grow the business into a full land-based grow-out facility. And this is the 17-hectare lease that we have obtained from the Department of Fisheries, as mentioned earlier. But that is still in the master planning stage. And of course, we will be looking at fundraising at a later date. So I'll move on to the next slide. Again, we'll just go through some high-level updates here. So as you can see from the chart, we have worked pretty much to increase our stocking at sea.
If you look at the line, this is basically an indication of our standing biomass, which is effectively what is the biomass that's actually in the water or inventory. The teal-colored bar below will indicate our net growth in terms of what we put in terms of what we put into the water that particular quarter. As you can see, year on year is about 113%, and this is just with a single cage that we have placed into Pelong Rocks . In 2025, we expect to be deploying a further five more cages and stocking that three times next year, so we should see a very positive growth in terms of our biomass, and that will be very critical in helping us to regain our revenue streams again. We've also done some improvement in our process flows from sea nursery.
We've taken this time to really look at how we can minimize movement. So logistically, we're now stocking the fish smaller directly into the grow-out at sea using a double net method, which actually really reduces the animal stress and any of the mechanical damage or disease that could be a result from overhandling of the fish. So these are all processes that we've been working on, and we already see very, very positive results in terms of the performance of the fish, as mentioned before. I'll move on to the next few slides, but I think I'll hand it over to Vanessa, who will take you through.
Thanks, James. All right, so we'll move on to the commercial aspect of what's happening in Brunei, and as earlier updated by James, in tandem with our increase in biomass, we have to ensure that our marketing efforts don't fall below. We have been building on our partnership with Ben Foods Brunei, which we signed an exclusive distributorship with last year to increase the number of frozen SKUs that we have on display in their counters and sell in their retail stores. Apart from that, we have also commenced some small-scale pilot exports, and while the numbers are quite small, these are actually important for us to help set the base commercial relationships with our customers and also to make sure that our logistical SOPs are all in place and ready for when our biomass increases and when we really start the exports business as usual.
Apart from exports and retailers, we are also working with some key restaurant chains domestically within Brunei to have the Kühlbarra labeled products featured in their menu. Moving on to our vaccines. For the past three years, UVAXX has actually been part of a joint research program together with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, or in Singapore, better known as A*STAR, to develop an SDDV, or Scale Drop Disease Virus vaccine. I think we are quite heartened to say that we have come up with a rather promising autogenous vaccine to take this project forward. We have been awarded the second phase of the project together with A*STAR as well. Within this second phase, we'll look to commercialize the vaccine to become a commercial fully registered vaccine.
This part of the project will actually cover the safety field trials, will ensure that we have all the health and safety dossiers for submission, and once this registration is complete, it will mean that UVAXX will have its first ever registered non-autogenous vaccine, and the good part about this is that with a commercial vaccine, it's easier to sell across borders as compared to the autogenous vaccine, which is meant to be farm-specific. Furthermore, UVAXX has also been appointed by a major MNC pharmaceutical company as their sole partner to perform lab diagnostic service within the region, so with this tool in place, I think management is really focusing and making sure that UVAXX reduces its reliance internally as much as possible and makes sure that there's actually commercial viability for the entity to stand on its own two feet going forward.
Next, we'll talk about our food processing entity, Fassler Gourmet. I think, as mentioned in our previous update, 2023 was a rather challenging year for the entity, and so was the first half of 2024. There was high inflation in quite a key number of our raw materials, and prices were also volatile for some of the commodities like salmon, which we do use quite a bit of. As a result, there has been some erosion of customers due to the increasingly competitive landscape in Singapore. However, we are doubling down together with our R&D and culinary team to come up with new higher-margin products and put the focus basically on better quality revenue.
These efforts have yielded two products during the year, the Salmon Shepherd's Pie, as well as the Salmon Burger Patty, which we are glad to say have both been taken up by Singapore's largest supermarket retailer. As a result, we did see an improvement year on year in the EBITDA margin, and we do expect to see this trend continue into the year and also in the coming 2025. I'll pass it back to James for an outlook of the company.
Thanks. Thanks, Vanessa. So I'll just do a summary in terms of the outlook for the company. As mentioned, restructuring is really primarily what we are looking at for the last year or so, and we expect that the resolution for this restructuring should occur no later than first half 2025. We will share more information as and when we are able to, provided through the Euronext announcements or through the website. In terms of Brunei, again, we really will be continuing our focus on strengthening our operations as we start the team to really start farming in earnest in Pelong Rocks . We will continue to augment operational capacity by adding in that five additional net pens very early 2025, as well as having additional stockings into Pelong once those nets are in place.
The idea is to basically move us into a steady state of 1,000 metric tons per year. In terms of the growth and health performance of the first stock mentioned earlier, again, very promising with very, very low accumulated mortalities, much lower than we are seeing in Singapore and even in Australia in the past, with low FCRs and better than model growth, meaning to say that the fish in Brunei seem to be growing faster than all the previous years of data that we have in terms of growth. We think that this is really largely due to the quality of the water, the remoteness of the site, and of course, that this area of the Bruneian coast is very much uninhabited with very little traffic. Again, in aquaculture, we'd like to say that these are still very early days.
Again, we are cautiously optimistic that with the better quality waters and the results that we're already seeing, that we will be able to very quickly ramp up to that 1,000-ton target. The other bright spot in the area that we're looking into will really be on the commercialization of the vaccines. As you know, UVAXX is a very important part of the business. And apart from the phase two of the Scale Drop Disease Vaccine project to achieve commercialization, we are also developing other vaccines, and we've identified two other pathogens of commercial interest that we are focusing on right now. And the team is actually working towards ensuring that we can bring these products out into the market shortly.
For Fassler, I think a lot of the focus will be on growing our trading revenues of Norwegian and Chilean fish, as well as increasing the rollout of a lot more of the premium smoked and value-added products, the ones that Vanessa mentioned that are higher margin yielding products so that we can come back and take back some of that revenue and erosion of that revenue that we saw in 2024, and we're fairly confident that with the different products on the R&D pipeline, we will see this happen in 2025. As mentioned, this update is really an operational one. We have kept the numbers fairly high-level. We've included the P&L for this particular period in the appendix. Please do go to the website to download. It's already been uploaded into the barramundi.com website as well as on Euronext. With this, I conclude today's update.
We really want to take the opportunity to thank all shareholders for your continued patience and your support as we work towards rehabilitating the company. Also, as we enter the end of the year, Vanessa and I would like to just wish you all a safe and blessed holiday season and New Year. So thank you very much. Goodbye.