Stealth Group Holdings Ltd (SGI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
September 3, 2025
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Michael Arnold
executiveOkay. Terrific. So thank you, everybody, for joining us for the 2025 full year results briefing presentation of Stealth Group Holdings. It's a pleasure to obviously present, on an annual basis, the half year in terms of what our results are. In this year, we've delivered a really good outcome for our business. And just making sure that all the tech is in place, everything is okay to go. So as I go through the presentation, in terms of formalities, I'll walk you through, obviously, the FY '25 results, the FY '28 plan. The question time, we will leave to the end. [Operator Instructions] And for those that we can't answer just purely because of time, we will obviously respond outside that to you. So if I can just start off with probably 3 key slides and points that I want to make on FY '25 and beyond. So first of all, it's a record performance for the company. It marks a milestone not only from a financial perspective, but also in a number of other key areas. So from an investment point of view, we pivoted considerably in the acquisition of Force Technology in June 2024. And what that created for us was one of Australia's largest diversified microcap, for a better word, distribution companies, it opened up our platform considerably. That gave us another 3,000-odd retail outlets that we can push and promote our products through, the diversification through customers, the scale leverage that are added, the cross-synergies with the organization is obviously in quite a significant zone right now. And we're a player that obviously has relevance in the market. We maintain our target for FY '28 for $300 million in sales and an 8%-plus EBITDA and a 5%-plus NPAT. In FY '25, we delivered strong progress towards the initiatives that are aligned to that plan. We had significant investment, which I'll walk you through shortly, that, again, is aligned to that plan. Ultimately, if I can reinforce, that our ultimate goal here is to build Australia's market-leading alternative to the major players. And we've won and started to progress our market share. We've absolutely grown in terms of our revenue, particularly in our industrial side of our business, where 6 or 7 of our largest and direct competitors all had downgrades in terms of their sales growth but also have gone through a number of rightsizing initiatives. And that means that we are absolutely holding our position and taking position in the market. So we're, very simply, a good quality company, a good investment. We have a long-term plan. We have good strong growth pathway, and we're going to continue to deliver returns over time. If I can give you a couple of key messages on the result of FY '25 and how that links with what I've just said to you but also as we're heading to FY '28 and our $300 million target. So there's a couple of things. One, clearly, acquisitions add significant value to our business. We've now completed 9. It highlights in FY '25 the scale benefits and the operating leverage that comes from that in terms of our bottom line result. The cost synergies and the benefits that are associated not only in shared services from consolidation such as technology teams, human resources, finance teams and also, in some regards, the product development teams allows us to produce a lower cost to serve. The revenue synergies, that have come into play. There's a couple of examples there. Our new Hong Kong office that was borne out of the acquisition of Force Technology allowed us to open up introductions to new opportunities within China, and that created 3 new industrial private label or exclusive label products that we're able to bring into market, being CAT Power Tools, Wesco Power Tools and Harden Power Tools. And a lot of those didn't contribute towards FY '25 results. So we're looking forward to the uptake that that's going to bring in the future. It also, as I mentioned earlier, significantly expanded our portfolio in terms of distribution network. And that means that there's a number of new store locations and online locations that are now part of the portfolio. They also allowed us to bring out a new brand called RIVO, which is borne out of the industrial business that we're putting into the consumer side of the business. And that has meant that we're putting that into convenience locations, and that product is due for launch in November. That's in production at the moment. So there's a number of cross-synergies at its infancy. There's a pipeline of growth plans that are in place that link between both businesses. So we're excited about what that can bring in the future. And all this is aligned to our FY '28 plan. So our FY '28 plan is clear. Our EBITDA of 7% we've reduced in FY '25, with an 8% target in FY '28, we believe that we're ahead of that plan. Some of the exclusive and private label products that we have in place, our original target is 10% of total sales in FY '28. We're sitting at 16% today. So again, that's another area that we've been able to develop. That's ahead of plan at the moment. So there's a lot of really good things that have occurred in FY '25, but we're not done yet. So we're looking forward to those coming to fruition in the coming period. So the catalyst for growth, you will see and would have seen through the deck we put out, it's quite comprehensive in its detail. And we've deliberately done that because we undertook a capital raise only 3 or 4 months ago -- sorry, 4 months ago, 5 months ago. And in that, we wanted to demonstrate that the use of funds is actually well and truly on its way. So the investment we take you through is all around the catalyst of growth. So we've consolidated those, I guess, into 6 key areas that you'll see as we go forward and all our initiatives that we work within, and our plan will be aligned to one of these 6 key areas. And they are obviously expanding our product and our value-added service offerings. And I've given the example of exclusive and private label range. We will give you examples of our loyalty program, our Tool Hire business and online platforms. So what we're doing also is growing with customers. So delivering more value and better experiences for customers will attract the customer. And there's demonstrations, as you would have seen throughout the presentation, on the investment that we put towards marketing and the excellent quality of work that our marketing team has put together to be able to push and promote the products in our business but also our storyline across multiple platforms, and they've done an excellent job. From a productivity point of view, we clearly continue to demonstrate a lower cost of sales and push the AI-powered actions. And the repetitive work of functional processing absolutely can get replaced by AI, which allows us to put our people on to more important tasks, to focus on creating more value for the customer and delivering more for the customer. And what that also allows us to do is considerably increase our volume to keep our head count lower, which produces a lower cost of sales, because that repetitiveness allows us to be able to be more responsive as a business but also have an organization that can cope with more volume without the need to continue to throw people at it. And that's one of the evolution factors and that you'll see continually, have a message by us put out over the coming years. The leverage of data and digital. Clearly, having the information available to us allows us to align and predict better our demand forecasting, the types of products and services that our customers are looking for, how we adapt from a pricing reset perspective to be competitive in the market. And ultimately, sitting around 3 key themes is around price, convenience and the range that we offer. And all that sits in with the technology that we have available, equally supported by an offline platform, ensuring that we've got a physical store network. So the more that we can get to our customers and have product on shelf gives them more choice, so having a multi-touch distribution company. There's the term omnichannel, I'd like to feel that we're more than that. We're creating more touch points, which allows our customers to have more choice from multiple demographics, multiple end markets and sectors that our customers obviously involved in. And most importantly, continuing to build partnerships in that environment, and we will continue to look at acquisitions in what we feel is the current market of opportunity for consolidation. So there are the 6 catalysts of our growth. Everything that you see within the presentation today, and as you'll see moving forward, will be aligned to those 6 key areas and all our initiatives within the business fall under those buckets. And you may even find that, that gets brought down to 5 in the coming period as well, but that's in our pathway forward. So with that introduction of the 3 key slides that I've just shown you, I'll take you through the presentation, the results of FY '25, some of the initiatives that we've undertaken and also where we're setting ourselves for the future. Obviously, our promotion has been our theme. We provide products and solutions made for everyone every day. So we've created now, on the back of the acquisition of Force Technology, 2 operating divisions. Those are dual platforms. One is focused on the industrial distribution part of the business, which is maintenance, repairs and operations type of products in any work environment, and also for DIY and tradings at the front end. The bulk of our business is clearly direct-to-business customers within that portfolio. And that means that our average order size obviously increases as well. We are really strong in Western Australia. We're building positions in South Australia and also in Queensland, and we need to build stronger positions within Victoria and New South Wales. So that's where our growth in terms of our distribution partnerships become really important and also our growth in networks. Our multi-category/multi-sector approach is ensuring that we have our distribution platform with a strong sales force in the back end. Our customer call centers, our packing and our shipping operations are all supporting what we say that we're doing to be in front of the customer, both in the physical stores and also in the online part of our organization. So you'll see more of this as we go forward. We will continue to segment and show you the growth within those 2 operating divisions. Whilst in the back end, our distribution model is really simple, from a supplier into a distribution center, feed that through into how we can get that in front of the customer. So in the case of the industrial, we have our own stores. We have trade partner stores. We have sales reps on the road. We have account managers. We have on-site solutions. So that is very much driven about our own infrastructure supported by trade partners. In the consumer side, this is a brand-specific dedicated approach, taking to market using retail resellers and their platforms and their stores to actually sell our products to the end consumers as well as an online play. So very different in its go-to-market strategy, but ultimately, the fundamentals of the distribution business are exactly the same in terms of supply chain. Our portfolio in terms of our history. So I founded the business in 2014. There's been wonderful growth over the course of that period of time. We continue to evolve not only in the 9 acquisitions that we've acquired, but all the new brands that we've just recently acquired in recent times. What that allows us to do is continue to bring in capability not only new people but also organizations, and we continue to learn and evolve in the market. That's why we're really comfortable in terms of not only our diversification but in terms of what we offer our customers and the everyday products that we have. You can see that in 2024, '25, '26, that there's been a number of announcements that we've placed in the last 12 months. That's taken us to a sales turnover of $145 million, up by 27%. And there's a lot of those initiatives that sit there within 2026 and part of 2025 that are yet to contribute to our financial performance. So it provides us with strong certainty about our market positioning. It also provides us with certainty in terms of the support on our 2028 strategy. From a corporate perspective, you can see the brands that we offer there. We can see that we've had some important share price growth, and our capitalization has increased considerably to almost $100 million, partly supported by obviously a capital raise. But we've almost doubled the amount of shareholders on our register in the last 12 months that moves towards liquidity or improve liquidity. It was one of our initiatives that we spoke about 2 years ago is how do we create more liquidity in our business and we're going to continue to do that. So there's a couple of things. One is the size of our business allows us to have a stronger message to shareholders and why they should invest. Our demonstrated results continue to entice more shareholders on our register. We are well engaged with a number of different institutions and broker groups that now are supporting us and following us and providing research in that regard. So embryonic, I would say, even though we've doubled the number of shareholders, we're almost 1,000, we'd be looking to hopefully double that again in the course of the next 12 months. So from a shareholder return perspective, I guess all of us, including myself, are really pleased about where we are, but also where we're heading. So from a presentation point of view, there will be some slides. I'm not going to go through the 40-odd slides that, obviously, we have in the deck. So I will skim some of those, and I'll bring us to what I feel is the key points. And then, as I said earlier, you'll be able to raise any questions that you have. So I guess most of this I covered in the first 3 slides, but if I can just take you into some of the specifics that's occurred in the course of the 2025 period, particularly on the back of the Force Technology acquisition in June of 2024, which only created 1 month of contribution, and that's contributed a full year into FY '25. So we invested in platforms. We have bought in the private label products. I mentioned the Tool Hire business had a soft launch, and that will be in 9 stores in the very near period, and that's a store-in-store model. We invested in upgrading our retail stores in 4 locations. So that was more about a better customer experience. And also our online platforms that we've evolved, a few those are at its infancy in terms of its launch, but also how that goes to market has been very deliberately considered. So we invested $4.8 million in FY '25. All those initiatives are aligned to future revenue and profit growth. But some of that has obviously improved our profitability in FY '25, and we're really well positioned in terms of future growth and long-term return for our shareholders. And one of the other things that I should mention is the loyalty program. So this is a 3-phase approach. The first phase has only been implemented. The second phase is imminent, and that will be going out to business and trade customers. It's been well designed. It's absolutely market-leading. It's rewards system is something that we have tried and tested and surveyed, that we know will add value and attract customers but retain customers more in the trading space. And that's new business and new growth within that market. So it's a really important call to our overall offering. So bringing that back, if I can sort of say that in FY '25, we grew by 27% at a sales line; and our revenue line, very similar. We grew by 62% at an EBITDA line. That's now 7% of our revenue. We more than doubled our profit and almost doubled our EPS. So in terms of profitability, our focus has been on ensuring that we drive more to the bottom line. We absolutely have the benefits of scale that are flowing through. Our continuance of rightsizing becomes really important to our program, which I'll talk about more of. But as we grow, one of the things that we've been consistently looking at year after year, and we've demonstrated our ability to manage both, is to be a high-growth company but importantly, look at ensuring that we're getting the right return on investment. Therefore, underperforming areas of our business that we've acquired through acquisition or taken on through acquisition, if we can't turn that into an acceptable return on investment, then we will close them down or we will move that away, and we'll put an investment into areas that we know will deliver the right result. And last year, there was $10.8 million of revenue that we removed from '24 into '25, discontinued operations, and that hasn't impacted on our profitability. So what I won't do is grow our revenue for the sake of growing it to make ourselves look good in revenue growth. I will continue to make sure that we -- and it's a discipline through the business with my management team that we look at every operation, everything needs to perform, everything needs to give us the right return on investment, and that is counteracted by obviously growth. So our debt has reduced by 37%. Partly, that is by increased cash flow. It's also from capital raising. It's also being really disciplined in terms of our capital management profile. I'll walk you through the operating cash flow and other items in the next slide but ultimately, everything that we're doing is looking at how do we work our balance sheet harder. And our cash balance obviously is strong, and that's improved by 40-odd percent. And pleasingly, for the second year, we are able to announce a full year dividend. That's up 19% to $0.01 per share. So overall, we're really pleased with those results. It's a record operating performance for our business. And next year, we expect to outperform what we've done in FY '25, heading towards our target FY '28. So with those items, you can see that we've grown in every aspect, including our return on capital employed. From a cash flow perspective, for those who did know or didn't know, we received -- we're down obviously $4.9 million to $6.3 million on last year, but there was $2.7 million of cash receipts on the first day of July and the second day of July that we were expecting on 30th of June, the cycle of 30 June deadline and cutoff date. So for us, obviously, that would have been $2.7 million higher. It obviously would have looked a different number. So we're not concerned. We're collecting well. Our debtor days are strong. Our payment days are equally consistent. Our capital expenditure is 3.3% of sales, whereas historically, it's been less than 1.5% and we will return to 1.5% in FY '26 and beyond. So we ramped up the investment to ensure that we were able to bring a number of these initiatives forward and act on those. And I'll take you through what those initiatives are. So ultimately, there's still a strong discipline around cash management. Our inventory has slightly come down in terms of dollars, but obviously, we continue to invest in inventory based on exclusive private label brands and based on the demand of our customers and their projects that they're running as well. We were slightly down on our gross margin. That's been counterbalanced by our cost of doing business, and that's obviously flowed through from a number of the initiatives that we put in place. As we move forward, our annual objective is to continue to reduce our cost of doing business. Our growth in gross margin will occur as the mix of private label, exclusive label and value-added services contributes, including things like Tool Hire, and that will drive both our EBITDA margin percentage and our NPAT percentage. So overall, look, we're really pleased with the results that we've delivered on. There's more work to do. There's a whole host of different things and levers that we can pull, which I've already shown in the growth catalyst. But everything is well led from a financial perspective. We have a really strong financial team with a new CFO that is showing great leadership in that area and discipline and comes from a big business that allows us -- as we move from $150-odd million turnover to $300 million, we've got the financial disciplines in place and systems that support our period of growth to that point and beyond. We've grown clearly over the last 5 years. This demonstrates -- so these are all nice metrics in terms of an outlook. You can see, from a CAGR perspective, all really nice growth. That sort of sits from 20% to 50-odd percent from a sales and a profitability perspective. Whilst our sales is clearly a driving factor, our focus on profit is absolutely coming from productivity gains and benefits of scale. So we'll continue to provide what we feel is positive growth signs in all these bar charts as we go forward. A couple of things that we're now bringing into the equation, which will show growth in not only the financial metrics but, I guess, operational metrics as we go forward. So for the first time, we're now showing the volume of orders and units that we process through the company and the percentage of sales that represents in different areas as well as average order value. So we're dealing now with almost $4,500 of customer orders on a weekly basis. And there's a lot of manual intervention in that. So the opportunity for AI is important in that aspect with 158-odd thousand units that we're distributing on a weekly basis, quite significant in terms of that size. Our average order size is in the mid-$600s, a bit higher in the consumer side and a bit lower in the industrial. Our weekly purchase orders are 927. That all needs to be automated, which helps not only with the processing of our replenishment within our stores and our distribution centers and also to bring in on customer demand, but all of that should be an automated process to help with future demand planning. So one of the important factors in our business is inventory. It's our biggest asset. The stock turn is absolutely paramount in that. The use of AI technology to have prediction from purchase order to customer order and what we stock and how it turns is imperative to us having a better working capital cycle and part of our success. So we've started to implement some of those programs today. But as I said earlier, it's embryonic. So we're looking forward to that evolving in the near future. You can see that our marketing spend is almost a bit over 3.3%, and that is online and through our physical stores and social media platforms. And that's where opportunity drives in our e-commerce sales, where you can see it's 4.4% of total sales today. So the rise of that, the competitiveness of that, we've just built the platform, so they're in the process of not only being upgraded in our existing businesses but also some new platforms that are being launched. So in terms of the metrics, you can see on the left-hand side there the new platform, United Supply Company; the upgrade of the Heatleys website; the fact that we now have 80,000 printed catalogs that are getting distributed Australia-wide; we've got 32-odd thousand e-mail subscribers with 420-odd thousand website views in the last 12 months that has grown by 18%. So those operational metrics is what we have internally. We'll now be sharing those externally, so you'll see a benchmark of where we started or ended in FY '25 and where we will end up in FY '26 in the future. And that's in the industrial business. And as we move across into the consumer side, we've just entered on the JB Hi-Fi marketplace, which essentially means the products we don't range in JB Hi-Fi stores, we now sell through the marketplace, and that's given us a new audience of customers. And we're also in the process of launching our refreshed EFM, our own brand mobile accessories product that sits there. And we've got 16,500 Instagram followers. We've got 10,000 e-mail subscribers. We've grown without those 2 platforms really kicking in and adding contribution in FY '25 by 18%. And we've got significant, obviously, website views. So both in the industrial side and also in the consumer side, we see this as a big growth area for us and well supported by marketing campaigns that sit behind that. So from a financial point of view, and I'll skim through some of these slides, and I can come back to that because everybody would have read it. If I can just mention a couple of things that I haven't covered already, it's 11 years now of consecutive growth in our sales. And that's really pleasing that we can demonstrate that from a financial metric perspective. Force Technology did contribute its first full 12 months. The finance costs from a dollar perspective increased through the acquisition of Force Technology. Equally, the capital raising that we did in April, received the funds in May, has helped offset some of those finance interest costs as well as obviously a change to interest rates. So we see that our finance interest costs will continue to reduce. Our net EBITDA (sic) [ net debt to EBITDA ] now ratio or leverage is 0.7, down from 1.8, and it's our lowest for a number of years. We, as a percentage of our inventory, are now at 14.4%. We were sitting pre-acquisition of Force around about 13%. Clearly, that's improving in terms of management controls, and I've explained to you some of the initiatives around our demand planning that will help with stock turns and make that better. Our share price has clearly improved and our dividend and market capitalization is obviously significantly better than what it was 12 months ago. So our 5-year outlook, and I've shown you -- sorry, our 5-year history, and I've already showed you from a growth perspective in terms of bar charts how that's progressed itself. Obviously, we'll continue to play this out and show this on a year-by-year basis. But every metric and every line is trending the right way. And that sort of sits behind the fact that we've had a really good and successful year across all areas. And the disciplines within our business continue, as I mentioned earlier, to be stronger. And that is operational profit, operational financial performance in terms of our disciplines behind that and how we manage working capital and how we're managing our debt. Divisional performance. The Industrial division grew by 2.2% on comparative sales. I've already covered the discontinued operations and the number of stores that we closed. So there was 1 branch, 6 on-site stores that we closed as well as 17 partner stores that are no longer part of our network. The cost to serve is too high. Equally, on the consumer side of our business, we grew by roughly 200 stores across telco, being in places like Vodafone; convenience stores, being in 7-Eleven. We're also looking at -- 7-Eleven advised that they're looking to double the size of their stores within Australia in the coming years. So we are part of that trajectory as well. So in terms of our exclusive and own brands, I mentioned earlier that 16% of our sales today in FY '25 is already relating to those products. We had forecast 10% by 2028. So we expect to maintain that level of approach. The mix, you can see that our customers are, obviously, varied. And the product categories that we have are varied as well. But if I consolidate those, our primary 2 areas of sales that are driven is a direct-to-customer; B2B, business-to-business; and our retail resellers, which again is a business-to-business approach. So the predominant part of our business, 83-odd percent, is driven by our relationships with business customers, with the balance then to end consumers. So that's part of our strength. When we have cycles of economic growth or the opposing way, of a downturn, our flexible model allows us to not have the drain of fixed infrastructure, having our own stores, our own operational head count. So investing in new stores and opening stores and then closing stores and rationalizing or rightsizing is not too much of the cycle of our business. Hence, why we talk about being a light capital invested company is because of exactly that. And our ability to be able to service B2B is a future part of our strategy and will remain so. Our industrial business has a whole bucket of different products from power tools to hand tools, to gardening tools, to hardware type of tools, to materials handling and beyond. Our safety products is head-to-toe coverage from clothing to eyewear, footwear, ear, head protection and a whole range. And that part of the market is becoming an evolving opportunity as our business customers have more stringent occupational health and safety requirements for sites but also in any workplace. And our consumer business today is predominantly in mobile accessories, and that will be expanding into safety products for the convenience stores and supermarkets, which is the RIVO brand that we announced not long ago, and that product is in production now. We've partnered with PIP Global Safety, who are the world's largest and leading manufacturer of safety products, and that gives us certification behind our products. Immediately, that is certification of the factories, everything is aligned with standards, and we have an excellent product and promotional launch campaign that is about to hit the market. I can move forward into the invested capital. So these are the areas that, if I take you back to one of the catalysts for growth, the subsections of these are where do we invest and why do we invest. And a lot of these, as I mentioned earlier, will benefit our period from FY '26 to FY '28. So the new digital commerce channels, there's 3 online shops; the Tool Hire business, which has been in soft launch phase; the loyalty rewards program, which has been rolled out to our trade partners and that is getting rolled out to our B2B customers on next month. Also with the marketplaces, we're on JB Hi-Fi marketplace today, and we'll be on the Woolworths marketplace in the coming months in the short term. And they have 30 million visits per month to the Woolworths sites. So that is BIG W, the Everyday Rewards program that they have across their platform. And that is a significant touch point for us where we're able to put select products on that platform. So marketplaces are really important. Our integration with those companies is where we invested. So our API allows us to feed direct order flow from the Woolworths sites, for example, the BIG W site. A customer order online that will feed directly into our system, we will fulfill that order by sending it direct to the end consumer. And that means that Woolworths doesn't touch that, but obviously, that allows us to go through our platform. So that we see, with the amount of monthly visits, is significant. We are already -- as I mentioned, on JB Hi-Fi, that's exceeding our expectations when we're launching another couple of brands on that platform in the near future. The upgrades and the automation, the investment there is about AI-powered programs. So AI today, as I mentioned earlier, is a whole host of opportunities that sit here from demand planning, from processing our purchase orders linked with our supplier invoices to link with our customer payments. All of that from an end-to-end perspective is what we're now starting to build. And the processing of that is just significant in terms of the number of invoices that we're pushing through. There's 4,500 customer invoices that I mentioned on a weekly basis. There's 927 average purchase orders we're placing on a weekly basis. And in the history of the business, and that's been more manual processing, so much efficiency. We continue to increase our cybersecurity. Clearly, as we go out to protecting our organization, that is fundamentally important to any organization. Our human resources technology, we're bringing all our employees after 9 acquisitions into one main operating system that not only manages payroll area but also everything is automated. So within our operations, everything will be digitally log on/log off for those people who are paid on an hourly rate. All that's been manual time cards in the past. So all that gets removed. And all this is about efficiency and producing a lower cost to serve becomes important on not only what we have today and the benefits it can bring to that, which has driven our margin, but also about how do we get to more than 8% in the future, how do we actually go from $150 million to $300 million. These are the things that we put in place to get us to that point we've built to that level. I mentioned earlier around the investments around property of $1.2 million that we put in, which is creating a better experience for those customers that walk into our stores. It also is to accommodate the tool shop -- the Tool Hire business, sorry. And also, we've put in-store and stores with certain brands within those locations as well. So the overall experience is far better than what it's been. Private label, we've already covered in depth. And the 2 owned brands that we bought in is RIVO, which I mentioned the safety brand. We've invested in more product lines, which is predominantly in Officeworks with our EFM mobile accessories range. And we've also brought in an entry point product DullCo, which is sitting in some IGA stores in Australia at the moment. And obviously, there's a number of new exclusive brands that we've recently won in the last 5 months. And a lot of those are about to hit the market. So CASETiFY is a world-leading mobile accessory brand that's just starting. Ember, which is the -- its electronic heating coffee cup and mugs that's now in stores. So it's in David Jones. It's in JB Hi-Fi. It's in Retravision. We're in the process of putting it in The Good Guys. We've exceeded already, in the last 8 weeks, our sales plan for FY '26 in regards to that particular brand. The industrial side with Caterpillar, we have stock arriving in the next 2 weeks. We have renegotiated the purchase of product, the Caterpillar product, from the previous distributor. There's $1.1 million of value in that product that we've acquired for $500,000. So that gives us an immediate uplift from a margin perspective. Harden Tools is in 12 different stores today. And the WESCO product, which is an entry-level power tool product, will hit the market later in the year. So all those investments which we've sort of shown further through the presentation on a line-by-line item have evolved considerably. The reason why we invested to that now and today is to make sure that we actually got ahead of the curve. We committed with those, some of those global brands, that we would grow their market share. They're great brands. They're well-known for the people who are in that space. They are well supported from a supplier and a marketing perspective. And when we take something to market, we want to do it right, and we want to be successful with it. And ultimately, as I mentioned earlier, 3.3% of sales was our investment. That will come back down to a light 1.5% moving forward. From a comparative perspective, businesses of our size are anywhere from 2% to 5% on average. And we have proven models both within the U.S. and within Australia that demonstrate that type of investment. So we're still well and truly below that, and our operating model is unique that allows us to maintain that light capital approach to market. If I can cover the shareholder dividend distributions quickly in terms of dates. So the $0.01 per share, 41% of our profits are getting returned to shareholders. There's a DRP plan in place that will remain available for all shareholders. The election date is the 8th of October. The pricing period will be between the 9th of October and the 22nd, and the shares will be issued or payment is early November, around about the 4th. So it's based on franking credits. We continue to look at our distributions in terms of cash flows and current earnings, et cetera, and also what our future cash flow requirements are. Part of, obviously, what we wanted to do is attract shareholders is to ensure that we provide a return on their investment, both not only just value and share price accretion but also from a return on that investment, with the choice be able to convert those back into shares, which for those who did that 12 months ago, at a $0.21 price, I think it was at that time, would be very happy that they made that choice to do so with the price today, I think, of around about mid-$70s. So our progress on strategy. Again, I'll flip through this because I'm conscious of time. All the things that we said we'd do, bar one, which is the dot point almost in the middle of the page, and I'll explain that in a second, have been completed. So I think I've probably gone through this enough. This is more of a detailed pack this year because of all the things that we said we'd do to give everybody clear visibility of where our evolution has come from 12 months ago from our strategic pivot but also where we are today. Clearly, it won't be, in some areas, as detailed as it is for the future, but everybody will have a starting point and obviously be able to follow our pathway from here. The drop shipping strategy and store hub comes out of our United Supply Co online retail website for the Industrial division. So what that essentially means is we're using our trade partner network throughout Australia to fulfill orders. So as a customer places an order online through the United Supply Co website, the closest store with that particular product will fulfill the order and deliver it to the customer, and that will be anywhere Australia-wide. So what that does is it gets our product to the customer on time, gives them a good experience, creates a new relationship for our trade partners that they can manage. And then from a price to customer as well, it allows us to maintain a high gross profit margin for the goods that we sell by not having to ship from one single location. So in doing that -- that's an FY '26 launch, not an FY '25 launch, which is why it's got a dot point there. Everything else, we've progressed nicely. And I think I've provided this and gone through this in all aspects, equally secured the new opportunities and the supply chain optimization that we're taking you through. So I won't go through any of that, but I'm happy to answer any questions that anybody has at the end of the time. With our capital raising, these are the 6 themes that we said we're raising money on. All that links with everything that I've just covered with you to now. And that then cascades down, I guess, into individual projects. So what sits in the 6 comes into the 10. You can see what the model is, you can see what the upgraded financial targets are for FY '26, and we'll provide progress reporting on that. And equally, what we've achieved in terms of FY '25 and what the status is today. So we've made really good progress in a number of areas. In some areas, we're not as advanced of where we are, but we're imminently at the dead knock of launching those. So we're expecting all of these to fall in part of our FY 2028 plan. And there's a number of moving pieces and levers that we're pulling that obviously are really favorable. So if I can just take you through to some of the wonderful work that's been done internally by the team here within the Stealth organization. Importantly, this is to provide you a context about our investment. Our investment is in-store and online, as I mentioned. That's also been looking at how we're promoting ourselves so that the touch points of the demographic and types of customers that we deal with requires a whole host of different go-to-market supporting strategy. So you can see on the online program, you can see the catalogs that's been created. We're promoting ourselves out in general market, on the back of buses. We're holding trade events within our stores and also on site. We also have on-site training where our suppliers -- we have once-a-month major product initiatives down at different sites where the suppliers come in and train all our people. So everyone who's in a warehouse or working in an office environment has the ability to touch and understand how those products are actually sold to market and the features and benefits of those. And all of that then cascades into social media. So across multiple platforms, that is from weekly specials through to different product suggestions, it's obviously pushed and promoted depending on the campaigns that we're running by a whole host of different brands in our industrial business. So there's a whole host of work and effort that goes into pushing, promoting our company. And this has evolved itself considerably in the last few years. And one of the pleasing things, when we talk about people and promotion and opportunity, we brought in a number of interns into our marketing team over the course of the last 3 years. The original interns are now sitting in marketing coordinator roles. They've evolved 2 levels, into taking responsibility for brands to market. We've got new interns that have joined our organization. So these are people who have come out of university, either grads or haven't even gone to university and come out of high school, into our business that have created a career for themselves within our business. The experience that they can learn is not one dimensional. It absolutely is a whole host of opportunities from catalogs, from campaign-driven programs, from actually understanding how to take products to market and features and benefits and what will win the customer. So in terms of that growing and promoting from within, we've had excellent success in that area, and that's now expanding out into other divisions of our business where we can create an opening for interns, cadetships or for the people looking to come into an organization and build a career. If I can then just move through to our Consumer division. Similarly, clearly, as I mentioned earlier, but similarly in terms of our approach, the in-store is sitting with major retailers. So in the case of the in-store display there, that's in our Officeworks location. You can see that we're well ranged there. All our products are sitting there through our online platform, both on our own websites and it's also on our customer websites. We're on marketplace. As you can see, we have a whole host of printed products that sit within our industrial business that are pushed and promoted from consumer into that area. We have in-store displays as well as digital marketing. So again, multiple touch points depending on customer types and how we get our brand more out to market. And in terms of our own label and white label, so own label first, you can see there the prototypes of the RIVO products, which is going to be sitting in 7-Eleven stores. The packaging and the products being created of about 30 different line items, that is catered for a high-volume, condensed convenience store environment. But what we found is that product can actually be sold in the industrial side of our business as well, so a great opportunity for that product to be able to be a well-known success within our market. On the right-hand side, the NRG product is actually what you will see in Coles stores, where that product is in 800 stores Australia-wide. Below that is what's sitting in 7-Eleven stores. So this is branded 7-Eleven. And ultimately, we did the design. The manufacturing component is done through one of our 22 factories, in China. And we also obviously ensure that, from a compliance point of view and merchandising perspective, it meets all the requirements that 7-Eleven and Coles need. So we work closely with their teams to take these products to market. And this is an important part of not only our buying power but obviously, how we continue to make ourselves sticky with these larger organizations. So if I can just take you through to this component, reinforce a couple of things. One is $300 million plus in terms of our target for FY '28; 8% EBITDA; 5% sales; capital investment of less than 1.5% of the sales; and our exclusive white label or private label products to be greater than 10%, even though they're sitting at 16%. So we haven't adjusted our guidance nor will we do so at the moment. But all the signs are that our EBITDA is on track and ahead of schedule. Our capital investment is coming down. Our exclusive brand and private label range is ahead. So everything seems to be pointing in the right direction for us to outperform. The catalysts for growth, if I can just take you to the right-hand side, this is the pathway that we've shown in the past. Our growth agenda all sits with the items that I've just covered with you from online to hire business, to network expansion, loyalty programs. All those areas are absolutely in play, and we will continue to provide updates on our progress as we move forward. In terms of trading and outlook, so clearly, if I can summarize it this way, the benefits of scale absolutely improved our financial performance and we'll continue to do so. We're on track to our $300 million target. We've had some really good progress in terms of the projects that we've worked under and rolled out this year, we have strong competitive advantages in each of our businesses with really equally as strong growth opportunities. We're being proactive in everything that we do from AI-powered systems to consolidation and synergies between the businesses, to driving cost down and profit up, as well as being in a position to provide more value and better experiences for our customers whilst looking to be and continue to be financially disciplined by working our balance sheet harder than ever. We have found in the last 3 months that, because of the push around U.S. tariffs, that our Chinese suppliers are willing to work with us closer than ever in terms of not only ranging but also the price of goods. We've been able to negotiate a number of improvements, and we'll continue to negotiate harder on those to bring cost down and higher margin. Equally, we've noticed that the cost of freight into Australia has significantly come down as well with about a 15% reduction overall. So for all those shipments that are coming in from overseas, we're getting the benefits of those. So that is obviously positive signs. But my air of caution, I guess, is we just don't know what will happen out of the U.S. at any point in time. So we're making the most of this window. And how long this window will remain open remains to be seen, I guess. Our margins will obviously continue to grow. We've got a number of things rolling out like our Tool Hire business, which has an 85% margin return, payback period of 8 to 11 weeks. It's incremental based on our existing customers and offer, too, there. But it's also to look at winning new tradings and new customers. Our initiatives will contribute to FY '26 that were rolled out in FY '25 and didn't contribute in that period. So all in all, we're in a good position. How are we finding the market in different pockets has different sets of challenges. All the things that I've just shown you are about to overcome those. Our peers have all, in the main, had declining sales or are consolidating businesses, or are reducing head count, or are closing operations. And in some cases, we know with a couple of groups, with a large amount of stores, 1/4 of their stores are actually profitable and the balance is no longer because their one-way approach is focusing on the retail sector and attracting somebody to walk into your store. Our multiple touch points allow us to have an industrial flavor as well as a consumer flavor, both touching end consumer discretionary buyers as well as nondiscretionary buyers, which is our 90% of the products that we sell within the industrial business. We have repeat sales. We're winning 66% on average of all quotes given. We know through pricing reset that's been recently done that our target is to increase that more than 80%. That's an internal target. So that is more efficient, better pricing, better ranging, more convenient to customers. And I guess the basics is how we compete and provide good marketing options to our customers. So with that said, I know that was a bit long, but obviously, we have had a lot of things happening in the last 12 months. Really positive about where we are, really positive about where we're heading, on track, got a really good team that sits behind us, and their contribution to these results has been outstanding, and I couldn't thank them enough. So what we'll do now is, if we pause for a few minutes, we will take questions, and then I'll log back on and we will answer those questions that come forward. Thank you.
Michael Arnold
executiveSo there are a couple of questions. I think I've probably answered these, but I'll come back and hopefully reiterate a few components. Somebody's asked a question about revenue for FY '26 and EBITDA. We haven't given any guidance. And our target is to remain long term on our $300 million goal. I'd love a straight line from FY '25 to FY '28, but it wouldn't be prudent for me to give you something that obviously will evolve positively or might take a little bit longer. But ultimately, our push is $300 million. What I can say is we've demonstrated through FY '25 results that we can outperform or we can perform within the range of our guidance. There's a number of initiatives that have absolutely come forth. And a couple of initiatives we slowed down because we wanted to make sure that they were right. So the Tool Hire business, we would have liked to launch 3 months ago, but we decided to add a subscription model to it. So that took more time to develop the technology. We also wanted to make sure that, that actually worked real life. So from a customer experience, the customer has a great experience from day 1. So we're never shy on making sure that what we take to market is best experience. That takes a little bit longer. Equally, I can give an example with the CAT Power products. We have negotiated a 12% better price point in terms of our buying from factory because we're hanging out in terms of our approach to market. And that's delayed our go-to-market by a couple of months. So we need to make sure that we're prudent in that aspect. Equally, on the other side, we've been able to take a number of things to market sooner, and that's obviously driven the benefits behind our financial performance in FY '25. The other couple of questions that are here is what about contract terms with customers, KPI, minimum sales, average spend, how often are they reviewed. We have a number of different customers on contract, both in the consumer part of our business and also within the industrial side of our business. Absolutely, they're reviewed on a quarterly basis, what our standard practice is. We sit in a formal review environment. We discuss expectations on both sides. We measure those performance. And typically, that is about fulfillment: are we on time, in full within the time lines and service parameters that are set. Equally is the customer spending, the volume and throughput that we would expect in that. And that gets adjusted on a new set of criteria for the next 3 months, and then that's measured accordingly. So that's a formal setting at the highest level to an informal setting where a customer will just come and buy our product off the shelf or online. But our account management of customers is quite sophisticated. Our contract arrangements we have in place stem from 1 year to 3 years traditionally, and they vary in terms of the complexity of our engagement with them to the simplicity of a single purchase. There's a couple of questions around debt, so reducing debt more aggressively given the local CapEx. Well, I think we've shown over the last 4 years, our use of debt. In 2020, we had no debt. We then took on debt to acquire 4 businesses through that journey. We paid all that, the majority of that, fixed debt back in 2025. Our last payment of $1 million was made in August of 2025. We had new debt coming into play on our acquisition of Force Technology, which is about $6 million, and we're at $6.8 million today. So we undertook a capital raising for a couple of things. One is strategically for certain institutional investors joining a register, which we didn't have. It also strengthened our balance sheet to push the initiatives that we have in place. And also it obviously allowed us to be more focused on our margin accretion by reducing things like interest rates. We're at a 0.7 debt ratio. That's an excellent ratio for a business of our type. And if you just go and look at our peers, all our peers are at 1.5 to 2, if not more. So the majority of them are higher. And clearly, debt is one part of our push. And we would love to be debt free, but we will balance debt against working capital requirements and future investment as we go. And clearly, with our biggest asset being stock, and stock turn being the lever of that, we want to ensure that we have a stronger free flow cash contribution that is used to invest but also to reduce our debt as we move forward. One of the other questions that we had is how we're measuring success in terms of nonfinancial metrics, such as customer satisfaction, loyalty and improvements in service levels. So that's a combination of what I've just explained that gets reviewed in formal contract settings predominantly. One of the areas that, from a customer satisfaction score, is an option for the future. But the way that our distribution model works, and we're going through companies such as retail resellers or trade partners, we can't take the satisfaction of the end consumer. What we can do through our own retail stores is take that satisfaction measurement. And you can see through the slide that I've given, we've started to measure our throughput, and we'll start looking in the future at introducing some of those other components of, I guess, end consumer customer satisfaction. There is online reviews that we take. There is feedback that's obviously come through, through our product, particularly our own brand usage, but that isn't made available at the moment in the public area. But clearly, as our business evolves into something, that we would want to make known and shown. There is a question here around margins for the hire business. The hire business is and will contribute an 85% margin. We've said that before. That's consistent with what we said in our April raising, in our February announcement of our half year result and everything in between. So there's companies that work in the hire space that are generating at a net level high 20%. And I think it's 26% and 29% at a net profit level. So we have taken our model from proven models out in the market in terms of what we can generate. We've also completed our own internal modeling a low usage rate what that return would be. There's a question around any significant costs written off in '24, '25, changing CFOs, redundancies and a recruitment fee. There is a recruitment fee for the new CFO in place because we went to an external provider. There's no redundancies. I have a philosophy of not doing that. What we do, do in terms of rightsizing, if an individual, and this is about productivity gains, is that if we do lose an employee within the business, we look at an opportunity to rationalize, and can we not replace that role depending on the type of role through our business, noting that we have anything from people working as drivers, warehouse team members, customer service, finance operators, salespeople, marketing, IT. And from a supply chain perspective, we're producing our own products and development. So there's a whole host of different requirements in all those different areas. And from our side, if we can rationalize because it's a functional role or a processing role that can be consolidated, we do, but we fundamentally don't have an approach putting redundancy through. And outside that, I think we probably answered most of the questions that have come through in some part or another. Unless I miss something, Jess could remind me so. There was one more question around what do I think is the greatest contributing target in FY '26 to '28. Well, I can say there's not one thing. The 6 catalysts of growth are all intertwined in terms of our ability to be able to execute. So all what we've invested in, all of those have multiple levers within them that are driving our performance. There is no one thing that will make a fundamental difference. They all absolutely are combined together. I think that's it. Okay, so on that note, if there is any other questions that I've missed, I apologize, please send that through to Jess, to our Investor Relations e-mail address, we'll answer that for you. And I appreciate your time. We look forward to a really good period over from today to FY '28. It's an exciting business to be in. It's an evolving business. It's been an excellent journey in the last 12 months. And also, we're not an overnight success. This has been a number of years in the making to get to this point. The benefits of those early years, and I'm going to say '23, '24, are obviously materializing now. And we continue to have considerable drive to head to our 2028 target. And importantly, we've got a really good strong team that supports the business and those initiatives to go forward. So I appreciate everybody's attention. I appreciate all your involvement and your investment into our company. I really look forward to continuing to deliver good positive results, financial results, shareholder value in terms of share price movement, as well as obviously return on your investment. And one of the things that we will continue to do is push and promote our company and continue to improve the liquidity of it, which getting our story out there comes from all of us and all our contribution and whoever we can tell. So thank you.
This call discussed
For developers and AI pipelines
Programmatic access to Stealth Group Holdings Ltd earnings transcripts and 251,000+ others is available through the
EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments,
full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.