Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us today as we present our first-half FY '26 results. I am joined by our CFO, Andrew Crowther, and our COO, Matt Caporella, who will assist me in the presentation today.

I'm going to walk through the presentation that was released after market close last night. Firstly, in terms of the overview of the business, I think what has become clear over the last couple of years is that the Acrow of today is actually now a very different business than it was certainly a few years ago, but seven years ago when we listed.

Today, we're a multifaceted company providing services to both the industrial and construction markets. Clearly, we've grown our industrial business very significantly over the last couple of years, and today's presentation will talk a fair bit about that and the future prospects for that division.

We've really concentrated over the last two years on diversifying the revenue streams within Acrow. That has been a successful strategy, and again, as we go through the presentation, we'll talk about how that looks.

Certainly, a lot of this presentation has to be seen through the lens of what is our biggest formwork market in the country being currently the one that's probably performing at the lowest level—certainly the lowest level it has for some time—but also has, by far, the biggest upside opportunity in it within the next relatively short period of time. On the highlights of last year, again, the Industrial Access division, it's now 62% of group revenue in this half.

Over a two-year period, both organically and via acquisition, we've almost tripled the revenue within this division. The two acquisitions that we made at the tail end of the last financial year, Above and Brand and what is now known as Acrow Infrastructure, based in Muswellbrook and the Hunter Valley, both of those businesses are performing above our expectations.

Over the first six months, we've had significant growth in our Screens business. We are the national market leader in the provision of protective screens on high-rise projects.

It's a highly profitable division, high return on investment, and we'll continue to grow. The biggest project currently underway in probably all of Acrow is the column climber at the Meriton Cypress project on the Gold Coast.

It is industry-first, primarily using our jumpform technology. Matt will talk more about that project later on.

It has had a very heavy capital investment into it on that project, but it has very, very strong both medium- and long-term prospects at a whole new level for very high-level, probably above sort of 50- or 60-story construction projects. The SA and WA formwork growth in the first half has been very encouraging.

I think this is indicative of the business's ability to capitalize on opportunities when markets turn in their favor. You can't invent work, but when the markets are there and the opportunities present themselves, this business can capitalize on them, and the growth we're getting in SA and WA is indicative of that.

Our hire revenue pipeline continues to grow. It's grown by 12% to $235 million this half, indicative, again, of a strong forward outlook.

In the next page, in terms of pipeline, you see that it's been a stable period in terms of winning hire work. It does fluctuate on a month-to-month basis, but I'm still happy with the trajectory in that regard.

Our labor hire forward order book is now up in excess of $300 million. That's become obviously a very large part of Acrow as we pivoted heavily towards the industrial markets.

In terms of safety, look, again, this is a more complex area for us now, given the growth of our industrial business and we have circa 700 to 800 scaffolders in the industrial access field at any given time. We've increased the number of working hours by some 40% year-on-year.

Look, our aim, clearly, is to have a very low TRIFR, low total recordable injuries, and low lost-time injuries. I still think there's work to be done here.

I think the result is okay, but there's work to be done. We've recently appointed a new national safety manager, general manager, who has come from one of the larger construction companies based in Queensland and already is making a big impact in our business.

In terms of the key financial metrics, while, obviously, it's great to have a 23% growth in revenue, none of the other results can we be pleased with, clearly. Again, I just want to point out that they need to be looked at through a lens of what's gone on in the Queensland formwork market on a year-to-year basis.

We will talk about this a little bit later on, but there's a $6 million reduction in EBITDA in that business PCP by itself. Now if we were just even able to hold that, let alone grow it to what we know we're having going forward, every one of those metrics would have been in positive territory.

Then when we get to the dividend, given the heavily front-loaded capex again for us this year, we just think it's prudent at the moment to reduce the payment of our dividend down from 2.9% to 2%. Clearly, we'll review that on a full-year basis when we get to July, August.

Firstly, you can't, again, look at these results without understanding what we've done with capital over this period. We're not investing in core formwork products.

We are investing in jumpform, screens, and industrial access. Screens growth is generating almost 100% return on investment even within the first year of operation.

The industrial goes hand-in-hand with that tripling of the revenue in that business over the last couple of years. The jumpform spend is heavily slated towards the column climber project, that again Matt will talk about in more detail later.

We expect the second half to have a very strong reduction in spend. We spent 25.5 in the first half, expect to spend between 5 and 10 in the second.

Although, we are not going to back away from opportunities if they present themselves that will generate strong returns. 40% is still our hurdle rate.

We probably won't accept 40% for the balance of this year, but certainly in screens and some of the other categories, but screens primarily, we're getting one turn of revenue based on $1 of capital spent. We're going to continue to invest in that system.

For the first time, we've now broken our business into two divisions: a Construction Services business, which encapsulates formwork, screens, jumpforms, and commercial scaffold; and the Industrial Access business. You can see in the half, 62% of the revenue now comes out of industrial access.

Going to the Construction Services division, we have had a $4 million decline in revenue. We have had a $3 million decline in underlying EBITDA.

I think it's the next page of this presentation that spells that out very clearly as to actually what's going on. If you go by state, you can see here that the $14.4 million of revenue in Queensland is $6.8 million less than the first half '25.

It's another couple of million dollars less than the first half '24. As I said before, you can't invent work.

We haven't lost market share in Queensland. This is purely a result of the conditions within that market, and I think if anybody also follows other construction-based stocks, everybody's saying the same thing about current results in Queensland.

I think everybody's also saying the same thing about the I always call it medium- to long-term opportunity in Queensland that we'll talk to later. Clearly, great growth in South Australia, great growth in WA, and whilst Victoria shows a couple of million dollar decline, there's a project profile change in Victoria, and I would expect the Victoria second half will be better.

While I'm on the second half, already with work secured and what we see in front of us for Queensland, we're going to get a circa 25% increase in revenue for formwork in Queensland, second half to first half. That's going to be heavily slated towards an increase in the last quarter that takes us into the new financial year.

Just some facts around Queensland. We pull it out so you can see clearly to understand what's going on here.

The projects in December '24 that were making up the vast majority of our revenue, they have all finished. Projects that are in play at the moment, and there's not a lot of them, and we're talking civil infrastructure here primarily, and then the projects that will commence from Q4 '26 through to Q4 '27, there is work we've already secured a lot of revenue on the Rockhampton Ring Road and Coomera Connector South projects.

I could put some dollars around the size of the revenue opportunity for us there. I won't call that out today, but they are substantial.

In terms of jumpforms and screens, both of those divisions are heading towards the best revenue and EBITDA performances that those divisions have had since we started them, certainly, and they are complementary as there's almost hardly a project now where we don't win both the jumpform and screens package. As I said, we're both heading towards record revenue levels in both.

In terms of industrial access, I called out 62% of group revenue. It's still a very strong gross profit margin of 35% and EBITDA margin of 21%.

Any company that is primarily providing labor, I think, would be quite envious of those results. There is a reality that with the contract in Perthman that we've won, it comes with a lower overall margin given that there's no hire revenue on that project.

It's basically all labor. It comes with a lower margin, but still an acceptable 13% odd labor margin.

The business that we bought, Brand, based in the Hunter Valley, their overall margin, as a percentage of their revenue, is lower than we're having the rest of Acrow, but that's totally taking into account of what we paid for that business. The actual profit performance in that business is turning out to be something like a three-time multiple on what we paid for that business.

We now, as I said, we've got a national platform in industrial. You can see where we are operating at the moment.

The current target actually is 195 for revenue for the year. I hope we hit 200, because it's a bit of a milestone.

At 97.5, second half looks like circa 98 at the moment, but we've still got clearly four months, nearly 4.5 months to go. We're going to keep growing this business.

We're going to keep growing it organically. There's lots of opportunities opening up into new sectors like defense, marine, industrial mining, etc., off the back of some of the contracts that we've won recently: asset maintenance, in Above, what we're doing on the Sydney Harbour Bridge is quite radical.

I'll talk about some other stuff there a bit later on. We like this business.

We're going to keep growing it. It's going to happen, as I said, both organically and through M&A activity, probably over the next 24 months.

I'll now hand over to Andrew for the financials.

Great. Thanks, Steve, and welcome to everyone.

As Steve said before, when we look at the P&L, this really is a reflection of what Steve talked about with the the Queensland formwork market, and on the other side, our high convictions for the future, in particular with our capex profile. If we we get into the P&L, slide 19, we we our EBITDA, as Steve said, $38 million down from 39, and EBITDA margin slightly down from 30.8 to 24.4%.

That's that's a reflection of the change in mix between industrial access and commercial only. We pretty much held our margins there with, as Steve said, the Brand's gone For the Sorry, the Industrial Access is slightly gone down because of the a couple of projects, and in in particular Perthman and the Brand acquisition.

Depreciation increased by from 11.5 to $14.7 million, or 27%. That was a reflection of the increase in our property, plant, and equipment from an average of $180 million to 217 million in average PP&E.

The actual average depreciation rate was pretty much steady at 8.7-odd percent. It's just a reflection of the the increase in the capex.

We had to front-end this capex, as you've seen, with the the very large pipeline of work we've got coming up. From a net interest point of view, interest likewise, $4.7 million up to $6.6 million.

Our average debt increased from 80.5 PCP to 134. Now the the debt, which we'll go into a into a moment into a moment, was to finance base our working capital increase and obviously our our large capex in the in the first half.

Then we get to pretax profit, down from 22 $22 million last year to 16.6. Then tax expense, the the the statutory tax expense was about 36%.

Now the reason that's above 30% is because of the acquisition-type expenses we have that are nondeductible. When we go below, NPAT underlying, sorry, is down from 16 down to 12.8.

Significant items, we had we had significant items of $2.7 million during the period. Now $1.8 million of that was in relation to the integration and restructuring of the two acquisitions we we had, plus the ATech acquisition.

Brand, Above, and and ATech, that's that's a very expensive to do these restructures and integrations, particularly from a system point of view. We also had about we had an amount We're doing a new ERP system at the moment, there was quite a bit went into that.

We're looking at some of that may be capitalized in in the future. We also had a depot move and we had some we had some other advisor items in that significant items.

Then we had contingent consideration. Now this is this 1.579 million is in relation to a $1.1 million expense on the MI earnout.

You probably remember from last year, we actually had MI we had to pay a full earnout of $4.95 million, which is a excellent outcome consider given they they they made their full the the full amount. We had to expense 1.1 because we we actually didn't accrue enough when we first did the acquisition.

We also had another 500,000 in relation to other earnouts to build up to build up what we have to pay in the future. We also had So in the in the in the in the future, that will be a that that'll be a low number, a very low number, because we've paid out the big MI number now.

Amortization of intangibles, this is in relation to Brand and and customer intangibles that we've taken up. That will be a pretty much an ongoing expense of about $186,000 per month.

Per month, and obviously, that's a non-tax item. We had share-based payments that were quite a bit lower than last year.

That's just the timing. Then NPAT reported, 9 down 6.5.

EPS down from 5.3 38 down to 4.16. As Steve said, an interim dividend of 2 cents, 100% franked, for the for the period.

Over to the balance sheet. Net debt, it increased in the period from 28.2 to 151.5.

Now that was predominantly capex related. Capex was the capex was 20 just over $25 million, and we actually had an expansion of labor in industrial access.

Every time we we increase our industrial access, there's a working capital hit, and that was about $7.2 million. In general, basically, all that increase in debt was from a growth was growth-related items.

If you have a look at the actual net debt bridge, you can see the 123 up to the 151. The predominant or the largest parts in this when which relates growth, there's the working capital hit of 7.2.

There's also other significant items of 2.7, which was cash, and that relates to predominantly our past acquisitions. Then we had 25.5 growth capex.

All the other items there wouldn't have really increased our our our debt to the level it did. Net debt-to-EBITDA went from 1.8 to 2.2, which is above the level that we said we're comfortable with.

We've got we've got a plan to start reducing that that level, and that's to reduce capex, for one thing. EBITDA is obviously going to increase in the future, and also we'll start rationalizing our working capital.

In particular, we had a large inventory balance at the end of December, so that'll start monetizing itself. Working capital to sales was actually not a bad level at 23% versus 25.7% at June.

We aim for 25 to to get below 25%. Current assets at 22.4 versus $6.8 million at June.

Now the $22.4 million, we actually did a restructure of our debt, and $10 million of our what had been our overdraft or at call has been moved down to noncurrent. It's it's actually not like-for-like, but we still do have that part that was current is now noncurrent.

Cash flow from operations, we had $27.6 million, a 73% conversion rate. Slightly up from 71%, and the main differences there with the the conversion is is is working capital and and higher sales.

That that's sort of the the main differences there. Over to the next page, our our debt.

We had, as you can see, we had $158 million of gross debt, up from 131 from the previous period. Our our headroom went down at June from 40 down to 30.4.

We actually had a restructure of the debt during the period. We've got a very close relationship with our bankers Westpac, and we increased our our our debt headroom by 50 mil.

Because of the, as I said before, because of our large upfront capex and our working capital impost from industrial access, our net debt [bridge?] went up to 2.2.

I think that's that's it from there, Steve.

Okay. Thank you, Andrew.

I'll go through the current sort of, I guess, medium-term growth opportunities as we see them in the business, and Matt will help me with a little bit of this. Firstly, just the other areas other than just winning work that go to making our business as strong as it is today.

Clearly, now with scale, we've got a very capable and flexible workforce. Both if you look at our scaffolders, with the number of people we have available to us now in this particular industrial access space, we can undertake much larger projects.

Every day, basically, I'm hearing of more opportunities that are presenting themselves across the country due to the scale of that operation and the talent of that operation. Then obviously, the effort we put into growing a very strong engineering team continues to pay dividends for the business.

We focus on training and development. We've got a great cadetship program for engineers.

We've broadened that to include now sort of administrative, HR, and sales-type roles. Then the ATech acquisition that Andrew mentioned, which is a training facility in Brisbane and now one in Mackay, basically focused on growing our own scaffold talent.

Very important part of the business. I've got real hope for how that can not just be an internal training facility, but also can be a profit-generating business down the line.

Massive effort going into making sure our supply chain is as tight as possible, given the work that we see that's in front of us as we lead into the Olympic cycle, certainly in Brisbane, where if you've got the equipment on the island, you'll be able to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves. Then Andrew mentioned our ERP project that is well underway, and we hope to have a new system in place by sort of July, August period.

Industrial access, we've grown this business to a $200 million business now. I have aspirations to double that over the next two to three years, both through an M&A focus and through organic growth.

Give you the Above scaffolding example. We bought the Above scaffold business in May last year.

The two things that they do particularly well that are new to Acrow: first is their relationship with defense and with the Navy at Garden Island. They've got some substantial contracts that they do maintaining the fleet, the naval fleet, when it comes into Garden Island.

That's opening up more national opportunities for us. The second big one is in asset maintenance, and primarily bridge maintenance.

We've got some really strong packages of work we're currently undertaking on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. They will continue to multiply over the next number of years.

That expertise now is more broad than just the bridge. Only in the last few months, the Above team won a significant package of work on what was the Nowra Road Bridge in New South Wales, that has been converted to a pedestrian bridge.

That's around about a $2 to $3 million package of work. It's become a real opportunity and sweet spot for Acrow nationally now to look at bridge maintenance.

We've got a lot of road and rail bridges across the country that are in pretty urgent need of maintenance given their age, and we see this is a great opportunity given the expertise that's coming out of Above. We're going to target organic growth in WA and SA.

We've recently hired a very senior guy from one of the biggest industrial providers in South Australia, Western Australia, to head that opportunity up for us. Then we've launched our own industrial scaffold product, Uni-Ring.

Matt will talk about that more in a second. That gives us an opportunity to both sell that product into the market and also to grow hire opportunities off the back of having our own proprietary systems.

That's a good segue, Matt, into where we're up to at the moment with product development.

Thanks, Steve. As Steve mentioned, over the last 6 to 12 months, we've been focusing sort of three new product groups, which is the Uni-Ring, Powershore 60, the column climber I'll cover a little bit later, and a new market segment in the propping and shoring space.

As Steve mentioned about the Uni-Ring, we launched this in January 2025. Far, we've landed about 4,500 ton of the product in Queensland, WA, and SA, and it's 100% compatible with our existing ringlock kit in the industrial sector.

The key here is scalability, we own the IP of this product. We have multiple manufacturing options, importing it directly through our existing supply chain.

What this is doing now, it's supporting a good margin on when we're selling products, and also improving our ROI on hire kit as well. Ultimately, our supply chain continuity as the demand grows, as Steve mentioned.

The Powershore 60 product is new. We launched this in January 2026.

It's already hit the ground running. The market's response has been immediate.

We've had a $220,000 sale that's going through in March when the product arrives before we even actually landed stock in Australia, which is a good sign. We've got our first hire project starting at the end of March as well.

This product here sits beside our Powershore 150 product we launched about four years ago, it's in our heavy-duty propping space. Performance-wise, we've innovated on this product.

It's brand new to the market. It's twice as strong as the comparable products, and it's only 20% heavier.

Then it's integrating seamlessly with the rest of the Acrow fleet. Then in sort of another market segment where we're looking at now and we're getting into is the propping and shoring segment.

We're leveraging our existing fleet here, the formwork kit, and then building on the Powershore 60 and Powershore 150. We're targeting more propping-only projects, and this is allowing us to unlock sort of new opportunities and return on the assets that we already own.

We're really excited in this space. We've made a few key acquisitions that's helping us along, and that are experienced in the propping and shoring space

In people.

Then we've mentioned it in the past, but we're well advanced now on the ground shoring space, too. We are looking at this space.

We've got some innovative stuff that we're working on, and plan to sort of launch that in the next financial year.

Thank you, Matt. Just turning to major infrastructure projects.

Look, the infrastructure pipeline in the country is increasing; it's not decreasing. We're sort of at the very, very start of Suburban Rail Loop in Victoria.

We're not seeing a lot of revenue from that yet, but we will. We're doing very well on North East Link at the moment.

Torrens to Darlington also, it's in its infancy, but you can see from our South Australian formwork numbers we're getting very good penetration on that job. Rockhampton Ring Road is interesting because you look at it and say it's a $2 billion project versus some of these are 30 and 26.

That will probably be the biggest generating revenue project for Acrow in civil infrastructure over the next 12 to 18 months. We've already won some very, very large packages that are sort of going to kick in for both sale of product and hire in probably the May-June period.

It's going to be, I'd say, this time next year we'll be reporting it as our largest civil infrastructure project in the country. The Whyalla desalination plant in South Australia, just really in its infancy.

Sydney Western Harbour Tunnel, we have won What's that, Matt,

about a That a million

dollar A million-dollar package on Sydney Western Harbour Tunnel. Sydney Metro is in sort of a lull at the moment and about to kick into a very, very large upgrade of projects, and also the same for Coomera Connector.

This is just a snapshot of some of the projects across the country. As I said, the infrastructure pipeline is actually going to increase, not decrease, significantly over the next period of time.

Just a bit on the Olympics. I think there's been a bit of a misunderstanding about when Olympic opportunities present themselves.

Building tenders are starting. I saw the first one go out a few days ago.

A tender went out for the building of the new aquatic center. It's the first one I've seen.

You look at the timeline down the bottom. The timeline is relatively accurate.

You come to this time next year where sort of some of the construction commences, and clearly from the end of '27 into '31, that's the peak period. For us at the moment, it's about focus.

I can say we are really clearly focused on all of the Olympic-oriented activity in terms of tenders that have been let, who the potential tenderers will be, and getting in very early, having very early engagement with potential tenderers. I'm very happy with the focus in our business in relation to the opportunity this presents.

It's a broad opportunity. I've said many times before, having lived through the Sydney Olympic Game development, this is once-in-a-generation stuff, and it really is.

It's the one project that the commencement date cannot get pushed back. Anybody that wants to tell you that Queensland's ahead is wrong; they are behind.

There is going to be a strong condensing of work required, and if you position yourself well with equipment and manpower, you're going to be in an extremely strong position to capitalize on this, I'd say, from the tail end of FY '27 through. It's not just about the Olympics in Queensland.

There's going to be an unprecedented project spend in civil infrastructure outside of Olympic activity between the current day and FY '29. Over the next four years, forecast spend in major projects in Queensland is almost tripling, 10 to 10 to 30.

We're starting to see some of the seeds of that now, certainly with the Rockhampton Ring Road and the next stage of Coomera, and then a range of other projects that we sort of referred to earlier. You're going to get this perfect storm in Queensland.

Again, I make the point: it's currently the weakest performing part of our business compared to where it would normally be. It's a $6 million impact on our EBITDA for this half.

You're going to go from that to over a period of time it's clearly the business and the market that has the greatest opportunity for growth over the next five years. We're extremely well positioned to take advantage of that.

Matt, more detail, please, around the Meriton column climb.

We've mentioned the column climber. The Meriton project itself, 78-story tower, Gold Coast.

We've got our main jumpform on there, there's two parts to it: there's a standard jumpform, so that's up and away. It's on a level 10 at the moment.

Then there's something that we've called a column climber. There's 16 mega-columns around this tower.

As you can imagine, for a 78-story building, they're quite large. What we're doing is we're using a lot of our existing jumpform kit, but then we've also basically done product development on a new bit of kit using the existing jacks to climb all 16 columns and our perimeter screens below them up at once.

When this is full built and climbing, we're going to be lifting 850 ton in one go. It's a massive project.

It's Acrow's biggest project, even one of the biggest formwork projects in the country at the moment, this column climber sort of project. Over the last, gives us 12 months, we've been developing the project.

It's been a lot of focus on reusability, this system now is 100% reusable on sort of any sort of multistory tower. It's fit-suited to over 50 stories, but we can sort of plug and play now onto any column up to 4 to 4 m by 2 m, all the hard work's been done now.

There's a lot of opportunity in this space. We have priced a few more projects sort of starting next calendar year.

There is a lot of towers, especially on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane, over that 50 stories in the works. It's just be a strong pipeline.

Installation on the Cypress project has commenced, we should be climbing middle of March at the moment as planned. Look, and

again, unapologetically, this has been a very capital-intensive project. Given that it's game-changing opportunity for that high-rise market, we've invested a lot of capital in this first project, but as Matt said, totally then reusable on the next series of projects.

In terms of our screens business, as I said, we are the market leader. We're heading towards $20-plus million in revenue this year, up from 15 last year.

One of the main things that we see some of it this year, but going into next year, we will get an improvement of around 2 to between $2 and $3 million in EBITDA out of the Western Australian screens business. We won a range of projects that we won 5, 6, 7 months ago only start generating revenue around about June.

That will give us a great lead into the next year. When we're going extremely well in New South Wales, Queensland actually really improving now, we've got a good business in Victoria, and we're going to have a $2 to $3 million profit business in Western Australia next year that we don't have this year.

Finally, just wrapping up the observations, so as I said, we'll keep growing that industrial access division. We will push towards 200 million.

The recently acquired businesses are going extremely well, and as I mentioned, are opening up new markets for us. We're going to keep looking at WA and SA organically.

We're renewing our M&A focus in that industrial space into next year. Then we're going to keep growing the screens and jumpforms business.

We mentioned WA specifically. We have got right now, as we sit here today, we've still got subdued trading conditions in Queensland in quarter three.

There is now clear signs of improvements in the quarter four, as I mentioned. We think we'll be up about 25% in formwork revenue second half in Queensland compared to the first, and all of that growth's going to come in the last quarter.

We'll keep seeing brilliant results in WA and SA, and New South Wales, Victoria will continue to operate at acceptable levels. Without giving a number, but I can say very clearly, quarter four FY '26 will deliver the largest quarterly contribution for the year in terms of EBITDA by quite some way, carrying that momentum into FY '27.

We've given guidance at the moment, our revenue between 315 and 325, so that'll be 21% up on last year, and EBITDA of 80 to 84, 2% up on last year. That's the presentation as it stands at the moment.

Thank you everybody, and happy to hand over to any questions.

Thank you. Hi, Steve, Andrew, and Matt.

Thanks for your presentation this morning. I just wanted to follow on, perhaps, Steve, from the comments you made just then.

Can you perhaps provide a little bit more commentary on how the construction segments have performed in first quarter, second quarter, and then into the third quarter? Also, when we take into account the new group revenue guidance range in consolidation with the industrial access guidance commentary for $200 million worth of revenue, when you back all that, it looks like you're sit flat to slightly up in construction.

Can you overlay those quarterly insights into that guidance range you've provided, please?

Thank you, John. It's fair to say that the first quarter was very soft.

The second quarter reasonably, significantly improved. January and February always by far our quietest months, and they were that again this year.

Then you get momentum with projects commencing into that April, May, June period, and that's where we get the really, really significant uplifts that takes us into next year. There is a bit of a yearly cycle, but then there's also a macro cycle on top of that.

There is a yearly cycle that says January and February are poor, every year. That's the worst period, every year.

Then there's a macro cycle that I see now that shows that as I said, 25% increase in Queensland, increasing revenues in Victoria, and probably stable revenues in New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia into that second half, coming off good results from all of those businesses in the first half.

Thanks. Just on that third quarter if you may, would the performance have been below that of the first quarter as well?

About the same.

About the same. Right.

Thank you. I've got a couple here.

You've narrowed your range on the Olympic build as well, when you expect activity to start. Can you give us a little bit more color on how you expect Acrow to be involved?

Is it going to be the early-stage-type work with your formwork, or do you think you'll be heavily relied on for the jumpform and screens work as well? I guess how are the contractors talking to you guys at the moment on the ground about how they're going to use your products through the process?

It's very early engagement, John. It really does depend who wins.

I've said many times, I think you've heard me say this: the Olympic stadium is not the prize, right? In my experience, some of those bigger, high-profile projects are actually not the project you target.

However, depending on who the builders are, now the consortiums are being formed, we now know who the consortiums are that will be bidding for the major construction projects like the main stadium. Depending on who wins that project will change our view, because there are some builders that we work with who work with certain formworkers who we work with that will mean we'll absolutely be doing the work.

In other cases, we know that if a certain builder wins it, not likely to go to us. Again, I'd stress, it's not the big prize anyway.

I think it's across a range of areas. It's definitely going to be in venue construction.

It's definitely going to be a very big opportunity for us in all the different villages, because there's four villages, right? It's not just Brisbane.

There's Rockhampton, Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, and Brisbane. There's four villages.

Then there's a range of venues. There's a massive amount of other smaller venues that will all require formwork activity.

Then you get to all of the associated infrastructure to get people around. I think that's probably even our biggest opportunity.

I think the high-rise stuff will be great for screens and jumpforms and potentially for our formwork decking systems. Then there's all the other infrastructure to get people around the city of Brisbane that is unraveling itself now.

That's massive amount of work in road, pedestrian walkways, bridges, etc., that is absolutely right in our sweet spot for our formwork business.

Okay. Thanks.

Perhaps that's a good section to talk about that investment in kit that you made late last half or in the second quarter. It's largely jumpform, I think, that you've acquired here.

Where did you expect to deploy it, and how long is that project, I guess, going to engage that kit for? Then how do we think about the return on that investment going forward, please?

The vast majority of that spend is on the is on the Cypress project.

It it is

it is a significant amount of the capital spent on that project. I won't call it out because of there's a competitive confidentiality thing around there, I think, really.

It's a significant spend. Now the gear's going to be on that job for, Matt, for how long?

18 months?

About 18 months, year and a half. So

18 months or so that gear's going to be tied up on that project. It's fair to say the return on investment for that gear on that project is not at our normal level.

However, then you got you move from that project to using that gear on other similar-style projects that I think will attract a far higher revenue value than the revenue that we've is attributable to that first project. Longer term, the returns for that equipment are going to be considerable.

We're getting to scale with our jumpform business. We are absolutely getting to a scale where you don't need to keep investing at this level.

If it wasn't for the column climber, we wouldn't have been spending far less in in capex this year for for jumpforms. It's almost got to be seen through a lens of it being another business, not not just a traditional jumpform business.

The great thing about our system is is the fact that it's it's it's goes from one job to the next. There's there's basically almost very almost no kit that's just needs to be used on one application.

Right. With the Cypress project with the deployment of this kit, I guess you get back the capital investment.

Essentially next time you use it, you're talking about full margin. There's no risk that this project is, I guess not delayed, but is extended further, and the kit's tied up for longer?

There's

100% will be used on another project with no costs. If we did another project similar, it would be 100% margin.

Then, yeah, there is risk of it being tied up, but the main core is now level 10. They're doing a floor a week once the column climber starts.

This project is the way it's designed to go, to trip perform, and we're aiming for a week cycles. So 78 weeks.

Look, these things do blow out. We do get project revenue overruns on it.

Definitely, the next style of project that we do that uses this system will attract a far higher revenue value than the current project. This was an entry into the market.

This was an entry project that I think is priced at a level that we would not price again and we wouldn't have to price again. We've invested, to be frank, more capital into this system than we probably expected to start with.

The next time we're talking about winning a project for this nature using that kit, it'll be a highly profitable project for the company.

Yeah. No, that makes sense.

Thank you. You've given us a little bit more detail with the EBITDA segments this year.

How should we think about those individual cost lines in the second half '26 and then into FY '27, for example with construction, as kit is utilized and Cypress, for example, winds down, should you see yard costs and labor costs actually come down as leverage improves? Then is there any impact to the cost lines with industrial access as well?

Not really, John. I wouldn't call any of that as being substantive, mate.

Sort of flat, half-on-half?

Look, I think, and I haven't done the exercise, there's no great shifts happening in any of the branches across the country at the moment. There's a bit of investment in yard staff for jumpforms, because once you get that kit back in the yard rather than off jobs, does require maintenance to get it back out for the work.

No, there's no significant changes in that area.

Got it. Okay.

Then last one for me: with industrial access, obviously, you're consolidating the acquisitions and you called out Brand as having a lower margin versus the other businesses within that segment. Is Brand a larger component of the revenue of industrial access now, and how does the growth profile look for Brand compared to the other businesses within that segment going forward?

I guess what I'm asking is where do you expect segment margins at an EBITDA level to settle now? Look,

the Brand business, which we now call Acrow Infrastructure in the Hunter Valley, is incredibly stable business. It's probably one of the most reliable businesses that we've got in terms of its profit every month.

You got to look at that business for what we paid for it. Right?

Again, we probably paid even less than three times EBITDA for that business. Its revenue is consistent, its profit is consistent, its contracts are long term.

It does overall make a lower margin than on average the rest of the business, but again, you got to look at it through what we paid for it versus what it's returning.

No, I completely understand that. I'm just thinking looking forward with the margins, will it keep margins at these sorts of levels or will they go lower in the second half as Brand becomes a bigger part of

the business? No, no, Brand's not going to become a bigger part.

Brand's staying at exact to the same levels.

Right.

Perthman staying basically exact to the same level. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you.

I'll get back in the queue.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question.

Not sure how I'm going to follow John with all his two questions, but I might throw one in. John, call me afterwards with your numbers, please.

Just on the $6 million EBITDA reduction in formwork because of the slowing down in Queensland, what have we learned from that about the cost base? Presumably, it's labor and yard work.

Going forward, how do you better position yourself for downturns, or is it just a short-term blip and you write it out? Can you variabilize more costs, or is it just got to trade through it?

Oh, you would be making very short-term decisions, Philip, that you'll pay for in 6 to 12 months' time. I think we didn't expect to be at the level we are in Queensland formwork.

We've been talking about this for some time. We didn't expect to be at this level.

We expected to see the uplift in work quicker than this. If we made significant reductions in yard staff, for example, and that would have to come with redundancy expenses, etc., you'd just be redeploying staff in a very short period of time.

That would be a very silly decision to make.

Understood. I'll ask a second question.

Might be I don't know what the right answer to this is. With your gearing up above two times, you did then reduce, but did you consider not paying a dividend just to get the debt below two times a little more quickly?

Phil,

we did discuss a whole lot of options, but we thought on balance, we go through a lot of metrics, we have a lot we go through, as you can imagine, but we landed on two. Two is for a company in growth mode like ours, it's still not a bad return, but fundamentally, our operations are still going well, we did want to reward shareholders, but also retain some cash for the growth.

Yep.

Makes sense. Thank you.

Hey, guys. Hope you can hear me okay.

Yep. All good.

Great. Just the first question on the screens and jumpform, please.

It sounds like you're doing really well there in WA, and, Steve, I think you mentioned that you're expecting a $2 to $3 mil EBITDA uplift in WA. Just interested in what's driving that improvement.

What are you doing well there that's able to, I guess, yeah, deliver that performance?

We weren't in the WA market for screens at all, Alex, 12 months ago. When we started the jumpforms, the guy that we hired to start the jumpform business was WA based, and he did a really, really, really good job of getting us to penetrate the jumpform market in WA.

In fact, WA is our biggest market. It is.

Yeah.

In terms of most work that we've got. Not the biggest projects.

Cypress is clearly the biggest project, but in terms of number of projects that we've got active at any time, WA is our biggest jumpform market. Now the screens and jumpforms go hand-in-hand.

We didn't have a screens business. We started to look at that, although we were actually being asked by our customers, "Can you provide screens?"

There weren't a lot of screens in the Western Australian market anyway. From scratch, we've now been winning projects that are screens and jumpforms together.

We've won a lot of work in the last six months that only starts, as I said, at the end of this financial year. From a standing start, we will have a $2 to $3 million profit business next year in WA screens that we haven't had this year.

That's pretty good effort. Then just the second one, just on the M&A opportunities that you're looking to renew in industrial access in FY '27, can you just remind us about, I guess, the types of businesses you're looking at, and are you still targeting WA for acquisitions?

Look, they're similar businesses to the style we've got today. We're not looking to radically go into something that isn't an access business.

At the moment, we're not looking at any WA opportunities. We've looked in the past, and there's nothing that we've liked, particularly.

Other markets. It's the same metrics.

We're not going to pay above our normal less than four times EBITDA metrics. We're not going to buy anything that doesn't have great growth opportunities.

Brand was a bit of an outlier there, purely because we bought it so cheap, and it's got great sustainable earnings. It's very similar businesses to what we've done in the past, but to your specific WA question, we do not currently have a WA target.

Okay.

Does that mean that at this stage, it's more of a organic growth, I guess, strategy in WA then, in industrial access?

Absolutely. WA and SA, absolutely, organic growth strategy.

Okay. Great.

Thanks, Steve. Thanks, guys.

Good day, gents. If we can touch on net debt for a second.

You mentioned that it's above target debt levels at the moment. You're looking to get that down over the next 12 months.

Can you give us an idea of where those levels are, and is that within the scope of the 12 months?

By the end of this financial year, we'll still be around. We won't be under two, unless something dramatically changes with our guidance and so forth.

We're not going to be having anything like the capex we did in the first half in the second half. It's just from our EBITDA cash generation, the lower capex, and in particular, as well, our monetizing of the inventory.

It will come down, but as I said, not below two in June. Then in 2027, that'll start coming down quite fast.

Yep. Understood.

In terms of seeing signs for the fourth-quarter rebound in Queensland, can you give us an idea of what exactly you're seeing that gives you that indication?

The Rockhampton Ring Road project starts for That starts. That's one one strong example.

We've already won upwards of a million dollars worth of work on that project, and and some of it will be delivered in May and June. That's just in that one project.

There's also a very large project, which is the next stage of the Queen's Wharf development in Brisbane, where again we we won a package of work. I don't know how long ago, Matt.

How long?

12 to 18 months ago.

12 to 18 months ago, where the gear is now going out. Now that's worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars a month by itself.

Just between those two, just between those two projects, Benjamin, there's lots of revenue that we don't currently have today.

Fantastic. Thanks, gents.

Thanks for taking my questions. Just wanted to ask about the hire contracts won and the pipeline.

You've won a little bit less hire contracts, but you've got a bigger pipeline. Could you just help us understand the dynamics behind that?

Thank you for that question. I think, look, the the hire contracts won does fluctuate month-to-month to month.

The overall trend is still okay. I my target is to win about if we can win $8 million a month worth of work, I'm happy.

You can see that eight sixes are 48, we're not far off that number for the half. A bit to do with that we we like the big the big numbers that go into there is when we win jumpform and screens work.

There is quite a long way ahead. Certainly in screens, I mean if you've looked at our screen page, we actually won more screens work last year than we've won this year, but now we're seeing the revenue.

That and that so we're seeing the uplift of revenue in that area for what we won last year. Now we know that we've got now a very strong at least 12 months of revenue with what we won in screens, and then we've got to replenish that.

The next that's a very strong focus in the business now about winning work in that part of the business that probably doesn't start until sort of July, August, September of this calendar year. Similar with jumpforms.

We actually don't want to win jumpform work today that we have to start in two months. We couldn't do it.

All right? We're focusing very clearly on that on that part of the business on work that will start at a time that we can both from a, just from engineering capacity, but also from without having to invest more capital, we can we can take that work on.

The pipeline the the big the big money in the pipeline is actually in screens and jumpforms.

Okay. Great.

Thank you. Then just a question on the guidance range.

Between the bottom end and the top end, is it largely driven by how quickly Queensland would recover? Is that how we should think about the range of the guidance?

Oh look,

it's always for us, we always focus on hire, and we always focus on labor, but there's a factor in our business about large sales. We haven't had a lot of big sales this first six months.

We've got some big ones in the second half, and we've got some big opportunities in the second half. It's actually more to do with those.

Do they tick into pre-30 June, or do they tick into the next financial year? That's really the factor of change.

Okay. Great.

Thank you very much. That's all from me.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody again for your attendance. Thanks, Andrew and Matt, for your comments, and we look forward to talking to everybody again in six months' time.

Thanks very much.