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Inflation in Japan's capital cooled below the central bank's 2% target for the first time in over a year, but the slowdown is unlikely to derail further interest rate hikes.
Inflation in Japan's capital cooled below the central bank's 2% target for the first time in over a year, but the slowdown is unlikely to derail further interest rate hikes.
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The stock market is at a critical juncture, with major indexes stalled and upside catalysts lacking. Strong earnings, including Nvidia's, failed to ignite a rally; tech sector rotation and AI disruption fears weigh heavily.
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Operator: Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call and Webcast for Canadian Utilities Limited. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Colin Jackson, Senior Vice President, Financial Operations. Please go ahead, Mr. Jackson. Colin Jackson: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased you could join us for Canadian Utilities Fourth Quarter 2025 Conference Call. On the line today, we have Bob Myles, Chief Executive Officer; Katie Patrick, Chief Financial and Investment Officer. Before we move into today's remarks, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the numerous additional territories and homelands on which our global facilities are located. Today, I am speaking to you from our ATCO Park head office in Calgary, which is located in the Treaty 7 region. This is the ancestral territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy comprised of the Siksika, the Kainai and the Piikani Nations, the Tsuut'ina Nation and the Stoney Nakoda Nations, which includes the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Goodstoney First Nations. I also want to recognize that the city of Calgary is home to the Metis Nation of Calgary, Districts 5 and 6. We honor and respect the diverse history, languages and ceremonies and cultures of the indigenous people who call these areas home. Today's remarks will include forward-looking statements that are subject to important risks and uncertainties. For more information on these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our filings with the Canadian securities regulators. During today's presentation, we may refer to certain non-GAAP and other financial measures, including adjusted earnings, adjusted earnings per share and capital investment. These measures do not have any standardized meaning under IFRS, and as a result, they may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other entities. Please refer to our filings with the Canadian securities regulator for further information. And now I'll turn the call over to Bob for his opening remarks. Robert Myles: Thank you, Colin, and good morning, everyone. To begin, I'm really pleased to tell you about the strong results we achieved in 2025. Notably, we overcame $57 million of headwinds last year. This is a major feat highlighting our ability to deliver earnings growth in the phases of challenges. This is a testament to our strong work ethic, discipline and resiliency. Katie will speak to this more in the financial update. I want to reiterate the key pillars driving our strategy and where we will focus our efforts in 2026. First, we have growth and prosperity. This is reflective of our project pipeline across all of our business segments. Next, we have operational excellence, which includes continuous modernization of our operating model with safety, reliability and resiliency at the forefront. And lastly, we remain focused on financial leadership, which includes our funding strategy and financial performance. Beginning with our first pillar, growth and prosperity. 2025 was a transformational year at Canadian Utilities. The team at ATCO Energy Systems saw significant growth with over 19,600 new gas connections. This is the largest number of gas connections we've had in a decade, and we are projecting to continue this momentum into 2026. With our largest assets located in Alberta, we remain optimistic for the year ahead. Throughout 2025, Alberta experienced the strongest population growth, leading the country amongst all provinces. As shown on this slide, this population growth, along with industrial development is also driving the increasing electricity load forecast for Alberta. We continue to believe that significant investment will be required in our service territory, reinforcing our view that Alberta is leading Canada's energy future. Aligned with Alberta's growth forecast, we are spurring investment and capitalizing on growth opportunities in front of us. Today, we announced a $12 billion 5-year capital expenditure plan across all of our regulated utilities, which I'm proud to say is our most ambitious plan in the history of Canadian Utilities. As shown on this graph, you can see a significant increase in our natural gas transmission spending in 2026 and 2027. This is directly correlated with the Yellowhead pipeline project, which I will expand upon later in my remarks. Although 2028 will see a year-over-year decline in capital spend following the completion of the Yellowhead project, I want to highlight on this slide that our 2028 to 2030 plan will still be significantly above historical levels as we focus on 3 key areas: customer growth, system reliability and safety and climate and technology. I will also note that the forecast does not account for any prospective major projects that may be approved to alleviate existing capacity constraint on the natural gas or electric transmission systems, nor does it reflect the possible approval of new interprovincial electric transmission lines. These potential projects would be additional growth not currently recognized in the forecast. Our strategic capital plan is driving our 5-year compound annual growth rate or CAGR of 6.9%, an increase from our previously announced 3-year forecast of 5.4%. This CAGR includes our regulated utility businesses and the impact from the Yellowhead pipeline project. I would like to remind everyone that it does not include the growth ambitions from our nonregulated assets and only reflects regulated distribution and transmission, allowing for further growth for our organization. We are pleased to confirm that our Central East Transfer-Out project, or CETO, continues to progress on time and on budget with our 85 kilometers of the transmission line on track to be energized by June of this year. This $255 million investment directly mitigates grid congestion challenges and remains a critical piece of energy infrastructure in the province, improving the efficiency of our grid. Beyond CETO, further opportunities exist to improve congestion of the electricity system as our transmission lines are located in key areas that will bring generation to consumers, including industrial development. Opportunities that we expect will drive long-term growth include the Northwest area transmission development. This is one area where the ISO has initiated needs identification development work for transmission reinforcements in the Grande Prairie area of Alberta to support existing demand, future load growth and reliability. The size of this opportunity will be clear as we progress through 2026 with a preliminary cost estimate of $500 million. The McNeill converter station is another opportunity we continue to progress. As shown on the map, the McNeill converter station is currently the only intertie point between Alberta and Saskatchewan. Currently, the ISO-led work is being undertaken for an end-of-life replacement of the McNeill converter. Once complete, this will enable more generation to flow between Alberta and Saskatchewan, representing the next step in addressing regional congestion and supporting system reliability. Due to the scope involved with this opportunity, preliminary cost estimates are approximately $1 billion, and we would expect the majority of the costs to fall outside of our 5-year capital plan. And finally, we believe there are a number of opportunities for us related to substations and interties. On substations, I'm proud to announce we recently had 2 new substations approved by the AUC in Fort McMurray and in Northwest Alberta, which will be in service in late 2026 and the first half of 2027, respectively. Beyond these projects, we continue to work on other substation development opportunities throughout the province of Alberta. As it relates to interties, we are optimistic about the collaboration referenced in the Alberta, Canada MOU, which is expected to significantly increase the intertie transfer capability between the Western provinces, which we expect will be an opportunity for our utilities. Moving to our largest infrastructure opportunity, the Yellowhead pipeline project. This project will be a key conduit to connecting supply to demand growth while debottlenecking Alberta's existing natural gas network. Ultimately, the Yellowhead pipeline will relieve pressure on the entire Alberta integrated system, making it a key infrastructure investment in the province. The Yellowhead pipeline is fully situated in Alberta, running through Treaty 6 territory. We continue to pursue partnership arrangements with indigenous partners, First Nations and Metis as meaningful participation remains essential and closely linked to our company values. In 2025, the project reached several milestones, including the approval of the needs application from the AUC. In late 2025, we also filed a facility application with the AUC. This facility application includes a detailed technical and environmental plan, along with our consultation data, a requirement for construction approval. We expect to receive approval of the facility application by the third quarter of this year, which will enable us to commence construction. Other Yellowhead milestones accomplished in the last quarter include the procurement of steel pipe, the securing of major equipment for compressor facilities and the advancement in the selection of a number of service providers. We continue to work collaboratively with the AUC to progress this project, and I'm proud to share that the Yellowhead pipeline project is now 100% contracted, reinforcing the need for this natural gas pipeline in Alberta. Moving to Australia. I'm also proud to say that ATCO Gas Australia continues to deliver strong results, particularly under the new access arrangement, AA6. For the 5-year AA6 period, the return on equity is 8.23%. Coupled with the arrangement, the Australia government forecasts significant population increases from which we will benefit and expect to grow by 80,000 new customers during the AA6 period. Our 5-year capital plan has $500 million of investment in our Australian gas business, and we remain confident that we will continue to see growth in Australia in the years ahead. As I look at the non-reg side of the business, we have a strong base of assets that align with our strategic pillars of energy storage, generation and cleaner fuels. Notwithstanding the challenges renewable generation is facing in Alberta, we remain committed to the long-term strategic potential of power generation. In the fourth quarter, we acquired a 100% ownership interest in Northstone Power Corporation, an independent 18.6 megawatt power producer located near Grande Prairie, Alberta. Northstone primarily operates as a gas peaking facility, supplying power during periods where there is low renewable generation. This acquisition provides differentiated economics and follows a distinct operating strategy, complementing our existing assets and strengthening our generation profile. As you can see on the slide, we have a balanced portfolio of gas-fired wind, solar and hydro generation assets. As previously mentioned, and based on our inability to get Government of Canada support for rail infrastructure expansion, we've made the decision to pause further work on the Alberta Hydrogen Hub project. We did stage gate this cleaner fuel project opportunity, and we will reevaluate the project at a later date should investment in cleaner fuels like hydrogen become more economically feasible and market conditions become more favorable. The project remains part of the portfolio and our long-term cleaner fuel strategy. But in the near term, we require appropriate policy frameworks to make the project investable. As part of our cleaner fuel strategy, we continue to move ahead with the first phase of the Atlas Carbon Storage Hub in partnership with Shell Canada. This project serves as a centralized storage facility for carbon emissions in Alberta's Industrial Heartland region. Construction has begun and once it reaches commercial operations in late 2028, Atlas will be another key nonregulated asset within our portfolio. Optionality allows us to choose growth opportunities we wish to pursue. Natural gas storage remains a valuable asset for our business, generating consistent and predictable cash flow based on long-term secure contracts. The growth in our storage business has allowed us the ability to offset the reduction in our generation earnings and still achieve our overall nonregulated financial targets. We remain on track to expand the capacity of our carbon and Alberta hub assets from 117 petajoules today to 130 petajoules by the end of 2026. This expansion will support future natural gas storage financial performance. Outside of these accretive organic growth opportunities, we continue to review strategic opportunities for additional growth in both natural gas storage capacity and power generation, including M&A. We are well positioned to capitalize on these market fundamentals, and I look forward to sharing further updates as we progress through 2026. Our second pillar, operational excellence, is anchored on safety, reliability and operational outperformance. Despite a challenging wildfire season with the number of fires in 2025, well above the 5-year average, we were able to maintain strong operational performance, reinforcing the strength and reliability of our infrastructure and systems. As evident by the year-over-year performance on this slide, we saw a significant improvement in the overall reliability of our Alberta distribution utilities despite headwinds caused by wildfires. These results can be directly attributed to the teams across our company who seamlessly coordinated their efforts while responding with remarkable efficiency and unwavering dedication to the safety of our people. As we look at safety across Canadian Utilities, we were able to achieve 0 recordable incidents across our nonregulated businesses in 2025, a wonderful accomplishment. Throughout 2025, our team members continue to show their commitment to continuous improvement. And as we enter 2026, safety, reliability and operational outperformance will continue to be at the forefront of our operations. Our third pillar is financial leadership. And with that, I'll pass the call to Katie to discuss this in further detail. Katie Patrick: Thank you, Bob, and good morning, everyone. Following the financing plan I have discussed for the Yellowhead pipeline project in previous quarters, I'm very pleased to share that our portion of the equity investment of the project is fully funded. This was completed via combination of hybrids, preferred shares and cash from operations without the need to issue common equity. We continue to pursue partnership arrangements with indigenous partners for up to 30% of the remainder of the equity investment. Looking at the full year 2025 performance for Canadian Utilities, we are very proud to have delivered year-over-year earnings growth despite many challenges put in front of us. Canadian Utilities achieved adjusted earnings of $658 million or $2.42 per share, up from $647 million in 2024. As you can see on the graph, this was an exceptional accomplishment as we were able to overcome $57 million of headwinds we faced. The first of these was a decrease in the 2025 return on equity and the completion of the efficiency carryover mechanism at the end of 2024. These factors immediately created a $26 million gap to overcome. As Bob discussed, changing government policy also created significant earnings deficit from our renewables portfolio of $12 million. And lastly, as you can see on the slide, our strategic decision to redeploy capital from the sale of ATCO Energy to our core regulated business did create an earnings obstacle relative to 2024. However, redeployment of this capital contributed to the $36 million of Alberta utility rate base growth and other outperformance. Adding to this, our successful regulatory outcome and move into AA6 in Australia added $21 million of growth to Canadian Utilities. And finally, we had $11 million of growth within our Storage and Industrial Water segment, an impressive 30% increase over 2024. Our continued adjusted earnings growth in the face of these headwinds highlights the strength and resiliency of the company's portfolio. I would particularly highlight the impact of targeted capital recycling out of ATCO Energy into our core utilities, which created an immediate positive impact to our shareowners. As we look ahead, we are well positioned entering 2026, and we expect to deliver further adjusted earnings growth on a full year basis. Looking at the specific business units, ATCO Energy Systems delivered adjusted earnings of $642 million in 2025, $10 million higher year-over-year. When factoring in the impact from the change in the ROE and completion of the efficiency carryover mechanism, ATCO Energy Systems drove an impressive $36 million of growth within its regulated utilities, driven primarily by growth in rate base and a prudent focus on delivering cost efficiencies. Within ATCO EnPower, we successfully delivered comparable results to the prior year. As shown in this graph, this was due to the strong performance of our Storage and Industrial Water segment, which, as I mentioned, delivered adjusted earnings growth of 30% year-over-year. This segment continues to generate consistent earnings growth. And as Bob spoke to, we continue to progress our expansion of key facilities that will result in additional storage capacity for us by the end of this year. ATCO Australia had an excellent year and was a key driver of growth at Canadian Utilities, delivering adjusted earnings of $69 million, up $21 million year-over-year. This is an almost 45% increase in year-over-year adjusted earnings, and I want to congratulate the team's effort in transitioning seamlessly into the new access arrangement, AA6 and their focus on driving efficiencies and outperformance across all of our operations in Australia. From a cash flow perspective, our cash flow from operating activities increased by $144 million. Our strong foundation of regulated utilities continues to drive cash flow, earnings and our long and consistent history of dividend growth. In 2026, we will continue to execute our proven strategy and focus on finding efficiencies across the business to ensure we create shareowner value. I will now turn the call back to Bob for his closing remarks. Robert Myles: Thanks, Katie. As we close out 2025, we have positive momentum heading into 2026. In the year ahead, we will continue to advance strategic initiatives that reinforce our stability, expand our capabilities and position the business to capture long-term value. I hope you agree it was an outstanding year as our team worked very hard to overcome many headwinds to drive earnings growth. That concludes our prepared remarks. I'll turn the call back to Colin for questions from the investment community. Colin Jackson: Thank you, Bob, and thank you, Katie. [Operator Instructions] I'll now turn it over to the conference coordinator for questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from John Mould with TD Cowen Securities. John Mould: First of all, I'd just like to touch on the renewable impairments, a bit of a 2-part question. One, how much of this is due to planned versus actual curtailments since you bought the assets versus uncertainty around future congestion policy and where financial transmission rates are going? And then sort of flowing from that, EnPower generated about $60 million of EBITDA in 2025. How much lower could this go under the scenario that underpin that impairment decision? Robert Myles: John, I'll start, Bob here. On the curtailment, when we, I guess, got into the renewables business 3, 4 years ago, there was a policy of 0 congestion in the province. That has since changed. And to give you a sense, probably 12 to 15 months ago, we were seeing 0 congestion on our largest facility, our 40-mile wind project. We're now seeing upwards of 40% curtailment. So it's pretty significant. We're obviously working hard with the ISO and the government to actually address that. But as of right now, that's a pretty significant impact on our ability to generate power in the area. Katie, why don't you comment on the financials? Katie Patrick: Yes, John, I mean, I think when you think about how we look forward for the renewables business, I mean, it's a very challenging market, as we've highlighted before, but I think you can see comparable year-over-year. We expect comparable earnings profile going forward. I can't exactly translate it to EBITDA, but I'm sure we can give you some help with that offline as well. John Mould: Okay. No, that's helpful. I appreciate that. And then just maybe on the gas side of things, you highlighted looking at gas M&A and the peaker you bought. How much of what you're potentially looking at is additional acquisitions of smaller gas in Alberta? Is there a potential for you to build a bit of a peaker portfolio there? Are you looking outside the province? Or -- and would you consider development opportunities in any circumstances just being mindful of the merchant nature of the market? Robert Myles: Yes, John, I mean, as we've said in our capital forecast, that's the regulated side, and I'm sure you saw that as well. On the non-reg side and specifically in generation, we have been looking at different gas -- peaker gas generation opportunities. Would we look outside Alberta? Yes, we would. We see some opportunities in Australia to basically develop as well as to acquire. So we would look at both organic and inorganic opportunities. But the thing that I would really stress is that it's got to be economic. We are not going to do things just for the sake of doing a deal. Operator: The next question comes from Mark Jarvi with CIBC Capital Markets. Mark Jarvi: [indiscernible] the equity for that is fully covered. How would you frame the overall funding as you look out over the 5-year plan to 2030? Would there be a need for any external equity to fund the growth? Katie Patrick: Yes. Thanks, Mark. Yes. No, we're really happy that we have cleared away the headwinds that were in front of us in terms of headwinds in terms of trying to make sure we had a clear funding strategy for Yellowhead. I think that was an important step for us. And as you know, we've released the new 5-year capital forecast. I think as we move forward, we should see higher cash flows obviously coming from the investment in Yellowhead and the renewed rate base. But we will continue to look to maximize the funding plan for shareowner value. And as we get closer to those investments, roll out a more specific funding strategy as we are with Yellowhead right now in the near term. Mark Jarvi: In the past, you've mentioned potentially some minority asset sales or even noncore asset sales. Is that something that's still on the table beyond Yellowhead? Yes. Katie Patrick: Yes, absolutely, we would consider any option that's going to maximize returns to investors and capital recycling is part of the mix in terms of how we would fund future growth. Mark Jarvi: And then, Bob, just on Yellowhead facility application, you're trying to get it by Q3. Can you just comment in terms of time lines, if it slips a little bit, any implications, what that could do for the project in itself? Robert Myles: Yes, Mark, we -- knock on wood here, we're optimistic that we will receive it. We have a hearing date set with the regulator right now, which is actually about 3 weeks ahead of what we had in our original plan. So that's encouraging. We -- obviously, we want to be in construction in late Q3 is kind of our time line. The current plan is we're still on track to do that. If it slips, then, of course, it would -- the construction onstream date would slip as well. We have some room to be able to move on that. But we're definitely taking a look at the schedule. I'm not going to say on a daily basis, but definitely on a weekly basis, we're evaluating the schedule and making sure that we have some ability to have some float in that schedule. Mark Jarvi: Typically, if something gets delayed a little bit, there's some cost increases. Is your view though that, that would be fully put back to the ratepayers? Or would there be a view that maybe you'd have to reevaluate even the scope of the project somehow? Robert Myles: We have been working with the regulator, Mark, specifically on some plus or minus in our estimate. We filed an application of $2.9 billion, plus or minus 20% because we still don't have final design, and we don't have all of that schedule locked down yet for the reasons you've mentioned. But we are working with contractors quite closely to partner around how we can definitely execute this on time and on budget. Operator: The next question comes from Maurice Choy with RBC. Maurice Choy: Just wanted to come back to the rate base CAGR. Previously, I know that you've mentioned a long-term CAGR of 4% to 5%. And obviously, today, you've further increased it from 5.4% to now 6.9%. Is there -- if I look at some of the commentaries that you made today, it sounds like there is even more to come as well. So just curious whether or not this 4% to 5% long-term CAGR is still valid or not? Robert Myles: Yes, Maurice, I am quite proud to say that we have increased our CAGR. As I mentioned, there are opportunities that we're pursuing to allow us to increase that further. We just want to make sure we're comfortable with the numbers that we put forward. We do think there is potential, but we want to -- again, we want to make sure that whatever we put forward that we can actually execute on that. Maurice Choy: Maybe just a quick follow-on to that. When I think about your philosophy of what's baked into this $12 billion of CapEx, you mentioned it doesn't include prospective projects such as those on Slide 11. Is it fair to say that the projects in this $12 billion pipeline are projects that either have been approved or have effectively been sanctioned such as the Yellowhead project? Robert Myles: Yes, exactly, Maurice, is you might say that's a conservative way of looking at it, but we do want to feel very confident in the projects that we put into our capital forecast. We have been working with the ISO. We have been working with the regulator on those projects. There is, as you know, the time delay from pursuing some of these projects to getting them into rate base, which we obviously are working on that issue as well. But yes, I would say that we're pretty comfortable with the numbers that we're putting forward. Maurice Choy: Understood. And if I could just finish off with discussion about guidance and more specifically EPS guidance. I know you guys don't put that out. And I suppose you have at least 2 moving parts here, one being the annual update to your Alberta ROEs. And secondly, any equity raises that you may do seeing us -- it doesn't sound like you're ruling that out from an earlier response. So beyond these 2 items, can you just discuss some of the top things that could prevent you from delivering an EPS CAGR that's similar to your updated 6.9% rate base CAGR? Katie Patrick: Yes. Thanks, Maurice. It's Katie. I think you hit on the 2 big ones that are moving factors when we look at how we will deliver earnings per share growth in the future. And the other one, obviously, would be the outperformance. And we have a long history of strong outperformance, but as we move through, as you know, we've moved through a number of different PBR cycles as well as different characteristics associated with our transmission applications. And so those can create some upside or can create some headwinds in terms of how we would deliver precise sort of earnings related to that rate base growth. So I think those are a few of the -- some of the biggest items that we would -- can have a bit of volatility in them. Maurice Choy: And do you envision the non-reg business to provide -- I'm sure there's upside, but material upside beyond just the infrastructure -- regulated infrastructure category? Katie Patrick: Yes. Sorry, apologies. And that rate base growth, of course, would not include any growth that we would have from the nonregulated side, but we are definitely looking for not insignificant growth, but we are looking for that to be a big driver of growth for us in the future. Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Ben Pham with BMO. Benjamin Pham: I wanted to follow up on Mark Jarvi's question on funding. I just didn't totally get it or crystal clear from my standpoint. In your CapEx plan you have now, do you need equity to fund that? Or can you self-fund the $12 billion? Katie Patrick: To be clear, I think that as we get further out, there probably will be the need for some form of capital recycling or equity component to that $12 billion capital plan. But we are very focused on the near term and delivering successfully on the project at Yellowhead, which we have now fully funded. So for the next few years, I think we're in a good position, and we'll keep people posted on how it looks for the outer years of that capital plan. Benjamin Pham: Okay. Got it. And on the top of acquisitions, you now have the 7% rounded rate base CAGR. You have maybe some upside beyond that in acquisitions or nonorganic growth opportunities. I'm just curious then, I mean, that's generally pretty good growth rate in North America as a leading point. Why are you pursuing acquisitions than when you're considering just the balance sheet right now to and where it's going forward. Is that sort of strategic angle you're looking at? Is it relative valuations versus organic growth? Maybe enlighten us a bit on the acquisition strategy? Robert Myles: Ben, I would say one of the big things is, obviously, we want to try to continue to increase our earnings per share and which is why I said earlier that not really interested in acquisitions if they're not going to be accretive and not going to really make economic sense. But the other benefit of looking at acquisitions for us is geographic diversification. And Australia is an area that I really believe is a great opportunity for us. And so an acquisition in Australia would be something that we would consider. Just to give you an example of that. But also as we grow our portfolio, it's got to be the right acquisition. And so it's more around those items, I would say. Operator: The next question comes from Patrick Kenny with National Bank. Colin Jackson: Sorry, Patrick, we're having some trouble hearing you. So maybe we'll just continue on with the call. Operator: This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Colin Jackson for any closing remarks. Please go ahead, Colin. Colin Jackson: Thank you, and thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in Canadian Utilities and look forward to speaking to you again in the future. Operator: This brings to a close today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.
Oleg Vornik: Welcome to those joining the DroneShield investor call covering our 2025 annual results. I'm Oleg Vornik, the CEO and Managing Director of DroneShield. And joining me today are Carla Balanco, our Chief Financial Officer, on my right; and Josh Bolot, our Head of Investor Relations, on my left. Angus Bean, our Chief Product Officer, is unfortunately unable to join us today due to customer travel commitments overseas. We will aim to speak for approximately 15, 20 minutes presenting the results, followed by questions. Please submit your questions well in advance so we can start immediately with the questions following completion of the presentation. 2025 has seen a record revenue of about $260 million, about a 4x increase on the previous year. Importantly, it has been a profitable year for us of about $3.5 million profit being also $33 million of underlying profit before tax. And importantly, having $15.9 million of net cash from operations. This reinforces our aim to have rapid growth as well as being profitable and operating cash flow positive moving forward. The pipeline has slightly increased from $2.1 billion to $2.3 billion in the last month since we presented the 4Q results, and a lot of it was due to our increase in the Asia Pacific pipeline specifically. The pipeline corresponds to about 295 deals. Great diversity of deals is how we have certainty of ongoing business where there's diversification across the stages of maturity, geography, products, customers and other factors. Some of those deals are significant. There is about 18 deals over $30 million each and our largest deal being about $750 million. Previously, we advertised this deal is about $800 million, but with being European deal and the Australian dollar continuing to strengthen, the Australian dollar value of the deal has slightly reduced. DroneShield continues to be significantly well positioned to win in the exploding counter-drone market. We have 460 employees in about 7 countries around the world, and that includes over 350 engineers. We continue to invest significantly in R&D in this rapidly evolving landscape, and it's about $70 million plus of R&D that we spend every year. And we continue to have significant cash balance of over $200 million to support our growth. To recap on top of what I was saying earlier about the record revenues, the SaaS is continuing to grow, and our goal is to continue to ramp it up to the eventual aim of over 30% a year over the next 5 years. And the growth in SaaS will be reached through having multiple streams of SaaS over increasing amount of hardware in our space. We're familiar with some of the recent market commentary about some of the software companies that have been sold off. And the big difference in the DroneShield case is we have an integrated hardware and software solution, where a lot of our IP is really deeply inside the hardware as well as software. And the data we use for our software is not something you can easily just scrub off the Internet. So when you're looking at the drone signal data, you have to collect it in a number of countries, often very sensitive situations. So very high IP that cannot be easily disrupted by the likes of ChatGPT. Along with the record revenue growth, we're seeing significant matching growth in customer cash receipts and big increase also in the committed and also recognized year-to-date revenues and cash receipts already going in, into 2026. So a very strong start of the year. We talked briefly about the profit where the underlying profit before tax for 2025 has been about $33 million and then showing the significant operating leverage going forward. What I mean by that is with the roughly 65% gross profit margin as the revenues grow, that is going to outpace the growth in costs, resulting in what we're aiming to be increasingly profitable position. And the bottom right-hand chart is the NPAT to EBITDA bridge. I'll leave it as read, essentially $36 million in underlying EBITDA with $3.5 million statutory NPAT. If there are any questions on that, happy to answer that. The sales pipeline, this has largely been covered when we presented about a month ago. So one change, as I mentioned, is the increase in our Asia Pacific position where a number of countries bordering China are significantly concerned about the Chinese drone threat, and we're continuing to see increase in demand there. But overall, to recap on the key themes, U.S., we believe, will have a number of growth factors. So in addition to the military, where there is a $1 trillion record defense budget for '26 and $1.5 trillion defense budget proposed for '27, we're expecting to see significant public safety market, not just with the Safer Skies legislation enabling police to take down drones, but also significant funding applied ahead of the FIFA World Cup in June, July, and we expect to see meaningful sales between now and that time and also going forward. Importantly, we believe that police will be a bridge towards the counter-drone being seen less so strictly military type of solutions and more into the civilian solution. So then increasingly deployed by critical infrastructure operators, airports and corporates. In Europe and U.K., we have opened our sales office in Amsterdam, managing our local distributors around Europe. And both Europe and U.K. are driving our momentum significantly at the moment, underpinned by everything you read in the news about Ukraine and the general instability there. Europeans realizing they cannot rely on U.S. for their security. And being Australian is a great neutral position in terms of appealing for sales for both the European and the U.S. markets. In Australia, DroneShield has been selected on the panel for LAND 156, which is the rollout across defense spaces nationally and we anticipate for there to be a significant amount of business for us even starting from this year in this $1.3 billion program. We have approximately $79 million in inventory as of 31st of December. That combines $26 million in finished goods as well as $53 million in raw inventory, which is largely the long lead items to ensure that we can deliver to our customers in a short amount of time. We have moved to an enterprise ERP system, which enables us to really push out on our goal of moving production from $500 million a year to $2.4 billion by the end of the year, which is underpinned by the new 3,000 square meter facility in Sydney as well as our manufacturing hubs in the U.S. and Europe, which are being finalized as we speak. 2025 has seen inventory impairment of about $10.3 million, constituting 2 factors, the $8.5 million in finished goods, which substantively relates to DroneGun Mk4 out selling DroneGun Tactical. We believe it's a one-off situation because we essentially introduced 2 product lines with the Mk4 being the success to tactical within a couple of years of each other. And we do not intend to introduce successor versions to the DroneGun Mk4 and RF controllers, we believe that at the hardware level, those are essentially as best as the technology can get within those form factors and the future versions of those technologies will look entirely different. And therefore, we do not believe that similar sort of impairment is likely going forward. And the $1.8 million in raw materials, so a lot of it was linked to us moving to the new ERP, and it's in line with FY '24 impairment of $0.6 million. On the manufacturing, as I mentioned earlier, we are expanding from $500 million a year to $2.4 billion, and that includes the European and the U.S. assemblies. For those relatively new to our story, we have essentially 2 streams of products. You have the dismounted being the RfPatrol, body-worn drone detector. It's a hardware that has AI on the edge. So SaaS software that lives inside of it that we do quarterly software updates on. And then there's DroneGun, which is what we've historically been most well known for. In fact, those observing our news probably would have seen with electronic arts major game adopting DroneGun as one of its key weapons. But in fact, DroneGun has only been just under 20%, 19% of our revenues in FY '25. And in fact, the business is fundamentally moving towards being a diversified company with our on the move and fixed site DroneSentry system constituting just under 40% and RfPatrol being just over 40% of our revenues. And SentryCiv, the civilians specific subscription-based product that we launched last year, I think will start ramping up as the civilian sector grows as well. Our SaaS strategy is separated into 3 streams. You have the device level SaaS. So today, when you buy RfPatrol, DroneSentry-X that comes with RFAI detection software. And then we're currently trialing the RFAI attack, which is AI-enabled defeat software that will be a paid product from about middle of the year. Then we do AI that sits inside the cameras and then also utilize third-party AI for radars and of course, SentryCiv, which is our own SaaS as well. And then the site SaaS, so when you have a base or generally maybe critical infrastructure facility, you'll be having a number of sensors, DroneShield and third parties stitched together by our DroneSentry-C2, or perhaps commanders with tablets with our Sentry-C2 Tactical. And then our latest product that we introduced at the end of last year being our DroneSentry-C2 Enterprise when you have entire region or a country looking for patterns of drone incursions, drone attacks. So the idea when I was saying earlier about the SaaS getting to 30% of the revenues over the next 5 years being our goal. For example, you might be buying DroneSentry-X and on that, you might have our RFAI detection software and then RFAI defeat, you'll probably be pairing DroneSentry-X with a camera that will come with our DroneOptID SaaS, probably a radar as well, which will have its own SaaS. It will probably sit on a base underpinned by DroneSentry-C2 and potentially even in the region overseen by DroneSentry-C2 Enterprise. So this is an example of how multiple SaaS packages can apply to a single piece of hardware. Sometimes we get asked what's a small company at the end of the world in Sydney able to do to compete against large defense players. And historically, when you think about defense, you think about perhaps U.S., Europe, Israel, maybe South Korea, you don't think about Australia. And we have been lucky to an extent of being in this game right from the start and deploying significant engineering force on this. And also being in Australia, we knew that we cannot sustain ourselves just for the Australian market. So we became an export business from day 1. In fact, today, about 95% of our revenues are export, and I'm expecting the trend to be similar going forward. And so as a result of this truly global threat being the drone attacks, we developed distributors in about 70 countries around the world and now we have active customers in dozens of countries around the world. And with that, over time, Australia also being very good base for engineering, we developed solutions which are smaller, lighter, more effective for both detection and defeat and also those relationships with end users around the world, Australia being a great country again in terms of the relationships with these Western and Western allied countries that feed us honestly, probably more information that we can do with in terms of rapidly changing our technology roadmap to adapt to the latest drone threat. So a number of commercial and technical differentiators. In terms of specific competitors, what we generally say is that within the niches of counter-drone that we choose to compete in, we are the dominant player. So if you think about body-worn drone detection, our RfPatrol is, we believe, the leading product by number of units sold around the world. There are a couple of others. So MyDefence has a product and DZYNE has a product, but we believe that we significantly outsell them based on what we're seeing. And similarly, for handheld defeat, we believe DroneGun is the best-selling product of its nature around the world. In the on-the-move detection and defeat, the closest product to DroneSentry-X will be a product that AeroVironment has, but it's a pretty small part of their business. And if anything, in the long term, this potentially be a cooperative relationship. In terms of the C2 solutions, there are a couple of competitors. So we're listing Dedrone and Anduril, but I think we have a number of unique differentiators on both of them, and we don't necessarily compete with Anduril being a much higher cost and strictly military solution compared to DroneSentry-C2. Last thing to add here is that the traditional defense primes are not competitors and really more customers because they are not really moving at the speed and the cost base that is required to be successful in this cost asymmetric market. Cost asymmetric, meaning if you've got a $500 drone, you can't really be fielding a $10 million solution. So with that, we see the traditional primes as customers. On the corporate governance, many of you will be familiar with a lot of the media scrutiny we had at the end of last year. We have engaged Freehills, a Tier 1 legal advisor, to give us essentially gold standard in corporate governance. And with that, we have yesterday revealed a number of updates of our policies, the trading policy, disclosure policy, the minimum shareholding policy, and others. And in my view, what has actually happened is the business has been growing incredibly quickly. So on the indices front, for example, we joined the All Ords in March '24, ASX 300 in September '24, ASX 200 in September '25, and now, depending on how fast we grow, we might be knocking on the door of ASX 100. So as a result, when you grow so quickly, policies, procedures can sometimes fall behind, and this was an opportunity for us to establish gold standard for this particular area, much like we are running really quickly, recapping our -- changing our policies for a much larger business right across the company. We made a number of hires, so Head of People & Performance at the end of last year. Josh joined us in January this year, and also Chief Operating Officer, who joined us from a similar position from Thales, where he brings a wealth of that high-end operational experience. The last slide, then we'll turn to questions, and I encourage everybody again to please be asking us questions. So as we stand today, we are excited to be starting to launch the next generation of hardware across our product family, so this will be towards the second half of the year and into '27. The counter-drone market continues to have very low saturation because you think about drones, they only really came into people's minds about 10 years ago, really started having negative that sort of nefarious impact from the start of the Ukraine war. So thinking about only 5 years ago, and counter-drone is a derivative of the drone market, so military started to buy or looking to buy in any meaningful quantities only in the last 5 years, and when you're selling to the government market, the wheels can grind slowly, right? And so as a result, I would say militaries have probably sub 5% market saturation, civilian market has close to zero, and therefore, we have significant opportunity in front of us. The SaaS revenue we talked about are going from about 5% current to about 30% and continuing to expand our market share. So in addition to selling hardware and software, we'll be looking to expand into training solutions, support, counter-drone as a service, and other related initiatives to maximize, I guess, that ownership of the customer and providing the services to them. We talked about establishing of the European manufacturing facility, and also in the U.S., and we believe that the next 12 to 18 months, we'll start seeing additional -- initial material sales in the civilian space, such as data centers, potentially airports, and other key customers. We're continuing to work on our processes and systems due to our rapid growth and in a very disciplined manner, looking at the opportunistic M&A. Now, there are no competitors that we would like to buy, but we're always interested to look at emerging counter-drone technologies, in addition to what we may be doing in-house, and we're really well-positioned to assess what makes sense due to our understanding of the sector. And as we look over the next 5 years, we're looking to get to the target revenue of over $1 billion a year. This may sound like a lot, but then we quadrupled our revenues last year alone, so that will hopefully give you some sense of our ambition. And also, just the fact that the maturity of the market is still so early, and the customers are going to be putting increasing orders, hopefully. Most of our revenues are from repeat customers, right? So people placing increasing orders as they get more comfortable with the idea of having counter-drone solutions and more budgets to go with it. And continuing to have that global focus is probably the last point to say. So with that, we'll conclude the presentation part of that session and turn to any questions. Oleg Vornik: The first question is: How likely do we think is it to sign a $750 million deal with Europe, and do we have production to deliver on the deal timely? So it's not going to be trivial, we think that we're well-positioned, and it's the same customer who gave us a $62 million order in the middle of last year, and smaller orders in addition to that. So we have an existing, really good relationship with that customer. And the production capacity, so depending on how fast the customer wants to execute on the deal, if they say to us, "Go as fast as you can", I believe we should be able to deliver it in batches over perhaps under 9 months. If the customer wants to stagger it, which is entirely possible, in stages, it might be, say, over 2 years or so. So that's my best estimate at this stage. I think the next question, I'm trying to rephrase it. What is our announcement level for deals? So we continue our approach as of the past, where approximately 10% of last year's revenue has been our announcement threshold. For '26, it'll be $20 million, unless there is a strategic element to announce a smaller deal. So there's a question about $18 million of the $30 million deals. When are we going to be announcing them? Well, hopefully, once we win them, we will be announcing them. The next question is about, does DroneShield have plans to expand its drone technology into different domains, such as naval drones, used in Ukraine conflict? And do we see it as an area we could pivot to? Absolutely. So when you see us talking in our announcements about counter-drone, we actually refer to it often as C-UxS, not C-UAS, A being aerial. We consider drones being all domains, whether it's ground, naval, or flying machines. And the good news is that the technology that we use is equally valid for flying machines, swimming machines, and crawling machines, and we can be effective on all of those. The only time when the technology stops working is for the underwater drones, so UUVs, where our command and control is still effective, but for the detection, for example, you'll be most likely looking to use a sonar. If we see more of that being where the market is heading, we would simply focus on integration of most sonars and lead with our C2. But the vast majority, we believe, for the foreseeable future, will be aerial, ground, and what we see in Ukraine, as you said, being the swimming drones. So I think the next question I might pass to Carla, our CFO. The January update referenced gross margin of 65%. The statutory FY '25 number was 61% after the inventory impairment. Should we think of 65% as the normalized run rate? Carla Balanco: Thanks, Oleg. Yes, our average normalized run rate for the gross profit margin should be seen as 65%. There's obviously items that will affect this margin. And those items will be the percentage of system sales versus dismounted sales. Our systems carry a lower gross profit margin. And the reason for that is because of the external third-party componentry that is incorporated in the system, such as the cameras and the radars. Those items carry gross profit margins between 15% and 30%. Therefore, we do think a 65% average moving forward for our gross profit margin is our aim. Thanks, Oleg. Oleg Vornik: Thanks, Carla. The next question is about Bundeswehr, the German army. Are they a customer of our products, and do we have plans to supply the Bundeswehr? Yes, Bundeswehr is a key focus for us, and in fact, if you follow the German defense market, there's a high-profile defense exhibition in Germany that is just concluding now that we were at. So yes, it's very much focus for us. Germany is a key European market. The next question is, what is our current penetration of Ukraine and neighboring NATO markets? So we have hundreds of detection and defeat systems deployed in Ukraine and continuing to add more. We have systems deployed in Poland and a number of other areas. So yes, absolutely, we are deployed, I want to say probably with about 10 or 12 European NATO countries, plus obviously U.S. and Canada, as far as NATO is concerned. The next question is: Is there a goal for the stock price? I mean, as high as possible, but unfortunately, I only get to influence it so much. How much revenue do we estimate currently comes from civilian buyers? Do we estimate a shift? So today, almost all of the revenue comes from military, border security and intelligence community with a bit of public safety being police. I think the question was referring more to customers like airports and data centers. So today, those are minimal, but we're starting to see green shoots of demand. And if you looked at our total addressable market, we're estimating about $30 billion TAM, total addressable market for the military and another roughly $30 billion for the civilian market. And we think over the next 5 years, our revenues will truly become more 50-50. And once the civilian market gets going, I think it can evolve potentially much faster than the military market has. Next question, given the continuous innovation in the industry, what gives us confidence that the inventory is sound? And are we able to reduce the inventory risk in terms of moving to just-in-time manufacturing? So as I briefly mentioned, the inventory write-down this year was a bit of a unique situation, where we introduced 2 DroneGuns within several years of each other and essentially, our newer DroneGun ended up cannibalizing some of the older DroneGun sales. And by the way, we continue to sell DroneGun Tacticals, we just decided together with our Board to take a prudent approach and do the inventory write-down. Going forward, we don't expect to launch superseding versions of any of our product lines today, but rather really different product form factors. So I don't expect for there to be cannibalization, meaning if you want to have a jammer in a shape of a gun that you hold in your hand, I believe DroneGun Mk4 is kind of as good as it will get. So there will be better jammers, but there'll be backpacks, they'll need more space and so on. I don't believe that just-in-time manufacturing really works for this industry because some of our longest lead circuitry has a 25-week lead time. And I don't believe it will change much because, again, of just complexity of the technologies that we're dealing with and our buyers want to be able to fulfill small orders quickly, right? So our goal, which is largely in consultation with our sales force and customer expectations is to be able to deliver orders in single digits of millions instantly. So you probably would have seen, we did an announcement at the end of last year. We received an order about $5 million on the 30th of December, delivered it by the 31st of December, which was pretty incredible. Then the $62 million order we had in the middle of last year, we delivered within 2 months and then the $750 million order I talked about fulfillment in under 9 months. So for that, you need to hold inventory. But we're pretty happy with the raw and finished inventory we're holding. And please remember that raw, as I was saying, is largely long lead time items as well. They're not finished goods. And also keep in mind that, for example, RfPatrol and DroneGun and some other products we have, have interchangeable parts that you can use in between the products. And we're trying to have as many interchangeable parts between product families as possible. What are our plans for increasing effective range and distance of our products? I guess it's the same thing, range and distance. So my first comment somewhat flippantly is that more is not always better. So for example, for the detection, more range you get often more false alarms you get. And our customers don't necessarily want to be able to see 20, 30 kilometers out. And at some point, physics kicks in as well, right? So a lot of our work with customers if they're very new to counter-drone is saying, okay, well, if you come with an expectation of detecting a proper missile 200 kilometers away, there's nothing that will detect a small drone 200 kilometers away. So explaining that there is natural physics limitation to range. But a lot of it is just pushing the envelope of physics, right? So you're saying, okay, there's noise floor in radio frequency, how do you see through the noise floor, how do you reduce the false alarms. There are quite a lot of parameters that you want to optimize how you detect never seen before drones, how do you deal with the Chinese drones, which are hiding behind other bits of noise, which are running away from you when you're trying to disrupt it. So there are a number of challenges in addition to distance, but that is ultimately why you have 350-plus engineers working on that problem with a lot of drone signal data and just continue to get information from their customers. The next question is about, can we provide some more detail about the types of drone deployments by China, which are behind the concerns that our Asia Pacific customers have? So a well-publicized example, this is a bit dated about 2 years ago, has been of a Chinese drone landing on the deck of a Japanese naval ship. Now you imagine massive embarrassment, loss of faith -- loss of face. And so that's an example, right? So small drones are buzzing over military facilities and just generally harassing both the civilian and the military targets. So this is what our Asia Pacific customers are looking to protect against. Has DroneShield considered underwater drones and drone capabilities -- anti-drone capabilities and detection? Yes. So we actually first came upon the concept of underwater drones and what to do about them about 5 years ago. Those who have been following us for a while would have seen we introduced a partnership with a sonar company. And our job there is our command and control. So DroneSentry-C2. Again, remember, we're not a drone gun company. We are much more than that. So we make a command and control solution that various modalities of sensors plug into. And so we had a sonar compatible with our command and control system, started marketing it those 5 years ago, not a single person bought one. Now the conclusion we reached is that the market just wasn't ready for it. And my view is that the market is still not ready for underwater drones, but the threat is there. And underwater is significantly different, as I was just saying 5 minutes ago, to every other types of drones. So drones that crawl on the ground or the surface of the water that fly in the air because traditional physics of radio frequency in the air doesn't propagate well under water. So you need sonar for the detection and something else, be it nets, torpedoes, it depends really on the customer in there, the ability to deploy countermeasures for the defeat. But our role in all of this will be providing a command/control solution, which also will protect against drones from the air and the ground and so on. Can we quantify the current order backlog and how much of the revenue is expected to be awarded in this financial year? So if you look at the chart, we are sitting at a bit over $100 million in committed revenue this year, and we recognize roughly about 20-ish or so. So that means the backlog of about 80 and virtually all orders for this year, plus obviously, the revenue that we will actually secure. Now my controversial view is that I don't like backlog, backlog means a customer has placed an order and is patiently waiting or sometimes impatiently waiting on delivery from us. My goal is to deliver goods under order as soon as possible to customers. So you find that big defense primes often advertise their backlog. So they say, "Hey, I've got a 5-year contract, I'm going to deliver this and that over the next 5 years, and that is seen as a positive, great. But in our industry, it's actually negative in a sense that you want to be rapidly delivering to customers and not making them wait. So vast majority of the revenue I anticipate for '26 is not inside of that $80 or so million current backlog, but the new revenue that we will earn and deliver and recognize from now before the end of the year. What likely drone threats exist or may exist that DroneShield does not have solutions for, for example, cable drones? So I think the person is referring to the fiber optic drones. So there's a slide in our presentation, which talks specifically about why fiber optic drones are not a threat. So for example, we are effective against fiber optic drones because we offer a command and control solution that integrates with radars, which can detect anything that flies, including fiber optic drones and also depending on the customer solutions like HPM that can take down those drones. But my view is, I think I said to many of you before is that radio frequency is the backbone of drones. And fiber optics exists very much around the edges with significant limitations. You think about flying a drone with 10 kilometers of fishing line attached to it, wrapping around trees, buildings, you fly a bit too quickly, you snag the cable. It's really very much an edge case. And RF to drones, I believe, will be a bit like wheels and cars, like whatever cars will look like in 50 years, they'll probably have wheels on them because we're flat in our world and built a lot of roads. So similarly, for how much was invested in the radio frequency. Now that's not to say there will be new types of RF, which is like I was saying, the Chinese are now putting what was 5 years ago, sensitive electronic warfare techniques into $5,000 drones designed to avoid detection and defeat. We're starting to see slow rise of cellular control drones. But tethered drones, I don't believe, have that much future and our existing on-to-move and fixed site solutions already have a way of dealing with them. The next question is $28 million of our FY '26 committed revenue is the SaaS pipeline tracking 2x of '25. So about 7% of SaaS for FY '26, how are we going to get an uplift to get to 30% by 2030? Great question. So I talked before about the 3 strands of SaaS, the device level SaaS, which has a bunch of elements to it, like the detection, defeat for the radio frequency to separate SaaS, our RFAI, RFAI attack, talked about DroneOptID SaaS, the radar SaaS, the SentryCiv SaaS and then the DroneSentry-C2 and the C2 Enterprise. So today, out of the roughly 4,500 pieces of hardware deployed around the world, maybe only half actually receive SaaS, the other half being DroneGuns, which don't require SaaS by design. Going forward, as the technology continues to rapidly iterate, so hardware probably has a 3-, 4-year cycle, I would expect over the next 5 years for us to have tens of thousands of pieces of hardware, almost all of them receiving SaaS. And not just one piece of SaaS on every piece of hardware, but having like an example I was giving with DroneSentry-X, you have one piece of hardware, but then you might have RFAI, RFAI attack. It's part of the system. So it has a radar SaaS, camera SaaS and the C2 SaaS. So having multiple pieces of SaaS maximizing that SaaS element as part of the total revenue. But then also on top of that, I talked about the wallet share, right? So talking about the training and counter-drone as a service. So there's quite a lot of elements that we are actively exploring with customers at the moment. The next question is about how do we see ourselves in terms of the World Cup this year in the U.S.? So we talked about the Safer Skies Act, which enables police and public safety officers more generally to use jammers take drones down going forward. This, we believe, will really drive adoption of counter-drone technologies within public safety system that will protect those stadium venues. So we have a public safety team inside of our U.S. office run by Tom Adams, an ex-FBI guy. And we are actively engaging with a number of police agencies around the world -- sorry, around the U.S. at the moment and believe we'll have meaningful sales from that between now and the World Cup. What countries or theaters of war are considered no go for DroneShield? So pretty common sense, right? We would not work with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran. I mean, essentially, any country which is either prohibited or gray zone list by the Australian government because we do need export licenses to sell. And well clear what those are. We've been working with Department of Export Controls now since the beginning, and we have a very close relationship with them. We basically would never ship to those countries. And the processes are very strict, right? I mean, even though our products are entirely safe for humans, so none of our products can hurt human being or even the drone for that matter, the strictness of export controls is comparable to a proper weapon. So for example, a guy who runs our shipping department is an Italian guy who used to be shipping torpedoes around the world on behalf of a Italian defense prime. And so it's the same strictness of the process in terms of end users entering into paperwork not to share our equipment with anybody else. And ultimately, this is not just between us and them, but also involving Australian government. So exceptionally strict control processes. What are some of the drone-related verticals that look interesting to us from an M&A perspective? So we'll always stick with counter-drone as we want to continue playing in what we know. There are technologies like high-power microwave, which I find really interesting, and it fits in our nonlethal but complementary to drones, for example. I think there will be new methods of detection potentially relating to shock and vibration coming from drones. So essentially, the way I see this is the equipment needs to be cost effective. It's hard to justify having a $10 million piece of equipment against $200 drones. It needs to ideally protect an area, not just 200 sort of meter range around it, unless it's super cheap, so you can have mass volume of these things. And ideally non-ITAR because we want to have the market of all of the NATO and NATO allied countries. And the current AUKUS process in terms of Pillar 2 is streamlining a lot of that ITAR stuff between Australia, U.K. and the U.S. But ideally, we want to be continuing to focus on non-ITAR technologies. The next question talks about how was our exhibition at Enforce Tac in Nuremberg. So I wasn't there myself, Angus, our Chief Product Officer, was leading our delegation. We have a number of European team members who were in Enforce Tac and the download I had so far is that it's been an exceptionally positive meeting and helpful for our folks on Germany with Bundeswehr as well as the rest of the European market. So the next question is, why has DroneShield not introduced Phantom shares to attract and retain talent and not put pressure on the share price? So the Board regularly revisits what are the most appropriate structures. In my opinion, phantom shares are not an optimal structure. And so we haven't been introducing it, but the -- this is something the Board does review regularly what makes most sense. There are increasing reports of hybrid attacks at airports throughout Europe, what are our plans in that space? So we have had equipment deployed at the airports. For example, you might have seen news articles with the DroneSentry-X at Copenhagen Airport a few months ago. I think airports more generally struggle bureaucratically. So in some countries like in Germany, actually, Bundeswehr has technically a lot of influence over what gets deployed at the airport. So it just becomes of kind of too many cooks problem where you have airport, you have the military, you have government more generally kind of all coming up with what's the most appropriate solution. But I think you're right in that the pressure continues to escalate on airports to deploy counter-drone measures. As today, you imagine you stop all flights for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, and that's a significant disruption. And the alternative is even worse, plane taking off and a drone blowing out an engine, right? So we are talking to some of regulators. We're talking to airports directly. We're talking to military. So the idea is that you just keep pushing, chipping away of the stakeholders until eventually you kind of break through and start deploying gear. The next question about viewers saying they watched a terrifying video on Chinese robot advancement moving to RF control. So I mean, robots can be seen as UGVs and ground vehicles, and this is very much part of our market. So UGVs, ground vehicles, UAVs, aerial vehicles or fly drones and USVs, so unmanned surface vehicles, both essentially on the surface of the water. And the physics is exactly the same in terms of how radio frequency radars. Radars work a bit not so well close to the ground because you get a lot of ground clutter coming up, but radio frequency is generally pretty good. Have any shipping companies expressed interest in DroneShield to protect ships through conflict areas in Red Sea and Iran? Yes, we have some shipping companies using our kit already. This normally needs to be a bit of a layered arrangement of government forces being on those ships and them having our kit, which ultimately links to if you -- who can own -- possess jammers. So the law of the high seas essentially says, well, anybody can do anything. But then, of course, those ships need to come to harbor eventually. So usually, the arrangement that we're seeing at the moment is if the ship has government security on it, they'll be able to use our kit and some of them do. I'll pass the next question to Carla as it deals with the net profit margin. So I'll read out the question. I understand we're investing heavily to scale, which is importing reported net profit, but net margin is low. When do we expect net profit margin to materially improve? And what level of margin do we believe -- what level of margin do we believe is achievable in FY '26 as we continue to scale? Carla Balanco: Thank you, Oleg. So right now, our focus is, obviously, we want to grow the business and we want to increase our revenues. We know that profitability is important as well. And we are focusing on trying to improve our profitability position, taking into account that we were in an operating loss, a net loss a couple of years ago, and we've only now really started to focus on improving our net profit position. However, as you mentioned, we are scaling really rapidly. So balancing that rapid scale in terms of implementing a new enterprise risk system that we'll be doing this year, also our ERP system, opening a European office, focusing on U.S. manufacturing, European manufacturing, all of these items add costs to the P&L. And so we are focusing on trying to control costs, but focusing on increasing those revenues. And by doing those 2 things, naturally, our net profit will increase. I cannot provide any details at this stage in terms of what I forecast our net profit margin to be. But what I can say is our fixed cash costs for this year is looking at around $150 million. We have capitalized R&D and so we're looking to capitalize between $25 million and $30 million on R&D. Our gross profit margin, we spoke about already, which is 65% in terms of normalized average gross profit margin. And that is about as much as I can provide at this time. Thank you. Oleg Vornik: Thanks, Carla. Does DroneShield see Asia, excluding China and Central South America as big potential markets than European Union as they quickly adopt drones, as seen in the Thai-Cambodian conflict? And are there any difficulty selling into those regions, countries not seen as Australian allies? So I'm not sure about these becoming bigger than EU. EU is a huge driver for us, but becoming big, yes. So the key countries in Asia we're focusing on is Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and there are a couple of others as well. None of those markets have an issue with export permits with the Australian government. So we've been working there. And in Central and South America, so Mexico and Colombia both have issues with drug cartels and past that, there's Brazil, Argentina and others. So again, growing markets, especially Mexico and Colombia. And we haven't had issues in terms of export permits working with Department of Export Controls. The next question talks about competitive landscape across product lines. We're seeing new entrants and are we increasingly having to compete on price? No, we don't compete on price. It's interesting. So when we started 10, 11 years ago, there was really maybe us and 1 or 2 other companies. And then roughly maybe 5 years ago, the amount of competition really blew out. You go to defense show and every single stand is suddenly a counter-drone company, all kinds of stuff. Now we're seeing the market consolidate significantly. So some get merged or acquired, for example, DZYNE, which is a compilation of 3 or 4 companies or BlueHalo that got absorbed into AeroVironment and some go out of business just because customers basically don't buy from them because the products don't make sense. So we don't really see new entrants just because the industry is so high barrier now. We talk, for example, about drone signal data, right? Like you try to go around dozens of countries collecting drone signals in various environments. Some of these drones are very sophisticated restricted government drones, very, very difficult to build up and maintain that database, deal with relationships with military, government and customers, looking at radio frequency at the edge of physics, like, say, maybe 5, 7 years ago, the aim is to take an existing technology that has been successfully deployed in electronic warfare and cost effectively adapt it to counter-drone. Today, you are truly at the edge of like stuff that we are using is often a lot more sophisticated than any electronic warfare solution just again because we've been at it for so long and you just keep getting better and better. So it's very hard for new entrants. If anything, I would say our products will become more expensive, but also with more capability. So some of our new product lines will be launching from end of the year will be triple the cost of the existing products, but roughly keeping the same gross margin. But then the capability will be significantly higher as well. So if anything, I see our pricing trending higher rather than lower. How do we keep captured equipment from being used by the enemy? So it depends on the equipment. Most of our equipment and increasingly more and more are software-enabled. So obviously, we have ability to deny any changes in software. And then if you don't do changes in software, then the software quickly becomes obsolete. Can it be linked with laser beam technology? Can be in terms of our command and control DroneSentry-C2. But I actually have a pretty dim view on the laser. It makes for cool news headlines. But remember, right? So lasers have their place, right? So you always see militaries deploying some laser solutions. But think about mass deployments. You have systems that often cost $10 million plus that have obviously kinetic impact. You don't want to be blinding people if you're using it for stadiums. So I would consider laser in the same bucket as say, high-power microwave; an exquisite, very useful but very specific use case rather than what we are targeting most of our technologies being mass deployment to as much of the customer base around the world as possible, which has to be no collateral impact. But then if a customer comes to us and says, can you provide a laser solution? We have our great friends in AIM Defence based in Melbourne. They do amazing laser solutions. So that's what we'll be putting forward, assuming it works from an export compliance point of view. Have we considered drone protection with the making of other drones? I think anti-jamming, I'm trying to rephrase the question. So no, we don't really do things on the drones that stop other counter-drone systems being able to detect or defeat them. It's very different technology. I mean it's a bit like saying Boeing doesn't do anti-aircraft missiles, even though Boeing is great at planes, like you kind of have to stick to what you're good at. So drones and counter-drone are actually very different technologies, even though they are obviously on the opposite ends of the same battle. Are we prepared for threats to the business such as cyber attacks, theft for facilities or threats to executives or employees? So this is something we take very seriously. And also, there are government standards across physical cyber and other classes of security that we follow. So we have a team led by an experienced executive that deals specifically with cyber threats. And thankfully, knock wood, we haven't had a single successful cyber attempt, but we're continuing to see a ton, and this is something we take extremely seriously. In terms of insider threat, there is a very thorough employee vetting and also employee vetting program. We use a dedicated defense software in terms of monitoring employee actions, for example, ensuring the person doesn't download a whole bunch of stuff they're not supposed to. There is natural segregation on a need-to-know basis. So for example, I don't actually write code, so I don't have access to the code database because why should I? And a number of other kind of standard defense industry things. We don't need to reinvent the wheel here. So similar things to what the likes of Lockheed Martin or Thales or Raytheon doing, I mean, we do largely all the same stuff, gold standard and continuing to revise that as the technology evolves. In terms of threats to the executives, so yes, look, I mean, it's something that we looked at a lot. So for example, about a week or 2 ago, to give you a recent one, there was a case of somebody, I believe it was a Ukrainian guy, who got deported from Dubai, where he was based, forcefully to Russia as he was accused by Russia of killing a Russian general involved in Ukraine war. So for example, my directive internally was if you happen to be on the Russian sanctions list, which I personally am, for example, then you don't transit through Dubai. You don't stop in Dubai. And so this is something that we take very seriously. Do we have a capability to detect and neutralize drones swarms? Yes. So our detection and defeat is what you call volumetric, meaning you're scanning not just a little area at a time, but a whole wide area and you're basically staring at the sky and you can detect multiple drones at the same time, essentially, I don't want to say limited, but exceptionally large number of drones. And similar for the defeat, jamming and its advantage of jamming versus some other technologies like cyber can affect multiple drones at the same time. Next one. What do we see as the main threats to our growth and profitability going forward? Is it emerging competitors, for example? It's a great question. So I don't believe there are major blocks, right? But generally, you want to be on top of technology. So you always live in fear that our friends in China will invent something that's entirely immune to anything that we do, detection and defeat wise. But the reality is that physics are physics and as smart as engineers in China are, they still have to follow the laws of physics. So that nature limits to what parts of the bands you use and how you hide behind noise and so on. So we think we're pretty well positioned. And again, we've been in this space for 11 years. We understand the industry, and we continue to be on the bleeding edge of it. But you need to keep at it, right? Like you can't rest on your laurels. That's why you have 350 engineers out of the 460 people because you just have to keep innovating on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. I'm super excited about the next gen of hardware that we're releasing, the next gen of software, our RFAI version 3 that will go on top of the new gen of hardware when we release it at the end of the year. So this is all part of -- all part of that. And also, there is just general growth, right? So the organizational theory is that as you get past 30, 50, 100, 300, 500 employees, you almost have to break and remake organization. So how you follow your processes, how you communicate, all of that needs to be entirely changed so the organization doesn't sort of collapse onto itself. So that's what a lot of our focus is on at the moment. Do we need to work with CASA to certify our solutions to use in the Australian airports? So there is no such thing really I wish there was as a certification to be deployed at Australian airports. So first of all, it's not CASA. CASA used to be in charge of counter-drone security, and then it was transitioned to Airservices Australia several years ago. And Airservices ran a limited trial, we were involved in it. And since then, nothing really happened, unfortunately. And I mean, I get it. I don't want to blame Australian government. To be honest, U.S. government and all the other Western governments are doing exactly the same, meaning not doing much. But I think as drones continue to pose a threat to airports, this will just continue to become more and more a pressing issue. And I think once a few airports start deploying it, you'll be seeing more and more continue to do it because today, it's kind of easy to say, well, nobody else is deploying, no other airports are deploying counter-drones. So I just won't do anything. But I think that excuse will start going away. And so we're really excited about that eventually starting to snowball, but we're continuing to push. So in Australia, this ultimately sits with the transport minister. So we're continuing to push at the government level to have counter-drone deployed at airports. Next one. Are we seeing increasing pricing pressure with Anduril and other primes pushing into the space? So I think if anything, anything to do with primes will probably mean we're increasing our margins, not reducing given the cost structure of the primes and Anduril would be in the same bucket. I wouldn't call them the cheapest by any measure. So no, as I was saying, Anduril is really only overlapping with us on Lattice, the C2. And I don't want to say it's a competitor to DroneSentry-C2 Enterprise. It's just a different product. So there will be customers like the U.S. military where Lattice will be competing with Northrop Grumman and their environment and other dedicated C2s. And for example, the countries where we are deployed, they for various reasons, wouldn't be using Anduril C2. So I'd say -- and also, by the way, in the civilian space, Anduril doesn't really go into that space either. So I think -- or public safety, for that matter. So I think it's not really competitors, but if anything, our customers. Anduril is our customer, too, by the way, as they are the SIP, administrator essentially on the U.S. SOCOM program. We -- next question is we just released the $21 million contract. Can we elaborate? So we've been working with this Western customer for a number of years. If you read the announcement, the details are all there, had a number of contracts with them, and now they're just ramping up in terms of the deployment. And we're really excited in that particular country, we are the only counter-drone system of any significance. And it's actually a very large Western country in terms of defense budget. So now it's just a matter of continuing to sell more. We talked about low market situation to really kind of assist the customer into high situation with our equipment. Okay. Last question I'm seeing here. If there are any more, please ask or otherwise, you can e-mail your questions to us later. Are there any plans to integrate counter-drone tools directly into drones or other mobile platforms? What are the challenges of this? So not drones, but if you look at programs like AIR6500, which is Australia's mission -- sorry, missile protection system operated by Lockheed Martin. So those likes of programs where you have complete airspace awareness, so you are protecting against missile threats, but also you want to be able to protect your lower airspace against drone threats. So for example, attacks locally from drones taking out your jet fighters at Amberley or Williamtown airbases. So it's the likes of those, so call it like the larger air defense programs that we'll be looking to integrate with over time. And our DroneSentry-C2 has pretty standard APIs. So that makes the integration pretty streamlined. But ultimately, the government and customers will be driving a lot of this. The next one I'll leave to Carla. Can we talk to income tax benefit in the second half versus tax expense in the first half, what to expect going forward? Carla Balanco: Thanks, Oleg. So with regards to our taxes, you would have seen in the annual report that we have a complicated tax structure. We are tax residents in the U.S. as well as in Australia. What that means is that obviously, our tax profit and accounting profit are very different and there's items that were deductible in the second half of the year versus the first half, resulting in a tax benefit versus the tax expense for the first half of the year. Currently, we have about AUD 11 million in carryforward losses to be used against future tax profits. Oleg Vornik: Thanks, Carla. How does selling through resales impact margins? So our margins are already after the use of resellers. So essentially, the way you should think about the customer cash flow is our revenue is what we get from the reseller and the reseller would have their own margin on top. Now what we do is in the U.S. and Australia, we would influence the customer directly. But in the U.S., when you sell, you often sell through vehicles like DLA, TLS, it's just how you do defense procurement there. So there is a degree of clipping the ticket. And when you say, sell in many European countries or Asia Pacific, you have to go through distributors because these are people that have local relationships, obviously, understand the customers, the language and it saves us from trying to hire people in 70 countries around the world. So even despite the resellers, we're able to achieve very attractive 65% gross margins, but then we don't have to employ people in every country. And to be honest, some of the best guys who are resellers in terms of their relationships with the end customers, you can't employ them. They'll have their own little shops where they would sell maybe a dozen different product lines, we would often be their only counter-drone brand, but then they will be, for example, selling radars, electronic warfare, maybe drones themselves to the customers, and we tap into those unique relationships. A lot of the recent contracts are with existing customers, how we're going with converting prospects into customers, what's been experienced like bringing in new customers into DroneShield? So this is the whole art of selling to governments, right? So we lean on our distributors, but also we try to own as much of the customer relationship as possible. So you're not entirely dependent on the distributor. There is this complex web of the government budgets, which are often competing with different priorities and counter-drone is a priority. But for example, sometimes the customer may choose to buy drones rather than counter-drone equipment as that happens to get the priority. I mean, usually, customer gets a bit of both. Then you often have -- is it us or is it going to be another competitor, you normally try and ensure that the tenders are written with advantage to DroneShield in mind. Often if you see tender for the first time when it comes out, that means that it's been shaped by a competitor. So you want to be involved in the earlier stage. But generally speaking, you really want to ensure you're servicing the customer, right? You're providing that quarterly software updates is an important touch points. If there is an issue, you attend to that. And that's also expanding our fee wallet as well, as I was saying, in terms of having those support fees that we plan going forward. In terms of the new customers, so we continue to gradually expand to new customers. And so every once in a while, we -- like, for example, there was a new customer in South Africa about a year ago that we got and there are smaller customers in Asia Pacific that we would get in the last couple of months. But the goal really is to say there are -- in terms of what moves the dial, right? So there are probably 20 government customers around the world like U.S. Army that move the needle. And so the best bet for us is to focus on programmatic levels, so large-scale deployments while opportunistically going at the tactical level, so unit level to get those purchases. So it's less about kind of scrubbing and ensuring you get all the little fish. I mean you do that kind of in your spare time as best as you can of going around the elephant opportunities. And also once you have product deployed with customer, often they'll come back to you anyways for the top-up. So it's a pretty sticky position. I think that's all the questions we had, and we are over an hour. So we'll stop here. Thank you for your time. And if there are any questions, please e-mail them to us at investors@droneshield.com. Thanks for your time.
Operator: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Lynas Rare Earths Half Year 2026 Results Briefing. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Lynas Rare Earths. Please go ahead. Jennifer Parker: Good morning, and welcome to the Lynas Rare Earths Investor Briefing for the half year ending 31 December 2025. Today's briefing will be presented by Amanda Lacaze, CEO and Managing Director. And joining Amanda today are Gaudenz Sturzenegger, CFO; Daniel Havas, VP, Strategy and Investor Relations; and Sarah Leonard, General Counsel and Company Secretary. I'll now hand over to Amanda Lacaze. Please go ahead, Amanda. Amanda Lacaze: Thanks, Jan, and good morning, everybody. Thank you all for joining today. I always think that it's a bit funny. You can see me, but I can't see you, but I hope that you're all well. And I'm incredibly pleased to be able to do this presentation. The first half of FY '26 has been one of those sort of half years where we were very busy, but it's really only in retrospect that the scale of what we were able to achieve has been properly illustrated. So look, I think it will be helpful to really step through the presentation that we launched today. We've got the obligatory disclaimers. And we have the important recognition of country as an operator in Australia in the mining sector, acknowledging and respecting the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we live, work and meet across Australia is important, and in particular, acknowledging and valuing our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees, partners and communities. So in the year-to-date, as I said, in the first 6 months of this year, we were busy. But as we look back on it in the rear vision mirror, gosh, we were really busy. Many achievements. So for a long time, we've been talking to you about the Lynas 2025 capital projects. And during this first 6 months of this financial year, a lot of milestones have been achieved with respect to those. The Mt Weld expansion project has been largely commissioned with the new flotation circuit operating at 70% of nameplate. I know that oftentimes, it's sort of, people will look at Mt Weld and I'll just say, well, we know the Mt Weld resource. We know the beneficiation circuit, all of this is pretty easy. I just would like to remind everyone, this is a big, complex project, as big as many other mining firms in Australia who don't do any processing past that initial beneficiation. We've had to commission 3 new mills. We've got new processes. We've got significant investment. I'll talk a little bit more about with water recycling. And so all of these things, it has been a complex commissioning and process and ramp-up process. And I'm really pleased with the progress that the team has made. Also of really important note is our 65-megawatt hybrid renewable power station is operational, and you can see some of the photos further on of the new wind turbines. The ramp-up at Kalgoorlie continues. We've undertaken a number of process modifications there to improve its performance. And I think as everybody knows, it has not been without its challenges, both internally and most particularly externally. It's very difficult to run a big complex plant like Kalgoorlie without reliable power. In Malaysia, where I think that we often don't put quite as much focus as we're talking about these things have been significant changes implemented as part of Lynas 2025, the uplift in production capacity, the processing of mixed rare earth carbonate and of course, the -- we had our first full 6 months of HRE or separation of dysprosium and terbium. So having done all of those things, and we've drawn the line under the Lynas 2025 capital program. It's really about how we're setting up the business for the next growth phase. And we started with the capital raise. We've announced the larger HRE separation facility that will go into Malaysia. We've announced some elements of our contribution to continuing industry development, including in metal and magnets, but also in terms of resource development. So as we look at all of this, I am minded to remind everybody that this is complicated. And I think I have mentioned it previously, but I would recommend to any sort of observer of this market, a particular study done by an engineer, Jen can provide information on this, but a consulting engineer on ramp-up curves for critical minerals and the fact that if you use McNulty, which is a 1 to 5 in rare earths outside China, you've never had anyone who's -- or in critical minerals projects generally, you've only had 1 or 2 projects. And this includes things like vanadium and nickel and as well as rare earths and a variety of other materials that has ever come close to a McNulty 1 or 2, which is the fastest, most trouble-free ramp-up. In other sectors, Lynas has performed best, and we were at a McNulty 4 ramp-up in Malaysia, and then we jumped up to a McNulty 2 in around about 2016. It is easy because we are an established player for people to think, oh, well, we've just brought on a new facility here and brought on a new facility there and everything is fine. But I would just remind everybody of the complexity and the value that derives from the fact that we are an established and experienced operator and indeed have been able to bring our new assets online, not trouble-free. That would not be fair to my operations team to say that, but certainly in very good order, and we continue that ramp up as we speak. We continue to put safety at the heart of everything that we do. And I was talking to our Board about this and as we were thinking about how do we present some of the safety information. And I made the point that it's a little bit disappointing in some ways that we hardly ever spend any time on the safety slide externally. We spend a huge amount of time, however, on safety, on personnel and process safety inside the business. And I would also take this opportunity to remind everyone that Australian mining leads the world in terms of both our approach and our performance with respect to safety and other sustainability practices. We're incredibly proud that the major maintenance that we undertook in Malaysia late in the second quarter, which involved over 30 subcontracting companies and 100,000 work hours was executed to schedule and without injury. We're incredibly proud that Mt Weld and Kalgoorlie employees achieved 12 months without any recordable injuries in December 2025. And as our projects move from commissioning to operations, we are very focused on our Yes, We Care HSE strategy because, yes, we really do care that everybody goes home safely and well every day. Then if we look at our financials, well, this is very pleasing for me as I make my last half year report, to be able to report such an excellent results. I'm also a bit sad that the next CEO will get all of the second half glory because as we've foreshadowed in our announcement, we expect that the market settings will continue to be positive. And I think everyone who's been following Lynas for some time would appreciate we are the only company that can take full advantage of the positive market settings because we are the company that is operating and producing today, not just lights but also heavies. So excellent performance, sales revenue, net profit after tax, EBITDA, all up. And of course, we have the big jump in cash and short-term deposits as a result of the capital raise, which is setting us up for towards 2030. When we look at it operationally, and this is one of my favorite photos. And I think some folks have been in Malaysia in the last 6 months would have seen this new part of product finishing. And it is just beautiful. It's part of our uplifting capacity that we have available to us now in Malaysia. So NdPr production was absolutely on track for record 6 months until we hit the problems with power in Kalgoorlie. So we're just a little bit off. But -- and as you can see from this, we're starting to roll off in terms of sort of final payments related to the capital program with Lynas 2025. Looking at that sort of with a bit of history, we've just put in the half years since FY '20. You can see that we are sort of consistently increasing on a rolling 12-month basis, we've certainly had -- and rightly so with all of the investment that we've made, we continue to set new production records. As I say to our operations team, every month should be a record as we continue our ramp-up of the new facilities. And then, of course, you can also see the benefits that come from the increased benchmark selling price. So the benchmark is moving higher, but our internal measure is how much we can beat that benchmark by as a result of our efforts and our negotiations with various customers. The market generally is very constructive right now. As we've indicated, the price in December 2025 was sitting for -- NdPr was sitting at $74 a kilo compared to $49 in December 2024. That price has continued to firm. And yesterday, we reached over the sort of magic $110 a kilo mark. And this really reflects a number of things. It does reflect the government actions in -- which is really starting to reshape the market. We are seeing governments Australia, Japan, EU and of course, the U.S. taking action to create a functional market, right? We have never asked for subsidies, but there is no question there has been market failure for many years in the rare earths industry and acting policies, which ensures that the market is functioning properly, we think is really important. And as those policies are implemented and the market responds, then the potential cost to government just goes down. I mean like at present, as the price sits above the $110 NdPr floor price, I'm sure the U.S. government is feeling very relaxed. We continue to be engaged closely with relevant governments, and I'm sure many people will have read various articles on the likelihood of governments other than the U.S. government also putting in place policy measures to facilitate a proper functioning market. So for us, huge opportunities. We make lots of NdPr, and we make now Dy and Tb. These are the products in greatest demand in terms of total volume, and we will shortly be producing some other materials, particularly samarium, which we expect to come through before the end of this financial year. I was hoping -- so -- and then it will follow up with gadolinium and neodymium and then other elements as we bring our new production facility in Malaysia online. Japanese magnet makers are winning new business. Ex-China magnet buyers are seeking direct supply to mitigate supply chain risks. As recently as yesterday, we had Chinese indicating further controls on materials to be exported to Japan. We have a very long-standing and productive relationship with our Japanese customers, and this certainly provides an opportunity for Lynas. And we are seeing significant demand for our bundled lights and heavies sort of being able to sell these together in the ratio that customers require them gives us a significant competitive advantage in the market. So we are -- this says we can capture value, we are capturing value from the current market upside. Just then just everyone can step through. I love this picture of Mt Weld. We've gone from this tiny baby little sort of concentrator, which is sitting sort of in the sort of top right-hand corner there below the process water pond. On your top left, I think it's quite helpful for people to see. Those are our tailings dams. But as you can see, they're like a beautifully sort of plowed field, not ready to be sown with wheat, but certainly ready to be remined and put back through our processing facility. Some of the elements of the new beneficiation plant means that we will be able to liberate some of the materials, which we did not recover in the first instance. And in those tailings dams facilities, we've actually been able to track the rare earths concentration at somewhere around about 7% to 7.5%, which makes it in and of itself a highly valuable mineral resource. Kalgoorlie continues to ramp up. Sorry, I missed -- no, Jen, you can go back. You can see 3 of our 4 wind turbines there. This is just terrific. We are so pleased with the new power station. It is not cheap. And I do get frustrated when people talk about how sort of the unit cost of a kilowatt hour of renewable power is cheaper than any other option. That's true, but only after you've covered the capital cost of the 4 wind turbines and 2,500 solar panels and the gas turbines, which need to be there to provide baseload power and the batteries as well. Having said that, it is true that on a variable cost basis, we now have electricity, which is significantly less costly than our previous diesel power station. But more importantly, we are really, really pleased that we've been producing in December, 92% of our power has come from renewable electricity. The wind at Knight has been a better source of power than we were expecting. And the power station is performing better than our initial target of 70% renewable content. So really very excited about that. And the second really significant initiative as part of the Mt Weld expansion was commissioning of some of the new water treatment facilities with our objective to achieve 90% of our tailings water to be recycled. We've been able to demonstrate that. We're not yet reliably and sort of delivering at that level, but we are confident that we will get there. And then Kalgoorlie, Kalgoorlie, I think I've said previously, we need to recognize there are 2 parts. Cracking and leaching, but -- we have many skills when it comes to sort of cracking rare earth ores in our company and the cracking and leaching part of Kalgoorlie is actually running pretty well, notwithstanding the outrageous, frankly, power disruptions that we had during the second quarter. The mix -- the carbonation circuit as with all new processes, we found as we've ramped it up that bottlenecks move around and that we need to enhance or improve certain processes. And we are doing that in a very managed and measured way, just like we did when -- really when we were ramping up the LAMP 10 years ago. And so Kalgoorlie continues to improve, but not yet where we would like it to -- quite yet where we would like it to be on a long-term basis. And then Lynas Malaysia is, once again, not giving me any sleepless nights at all. The Malaysian plant is running extraordinarily well. The -- particularly, we're seeing the benefits of the major maintenance on the cracking plant in the second quarter. It's running better than it has ever run in its life. The new separation circuits are stable and producing. And really, it's just a case of can we keep feedstock at the sorts of rates that we want them to. I think as we said, we produced Dy and Tb last year, and we've announced the new expansion, Heavy Rare Earths expansion plant, and we expect samarium production soonish. So all looking very good in Malaysia as well. In the U.S., the U.S. has -- well, boy, has the U.S. government really sort of discovered rare earths. We have continuing discussions with the U.S. government, particularly with respect to an offtake agreement, which is acceptable to us. Having said that, our engagement with particularly U.S. defense industries is really strong. And we are selling material into U.S. defense industries at very pleasing prices. We've also taken the opportunity to do a little brand promotion. I thought everyone would like to see our billboards as they were in various locations in Washington. So just -- Jen, moving on to the next one. I've really already talked about the hybrid power station and -- okay, now we'll move on to communities. And I think everybody who has even spent a few minutes with me over the years knows my view, which is that we cannot prosper if the communities in which we operate do not prosper as well. So in each and every one of our locations, we are incredibly connected to community. We think that it is a really important part of our success and also our culture. And I look at the faces whenever we have these photos. I look at the people that -- our people who are engaged in our community events. And I'm just really proud of them and really proud of the contribution that we make to improving the lives of the people who both work for us, but also their families and their community. So with that, I am very happy to -- yes, then we got the stuff about people. Then I'm really happy to take questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Rahul Anand with Morgan Stanley. Rahul Anand: I just wanted to ask a question on sort of how you're going with securing that ionic clay deposit or supply from Malaysia for the HRE plant? And I guess, how much can you produce from the plant; currently in terms of yttrium, dysprosium and terbium if you're only using the Mt Weld feed? Amanda Lacaze: So we can't produce anything from the plant yet because it's not actually constructed. So we do just have our small little circuit that which is just doing the Dy and Tb, right now, we will have some samarium come out, but that's actually not from the ultimate facility. We're doing that via a bit of flow sheet development within our normal operations. We are working closely with a number of firms in Malaysia on working through the ionic clay development with the objective that we will have that as feedstock at the same time as we're bringing that new plant online, which we expect to be towards the end of calendar year '27. Rahul Anand: Yes. So my question was related to the new plant, Amanda. But I guess just as a follow-up, if there is at all a restriction from China in terms of, I guess, IAC leaching reagents or SX chemicals, is there a contingency plan? Or can you source them elsewhere as well once that plan comes up? Amanda Lacaze: We've already done that. We've already put in place contingency plans for all reagents and all equipment, which is required in Malaysia. We've been working on that since -- well, actually since before the initial issues in April last year, but certainly since that time. And so where when we started last April, there was a couple of critical path items, we have identified alternate sources for those items. And we are confident about our ability to continue to operate. But the point that you're making about sort of availability of reagents, equipment and expertise out of China is an important one and is another reason why Lynas is in such a strong position to take advantage of current market dynamics compared to other firms. Operator: Your next question comes from Neal Dingmann with William Blair. Neal Dingmann: Amanda, a quick question. Could you talk a little bit about offtake agreements, maybe even including, I know with Noveon, you have the MOU. So I'm just wondering, it seems like, again, now that you are cranking up production, I would assume everybody is sort of knocking at your door. Amanda Lacaze: Of course, sometimes we knock at their doors. Certainly, our objective is to ensure that we have -- ultimately that we have 100% of our offtake contracted to the highest value customers in the market. Our ability to be able to sell bundles of NdPr and Dy and/or Tb certainly gives us the opportunity to be able to capture, as I said, the highest value customers. And we're confident that as we ramp up over the next 3 years as some of the downstream capability outside China, downstream capability comes online that we will be to place 100% of our material outside China. Having said that, China is the largest rare earths market in the world, and we're happy to participate in the Chinese market as well. Neal Dingmann: Very good. And just a reminder on the heavies, what is the -- what's your capacity on the heavies? Can you remind me again? Amanda Lacaze: Well, at present, we haven't provided explicit capacity on Dy and Tb because it's a bit of an opportunity sort of circuit that we've put in place. But on the -- we have provided that. And actually, it would probably be best if I point to Daniel to give that sort of data. But at present, we -- if you take our production stats that we provided as part of the quarterly report for the first 6 months, that's probably a reasonable sort of an indication. Daniel, did you want to add anything to that? Daniel Havas: Well, the current circuit is doing -- has the capacity of 1,500 tonnes throughput. But as Amanda points out, we've not provided guidance on the breakdown of the Dy and Tb coming out of that. The new facility will allow us to have 5,000 tonnes of throughput and the figures were outlined in the release when we announced the heavy circuit -- sorry, the heavy facility that we're putting in Malaysia. Operator: Your next question comes from Austin Yun with Macquarie. Austin Yun: Just first question is on the cost side. Looking to understand what's driving the rise in the general and admin costs in this period. Also, understand how should we think about the depreciation charges given the run rate is ramping up at Kalgoorlie? Amanda Lacaze: Sorry, what was -- Austin, what was the second part of that question? I just missed it. Austin Yun: Sorry. The second part is on the depreciation charges. Amanda Lacaze: Depreciation? Okay. Austin Yun: Yes. The first one is on general and admin expenses. Amanda Lacaze: Okay. So I'm just going to ask Gaudenz to deal with both Part A and Part B, Gaudenz. Gaudenz Sturzenegger: Yes. Austin, thank you for the question. I think the first one, I understood was a G&A question. The other one was a depreciation question. On G&A, I think if you go a little bit to Note 10, which -- and the Note 2, which Note 2 in this case, I think a big portion of the increase is related to not absorbed depreciation and employment cost charges, which relate to Kal. So we are not yet running at the run rate we are planning. So that has impacted about $20 million, $25 million on this. And on depreciation level, I think here, important to go back to our main projects we have or we had. I think it's $800-plus million on Kal, $550 million for the Mt Weld expansion. And most of this has been capitalized before. So you will see now the impact on the depreciation side, there is a smaller portion, $100 million to $200 million, which is still to be capitalized in Mt Weld expansion, which should happen in this quarter. So I think it's a pretty solid base. You have seen there. There's probably a little bit more due to the second phase of the Mt Weld. But fundamentally, it's just the $1.35 billion, which are coming into operation and where we had the capitalization event. I hope that helps. Austin Yun: Yes, sure. So the depreciation charges will be even higher in the second half, potentially given the ramp up? Gaudenz Sturzenegger: Yes, exactly. Austin Yun: Okay. Just the second question is on Kalgoorlie. Amanda, you mentioned that it's still kind of in the ramp-up and the bottleneck is sort of shifting. I'm just keen to understand your operating model plan for this plant in the next 12 months. Are we still expecting a batch operation model? Or would you aim to switch to continuous towards the end of this calendar year? Amanda Lacaze: At present, we aim to -- at present, Kalgoorlie is extra capacity to the baseload in Malaysia. And so we manage production to that. And so that's not hard to work that out. We added 50% capacity to downstream. So we've got baseload comes out of cracking in Malaysia, plus half of that again coming out of Kalgoorlie. And we'll just manage it, whether it's sort of decisions on batching or continuous operation for longer batches, I guess, they're just operational decisions that we will make on what's the best operating and financial outcome. Operator: Your next question comes from Chen Jiang with Bank of America. Chen Jiang: Thank you for all the color on the rare earths market and comments about your sales in the presentation. First question, I'm just trying to understand your comments about Lynas continue to optimize your sales model, direct contracting and also you have ongoing negotiation offtake agreement with U.S. government. What's going to change going forward, especially for your 7,500 tonne per annum NdPr priority sales to Japan? And because you are ramping up, there will be incremental sales ex Japan. I guess, given -- how should we think about your pricing mechanism for NdPr? Because as you mentioned in the call, China NdPr price is $19 or 17% above the price floor. So I guess you are getting that USD 120 per kilogram higher than price floor or you can beat that benchmark for NdPr. Amanda Lacaze: So you've answered all your own question, Chen. Yet, our job -- the sales job and the sales measure that our Head of Sales provides to me on a monthly basis is what percentage above the equivalent benchmark rate are we achieving in terms of price. And we do achieve a premium versus the benchmark. It is different customer by customer for customer-specific reasons. And we don't provide sort of detail on all of our customer contracts, which wouldn't surprise you. I mean they're commercial and confidence and really such an important driver in our business. So we do still have -- however, we have some contracts which have floors and ceilings and the ceilings sometimes can be lower than the market price, but we've made a decision that made sense when we put those contracts in place. We have other contracts which are just pegged to the market price. So as the price goes up, we make more money. And then we have increasingly longer-term contracts and our discussion with all of particularly magnet buyers is that we're not interested in short-term contracts. We're interested in long-term contracts, which properly reflect the value of the materials that we produce. So we've always said this that we have a variety of different pricing mechanisms and the task of our sales team is to optimize that to give us the best possible return. And really a key measure on that is how much value are they adding, which is the size of the premium versus the benchmark. [ It's ] really good right now, as you can see. Chen Jiang: Yes, yes. I guess for your priority sale to Japan versus ex Japan, you would get a better price ex Japan. Is my understanding correct? Amanda Lacaze: We seek to get the best price in every instance, which is the right price for our customers and the right price for us. We have a very long-standing relationship with our Japanese customers. We have commitments, which are mutual commitments as far as those contracts are concerned. But I think that trying -- I understand why you are asking this and you're trying to deconstruct our revenue line. I'm not going to even give you breadcrumbs to be able to do that because the way that we deal with our customers is an important part of adding value in our business. And I don't want to be deconstructing the way that we deliver the final outcome. The issue is are we continuing to drive extra growth from our business? And are we driving that growth from a combination of volume and price. And I think that our results tell you that we are doing that. Chen Jiang: Sure. I understand. And just a second question on your balance sheet. So I guess you have over $1 billion cash sitting there from the equity you raised last year. Now thinking of the incoming operating cash flow over the next 12 months given NdPr price is so high and you continue to ramp up production. So you will have a lot of cash printing over the next 12 months. But your FY '26 CapEx kind of guided last year $160 million. So how should I think about your CapEx profile? I guess you won't keep piling the cash. How should I think about your CapEx profile and your organic growth over the next, I guess, near term or medium term? Amanda Lacaze: Thanks, Chen. So I think the first thing is that we did -- if we separate these 2 things, and actually, we do separate these 2 buckets of money as -- even on -- we still do a weekly forecast, and we separate these 2 buckets of money. We manage to the ex capital raise bucket. So really, what are we doing in terms of generating cash from operations and improving our position there. And that is really because it remains my heart desire that we are able to return some of that capital to our shareholders. The second piece, which we manage as a separate sort of bucket of money is the money that we raised for the Towards 2030 growth initiatives, and we will spend that money on those initiatives. So far, we have announced the $180 million, which is for the new HRE plant in Malaysia as well as that we are progressing rapidly on detailed documentation around things like the JS Link magnet factory in Malaysia, and we will be making further investments in terms of resource development once again, particularly in Malaysia. So that's the way that we are thinking about this with the objective that as we continue to generate more cash out of the business that we manage that accordingly, and we have the ability to make a decision on how and at what time and in what form might that be returned to shareholders, recognizing that we are still a growth business. The capital that we raised in August actually underpins our growth capability and we'll continue to do so. Operator: Next question comes from Jonathan Sharp with JPMorgan. Jonathan Sharp: Congratulations on the good result. Nice to see those NdPr prices coming up. First question just on the Towards 2030 5-year growth strategy, which one of the pillars is increasing capacity. But my question is, will this include expanding NdPr capacity at some point beyond 12,000 tonnes per annum? Now I understand that you're currently embedding the expansion that you've just done and some -- but yes, will it include expanding beyond the 12,000 tonnes per annum? And if I'm correct, my understanding is that there's a pathway to an additional 2.4 kilotonnes per annum at the concentrator, which was previously disclosed. You have the capacity of cracking and leaching once Kal's ramped up. And I would imagine the ability to expand solvent extraction is there with not too much capital. So really, my question is, why not expand further beyond 12,000, even if that's after 2030? Or is it more to do with the market being there to sell into? Amanda Lacaze: Thanks for the question, Jonathan, and welcome. I see that you're now [indiscernible] at JP. So yes, we will consider expansions beyond the current -- well, we've got -- we've said in the Towards 2030 like today, we got 10.5. We've said the stepping up to 12 is sort of a bit of a no-brainer. There are, however, some more substantial investments required to take it beyond that, but we know what they are. Some are at Mt Weld and some will actually be in Malaysia. You're right about our ability to be able to increase throughput and solvent extraction very cost effectively. But bear in mind, we just put on about 50% capacity increase in solvent extraction without a really serious price tag attached to it. The next step is going to have a few more costs associated with it. And some of those are going to be related to utilities and other management capabilities in Malaysia. The team is working on that. We expect over the 5-year period, yes, we will have placed 100% of what we produce outside China, and we will be looking for more production. And so therefore, we will be looking to drive production higher. But we don't have the precise plan on how all the bits of the jigsaw fit together to do that quite yet. Jonathan Sharp: Okay. And maybe just to dig in a little bit more on that. Would it be right to do 14,000 tonnes per annum after 2030? Or is there a number that you could give us? Amanda Lacaze: Well, I think -- as you've noted, Jonathan, we have identified 2,400 tonne uplift that would come out of Mt Weld. And we've previously identified that that's available and maybe towards -- I would think that our ability to place all of our NdPr outside China is dependent upon the speed with which the downstream industry develops. And so I think there's something like 7 different magnet projects in the U.S. at present. Some of them will never see the light of day. Others will come to market. We've got the projects that we're partnering with, particularly in the Korean metal and magnet making projects. We are confident that they will come online. So we will increase our NdPr production as downstream processing increases. So hopefully, those projects which do successfully come to market will start producing sometime in late '27, early '28. We'll have a watching brief on those to make sure that we're matching our production to that capacity. Jonathan Sharp: Okay. Great. And just second question. Congratulations on the very good... Amanda Lacaze: You get 2 questions -- I'm sorry. Go on, Jonathan. I shouldn't have joke. Yes, go on. Jonathan Sharp: Now I know you're still there. But as you do look to appoint the next CEO, what are you looking at in terms of capabilities? Is it operational execution, marketing, maybe government relations? And should we expect any changes in the direction under the new CEO? Amanda Lacaze: Look, you'll have to ask the Board that despite the fact that I think that I'm by far the most competent person to select the next CEO, the nonexecutive directors on our Board think they have the say, too. Anyway, I think that we have -- my job is to make sure that we have a business which is strong, which is resilient and which is able to continue to demonstrate the same sort of success that we've been able to demonstrate over my tenure. I would expect that given the quality of our track record that we would not be -- the Board would not be seeking to make an appointment, which would take the business in a fundamentally different direction. Sorry, everybody. I've just got a message that says that there are 7 more questions in the queue, and it's 10:54. So please, can we just have 1 question each so that we can try to give everybody a chance to ask a question. Operator: Your next question comes from Daniel Morgan with Barrenjoey. Daniel Morgan: Just on the market, it's clearly improved. Spot prices are rallying, customer inquiries is increasing. I'd basically just like to circle back to how you plan to run the volume side of the business going forward. So can you lift volumes materially from here? When do you think you can run the system at 10.5? Or is rectification and power issues that probably meaning that in the short term, you're going to be kept at 8,000 to 9,000 tonnes per annum? Amanda Lacaze: Daniel, good question. In the very short term, the 8,000 to 9,000 is probably right. In the short term, but not quite so very short term, we continue to be focused on the 10.5. 10.5 is roughly 30 tonnes a day. We know how we get that 30 tonnes a day, and we have many days where we are achieving the 30 tonnes a day, we're just not achieving it every day yet. And yes, that is primarily about Kalgoorlie and about the amount of feed that we're able to deliver into LAMP ex Kalgoorlie. Operator: Your next question comes from Scott Ryall with Rimor Equity Research. Scott Ryall: Amanda, on Slides 5 and 6 -- no, sorry, 5, you talked to how well the business was set up as an incumbent and with lots of capability and opportunities to expand into other areas. So I guess what you didn't say was that's your legacy, so congratulations. I'm wondering, just on a 3- to 5-year basis, given the excitement around rare earths in the last couple of years that has stepped up big time. How do you keep your staff and -- or protect your staff and protect your intellectual property, please, just in the context of your incumbency advantages? Amanda Lacaze: Yes. I think that's a really intelligent question because many times, people forget the importance of people in the business. We talk about IP, and there is no doubt that some of it is scientific IP, which can be properly documented, et cetera. But there's huge value that comes from just every operator in the company actually knowing what their job is, and that's a form of IP as well. We're very focused on ensuring that we are an employer of choice, and I don't expect that to change when we transition to a new CEO because Lynas is so much more than a single person. Lynas, I know that I'm the figurehead, but Lynas is every person who works in the company. And so the care and -- the care for each other that is a feature of the way that we operate and our focus on achievement and excellence, I believe, will survive me. Our people continue to work at Lynas because they get satisfaction from their jobs. They know they're doing something which is valuable and that they are valued for doing it. And I think that, too, after 12 years will definitely survive me. So being an employer of choice, yes, it's about making sure that we pay well and all of those things. But it's mostly about making sure that when you go home at the end of the day, you can say, I made a difference today, and we work very hard to make sure all of our people can feel like that when they go home every day. Operator: Your next question comes from Dim Ariyasinghe with UBS. Dim Ariyasinghe: Can I just get an update on the LAMP license? So it's due to expire on Monday. It feels like it's maybe just a rubber stamp that you need. But in the unlikely case that it doesn't go ahead, what contingencies do you have? Can Kal step up to ensure that the rest of the quarter is okay? Yes, if that's one question, that's it. Amanda Lacaze: Dim, I'm not sure that I've got a lot constructive to say about sort of the hypothetical of, let's say, we don't get sort of an extension on the license. I don't think that that's likely to happen. I think that the licensing environment, as we indicated, has changed. The new legislation went through and was gazetted at the beginning of December last year. It certainly should ensure that we're no longer in this sort of every 3 years, what's going to happen, but in a much more normalized licensing environment where if we meet sort of our requirements, we can reasonably expect that the license will continue. As we've indicated, we've done the things that we need to do. We've had the Atomic Energy Department has been in done its audit. We've received a very satisfactory rating, which is the highest rating available and we continue to run our operations safely for our people and our communities and the environment. So yes, would I have liked all of this to be resolved a month ago? Yes, but that's not the way the system works. But we will provide you with an update, I would expect within the next few days. Operator: Your next question comes from Paul Young with Goldman Sachs. Paul Young: Just this one should be pretty easy. I noticed that you've got a really good provisional pricing tailwind in the half of about $20 million. So your revenue beat the Street's expectations, and it was well above the cash receipts because of receivables increase in inventories, et cetera. But just on the provisional pricing tailwind, just to help us out going forward because you should actually see this benefit over the next 6 months as well, like a revenue tailwind on repricing of product you forward sold, but the price hasn't been locked down. Can you just help us just think about or just explain what your quotational pricing period is? Like as far as -- so we can look at -- we can actually just judge provisional pricing adjustments going forward? Amanda Lacaze: I can't give you chapter and verse on that, Paul, because it is different by customer. And the provisional pricing mostly relates to sales which are made into Japan. Sojitz carries that inventory and does actually denominate certain inventory for certain customers, which is why sometimes the tail is longer than we might otherwise expect it to be. But I'll invite Gaudenz to speak to it as well, but I would think that we should have most of it find its way through the system sort of within the next 3 months. Gaudenz, do you want to add anything to that? Gaudenz Sturzenegger: Yes, Paul, I think that's correct. You see it on the balance sheet receivable side already. But yes, it depends sale by sale also when the final sale is made to the customer. And that varies between 1 month and 3 months. Probably best you take -- if you want to model it, take about a 2 to 3-month lagging impact into consideration, then probably another 3 months before you see the cash really coming in or going out. I mean it's positive at the moment, has not always been like that, but we obviously enjoy the current setup, okay? I hope that helps. Amanda Lacaze: A little bit more color, Paul, because I think it's an interesting question, a little bit more color. We basically invoice when it leaves our factory gate. We go through a process of then tolling it in our toll metal makers. And then it goes from there into the magnet makers. And that actual -- that's part of what drives the difference here. And that is, as Gaudenz said, it's at least a 2-month period that we're talking about before it finds its way into the magnet makers. So yes, for modeling purposes, I think that you could assume a 2 to 3 months sort of lag is reasonable. Operator: Your next question comes from Austin Yun with Macquarie. Austin Yun: A quick follow-up. Just looking at your term deposit, keen to understand how did you explain the budget for that figure? Should we assume that the remaining balance will be what you set aside minus working capital requirement set aside for the downstream... Amanda Lacaze: Austin, I'm sorry, I have not -- you've just been garbled on my line. I don't -- can you start this question again, please? I can't understand what you're asking. Austin Yun: Sorry. I'm keen to understand the thinking for this term deposit and the remaining cash for the next 12 months, would that be the amount you set aside for the ionic clay project in Malaysia and also the downstream plant, the capital requirement? Amanda Lacaze: So that's basically a treasury question. So I'll let Gaudenz do that. I mean in terms of allocation into the different projects, we will disclose those as we finalize each of the projects. So we've disclosed the $180 million on the Heavy Rare Earths. We understand the profile of expenditure of that money and are managing it accordingly. But in general terms, treasury, I'll let Gaudenz say a few words to that. Gaudenz Sturzenegger: Yes. There -- I think it's probably better to look at it as a very dynamic process. I wouldn't really draw conclusions as you try to do that this is really specifically for certain spendings later on. I think also the terms we have there in that category are between -- beyond 3 months, but shorter than 12 months. It's more interest optimization approach we have there. So I will not read too much into the figure as such. And overall, we try to have a balanced approach, a cautious approach, but obviously, at the same time, optimizing the interest income. And at the moment, some of the shorter durations are better than the longer one. So it's pretty mixed. Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Ms. Amanda Lacaze for closing remarks. Amanda Lacaze: Okay. Thank you very much, and thank you all for your participation today and the questions that you have asked. And as with, I think, every CEO, I would remind you that any day that ends in "y" is a good day for Lynas and Lynas shareholders. So I look forward to seeing many of you over the next week or so. Thanks. Bye. Operator: That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.
Operator: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the DXP Enterprises Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Release. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the call over to David Little, CEO. Please go ahead. Kent Yee: Well, thank you, Jade. This is actually Kent Yee. I'll jump in here and have a small disclaimer in front of the call, and then I'll turn it over to David Little, our CEO and Chairman. This is Kent Yee, and welcome to DXP's Q4 2025 Conference Call to discuss our results for the Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 2025. As I mentioned, joining me today is our Chairman and CEO, David Little. Before we get started, I want to remind you that today's call is being webcast and recorded and includes forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. A detailed discussion of the many factors that we believe may have a material effect on our business on an ongoing basis are contained in our SEC filings. DXP assumes no obligation to update that information as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we may refer both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in our earnings press release. The press release and an accompanying investor presentation are now available on our website at ir.dxpe.com. I will now turn the call over to David Little, our Chairman and CEO, to provide his thoughts and a summary of our fourth quarter and fiscal 2025 performance and financial results. David? David Little: Thanks, Kent, and thank you to everyone who is joining us today for DXP's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2025 Earnings Call. I am pleased to report that 2025 was an exciting year for DXP with strong performance across all our key financial metrics, including sales, sales per business day, gross profit margins and adjusted EBITDA margins. These results reflect the continued strength of our DXPeople, products and operating model and our ability to serve customers across a broad and diverse set of end markets. On behalf of more than 3,286 DXPeople you can trust, I want to thank our customers, suppliers and shareholders for their continued trust and support. Fiscal 2025 was a year of execution, and our results demonstrated the benefits of diversification, scale and disciplined capital allocation. For 2025, DXP sales grew 11.9% to $2 billion, while gross profit margins expanded 67 basis points to 31.5%. Adjusted EBITDA reached $22.3 million -- $225.3 million with an 11.2% margin. This was a record year for both sales and adjusted EBITDA margins, and it marked an important milestone as we continue to scale the business. Operating income increased 21.7% year-over-year to $176.9 million. And diluted earnings per share improved to $5.37, up from $4.22 in fiscal 2024. Sales per business day continued to improve throughout the year, averaging $7.57 million in the first quarter and increasing to $8.51 million by the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 average sales per business day of $8 million as compared to $7.1 million in fiscal year 2024. These results reflect solid organic growth and contributions from accretive acquisitions, all while maintaining a focus on operating efficiencies. A core component of our strategy continues to be diversification of end market exposure while building scale in markets where we have a strong competitive position. At the physical -- at our fiscal 2025, energy represented 22% of DXP sales, followed by water and wastewater at 15%, general industry at 15%, chemical at 10%, and food and beverage at 7%. This diversification has meaningfully reduced our cyclicality and helped drive more consistent performance over the last several years. We are encouraged by the interplay of these markets as we move into fiscal '26. Note that over the last few years, energy market has been flat and our other markets like water and wastewater have grown substantially. We continue to pursue growth markets and battle increased market share on our other markets. Thank you, DXP sales and operation professionals for teaming up together and winning for our customers and stakeholders. Thank you to our corporate support team for their efforts to support both our internal and external customers. Thank you, DXP, for an awesome year. During the year, we continued to execute on our capital allocation priorities. We completed 6 acquisitions, including Arroyo, McBride, Moores Pump, APSCO, Triangle Pump and Pump Solutions, all of which strengthened our capabilities and expanded our reach. We also continue to execute on our share repurchase program, returning $17 million in capital to shareholders, and we refinanced our debt in the fourth quarter, improving flexibility and positioning DXP for both growth and acquisition growth and organic growth and acquisition growth in 2026. From a segment perspective, Innovative Pumping Solutions led the way, growing 26.4% year-over-year to $390.3 million. Growth was driven by strength in energy, water-related project activity, along with contributions from recent acquisitions. In terms of IPS, our Innovative Pumping Solutions, it bears repeating that we have 2 broad businesses tied to capital budgets or what we refer to as project work, DXP's heritage energy-related project work and DX Water. Within IPS, DXP's Water represented 55% of the segment sales in 2025, up from 46% last year. As we have grown this platform, we have seen improvements in both gross and operating income margins. The DXP Water backlog continues to grow organically and through acquisitions, including Triangle, APSCO and Pump Solutions. Energy-related bookings and backlog remain at an all-time at our long-term average, although they have pulled back in Q3 and Q4, and we look to Q1 to see if we have any trends emerging. As we move to 2026, we feel good about how this backlog translates into revenue given the large projects that we are still in the process of completion. But we look to this quarter of 2026 to see if we get new bookings. Service Centers delivered 11% total sales growth, including 9.8% organic growth, driven by the diversity of end markets and our multiple product MRO-focused operating model. A few growth initiatives that are helping DXP growth percentages include technical products like automation, vacuum pumps, new pump brands for water and industrial markets, process equipment and filtration. New markets like data centers, need pumps, water, power, cooling, filtration, which DXP has continued to add and expand. We have added an e-commerce channel for the generation that wants to buy pumps and parts electronically, which had a record year for DXP in 2025. Growth was broad-based geographically, but regions with experienced notable sales growth year-over-year included Ohio River Valley, Southeast, Texas Gulf Coast and California. We also had continued strength year-over-year in air compressors, U.S. Safety Services and metalworking. Supply Chain Services experienced a modest decline year-over-year, primarily due to customer facility closures and reduced activity at certain energy-related sites. That said, SCS continues to invest in its customer care model and remote technologies, allowing us to expand service offering to customers with some smaller sites while improving efficiencies. We believe demand for SCS services is increasing and these capabilities gain traction, we will look for sales growth in 2026. From a margin, cash flow and financial position standpoint, DXP's overall gross profit margins for the year were 31.5% or a 67 basis point improvement over 2024. IPS delivered the largest year-over-year expansion with 166 basis point improvement, followed by Supply Chain Services with 121 basis points and lastly, Service Centers with a 59 basis point improvement as compared to 2024. These gains reflect a combination of mix, pricing and execution as well as the impact of accretive acquisitions. In terms of cash flow, we generated $94.3 million in cash from operating activities, which translated into $54 million of free cash flow during fiscal 2025. This reflects our focus on generating cash while continuing to invest in working capital and growth capital expenditures to support DXP. Our balance sheet remains strong, providing flexibility to continue executing on acquisitions and returning capital to stakeholders -- shareholders. As we move into fiscal 2026, our focus remains on maintaining margin discipline while driving organic growth, executing on strategic acquisitions and improving operational efficiency as we scale. We continue to see constructive demand across energy, water and industrial markets, and we remain mindful of inflation dynamics and supply chains variability. Since 2022, DXP has grown sales at a 15% compounded annual growth rate, and we believe our strategies and our operating model positions us well to continue this trajectory over the long term. In closing, I want to thank our DXPeople for their passion, teamwork and commitment. Their efforts continue to differentiate DXP and create value for our customers and stakeholders. With that, I will now turn it to Kent to review the financial model in more detail. Kent Yee: Thank you, David, and thank you to everyone for joining us for our review of our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 financial results. Fiscal year 2025 was another record year for DXP, reaching new highs in sales, gross profit margins and adjusted EBITDA. It is also our first year of sustained 11% plus adjusted EBITDA margins and our third fiscal year of 10% plus adjusted EBITDA margins. We are excited to report this year's financial results. Additionally, with the consistent upward movement in our stock price and growth in our market capitalization, we are now an SEC large accelerated filer, and we are excited to report fiscal 2025 financial results under a quicker time frame. Thank you to everyone who made this happen. Turning to our financial results. Fiscal year 2025 financial performance reflects our ability to drive the following: strong sales growth within IPS, along with an accelerating contribution from DXP Water, record Service Center performance marked by continued growth in sales from Q1 through Q4 and gross margin strength and stability, consistent consolidated gross margin performance with 2025 gross margins up 67 basis points year-over-year, consistent operating leverage leading to sustained adjusted EBITDA margins, more notably, our first fiscal year of 11% plus adjusted EBITDA margins, continued execution of our acquisition strategy, completing 6 acquisitions contributing $96 million in sales in 2025, the successful refinancing and repricing of our Term Loan B, including raising an incremental $205 million in capital and reducing interest costs by 50 basis points and continued capital return to shareholders through our share repurchase program, a great year. Total sales for the fourth quarter increased 11.9% year-over-year to a record $527.4 million. This reflects an improvement in average sales per business day increasing from $8.03 million per day in Q3 with 64 business days to $8.51 million sales per business day in Q4 with 62 business days. Acquisitions that have been with DXP for less than a year contributed $21.9 million in sales during the fourth quarter. Total sales for DXP for fiscal 2025 were $2.0 billion, increasing 11.9% compared to fiscal 2024. For the full year, acquisitions contributed $96 million in sales. Average daily sales for fiscal 2025 were $8 million per day versus $7.13 million per day in fiscal 2024, a 12.3% increase. Adjusting for acquisitions, average daily organic sales were $7.6 million per day for fiscal 2025 compared to $6.7 million per day in fiscal 2024. That said, the average daily sales trends during fiscal 2025 improved from $7.6 million per day in Q1 to $8.5 million per day in Q4 or an increase of 12.5%. In terms of our business segments, Innovative Pumping Solutions sales grew 26.4% in fiscal year 2025 versus 2024, followed by Service Center sales growing 11% year-over-year and Supply Chain Services sales declining 1.4% year-over-year. In terms of Innovative Pumping Solutions, we continue to experience strong backlogs in both our energy and water and wastewater business. On a comparative year-over-year basis, our average energy-related backlog finished the year up 36.9% compared to 2024. That said, our Q4 energy-related average backlog declined another 9.3% from Q3. This is the second quarter of decline in the energy-related backlog, but the backlog continues to be ahead of all our averages. Additionally, January grew 5.3% over December. As David mentioned and as we have been discussing on previous earnings calls, we have booked a few large projects in both energy and water that we have recognized some revenue in 2025 and will continue into 2026. Now we will be looking to see what happens to our Q1 2026 average energy backlog. The conclusion continues to remain that we are trending meaningfully above all notable sales levels based upon where our backlog stands today. We also see strength in our IPS Water backlog as it continues to grow due to a combination of organic and acquisition additions. In terms of our Service Centers, our Service Center performance reflects our internal growth initiatives, along with our diversified and evolving end market dynamics. On a comparative basis, fiscal year 2025 is now our strongest year with $1.4 billion in sales and sets a new sales high watermark. Regions within our Service Center business segment, which experienced year-over-year sales growth include the Ohio River Valley, Southeast, Texas Gulf Coast and California. From a product perspective, we also experienced strength in our air compressors, metalworking and U.S. Safety Services divisions. Supply Chain Services sales performance reflects a 1.4% decrease year-over-year. Supply Chain Services sales performance reflects pullback in activity at oil and gas and our diversified chemical customer sites. Overall, we experienced reduced spend from existing customers while continuing to drive efficiencies and streamline purchasing that we bring to our customers. As expected, Q4 was impacted by seasonality with there being fewer billing days as SCS customers have facility closures and holiday hours. However, interest in demand for SCS services is increasing because of the proven technology and efficiencies they perform for all their industrial customers, and we expect a stronger 2026 as we onboard new customers. Turning to our gross margins. DXP's total gross margins were 31.54%, a 67 basis point improvement over fiscal 2024. This improvement is attributed to strength in gross profit margins across all 3 business segments with Innovative Pumping Solutions showing 166 basis point improvement from last year and Supply Chain Services improving 121 basis points. Additionally, the contribution from accretive acquisitions at higher overall relative gross margin versus our base DXP business helped drive consistent gross margins within consolidated DXP. Acquisitions continue to be accretive to both gross and operating margins. That said, from a segment mix sales contribution, Service Centers contributed 68%, Innovative Pumping Solutions, 19% and Supply Chain Services was 13%. This sales mix positively impacts our gross margins as we see an uptick in contribution from IPS compared to fiscal 2024. In terms of operating income, all 3 business segments combined increased 40 basis points in year-over-year business segment operating income margins or $38 million versus fiscal 2024. Service Centers, IPS and Supply Chain Services each had 14.54%, 18% and 8.7% operating income margins, respectively. The consistency in Innovative Pumping Solutions reflects the impact of our water and wastewater acquisitions at a higher relative operating income margin and a growing percentage of revenue or sales mix. DXP Water has gone from 22% of sales of IPS in 2023 to over 55% of IPS at the end of 2025. Total DXP operating income was $176.9 million or 8.8% of sales for fiscal 2025 versus $145 million and 8.1% of sales in fiscal 2024. Our SG&A for fiscal 2025 increased $48.2 million to $459.1 million. The increase reflects the growth in the business, the addition of acquisitions as well as incentive compensation and DXP investing in its people through merit and pay raises. Additionally, this also reflects an increase in our insurance premiums, continued investment in technology and our facilities as well as acquisition costs and growth initiatives. SG&A as a percentage of sales decreased slightly or 3 basis points year-over-year to 22.8% of sales. We still anticipate that DXP will benefit from the leverage inherent in the business despite increased operating dollars supporting our growth and the impact of acquisitions. Turning to EBITDA. Fiscal 2025 adjusted EBITDA was $225.3 million. Adjusted EBITDA margins were 11.2%. This is our third fiscal year with adjusted EBITDA margins in excess of 10% and our first year with adjusted EBITDA margins in excess of 11% for all 4 quarters. We will look to continue to expand margins in 2026 as recent acquisitions should enhance our margins and internal initiatives focused on efficiency extract operating leverage. In fiscal 2025, this translated into 1.5x operating leverage. In terms of our EPS, our net income for fiscal 2025 was $88.68 million. Our earnings per diluted share for fiscal 2025 was $5.37 per share versus $4.22 per share last year. Adjusting for onetime items, adjusted earnings per diluted share for fiscal 2025 was $5.42 per share. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. In terms of working capital, our working capital increased $70.7 million for December -- from December, excuse me, of 2024 and decreased $2.9 million from September of this year to $361.7 million. As a percentage of fiscal year 2025 sales, this amounted to 17.9%. This is an uptick from fiscal year-end 2024 and reflects the impact of acquisitions, business mix and an increase in DXP's capital project work. As we move into fiscal 2026, we will continue to grow into the working capital as a percentage of sales, specifically the impact from recent acquisitions. That said, we do anticipate further acquisitions, which could cause a move upwards, albeit we are focused on managing working capital as efficiently as possible as we scale and grow. In terms of cash, we had $303.8 million in cash on the balance sheet as of December 31. This is an increase of $155.5 million compared to Q4 of 2024 and $180 million since September. This reflects the refinancing of our existing Term Loan B in the fourth quarter and the strong cash flow generation we experienced during the fourth quarter, which we will touch upon later in my comments. As it pertains to our Term Loan B, similar to last year, during the fourth quarter, we announced that we refinanced and repriced our Term Loan B, maintaining our maturity of October 2030. We successfully repriced the Term Loan B, reducing our borrowing cost by 50 basis points to SOFR plus 325 versus SOFR plus 375 while also raising an incremental $205 million in capital to support our acquisition and investments program over the next 9 to 12 months. Over the last 2 years, we have successfully reduced our borrowing cost by over 150 basis points while raising an incremental $310 million in capital, and we have deployed $218.3 million for acquisitions through 2025. We look forward to an exciting acquisition year and the continued scaling of DXP. In terms of CapEx, CapEx for fiscal 2025 was $40.3 million versus $25.1 million in fiscal 2024. This increase reflects investing in some of our facilities and equipment, software and related investments to drive improvement and efficiencies on behalf of our employees. That said, a majority of our CapEx is growth-oriented and controllable, and we have the ability to pivot if and when necessary. As we move forward, we will continue to invest in the business as we focus on growth. As mentioned during the second quarter, over the short to medium term or the next 1 to 2 quarters, we should see CapEx lessen, and we will look for it to be less overall in 2026. Turning to free cash flow. We generated solid operating cash flow during the fourth quarter as we did during the second and third quarter. During Q4 and for fiscal 2025, we had cash flow from operations of $42.6 million and $94.3 million, respectively. For fiscal 2025, this translated into $54 million in free cash flow. This does reflect the improvements in profitability along with elevated CapEx, which is primarily growth oriented, and we expect to taper again in fiscal 2026. Additionally, we continue to focus on tightly managing our capital projects, which we see as an opportunity to further generate and optimize cash flow. We have highlighted this in the past as recurring investments in inventory, product and costs in excess of billings. That said, we continue to focus on tightly managing this aspect of our business from a cash flow perspective and look to align billings with the investments and we look to make further strides here in 2026. Return on invested capital, or ROIC for fiscal 2025 was 39.2% and continues to be measurably above our cost of capital and reflects the improvements in EBITDA and operating leverage inherent within the business. Additionally, it also points to our recent acquisitions performance and their positive contribution and accretive impact to both gross profit and EBITDA. As of December 31, our fixed charge coverage ratio was 2.1:1 and our secured leverage ratio was 2.3:1 with a covenant EBITDA for the last 12 months of $241.1 million. Total debt outstanding on December 31 was $846.8 million. In terms of liquidity, as of December 31, we were undrawn on our ABL with $31.5 million in letters of credit with $153.5 million of availability and liquidity of $457.3 million, including $303.8 million in cash, which a portion of has been used to purchase Mid-Atlantic, PREMIERflow and Ambiente, which we've closed subsequent to fiscal year-end. We are excited to have all 3 recent acquisitions as a part of DXP, and they will start reporting with us for the first quarter of 2026. All of you, welcome to DXP. DXP's acquisition pipeline continues to grow and the market continues to present compelling opportunities. Looking forward, we expect this to continue through fiscal 2026, and we look forward to closing a minimum of 1 to 3 additional acquisitions by the middle of the year. We remain comfortable with our -- with our ability to execute on our pipeline and valuations continue to remain reasonable. In terms of capital allocation, we repurchased or returned $17 million to shareholders via our share repurchase program in fiscal 2025 or a total of 182,000 shares of DXP stock. In summary, we continue to remain excited about the future of building the next chapter and evolution of DXP. We will keep our eyes focused on those things we can control and what is ahead of us. With that, I will now turn the call over for questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Zach Marriott of Stephens. Zachary Marriott: Is there any color you can share on the daily sales trends by month for both Q4 and Q1 thus far, please? Kent Yee: Zach, great to hear from you. Absolutely. We'll walk through Q4. And then given the fact that we filed earlier this year and being a large accelerated filer, we just really have January, but we'll give some color there. Starting in October, $7.5 million per day; November, $8.2 million per day; December, $9.8 million per day for a quarterly average of $8.5 million per day. January was $6.9 million per day. To give you context, that's up year-over-year 2%, if you will. January also typically is, if not the lowest month in the year, typically is always typically our slowest month in the year. So that's what we have at this point in time and feel good with how February is shaping up. Zachary Marriott: Understood. And then is there anything that should drive a meaningful margin difference, whether up or down when comparing 4Q with 1Q? Kent Yee: You mean on a go-forward basis. We don't necessarily specifically provide any guidance, Zach. But once again, to the comments we made during our script, water continues to be accretive to both gross and operating income margins. And in Q4, obviously, this year, a little bit different than last year, we closed 3 acquisitions: APSCO, Triangle and Pump Solutions. So if they perform what we saw from a due diligence standpoint, that should be accretive to our margins here in Q1. Operator: There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you so much for attending. David Little: Wait a minute. I'd give Zach more time if he needs it. Operator: Absolutely. One moment please. Zachary Marriott: Sure. I got one more. Just looking for some color on the positive dynamics that you guys called out developing in energy in the second half of this year. Would this be conversion backlog or something else? Kent Yee: I'll let David comment on the overall tone, but just in terms of from a backlog perspective, Zach, what our comments were is in transparency, we did see another decline in Q4. That said, the tone in our business planning was everybody was quoting jobs and there was a fair amount of quote activity. And so the early expectation, the way I put it is for 2026 from an energy perspective potentially to be more back-end weighted. But I'll let David comment and see if he has anything. David Little: Yes. From our operating perspective, we're just seeing a lot of quoting activity. So we go back to the third quarter and fourth quarter, and so our bookings seem to be light. So we followed up with what our quoting activity and what about the projects in the future and et cetera. And so I think in general, people felt like that people had things on hold a bit and maybe that was political, maybe it wasn't. I'm not sure. But they just felt like that things would start being turned loose sort of at the beginning of the year. And then, of course, that affects sales towards the end of the year. Anything else, Zach? Zachary Marriott: No, sir. Operator: Okay. At this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the call back to David Little for closing remarks. David Little: Yes. My remarks basically to all the stakeholders and DXPeople. Just -- we had an awesome year. We feel like that between organic and inorganic growth that we're going to have another good year. And so thanks for that. Thanks for all the hard work on trying to drive whether that's new computer systems or new sales processes, et cetera. I know we work to improve continuously. And even though our SG&A only modestly improved, it did improve. So I'm happy about that. And -- but anyway, thanks for a great year, and we look forward to next year. Operator: This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
Operator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Veolia Annual Results 2025 Conference Call with Estelle Brachlianoff, CEO; and Emmanuelle Menning, CFO; and also Daniel Tugues, Country Director of Spain. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded today, Thursday, February 26, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Estelle Brachlianoff. Please go ahead. Estelle Brachlianoff: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining this conference call to present Veolia's 2025 results. I'm accompanied by Emmanuelle Menning, our CFO; and by Daniel Tugues, Head of Spain. I'm on Slide 4. 2025 was the second year of our 4-year GreenUp plan, and I consider it as a truly pivotal year in our trajectory, and I will tell you how. 2025 was another year of outperformance and historical high. We exceeded our guidance with an organic EBITDA growth of plus 6.3%, above the target range of 5% to 6% despite a complex environment and with a particularly robust fourth quarter. In the 2 years since the start of GreenUp, we have significantly improved our profitability with an increase of 150 bp in our EBITDA margin and plus 11.8% average annual growth of current net income. The first half of GreenUp is a real success, and we are fully in line with our trajectory, even ahead when it comes to our ROCE at 9.4% after tax at the end of 2025. This is 2 years in advance of our targets. But in 2025, above all, we resolutely resumed external growth with 2 major multibillion dollars acquisitions in Water Technologies and U.S. Hazardous Waste, two of our growth boosters accelerating, therefore, the group's transformation towards more international and technology-driven businesses and enhancing the group's growth profile for the years to come. We have also enhanced our shareholder return in 2025 as we complemented our dividend policy with a multiyear share buyback program related to our employee shareholder plan. The excellent 2025 result as well as our strong fundamentals allow us to be very confident for '26 with an ambitious guidance and full confirmation of our GreenUp trajectory building a stronger group going forward. I'm now on Page 4 -- 5, sorry, where you see that 2025 results are at a historic high and largely exceed our initial objectives. Revenue reached EUR 44.4 billion, up 2.8%, excluding energy price, which are essentially pass-through for us, as you know. EBITDA increased by a substantial 6.3% on a like-for-like basis, above our 5% to 6% guidance range and shows a margin improvement of 70 basis points, above plus 80 basis points in '24. We are now at the historical high of 15.9% margin rate -- EBITDA margin rate in Veolia. This is thanks to our continued performance improvement and recurring efficiency gains with an enhanced performance outside Europe, where EBITDA jumped by plus 9.3%, complemented by the last synergies coming from the Suez acquisition 4 years ago. Current net income was up plus 9.1%, in line with our guidance and demonstrating our strong operating leverage. Net financial debt remains well under control at EUR 19.7 billion, even after EUR 2.3 billion of net financial acquisition, closed in '25. Our leverage ratio is at 2.79x at the end of '25, well below 3x, testimony to our strong financial discipline and our capacity to have room for maneuver in the future. Finally, we reach our ROCE targets 2 years in advance and achieved a remarkable 9.4% after-tax ROCE in 2025. Page 6 illustrates our enhanced growth in international markets, notably outside Europe, where our businesses are not only faster growing, but also more profitable with an EBITDA margin already at 17.8%, which is better than the 15.9%, nevertheless, a historical high for the group as a whole. Our revenue grew by 4.1% organically outside Europe with an excellent performances in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, notably. Emmanuelle will detail each zone performance in a minute, but I would like here to highlight a few key commercial successes. In the Middle East, after years in the making and technical design, we were awarded, and we've just signed a few days ago, a $500 million project in Saudi Arabia for the Saudi Aramco TotalEnergies Consortium, SATORP. We will design, build and operate a massive new plant to treat the super complex effluent of this petrochemical site. In the U.S., in addition to the strategic execution of Clean Earth, which we expect to close mid-'26, our biggest and most transformative acquisitions since the merger with Suez. As you know, we've complemented the strong organic growth with 3 tuck-in and hazardous waste, which are high value creative. In Chile, we signed the first hybrid municipal industrial desalination plant in Valpara so. In India, we secured 2 strategic contracts for 2 of Mumbai's larger water treatment plants. Both facilities will use Veolia cutting-edge technologies. Finally, in Europe, we also enjoyed a very encouraging commercial momentum. Page 7 shows our performance split by activities. On the one hand, our booster activities, which is Water Technologies, Hazardous Waste and Bioenergies have continued to grow at a steady pace in '25, plus 4.3% organic and plus 8% including tuck-ins, almost 2x faster than Strongholds. Strongholds on the other hand, confirmed their resilience and infrastructure life profile with a 2.2% growth. As you know, Strongholds and Boosters go hand in hand with 30% of our revenue coming from a combination of activities. Those numbers are a confirmation of the sustained demand for our proprietary solutions to tackle critical needs from securing water supply to treating pollutant and protecting health. This top line performance translates well into value creation with EBITDA up 4.8% for Stronghold and jumping by 12.1% for Boosters. Emmanuelle will give you all the details in a few moments. 2025 was also the year of the successful launch of new technology and offers. I would like to give you two examples on Slide 8. First, in PFAS treatment, which, as you know, is a fast-growing and very promising business unit opportunity for Veolia. We achieved EUR 259 million of revenue in PFAS in '25, which is up 25% versus 0 in 2022. And as you know, we aim to reach EUR 1 billion by 2030. In 2025, we developed BeyondPFAS, our end-to-end management solution from detection to disposal, combining Water Technologies and Hazardous Waste and including our DropFast proprietary technology to optimize HTI disposal. We already provide PFAS treatment in the U.S., in France and in Australia, and we've already deployed 30 PFAS removal units in our U.S. water operations and plan an extra 15. In the area of new urban energy, we presented our new Ecothermal Grid offer in Poznan last November. It's a truly green heating and cooling solutions for existing and greenfield networks, using untapped local sources of energy, which is really unique at Veolia. We target EUR 350 million extra revenue in 2030. We actually already have a pipeline of GBP 1 billion of projects in the U.K. as part of the deployment of our new Ecothermal Grid offering, and I'm very pleased we were recently awarded a first in this U.K. pipeline with flagship scientific Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge. I'm now on Slide 9. In 2 years, the delivery of the GreenUp plan, combining resilience and growth was above our own expectation, both in terms of growth performance and strategic transformation. And this in spite of a complex economic and political context, which impacted foreign exchange rates, fiscal stability and production costs, notably energy costs. These first 2 years were indeed marked by a strong improvement in our profitability and value creation with an average annual 11.8% growth in current net income group share between '23 and '25, combined with a spectacular improvement of ROCE post tax to a record high 9.4% in '25. Our performance during these first 2 years was also augmented by the completion of Suez Energy Plan, which evidenced our capacity to boost the performance of the business we integrate. On Slide 10, given our very strong '25 results, the Board proposed to the AGM a dividend of EUR 1.5 per share, up 7% versus '24 and 20% since '23 and in line with our EPS growth. Since the start of GreenUp, I really -- as I mentioned in the beginning, we have also enhanced our shareholder return as we complemented our dividend policy with a multiyear share buyback program in order to offset the impact of our employee shareholding program. And this represented EUR 402 million in 2025. 2025 was a pivotal year in many ways. I'm on Slide 11. First, 2025 was the last year of Suez integration. We successfully completed our integration plan with EUR 534 million of synergies delivered in full year, above our initial target of EUR 500 million. This clearly demonstrates our track record in securing delivery of value creation when it comes to external growth, and we will, of course, apply those skills to the Clean Earth's acquisition. Moreover, 2025 has also been the year where we've crystallized strategic move consistent with our GreenUp strategy, investing in priority in highly innovative and technology-driven activities, our Boosters and outside Europe. Two major acquisitions were signed or closed in '25, creating value and enhancing the group's growth profile going forward. This began in the spring with EUR 1.5 billion invested in Water Technologies to buy out the minority interest and to fully merge our entities, and be in a position to extract EUR 90 million of additional synergies and enhance our growth capabilities on a worldwide dynamic market. We then accelerated external growth in Hazardous Waste. First, with several tuck-ins for a total amount of almost EUR 370 million in the U.S., in Japan and in Brazil. And finally, with the strategic acquisition of Clean Earth in the U.S. This $3 billion acquisition, the largest in Suez will allow us to double our size in Hazardous Waste in the U.S., positioning us as #2. Veolia will strengthen its presence in the U.S. altogether with more than $6 billion turnover and a very strong position to deliver unique solutions and technologies to remove pollutants, to secure water supply and support reshoring of strategic industries. The complementary of Clean Earth and Veolia's assets in the U.S. will enable us to extract significant synergies of $120 million and will be accretive from 2027, excluding PPA, assuming a closing midyear '26. On Slide 12, we've illustrated the accelerated portfolio transformation underway with EUR 8 billion of asset rotation in 4 years towards a group that is stronger, more international and more technology-rich. This transformation enhances our sustained growth profile and will create additional value for many years to come. We started GreenUp with a divestment program of around EUR 1 billion, including the disposal of our SADE French construction activity and the non-duplicable sulfuric acid generation activity region. In '25, we will have crystallized major acquisition in our boosters, specifically in Water Tech and with Clean Earth to close in '26. We will divest an additional EUR 2 billion in the 2 years post closing of Clean Earth. The typical candidates for disposal are assets that are mature or nonstrategic or undercritical in size. I would like to highlight the fact that these divestitures are not all financing purposes as well finance Clean Earth on our balance sheet and recover 3x leverage as soon as '27, but rather in order to keep flexibility for investment in faster-growing activities or geographies. Acquisitions, net of disposal represent a cumulative net financial investment of EUR 2.5 billion compared to the EUR 2.2 billion initially envisaged for GreenUp. Before we move to our guidance for '26, I would like on Slide 13 to emphasize the group's sustainable growth engine, which explains how we could be confident about our future performance. The demand for our services has never been stronger. And it is here to stay whilst crisis multiple because the proprietary solutions Veolia provides are answers to critical needs for industries and cities alike. Indeed, our customers, businesses and committees are facing growing challenges in terms of water scarcity, water quality, pollution control, supply chain interruption and a growing determination to achieve strategic independence and accelerate industrial reshoring. In short, for cities to deliver essential services for industries to produce, for economies to grow, one thing is nonnegotiable. This is environmental security, securing water, securing energy, securing supply chains, protecting health. We secure water supply to cities by leveraging our unique patent of technologies, our efficient network distribution using AI, by resuming wastewater and running energy-efficient desalination plants. We secure supply chain for industries by mining waste or waste heat to secure local sources of energy or critical minerals, thus avoiding dependents on long-distance imports. We protect health with Hazardous Waste management and depollution, ensuring that drinking water is at the highest standard and securing the license to operate for strategic industries such as MicroE or pharma. Whatever the turbulence in the world, Veolia's mission and unique offer is, therefore, to keep vital resources available, reliable and affordable to enhance strategic autonomy and to take advantage of sustained demand for our services and technology. On Slide 14, I would like now to share how Veolia is uniquely positioned to benefit from this sustained demand as we've built a unique powerhouse for environmental security. Our worldwide leadership and presence in 44 countries always in the top 3, gives us size to innovate and develop unique technologies through our 14 R&D centers. As you may remember, we hold more than 4,400 patents in water treatment, for instance. Our proprietary solutions are then locally delivered, and tailor-made to fit each community or industrial complex specific needs. We are really multi-local in our delivery, which explains why we are not affected by tariffs and why ForEx does not impact our margin rate and central government are not central to us. In addition, our customer base is really varied. 50% from municipalities or public authorities, 50% from private customers and wide ranging from retail and hospitals to microelectronics, pharma or oil and gas. This variety is combined with the long duration of our contracts, 11 years on average. The high Net Promoter Score, which ensures a renewal rate of over 90% and with no one single contract representing more than a small percentage of the group revenue. This offers massive resilience in our performance. Finally, we provide a unique combination of waste water and energy solutions. That's our edge. It's already delivering 1/3 of the group's revenue from these combinations. Veolia has really transformed into a unique global powerhouse for environmental security, organized to grow and innovate whilst ensuring resilience and long-term performance in an uncertain world. This sustained demand and unique positioning gives me high confidence for the years to come as the group has never been stronger. I'm on Slide 15. The GreenUp trajectory is fully confirmed. I would like to highlight why our organic EBITDA and net result growth are sustainable for the years to come because they are fueled by top line growth, supported by sustained demand for critical services, boosted performance in certain activity, notably Hazardous Waste and Water Technologies, superior and continued effort on efficiency and cost control, as well as an ability to react quickly and strongly when needed with specific action plan, as we will see in a minute with Spain and a good track record in successful integrating companies when we complement organic with external growth. For 2026, we have very ambitious targets on an organic basis, which will be complemented by the Clean Earth acquisition when we close the deal. On a stand-alone basis, we expect a continued solid organic revenue growth, excluding energy price, an organic EBITDA growth of 5% to 6%, and I would like to highlight this is without Suez synergies since they are now behind us, a current net income growth of at least plus 8% at constant ForEx. The dividend will continue to grow in line with current EPS and our leverage ratio will be below or equal 3x before Clean Earth. And after Clean Earth, equal or slightly above 3x. As you know, we would consolidate Clean Earth for only part of the year, and we'll be back to 3x or below 3x in 2027. As you know, we have to go through various regulatory approvals before we close the Clean Earth acquisition, which we said will be accretive from year 2 and current EPS. Assuming the closing happens mid-'26, which is the best assumption we can do now, this would mean synergies will start in '27, and the transaction will be accretive to current net income from 2027 before PPA. The $2 billion -- sorry, EUR 2 billion disposal program should be delivered in the 2 years post-closing of Clean Earth acquisition. Before Emmanuelle details our '25 results, I will hand over to Daniel Tugues, Head of Spain. He will give you some color about how we can drive performance improvement and sustain margin increase as well as top line growth in what is a historical activity and typical stronghold for us, thanks to our agility. Daniel, floor is yours. Daniel Tugues: Thank you, Estelle, and good morning, everyone. I'm Daniel Tugues, Country Head for Spain. I'm very happy to be here today to present Veolia's 2025 results and illustrate our GreenUp execution with a focus on our activities in Spain over the past 2 years. Estelle just mentioned, Veolia is unique because we are an environmental security powerhouse. and this is highly relevant in Spain, where climate change and the scarcity of resources, notably water are central to our citizens' concerns. Indeed, 70% of Spanish people believe that they are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which are already happening in Spain. Citizens still vulnerable, and I'm afraid they are right. 75% of our land is threatened by desertification. We just went through the worst drought on record, which ended last spring, and it is going to get worse with 20% less precipitation expected by 2050. As it is recognized, these impacts could prove far more costly than the capital expenditure required for adaptation. This is precisely what Veolia is doing in Spain, driving ecological transformation by providing efficient water networks and reuse solutions, by securing supply chains for industries, providing them with local energy and by protecting health with waste management and depollution. Given this geography, it is no accident that we developed innovative solutions early on, such as wastewater reuse, which already accounts for 15% of our water supply and growing and other nonconventional resources such as desalination. To illustrate the point, during the past drought, the water coming out of the tap in Barcelona was sourced 1/3 from traditional sources, rivers and wells, 1/3 from desalination and 1/3 from water reuse. We have shared this experience with our Veolia colleagues. First, with our French colleagues across the building and also with our American teams who are very much looking forward to deploying those solutions in their countries. Veolia is strongly positioned to tackle Spain's critical needs. Spain is the fourth largest country of operations for Veolia, with EUR 2.8 billion in revenues or EUR 3 billion if we include the activities of our specialized business units for Water Technologies and Hazardous Waste. Our presence has grown significantly since 2022 with the integration of Suez and notably Aguas de Barcelona. The defining feature of our presence in Spain is our strong local footprint, deeply embedded across territories and communities. Starting with water, which represents 70% of our revenue. In a nutshell, Veolia is the #1 water provider in the country, locally anchored and positioned across the complete water cycle management from production and distribution of drinking water to the collection and treatment of wastewater. We run long-term concessions such as Aguas de Barcelona, Aguas de Murcia, Aguas de Alicante and many others, and we are also active in water technologies and operate several industrial wastewater treatment plants and desalination facilities. such as those in Tenerife and Almer a. In energy, Veolia is the #1 in building energy services and also leader in energy efficiency. Examples include EcoEnergies, the Barcelona District Heating and Cooling network using residual energies and energy efficiency projects for sites like Hospital Reina Sofia in Cordoba and maybe other similar sites around the country. In waste, we provide circular economy solutions for municipalities and industrial clients, notably in plastic recycling, waste-to-energy and hazardous waste, the latter including a high-temperature incinerator near Tarragona. Our strategy going forward is not only to continue developing those businesses and enhance profitability but also to constantly innovate at EUR 1 billion, especially given the strong demand for treating new pollutants for more simpler solutions and for new sources of local energy from waste or wastewater. On a personal level, having spent many years focused on water, I can say that the One Veolia project is like a tremendous opportunity to me. As for the whole of Veolia, 2025 has been a pivotal year for Spain, and I would like to show you how we have been able to recover while improving our profitability over the past 2 years since the launch of GreenUp. Given the underwhelming performance we faced in 2022 and '23, notably in water concessions, we decided to launch a specific action plan in 2023 called Hunter associated with specific objectives and incentives for managers, not only at the national level but also at the regional one. And I must say that Hunter benefited a lot by leveraging Veolia's performance culture and tools in our Spanish operations, including internal benchmarking on operational costs and KPIs as well as a proven methodology. To boost the top line, we launched a tariff campaign to catch up with cost in water concessions with a tailor-made approach for each of our more than 1,000 contracts. In parallel, we deployed a commercial excellence program to enhance our offers, and we also complemented our organic growth with 13 tuck-ins, mainly in energy efficiency, which were highly value accretive as they are actually plug and play. Over 2 years, this represented EUR 87 million in enterprise value, bought at an average multiple of 7.4x EBITDA. In terms of operational performance, we largely improved our efficiency, not least with AI. For instance, we put in place an AI customer service tool across Spain, that currently deals with more than 1,000 daily transactions, improving availability of our customer service, omnichannel 24/7 no waiting, while at the same time, saving nearly EUR 1 million. Those efficiency measures were complemented by the synergies delivered from the Suez integration. All in all, Spain delivered EUR 109 million in efficiencies plus synergies from 2023 to '25. All that resulted in a very significant improvement of our growth and performance. In 2 years, revenue has grown by 12% and EBITDA by no less than 40%. We are very proud of these results as we are even ahead of our plan to hence Spain's performance. But this is not the end of the journey, as I am focused on continuing to deliver sustainable and profitable growth for Veolia. Demand for all our services in the country is strong, and the power of One Veolia offers many possibilities for combining our diverse expertise to secure essential services. Thank you for your attention, and I will now hand over to Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle Menning: Thank you, Estelle. Thank you, Daniel, and good morning, everyone. Veolia 2025 results are very strong, perfectly aligned with our GreenUp trajectory and above our initial guidance and that on many grounds. For growth, we continue to deliver solid growth, thanks to strong underlying business trends and fueled by boosters, which progressed by 4.3% and even 8% if we consider tuck-ins. Second, performance in the first 2 years of GreenUp, we considerably improved our profitability driven by strong intrinsic growth and synergies, leading in 2025 to an EBITDA organic growth of 6.3% and to a very strong improvement of 70 bp of our EBITDA margin in 16%, which reflects the success of our strategic choices. We maintain a robust operational leverage, enabling us to grow current net income at a faster pace. And third, capital allocation, while we resume external growth in 2025, we maintain a very strong balance sheet with a leverage ratio below 3x at year-end, thanks to our strong free cash flow. And finally, value creation, the successful GreenUp execution led to an outstanding ROCE, which is the best measurement of our value creation at 9.4%, which was our objective for 2027, so delivered 2 years in advance. With EUR 34.4 billion in revenue, we experienced a solid growth of 2.8%. The operating leverage and the delivery of efficiencies and synergies were excellent and resulted in solid organic EBITDA growth of 6.3%, above guidance, current EBIT growth of 8.9%, current net income growth of 9.1%, with underlying higher growth, even higher if we restate for last year set capital gain. Net financial debt reached EUR 19.7 billion. The leverage ratio reached 2.79x, below 3x as expected. ForEx impact was significant as announced due to lower U.S. dollar and LatAm currency. This reflects the improved performance of our international activities, which is increasing value creation. But as you know, as a multi-local group with very limited international trade, ForEx has very limited impact on margin rate and on net income level. Moving to Slide 23, you can see the revenue and EBITDA evolution by geography. The main features in 2025 was the enhancement of our growth outside Europe and the superior growth of EBITDA in both outside Europe and Water Tech segments. In Q4, EBITDA growth accelerate as announced at the end of Q3, thanks to the benefit of our action plan notably in France and the good performance of Water Tech. I will start with Water Technologies, for which 70% of our activities are recurring, corresponding to product, mobile unit and chemicals, while 30% is more volatile by nature, what we call projects. In 2025 and especially in the first 9 months, project revenue was impacted by the timing of milestone delivery and a strong comparison basis versus last year. And as we announced in Q3, Water Tech revenue rebounded in Q4 and grew by 3.6% for the full year, excluding project by 4.6%. Operational performance was excellent with EBITDA growth of 14%. America, Africa, Middle East and APAC performed well in 2025 with revenue growth of 4.1% and EBITDA growth of 9.3%. Europe grew by 3.3%. And finally, France and Hazardous Waste Europe, revenue was flat, but EBITDA increased by a significant 6.3%, thanks to good Hazardous Waste performance, efficiency action in solid waste and resilient water activity. Now let's take a look at our performance by businesses. Very solid growth in our Strongholds, which proved themselves very resilient with very high margin and capacity to continue increasing EBITDA growth. Let's start with Municipal Water. Revenue increased by 3.5% with a remarkable EBITDA progression of plus 6.1%. We continue to benefit from good indexation, have achieved successful tariff renegotiation in Spain, and in the U.S., which protect our future earnings. Volumes were on a very good trend, up close to 3% in Europe. Solid waste revenue grew by plus 0.5% with a very strong EBITDA progression of plus 6.8%, which illustrates our capacity to implement efficiency plan, supporting EBITDA improvement. Revenue from District Heating Network increased by plus 1.7%, excluding energy prices, thanks to a sustained e-tariffs. Let's move on to our Boosters performance on Slide 25, which have gone very well, with revenue up by 4.3% and by 8% including tuck-ins. Overall, EBITDA performance is excellent, up by 12% with an increase of the average EBITDA margin by 100 bp, which confirms GreenUp choices. Skipping Water Tech that I am just commenting and started with Hazardous Waste. Revenue increased by 5.3%, including tuck-ins and 3.8% organically with EBITDA up by 12.8%, which is outstanding. I would like to highlight especially the strong growth in the U.S., up plus 9.2%, including tuck-ins, fueled by incineration volumes and mix. In Bioenergy, revenue was up plus 5.8%, excluding energy prices, and EBITDA increased by 5.1% with strong sales momentum in Belgium, Southern Europe and in the Middle East. The revenue bridge on Slide 26 explain the drivers of our growth in 2025. Negative ForEx impact decrease in Q4. Scope was slightly negative as the impact of 2024 divestiture, SADE, Lydec and RGS was compensated for a large part by the favorable impact of 2025 external growth. The impact will turn positive in 2026. The expected consolidation of Clean Earth in the second semester 2026 will further contribute. The impact of energy prices was as expected, divided by 2 compared to last year. Recycled prices were neutral. Weather effects after a colder winter at the beginning of year in Europe, Q4 was marginally helpful. The contribution of commerce and volume was comparable to last year. And finally, price effects were, as expected, lower than in 2024 due to lower inflation and contribute plus 1.4% to top line growth. On Page 27, you have the EBITDA bridge detailing our organic growth of 6.3%, above the annual guidance between 5% and 6%. Negative ForEx impact increased in Q4, as mentioned earlier. This impact was very much ups and down the line for EBIT and current net income. Scope was slightly negative, but as expected, was positive in Q4. The impact of energy was minus EUR 40 million, less than last year as expected, while recycled prices were slightly up, plus EUR 10 million. Intrinsic growth contributed by a significant plus 4.8% to EBITDA growth, thanks to the combination of commerce volume works for 2% and pricing productivity efficiency for 2.8%, it accelerated in Q4, thanks to the benefit of our action plan in France and the rebound in Water Tech, including new synergies, and I'll come back later to those synergies. Now let's dive into our second lever of value creation after growth, which is performance and efficiency. I am now on Slide 28, which shows our 2025 performance. In terms of our yearly efficiency plan, we achieved EUR 399 million in gain in line with our annual target of EUR 350 million, which we will, for sure, renew in 2026. Efficiency are indeed a permanent level of value creation embedded in our operation and therefore, one we can count on for years to come, not to say forever. It is worth noting that digital and AI gain already account for 23% of our recurring operational efficiency. Suez synergies are fully completed, as Estelle mentioned. We have achieved another EUR 100 million of gain in 2025 for a cumulative total of EUR 534 million since day 1, well above our initial objective of EUR 500 million, which, as you know, was raised a year ago to EUR 530 million. This overachievement is a testimony to our capacity to successfully integrate our acquisitions and the clear marker of the success of the Suez merger. Going forward, we will benefit from the synergies coming from the merger of our 2 Water Technology entities following the buyout of the 30% minority stake of CDPQ in June '25. We target EUR 90 million by '27 and EUR 20 million have already been achieved. On top of that, after we closed the acquisition of Clean Earth mid-'26, we will start the integration process and target a total amount of $120 million of synergies between 2027 and 2030. Let's now analyze our performance below EBITDA, and I am on Slide 30. Going down to current EBIT, this slide illustrates perfectly the operational leverage of our business model. 2.8% revenue growth, 6.3% EBITDA growth and 8.9% EBIT increase. Current EBIT grew to EUR 3.7 billion at a faster pace than EBITDA. I am particularly pleased with our financial results, which excluding financial capital gains, show a slight decrease of EUR 21 million of our financial charges. This was due to a combination of a well-controlled cost of debt and lower other financial charges coming notably from French exchange results. We did not benefit in 2025 from net financial capital gain contrary to 2024 with the SADE disposal. The tax charges were only slightly higher by EUR 11 million, and our current tax rate decrease from 27.1% to 25.4%, thanks to the benefits of Water Technologies fiscal synergies. Finally, current net income increased by 9.1% at constant ForEx in line with our debt. Moving to net income group share, I am on Slide 31. Noncurrent charges were stable at minus EUR 433 million. They include additional integration costs coming from Water Tech merger, one-off restructuring charges and an exceptional litigation provision in 2025. Net income group share reached EUR 1.2 billion, showing an excellent growth of 10.9%. Now free cash flow generation, which is key. I am on Slide 32. I am satisfied with the progression of the net free cash flow of EUR 39 million at constant ForEx, which we achieved despite the working capital evolution due to less project down payment in Q4 and one-off litigation payments in 2025, including Flint for around EUR 70 million. The underlying evolution of our working capital was, in fact, quite good with another reduction in the DSO of 5 days to 74 days. Thanks to our dedicated plan, which will continue quicker invoices. We have a clear plan to reduce time to invoice, cash collection, new ERP with use of AI. CapEx was once again under site control and was stable in 2025. CapEx will remain under control but continue to include significant growth CapEx, which will generate EBITDA. As you can see on Slide 33, net financial debt is well under control, which is EUR 19.6 billion at the end of 2025 versus EUR 17.8 billion at the end of 2024. This increase of EUR 1.8 billion is due to the resumption of external growth with EUR 2.3 billion of financial investment, which includes the purchase of the Water Tech minority stake for EUR 1.5 billion. This was not at the detriment of our leverage, which remained well below 3x at 2.79x. This bridge also reminds you of our share buyback program, which has been launched to offset the dilution of the employee shareholding program for EUR 400 million in 2025. We have, again, in '25, successfully issued new bonds, which attracted market interest and was done with very good market conditions. I will also mention that 85% of our net financial debt is at fixed rate. Our balance sheet, therefore, remains very strong. Both rating agencies confirmed strong investment-grade rating in '25. Before concluding, this slide reminds you of our 2026 guidance, which Estelle has commented earlier, continued solid organic revenue growth, excluding energy prices, EBITDA organic growth between 5% and 6%; current net income of minimum 8% at constant ForEx, excluding Clean Earth, which we will close mid-'26 and which will be accretive as soon as '27, excluding PPA, leverage ratio equal or below 3x, including Clean Earth and equal or slightly above 3x with Clean Earth acquisition. And as usual, our dividend will grow in line with our current EPS. And we fully confirm our GreenUp objective. Finally, let me remind you that we have started our $2 billion nonstrategic asset divestiture program, which I cannot, of course, give you detail, but which will also contribute to the continued soundness of our balance sheet while providing us with balance sheet headroom. Thank you for your attention. Estelle Brachlianoff: Thank you, Emmanuelle. Thank you, Daniel, and we are ready, 3 of us, to take your questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Arthur Sitbon with Morgan Stanley. Arthur Sitbon: I was wondering basically about your 2026 current net income target, which is at constant FX and basically without the Clean Earth impact. I was wondering if you could provide some more thoughts on at the current FX levels, what do you see as the mark-to-market impact from FX on your 2026 numbers as well as potential comments to understand a bit the magnitude of the Clean Earth impact for 2026? And you confirm the GreenUp target. So you talked about 8% growth in net income in 2026, but there is more growth. It's a 10% pace annual for -- by 2027 for the GreenUp target. So I was wondering basically if we should understand that net income growth will considerably accelerate in 2027. And my last question is just on your broader medium-term objectives. I was wondering if at some point you would consider rolling over your targets and maybe guiding to 2028 and 2029 or if we should wait for early 2028 for your new business plan? Estelle Brachlianoff: Thank you for your questions. Many different ones. Just a few things. We're very happy about the 2025 results, which was a very value accretive and a history high and well on our trajectory of GreenUp and even exceeded some of the target in EBITDA and in ROCE, just to mention the 2 of them. In terms of the guidance for '26, you have noted that the guidance left-hand side of the slide, if you want, is without Clean Earth and after Suez merger. So in a way, it's a kind of stand-alone. But of course, the acquisition of Clean Earth will be accretive for years to come. So the way to have a look at it, and that's why it's an ambitious one. We are saying that without any Suez synergies and before the accretion and the synergies of Clean Earth, we are able to deliver in '26 5% to 6% organic growth of EBITDA and at least 8%. So it can be more than 8%, but it's at least 8% of net results. That's what the guidance says. So I just wanted to highlight that it was after Suez and before Clean Earth. which means that it's really a confident and ambitious guidance, which I'm very confident we will deliver. In terms of the global ForEx element, and it's not only on like net results, it's on everything. I just want to highlight again that ForEx for us is a translation, not transaction. In other terms, as I tried to explain, we are a multi-local delivery company, which means that the cost and revenue are in the same currency. And therefore, ForEx up or down doesn't impact our margin. And we've proven it in '25. We've proven in '24, within 2 years, plus 150 business point -- bp, sorry, of margin increase. So proof is in the pudding, as you say in English, that it doesn't impact our margin. And as you know, ForEx translation at 100 at the top of our P&L goes down to 20 basically, so 20% or divided by 5 when it comes to net results, that's the global figures that we've already mentioned. But again, ForEx for us is not a real thing, as you know, like it doesn't impact our margin. It's more a sign of our being international and goes up and down, but it's not a question of anything, but the translation of us being very international. In terms of the targets midterm. So what the GreenUp trajectory, which I could fully confirm today and have fully confirmed it today, is 10% on average over 4 years, assuming, of course, more than 8% this year, and there is no reason why it should slow down going forward. We've achieved already 12% in the first 2 years of the plan. So we are really on the at least 10%, which we've said we would deliver in the GreenUp trajectory. So I guess that's a confirmation again. So another way to see the guidance for '26 on net result is in '25, we said and we have delivered around 9% of net result increase. And this was with Suez synergies in. And in '26, we said we'll do more than 8% without Suez synergies, and again, before like any positive effects of the Clean Earth synergies. So in terms of rolling over targets, that's always a good question. We have a few moving parts here. And the big one is the timing of the closing of Clean Earth, which everything is running exactly as we expected so far. But I will wait until we have the various authorization before we can have a clear timing, but that's a good point. At one point, we will be able to show visibility over years beyond 2027 GreenUp. But what I can say from now on is we've already crystallized with the acquisition of Clean Earth, value creation beyond 2027 with the synergies as well as enhanced revenue growth. So the more the company is international innovation-driven, which we are transforming quite rapidly the portfolio into, the more in the years to come and beyond '27, you will have a company, which is enhanced growth and enhanced value creation, in particular, thanks to the synergies of Clean Earth. I don't know if you want to complement something, Emmanuelle? Emmanuelle Menning: So maybe one element. So very quickly, as mentioned by Estelle, the figure that you see and the 2026 guidance is fully aligned with GreenUp. We have demonstrated in the past a very good result for the first part of GreenUp. I'm not going to mention again the ROCE, which is absolutely amazing 2 years in advance. And as mentioned by Estelle, you have seen the trajectory in terms of EBITDA with a target between 5% and 6% which is very strong, which is long term and which also show our capacity to grow on high potential growth and high-margin businesses as without the merger -- the Suez merger synergies, we are continuing on the same trend. In terms of ForEx impact, you will have at net result level, it's our estimation based on the ForEx rate for -- at the end of December, an amount which is similar to what you had in 2025. So '26 equal to 2025. You were mentioning... Estelle Brachlianoff: It's difficult to say because ForEx goes up, ForEx goes down, like it's super uncertain. Emmanuelle Menning: Yes, it's with the estimation that we have for the -- at the end of 2025. And where you're right is that, of course, in 2027, we will benefit from synergies from Clean Earth and the full synergies also of Water Technologies. And the element, which is, for us, very important is that you know at Veolia that the trains are arriving on time. You have seen what we were able to do with ROCE, with EBITDA, and we don't have any intention to stop and to not have this impact. Estelle Brachlianoff: You can't confirm that. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Bartek Kubicki with Bernstein. Bartlomiej Kubicki: I would like to discuss 2 aspects as well, please. Firstly, if we think about tariffs overall in waste and water in 2026, where do you see them moving and more specifically in France as 2025 was relatively subdued in terms of revenues increase in both waste and water? And secondly, if we think about your M&As, which has just happened and which are about to happen this year, just 2 sub questions. A, what will be the contribution of Clean Earth into your net income once it is being acquired? And secondly, what will happen to your integration costs with now 2 companies, or in 2026, 2 companies being integrated into your group? Shall we expect an increase going forward? Or shall we stay flat at around whatever EUR 30 million, EUR 40 million per annum as in the past? Estelle Brachlianoff: Thanks for your two questions. So in terms of waste and water price more so than tariff, probably, I don't know, and specifically in France, a few things. Altogether in terms of price for our activities, as you know, 70% of the Veolia revenue is indexed and 30% is prices in pricing. And as we said, like inflation is relatively neutral or slightly positive for us, which means that when the cost base goes up, the price go automatically up or via pricing and vice versa. So everything is a way to protect our margins. So I think the priority for us is to protect our margin. In terms of anticipation for '26 in France, it will depend on inflation and a few indexation formulas, which have anniversary dates. I don't expect a big plus in '26 in terms of this indexation given the inflation is relatively low, but that was anticipated. And again, that cost base and revenue base are in the same type of range. What I could say in addition is, in a way, the proof is in the delivery of our performance in France in '25 because we had a revenue which was relatively flat roughly but a big plus in EBITDA, which you see on slide -- I can't remember where it is. But anyway, you will see that in our pack. And this is thanks to our action plan. And in a way, that's exactly the same example, which Daniel just highlighted in Spain. We increased our EBITDA by a lot more than our revenue, thanks to a lot of efficiency plans, and it was specifically the case in Spain and France because we anticipated it. We knew that there won't be a big push from the revenue, from tariff or from specifically or indexation or from the economy. And we launched specific action plans. So it was Hunter in Spain. It was called Ariane in France, and it delivers results. It delivers results in EBITDA level. So what we expect in '26 is exactly the same as we've seen in '25. Top line probably modest, but EBITDA will grow again in '26 in France and in Spain, plus Daniel has ambition on the top line as well, as you've heard him explaining earlier on. In terms of M&A and Clean Earth's net income. So basically, the question is the timing of the closing. We said it would be accretive in current EPS from year 2. So assuming the closing is mid-'26, it will mean year 2 is mid-'28. So mid-'28 is not a point where you look at the net result because it's end of the year. So assuming, again, end of mid-'26 we close. It will mean that in '27, it will be accretive before PPA and in '28 accretive even after PPA, if you want. So more accretive before PPA and accretive altogether, including the PPA. And it's a very modest dilution in 2026. Again, assuming the timing I just highlighted, modest as in what really, really less than 0.5% of potential dilution, again, assuming the timing I just highlighted. And integration costs, we've highlighted, we will have integration costs in the 4 years of the delivery of the synergies. So synergies $120 million in 4 years. And integration costs, we said... Emmanuelle Menning: We communicated when we when we did the signing at the end of November, so it's less than the $120 million. It would be around $90 million. Estelle Brachlianoff: Yes, we said $90 million over 4 years. You have years with a bit more, years with a bit less. But roughly, if you divide on average the $90 million by 4 years, you have a good estimate. Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Olly Jeffery with Deutsche Bank. Olly Jeffery: Two questions for me as well, please. The first one is staying on the topic of M&A. You're looking to divest EUR 2 billion of investments or assets rather within 2 years of closing the Clean Earth deal. Could we expect you to get on the front of that and do that potentially some divestments by the end of this year? And do you have any color at all now on what type of assets you might be looking to or geographies you might be looking to divest in? And the second question is on hazardous waste in the U.S., but again, connected to Clean Earth. In the U.S., you've got finite incinerators, potentially more onshoring coming to the country. That seems like quite a good combination for having pricing power going forward. Compared to when you made the Clean Earth acquisition, do you think actually the environment for hazardous waste in the U.S. has improved? And we've seen some hazardous waste peer share prices in the U.S. do particularly well year-to-date. Estelle Brachlianoff: Two good questions. So on the EUR 2 billion disposal in the 2 years following the closing of Clean Earth, a few things. The timing I mean, we have, as you can imagine, a list with Emmanuelle and with the various options, and I won't be detail -- I will not detail them today. Nevertheless, I can give you a little bit of color on this list. So we have not anticipated a big sell in '26. We will go on with the traditional small and medium portfolio rotation, which we do every year anyway, but nothing as a big as a big object is in our plan so far. So what are the typical candidates in this list, which is another way of answering your question. I guess, threefold, one is mature. The other one is nonstrategic. And the third one is not in the top 3. Let me explain them one by one. What I mean by mature, it means a business, which we don't think we can grow much more the profit in the years to come. I'm talking about the profit here. As you can imagine, in some of our Stronghold activities, we still have a way to increase our profitability, and therefore, we would keep them. So it's really the -- if we are the max of profitability, and we don't anticipate any way to go better. The second, like criteria is what I call nonstrategic. Nonstrategic, typically, it's what we've done when we've divested the SADE, which is a construction business. We said years ago, we don't want to be in construction. We want to be in technology. And that was a good example of that. The third one is what I call non-top 3. As you've seen in our geographical strategy, there is an element of when we are in a country, we want to be in the top 3 of this activity in this country. It's a key element to have pricing power, for instance, which is what we said earlier on. We have a few smaller objects which are not yet in the top 3. So either we have a way to put them in the list in the years to come or if not, we will divest them. So that's the 3 criteria lists, which met the list which we have with Emmanuelle, and we have various option and will deliver in the 2 years following the Clean Earth closing. In terms of Hazardous Waste, you're right, we're super happy about Hazardous Waste business in the U.S. And there is nothing in the last few months, which is anything but confirming it's a very good acquisition, the Clean Earth one. Synergies-wise, platform-wise, including to be able to develop other services of Veolia beyond the Hazardous Waste. So you're right, the trend is good. We've seen a very good Q4 in Hazardous Waste in the U.S. for us. If I remember why it's a 7% organic growth for Q4, which is a very good positive way to end the year, and to begin the next one. So all the lights are really on a green light. We are very, very confident it will create a lot of value for years to come. Operator: Next question comes from the line of Juan Rodriguez with Kepler. Juan Rodriguez: I have two on my side, if I may, more follow-ups. The first one is on guidance at the net income level in 2026. I want to be clear. You said that you expect no synergies from Suez, but it does include water tech synergies on 2026. Is that right? And can you please quantify the fiscal positive effect that the water tech synergies had on your 2025 results because it supported a lower tax rate? And are they part of the EUR 90 million synergies that you're targeting. So this is the first one. And the second one is on France. You said that performance was slightly better in 2025 despite weaker revenues. Can you please quantify the level of the performance that you had in here? And what is expected ex Hazardous Waste? And what is expected for 2026? You signal some improvement in the region, [indiscernible] in the low to mid-high single digits. So some color on that would be helpful. Estelle Brachlianoff: So I've tried to note down all your question. Hopefully, I won't miss anyone, anything. So you're right, the net income guidance before Clean Earth acquisition in '26 does not include any Suez synergies because it's over. Does include, of course, the recurring gains, which will, again, efficiency gain more than EUR 350 million again in '26. And does includes some of the CDPQ water tech synergies, but they are not of the same magnitude of the Suez acquisition. That's why I won't compare apple and pear. But you're right, they do include some synergies of the water tech. I want to say that it started well with -- in H2, we already had EUR 20 million, if I remember, Emmanuelle, of synergies from the Water Tech acquisition, which was delivered in H2. We've closed in on the 1st of July. So EUR 90 million over 3 years, EUR 20 million already delivered in H2. There will be another lot in '26, another lot in '27. And that's when I mentioned the synergies as in EUR 90 million over 3 years. This is the EBITDA synergies, if you want, because we said clearly that they were on top of that fiscal and in a way, net income synergies, which already were delivered a lot in '25. So EUR 20 million of EBITDA, if you want synergies already, plus already some fiscal synergies in '25. Do you want to comment on the fiscal tax rate. Fiscal tax rate, maybe, Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle Menning: With pleasure. Thank you for your question. So as you know, in the GreenUp plan, we targeted a tax rate of 27%. Our current tax rate in 2025 decreased significantly from 27.1% at the end of '24 to 25.4%, thanks partially to the benefit of our water technology synergies. As an example, in the U.K., we have been able to offset past and future tax losses, which were not recognized before. In France, also, we were able to merge the total group of Water Technology. And also in 2025, we benefit from a positive impact led by the anticipation reduction of the CIT rate in Germany. So all of that is contributing to the good tax rate and we have also a positive ambition for 2026, which participate to the net result as the fact that we have the cost of debt fully under control. And on your question about France EBITDA, hopefully, you have the answer on Slide 23. Where you see the business unit Front and Hazardous Waste Europe with a revenue which was basically flat compared to -- or slightly negative compared to '24 with all the -- what we said about indexation formulas and so on and so forth, but a plus 6.3% EBITDA growth. So I think that's the type of results we see from the specific action plan we've launched 2 years ago in Veolia, we just don't wait. We anticipate and act quickly and strongly. So this was called Ariane in France, and you see the results. And this was called Hunter in Spain. And you've seen in Spain, and it was presented by -- because it's kind of a bit the same, plus 14% EBITDA growth in '25 compared to '24 in Spain. And we won't stop here. So you can go on with this type of improvement in '26 for France and for Spain. Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Davide Candela with Intesa Sanpaolo. Davide Candela: I have two, if I may. The first one is if you can share with us sensitivity on energy prices, mostly with regards to Europe. I know that in most cases, the energy component is a pass-through for you, but at least if you can provide a bit of sensitivity that would likely most refer to your WTE plans throughout Europe and so on? That would be the first one. Second one is with regards to your approach to demand. You said that the demand for your services is strongly increasing. I was wondering if you can share how you approach that in the sense that you are being selective in waiting. And so taking the most valuable contracts or opportunities or on the other hand, you are taking a more aggressive approach in trying to put more pressure on power on your prices and just being proactive in trying to take demand from your clients directly. And with regards to that also on volumes, which is the capability you have to attract more and more and if there is a risk of saturation in that respect And yes, that will be the second one. Estelle Brachlianoff: Thank you. So energy price sensitivity. So you're right, energy price for us are global pass-through. This is why we published and we've been publishing for years now, excluding energy price. Why is that so? Because we mainly sell heat and when you know the price of the entrance as in what we have to buy to produce the heat for the district heating net price goes up, the tariff goes up. And that's why it protects our margin again. The little effect, which is not what I said, is on the cogeneration of electricity, if you want, and the ancillary service is associated with it, where it's a little bit more into our margin. So it's more -- it's not the main product for us. We're not a producer of power. We're not at all. But we use all the equipment and infrastructure we have, specifically in district heating and things like that to try to deliver ancillary services in addition and on top. So this top-up is what can go up and down, and it's a little bit more like variable for us. If you have a view over 3, 4, 5 years in a way, you can see that in our figures because as you can imagine, the price of energy in Europe has gone through the roof in '22 and then down very massively in '23 and '24. And you can have a look at the sequence of our EBITDA in our Energy business over 4 years. There was a big plus, a small minus for the reason I just mentioned in terms of the cogeneration of electricity. But altogether, the curve is on the up over these few years. So in a way, we've demonstrated what I said in the figures from '22 to '25. In terms of the demand for our service, what I was trying to highlight is, I was asked a lot of questions about, okay, is Veolia about ecology, the environment? Yes, we are, but we are more about critical needs. I think this is important. So whatever the elections results are in a country, we're not about politics here. We're about critical needs for industries and population. That's what makes us super resilient when it comes to supply of water, when it comes to supply of critical materials and critical minerals, when it comes to supply of energy, we produce local resources Therefore, they don't depend from like far away imports, disruption of supply chain and so on and so forth, which is very key for all our customers. So that's why the demand is, in a way, the more the crisis, the more the demand is paramount because we are really critical for our customers. In terms of your question about how selective are we shooting everywhere? It's the former of the latter. We still are very selective. We don't want revenue for the sake of it. We want revenue, which can create value not only for 1 year but for years to come. The 2 keywords are resilience and growth here. The business model of Veolia is really sustainable growth and for years, which means that we've intentionally decided not to bid for specific tenders, for instance, in West municipal collection because it was not value creative for us to focus on what is very value creative, typically our growth boosters. So we are very selective and the choices are clear, the growth Boosters. So Water Technologies, Hazardous Waste and bioenergy. In terms of where we go for saturation at one point in terms of volume, do have a limit in a way, in our plants and installed base. This is not exactly the way it works. In water, the needs go with the growth of the population or the growth of the industries and the plants do follow, if you want, and that's what we've seen regularly. In terms of Hazardous Waste, it could have been a limiting factor, and that's exactly why we have invested in 5 new facilities across the globe, which are just ramping up from last year till 2028, exactly to be ensuring we unlock the future growth. So we're not only at Veolia talking about the guidance for '26. And when I say we have an enhanced profile of growth for years to come, I can talk to you about '28, '29, 2030, even with the Clean Earth acquisition synergies and investments we've made. Operator: And your next question comes from the line of Philippe Ourpatian with ODDO BHF. Philippe Ourpatian: I have three questions, in fact. One is a slight, I would say, a clarification concerning the efficiencies means that the Slide 27 is showing EUR 326 million growth in performances on which you have some price effects and volume effects. I would like to know exactly what was the amount of the efficiencies you were mentioning, in fact, previously in your slide has separated from works, volumes and commerce. That's the first question. And in this question, there is also another one concerning the next slide, which is the 28, where you are mentioning EUR 399 million. It's over the target of EUR 350 million of efficiencies. Could you spread it a little bit more by activities or geographies? You mentioned France and Spain as a specific plan, but to have more color about where this EUR 399 million were generated? Second point -- second question is hazardous waste. Could you just remind us or elaborate more about the new facilities because Germany -- in Hazardous Waste, Germany has started, if I'm not wrong. And there is some other geography where you are working, U.S., U.K., Saudi Arabia and Asia. Could you just remind us, in order to take into account those volumes and maybe value creation effects? And last, you just issued a press release concerning India. Your famous French competitor also issued a lot of press release concerning this area. It seems to me that India was not an easy country. We have seen Suez losing a lot of money years ago in this contract. What has changed in this market concerning water? And what are the level of risk or capital employed you are injecting in this kind of country, even if I do think that it's mainly through OEM contract? Estelle Brachlianoff: It looks like you have not only the question, but the answers, and you're right. But I will elaborate in a minute. So efficiencies in a way, the answer is on Page 28. So efficiency, EUR 399 million, which we've retained 47%, right, Emmanuelle? Emmanuelle Menning: Absolutely. So [Foreign Language] Philippe. So roughly, when you say -- you're absolutely right, from the EUR 399 million which have been fueled by all the specific action plan also which were in France and in Spain and the rest is, as you know, fully embedded in our business for 70%. We have been able to retain 47%. When you look at this number, if you want precise number, we have volumes commerce, which is around 10% growth and pricing net efficiency, which is around 2.8% growth. So roughly EUR 140 million and EUR 190 million. Estelle Brachlianoff: So 47% of EUR 399 million equals EUR 189 million, plus volume and commerce, roughly equals what you see on the slide. And where is it mainly? So the beauty of the Veolia's model, it's everywhere. That's why we're so confident we can keep it forever because it's a series of plants everywhere in the globe, which have initiatives, which combined give you the number. The specifics where you have more than the average are France, Spain and China. France, Spain and China launch specific plans, which were more than the average, given the fact that we're disappointed by the result in '23, basically for those geographies. So we've launched specific action plan with specific names, the Hunter, the Ariane and there was an equivalent one in China. And that's why on those geographies, we have a perfectly big disconnect between revenue and EBITDA growth because this was thanks to the very, very well-executed delivery of this plant, which again won't stop. Hazardous Waste. So the various Hazardous Waste -- yes, do you want to add something on the... Emmanuelle Menning: Yes, with pleasure. So you know us perfectly well, Philippe. Regarding the efficiency, one point that I wanted to add. As you know, 70% is fully embedded in our business model. It's what we sell, selling price increase, purchasing and procurement improvements. And on top of the 3 specific plans that Estelle has mentioned, and which are taking a lot of energy to the French team, but also to Daniel in Spain. So with very, very specific action plan where you have strong SG&A efficiency on top of procurement and on top of operational improvement, we have launched this year, and you see it in our results. What we call, it was a project which was called Mobi. So we are dealing with a lot of energy of what we consider as assets, which are not as performance as we wanted them to be, meaning that for us, it's a clear approach of upper out and all the team is working very, very strongly to it, and it's in all our geographies, and it is contributing toward our leverage -- operational leverage that you see and the increase of EBIT of 8.9%. Estelle Brachlianoff: In terms of Hazardous Waste, you're right, we have 5 new plants which are under construction or under commissioning. In terms of the sequence, we've showed it during our deep dive on waste a few months ago. So we are exactly on the trajectory we showed you at that time, which means that just to refresh your memory, you have a phase of construction, but then you have like what we call cold commissioning and then hot commissioning and then ramping up of operational performance with a commercial -- commercializing the plant. So depending on the difference, what we call by ramping up, again, cold commissioning, hot commissioning and then commercializing progressively the total capacity of the plant. It takes quite a while. It's not you press a button and it's on and off and 100% instantly. It takes usually between the cold, hot commissioning and the full capacity 2 to 3 years. Just to give you an idea. This is classical in this business, but then you're here forever, which has its merit. And in terms of the as orders of the being in this situation, the first to come online has been the Saudi one which has already gone through the -- and I hope I won't miss one, but the cold and hot commissioning and we are in the ramping up of the commercial activity, then the next on the line is Blue Jay, which is our facility in the U.K. in solvent, which is in the ramping up mode as well. I think we've finished the hot commissioning, and we are in the ramping up of the commercial activity. Then the next on the new will be the German one you mentioned, but which is not there yet. We are more at the end of the construction phase, if you want, not yet in the commissioning one. The next one will be in Asia and the next one will be in the U.S. All that means that combined, if I remember well, we've put again the figures in our presentation. But if I remember what it's 285,000 tonnes of capacity, which will be active at the end of GreenUp, but out of 130,000 tonnes of capacity when they are fully ramped up 100%, so 1 or 2 years after the end of GreenUp. And India, you're exactly right. We're not doing crazy things in India. That's why I was super proud about this contract, which is new of its kind. You've answered yourself the question, like there is not funds employed at all of Veolia. We've delivered technologies, and then we'll have 15 years of O&M contract. So it's not about funds employed here. It's about selling technology and know-how in terms of maintaining plant. Those are massive ones. We are talking about a plant, which will be able to sustain the water supply for 60% of the entire Mumbai global population, which I remember is a 12 million like population. So those are massive, and I'm very happy that it was without risk associated exactly, as you said. So we're not chasing revenue for the sake of it. So we said we will exit construction. So in India, many, many -- so it's EUR 250 million backlog, by the way. We are not chasing revenue for the sake of it. So that's why a lot of the contracts which were announced by competitors, we didn't even bid to be honest, because we don't want to be in construction and pouring concrete. This is not what we do. We do sell technology, plus we do want to be in the O&M. All the rest, we just don't go for it at all. So we are super selective in India as elsewhere, but this opportunity was a very, very good one. Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Charles Swabey with HSBC. Charles Swabey: Just one question for me on efficiency gains. And the '23 that came from digital and AI in '25, can you give us an idea how this compares to your assumptions when you put together the GreenUp plan? Would you say that they have exceeded expectations? And how should we think about this going forward? Estelle Brachlianoff: Thanks for your question. We have no idea there will be AI at this level when we launched GreenUp, which was at the end of '23, we've conceived the whole thing and launched it beginning of '24. So we had no specific expectation. We knew we were already very much into digital. or AI, but not GenAI, if you want. And this is really ramping up and a big potential for future efficiencies in the years to come. I think 23% is already a big figure. So we're not the style of talking about things we're trying to deliver that instead of talking too much. And I think that was a proof of it. We've picked our battles as well because some of it is more a miss than delivering new results. We've picked the tools, which actually are delivering real efficiencies. Real efficiencies for us means consumer less water, produce more green energy. This is the criteria, which we've picked a few proof of concepts and there were many of them, we've picked a few just to be on the scaling up front. Emmanuelle Menning: And what is also absolutely amazing is the increase of the percentage of digital. It was in the past 5%, 10% of our efficiency gain and now it's 20%, and it will continue to increase. Estelle Brachlianoff: You're right. Yes. I will say thank you very much. It looks like we have no further questions. And just wanted to say how happy we are about 2025, which not only was on target or even beyond targets in a few different KPIs, but as well as really a pivotal year for Veolia. We've crystallized major transformation in our portfolio, which will generate really enhanced growth and value creation for years to come and years with a lot of assets, as in '26, '27, '28, '29. I'm very confident about Veolia's trajectory, and there is more to come. Thank you very much. And let me, before I finish, I invite you not to miss what we've put on the slide, which are a few dates. If you want to have more information about our ESG agenda and multifaceted performance that's a webinar on the 23rd of March, and we'll have a deep dive on innovation, tech and AI in London on the 14th of April. Thank you very much. Operator: Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, this now concludes today's presentation. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.
Operator: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Aurelia Metals Limited FY '26 Half-Year Financial Results Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Bryan Quinn, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead. Bryan Quinn: Thank you for joining us to hear about the Aurelia Metals FY '26 Half Year Results. I am joined by Chief Financial Officer, Martin Cummings, today. And obviously, I'll pass over to Martin in certain sections of the presentation. While I'm on to Slide 1, this has been another great half-year, both operationally and financially, for Aurelia Metals. Our strong delivery on metal production and project delivery, supported by obviously strong commodity prices, has delivered a robust balance sheet and strong operating cash flow for the period. We continue to deliver strong results against our strategy, and we can see the benefits of this strategy playing out already. We are delivering consistent metal results from more reliable operations, but we've also have our mills working at new capacity at the current nameplate capacity, which has been a clear strategic deliverable over the past couple of years. During this period, we've also rolled out our mine operating system, our MOS, to really ensure that we're focusing on delivering our plan with the commitments of the team on a daily, shiftly, weekly, monthly basis, which is important for our future sustainability of the business. This has been a deliberate approach to ramping up Federation Mine at the right mining rate and long-term value of getting our ore from Peak mine over this period of time that delivers our 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes in FY '28. And our focus on our strategy is really about delivering superior value to our shareholders through a combination of future copper at 50% and future lead zinc at 50% coming out of the Great Cobar mines and the Federation mine in the coming years. This is going to continue to position Aurelia really well as we utilize the gold prices of today to invest in our business to achieve much higher prices in the future, hopefully, from copper and other commodities. In the meantime, we'll also be focusing on exploration team on looking to build our strong pipeline of options organically for both copper, base metals, and precious metals while expanding our Peak facility in the future. In today's results, Martin and myself will share how we're setting up Aurelia to continue to deliver value for our shareholders through our operations performance, while we continue to derisk our balance sheet and create significant cash much quicker than our peers into the future. Just refer to Slide 2, which is our forward-looking statement. On Slide 3, our operations have continued to deliver strong financial returns against, again, raising the bar from previous halves and results with underlying EBITDA up 41% and our underlying NPAT up 60%. There's still a lot more to come as we ramp up our high-grade Federation mine and complete expanding our processing capacity from the 800,000 tonnes capacity to 1.1 million to 1.2 million tonnes in the near future. We'll talk about that in a few slides. The great news for Aurelia is at the current nameplate capacity prior to expansion, and we are actually really focusing on building stocks in front of the mill coming up in the several couple of months. And I'd like to call out we've achieved record recoveries for some of our commodities as we've been ramping up these tonnes from our processing plant, which is a great result. The Federation ore body and the mine has been ramping up in line with our plan, actually a bit ahead of our plan for the year, and has been providing very encouraging grades, and the high-quality ore remains well on track to improve month-on-month as we go forward. We have our Great Cobar project, which will be accessing the future high-grade copper and gold deposits for FY '28 and beyond. And that's on track and on schedule at the moment, with our development is progressing quite well. And many of the other aspects of the project are delivering in line with the infrastructure works, the pipelines, and also the surface facilities that are being set up, ready for execution over the coming 12 months. So the project is in really good shape, and we're really happy how it's progressing. In line with our other projects, we have -- and we'll talk in more detail soon, other growth projects around the expansion of our plant. They're all on schedule at the moment, and we'll see some results of those coming up in the coming quarter, quarter 4, and obviously, quarter 1 of FY '27, which is exciting. It will deliver some really strong cash flows going into FY '27 with this expansion of our plant and business. And importantly, we actually have been able to really maintain a robust balance sheet, which is funding all of our growth from our balance sheet, which is something we're really proud of and setting us up for success also. And lastly, from our results in the half, it's important to call out the MREL results. We achieved a significant uplift to resources by 12% and reserve by 17%. This continues to show our ability to really find, explore, and actually develop our businesses into the future with this strong organic pipeline we've actually developed and will continue to develop. Importantly, during the half, we had several of our workforce did suffer hand and slip trip injuries across the business. As a result, our leadership have introduced behavioral-based safety programs and tightened up our induction and training programs on-site to really ensure that our people, when they come to work, wherever they're working, they just really think about hazards, use the tools and process we have, and ensure that they go home safely at the end of every day. That's an improvement we're working on every day to ensure that people all go home safely, and that's for the benefit of everyone. I'm just going to pass on to Martin now to talk around the highlights and the balance sheet. Over to you, Martin. Martin Cummings: Thanks, Bryan. So just moving on to Slide 4, and I'll just take you through some of the highlights. But obviously, in the Appendix 2, you'll find more detail on the financial results. I'll just point out when we're comparing on this slide, we're comparing to the first half of financial year '25. So starting with revenue, which was up 27%, and that was driven both by our strong production performance in the first half, but undoubtedly also from strong commodity prices. We did have significantly more zinc production and revenue in this quarter as volumes from Federation ramping up, but gold revenue did remain our dominant source, with around 53% of revenue coming from gold, about another 2% from silver. Our underlying EBITDA also benefited from the strong revenue, and we expect this to improve in the periods to come with the ramp-up of Federation. So as you know, this half, we booked the first commercial production from Federation, so commencing 1 July. And that production did come at a lower EBITDA margin initially. And as volumes ramp up, that EBITDA margin will expand. So as we increase our volumes into the second half and beyond, we expect our EBITDA margin to trend up accordingly. Our NPAT has been consistently growing, and we did again this year, underlying NPAT up 60% on that comparison period. Just within the NPAT, just some comments on depreciation. So that was slightly higher for the period, and that's driven by the first depreciation recognized from Federation. The prior period did have a little bit of depreciation in it relating to the last production from Dargues. So that depreciation will ramp up with the majority of the Federation assets depreciated on a unit of use basis. As those volumes ramp up, we expect the depreciation to tick up a bit as well. I'll just -- obviously, we're calling out operating cash on that slide, but I'll flip over to Slide 5 with the balance sheet. And what we're showing here is our regular chart for the 6-month period. And that operating cash flow from the Cobar region really is the standout with $51.2 million. That was up 37% on the prior period. Importantly, though, that does include all of the sustaining capital for both Peak and Federation. So that is a real cash flow generation before growth capital. Federation, as I said, is in that number. And as those volumes ramp up, that number is expected to increase with a higher contribution from Federation. I talked a bit about growth capital in the December quarterly call. We spent $21.4 million on growth capital for the half, and I do expect to see that increase in the second half. Within that, the plant expansion capital was only $4.3 million. So as we move further towards commissioning in those projects, the spend will ramp up. The Great Cobar spend of $11.2 million for the first half is largely in line with the ranges that we gave for FY '26 for Great Cobar. And there was a bit of spend for decline investment at Federation. I also talked in December about the tax bill. So we finalized our tax return and made a final tax payment for FY '25 of $12.2 million, and that's shown in the waterfall. But I guess the change I'm showing on this slide relates to restricted cash. So I just want to give you an update on where we're at with the refinance. Progress is -- the process is progressing really well. We are on track to agree to terms in this quarter. And I am targeting a financial close either within this quarter or early in the next quarter. Just to recap on what I'm looking for in the refinance is primarily an upsized performance bond facility. As you've been following, we've been cash backing bonds over and above the existing facility that we have, and we have $27.8 million at December sitting in restricted cash. That number is a bit higher today, we've announced that we had due in February. And really, the key there is to refinance that facility and add that cash back to the balance sheet. So I'm just showing you on that chart what cash could have looked like or will look like once that refinance is complete. So all in all, I'll leave it there, but it's another great half delivered by our ops team and really has meant that our balance sheet remains strong and able to fund all of our growth comfortably. So I'd just like to call out our Aurelia and Ernst & Young teams; some are on the call today just for their efforts in getting these releases finalized. It's been another smooth process. So thank you from me. And I'll just hand it back to you now, Bryan. Bryan Quinn: Thanks, Martin. Yes, some excellent results financially, and the balance sheet really supporting the business going forward, which is exciting for the team, a lot of good efforts going into that. If I could just move on to Slide 6. We're very happy how Federation is contributing to the bottom line now. It's ramping up very much in line with our plan. In fact, we do see it continuing to ramp up into the second half of this year, very much ahead of the plan, actually. So very exciting. What's been pleasing is the grade reconciling in line with our plan. And in fact, gold has been slightly better. But if you can sort of see between quarter 1 and quarter 2, some of those uplifts in our grades have been pretty much in line with what we explained to shareholders in the past that we see as we get deeper into some of these more sort of substantial ore bodies, we will definitely get the upside on the ore body grades, and we're seeing that coming through now as we have committed to do so. So that's good news for the ore body. In terms of Federation itself, the mine, look, we are continuing to advance the decline as we discussed in the quarterly. We are continuing to infill drilling as we push the decline down to really build confidence and get high confidence in our stope designs and our execution of our plans. That's giving us obviously pretty much upside to our business in terms of we can potentially bring extra tonnes out from our existing plan when we need to. All the infrastructure is in place now, all of the -- basically the infrastructure around the workshops, the site is just now operating as a mine and bringing tonnes out safely, putting them in the trucks and trucking them to the peak processing facility. And that's going to continue to ramp up as we build the mine and as we continue to build the expansion of the processing plant. It's worthwhile calling out we are continuing to drill the Federation West deposit, which is actually from underground towards Federation West to understand that deposit more as well, and that will be work that we'll continue to provide the market updates as we get the results from those areas. But overall, it's a well-executed project and ramping up really nicely in line with the commitments we made to the market. And this deposit continues to be one of the highest grade base metal mines, and we will continue to unlock future value for shareholders as we continue to mine -- as we continue to push the decline down and unpack the resource. So moving on to Slide 7. I just want to talk about the expansion and how we're tracking against the expansion for the Peak processing facility. It's important to reinforce that Federation is ramping up, as we just talked about. And we're currently just about nameplate capacity at the Peak plant. So the expansion coming on at this point in time is always about the timing to have the Tailington process water management in place in Q4 for this financial year, and then have the tertiary ball mill in place and commission in Q1 FY '27. And that lines up very well with the Federation ore ramping up as well and also delivery of ore out of both the Peak new Cobar side and the South Mine. So we'll be basically targeting the 800,000 tonne nameplate capacity we have now moving to the 1.1 million to 1.2 million tonne capacity. All of this is being self-funded, and that's a really important call out for investors. We're not seeking funding to do this, and the capital is very reasonable considering the upside in the potential cash that's going to come from this business as we build this. So we're well and truly on track for these projects. As you can sort of see in the photo of the slide, that's the ball mill that's come from Dargues. We repurposed that mill, have dismantled it, pulled it apart and have put it on truck, and brought it up to the Peak site. And very much -- it's now waiting for the construction work to happen to be able to place the ball mill in place. But -- and the substation or the power station substation that's come with it from Dargues has actually already been placed in place on its steel trusses and obviously the electrical work will commence very soon for that particular part of the project. In terms of the tailings and water management, that project is progressing well. And like I said, we are well and truly on track for Q4 for the project going forward. I will just move on to Slide 8, which is the growth in mineral resources and ore reserves. Look, this is really about our future, where the business goes, what we're extracting now, what we're going to extract in the future. But if you look at our pipeline between the Cobar at the top left-hand side of the plan to the Federation Mine at the bottom, we have a large set of tenements in dark gray, which we are actively exploring. And if you look at the sort of the portfolio of opportunities -- pipeline of opportunities on the right-hand side from peak copper, peak zinc lead, the mingy copper and the Federation, we have a large set of opportunities that we are working on in our long process going forward, obviously, to build our portfolio and optionality for maximum value. But right now, the real callout for us is the AMI was done in this half of FY '26 and 29 million tonnes, up 12% and obviously, our ore reserves are up 17% which is a testament to our exploration teams really looking hard at where we're discovering, working on the resource and obviously, how we can convert that into a development opportunity for ourselves in the current mines. So some really nice grades, really good resources, some good reserves all in France's business, and really, it's a great opportunity for really to enterprise that going forward. If I just move on to the next slide, which is Great Cobar. So as you're aware, obviously, the project was approved last year, and we kicked it off in July 1. It's progressing very, very well. It's -- basically, the development is a key priority right now, as is doing infrastructure work on the surface, getting ready for the shaft sinking at the back end of this calendar year. At the moment, development is pretty much on schedule. All the infrastructure works are on schedule. And like I said, it's sort of moving down the right direction to get towards that deposit. What is a really important call out, this investment case is materially higher at the current prices than we obviously put to the market last year. It's well worth running those through your models to see this potential uplift in value of the company. And like I said, this is going to be in production to commence within the next 2 years, which is exciting for the company. There is significant value upside potential that we know is under the current study and the current project deliverables we have. So if you look at the plan where the yellow line is sort of around the bottom of the stopping area, that 31, 31C, 31D holes, we do know what's there. And obviously, it's in our prioritization process now to develop the mine and the declines down to the top of the ore body, put some drilling platforms in place and basically work on infill drilling and also to drill under the current ore body as we know it, under the ore resource we know it and actually unpack what the potential is because we know the ore body is open at depth and in all directions actually. So this is materially a significantly good investment with the current prices. And also, like I said earlier, it's got value upside just in the resource, as we know, based on what we put in the feasibility study and the project execution plan versus what we know from the drill holes that have been done in the past in 2021. So a very exciting project for the business, and this will obviously provide a large proportion of the copper future that A really actually has as a company going forward. I'll just move on to the next slide, which is on the Nymagee slide, Slide 10. What's the next catalyst that we've been working on in H1 FY '26 is really the Nymagee exploration opportunity for future organic copper growth for our business. We had a massive uplift in resources that we reported in the MR in H1 of this year. Drilling is continuing over this calendar year to really look at growing this resource and understand what the potential is. It's really a suitable ore body for both the Hera and the Peak plant. And it's really important to understand the proximity of where this plant -- where this is relative to the Hera plant. It's all within 5 kilometers of the Hera plant. It's within close proximity to the camp and infrastructure we have for the Hera Federation group. And basically, it's all on sealed roads in that area. So realistically, it's a very nice location to have a catalyst for future pipeline of opportunities, which is all within stone business of your infrastructure that Aurelia actually own. And so one of the key focus points for us is obviously to continue to drill this work at the current present work that's being done. This deposit is not very deep. It's a couple of hundred meters deep and open at depth beyond 700 meters, as well as far as the work the team have actually done. So a very exciting opportunity. And obviously, it will be work in progress over the coming period beyond into H2 and into FY '27. Look, I just want to wrap up in terms of where we are against half 1 and what does it mean for us. We are building all the elements to deliver the growth and heading towards our 40,000 copper equivalent tonnes, as we've said, as part of our strategy for FY '28. We are building profitability as our production grows. And as you've sort of seen through the presentation, our volumes have increased and will continue to increase. We're putting the infrastructure in place to enable that, and the mines will continue to ramp up to support that. So we expect some really good results. At current NPAT up 60% in EBITDA -- underlying EBITDA at 41%. We can expect some really good results as we continue to build our business and the growth that goes behind that. We have a strong cash balance, and we haven't drawn down debt, as Martin talked about. So we feel like we're in a really strong position, especially relative to our peers. And we have been self-funding all of our work and all of our growth, which is obviously a testament to the hard work of the team and the results we've been delivering. Importantly, our execution of that Great Cobar is well and truly underway on schedule. Like I said earlier, it's really taking up nice shape, and we are prioritizing our drilling program from that Great Cobar decline work to ensure we unpack the potential future of what could be an amazing, even better deposit than we have in our resource base now. Our processing capacity available to mine -- to take all the mine ore. Our expansion, as I talked about, our first part of the expansion will be finished in quarter 4 FY '26. And then we'll be basically completing the second part of the expansion, which is the ball mill and the power unit that will be in FY '27. And really, we'll be in the 1.1 million to 1.2 million tonne capacity, and then the mines will be challenged to basically ensure that we're filling the mill again. We also have the Hera plant available for future options as we unpack our resources in the region, as I've just discussed around some of these catalyst opportunities we have. Importantly, as I said, we have 29 million tonnes of group mineral resource, and that's -- obviously, we have a proven track record to discover and to develop these ore bodies at a very, very good cost per tonne. And we've actually got a new highly experienced Chair has been appointed and has been involved in the first Board meeting, and very excited that Graham Hunt has joined the team and is going to provide very good direction and guidance to the Board and obviously to management as well. So all in all, we're in good shape, and we're heading in the right direction in line with our strategy. So with that presentation, I'll hand it over to Rocco to maybe take any questions we may have from the group who's dialed in today. Operator: [Operator Instructions] And today's first question comes from Daniel Roden at Jefferies. Daniel Roden: Good set of clean numbers. I probably got a few ones for you, to be honest. But I just thought if you could quickly just clarify the difference between the $9.1 million financing cost in the P&L versus the $2.7 million expense. How should we think about the, I guess, the assumed noncash differentials there? Is that rehab amortization style costs that are being thrown into that? And how do we think about that going into future periods? Bryan Quinn: Yes, it's about rehab unwind and also about amortization of borrowing costs incurred in previous periods. So that's -- they're the main items that sit in the noncash portion of that. Daniel Roden: And another boring one. D&A, I know we've spoken about it in previous periods, but just trying to get a sense of where D&A is going to fall kind of in second half FY '26 and FY '27, acknowledging it's pretty difficult with the change in operations. But yes, it's probably the only material change to expectations, I think, in the period. So just trying to get a sense of how that's going to balance out. Bryan Quinn: Yes. No. So let me just split the $23 million up for the first half. So roughly that was $15 million of Peak and around $8 million for just under $8 million, and there's a bit of corporate. So the $15 million is pretty solid for Peak. But as we reinvest in the plant and then start operating at the higher throughput, I expect that number to tick up a little bit. For Federation, as I say, around $8 million for the first half. I've got it at around $20 million for this year. So that will be the tick up in the second half. So group depreciation should land around sort of $50 million to $55 million for the year, and then be a bit higher next year as we're getting into those higher volumes out of Federation, primarily, you see it sort of step up a bit again. Daniel Roden: And just confirming the tax shield is largely exhausted, so you're now going to be a taxpayer going forward? Bryan Quinn: Yes, we are a taxpayer. You might recall back during COVID, we were taking advantage of those loss carryback provisions. So we were getting cash back through those '22, '23 period. So we effectively exhausted our tax shield in that way. All of the Dargues closure from FY '24 has been pushed through the FY '25 tax return. So now we're pretty clean, yes. Daniel Roden: Yes. And I'm sure I know the answer here, but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask it anyway. But -- just going to ask about the, I guess, the Aleris transaction. How do you -- do you see yourselves playing a role inside of that, given that the -- some of the key assets obviously have quite strong synergies potentially with your portfolio. Is that something that you're looking at or just happy to look at it from the sidelines? Martin Cummings: Look, I'll take that one. I think at this point in time, we're always looking at where the best growth options are for ourselves to fill our mill or mills. And we always look for what the best value is for our business in terms of what our shareholders would expect us to do. So we will continue to look at that. As we sort of said, we have a really good catalyst already. We have a great Cobar deposit, which is still lots of potential that we can drill, potentially unpack, and grow our business from. We have Nymagee, and we have lots of other sort of greenfield opportunities we're looking at as also. They will always be assessed against what other options are in the region that makes sense to us. And whatever the most value accretive is for the business, we will look at. So we won't give a definitive answer on anything we're looking at, but it's always about value. So if we have it in our pipeline and we have -- and we've got a pretty strong portfolio of resources ahead of ourselves that we'd have to pay additional for. So realistically, our mills are currently full with a nameplate capacity of 800,000. We're going to fill them again with our Federation and our ore bodies coming out of the Peak South mine, new Cobar and Great Cobar. And obviously, we're looking at, well, what do we -- when do we look at Hera and how we use Hera. But if we have the resource ourselves and we have it at a good price ourselves, we'll continue to look at that. But it's always about value, what's the best value for us. And we look at both organic and inorganic at the right time or based on what's going to shareholder outcomes. Operator: And our next question today comes from Paul Kaner at Ord Minnett. Paul Kaner: Just a couple of questions, if I may. Just firstly, on your balance sheet and growth projects, I guess you've sort of got $86 million of cash. You're about to refinance that facility and get that restricted cash as well. I mean, taking all of this into account, along with your outlook for cash flows, is there any sort of potential to fast-track some of your growth projects at this time? Bryan Quinn: Look, in terms of our growth projects, Great Cobar is on schedule at the moment. And you got a bunch of declines heading down to the project. We also have sufficient copper gold ore in Chesney, New Cobar, and Jubilee. So in terms of the mill, our focus is on drilling the mill and keeping the mill full, and as it expands, giving the mill full again. And then really, the acceleration will come from drilling programs, and we are funding the drilling programs a lot more in FY '26 than we have in FY '25 and '24, et cetera. So to be honest, if you look at the growth and acceleration, it's really about getting Federation ramped up, and it's going well, and getting Great Cobar developed and getting it drilled for further information, Lim drill for further information. So they're all progressing quite well. But at the end of the day, it's about what mill we want to fill the mill, give it mill full, and that's our focus right now because that will generate the most value for shareholders in the short and medium term, both at the Peak mill and obviously, options for the Hera mill. So as we continue to deliver, obviously, good cash flow and a very strong balance sheet, we'll continue looking at options to accelerate, and the Board will continue to challenge us on those acceleration options as well. And that will happen generically as we go forward. Paul Kaner: And then just secondly, just following on from Dan's question and I guess, looking at the organic versus inorganic approach and taking into account Nymagee there on Slide 10, sorry. You talked about sort of potentially processing Nymagee through both Hera or Peak. I guess what comes into consideration for this decision? Do you need more material to justify Hera restart? And I guess, how much CapEx would be required to restart the Hera mill to turn that back into, I guess, a copper con -- bulk copper con type processing plant? Bryan Quinn: Yes. Look, that's a good question. So we are looking holistically at -- obviously, Hera Mill is available. It's off the grid plant. And we're looking at -- well, with the combination of what we already have with Great Cobar, the New Cobar, the South Mine and Federation, what's the right configuration to maximize value with obviously commodity prices as they are today and where they will be in the future, what is that right combination. So as we get more information, we do want more resource information out of Nymagee before we make any decision, obviously, that's what the drilling program is all about. Once we have that information, we'll look at the trade-off of, well, where is the best position to go versus where is the best position for Federation to go versus where is the best position for the ores out of South Mine and North Great Cobar to go using the infrastructure we actually have. It's important to understand that we send trucks from Federation, they drive past full of ore, they drive past Hera, and they had their 9500 to Peak plant. That truck then turns around and comes back empty back towards past Nymagee, past Hera, back to Federation. So we actually have like a logistics chain already in place that can actually optimize on sealed roads, the access to those ore deposits, both at Great Cobar, the Peak South mine, Nymagee exploration area, Hera plant, and also Federation. It's one direct road basically, which is all sealed, which is in excellent condition. So it's all about optionality for us, and just thinking once we get the extra information on the resource, Nymagee, we'll then look at what does that mean. We'll get extra information out of Great Cobar in the next couple of years as well to see what that means. And we'll be continuing to drill in Peak South and Chesy areas as well. So it's about getting the options and optimizing them all with what you have. That's the organic side. And during that period, you'll also be looking at what's the inorganic options as well, which one of the things with inorganic options is they do cost you more money. You really don't know what some of the wood so you have a look. So I guess you've got to weigh up those sort of options all the time and see where you best to put your money for shareholder value. Paul Kaner: Yes, that's clear, Bryan. So I guess down the track, it's first and foremost, keeping that mill full there at peak, but then, I guess, any excess material down there, you could put back on the truck to come back up to Federation should you wish to restart the Hera mill and maybe combine that with Nymagee. Bryan Quinn: And then yes, and then the cost of what you put into the Hera mill will all be dependent on what ore source you put through there. Effectively, it depends on the ore, it depends on the actual -- the feed type we decide, which is best to go through Hera. That will obviously decide what the cost of capital will be to do that mill. In the past, we've sort of said $20 million to $30 million to restart Hera. That will all depend on the ore type we put through. And I'd say that you have to do a reassessment of that again, and I wouldn't definitely use those numbers in that assessment. I would think about what that looks like when we come up with the ore source feed for that. In the meantime, it's really important we do keep the mill full with the expanded numbers, 1.1 to 1.2 is going to be very, very good value and good cash flows for our shareholders. Operator: [Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Quinn for closing remarks. Bryan Quinn: Yes. Thanks very much, Rocco. Look, just to start with, I want to obviously thank the shareholders for continuing to support us and follow our strategy execution. We've talked about definitely all of our management and our people who are working every day to deliver the results, and the associated content partners and the strategic partners we have to support us as well. I'm really excited for where Aurelia is going. We are building the business step by step to get to this sort of larger volume in a very sequential way, funding our way to get there through our delivery, putting the systems in place behind us. We've got some great talent involved in our organization that is supporting this business going forward. And like I said, we have a very clear path to get there. You will see the profitability at the current prices will only get better as our production grows, as we expand. That balance sheet, as a result, will get strong, and there's lots of upside to the business in terms of where we're going with both the copper growth and also with the resource base we're looking at using as well going into the future. So thanks, everyone, for joining us. Really appreciate it, and we look forward to speaking to you at the next quarterly update. Operator: Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
Thomas Russell: All right. Tony, we're ready. Tony Sheehan: Thanks, Tom. Good morning, and welcome to the H1 FY '26 update for Change Financial. My name is Tony Sheehan, CEO of Change, and I'm joined by Tom Russell, Executive Director. Similar to our usual webinar format, Tom and I will run through a presentation and then take Q&A at the end. If you do have any questions, please submit them through the chat function on this webinar. Okay. Just a little bit briefly about Change Financial. So, Change Financial provides innovative and scalable payment solutions for over 150 clients across more than 40 countries. We are a B2B business with 2 core products. The first being Vertexon, which is our Payments as a Service offering, which provides card issuing, card management and transaction processing. Vertexon supports prepaid, debit and credit card issuing, and there are 2 main models under Vertexon, the first one being processing only. Under this model, we provide the technology, which is a card management system to clients to run their card programs. The clients hold the necessary scheme and regulatory licenses to issue cards. So processing only is available globally and supports all major schemes. And we have clients using Vertexon in Southeast Asia and Latin America, including 2 of the largest banks in the Philippines running over 45 million cards on the platform. The second model is processing and issuing. This is only available in Australia and New Zealand. And under this model, clients utilize Vertexon for processing capabilities and leverage our regulatory and scheme licenses and issuing capabilities. So under this model changes the card issuer record and provides treasury, fraud and compliance services. Vertexon generated 85% of the group's revenue in H1. Our other core product is PaySim, so that's software, which enables end-to-end testing of payments platforms, processes and scheme rule compliance. The PaySim software is based on global messaging standards and can be sold globally. PaySim is the default testing standard for EFTPOS in Australia and has a blue-chip client base, including 5 of the top 10 digital payments companies. PaySim contributed 15% of the group's revenue in H1. So importantly, for both the Vertexon and PaySim, they are proprietary payments technology platforms, which are owned and developed in-house by Change. So this is an important -- this is important from a value and control perspective for the company. So, if we look at some highlights, so really strong financial performance in H1 with a record half year revenue result of USD 9.3 million. So that's up 29% on prior year. 70% of revenue is derived from recurring sources. So this provides a very solid base of revenue to grow from. The proportion of revenue from nonrecurring sources increased during the half due to the strong performance from licenses and professional services revenue. So one-off revenue is an important driver of overall financial performance and was a key contributor to the strong financial performance during the half. Our rolling 3-year revenue CAGR to 31 December is now 25%. Underlying EBITDA for the half was USD 1.8 million. So, this is a material improvement on the underlying EBITDA loss of USD 0.5 million in H1 FY '25. The key drivers of this significant improvement in the underlying EBITDA were revenue growth, stable fixed cost base and the U.S. cost outs from the exit of the U.S. operations. Now if we isolate the impact of the U.S. cost-outs, H1 FY '26 underlying EBITDA was USD 1.9 million versus an underlying EBITDA of USD 400,000 in H1 FY '25. So, we also delivered a maiden profit of USD 600,000 for the half. So that's a real key milestone for the company and something we're very, very proud of as well. We are seeing the operating leverage pull-through we've been talking about. We've been talking about this for the last few quarters. We want to continue to drive operating leverage moving forward to generate margin expansion as we continue to scale. So, PaaS is a key driver of our growth, and we have seen strong growth in PaaS metrics across the board. We now have more than 110,000 cards active in Australia and New Zealand. That increase in cards was driven by the Sharesies debit card program in New Zealand, which launched in October and also significant growth in one of our existing fintech clients in the prepaid card space. So, we will continue to drive revenue growth on the PaaS platform through organic growth from our existing clients. Our new clients already signed. So, we're currently onboarding 2 clients and also further client wins. One of our key priorities across the business is growing our PaaS client base in Australia. So, increasing our footprint in Australia will drive scale benefits. So, we have the product and the team in place to add significantly more clients and volume without having to increase our cost base. There's a significant opportunity in market size in Australia as well. So, we want to really replicate that success that we've had in New Zealand and bring it here into Australia as well. Over to you, Tom. Thomas Russell: Okay. Thanks, Tony. So, we cover a lot of this information in our quarterly webinars. So, the slides are here for new investors, but I won't spend too much time going over the same ground. If you do have specific questions, please ask them using the Q&A function, and we are more than happy to answer them at the end. As Tony said, we've had a great growth in our active card numbers with a significant number of new cards added late in the half. Active cards were up 66% versus H1 last year. We obviously finished onboarding and launched a significant fintech client in New Zealand in October last year, and we're also currently launching another significant fintech client who will soon be migrating existing cards across the Change. We report active cards, which is a leading indicator for expected activity, that is transactions and transaction volume. We want clients growing because the PaaS model is designed to support our clients through launch and then their growth is also our growth. The types of fees we earn from our clients are listed there in the bottom left table. Generally, the largest driver of PaaS revenue is a number of transactions, but we also charge for active cards volume fees depending on the type of transaction and other valued fees you see there. Okay. The 2 clients I just mentioned that have recently launched and are in the middle of launching already have a significant cardholder base and the volumes are starting to show in the coming periods. Change is a B2B business and sales cycles can take a while. But importantly, once clients are onboarded, they can be very meaningful from a revenue perspective and as clients go through their own rollout plans and their multiyear deals. One question we get a lot is, are you actually going to be able to compete in market? Why would someone use Change over a competitor? Well, if you look at this chart, 6 of these clients were one of competitors. So the answer is yes, we can and are competing in market. We are winning on features, service and reliability as one of the only options in market now that owns our own technology. So in short, we've already proved we can win clients. The graph here shows that both competitors -- from competitors, banks and other issuer processes, and we can win net new programs. The key focus for us is building up the number of clients on the right that are contracted and going through the onboarding process. We won a new client in Q2, which is just about to start onboarding. And with the momentum building and more of the deals maturing through the pipeline, you should expect to see the box on the right starting to grow again very soon. All that will drive recurring PaaS revenues in the short-term, but also over the medium to long-term. I've presented this slide before as well, including in our full year results. So I'll just quickly touch on the key points for anyone new. Firstly, the scalability of Vertexon. Our clients process and manage over 45 million debit and prepaid cards on the platform, including one client in the Philippines who issued more than 40 million cards. For our Vertexon on-prem clients, we historically sold a one-off license to them. From that point, clients pay an ongoing support and maintenance fee of around 20% for as long as they continue to use the platform. That includes us pushing quarterly updates to them to ensure their system remains compliant with the card scheme mandated changes. Importantly, many of these clients have been with us for more than 10 years. Vertexon is a core system for them when they roll out new features, for example, the Southeast Asian client recently launched a credit card offering. They pay new license fees plus ongoing support and maintenance. Some clients also expand card tiers, which drives additional license revenue. Revenue here is generally not linked to transaction volumes. PaySim operates in a very similar way. Clients pay an upfront license fee for the modules they require and then ongoing support and maintenance to receive quarterly scheme updates. It's highly modular. Clients typically start with 4 or 5 core modules and then they add additional testing functions over time, which drives further license and recurring revenue. Across both products, particularly Vertexon on-prem, we also undertake customization work where required, generating professional services revenue. Talking explicitly to the financials now. It was a great half financially for Change, a record revenue half with USD 9.3 million of revenue or AUD 13.3 million of revenue, which is up 29% on H1 FY '25. PaaS is now the biggest contributor to revenue and Oceania has overtaken Southeast Asia as well as our biggest region in the last 12 to 24 months. I like sneaking this into every presentation, too, but we've had consistent quarter-on-quarter growth now for the better part of 3 years, and we are on track to have doubled the revenue in the business in the last 3 years by the end of FY '26. Pleasingly, revenue was up across the board and recurring revenue continues to build. The revenue waterfall chart here clearly shows where the revenue comes from across the business. The growth in revenue is being driven by our PaaS clients, but also our Vertexon clients who use Vertexon's core system and have had it deployed into their banks for a long time. The team is doing a great job at managing project pipelines, and we are seeing that work and resulting revenue dropping through at higher rates than in previous years. As a reminder, approximately 70% of our global client base pays us in USD, 20% in New Zealand dollars and 10% in AUD. Turning to the profit and loss. So again, USD 9.3 million of revenue in the half. You can also see the benefits of the cost reduction and exiting the U.S. operations, which is now materially completed, and we're in the final stages of the process to wind down the U.S. subsidiary. As we always say, we have the team in place to support significant increase in revenue, and that's the power of the platform. We are now starting to also see the benefits of AI multiplying the scalability of the platform, and Tony will talk through this shortly. Significantly, we recorded a significant step change in underlying EBITDA with a positive result of USD 1.8 million for the half. For context, we made a USD 0.5 million EBITDA loss last year in H1, and we only recorded USD 200,000 for the full year of FY '25, a 9th of the half year result. This clearly shows the inflection point the company is going through. Looking at PaaS margins, these have started to expand as we have advised they would. Margins in FY '25 set around 26%, but in H1 FY '26 have moved to around 30%. We still have heavy onboarding activities, which we continue to expect to have as more clients are onboarded, but the impact of these lower-margin revenues and even costs during onboarding are diluted by higher recurring base of transactional revenue. As we scale, fixed costs like connectivity and digital pay certifications are spread across a larger revenue base and will support ongoing margin expansion. Turning to the balance sheet. At the end of December, we had USD 2.6 million of cash at bank, an additional USD 1.4 million of cash-backed security deposits. As flagged at the full year, we have started splitting out client settlement funds that sit on our balance sheet as well. These relate to our PaaS business. They were USD 2.5 million at 31 December and fluctuate depending on the day of the week. There also is an offsetting liability for USD 2.3 million, which is labeled scheme settlements payable, which we've now split out from other trade and other payables. We also maintain a healthy balance of contracted liabilities. These are already contracted paid for support and maintenance as well as professional services work that will be unlocked over the next 12 months. In the first couple of months of H2, we've also contracted some large projects with Vertexon on-premise clients that are not reflected in that 31 balance. Overall, the balance sheet is in very good shape, and we continue to drive profitable growth. We'll continue to strengthen the balance sheet. In terms of cash flow, the significant improvement has been driven by a significant increase in cash receipts, but also the stable fixed cost base. The increase in operating payments is primarily driven from PaaS COGS as volumes and revenues increased. CapEx has stayed relatively stable with capitalized software development only up slightly on the back of additional revenue-generating features rolled out to clients in the half. As we always point out, given the billing cycle and cash usage cycle in the business, H2 is expected to be much more improved again on a net cash flow perspective and remain on track to hit our target of cash flow positive guidance for the full year. Back over to you, Tony. Tony Sheehan: Thank you, Tom. So just briefly touching on the large market opportunity that we have in front of us. Many of you on the webinar today would have already heard us talk around this, but there are some new people on the call. So, I will go through this, but I'll go through it pretty quickly. There is more details in the appendix. So, we have a very large market opportunity for Vertexon and PaySim. So, what is our focus really to capitalize on these opportunities? We have identified target markets. So, for Vertexon, that is Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. They are the regions that we are gaining traction and winning. For PaySim, it's global as the product can be sold globally without modification. Secondly, we have pivoted towards outbound sales hunting. So, we have reshaped the sales team and pivoted towards outbound sales. So, the BDMs that we have hired over the last 12 months continue to aggressively target outbound sales opportunities. Thirdly, it's growing and leveraging the partner ecosystem, so expand our partner ecosystem and work more closely with existing partners to drive mutual value. That partner ecosystem provides a one-to-many sales approach, which can be very effective for both Vertexon and PaySim. Fourth is cross-sell and upsell. So, work with our existing Vertexon and PaySim clients to drive project work, and for Vertexon clients, continue that journey towards migrating to PaaS or the latest on-premises version. We upsell the modern functionality and features to clients, which also drives incremental revenue across both products. So, if we look at some key operational achievements. So, to deliver on our financial results that Tom has just gone through, we have a clear and focused operational plan. So, some of the notable operational highlights for H1 include from a commercial perspective, we integrated a marketing campaign automation tool and commenced marketing nurtures for Vertexon and PaySim. So, this is to increase brand awareness and lead generation. We expanded our partner ecosystem. So, we signed 3 new PaySim partners and a new BIN sponsored partnership with a global processor. We also launched our first BIN sponsorship client in New Zealand. We've talked about them before, the Sharesies debit card program launched in early October. From a product perspective, we significantly enhanced the Vertexon PaaS digital capabilities. So, we upgraded our digitization offering, and we broadened our SDKs or our software development kit to enable faster and deeper client integration. So that's really key from a sales perspective as well is having a rich SDK, which does make it easier to integrate and offer more functionality. We continue progressing the PaySim modernization project. So, we completed a 64-bit upgrade to increase testing capacity for our clients. We also enhanced the PaySim ISO 222, which is account-to-account payments product offering. So that complements our ISO 8583 offering. And we completed dual domestic EFTPOS network connectivity in New Zealand. So that's important for our debit card programs and in particular, our financial institution clients as well. From an operations perspective, we strengthened the Vertexon PaaS platform monitoring to maintain high availability as volumes continue to scale. We also undertook ongoing high availability infrastructure improvements, again, for continued scaling. Some of the clients that we're in discussions with and one that we've won recently really is around the resilience and stability of our platform. So that is key for us from a business perspective. We also deepened AI integration across the business, and I'm going to talk more in more details around that now in terms of AI. So, if we look at -- looking a little more deeply at AI and what it means for our business. So AI is rapidly evolving on a daily basis. The enhancements in capability, particularly in the last few months is quite extraordinary. So, the evolution of AI has now reached the point where it can create significant opportunity and value for Change. AI is not new to us. So we already utilize AI in products, for example, fraud monitoring and over the last 24 months, have deployed AI to assist development and other business units. Now with the recent transformational improvements in AI, we are changing the way we adopt AI moving forward. We are embedding Agentic AI across development, operations and client delivery. This will enhance structural advantages and drive operating leverage across the business. So, what is the impact we see from embedding Agentic AI across our business? Firstly, it's around defending and deepening the moat. So, we have proprietary platform control. As we mentioned earlier, we own the technology for Vertexon and PaySim. So this enables faster execution versus competitors reliant on third parties. We have over 20 years of institutional trust in our products. So AI improves our resilience and scalability. Embedded proprietary business logic, so compounding advantage as AI trains on our internal data. There are also some things which AI can't shortcut. So for example, scheme certifications and regulatory licenses and compliance. From our perspective, AI strengthens our competitive moat rather than eroding. Secondly is to accelerate revenue, so faster product releases. So development cycles compressed from months to weeks. So, this will accelerate our product road map delivery, which is super exciting. Will enable faster client onboarding through reduced implementation time frames. It will enable more customization capacity. So that's improved -- that will improve our ability to win large and complex deals. And it will also improve client responsiveness, so stronger retention and cross-sell expansion. The third pillar that we see there is really to drive margin expansion and operating leverage. So increased developer productivity, so far greater output per employee. There will be automation assistance with support and reporting, reduced rework and testing cycles. The operational task, automation, so workflow enhancements to reduce manual engagement and also expanded operational capacity. So, AI will augment teams and drive financial efficiency. So, we are in a super exciting period of evolution for our business. In terms of the outlook, so on the back of a strong H1, we upgraded our guidance for FY '26 in late January. Many of you will be aware of that. Revenue is now expected to come in between USD 17.5 million and USD 18.5 million. So, the increased quantum of recurring revenue provides a very solid base for the business. Underlying EBITDA is now expected to come in between USD 3.1 million to USD 3.8 million. So that's a 15% increase at the midpoint compared to previous guidance, which we released in July. We've also maintained our guidance of being cash flow positive for the year. So as Tom mentioned, historically, our cash flow has significantly improved in the second half of the year. We expect that to be the case in FY '26 as well. So overall, it's been a great start to FY '26. Our focus is on growing the business and executing on our operating plan to deliver on our targets for the year. Tom, we might turn over to Q&A. I think we've had some come in. Thomas Russell: Yes. Thanks, Tony. Okay. So. the first one here is from Miles at Veritas Securities, who has recently picked up coverage of the stock. Thanks, Miles. To what extent are AI and automation enhancing your sales and marketing capacity? Tony Sheehan: Yes. So good question there. I think let's start with the marketing. What the -- what AI is enabling us to do is establish content faster, whether that's white papers, whether that's lead generation materials as well. So that's sort of the first pillar is around that content. It will also likely enable us to do AI-powered lead scoring as well. So, we will use signals, web visits, content downloads, engagement frequency to enable targeting to potential clients there. So, it will continuously learn from our CRM data that we have and refine that and refine the nurtures and the campaigns that are going out. And then what we would be hoping that will come out of that as well is the identification of more sales-ready leads earlier. So that directly leads into the sales side of the business as well. I did talk around the enhancements that Agentic AI, we see coming across the business in terms of product delivery, the road map, customizations as well and onboarding -- the speed of onboarding of clients. So, we think that when you combine that with marketing and the product from a sales perspective, we will reduce implementation friction, increase confidence, particularly during those large and complex enterprise procurement processes there and accelerate our sort of revenue recognition for new contracts. Thomas Russell: Thanks, Tony. Next one from Joe at MST. Congrats on the great result and maiden profit. Just wondering if you can give any color on the current sales pipeline. Tony Sheehan: Yes, I'll take that. So, the sales pipeline at the moment is in very good shape. We've got some very good opportunities that are down the bottom of the funnel, so well advanced in Australia, which is great on the PaaS side. Tom mentioned around when we talked around that onboarding slide where you can see the number of clients and building out that box down the bottom right in terms of clients that are signed. We will be looking to really build that out over the coming quarter or 2 as well. So, from a sales perspective, looking very strong there, which is great. We just need to get those conversions and close those deals hopefully in the coming months as well. And then Southeast Asia, we are still seeing good traction up there. We've got some really marquee clients up there, which is driving a lot of our professional services and license sales on the Vertexon on-premises side as well. So, some great opportunities coming through. Joe, needless to say, we just need those to drop through in the coming months as well. Thomas Russell: Thank you. All right. Laf from MST, who also covers the stock. I appreciate the extra color on AI. Can we talk to specifics on the costs and how they may change and investment versus possible savings? I'll let you take that one, Tony. Tony Sheehan: Yes. And Tom, jump in on this as well. So Laf, in terms of where we're at with that AI, that is rolling out in a very accelerated manner across our business. I think in terms of the costs and what that will change, we will be working on that in more detail in the coming sort of couple of months as well as we -- as that rolls out across the business. So, probably a little bit early for us to sort of talk around that investment and possible savings. Tom, I don't know if you've got anything you want to add to that? Thomas Russell: Yes. The only thing I'll say is that the actual AI tools don't cost a huge amount of money. So, it might surprise you, but we're not talking about huge amounts of money to make that investment in AI. We've already started doing that, as Tony said, over the last 12 months in particular, but the additional cost of AI is not great. And I think we can provide a bit more color on that in the coming sort of months to 6 months. Okay. Another question from Laf. Are the 3 wins in PaySim net wins, new wins? Tony Sheehan: Yes. So, they're partner wins, so they are net new partner wins, Laf, on the PaySim side. And so, they're in most of those -- one partner was in Latin America, 2 were in the Middle East as well. So, regions where we can sort of leverage that partner network to sell PaySim licenses in region. Thomas Russell: So, we sell a lot of licenses through partners currently in different parts of the world as well. So, we use them as a distribution channel. And what worked in the pitch for PaySim, how do you seriously move above a less than 0.5% market share? Tony Sheehan: Yes. So, with PaySim, it is extremely functionally rich. So, the software itself, functionally rich. We have resellers that have their own testing tools as well, but they sell PaySim because it is more functionally rich. In terms of how do we move past that 0.5%, we are undertaking a modernization of that product, so to improve the look and feel of that. That's where we would expect our Agentic AI to really accelerate that modernization of PaySim. It's also about direct sales. So, we've moved towards outbound sales hunting with the appointment of new BDMs last year, and that partner network, we talk around that one-to-many partner network for distribution as well. So, it really, Laf, comes from product. So that modernization is very functionally rich. Let's modernize it to improve the look and feel and then direct sales and partner sales, I think the partner sales network, which has been very good for us historically. We need to accelerate that, and that's one of our key focus areas. Thomas Russell: Back to AI. Do you think you can use it for any horizontal opportunities as a new revenue potential? Tony Sheehan: Look, in terms of horizontal opportunities, I mentioned it earlier around accelerating our road map. We have road maps for Vertexon and PaySim. Where I see the AI coming in is the acceleration of that, which is new products and features. So that is revenue potential. So absolutely see AI as accelerating our revenue potential and growth there. Thomas Russell: I've got another question here. What is the cost of remaining listed? Would the company not be better off being privately held? Look, that's something that people ask us from time to time. The cost is probably about USD 400,000 a year in terms of being listed. It's not cheap to be a listed company, which is why you see in the market now companies need to be bigger before they list. Look, it's something the company could consider, but we've got about 2,000 shareholders who I'm not sure would all appreciate being a private company. So, for now, we'll be staying listed. Michael from MST. Can you touch on some of the future products or enhancements you guys may be exploring over the next 12 to 24 months? Tony Sheehan: Yes. So, Michael, from a product perspective, if we have a look at PaySim, the modernization, which I mentioned in the presentation and also some of the last questions there, the modernization look and feel, also building out our ISO 222, which is our account-to-account solution as well. So, what we -- a core function that we have runs on 8583, ISO 8583. What we want to do is build out that functionality around account-to-account payments because that's a growing segment as well. So, that will be the real focus for PaySim. If we have a look at Vertexon, again, we have a long list on our product road map, which we go through with prioritization. Things that we are looking at, I've mentioned that we've significantly enhanced our digital capabilities on the PaaS platform. We will also be looking at loyalty and also account-to-account, so real-time payments to complement our card issuing. We're not going to be someone that competes for account-to-account payments, but it is a complementary offering for our clients around that card issuing. So that's probably some of the key things that we'll be looking at over the next sort of 12 to 24 months. And again, that's where we do expect that acceleration to happen through our sort of rollout of Agent AI. Thomas Russell: Thanks. Last question for now. Sean from Snowble. Does the use of AI affect your hiring decisions? Example, would you look at hiring less due to efficiency gains? So, I might take that one, Tony. So yes, I think that is our expectation. The platform, as everyone knows, is very scalable, and we've always needed to hire a few people to double the revenue, like we said for the future and like we've shown in the last sort of 12 to 24 months. We've had those people there the whole time. The revenue has doubled. We don't need to -- when we sign a new client, go and add more staff necessarily. There will become a point where we do. As we said before, we're sort of going through our AI rollout plan at the moment. It's happening very quickly, something we've been sort of been keeping a very close eye on and how it's going to affect us as a business. So we're well ahead of it. But over the next few months, I think we'll be in a position to talk more about that as we come into towards the end of the financial year. Okay. That's it for questions for now, I think, Tony. Tony Sheehan: Okay. Thank you for the questions, Tom and I always enjoy the engagement from investors and our analysts that cover our stock as well. Thank you for joining. Thanks for taking the time to join us on our H1 update. I look forward to keeping you updated throughout the remainder of FY '26. Lots of exciting things happening in the business. So, we'll keep that coming with our news flow as well and our quarterly updates that we provide.
Thomas Russell: All right. Tony, we're ready. Tony Sheehan: Thanks, Tom. Good morning, and welcome to the H1 FY '26 update for Change Financial. My name is Tony Sheehan, CEO of Change, and I'm joined by Tom Russell, Executive Director. Similar to our usual webinar format, Tom and I will run through a presentation and then take Q&A at the end. If you do have any questions, please submit them through the chat function on this webinar. Okay. Just a little bit briefly about Change Financial. So, Change Financial provides innovative and scalable payment solutions for over 150 clients across more than 40 countries. We are a B2B business with 2 core products. The first being Vertexon, which is our Payments as a Service offering, which provides card issuing, card management and transaction processing. Vertexon supports prepaid, debit and credit card issuing, and there are 2 main models under Vertexon, the first one being processing only. Under this model, we provide the technology, which is a card management system to clients to run their card programs. The clients hold the necessary scheme and regulatory licenses to issue cards. So processing only is available globally and supports all major schemes. And we have clients using Vertexon in Southeast Asia and Latin America, including 2 of the largest banks in the Philippines running over 45 million cards on the platform. The second model is processing and issuing. This is only available in Australia and New Zealand. And under this model, clients utilize Vertexon for processing capabilities and leverage our regulatory and scheme licenses and issuing capabilities. So under this model changes the card issuer record and provides treasury, fraud and compliance services. Vertexon generated 85% of the group's revenue in H1. Our other core product is PaySim, so that's software, which enables end-to-end testing of payments platforms, processes and scheme rule compliance. The PaySim software is based on global messaging standards and can be sold globally. PaySim is the default testing standard for EFTPOS in Australia and has a blue-chip client base, including 5 of the top 10 digital payments companies. PaySim contributed 15% of the group's revenue in H1. So importantly, for both the Vertexon and PaySim, they are proprietary payments technology platforms, which are owned and developed in-house by Change. So this is an important -- this is important from a value and control perspective for the company. So, if we look at some highlights, so really strong financial performance in H1 with a record half year revenue result of USD 9.3 million. So that's up 29% on prior year. 70% of revenue is derived from recurring sources. So this provides a very solid base of revenue to grow from. The proportion of revenue from nonrecurring sources increased during the half due to the strong performance from licenses and professional services revenue. So one-off revenue is an important driver of overall financial performance and was a key contributor to the strong financial performance during the half. Our rolling 3-year revenue CAGR to 31 December is now 25%. Underlying EBITDA for the half was USD 1.8 million. So, this is a material improvement on the underlying EBITDA loss of USD 0.5 million in H1 FY '25. The key drivers of this significant improvement in the underlying EBITDA were revenue growth, stable fixed cost base and the U.S. cost outs from the exit of the U.S. operations. Now if we isolate the impact of the U.S. cost-outs, H1 FY '26 underlying EBITDA was USD 1.9 million versus an underlying EBITDA of USD 400,000 in H1 FY '25. So, we also delivered a maiden profit of USD 600,000 for the half. So that's a real key milestone for the company and something we're very, very proud of as well. We are seeing the operating leverage pull-through we've been talking about. We've been talking about this for the last few quarters. We want to continue to drive operating leverage moving forward to generate margin expansion as we continue to scale. So, PaaS is a key driver of our growth, and we have seen strong growth in PaaS metrics across the board. We now have more than 110,000 cards active in Australia and New Zealand. That increase in cards was driven by the Sharesies debit card program in New Zealand, which launched in October and also significant growth in one of our existing fintech clients in the prepaid card space. So, we will continue to drive revenue growth on the PaaS platform through organic growth from our existing clients. Our new clients already signed. So, we're currently onboarding 2 clients and also further client wins. One of our key priorities across the business is growing our PaaS client base in Australia. So, increasing our footprint in Australia will drive scale benefits. So, we have the product and the team in place to add significantly more clients and volume without having to increase our cost base. There's a significant opportunity in market size in Australia as well. So, we want to really replicate that success that we've had in New Zealand and bring it here into Australia as well. Over to you, Tom. Thomas Russell: Okay. Thanks, Tony. So, we cover a lot of this information in our quarterly webinars. So, the slides are here for new investors, but I won't spend too much time going over the same ground. If you do have specific questions, please ask them using the Q&A function, and we are more than happy to answer them at the end. As Tony said, we've had a great growth in our active card numbers with a significant number of new cards added late in the half. Active cards were up 66% versus H1 last year. We obviously finished onboarding and launched a significant fintech client in New Zealand in October last year, and we're also currently launching another significant fintech client who will soon be migrating existing cards across the Change. We report active cards, which is a leading indicator for expected activity, that is transactions and transaction volume. We want clients growing because the PaaS model is designed to support our clients through launch and then their growth is also our growth. The types of fees we earn from our clients are listed there in the bottom left table. Generally, the largest driver of PaaS revenue is a number of transactions, but we also charge for active cards volume fees depending on the type of transaction and other valued fees you see there. Okay. The 2 clients I just mentioned that have recently launched and are in the middle of launching already have a significant cardholder base and the volumes are starting to show in the coming periods. Change is a B2B business and sales cycles can take a while. But importantly, once clients are onboarded, they can be very meaningful from a revenue perspective and as clients go through their own rollout plans and their multiyear deals. One question we get a lot is, are you actually going to be able to compete in market? Why would someone use Change over a competitor? Well, if you look at this chart, 6 of these clients were one of competitors. So the answer is yes, we can and are competing in market. We are winning on features, service and reliability as one of the only options in market now that owns our own technology. So in short, we've already proved we can win clients. The graph here shows that both competitors -- from competitors, banks and other issuer processes, and we can win net new programs. The key focus for us is building up the number of clients on the right that are contracted and going through the onboarding process. We won a new client in Q2, which is just about to start onboarding. And with the momentum building and more of the deals maturing through the pipeline, you should expect to see the box on the right starting to grow again very soon. All that will drive recurring PaaS revenues in the short-term, but also over the medium to long-term. I've presented this slide before as well, including in our full year results. So I'll just quickly touch on the key points for anyone new. Firstly, the scalability of Vertexon. Our clients process and manage over 45 million debit and prepaid cards on the platform, including one client in the Philippines who issued more than 40 million cards. For our Vertexon on-prem clients, we historically sold a one-off license to them. From that point, clients pay an ongoing support and maintenance fee of around 20% for as long as they continue to use the platform. That includes us pushing quarterly updates to them to ensure their system remains compliant with the card scheme mandated changes. Importantly, many of these clients have been with us for more than 10 years. Vertexon is a core system for them when they roll out new features, for example, the Southeast Asian client recently launched a credit card offering. They pay new license fees plus ongoing support and maintenance. Some clients also expand card tiers, which drives additional license revenue. Revenue here is generally not linked to transaction volumes. PaySim operates in a very similar way. Clients pay an upfront license fee for the modules they require and then ongoing support and maintenance to receive quarterly scheme updates. It's highly modular. Clients typically start with 4 or 5 core modules and then they add additional testing functions over time, which drives further license and recurring revenue. Across both products, particularly Vertexon on-prem, we also undertake customization work where required, generating professional services revenue. Talking explicitly to the financials now. It was a great half financially for Change, a record revenue half with USD 9.3 million of revenue or AUD 13.3 million of revenue, which is up 29% on H1 FY '25. PaaS is now the biggest contributor to revenue and Oceania has overtaken Southeast Asia as well as our biggest region in the last 12 to 24 months. I like sneaking this into every presentation, too, but we've had consistent quarter-on-quarter growth now for the better part of 3 years, and we are on track to have doubled the revenue in the business in the last 3 years by the end of FY '26. Pleasingly, revenue was up across the board and recurring revenue continues to build. The revenue waterfall chart here clearly shows where the revenue comes from across the business. The growth in revenue is being driven by our PaaS clients, but also our Vertexon clients who use Vertexon's core system and have had it deployed into their banks for a long time. The team is doing a great job at managing project pipelines, and we are seeing that work and resulting revenue dropping through at higher rates than in previous years. As a reminder, approximately 70% of our global client base pays us in USD, 20% in New Zealand dollars and 10% in AUD. Turning to the profit and loss. So again, USD 9.3 million of revenue in the half. You can also see the benefits of the cost reduction and exiting the U.S. operations, which is now materially completed, and we're in the final stages of the process to wind down the U.S. subsidiary. As we always say, we have the team in place to support significant increase in revenue, and that's the power of the platform. We are now starting to also see the benefits of AI multiplying the scalability of the platform, and Tony will talk through this shortly. Significantly, we recorded a significant step change in underlying EBITDA with a positive result of USD 1.8 million for the half. For context, we made a USD 0.5 million EBITDA loss last year in H1, and we only recorded USD 200,000 for the full year of FY '25, a 9th of the half year result. This clearly shows the inflection point the company is going through. Looking at PaaS margins, these have started to expand as we have advised they would. Margins in FY '25 set around 26%, but in H1 FY '26 have moved to around 30%. We still have heavy onboarding activities, which we continue to expect to have as more clients are onboarded, but the impact of these lower-margin revenues and even costs during onboarding are diluted by higher recurring base of transactional revenue. As we scale, fixed costs like connectivity and digital pay certifications are spread across a larger revenue base and will support ongoing margin expansion. Turning to the balance sheet. At the end of December, we had USD 2.6 million of cash at bank, an additional USD 1.4 million of cash-backed security deposits. As flagged at the full year, we have started splitting out client settlement funds that sit on our balance sheet as well. These relate to our PaaS business. They were USD 2.5 million at 31 December and fluctuate depending on the day of the week. There also is an offsetting liability for USD 2.3 million, which is labeled scheme settlements payable, which we've now split out from other trade and other payables. We also maintain a healthy balance of contracted liabilities. These are already contracted paid for support and maintenance as well as professional services work that will be unlocked over the next 12 months. In the first couple of months of H2, we've also contracted some large projects with Vertexon on-premise clients that are not reflected in that 31 balance. Overall, the balance sheet is in very good shape, and we continue to drive profitable growth. We'll continue to strengthen the balance sheet. In terms of cash flow, the significant improvement has been driven by a significant increase in cash receipts, but also the stable fixed cost base. The increase in operating payments is primarily driven from PaaS COGS as volumes and revenues increased. CapEx has stayed relatively stable with capitalized software development only up slightly on the back of additional revenue-generating features rolled out to clients in the half. As we always point out, given the billing cycle and cash usage cycle in the business, H2 is expected to be much more improved again on a net cash flow perspective and remain on track to hit our target of cash flow positive guidance for the full year. Back over to you, Tony. Tony Sheehan: Thank you, Tom. So just briefly touching on the large market opportunity that we have in front of us. Many of you on the webinar today would have already heard us talk around this, but there are some new people on the call. So, I will go through this, but I'll go through it pretty quickly. There is more details in the appendix. So, we have a very large market opportunity for Vertexon and PaySim. So, what is our focus really to capitalize on these opportunities? We have identified target markets. So, for Vertexon, that is Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. They are the regions that we are gaining traction and winning. For PaySim, it's global as the product can be sold globally without modification. Secondly, we have pivoted towards outbound sales hunting. So, we have reshaped the sales team and pivoted towards outbound sales. So, the BDMs that we have hired over the last 12 months continue to aggressively target outbound sales opportunities. Thirdly, it's growing and leveraging the partner ecosystem, so expand our partner ecosystem and work more closely with existing partners to drive mutual value. That partner ecosystem provides a one-to-many sales approach, which can be very effective for both Vertexon and PaySim. Fourth is cross-sell and upsell. So, work with our existing Vertexon and PaySim clients to drive project work, and for Vertexon clients, continue that journey towards migrating to PaaS or the latest on-premises version. We upsell the modern functionality and features to clients, which also drives incremental revenue across both products. So, if we look at some key operational achievements. So, to deliver on our financial results that Tom has just gone through, we have a clear and focused operational plan. So, some of the notable operational highlights for H1 include from a commercial perspective, we integrated a marketing campaign automation tool and commenced marketing nurtures for Vertexon and PaySim. So, this is to increase brand awareness and lead generation. We expanded our partner ecosystem. So, we signed 3 new PaySim partners and a new BIN sponsored partnership with a global processor. We also launched our first BIN sponsorship client in New Zealand. We've talked about them before, the Sharesies debit card program launched in early October. From a product perspective, we significantly enhanced the Vertexon PaaS digital capabilities. So, we upgraded our digitization offering, and we broadened our SDKs or our software development kit to enable faster and deeper client integration. So that's really key from a sales perspective as well is having a rich SDK, which does make it easier to integrate and offer more functionality. We continue progressing the PaySim modernization project. So, we completed a 64-bit upgrade to increase testing capacity for our clients. We also enhanced the PaySim ISO 222, which is account-to-account payments product offering. So that complements our ISO 8583 offering. And we completed dual domestic EFTPOS network connectivity in New Zealand. So that's important for our debit card programs and in particular, our financial institution clients as well. From an operations perspective, we strengthened the Vertexon PaaS platform monitoring to maintain high availability as volumes continue to scale. We also undertook ongoing high availability infrastructure improvements, again, for continued scaling. Some of the clients that we're in discussions with and one that we've won recently really is around the resilience and stability of our platform. So that is key for us from a business perspective. We also deepened AI integration across the business, and I'm going to talk more in more details around that now in terms of AI. So, if we look at -- looking a little more deeply at AI and what it means for our business. So AI is rapidly evolving on a daily basis. The enhancements in capability, particularly in the last few months is quite extraordinary. So, the evolution of AI has now reached the point where it can create significant opportunity and value for Change. AI is not new to us. So we already utilize AI in products, for example, fraud monitoring and over the last 24 months, have deployed AI to assist development and other business units. Now with the recent transformational improvements in AI, we are changing the way we adopt AI moving forward. We are embedding Agentic AI across development, operations and client delivery. This will enhance structural advantages and drive operating leverage across the business. So, what is the impact we see from embedding Agentic AI across our business? Firstly, it's around defending and deepening the moat. So, we have proprietary platform control. As we mentioned earlier, we own the technology for Vertexon and PaySim. So this enables faster execution versus competitors reliant on third parties. We have over 20 years of institutional trust in our products. So AI improves our resilience and scalability. Embedded proprietary business logic, so compounding advantage as AI trains on our internal data. There are also some things which AI can't shortcut. So for example, scheme certifications and regulatory licenses and compliance. From our perspective, AI strengthens our competitive moat rather than eroding. Secondly is to accelerate revenue, so faster product releases. So development cycles compressed from months to weeks. So, this will accelerate our product road map delivery, which is super exciting. Will enable faster client onboarding through reduced implementation time frames. It will enable more customization capacity. So that's improved -- that will improve our ability to win large and complex deals. And it will also improve client responsiveness, so stronger retention and cross-sell expansion. The third pillar that we see there is really to drive margin expansion and operating leverage. So increased developer productivity, so far greater output per employee. There will be automation assistance with support and reporting, reduced rework and testing cycles. The operational task, automation, so workflow enhancements to reduce manual engagement and also expanded operational capacity. So, AI will augment teams and drive financial efficiency. So, we are in a super exciting period of evolution for our business. In terms of the outlook, so on the back of a strong H1, we upgraded our guidance for FY '26 in late January. Many of you will be aware of that. Revenue is now expected to come in between USD 17.5 million and USD 18.5 million. So, the increased quantum of recurring revenue provides a very solid base for the business. Underlying EBITDA is now expected to come in between USD 3.1 million to USD 3.8 million. So that's a 15% increase at the midpoint compared to previous guidance, which we released in July. We've also maintained our guidance of being cash flow positive for the year. So as Tom mentioned, historically, our cash flow has significantly improved in the second half of the year. We expect that to be the case in FY '26 as well. So overall, it's been a great start to FY '26. Our focus is on growing the business and executing on our operating plan to deliver on our targets for the year. Tom, we might turn over to Q&A. I think we've had some come in. Thomas Russell: Yes. Thanks, Tony. Okay. So. the first one here is from Miles at Veritas Securities, who has recently picked up coverage of the stock. Thanks, Miles. To what extent are AI and automation enhancing your sales and marketing capacity? Tony Sheehan: Yes. So good question there. I think let's start with the marketing. What the -- what AI is enabling us to do is establish content faster, whether that's white papers, whether that's lead generation materials as well. So that's sort of the first pillar is around that content. It will also likely enable us to do AI-powered lead scoring as well. So, we will use signals, web visits, content downloads, engagement frequency to enable targeting to potential clients there. So, it will continuously learn from our CRM data that we have and refine that and refine the nurtures and the campaigns that are going out. And then what we would be hoping that will come out of that as well is the identification of more sales-ready leads earlier. So that directly leads into the sales side of the business as well. I did talk around the enhancements that Agentic AI, we see coming across the business in terms of product delivery, the road map, customizations as well and onboarding -- the speed of onboarding of clients. So, we think that when you combine that with marketing and the product from a sales perspective, we will reduce implementation friction, increase confidence, particularly during those large and complex enterprise procurement processes there and accelerate our sort of revenue recognition for new contracts. Thomas Russell: Thanks, Tony. Next one from Joe at MST. Congrats on the great result and maiden profit. Just wondering if you can give any color on the current sales pipeline. Tony Sheehan: Yes, I'll take that. So, the sales pipeline at the moment is in very good shape. We've got some very good opportunities that are down the bottom of the funnel, so well advanced in Australia, which is great on the PaaS side. Tom mentioned around when we talked around that onboarding slide where you can see the number of clients and building out that box down the bottom right in terms of clients that are signed. We will be looking to really build that out over the coming quarter or 2 as well. So, from a sales perspective, looking very strong there, which is great. We just need to get those conversions and close those deals hopefully in the coming months as well. And then Southeast Asia, we are still seeing good traction up there. We've got some really marquee clients up there, which is driving a lot of our professional services and license sales on the Vertexon on-premises side as well. So, some great opportunities coming through. Joe, needless to say, we just need those to drop through in the coming months as well. Thomas Russell: Thank you. All right. Laf from MST, who also covers the stock. I appreciate the extra color on AI. Can we talk to specifics on the costs and how they may change and investment versus possible savings? I'll let you take that one, Tony. Tony Sheehan: Yes. And Tom, jump in on this as well. So Laf, in terms of where we're at with that AI, that is rolling out in a very accelerated manner across our business. I think in terms of the costs and what that will change, we will be working on that in more detail in the coming sort of couple of months as well as we -- as that rolls out across the business. So, probably a little bit early for us to sort of talk around that investment and possible savings. Tom, I don't know if you've got anything you want to add to that? Thomas Russell: Yes. The only thing I'll say is that the actual AI tools don't cost a huge amount of money. So, it might surprise you, but we're not talking about huge amounts of money to make that investment in AI. We've already started doing that, as Tony said, over the last 12 months in particular, but the additional cost of AI is not great. And I think we can provide a bit more color on that in the coming sort of months to 6 months. Okay. Another question from Laf. Are the 3 wins in PaySim net wins, new wins? Tony Sheehan: Yes. So, they're partner wins, so they are net new partner wins, Laf, on the PaySim side. And so, they're in most of those -- one partner was in Latin America, 2 were in the Middle East as well. So, regions where we can sort of leverage that partner network to sell PaySim licenses in region. Thomas Russell: So, we sell a lot of licenses through partners currently in different parts of the world as well. So, we use them as a distribution channel. And what worked in the pitch for PaySim, how do you seriously move above a less than 0.5% market share? Tony Sheehan: Yes. So, with PaySim, it is extremely functionally rich. So, the software itself, functionally rich. We have resellers that have their own testing tools as well, but they sell PaySim because it is more functionally rich. In terms of how do we move past that 0.5%, we are undertaking a modernization of that product, so to improve the look and feel of that. That's where we would expect our Agentic AI to really accelerate that modernization of PaySim. It's also about direct sales. So, we've moved towards outbound sales hunting with the appointment of new BDMs last year, and that partner network, we talk around that one-to-many partner network for distribution as well. So, it really, Laf, comes from product. So that modernization is very functionally rich. Let's modernize it to improve the look and feel and then direct sales and partner sales, I think the partner sales network, which has been very good for us historically. We need to accelerate that, and that's one of our key focus areas. Thomas Russell: Back to AI. Do you think you can use it for any horizontal opportunities as a new revenue potential? Tony Sheehan: Look, in terms of horizontal opportunities, I mentioned it earlier around accelerating our road map. We have road maps for Vertexon and PaySim. Where I see the AI coming in is the acceleration of that, which is new products and features. So that is revenue potential. So absolutely see AI as accelerating our revenue potential and growth there. Thomas Russell: I've got another question here. What is the cost of remaining listed? Would the company not be better off being privately held? Look, that's something that people ask us from time to time. The cost is probably about USD 400,000 a year in terms of being listed. It's not cheap to be a listed company, which is why you see in the market now companies need to be bigger before they list. Look, it's something the company could consider, but we've got about 2,000 shareholders who I'm not sure would all appreciate being a private company. So, for now, we'll be staying listed. Michael from MST. Can you touch on some of the future products or enhancements you guys may be exploring over the next 12 to 24 months? Tony Sheehan: Yes. So, Michael, from a product perspective, if we have a look at PaySim, the modernization, which I mentioned in the presentation and also some of the last questions there, the modernization look and feel, also building out our ISO 222, which is our account-to-account solution as well. So, what we -- a core function that we have runs on 8583, ISO 8583. What we want to do is build out that functionality around account-to-account payments because that's a growing segment as well. So, that will be the real focus for PaySim. If we have a look at Vertexon, again, we have a long list on our product road map, which we go through with prioritization. Things that we are looking at, I've mentioned that we've significantly enhanced our digital capabilities on the PaaS platform. We will also be looking at loyalty and also account-to-account, so real-time payments to complement our card issuing. We're not going to be someone that competes for account-to-account payments, but it is a complementary offering for our clients around that card issuing. So that's probably some of the key things that we'll be looking at over the next sort of 12 to 24 months. And again, that's where we do expect that acceleration to happen through our sort of rollout of Agent AI. Thomas Russell: Thanks. Last question for now. Sean from Snowble. Does the use of AI affect your hiring decisions? Example, would you look at hiring less due to efficiency gains? So, I might take that one, Tony. So yes, I think that is our expectation. The platform, as everyone knows, is very scalable, and we've always needed to hire a few people to double the revenue, like we said for the future and like we've shown in the last sort of 12 to 24 months. We've had those people there the whole time. The revenue has doubled. We don't need to -- when we sign a new client, go and add more staff necessarily. There will become a point where we do. As we said before, we're sort of going through our AI rollout plan at the moment. It's happening very quickly, something we've been sort of been keeping a very close eye on and how it's going to affect us as a business. So we're well ahead of it. But over the next few months, I think we'll be in a position to talk more about that as we come into towards the end of the financial year. Okay. That's it for questions for now, I think, Tony. Tony Sheehan: Okay. Thank you for the questions, Tom and I always enjoy the engagement from investors and our analysts that cover our stock as well. Thank you for joining. Thanks for taking the time to join us on our H1 update. I look forward to keeping you updated throughout the remainder of FY '26. Lots of exciting things happening in the business. So, we'll keep that coming with our news flow as well and our quarterly updates that we provide.