Accsys Technologies PLC (AXS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Accsys Technologies PLC full Year results presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Rob Harris, Chief Executive. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our full year results presentation for the 2021 financial year. And firstly, I hope you're all safe and well. And before we start, as always, I'd like to pause for a photo moment of our Accoya product. In this photo, we have Accoya decking, showing its strength against the elements of the [ Banff Mountain ] in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. It's also a very symbolic choice of photo as it's in the North American region, where we are making good strategic progress. I'll give you more about that later. Moving on, we have the usual disclaimers that I know will be familiar to you, and thank you for adhering to that. In terms of this morning's agenda, firstly, I'm going to give you a quick initial overview of the results, then Will Rudge is going to take you through the financials in more detail. I will then give an update on the Hull Tricoya plant since the early June update. I know this is a key focus for analysts, shareholders and many stakeholders on the call today. I'll then walk through the business review to update you on our strategic development and the Accoya segment's positive, tactical and strategic momentum. So looking across today's results, we have delivered a strong set of numbers for FY 2021. We have delivered a 4.5% increase in sales and a 10% growth in revenue. This is a really good performance, given the backdrop of COVID-19 this year and given the fact that we are capacity constrained with greater demand than we can actually supply. Our sales and revenue results shows the business is resilience and that strong market demand for our product continues. Our sales, manufacturing and supply chains continue to do an outstanding job for Accsys. These results are another step-up in our profitability. We have grown gross margin by 290 basis points to 33% and are reporting a 44% growth in underlying EBITDA today to EUR 10.1 million. We're also benefiting from good cash generation in the Accoya segment and margin gains through diligent pricing of this high value, sustainable product for the construction sector. Beyond the financials, 2021 has been a year of strategic progress as well. We are moving ahead in our plans to expand in North America, the largest single market for Accoya and are expanding capacity at Arnhem for Accoya production by 33%. While we are faced ongoing challenges in completing our new Tricoya plant at Hull, we have progressive construction during the year to the final stages, but more about this later. Finally, and very importantly, we are investing in our organizational capability, people, talent and our business processes, to manage it and deliver the growth ahead, and importantly, providing a platform to grow sustainably. This is important, really important in our path to increase production capacity to 200,000 meters cubed by 2025 in our 5x growth target. I'll now hand over to Will for the financial results, please.

Thank you, Rob. Good morning, everyone. The first image you can see here is a great image of Accoya being used as a floating boat platform in Canada, a great example of Accoya's durability and stability in action. But I'll move quickly on to the next slide, the financial highlights. Rob's already touched on some of these. This first slide summarizes what we believe is a strong financial performance, and this is for the year to 31st of March 2021. Revenue increased by 10%, with Accoya sales volumes up 4.5%. The sales volumes recovered strongly, with demand exceeding our production capacity following the impact to sales in the first quarter due to COVID-19. Revenue growth was supported by an increase in average sales prices. Price increases were implemented for all Accoya customers from January 2020, the end of the previous year. In addition, from 1st of April 2020, the European markets were successfully transitioned into our direct sales and marketing channels from their previous exclusive license to Cerdia, ending the previous discounted sales arrangements. A further price increase took effect from November 2020, including to address an expected increase in raw material costs. These increases have helped the Accoya manufacturing margin increased by 340 basis points to 33.4%. We have seen a marginal increase in other operating costs in the second half of the year as we increase our investment in our organizational capability. However, with the gross margin improvements, this has overall resulted in a 44% increase in underlying group EBITDA to EUR 10.1 million. This represents our third consecutive year of positive group underlying EBITDA and our second consecutive year of positive group underlying EBIT. The strong performance of the Accoya business has helped drive a 61% increase in group operating cash flow, and that has helped ensure we have maintained a robust balance sheet with a EUR 30 million reduction in net debt. Moving on to the next slide, which looks at our sales mix in a bit more detail. The underlying demand from resulting sales here have helped demonstrate the resilience comparable business. The chart on the right-hand side helps explain the year-on-year movements in Accoya revenue split by region. In Q1, sales were disrupted, in particular in the U.K. and North America due to COVID-19 impacting our customers' supply chains. We were able to focus efforts in other regions to stimulate additional sales, in particular in Mainland Europe, the Nordic region, while also increasing sales to our Tricoya partners. From Q2, sales volumes recovered quickly in all regions, and we saw a pickup in sales to North America in particular, being a key region for us to target in the longer term, given the substantial market opportunity, which we have confirmed exists there. The chart on the left-hand side shows the split of volumes by market. The Tricoya segment with 26% of the total sales volumes represent sales of lower price Accoya to our Tricoya partners. With these volumes expected to be transferred to the whole plant once it is operational, and that will free up volume in on them for full price Tricoya sales. The rest of Europe region, just for confirmation, represents sales, which in the previous year, have been sold at discounted prices under the previous arrangement with Cerdia. But during the year we're reporting upon, those were at normal prices. We'll move on to the next slide, please, which sets out our EBITDA progression in a bit more detail. This sets out how change in the Accoya business have helped drive the increase in the group underlying EBITDA from EUR 7 million last year to EUR 10.1 million this year. EUR 4.8 million was an improvement due to higher average sales prices. This is split among -- across a few areas. First of all, the effect of the termination of the Cerdia contract and the end of the pricing discount that was previously in place, that was effective for the whole of the financial year compared to the previous year. In addition, there was an increase in material sold for the Tricoya production. But lastly, the largest component was the price increases to all acquired customers firstly from 1st of January 2020 and then again a price increase from November 2020, helping improve our overall margins. EUR 1.3 million of the improvement was attributable to increased sales volumes for the year as a whole, the 4.5% volume increase I mentioned earlier. This was offset by raw material prices, including [ word ] and our [ net ] acetals costs, which increased marginally compared to the previous year. There was a more significant increase in acetic and hydride costs seen in the final quarter of the financial year, and that has continued into the beginning of the new financial year. However, we do also continue to benefit from the partial natural hedge we get due to the sale of the acetic acid byproduct, such that the impacts from overall raw material costs has been more marginal. The increase in Accoya operating cost reflects an increase in headcount for the year and an increase in spend on sales and marketing costs as in preparation for the support of our capacity expansion plans. Increase in other group operating costs largely also reflects higher headcount. We completed the recruitment of the majority of the remaining Hull operating team for the Tricoya plant in the second half of the year. In addition, we are investing in our overall organizational capability and added a number of experienced new roles to reflect our growth in scale and our ambitions for growth. This has included new groups, Head of Health and Safety, for our technology center as well as for Engineering, IT, [indiscernible] management and Investor Relations. Moving on to the next page and looking a little bit more detail at profitability progression. Both charts here show our longer-term trend over 5 years. Group EBITDA on the left-hand side and the Accoya segmental EBITDA and margin on the right-hand side. While the progression of the Accoya business has clearly driven the improvement in the group overall, I would like to highlight a couple of points. We have previously said that we believed the 30% gross manufacturing margin for the Accoya business was achievable. We have now achieved this for 18 months. And in particular, this was seen following the step-up of volume in FY '20, which resulted from the benefit of the Accoya -- the third Accoya reactor coming on stream and the associated economies of scale, which flow from that 50% increase in capacity. However, over that same period, margins have also benefited from the higher sales prices. Looking ahead, we will continue to keep sales prices under review so that we are at least able to maintain these margin levels. However, we will also target further margin improvement, seeking to take advantage of further economies of scale as we benefit from additional capacity, in particular with the completion of the fourth Accoya reactor due to be operational by the end of this new financial year. In addition, when the Hull plant turns on for Tricoya, this will free up additional capacity in item for higher-priced Accoya sales. Group profitability is then expected to benefit from the increase in overall sales volumes as well as the higher 40% anticipated gross margin, which we continue to believe is achievable from the Hull plant once it's operational. Moving on to the next chart, which looks at our cash flow. The net debt bridge on this slide shows that strong cash flow generation has helped decrease net debt from EUR 25 million to EUR 12.2 million at the end of the year. As explained earlier, the Accoya business drove most of this with a 27% increase in EBITDA, resulting in EUR 21.4 million of cash inflow. The Tricoya EBITDA reflects its pre-operating position, and that's expected to become general positive following the start-up of the Hull plant. The R&D and corporate costs did increase compared to the prior year, reflecting the investments in organizational capability. However, we don't expect that to increase in line with revenue as we continue to grow. The decrease in operation working capital by EUR 5.1 million is largely due to a decrease in inventory during the year, including the impact of some supply chain disruption as a result of COVID-19 and subsequent to that. Year-end inventory levels were lower than planned. And as a result, are being rebuilt in the new financial year with a further increase expected ahead of new production capacity coming on stream. The CapEx investments of EUR 21 million includes EUR 14.4 million for progress in the Tricoya plant at Hull and EUR 5 million for the fourth reactor in Arnhem. This investment was partially offset by CapEx accruals of EUR 9 million, reflecting the milestone nature of our construction contracts. The EUR 3.2 million Cerdia termination fee was reported in the first half of the year, offset against our Cerdia loan at the start of the year. And then finally, the Tricoya equity issuance reflects shares issued to our Tricoya consortium partners. If I move on to the balance sheet and just to note a couple of more points in respect of our overall position. Overall, we believe our balance sheet remains robust. In addition to the reduction in net debt I've just explained and the resulting net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, the group had cash balances of EUR 47.6 million at the end of March. This cash balance, together with positive operating cash revenue at Accoya business and further undrawn banking facilities ensure the group is well positioned looking ahead, including taking into account that much of this cash is expected to be invested in our key additional production capacity projects in Arnhem and Hull. In addition, subsequent to the year-end, we raised a further EUR 35 million through a successful placing and open offer. The proceeds of this are principally intended to fund our 60% equity share of the planned Accoya plant in North America. Rob has got some further details on this a little bit later. And at this point, I'll pass back to Rob.

Many thanks, Will. I'll now give an update on Hull before we go through the wider business. The image here is actually Tricoya panels. They are on a Swiss exterior cladding project. The interesting design you can see reflects Tricoya in its element. It's a high-value, high-performance wood element. Tricoya gives a lot of design freedom. And as you know, it's extremely stable and durable, 3 things that you do not get with regular MDF or regular wood panel products. I would now like to move on to building our Tricoya capacity in Hull. As most of you know, we are building a world first of its kind Tricoya production plant at Hull in the U.K. Across the full 2021 financial year, we have made fundamental progress in the construction of the plant despite some continuing challenges with the pace of work and construction, which has been impacted through COVID-19 and the lead contractors challenges. Last summer, construction progressed. And after the initial COVID shutdowns, activity on the site slowed down. Despite this, in October, we reached the milestone of installing the acetylation towers, which you can see here in the bottom right-hand photo at 56 meters tall. This year, however, we have encountered further challenges in progress to completion and have reported additional updates to the market. Firstly, in April, we reported our expectation of a likely 3- to 6-month delay to the construction. This was based on our assessment of the remaining works we could see needed to be completed and concerns that the lead EPC contractual schedule did not reflect this. This was due to a combination of late engineering changes and resource planning, principally people on the ground. Earlier this month, on the 7th of June, we reported that we have received a notice of purported termination of the EPC contract by the lead contractor, Engie Fabricom. Since that date, we have been working through the legal and contractual implications and working with Engie Fabricom to establish the status of the outstanding works and our best root to completion through building the necessary resource and capability to get this job done. Today, I can now update you that the contract has now been terminated. This means that we have also now taken over the responsibility for the safety and the security of the site. We are taking over and gaining control. Engie Fabricom on has been demobilizing from the site over the last couple of weeks and are due to provide us with handover documentation. This will allow us to establish the status of works done and the works remaining, allowing us to take safe control of the project. At this stage, our analysis is indicating that we may not need to appoint another lead contractor to complete the works. This is simply because the works are at an advanced stage. No decision on this yet has been taken. We are only 11 working days into the purported contractual termination by Engie Fabricom, and we are still completing a full evaluation. However, this is our current expectation and direction of travel. Additionally, in the last 11 days, we have been boosting our project management and project recovery capabilities on the whole site. Finally, we are committed to doing the right thing for the affected people and to maintain safety as our top priority during this challenging time. While as I say Hull has been a challenging project for some time, I want to just recap for a minute on what we are trying to achieve with this plant. Let's just step back for a moment. I feel compelled to describe where we have come from on this journey with Tricoya, which could be described as on a bumpy road. However, the destination at the end of this journey remains an extremely attractive commercial opportunity. The Hull project began in 2017 when the Tricoya consortium was formed, which is a venture between Accsys and our commercial and investment partners, including MEDITE and FINSA on the panel side and INEOS, formerly BP, on the acetyl side. Through the consortium ownership structure of Accsys, MEDITE and INEOS, Accsys look through interest at the Hull plant is around 47%. The plant costs for the Hull plant to date is circa EUR 80 million, and the expectation is that once the plant starts, we will ramp the manufactured volumes up to the capacity over a 3-year period. In my experience, this is prudent, even with new technology. Given the higher value nature of the Tricoya product, we maintain our plans to hit breakeven at only 40% capacity. While the plant is being built, we have been building market demand by chipping up a Accoya wood and turning it into Tricoya and working with our offtake partners to seed the market with Tricoya panels. This is building momentum, ready for when the plant turns on. This activity continues to confirm the compelling market opportunity for Tricoya-based wood panel products. The plant will run with a continuous production process rather than the batch process in Accoya in Arnhem. We will start with 40,000 metric tons capacity. The plan remains to be able to extend and add capacity to the existing site over time, which allows higher returns as with our extensions to existing sites with good economies of scale envisaged. Because we used wood chips as a feedstock in this process, we can use a wider range of feedstocks in those used for Accoya. Our Tricoya feedstocks are expected to be more local and domestically sourced. Once we have established Hull, like any new technology plant, we expect some coughing and splattering. And starting our Tricoya plant will not be like turn the key on a new Mercedes, we know that. But once we work through this phase, and we are ready with the technology learnings from this world's first project, we have an agreement already in place with Petronas in Malaysia who want to partner with us there to build a Tricoya plant. We anticipate being in a position to start the design of this Malaysian plant after about 6 months of operations at Hull. The other aspect to Hull is the product itself. In our marketing, we call Tricoya a new breed of MDF. And I think that is even a bit of an understatement. It's a game-changing, market-disrupting new building material component. We and most of our offtake partners think it is a transformational product. The panels that Tricoya creates, unlike MDF, they don't shrink and they don't walk. They effectively don't absorb water. They offer a huge amount of design freedom, strong durability, low maintenance and easily coated applications, if required. You can see some examples here from the shop fronts used in London to holiday homes in Mustique. It's a great high-value and high-margin product. So in summary, there is a really significant potential for the Tricoya product and our technology globally. I'll now take you through an overview of our business and our segments. This is another good shot. Just quickly, it's a stunning residential project in the Napa Valley using Accoya in the cladding. Many of you know us really well, so I'm going to walk through the next few slides pretty quickly as a summary to recap on what we do, our products, our market and our strategy. The overview of our strategy is this. We have a great world-leading products and technology with a large market growth opportunity and a global growth strategy with a capacity build-out plan to increase our production capacity by 5x to 200,000 meters cubed by 2025. We sell 2 key products: Accoya, our solid wood product; and Tricoya, our chip wood element. We make our products through unique and protective processes and technologies. We use acetylation, which is a bit like pickling. Essentially, our technology boosts nature. Our process transforms our wood into a high-performance product that is highly stable. It doesn't shrink, it doesn't move and it lasts a very long time. Two key things that are valuable in wood performance and why our customers actually love our products. It is also highly sustainable compared to competing materials from wood plastic composites to aluminum, to PVC or even tropical hardwoods. There is a significant global growth opportunity for our products. We operate within global wood production industry, which produces over 800 million, yes, over 800 million cubic meters of lumber and wood panel products annually. We also compete with adjacent non-wood construction materials. So actually, our total addressable market is even bigger. We segment our market further geographically, where our main focus is in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, and then by 4 product categories, windows, doors, cladding and decking. From this segmentation, we envisage an estimated achievable market for our products of over 2.6 million cubic meters per annum for Tricoya and Accoya together. We currently have just around 2% of this estimate on our current annual capacity. So Accsys has a really significant market growth opportunity in front of them. As a company, Accsys has a clear purpose, changing wood to change the world. We pursue this clear purpose by acting in accordance with our values, being ambitious, respecting and valuing all our stakeholders and being committed in all we do. We have a 4 pillar strategy: To grow demand for our products; expanding our capacity; and practicing excellence in our manufacturing; and importantly, yes, importantly, developing our processes and technology and investing in our talent to manage and deliver this growth. On the bottom right, we have a 5x production capacity growth target chart, and I know you're all familiar with this. We started in 2019 with 40,000 meters cubed, and we aim to get to 200,000 meters cubed in 2025. So turning now to our Accoya business segment performance in 2021. The Accoya business performed strongly in FY '21 with strong EBITDA and strong margin performance. Revenue growth was strongest in the last 3 quarters of the year after the impact in the first quarter from the COVID-19 disruption. We saw this most strongly in April when customer supply chains were initially disrupted. Sales volumes recovered strongly, with demand exceeding our production capacity across the remainder -- the entire remainder of the year. Accoya's revenue performance has also been supported by an increase in average sales prices. We have benefited in the 2021 financial year from price rises in the prior year, and these were maintained through the COVID-19 period. This, plus the removal of the previous Cerdia discount arrangements in Europe, have benefited our average selling prices this year. A further price increase also took effect in November 2020, which also helped to address expected increases in raw material costs. Looking at our regional trends, we have seen a particularly strong performance in the U.S. in the second half. We are continuing to ramp up our sales and marketing activity and increase allocation in the North American region to support our expansion plans there, which I'll come to just in a moment. This year, we have seen some higher-than-usual drawdown of the inventory stock we keep at Arnhem. This has been due to some supply chain disruption during the year, both COVID-19 and other effects impacting some shipping flows of raw materials. We have ended the year with lower-than-usual inventory levels, but we are rebuilding them into the new financial year. We also launched a new product during the year, Accoya Color. This is a true color wood product that is in tinted throughout the entire material. The response from our customers has been really strong and demand has increased across the year. If I look at the strategic development to the next slide of Accoya, we are adding a fourth reactor to our Arnhem plant, which will add another 33% to current capacity, there, bringing the plant to a total annual production capacity of 80,000 meters cubed. We have forecast a 3-year payback on this project. We expect this to complete at the end of 2022 financial year, and we are making good progress. The physical groundworks began in February and since the new reactor itself has arrived on site. You can see this here in the bottom right picture. As I just mentioned, we see good scope to increase our Accoya Color product offering, and this is one of our development goals in looking at ways we can expand our ability to treat and convert regular Accoya to a Accoya Color, a higher-margin product. Our joint venture with Eastman Chemical in the U.S. has moved further ahead since the half year. We have completed the independent market research we needed to validate the market opportunity and then identified an achievable market of up to 1 million meters cubed for Accoya in North America. We are already building on our foundations and have established a beachhead in which we can ramp up and grow sales ahead of building this new dedicated plant. We have appointed 5 national distributors already that give us coast-to-coast reach and up to it, including Canada. On top of this, our sales team are building and growing relationships through the Accoya approved manufacturers program. Turning to the JV itself, we have moved our planning ahead. We have also updated the market in our May capital raise with further details on these plans, and I need to summarize the key points of where we are today with this joint venture. Under the joint venture agreement, Accsys owns a 60% share with Eastman, a 40% share. And we are planning to build a plant on the Eastman chemical site in Kingsport, Tennessee. This is adjacent to their acetyls operations, which will give us the benefits and efficiencies, the operational support and acetyl supply. This location facilitates additional closed-loop recycling processes to further enhance the sustainability of our product. The site is in a good strategic location for transport links, and the plant will effectively duplicate the existing Accoya technology we have in Accoya Arnhem, essentially a copy-paste project. The initial plant will have 2 reactors, which is normally 40,000 meters cubed in capacity with a potential for up to 160,000 meters cubed of capacity by adding further reactors in future for cost-effective expansion. From the time line, you can see we are now working on the final feed, the engineering study. We expect to make the final investment decision this summer. And from that point, we expect construction to take approximately 2 years. From the point of becoming operational, we should reach EBITDA breakeven after 1 year of operations. Since May, we have received the regulatory air permits and reach an advanced stage in appointing an EPC contractor for this project. The debt financing work is progressing well, and the key services contracts are in a fairly advanced stage. We expect the cost of the joint venture to be $130 million in total, and it will be funded by a combination of project finance debt by the joint venture and the equity contributions I described earlier. We saw strong support from our existing shareholders for the capital raise in May, both the institutional placing and open offer were well oversubscribed. And I'd like to thank our shareholders again for their support as we get ready to accelerate the U.S. opportunity. We expect to achieve a leverage pretax IRR of 20% and joint venture revenues of over USD 90 million at initial build capacity utilization. So building for sustainable growth is a recurring theme for us. We see the potential for product and businesses, but we also need to get ready to manage growth through our organization, people and processes in a sustainable way, not just sustainability in the green sense. ESG is a key part of this, a way of mapping our responsibilities, impacts, opportunities and priorities and is integral to developing our organizational capabilities. We are growing our teams and developing new ones, such as our strategic global functions for health and safety, engineering, technology, acetyl's management. This will result in increasing our headcount by about 11% year-on-year and adding talent where it can have the most impact to this growth agenda. A great example is shifting our R&D to a center of excellence model to better support our products and teams as we grow across multiple sites. We've also published our first stand-alone sustainability report and new ESG framework in November and are taking the next step in our reporting by reporting to GRI and SASB ESG disclosure standards alongside our upcoming annual report and can share some key highlights here today. Our second annual employee engagement survey showed improvement across all areas, and it was very, very encouraging to see specific improvements on topics identified as opportunities for improvement last year. A great overall measure is how many of our employees are proud to work for Accsys. And actually, I don't mind saying it, we improved on an already high score there to bring up to 80% of our -- 82% of our employees. Safety is one of our highest operational priorities, and it was disappointing to see an increase in our lost time instant accident rate year-on-year, albeit in real terms, this was due to a single additional incident, 2 last year, 3 in FY '21. Our goal is simply stated a zero LTIs. We have a new safety strategy underway and expect to see improvements from this over time with our new think safe, act safe program. In FY '21, we updated our methodology for calculating the way that CO2 is locked into our products, in line with current best practice, give a total of nearly 50,000 tonnes of CO2 stored in the products we made and sold last year. This is equivalent to 122 million miles of car emissions. We also achieved a 24% reduction in emissions intensity, i.e., the CO2 equivalent emissions producing 1 cubic meter of product, with 7.5% achieved solely through efficiency improvements. So to finish up today and in summary, we have delivered a strong financial performance and a further step forward in our profitability. We have a robust balance sheet supported by cash-generative nature of the Accoya segment, and we are well positioned to advance our growth plans. Our strong focus is on Hull. And completing the work, we need to bring this online and unlock the market potential for our Tricoya products. When we look ahead of the 2022 financial year, we expect revenue growth as we enlarge group production capacity as the fourth reactor when Ireland comes online. We will continue to invest in our organizational capability and talent. This will allow us to manage and deliver our growth plans. Group overheads would necessarily increase next year. So longer term, we expect to continue to achieve improving profitability as we increase the level of sales from our capacity expansions under our 5x plan. We will benefit from the economies of scale associated with higher operating levels. And once the fourth reactor and Hull come online, our 2 current construction projects, we will effectively double our current capacity from 60,000 meters cubed to 120,000 meters cubed per annum, which is a significant step-up for Accsys. So to wrap up, we are very excited about the next phase in our growth journey and achieving the vision we have set for our Accoya, Tricoya and Accsys business as a whole. With that, Will and I will now take your questions. And thank you very much for listening.

[Operator Instructions] The first question today is from the line of Christen Hjorth from Numis.

I've got 3 questions, if that's okay. The first one, just on the U.S., potential planned U.S. acquired plant. Thanks for going through that. Just in terms of exactly what needs to happen from here to get it completed, that the EPC contract needs to be signed and the debt put in place. So those are sort of the final things that need to be tidied up. And then related to that, so what lessons have you learned from the Hull project in terms of potentially moving in Accoya plants in the U.S. The second one is on -- you put net debt-to-EBITDA being, I think, 1.1, 1.2x. And with EBITDA increasing at Arnhem, I just wonder what scope that gives you to perhaps refinance and maybe move to maybe more traditional debt structure, leveraging that Arnhem EBITDA? And then finally, as you pointed out, I think BP sold its chemicals business to [indiscernible] now. Now consortium member for Tricoya. I just wondering how conversations have gone with them and just assume they remain supportive of that project going forward.

So I'll take the first one, if I may, Christen. In terms of our plans for the U.S., things have been progressing well since August when we signed up the joint venture, and we're doing the initial engineering, what we call the feed, the front-end engineering design process. In terms of the next 2 significant milestones were due to complete that engineering project and to get to a final investment decision to allow us to appoint an EPC contractor. So those 2 key milestones appointment of the EPC contractor and the FID, the final investment decision, are anticipated to be in the summer of this year. So not too far away. In terms of your second part of the question around the U.S., clearly, there are many lessons to be learned from Hull. We're very reflective on that. And we've translated those lessons into a different type of governance structure for the way we're managing the project in North America with Eastman. Eastman is a very proactive partner, very collaborative partner in this project. And building plants is what they do as part of their living, and they are taking a lead role in the EPC -- planned EPC project. The project manager is likely to be an Eastman employee to assist us in successfully building out the project on time on cost or on budget. So yes, there are lots of lessons to be learned there as you mentioned. If I just go to your third question around INEOS and then hand back to Will on the net debt EBITDA ratio. In terms of the relationship with INEOS, they're a very supportive partner and they are geared around organic and inorganic growth on their acetyls business. They see the opportunity to supply increasing volumes of their industrial pickling agent to Accsys across Europe and potentially in other parts of the world. So at this stage, they're very focused on the growth opportunity that they can see to grow with us through supplying this critical raw material to the access portfolio of products. So overall, very supportive as we sit here today. Maybe I'll hand over to Will now on the net debt question.

Thanks. Christen, I think you're actually right to highlight the net debt-to-EBITDA ratio. I think over the next period of time, it is something we're going to examine very closely and carefully as to whether there is an opportunity to perhaps some more traditional financing structure in place. Our ambition, if we do that would be to, in the first instance, reduce our cost of debt. I think, as I said earlier, our balance sheet is robust, and I think there is an opportunity for us to look at that very carefully. It's not been something we've been able to do over the last year, particularly with COVID causing disruptions, more generally in the financial markets. But hopefully, that gives you an indication of how we're looking at it, so I think in line with perhaps how you might expect us to progress things.

The next question is from the line of Toby Thorrington from Edison.

Hopefully coming through clearly. I've got a few cash questions, please, one sort of Tricoya business question. Actually, I just have a quick follow-up on Christen's last question actually. Can you just confirm in the first instance what the current cost of debt is, Will, please?

On average, it's about 7%. We have a number of facilities ranging between 3% up to 9%.

Yes. Okay. That's great. On to my own questions. First of all, could you just update us on what the, if you like, the COVID cash benefit was in FY '21 and ergo what's flowing out in -- or has already flowed out in FY '22, whether it's government support, salary top-up or tax? That's the first question.

So I think you're right, we have elected to repay the government support we received during the year. It was about EUR 600,000, and that's been repaid post year-end. There was a further repayment of some salaries, which have been reduced for 4 months earlier in the year. That's about another EUR 200,000 in total.

Was there any cash tax benefit, Will?

Any -- sorry, for any what benefit?

Any cash tax, tax deferral?

No. No other benefits taken from a tax perspective or otherwise.

Okay. That's great. If I can move on to CapEx, a slightly difficult question, I suspect. I'm sure you can provide the sort of expected Arnhem for reactor CapEx for this year. I guess the Tricoya CapEx is slightly more open-ended. Could you give us some sort of guidance on that, please?

I think I'll provide the guidance for the fourth reactor. I think during the last year, we incurred about EUR 5 million on the fourth reactor project. If you recall, our expectation was a total of about EUR 26 million, excluding the additional and upgraded wood handling equipment and the chemical storage. So the majority of that is still to be invested over the course of this year from a cash perspective. For the Tricoya plant, we're not in a position yet to provide that guidance. There is clearly still some more CapEx to be incurred. That is clear. But until we can complete the sort of the analysis, the gap analysis that Robert explained earlier, we're not -- we can't be certain as to what that quantum will be or how long it will take and the duration of the remaining work may have an impact from the quantum as well.

Of course. Yes. That's understood. And I presume there's no provisioning one way or another against the Hull situation in the year-end balance sheet, Will. Would that be right?

So I think it's exactly what you mean by the situation. So you may have seen, as I went through the net debt bridge. We do have some CapEx accruals in place where we -- work has been carried out in advance of payments being made. As far as provisioning, there's no provision. I think the [ fourth ] determination is a post year-end event. And there's -- as we said earlier, there's ongoing work to be completed and determined before we can set out exactly what the remaining costs and cash payments will be.

Yes. Understood. Sorry for asking the question, 2 or 3 different ways.

Understood. Understood.

Bear with me, sorry, almost at the end now. Could you give us some feel for sort of natural inventory levels. Let's assume we're on the other side of Arnhem 4 being commissioned and running and Hull being commissioned and running. So let's say, middle of next year. What's the sort of natural inventory level for the group on that basis, would you say?

Can I try and answer it in a slightly round way? I think we say in our results, there's about -- only about 2.5 weeks of finished goods inventory at the year-end. That is low. I think, ideally, we would normally like to have at least a month, normally a little bit more than a month of finished goods inventory at any one time. Raw materials tends to fluctuate a little bit more given the natural flow and the long lead times. That those inventory levels are also low at year-end, but we would typically have another month or so, maybe more than that of inventory at any one time. So you can see even compared to last year, which is perhaps a more normalized level for our current operating level, our industry levels are quite a lot less.

Yes. Okay. All right. I'll drive it off revenue numbers then. That's fine. And final question, you'll be pleased to hear. Regarding Tricoya, just wondering whether the sort of partnerships that you have existing customers and prospectively other ones as well, whether you're aware through conversations, whether either MEDITE or FINSA have been laying down sort of additional capacity or production lines in anticipation of Hull coming onstream.

Yes, it's Rob. I'll answer that. I mean the beauty of the product is a drop in product to their existing production process. So it's a substitution into that process. We are aware of investments that one of those companies has made in terms of the storage and handling of the product to facilitate that. So they have committed CapEx into the business to do that. But as I say, the beauty of the product is a drop in to the existing wood chips into their traditional process.

We'll now take analyst questions via the web app.

We've got one question that's coming from Tom Rands of Investec, which is a 3-part question. Firstly, how are you planning to react to current timber price volatility with Accoya pricing? Secondly, in the medium term, do you see scope for Accoya manufacturing margin achieving 35%? And lastly, could future capacity expansion be more on a royalty model.

Acetyls. Okay. In terms of -- thank you, Tom. In terms of pricing of Accoya, we've seen a lot of movement in timber prices around the world, lumber prices. Currently, it's a very frothy market. We've seen 40%, 50%, 60%, 80% increases there. For what we've been doing on Accoya and, to some extent, Tricoya is a very disciplined segment approach to our speciality product. We do not see a need to commoditize our products by becoming opportunistic in pricing. And what we've got on our supply chains in principal raw materials, a long-term relationships, long-term contracts on the supply of radiata pine for Accoya, which allows us to have relatively stable pricing because of the investment, the forestry managers and the production mills, the wood mills and the sawmills have to invest in producing a clear Accoya product. So they recognize they have additional margin built in there, and they're looking for price stability. So we have currently reasonably stable prices. We are having to price some costs through. But on the principal raw material, the radiata pine, we have generally a stable price. And as Will explained, when it comes to the impact of the acetyls, we have this natural partial hedge on the -- and hydride on the asset, which again contributes to keeping our margins fairly stable and allows us not to become an opportunistic price player on the Accoya product. In terms of could we exceed 35% in terms of gross margin, it's possible to do so. But at the end of the day, we have to be very focused on getting the right value proposition to the customer and how we segment for different applications, windows, doors, decking and cladding, and how we bring on more value-add products into the range as well. So it's possible. And I personally don't believe we've hit the glass ceiling, as I said on a previous call, on pricing. But this is a very frothy market at the moment, and we want to tread carefully through it to maintain the speciality nature of our product. In terms of your third question around the type of business model that we could deploy. As people know, we currently have a business model, which involves 100% investment by Accsys in some facilities. In some facilities, we have joint ventures or consortia. And our path to get to the 5x growth plan to 200,000 meters cubed from 40,000 meters cubed involves a combination of 100% owned access entities and joint venture arrangements. The key to that strategy is to demonstrate that we can replicate both the Accoya and Tricoya technology and scale up internationally around the world. At that point, what that gives us is a choice, a choice to be continuing with either 100% ownership of new facilities by accessing new territories around the world, continue with the joint ventures or potentially look at a license model for our technology once we've proven that we can copy paste Accoya internationally and we can copy paste Tricoya internationally. That would give us the opportunity if we choose to do it for a licensing model as well. Thank you, Tom. Hopefully, that answers your questions. It's back to Sarah for, I guess, a further question.

I think that's all we've got time for on the web app. I'll just pass back to the leader to close the session, I think.

Thank you. In that case, that does conclude the conference for today. Thank you all for participating, and you may now disconnect.

Thank you very much, everyone.

Thank you very much. Thank you.