Hi everyone, good evening. Welcome to SATS 3Q FY 2025 webcast. I'm Carolyn from SATS Communications, and I have with me Kerry Mok, CEO, and Manfred Seah, CFO, to discuss our results and answer any questions you may have about our financial performance. Well, I hope you have time to review the data which we have just uploaded a short while ago. Now, for those of you who are sending in text questions, you can do so at any time throughout the presentation. I will provide instructions for audio questions when we come to the Q&A later. I will now hand the floor over to Kerry to get the ball rolling. Over to you, Kerry.
Thank you. Good evening, everybody, and thank you for spending your Friday evening dialing into this announcement results. Appreciate that. Let's go straight to the first slide.
First slide.
Yep. Okay, the Q3 numbers that we're announcing, I think you can see net profit has more than doubled, almost doubled to SGD 70.4 million. That's driven a lot by our revenue growth, a strong revenue growth for this particular quarter of 2.5%. Our margin compared to last year continues to grow steadily from 15.7% to 7.3%. This is a lot of work being done in terms of scaling our business and really getting the operating leverage that we have built this past few years. A very important highlight, free cash flow has improved tremendously this quarter itself from SGD 44.7 million to SGD 118 million, and that's a good performance from our cash flow perspective.
And I'm pleased also to announce that from a synergy standpoint, we have now secured SGD 92 million out of the SGD 100 million that we targeted at the start of the acquisition of WFS.
This cuts across both commercial as well as operational savings. We are making good momentum in this area, and we believe we have some more way to go in this synergy achievements. Now, in the bottom side, you can see both flights, cargo as well as aviation meals are all showing good improvement. Cargo at 14.5% growth, that's a very good achievement for us. I think a highlight really is this quarter is the aviation side of the meals, 20% growth in our aviation meals, and you'll see it's also reflected in our numbers on the P&L side. Next slide. Just want to give everybody an update. Again, this is something that we update every quarter. This is an important part of our driving the value of the network that we have created through the acquisition.
On the left-hand side, you'll see we started a facility launch with SF Express. It's the first time we are bringing an express company into our facility where we are optimizing import and export operations for SF Express. So this gives them the ability to improve their turnaround time for their customers and very much in line with our strategy to work with airlines as well as 3PLs to actually change the way we perform air cargo logistics at the airside. On the next one, we can see Air India. I think this is, again, we have announced it the last time around, but a bit more color around we are working closely with Air India to launch their air cargo network handling, and this is really through a global tender across the group, and actually, we have been seeing a lot more global tenders come out recently.
I believe a lot of airlines will now start to look at globalization and see how they can work with more global players to actually manage their cargo operations on a more global basis, and this, again, plays into our strength as the largest cargo operator in the world. You have read recently, we have just started our business with DHL in Hong Kong. This was a customer that we used to have in AAT many, many years ago, and we are very, very pleased to restart our collaboration with DHL in Hong Kong itself, and this cuts across not just the cargo side, but also the ground handling side with SATS Hong Kong, and we're now handling more than 50 weekly freighters out of Hong Kong itself.
With that, we are now working with DHL both in Singapore and Hong Kong, which are the two key hubs for DHL Express, and we believe that's going to put us in a much better position to hopefully take on more business with DHL going forward. The next one I wanted to highlight is the Exercise Wallaby. You may have seen some of the media releases that what we've done with Singapore Armed Forces. We sent our group of Food Solutions guys in there for a few months to actually provide food actually to the military group itself, and Exercise Wallaby is a big exercise for SAF, and we believe that this will continue to be a big exercise going forward, and we are there to partner SAF in providing those meals to them.
There's a new facility that's being created over there, and that's why we're quite happy to be there because a lot of nice equipment for our team in there to utilize. Back home, this is something, although it's not commercial, but I wanted to highlight that we are starting to digitalize our culinary recipe. We have a lot of signature products that we create for many of our airline customers. In the past, a lot of it is manual and all that. We have now put it into a database with various levels of categorization that allows us to then share this recipe in a far more widespread network. So basically, someone in, say, Thailand is able to look at this recipe if they have that right access to look at a recipe and then replicate it for their particular station or country itself.
We believe this is one way of digitalizing our knowledge and really putting our knowledge into a digital effort that will hopefully keep our know-how in a very safe and secure manner going forward. Bottom there, you can see all this we have achieved SGD 92 million or SGD 100 million, for which commercial is SGD 61 million. At the start, we actually kind of put it as 50/50, but now commercial is very strong. We're getting more market share. We're getting more discussion with key customers, and we're starting to leverage the network in a far more effective manner to win more business with our customers. Operational size at SGD 31 million, we think we have some more ways to go as we start to look at the next layer of operational synergy.
I think Manfred in the past has also presented financial and fiscal savings is really up to SGD 53 million per annum. Now, with that highlight, I will hand over to Manfred, who will take you through to the financial results.
Hi, good evening all. Thank you for joining this call. I have some slides that I will go through. I won't hit it page by page, but some of which I will leave it to you to read. Now, on the executive summary, you can see that the top row is actually the nine months results, then the second row, the third quarter. So maybe I'll just focus on the third quarter, and SATS achieved another good financial performance for the quarter, and then the continuing momentum is primarily due to sustained recovery of the aviation sector in Asia, particularly continuing growth in global air cargo volume helped by the seasonal uplift. Now, if you look at the revenue, third quarter revenue, we expanded by about 12.5%. Food came in better at 21%, and the Gateway revenue 10%.
This quarter's results are fairly straightforward, and I'll go through why certain things are basically there. Now, EBITDA improved to about SGD 51.5 million. To about SGD 264 million for the quarter, and with a margin expanding to about 17.3% from 15.7% a year ago. Third quarter, PATMI rose to about SGD 70.4 million, as Kerry has mentioned. This actually represents about 124% growth year on year. Nine months results came in at SGD 205 million, and this actually represents almost about 8x better than nine months of last year. On the segmentation standpoint, cargo continued to be about 50% of our business, 26% ground, and then the remaining being food, of which aviation food is a bigger portion. Aviation food here is 2x that of non-aviation. The business drivers, as I think Kerry mentioned earlier, on the three months, this is actually nine months year to date.
You can see that flights handled volume actually grew by about 6%. Air Cargo and Aviation Meals grew about 16.6% and 24% respectively. Now, just a quick note on Aviation Meals continuing to be strong. There's a catch-up. If you recall, when we emerged from COVID, aviation side, the meal side, the pax load side is the last to pick up. So finally, it has. So with the segmentation, again, Singapore and Americas are at parity at about 35% contribution each. EMEA represents about 19%, and the rest of Asia-Pacific 11%. If I move on to the next slide, all the key drivers, as I mentioned, actually have experienced good growth, and first, with flight of about 5.9%, as mentioned earlier, cargo, and then meals. You can see that aviation meals here, as mentioned, came in at 24% growth.
Now, all the little kind of light blue bubbles suggest how much have we recovered compared to pre-COVID levels, and you can see almost all, if not maybe perhaps just cargo tonnage is just a shade below 100%. The rest are all surpassing pre-COVID level. Okay. Just to point out, on the quarter-to-quarter kind of time series, you'll notice that the meal side, aviation meals, non-aviation meals volume dipped in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. That is seasonally consistent, even compared to last year. Primarily, this is due to the summer peak in China, so it is the China volume that has caused this flux primarily, and for the non-aviation, there's also the Exercise Wallaby that is actually in the summer, second quarter, so the third quarter, that volume is absent. A quick note on the number of employees.
Some of you may be alarmed by looking at this number being escalating continuously. This is primarily to cope with the peak load in Americas. Americas, both North America and South America, we do have some ground handling activities there. That has caused an influx of maybe about 3,000-4,000 employees on a subcontracting basis. And then we use that approach to actually manage peak period. You'll see that in the next quarter, this will fall off. Okay. Moving on to revenue by business segment. Just broadly, you can see that the revenue for the nine months grew 14%. And then there's respective percentages here. Cargo 16%, ground 3%, and then on the blended basis, Gateway grew by 11%. Food, on the other hand, grew 26%, led by Aviation volume of about 29%. Okay. And next slide, slide eight.
I'll just deal with the third quarter, the nine months. I'm going to leave you to read. Okay. So I mentioned that revenue expanded by about 12.5%, and this outpaced the OpEx, excluding depreciation and amortization, growth of about 10.3%. So more drops down to the EBITDA and the EBIT line. As a result, EBIT margin expanded by about EBIT dollars expanded by about 52.6%. Then EBIT margin came in at about 8.4%. And some of you with an eager eye would note that how come there is a degradation of the operating margin for the quarter compared to the second quarter. And this is simply because we have outperformed our annual operating plan, we need to recalibrate bonus provision. And as a result of that, you can see that additional provision is required here.
Now, on a normalized basis, just to give you a hint of those who actually want to work backwards, if I were to normalize this, our EBIT margin would have been 9.2% instead of 8.4%. So I'll leave you to work it out, and you'll then know how much is the incremental employment cost that we needed to pad on. PATMI came in at SGD 70.4 million, and as Kerry has mentioned, this almost doubled last year. PATMI margin is 4.6%. Doing the same computation, if I were to normalize this, we would have exceeded more than 5.1% for consistency purposes. For the nine months, I'm going to leave you to read that. Moving on to the cash flow, third row from the bottom, closing cash came in at SGD 706 million.
There is a favorable variance compared to the same period last year of about SGD 166 million. If you look at the bar on the right-hand side, the top one, operating cash flow almost doubled, more than doubled actually from SGD 248 million to about SGD 517 million. That has contributed primarily to the positive free cash flow of about SGD 49 million that we closed nine months. If you recall from the earlier slide, if you just look at third quarter alone, free cash flow was about SGD 118 million. Okay. Moving on, next slide, basically just show you the trending time series of how the operating cash flow flux is and including what is the free cash flow. Third quarter came in at SGD 118 million, right? With the operating cash flow of SGD 308 million. That's the last bar that you should be looking at. All right.
Group financial position, the balance sheet. Just touching on, I covered cash position. Now I want to talk about the net debt to EBITDA. Net debt to EBITDA came down from 3.9x to about 3 x, right? So this is how we have computed this, is using last 12 months, right? So LTM. So LTM EBITDA, then you look at net debt is about 3.0x . Gearing actually improved from 4.6x to about 3.7x. And if we are able to sustain this continuously, I think Moody's will be very happy. And the target given to us was about 4x , and we will surpass that and even way before the end of 2025. So that D/E ratio improved from 1.6x to about 1.5x . And the ROE, if you take the last 12 months kind of benchmarking, would have improved to about 9.7%.
Next slide, and more on the quarterly trending. I want to focus on EBIT, and you can see that EBIT margin continuously, sequentially kind of improved to about 8.4% for the third quarter. As I mentioned earlier, if you normalize this, it should be about 9.2%. The reason for the dip in the share of earnings from 29.8 in the second quarter to 27.6 is, if you recall, we actually sold down 10% of PT CAS. So that reduction in share of earnings is primarily due to that. Compared to a year ago, there's a 20% drop, and if you recall, some of you may check back, and there was a PPA adjustment, purchase price adjustment in the previous year that has actually caused that fluctuation. EBITDA margin, as I mentioned, continued to expand to about 17.3%. There's a dip.
Now, if we again normalize that, that would have been alongside the trend that we have been looking at. Just for everybody's recollection, our target for EBIT margin is more than 10%. Our target for EBITDA margin is more than 20%. And our target for PATMI is more than 5%. Now, when I say more than, I'm not bounding how much it is. So I think from a Capital Markets Day, I've gotten several comments that we are being overly conservative with margins. I'm not. I'm just not putting a bound to it, right? So I think we are continuing to trend in a good way. I think this is a good time for me to pause and perhaps hand it over to Kerry.
Thank you, Manfred. Let me just cover briefly the outlook. I think with the change in the presidency in the U.S., as you can see, there's a lot more volatility out there in terms of the general business environment. Based on the tariffs that we put in place, there's a chance that it won't impact the trade flows in the short term. But I think when you look at our network, we are the best place to actually navigate all these challenges. With the network that we have, no matter how trade flows, we are in a good position to continue to take on some of this volume. But whilst we do that, we need to be very nimble and look at how the flows are happening.
And if there are stations that we need to get ourselves into, we have the people and the structure and the know-how to start new stations very quickly as well.
I think that's a very good strength that we possess. Passenger traffic is still predicted to grow, and that's going to help our food business and going to help our ground business, especially here in Asia. Again, cargo business will be volatile. We really do not know when the de minimis thing will be reimplemented again. We know there's a temporary reprieve right now. We also know some of the shippers are cautious as well in terms of how this is going to affect them. Clearly, they will start to look at how to change their supply chain in order to take into consideration the change in de minimis. It's not so straightforward to have a zero de minimis in the U.S. We saw from the first implementation, it was not that straightforward, which is why they had to reverse that.
In our own facility, we did see that some of the shipments which were held, and there's quite a lot to process them on a daily basis. So we'll see. I think right now, we remain cautiously optimistic in terms of at least this will carry on for a while whilst the Customs and Border Protection will start to look at how to implement a zero de minimis regime. So yeah, we will be nimble and we continue to work with our customers very closely to actually help to streamline their supply chain. You would have seen our announcement yesterday that we actually signed an MoU with Atlas Air. Atlas Air is the largest air freighter airline in the world. We do a lot of business with them in the U.S. It's on the basis of that partnership.
We are looking at global collaboration with them where we're going to do more value services for them, focusing on e-commerce, digitalization. And importantly, digitalization is going to be key to bring more transparency. And then focusing on pharmaceutical high-end value goods, there's very much in line with our strategy. And we believe partnerships like this will continue to put us in the best position to navigate some of these volume challenges that we'll see in the near term. I think this kind of covers my statement, right? So yeah, I just want to say that we continue to benefit from the recovery of passenger volume in Changi. We work very closely as an ecosystem. It is now up to 99.1% of pre-pandemic levels. So yes, while globally, there are changes in the different environment, but there are pockets where we are able to continue to drive the growth.
And certainly, while challenges in cargo in Europe and U.S., we will see some of these challenges coming up next year. But in Asia side, we do have opportunities to continue to grow. And that's really giving us the resiliency to navigate some of these short-term challenges that we will see coming forward. And with that, we're open for Q&A.
Yeah. Thank you, Kerry. It's now time for Q&A.