Hi everyone, I'm Carolyn from Communications. Welcome to another section of SATS webcast. It has been an exciting year as we have posted our 4Q and full-year results on SGX and SATS website. With me here are Kerry Mok, PCEO, Manfred Seah, CFO, and Timothy Tang, CFO Designate, to take you through the results. Before I start, I would like to bring your attention to the forward-looking statement currently on the screen. I'll now hand over the floor to Kerry to get the ball rolling. Kerry, over to you.
Thank you, everybody, and I appreciate you guys all taking time for this results announcement. Before I start, I thought I would just take some time to say something. As you all know, Manfred, this will be Manfred's last call as CFO. And all you know that since I became CEO, Manfred and I have been partners in crime. He has done a lot for SATS, and it is through his leadership that we have gone through this significant transformation and, frankly, played a very pivotal role in the acquisition and integration of WFS . I got to say, it is through his disciplined approach, helped us with a lot of the financing and some of the stuff I will say later, a lot has got to do with Manfred. Manfred is not leaving us. He is just transitioning to a different role.
He's going to be a special advisor, still helping with some of the key corporate projects. As investors and analysts, you'll be pleased to know that we're still having his knowledge and skill set with us. Of course, at the same time, I want to just introduce Timothy, Tim, or I call us for short, so CFO Designate. After the AGM, Tim will take over as a new group CFO. I look forward to working closely with Tim as we continue to grow our business and really grow into a true multinational company that's headquartered here in Singapore. Once again, Manfred, thank you very much for all your effort and outstanding service to SATS.
Thank you, Kerry.
Okay, and then I'll go jump into the meeting proper. Pleased to announce that the full-year profit has quadrupled to SGD 243.8 million year-on-year. This is a good set of results, all thanks to the team around the world for really pulling in and getting our profit back on track. Fourth quarter itself is about almost SGD 39 million. That's about a SGD 6 million year-on-year improvement. I think I'm pleased to say that revenue-wise, we've grown 13% year-on-year. This is a nice growth trajectory. Probably one of our, even with such a big revenue base, it's one of our big growth, organic growth that we have shown on a year-on-year basis. EBITDA has expanded. Now it's crossed SGD 1 billion, and that's almost 33% year-on-year growth. In the fourth quarter itself, it's also expanded as well to about SGD 260 million.
Very pleasing for us is actually the free cash flow. Again, we end the year with almost SGD 230 million of free cash flow. If you recall, last year, we were negative about almost SGD 50 million. That is a huge turnaround. It is really down to how we have improved our profitability and how we have been managing our capital expenditure as well. The four-point synergy we started with when we first did the acquisition, we announced a, or we set a target for ourselves of SGD 100 million of EBITDA synergies over a five-year time frame. I am pleased to say that after two years, we have really hit SGD 103 million in EBITDA synergies. That is really driving our financial performances as well. Again, something that through the integration efforts of the team, we have been able to achieve that in two years.
Again, very outstanding performance from a team to actually hit those targets. The last bit, I'll propose final dividend of SGD 0.035 per share, and that will bring us to SGD 0.05 for the whole year. This is part and parcel of us trying to share the gains with our shareholders. As we continue this growth path, we hope that this number will continue to grow as we continue to be more profitable. On the bottom-hand side, you can see all the statistics, both from the fourth quarter as well as year-on-year. Across flights, cargo, and meals, it's all shown tremendous growth on a year-on-year basis. Very pleased to have this set of growth numbers. I'll go to the next slide. Now, a lot that's driving this growth has really been new client acquisition.
Our commercial team, our approach to grow our business as a network business is really gaining a lot of ground. This is just a snapshot of what we have done over the quarter as well, in fact, over the year, sorry, of how we have been having new customers coming into our network. Our business, really, especially on the cargo side, is based on a network. Our team has been going to all our customers and selling them our network and looking at how we can actually help them in places where we are present and they are not with us. We have been trying to extend that service offering to them globally. We have been fairly successful in getting some of these customers to come into our network. Next slide. Just some updates. We have seen some of this announcement in Singapore.
We have made an investment. We'll announce a SGD 250 million investment to really help upgrade our assets and our operations here in Changi Airport. That is to help drive the growth that we see that will still happen in Changi Airport before T5 comes on board. This will help us not just to modernize our fleet, but also drive productivity and safety performances as well. We've also announced the expansion of Marina Bay Cruise Center. Actually, that is to help facilitate Disney Cruise that is meant to start this year. Disney Cruise is a big ship, so we actually have to expand the capacity so that we can handle both Disney as well as another cruise ship all at the same time. At the same time, we've also extended our agreement with STB for operating site all the way to 2037.
Again, good development here on the Marina Bay Cruise Center. On the acquisition side, we have completed acquisition in Amsterdam. We announced that, and that has been closed now. That has given us additional capacity of about 600 tons annually. Schiphol Airport is one of the key logistics hubs in Amsterdam, also in Europe. Our warehouse space increase is highly strategic because this is all an airside. We have been constrained for growth in Schiphol for some time, and we are actually operating multiple sites today. This gives us a chance to consolidate, drive more efficiency, at the same time, take on more customers in Schiphol itself. On the food side, we have been participating in WTC. This is the fourth year of our participation. We have been showcasing our food products around to all our customers globally.
There has been a very interesting discussion with many of our airline customers on some of the products that we feature. One thing I want to highlight is in most airline caterers, most people struggle with vegetarian meals and/or even some of the special meals that many caterers have to cater for going forward. We have been able to show this to our customers on what we can do utilizing our production facilities in Thailand, India, as well as China. Good feedback from our customers, and we are quite confident that we can continue to grow this space with our key customers globally. PAX Awards has recognized us as seven consecutive caterers of the year in Asia. Our joint venture partner, TajSATS, has also received an award in South Asia. All in all, good progress in our catering business as well. Next slide.
This is a snapshot on the synergy itself, what we have achieved. You can see from both financial as well as operational, we have achieved 103. So 35 is through the operational synergies, and then 68 is through the commercial synergy. Initially, we were thinking it's going to be 50-50, but I think the commercial side has really come in very strongly. From a pipeline perspective, I'm confident that it will still show good growth in this area. We are taking market share from our competitors and winning new business. That is all because of the way we operate and our operational excellence that drives our ability to win new business. That's a good outcome, and we're really pleased with where we've landed with this initiative. Next. Just a summary of year to date. Our revenue for FY2025 is now SGD 5.821 billion.
EBITDA, as I mentioned earlier, is above SGD 1 billion now. EBIT is very strong margin at 8.2% to about SGD 475 million. Our share of JV, and our mentor will go a little bit on that, but it's reached about SGD 114 million. Overall, per me about 4.2%. When you look at the segmental growth, cargo, EBITDA margin is going good. Ground is the next, and then followed by the food. You can see a snapshot of EBIT margin all improving in there. I guess the quarterly growth in the per me trending has been good. Fourth quarter is traditionally low, and we'll go a little bit on that. The fourth quarter really is about because now cargo for us is 50% of our business. Traditionally, both Europe and the U. S. will always see a drop in the volume.
That is because after the Christmas period, and of course, we also have Chinese New Year in the month of February as well, that has kind of caused this volume drop. Nevertheless, it is still a year-on-year growth in per me against last year. The trajectory for us is something that we continue to try and grow going forward. Next, I will pass it on to Manfred. Actually, I took on your slide, Manfred. My apologies.
Thank you, Kerry. I was keeping quiet so that you can go on.
Okay. You should have stopped me, Manfred.
Thank you. Okay. Maybe just to stay on this slide for a little bit. You look at all the key drivers, flights, cargo, meals, all these are growing at a very nice kind of growth rate. In particular, cargo as well as meals, you can see these are double-digit growth. The reason why flights is slightly muted is the ground side actually accelerated growth ahead of these two others. Maybe just to give you a little bit more context here, cargo tonnage, we grew by about 15%. I'd like to actually show you a chart. How do we compare to industry? You can see here on the slide is loaded. The red line is the, sorry, the blue line is IATA line. Then SATS, as a group, you look at the red line, we are consistently over the last five quarters higher than the IATA number.
This basically demonstrates that we have been winning market share from our competitors. The blue line is the industry. It tracks our organic growth because we, being the leader in the market. With the new wins, which Kerry has mentioned earlier across the network, that has given us a 5%-6% point higher. If you look at the flights, there is another slide on the flight side of things. This chart here shows America, and the top half, America is also growing higher than the IATA America's numbers. As for Singapore, we do not have any ground handling in EMEA. We are only tracking America's and Singapore. You can see that Singapore line tracks the passenger load of Changi very, very well. It is highly correlated. Changi does not disclose the number of flights, but we do.
We know our flight number, and it correlates with the trending of the Changi Airport passenger volume. Just before I leave this slide, just to call out that non-aviation, there is a slight dip of about 300,000 meals. This is simply because we have consolidated our Kunshan facility into our Tianjin facility for efficiency purposes. During the transition, there is a slight drop in some of these meal volume. Number of employees increased by 1,000 from third quarter to fourth quarter. This is due to Brazil. We have an increase in headcount in Brazil to cope with the volume growth and offset by America because the fourth quarter is generally a softer quarter for the U.S. The other two increases were one in Amsterdam, where we actually took over Menzies operations.
Also for SG Hub, which we increased about 200-300 employees to cope with the volume surge. Yeah. Moving forward, I just wanted to, and you see that in this deck of slides, we have been trying to be very comprehensive as much as possible for your reading. We have tabulated this financial metric. On the left side, you can see that EBITDA, for the first time, we have actually crossed the SGD 1 billion mark, came in at SGD 1.04 billion. That is an increase of almost 33% growth compared to the same time last year. Now, the second metric here, EBITDA after leases, let's say we back out the leases, what does it look like? Today, our leases charges were about SGD 466 million. If we back that out, that comes up to about SGD 570.3 million, which is a 65% growth compared to last year.
Drop down two rows, operating cash flow came in very strong with a 74% growth at about SGD 891 million. I think what is of relevance to everyone here is actually the free cash flow. Free cash flow, we registered SGD 228 million. This is almost a 5% growth compared to negative about SGD 48 million. That basically represents a conversion ratio of almost about 23% of the EBITDA and then represents almost 94% of our net earnings of SGD 243.8 million, which we are very pleased of. We continue to be able to financially manage and get our free cash flow to increase a bit more as we go along. Cash balance came in at SGD 694 million. That is a slight uptick compared to same time last year, about SGD 659 million. We have a total debt, including lease liabilities, of about SGD 4.2 billion.
If you back out, if we were to back out the cash portion, basically net cash of, sorry, net debt of about SGD 2.8 billion thereabouts. Yeah. Now, moving on to the right-hand side, you can see the ratios, profitability ratio. All the margins are showing good growth. EBITDA margin is about 17.8%. If I were to back out the leases, we have registered the EBITDA margin after leases of about 9.8%. EBIT margin, there is an increase to 8.2%. PAT me grew almost about four times that of last year at about 4.2%. Very quickly on the leverage, gross net EBITDA, we came in at about 3.7x , which is below Moody's target of about four times. We have already satisfied and fulfilled our commitment to reduce it below four times.
We hope to be able to continue in paring down our debt to achieve even lower leverage. In terms of interest coverage, on the right-hand side, EBITDA over interest expense, we are about 4.2x , which is improved by about 1.2x compared to last year. Lastly, before I leave this slide, I'd like to cover return on equity has basically increased to about 9.8%. Some of you will recall that our target is continuing to trend this upwards to about 15%. That was about pre-COVID kind of return that we are aiming at. EPS, there's an accretion of basically from SGD 0.038 to about SGD 0.164 per share. As a result of that, our board has basically approved to declare dividend as Kerry has guided of about SGD 0.035 final dividend, totaling about SGD 0.05 for the year. Okay. Next slide.
I won't go too much into it except to point out that cargo revenue, ground revenue grew at about 15% and 3% respectively, boosting gateway revenue growth of about 11%. Food came in at about 22% growth, led by predominantly aviation catering of about 26%. The next two slides, I'm going to just leave you to read this. Maybe just to point out on slide 12, slide 12 here, you can see that our revenue as a group grew 13%. If you were to total up the total expenditure, total expenditure actually grew only 9%. There is a nice positive jaw to allow more profit to drop down. As a result of that, our EBIT margin has basically improved from 4.7% to about 8.2%, giving us a 95% growth in operating profit.
Then as a result of that, that basically powered the increase in our per me from SGD 56.4 million by about 3.3x to SGD 243.8 million. On the quarterly trending, I am just going to leave you to pick this up. I just want to point out that every single metric here has given a very nice growth compared to last year. Just to also pick up a point on the fourth quarter being seasonally low. We have guided that although we are growing sequentially, the fourth quarter is usually a weaker quarter. Nonetheless, we are pleased to see that our per me has come in at about SGD 38.7 million, which is surpassed, better than last year of about SGD 6 million. Okay. On the OpEx, I am going to leave you to read to pick this up on yourself.
I just want to point out that employment costs continue to be the dominant portion of this. This is about 59% of our total OpEx. Okay. Now, I just want to go flip into the free cash flow slide. This is slide 16. And this is a graphical representation and give you the profile of our free cash flow. You can see that for the last two quarters, it's coming very, very strong. And it's totaling at about SGD 228 million compared to -SGD 48 million the previous year. Right. One last slide. This is on the group financial position. And just to point out that our equity has increased by about SGD 209 million due to the earnings for this year. And gross debt EBITDA on the gearing side, you can see on the right-hand side has dropped from about 4.6x to 3.7x.
As guided, we have been able to meet Moody's target of about four times there. Return on equity, 9.8%. We will continue to work towards hitting the 15% and hopefully soon. With that, I am going to hand you back to Kerry. Kerry, I do not have to answer any question either.
Depends on the question. Okay. Let me just go a little bit outlook. I think we all know that we're in this heightened environment of the uncertainty due to the tariff situation. There's that 90-day reprieve right now. We are closely monitoring the situation. Actually, we are working very closely with our customers. In supply chain, things flow to where things need to be. Because of our network and because of our space, warehouse space, we are working with them as they adjust their routing strategy. With the reprieve, we are seeing volumes strengthening as well. I think it helps us, right? We have a very diversified business model today. We're not just in one region. We're across the group. That helps us. We do have also our food business is coming back, as you can see from the numbers.
We have been able to take on bigger market share. This is really true, very good commercial and operational performance that allows us to take more market share. We are very committed to how we continue to make sure that we are a key player here in Singapore Hub, as well as our ecosystem partners around the world. We are really just maintaining focus around driving cost discipline, operational agility to really help our customers navigate this challenging environment. We believe there are opportunities for us to continue to grow. Our focus on value-added services is an important one. That will actually help to also bring down hopefully costs for our customers' customers as well. As we continue to be successful, we will pare down our debt, reinvest in the business, and look to enhance shareholders' return.