Skellerup Holdings Limited (SKL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. We've just tipped over to 11:00. So good morning, everyone. We'll get the presentation of our FY '24 Results underway. With me is Tim Runnalls, our CFO. So, Tim appointed to the role at the beginning of April this year. At the same time, I moved into the CEO role. Can you just please make sure your microphones stay muted throughout the presentation. We'll take questions at the conclusion of the presentation. And if you can virtually raise your hand or drop a note at the meeting chat, we'll address those in sequence at the end of the presentation. As an opening and overall comment, the second half outcome was in line with our expectations, delivering another record full year EBIT for Skellerup. We are very pleased with this result given the market conditions and we'll discuss more details on this shortly. Before we get further into FY '24, some comments on the 6 charts on Slide 2, which will be familiar to you if you taken in our presentations in recent years. Collectively, they highlight the contributing elements to the sustained earnings growth we've realized over the past 7 years. Compound annual growth rate for revenue of 7% and EBIT and NPAT of 12%. Gross margin percentage steadily improving over the period, reflecting the steady injection of new products at better margins, better value capture from existing products and operational improvements. Indirect costs as a percentage of revenue trended down over the period and then a slight uptick this year due to the additional investment, we've made in strengthening our team for future growth. And again, we'll talk on that a little bit more later. I'll move to Slide 3 and the highlights. As noted, a record EBIT of $72.7 million and it's our eighth successive record EBIT result. This was achieved, as noted there, due to revenue growth in international markets, including new launch products in health and hygiene, potable and wastewater, roofing and construction applications. So that growth primarily came in the U.S., Europe, including the U.K. and Asia. There was a tougher year in the Australasian market. And again, we'll talk more on that later. We achieved a record operating cash flow of $70.8 million, up 31% on the prior comparative period and that reflects both earnings and working capital improvements. As a consequence, our net debt was further down, down 43% and we closed FY '24 at $15.4 million as well as funding the investment that we've made in capital and as I highlighted before in indirect costs with product development. It's also enabled us to increase our final dividend, bringing the full year payout to $0.24 per share. Net dividend reflects both the strength of the financial results, the strength of our financial position and our confidence in the prospects for our business going forward. This year's annual report is also the first occasion for Skellerup making the now mandatory climate-related disclosures. We started our work on this well over a year ago. And we've also voluntarily disclosed our Scope 3 emissions this year. The work that went into determining the Scope 3 emissions was enormous, but in our view, we can't reasonably seek to targets for improvement without a full understanding of what our missions are. But the most valuable work we've got through, I must say the outcome we've got from the climate-related work was the work we did to understand our risks and opportunities better. And by making a value change, we've derived some real benefit from that, which is summarized in our annual report. And again, I'll talk on this a little bit more later. I will now just pass over to Tim to talk to a couple of slides on the financial highlights and the earnings bridge.

Thanks, Graham. So, as Graham mentioned earlier, revenue was down 1% on FY '23, which reflected a mixed result; industrial, up 4% on the prior year, offset by agri, down 10% on the prior year. So, it shows the relative weighting of the 2 divisions. Gross margins were pleasingly up about 3% on the prior comparative period and this was mainly driven through operational efficiencies and changes in the product mix, which Graham has spoken to about new and improved products launched during the year. Indirect costs were up 6% on the prior year, which Graham will talk to you shortly around increasing the levels of staffing to support business growth, both in our product and process development areas as well as sales growth in some of our key businesses and markets. So overall, that meant our EBIT was up $1 million to a record of $72.7 million. Finance costs were marginally higher than the prior year, mainly as a result of higher average market interest rates. As we all remember, rates increased substantially over the FY '23 year, but were held relatively constant over FY '24. Therefore, the average rate that we've paid has been higher in '24 than '23. The tax expense, excluding the impact of a one-off adjustment for the removal of tax depreciation on our [Technical Difficulty] buildings, reflected a more normal effective tax rate of 26%. The 2023 year included the benefit of the cost of the share options exercised under the long-term incentive plan being deductible for the company in that year. So, it was around 24% in FY '23. As I mentioned, the change in legislation in New Zealand to remove tax depreciation on our commercial buildings meant we had to recognize a deferred tax liability and the one-off impact on the P&L, which we've normalized out in reporting our NPAT was $3.1 million. The reported or audited NPAT number of $46.9 million was down 8% on the prior year. As Graham mentioned, a 9% increase in our dividend per share to $0.24 per share reflects a payout ratio of 94% of our after-tax earnings. And that dividend is actually 120% higher than the FY '18 dividend reflected on that table, which I'm sure shareholders will be happy with. Our net debt, as Graham mentioned, closed at $15.4 million, a very pleasing result. Moving on to the earnings bridge, which reflects the changes in NPAT from FY '23 to FY '24. As you can see there, we've seen growth in earnings from potable water and wastewater applications, primarily driven through new markets, new market growth and share growth in new products, primarily in wastewater, but we've seen a return in potable water to more normal ordering patents from our customers, particularly in the key North American market. Growth in health and hygiene represents the successful launch of our product to a global customer in the hand sanitizer space. We've also seen growth in our roofing and construction markets in the Northern Hemisphere, North America and Europe and pleasingly, in the solar application in Europe. That was offset by a decreased residential construction market in Australia, where a lot of our roofing and construction products are sold. On the negative side, sports and leisure was down roughly $2 million due to lower sales of our U-Dek product used primarily in marine applications. And there was a high level of overstocking at our customers in the prior year. We believe this is largely cleared the system now and we've seen a return to more normal ordering patterns towards the back end of FY '24. The dairy result was driven down by a significant amount of customer destocking in the first half, as we've spoken to previously. The second half returned a result that was largely in line with the prior year, but a later start to the New Zealand domestic dairy season or maintenance season meant some of that sales has flown into FY '25. Footwear earnings were impacted by the economic conditions in New Zealand as well as a benign winter, offset by increased sales in specialty footwear in the U.S. and in Europe. Corporate costs remain well controlled. You see a favorable variance there and we support the group through a small head office in Auckland with a total cost of less than $5 million. I've spoken to the interest and tax movements. The FX movement is reflective of revaluation and hedging losses for the year, which were $1.3 million, but favorable to the $2 million incurred in the prior year. So, the sum of that means an underlying NPAT, as I mentioned, of $50 million and reflecting the $3.1 million deferred tax adjustment on our buildings, bringing the reported NPAT to $46.9 million.

Thanks, Tim. We're now on Slide 6. This one is called global presence. And this slide really illustrates the global nature of our business. In FY '24, 79% of our revenue was earned from international markets. And from another perspective, 66% of our revenue was earned outside of Australasia. This is not to diminish the importance of New Zealand and Australia rather illustrate the importance of the international markets to our group. Making the same comparison with people shows that 60% of our team are employed outside of New Zealand. Across the globe, we give 20 facilities, a combination of manufacturing, converting and distribution facilities across the world. If we move to Slide 7, there we go. Slide 7. This again demonstrates our global revenue mix and hopefully, shows the change in it over the past 5 years. Looking at FY '24 compared to FY '20 highlights that North America has grown more quickly than any other market. And as the comments noted on the side there, that's been attributable to a wide range of applications. In FY '24, as Tim noted, we've had growth in potable and wastewater. We also had growth in roofing and construction markets and then the hygiene application boosted by the launch of a new product with a global hygiene customer. For Europe and the U.K., the share increased slightly in FY '24. And as Tim noted, in particular, we had growth in the roofing and construction sector or application spurred by growth in solar installations in the U.K. And then as noted, Australasia, the share was down in FY '24 due to the economic impacts impacting on roofing and construction, particularly in Australia, but also to some degree in New Zealand and also footwear in the New Zealand market. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation. As Tim noted, also more benign weather conditions also negatively impacted on the result in FY '24. If we move to Slide 8, and this looks at our global revenue through the application lens. And as we've discussed many times that the primary essence of Skellerup is that we design and manufacture engineered polymer products for demanding applications, both from a performance and a conformance perspective. If we look at the bottom 2 cubes or stacks on their graph, the aggregate of dairy and potable/wastewater revenue represents almost half of the group revenue. And most of the products that we sell into this application must meet food safety or potable water standards, just demonstrating, again, the importance of performance and conformance into the applications that we sell into. Over the past 5 years, all applications have contributed to the growth in revenue. And perhaps the other notable thing to highlight in FY '24 is as we've already alluded to, from a small base of 2%, the health and hygiene share increased to 4% on the back of the newly launched product and to that effect into the application sector. And we saw a dip back in the revenue contribution from dairy, from footwear and from sports and leisure, which encompasses the marine foam product that Tim talked about before. But again, we'll talk a little bit more on these as we get into the discussion on each of the divisions. So with that, we'll move to Slide 9 and a focus on the Industrial Division. We're very pleased with this result and it is our fourth consecutive record, and the second half came in slightly ahead of our expectation. The drivers of the growth are highlighted there. And also of note, our EBIT if we compare it back to FY '20 on the 5-year time line of the table there and EBIT is up 124% on the result achieved back in FY '20. So, FY '24 result though positively impacted by potable water and wastewater growth. From a potable water perspective, particularly in North America, which is our largest market, we experienced some destocking in the prior period, you recall us talking about, that cleared in FY '24. And in particular, we saw a return to more normal levels and to temporary applications. We also enjoyed increased sales of vacuum systems used in wastewater applications. We continue to enhance and improve the product set and the systems that we sell into this application and we're confident that we continue to grow that in the future. As noted already, again, it's a little bit repetitive, but health and hygiene growth contributed. The ramp-up for new products into the sector actually ended up exceeding the expectations of the customer had set for us. So that was a factor in driving the second half performance a little bit above what we had anticipated. And the roofing and construction growth, as already noted, strong results in the U.S. and the U.K. Our focus on the U.S. is on a relatively small share of the roofing market, which is middle roofing, which is less exposed to the residential cycles and we enjoy good growth in the U.S. market in FY '24. And as already noted, in the U.K., we had good growth spurred by the increasing solar installations. That was partially -- this growth was partially offset by a market downturn in Australasia, in particular Australia, where building consent as Tim noted are at -- I think, [ decade -- decade long legals ]. And then finally, the negative impact on the Industrial Division for FY '24 was marine foam. There was market weakness and destocking, particularly in the U.S.A. and Europe, but also not surprisingly, given the economic environment, to a lesser degree, in Australia and New Zealand. Pleasingly, for the international markets, our demand started to increase a little bit in Q4 of this year and we've seen it continue into the new financial year, albeit we're only 6 or 7 weeks into it. But the situation we experienced in FY '24 was a combination of customers being overstocked and the market weakening, which exacerbated that process. Moving to the next slide. These are similar graphs as we've shared for the group, but now focusing on the Industrial Division. And as we've highlighted, at a group level, almost 80% of our revenues earned in international markets. For Industrial, some of that is 87% of our revenue being earned from international markets. Over that 5-year period, North America has continued to increase its proportion of the division revenue and through broad growth across all the applications we sell into that market. In FY '24 as noted, the growth we've had in Europe and we also had some growth in Asia in FY '24 due to potable water sales, potable water application sales and applications for electrical and appliances. As noted, down in Australasia in FY '24 due to roofing and construction and sports and leisure. If we look at the graph on the right-hand side, that again shows that the stack by application, on the left-hand side by market to give you some insight into the contributors. Along the bottom of this page, you'll see we've highlighted some of the critical brands and key brands in our business, which some of you will be familiar with. The Masport brand is our vacuum systems business into North America. DEKS is a global brand for roofing and construction into North America, Europe and Australasia. Gulf is primarily around a lot of our OEM products for our OEM customers, including potable and wastewater applications. Ultralon is our global foam brand. Tumedei is OEM customers in Europe and Talbot Advanced Technologies, which performed well for us in FY '24, is a business we acquired back in FY '21, just after the year-end, and reported in August 2021, and they had a good year in FY '24. So, we'll now move to Slide 11 and a focus on the Agri Division. As we've noted, we had a much stronger second half result. But due to the first half, the result fell below last year's record. Splitting the result into 2 halves, the first half EBIT was down 19% on the prior comparative period and the second half EBIT was down 3% on the prior comparing period. If we just focus firstly on dairy, as expected and as mentioned already, the second half included a return to more normal ordering patents from our international customers. The first half of the year was impacted both by destocking and some of our large customers with December year-end managing their balance sheet in and around year-end levels. We expect that may be a more normal pattern going forward and our Q2 or their Q4 of each year. But certainly, the first half was exacerbated by the destocking behavior based on our order book and product we've got in the water. So far, the first quarter of FY '25 will certainly be stronger than the first quarter of FY '24 for our international dairy business. As Tim noted, from the New Zealand market point of view, the maintenance season started a little bit later, as farmers work longer. And that shifted some sales at the margin into FY '25. That happens from year-to-year, given the maintenance season occurs, sometimes we get a stronger finish to the year and a slightly softer start to the new financial year and another way, other times, it works the other way. So that accounted for a little bit of the shortfall to our expectations in the second half of the year. Importantly, productivity improvements and some reduction in staffing helped offset what was lower production volumes given the full year result. And just a reminder that the restructuring costs we incurred in FY '24, predominantly in the first half of the year were around about NZD 800,000. Moving to footwear. As we've already noted, in addition to the economic conditions, more benign weather, that's a great thing. Obviously, the first half of FY '23 was characterized by some pretty damaging and horrific weather events on Hawkes Bay and also up in and around Auckland with the flooding that was experienced. It was a boost to our footwear business and a more benign weather we've had in the first half of this year, means that pleasingly, for the country wasn't repeated. But we have continued to see some growth in sales of our specialty footwear in international markets. If we move to the next slide, I'll just comment a little bit more on that segmentation. Again, these are similar slides that you've seen for the group and for industrial. But often the perception of our agri business is that it's significantly focused on dairy, which is true and that it is primarily leveraged to the New Zealand dairy market. Important point to note here is 63% of our revenue in FY '24 was earned from international markets. And if we break that into the dairy and footwear pieces, 70% of the dairy revenue is from international markets. As we've already talked about, all markets were down slightly in FY '24 due to the destocking and the later maintenance period in New Zealand and the overall economic environment in all markets. At the margins, we see our customers, we stretch the life of some of the intermediate consumables when the economic conditions are tough. But the important point to note is that our products are primarily essential consumable products and that's why you see a lot less volatility in our earnings relative to the economic cycles for the dairy industry. For footwear, greater than 60% of its revenue is earned in the New Zealand market and we've talked already about the impact of conditions in New Zealand for the second half of FY '24. The growth over the 5-year period that you see on this graph has been aided by us having a stronger presence initially in Bunnings over the past few years and more recently being arranged nationally through Mitre 10. International sales are predominantly specialty footwear for a range of applications, including the electricity industry, the forestry industry and fire boots, which are also sold into New Zealand market. I think this gives you a little bit of insight into the Agri Division segments, both application and from a geographic point of view. Again, we have some key brands in our portfolio here at the bottom, most of which you will recognize. One new one there is what we call the Skellerup Thriver, and I'm going to talk about that a little bit more on the next slide. So, on this next slide, some comments on the future. As stated at the start of the presentation, we have a very strong business and we've achieved sustained growth. We're confident we have the business model, the people with the opportunities to carry on this path. We've summarized what we think are the critical factors for our business into 6 elements and I'm going to focus in particular on the first 3. You've heard us talk for a long time about customer-focused development and that continues to be a priority for us. We often talk about it in the context of our original equipment manufacturing, our OEM customers. But it's also important for our branded products that we sell into more retail sectors. So, our approach to investing in development and product is always underpinned by either having a committed OEM customer. And often that commitment is characterized by contribution to our development costs or a committed retail customer in terms of they being committed to the launch of our product to the market. So, there's a couple of examples here, which I'll talk to and I alluded to one of them on the previous page. In September, we will launch a new Calf Teat into the New Zealand market called the Thriver. For a long time, certainly beyond the period that I've been with the company, we have had a product in market that essentially, we're manufacturing under license for another party. We've ended that arrangement during the fourth quarter of last year. And we'll launch our own product called the Thriver Teat into the market in September. And we think over the medium term that there will be a really good growth engine for Skellerup not only in the domestic market in New Zealand, but also in international markets. The other -- another example of a new product that recently has been launched is a further enhancement to our vacuum systems. We've added a water pump to our vacuum system, which provides some real benefits to users in terms of the operation of that and their applications and their use. And that already having recently launched is generating some increased sales for us. And we're confident that's going to continue into FY '24 -- sorry, FY '25. And then we have also recently launched a new liner into the North American market, which comes loaded into the shell as part of the cluster, which reduces the time taken to swap out liners in North America where milking liner replacement is done on a much more frequent basis than it is in the New Zealand market due to the intensity of the use in the market. So that's a couple of examples for you of customer-focused development. Also, we have a proven capability to integrate and offer broader solutions. And an example that we've talked about was the recently launched product into the hygiene application. And in previous presentations, David explained how that opportunity came about from an individual component that we're able to grow into a larger system solution and deliver real value to the customer. But an area where we believe we can improve is on our product life cycle management. We do have a lot of products and an improvement in how we look at the life cycle of some of our products with the good yields of gains. And that's part of being a customer-focused business. The second point is noted there is progressing at end market and near market presence. In the media release, we talked about some of the investments we've made in FY '24. And some of those investments, in particular at Wigram, provide us with an option and an opportunity to accelerate, manufacture and market at the time that suits us. We've progressively been investing in some more standard equipment to manufacture some of the higher volume products. Importantly, the investment in more standard equipment does not diminish or put at risk our intellectual property. They remain secure with the tooling and product design, which is undertaken in-house and the formulations and our process knowledge expertise. So, we have an opportunity by investing in more standardized equipment to enable some great end market, near market presence, which we think is a pretty sound strategy to have going forward. In addition, we have already been leveraging the presence that we have in various markets. As noted at the outset, we have 20 facilities across the world, of which 6 are in the U.S. In recent years, we have taken full ownership of a liquid silicon rubber manufacturing facility up in Wisconsin, which gives us the opportunity to leverage that investment. And then in November, we will shift our distribution center for our roofing and construction business to a better location in Chicago and we're taking the opportunity to colocate some of our agri products in that facility as well. So, whilst our business unit model serves us very well in terms of accountability, at a business unit level, there is an opportunity for us to aggregate and leverage our presence in markets with one particular product set with another. And then that leads into the first point about increasing collaboration across our group. As I noted, we have a business unit model, we have very strong leaders across the group and the improvement in our earnings consistently comes across a wide group of our businesses. But the growth of the business has provided us with the opportunity to elevate some leaders with a broader responsibility, which is good for them and good for us. So that's -- it's a benefit of the growth that we've achieved and been able to provide growth opportunity for those people. Also in our development and technical groups, we've invested greater resource in those over recent years and in particular FY '24 by adding personnel and adding investment in terms of capability to enable us to do things more quickly and to do more things. And we've increased the collaboration amongst those groups. For example, the Thriver Calf Teat that I talked about earlier on, that project is the outcome of a collaboration of our development team in Wigram, but also our development team based in Auckland in terms of the contribution to an element of that product. So, those are the 3 points I really want to emphasize here in terms of factors that will drive our future earnings growth. We'll continue to maintain our focus on operational improvements, and we'll gain improvements both through process and capital investment for record payback. We had some very important partners that manufacture products for us, particularly on the industrial side, we control the design of our products and the sale of those products, but we use manufacturing partners for some of those to manufacture those. And our plan is to work a little more closely with them to ensure we get the best outcomes for both parties on that. And then without [ expanding ] on the building edge, we will use digital tools better. We already are. We've upgraded the website for a number of our businesses this year and that is already delivering some improvements in lead generation and in some of our businesses, we do operate an online trading one. So that's what I wanted to cover there. The final slide for this presentation is on environmental, social and governance factors. Our environmental priority for FY '24 has really been on assessing the impact of climate change on Skellerup and disclosure. And it has been a pretty significant undertaking, which intends and carry those significant responsibility for. We have a collection of business units with a common thread in terms of technology and products that we manufacture at a very small head office as we've talked about before. But we embarked on this duty reasonably early and our approach to identify risks and opportunities was by really mapping out the value chains for the key applications that we sell into. And that's helped us identify not only risk but also a number of opportunities, which we'll be able to invest going forward. The thing that we get focused in on climate change is important, obviously, but it hasn't gone -- it hasn't been a running initiative. We continue to focus on waste reduction and utilization initiatives. And we've embarked on some exploratory work for some of our consumable products in terms of how we might be involved in the management of end of life of those products. From an emissions point of view, as noted earlier, we have calculated and disclosed our Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions this year. It was a massive undertaking to pull that work together. But as I noted, we believe as a platform to start to consider what we might change, we need to clearly understand that. We've done the work to emphasize this year. We have further reduced both the absolute value and the intensity of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions in FY '24. And that's been enabled by some investment and equipment and process improvements to enable them to happen. From a social point of view, health and safety, quite rightly continues to be our highest priority, and that's the thing that we can in our own facilities, both for our people and for visitors to our facilities that we have the best opportunity to control and achieve outcomes from. We have reduced the incidence of injuries. We are absolutely committed to achieving better because, obviously, the only goal we can have is zero harm and everyone going back safely end of the day. We have increased external and independent assurance across our business and we do use experts within our business to visit other facilities and provide a peer review. And we have increased the number of facilities we have certified to the ISO standard, particularly in our largest facilities. We continue to consider and have replaced parts on an hybrid arrangements. The critical factor here is we consider that ensures that we can both retain our best people and attract from a wider talent pool. But importantly, these arrangements are only considered where it's both good for the group and good for the employees. We've achieved on our diversity and inclusion objectives. We are equitable in terms of how we pay people and that's part of our annual payroll review process and we did not have any reports of discrimination on our estimate in FY '24. And just a final comment on social. We've implemented a supplier code of conduct in FY '24. And all of our key suppliers, the top 10 suppliers have confirmed compliance with that. So that gives us greater assurance over our supply chain, ensuring that our suppliers are behaving and operate in a manner that meets our standards and including consideration and on site. And then just to close, from a governance point of view, no change to our Board of Directors. Obviously, there is a change in the role of David who stepped down as CEO, but continues as a Non-Executive Director. I'm really glad to have his continuing expertise and contribution available to us. We've got a great mix of skills, experience and tenure on the Board and they are very supportive of the promotion and development of both of our leaders and the investment we're making in our resources to ensure we to grow in the future. So with that, we'll move to questions. The next couple of slides are [ formative ] in terms of reconciliation of our segment performance to group NPAT. But with that, we'd like to take your questions, please.

If you just pop it in the chat or assuming I can see your chair or otherwise raise your hand, we should be able to unmute you then to ask those questions. There you go, Rohan. Unmuted yourself, very good.

Sorry, I was trying to find the raise hand button, but -- with the chat option. Congratulations, guys, on the first result at the helm. Just a couple of, hopefully, quick ones. The second half was obviously quite important for dairy. Didn't quite get to where we were thinking. But I think going forward, you talked to some more seasonality. And I guess the tough part to try and unpack is what is normal and what can we actually run rate going forward? I guess there was some drop-through or pull-through of kind of catch-up from destocking into the second half? And then you talked about New Zealand actually being weaker than expected. So, can you give us an idea of what a more normal year kind of looks like and kind of more normal seasonality in your view?

I mean to some degree, Rohan, I think we're probably still finding out a little bit. Tim and I looked at this the other day. And if you look pre-COVID, they used to be a greater seasonality, not too dissimilar to the last couple of years in Skellerup's result. And then during that COVID period there was a greater sort of inventory building and what have you, it was least seasonality between our first and second half results. So to some degree, I can't give you a definitive answer to say, hey, this is the new norm. But what I certainly do expect in FY '25 is the contrast between the first half and second half will not be as substantial as it was this year. So, if we look at -- and then the other factor weighing on the FY '24 result was, as you see, the softer finish to the last quarter in the New Zealand domestic market. So, we expect our first half dairy result to be stronger than it was last year when we had the significant destocking exercise. But in terms of some of the more recent behavior of some of the larger customers managing their balance sheet in and around the December year-end, it's a little bit harder to pick too soon, I guess how much of what happened in the first half last year. We know that a chunk of it was destocking. I mean a chunk of it was balance sheet management. But I think we'll get a bit of revamp after the end of first half of this year to answer your question. So, I can't give you an unequivocal answer. It seems like that the splits will be at least of a gap between the first and second half splits in FY '25.

Thanks for the color on all these new products you've got coming through. Just interested in this Calf Teat product. You previously licensed a product that you produced, now you've got your own product. Can you just give us an idea and it's probably not a big number, but how much of agri that Calf Teats make up? And then I guess, without the licensing fee, is there any sort of number you can give on the margin improvement that could come through with that product?

Sure. So historically, in terms of the Agri Division result, this has probably been around about 5% of the revenue. I guess the benefits for us here are probably 2 or threefold. As I said, we've been manufacturing of this product under license for a very long time. And it was a profitable product. But because we didn't have control of the product, the opportunity to innovate and improve the product has been limited. So, by launching our new product, the Thriver Teat, we're very confident from trials that we have a product that is superior higher margin in terms of how the calves feed on it and we've got some interesting [indiscernible], which show calves very quickly gravitating to the new teat rather than the alternative products. So, the other factor is the nature of the license had made it difficult for us to sell this product or variations of this product into international markets. So, by ending that arrangement, developing our own product over a sort of a 3-year time frame, we expect that we can grow revenue for this product probably at a disproportionately faster rate than other products in the dairy portfolio.

And sorry, is there any sort of short-term impact you've got from trying to get people to switch? 5% is a reasonable number in terms of revenue for the division?

Historically about 5% for us, this year was about 3% because we ended the arrangement a little bit, we ended at the beginning of Q4. So, we expect -- it's not going to be an automatic switch, it's probably that everyone will switch to our product. So, it's a little bit hard to tell yet in terms of could there be [Technical Difficulty] for us in FY '25. We're working on the basis that it will be and that we might get a complete switch over of our product. But by the time we get into FY '26 and FY '27, we think this will be adding to the top line.

And just on current kind of run rates and demand in industrial, it all seems to be going pretty well. Is there anything you'd call out in terms of why the year started slightly abnormally to kind of where it ended? Is it still kind of tracking at those sort of levels? And again, sorry to labor the point, but on run rates, but is this kind of a normal half that we can kind of start to annualize up in your view?

I think Tim, you prepared a graph the other day which showed our first and second half results for Industrial Division. Can you just comment on the period of time, I think we've been consecutively half-on-half been increasing our results.

I think we've had 9 consecutive half years of growth in the Industrial Division. Obviously, there's less seasonality to that division versus agri. But we have seen half-on-half growth in earnings on the industrial.

So, I think the other point to add to that, Rohan would be certainly the first half result suffered from the slowdown in marine foam export market. The second half result did as well, but growth from other applications mean that it wasn't as evident in the result. There's no 2 ways about it. The FY '23 result was probably a high that we won't achieve in FY '25. We think it's going to take a little bit of time to build back up there because there was a bringing forward of demand on that and a part of it was COVID and labor, part of it was also, we did some constraints on our own capacity. So, we had customers ordering to long lead times that we were specifying and then we sold that capacity constraint that we have, which meant we were able to get the product a little earlier. So that gave a probably somewhat of an unnatural boost in the first half of FY '23. And then there's been a little bit of an adjustment since then. But we think we have really good opportunities for growth in this market. It is a great product. It's growth in terms of the available market that we can exit that so the market itself is going to grow. And we think we can get a better share of it. We have a really strong presence in New Zealand and Australia. We have a reasonable presence in the U.S. that we've been getting grown. We have a very small presence in Europe and a growing market, and we think that's a great opportunity for growth as well. So, I guess the point being in relation to your question, we are confident we can continue to grow the Industrial Division results. And if you want to split out the halves, halves-on-halves, seasonality in the Industrial division business because if you think about when some of that seasonal demand in the Northern Hemisphere summer comes, that kind of straddles the halves. So, we often begin to see a bit of strength in December. But typically, it is stronger -- sorry, beginning to see the strength in the May, June period, but then also that flows on into July, August. So, less seasonality in the industrial business.

See any other hand outside, just pop in the chat, if you'd like to ask any questions.

No other questions? Adrian, there you go.

Sorry, I just have a question. Is the growth in the [Technical Difficulty], is a signal there more a reflection of where you sort of see the medium-term growth for the earnings, like noting that, I guess, the NPAT sort of flat at an adjusted level, the payout is up a little bit? And I guess the operating cash flow benefit is mostly -- yes, there's a lift in profitability, but it's mostly a working capital feature. Is that the right way to interpret that?

I think it's 2 or 3 ways to interpret it. The first is, yes, we have confidence in the growth profile that we have. Secondly, as we talked about before, our business model is a relatively low CapEx model because of the contributions we get from customers to the developer. And that's another fact that and our debt is at a very low level. So as Tim noted, we paid out 94% of our profits. We certainly don't want this to be interpreted as that we don't have opportunities for growth we do. But we're very comfortable we can fund our organic growth opportunities from operating cash flow. And if we can realize and locate some inorganic type growth opportunities we can fund that either from debt or if is substantial enough from new equities. So, I think there's 2 factors, Adrian, it does express our confidence in the future but also reflects the financial position that we're in. You there Adrian?

Yes, I am here. Just a follow-up question. Towards the end of your slide pack, you've got, I guess, those core attributes or advantages that you're trying to extract. And one of the ones you mentioned was product life cycle management. But how much -- like I guess this is one of the things about [indiscernible], there's lots of products. But what -- can you just sort of elaborate on what sort of -- or not sort of [ Mitre ], but what you're sort of doing there? Like it's -- I mean it's always been an ongoing feature, but are you looking to accelerate what you've done in the past or...?

Yes. Look, I think if we see few businesses, we could use examples too, but one of them would be dairy. We manufacture a very wide range of liners and what typically tends to happen is when we introduce a new line up and we give volume growth and what have you from those liners, we haven't been that good at sort of pruning off the low-volume products or the lower volume products or phasing those lower-volume products out at the bottom of the chain, I guess. And manufacturing products and low volume always costs more than what we think it does. So, it's just making sure -- and we have had some focus on this, but we think there is more we can do, not only in that business but in other businesses to ensure that we are constantly looking at what does our revenue profile look like? What does the gross margin profile look like? Another example is our business in Italy, whereby we have quite a long tail of products with relatively small volumes and revenues and customers will keep on ordering them. But these things we can do to better manage those product life cycles. One of those things is simply [Technical Difficulty]. Another thing is to price them more appropriately for the sensibility to manufacturing it. Any other questions?

Do you mind if I...

Yes. Go ahead [ Douggie ].

Good result, Graham for the conditions. Just wondering, gross margin continues to increase. Can you just elaborate or give us some color on the dynamics there? Is this cost out price increases was sort of driving this for the various sectors?

Yes. So certainly, in FY '24 less price increases, there was of necessity, quite a bit of price increase, not that there hasn't been, but less of a factor. There was a necessity for price increases, obviously, in preceding years as we're facing a pretty rapid increase in raw material costs and freight costs. So yes, continued operational improvements. I think also the introduction of new products at better margins than what we had historically. And then a bit of discipline around, I think, across the business around really understanding the margins of all of our products. And the kind of what I touched on there with Adrian before, for some of those low-volume products, making sure that we are capturing an appropriate margin for it. So, in some of our smaller businesses, we've become a bit more disciplined in terms of driving some price improvements for low-volume products. And in some of our businesses, our margins were below the level that we think would we should be achieving it. So, we've got to focus on improving those as well. So, I think there's 3 factors. There's always opportunity to analyze and review our products and see where there's some opportunity for improvement, understanding the value we provide to the customer. We are consistently interesting new products and our objective is to introduce those in better margins than what we're currently earning. And we are focused on ensuring that we improve our operating performance.

And probably just a question on July and August. Can you give us indication on how that [indiscernible] and any sort of particular notable strengths or weaknesses? I know you mentioned marine, but...

Yes. I don't want to overplay marine. But so I mean, obviously, we're only halfway through August but difficult to comment on August. But certainly, the year has started well for us. We had a strong result in July. It was ahead of the prior year. So, the strength you see in the industrial business in the second half of the year continues. That's pretty broad-based. But we're pretty cautious about placing too much weight on 1 month out of 12. But yes, we've had a good start to the year, pretty broad-based, as we touched on with dairy. There was a little bit of deferral from Q4 into the beginning part of this year. We're not talking massive numbers, but there was some withdrawal. So, that's meant we had a better start to dairy than we did in the preceding year, but particularly Industrial Division has started well in FY '25. It's an interesting world out there, everyone knows, there's some pretty challenging economic conditions. We do have products in some good sectors and good applications of good customers. So, we're planning to continue to do well.

And just one last question. Just can you give us some indication on when does that health and hygiene product actually kick in? Like was that [Technical Difficulty] for the year or...

No, it was throughout the year. Our sales of that product were about USD 3 million. My recall is probably about 2/3 of that was in the second half of the year and maybe 1/3 in the first half. Thanks. Are there any other questions? We've got a couple of minutes there before we need to wrap up. So, if anyone else has got a question, perhaps unmute yourself and have a crack because we seem to be struggling to see you on the [Technical Difficulty].

Rohan managed to navigate it.

Okay. If there's nothing else, we'll close it up there. Thanks very much for joining for the call. And as we noted at the start, we've got a good strong robust business. We are pleased with the result. Of course, we would like to do better. But given the economic environment, we think it's a pretty strong result and coming off a weak first half, a very good second half result and we're in very good shape for the future. Thank you very much. Thank you.