Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Lycopodium Full Year FY 26 results call. I'm Sam Wells from NWR Communications, and joining me from the company today is Managing Director and CEO Peter De Leo, as well as CFO Justine Campbell.

Following the summary of the results released to the market this morning, investors and research analysts will have an opportunity to ask questions throughout the call duration today. There will be a choice of two options.

First, analysts and investors can raise your hand via Teams should you wish to ask a verbal question of the management team, or you can also submit a written question via the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. If you are joining from a mobile phone device today, please email me any questions.

We'll endeavor to get to the majority of questions asked, in some cases combining questions on the same or similar topic. For the analysts asking verbal questions, we'd kindly ask that you limit yourself to two questions on today's live call.

Thank you, and over to you, Peter and Justine.

Thanks very much, Sam, and welcome to Lycopodium's investor presentation for the full financial year 2026. We've just completed a highly successful year where we've delivered on our commitments to clients and shareholders alike.

I thank staff and management for their outstanding efforts and really look forward to running you through some of the detail of what constituted a landmark year for Lycopodium. In the next 30 minutes or so, we will be providing you an update on the company, running through FY 26 financial highlights, providing you some insight into our operational highlights for the year, and providing some commentary on the outlook for our business, as well as providing financial guidance for FY 27.

In the past year, Lycopodium has enhanced its reputation as being one of the world's leading engineering and project delivery groups working globally across the mineral resources, industrial processes, and rail infrastructure and asset management sectors. At the end of June, we had over 1,400 people, and at this time, as we speak today, we have 1,500 people in the business as we grow to meet the opportunities that we're seeing.

We retain our 18 offices globally, and I'll talk a little bit more about those later. We have a broad and diverse client base, including the emerging majors and globally diversified companies, and really is a fantastic suite of clients for whom we work.

In terms of our capabilities and core services, we continue to work across all phases of projects, from very early stage evaluation, scoping, and concept creation, through to the detailed engineering and project delivery, as well as being highly considered for our ability to provide optimization and expansion services for existing facilities. Each part of our business focuses on delivering and creating value, and it remains part of our ethos to focus on delivering high-quality services to help our clients succeed in unlocking the maximum potential in their projects.

We continue to grow our global scale. In the past year, we've managed and controlled over 9 million man-hours for the delivery of over 50 resource projects and 90 studies.

Importantly, these metrics demonstrate both the growth, but also the potential for the business, as our level of committed contracts is up 59% from 6 months ago, revenue opportunity pipeline is up 8% from 6 months ago, managed capex up 32% from 6 months ago, and number of studies we're currently managing up twofold from 6 months ago. Again, for those of you that have heard us present previously, you know that's a very important metric for our business.

I'll now hand over to Justine to present FY 26 financial highlights.

Thanks, Peter. Lycopodium's had another successful financial year, delivering results within the guidance range for FY 26.

Revenue was $377.5 million, up 11% on the prior year, representing record revenue for the company. EBITDA of 59.5, or 15.7%, with a profit before tax of $52.5 million.

NPAT of $40.2 million at 10.6% of revenue reflects the company's long-term goal of a plus 10% NPAT margin target. NPAT is also at the top end of guidance given earlier this year.

Equity increased 13% to $170.7 million, with return on equity achieved of 25%. The net tangible assets are $3.92 per share.

The company again had strong operating cash flows, ending the financial year with a very healthy cash balance of $106.2 million, with minimal debt maintained on the balance sheet. Earnings per share for FY 26 were 101 cents per share.

In line with the company's dividend policy, the board has declared a final dividend of 37 cents per share, which together with the first half dividend takes the full year dividend to 59 cents per share. The business has continued in FY 26 to have a diversified portfolio of projects across geographies, commodities, and clients.

Based on project location, 58% of the company's revenue was generated from projects in Africa, 24% from the APAC region, and 11% in the Americas. Lycopodium is considered a market leader in the delivery of gold processing plants, which is reflected in the number of gold studies and projects the company is completing.

In addition, the business is working on copper, lithium, uranium, and other rare earth studies and projects.

Thank you, Justine. I'll now just touch on some operational highlights for the past 12 months.

Across the last year, we've refined our operating model to focus on our regional approach to the delivery of our services, supporting our one Lycopodium ethos, where whether a client's being serviced from Cape Town, Perth, Brisbane, or Toronto, they receive the same high-quality outcome for which Lycopodium is known. This approach enables us to engage more effectively with clients, access new market opportunities, support structured growth across our identified key markets, and to leverage local expertise, and we've got great examples of that across all of those regions.

We're organized around our three hubs being APAC, Africa, and the Americas, and our efforts across the year have seen the first signs of our endeavor to achieve a balance of quality business across these three regions. Based on our current and highly prospective workload, we believe we'll see a significant advance in this endeavor across the next 12 months, building on what was achieved in FY 26.

In terms of project highlights, we only yesterday advised the market of the award of our first material full EPCM in South America with the award of the Minera San Cristóbal project in Bolivia. Our other recent awards, including the Diamba Sud project for Resolute, the Pilgangoora plant expansion for PLS Group, and early works for Havieron, Greatland Resources, and Katanning Gold Project, of course, Ausgold, or Oceana, demonstrate our commitment and success in achieving a balanced and suitably blended style of contracting model across our project portfolio.

We're also delighted to be ramping up on the Blackwater Phase 2 expansion project, continuing work we've been undertaking at that operation, helping Artemis improve and debottleneck their Phase 1 project. Other work which continues to ramp up includes the Tilwary project for which we're doing an engineering, supply, and labor hire contract, and the Winu copper integrated management team, which continues to grow within our facilities here in Perth, in fact.

All this on top of the continued successful work Lycopodium is doing on major projects, including Koné project in Côte d'Ivoire, Twin Hills in Namibia, Baomahun in Sierra Leone, Yanqul in Oman, Nyanzaga in Tanzania. More on the project pipeline later.

Further to our previously advised focus of building our business in the Americas, we continue to take a disciplined and staged approach to expansion in this key geography, providing a key growth pillar to the organization. Our presence in the Americas started some 15 years ago with the establishment of our first American office in Toronto.

In the past few years in particular, we have seen steady but significant growth with the acquisition of Saxum, as well as the opening of our client-facing studies-focused office in Vancouver, and our value engineering and regional office in Lima. Our focus in the past year and heading into FY 27 is to convert a suitable and sustainable pipeline of quality work.

We will see the offices in Toronto, Lima, and Vancouver all increase in size in the next 12 months, with additional floor space being taken in Toronto, a new office being sought in Vancouver, and a new office being sought in Lima to accommodate that expansion. This is a slide that we've presented over the last couple of years just to demonstrate the project pipeline and where we're at in the various phases of the project.

I'll note that, as I mentioned earlier, we have a very, very healthy level of studies, plus 90 studies through the business at the moment, but I'll also note the commodity blend in the new work, as well as the excellent work being done in that work under the green block. I've mentioned some of these projects already, but not only that work that we've done, but that work that we've completed.

In the last 12 months, we completed work at Greenbushes on Talison's CGP3 project, the work for Bomboré for Orezone on the Bomboré project, Newmont's Ahafo North project, and Managem's Boto project. Again, of importance is if I look at the work we've done in the last 12 months for Talison, Orezone, Newmont, and Managem, those four projects that I've spoken about we've completed, we've got continued and ongoing work with all those clients.

Managem's case, they've seen fit to award us or have us lined up to be awarded additional EPCM and study phase projects in the next 12 months. Again, it's an excellent testament to the quality of the work that was completed during that period of time.

Lycopodium remains focused on attracting and developing high-quality individuals into our organization. We now have a very well-established approach to inducting, training, and developing people at all levels, and we seek in the main to grow our own Lycopods with a very strong graduate development program and induction of more junior-level people.

We also like to graft them onto our organization in the case of later career-stage individuals. This supports our approach to ongoing development of the individuals, but also ongoing growth of the business.

We're also committed to providing our staff high-quality systems and tools of trade to enable them to deliver their work effectively and efficiently. We have in the last 12 months continued to roll out our new ERP, to improve the functionality of that ERP, to focus on the standardization of our platforms across the business, to work on the engineering and project delivery tools for the business, and all done very, very successfully, as well as mapping out our digital pathway.

All of this is to support our one Lycopodium approach. We continue to support the communities within which we work and live by the Lycopodium Foundation.

Our efforts in this regard are focused on the key pillars of social development, education, innovative thinking, and environmental sustainability. I'm very proud of the work the team has done.

Most recently, a highlight has been a raising of over $110,000 at our annual Jeans for Genes event for the Children's Medical Research Institute. That brings in total from Lycopodium over the past 20-plus years in excess of $600,000 raised for a very important cause.

Outlook and guidance: The overall demand drivers for our services remains very strong. At this time, demand outweighs capacity in the market for quality engineering and project delivery services.

Lycopodium's excellent track record and reputation and the ability to work globally across a broad range of commodities provides us with a growing list of opportunities, which bodes well for our pipeline of work. We have at this time a record level of committed work and an excellent view on the potential pipeline across not only FY 27, but into FY 28.

We're established, and our strategy of the past few years have really laid the foundations for us to be able to maximally support what is a very, very busy and enduring market. The growing volume of work underpins future earnings.

Considering the FY 27 outlook, we've seen fit to bring forward our guidance this year. Ordinarily, we provide our first guidance at the AGM.

Given that FY 27 looks a little different to FY 26, we've decided to talk about it at this point in time, and give guidance of revenue between $540 million to $580 million Australian dollars with net profit after tax range of $54 to $58 million, again, typically in line with our plus or minus 10% NPAT target for the business. We will, of course, continue to update shareholders as the financial year progresses.

In summary, Lycopodium remains a secure, stable, and sustainable business, deep engineering expertise, a disciplined approach to risk management, an exceptionally strong history of execution, a capital-light approach to our business. We maintain a list of blue chip clients.

We have good commodity diversification, and we are geographically diversified as a business. It's something which we've been focusing on, as I've said earlier in the presentation, that is really starting to see the delivery of real value to the organization.

Before I invite questions, I'd just like to again thank, on behalf of the board of Lycopodium, our staff and management for the excellent efforts and hard work this year. I'll also invite you to peruse the full presentation, which includes, amongst other things, an overview of Lycopodium's strategic approach, approach to risk management and innovation, as well as a host of other relevant information.

Now I'll hand over to Sam, who can manage any questions that you may have.

Great. Thank you very much, Peter and Justine.

As a reminder, you can ask questions submitted via the Q&A function, or covering research analysts are invited to raise their hands should they wish to ask a verbal question. We'll kick off with a few pre-submitted questions first.

How is Lycopodium structurally mitigating increased sovereign and execution risks as its contract mix tilts heavily towards foreign jurisdictions? Additionally, is the company achieving higher project margins to compensate for these risks, or does the complexity of international work erode any potential pricing premium?

Thank you, Sam. That's a good question.

I guess Lycopodium's approach to managing the risk in some of the jurisdictions in which we work is handled in a number of ways. The first one is typically our contracts on the international projects are split contracts, where a large part of the portion of the work, of course, happens in our hubs or our spoke offices.

For those contracts, I'm talking there about the engineering, the procurement services, and other things. Study services go without saying happen in the hubs, and those contracts are contracted with our APAC entity, our Americas entity, or the South African-based entity.

That sees a lot of our revenues, a lot of our earnings, and the jurisdiction of those earnings being outside of those international locations. The work that we do in country, obviously, is all contracted through typically our in-country entities, which, again, are fully compliant with the requirements of the country.

We have over 30 years track record of working in a lot of those jurisdictions or jurisdictions with lots of similar attributes. Lycopodium has established risk management approach to everything we do, whether it be contracts, legal, health and safety, logistics, whatever the case may be.

Our skills and our ability, however, and our, call it, our strength in those niche markets enables us to deliver good returns and good margins. We always seek to deliver value to our clients, I'm not going to suggest that we're looking to gouge clients in difficult jurisdictions just because we can.

We don't do that. We play the long game.

What we do, of course, is make sure we can price fully, and because of our skill and expertise in dealing with all the nuances of working in many of these jurisdictions, we're able to deliver very good returns. In years gone by and forecasting years ahead, it's been supportive of delivering very, very strong NPAT return, or very strong return on our revenues, and that is our intention moving forward.

I hope I've answered the question, but I guess in summary, Lycopodium's well rigged in terms of our approach to risk management, understanding the subject matter, and seeks good return for what we do in those jurisdictions.

Great. Thank you.

The next on the study pipeline, it's more than doubled since December. What's your historical conversion rate from study to project award, and how should we think about typical lead times?

Also, how's the composition of these studies shifted, i.e., Americas-based majors versus emerging companies or those with multi-asset?

Maybe the second part first. That is that, look, I'm really pleased with the composition of the studies inasmuch as they demonstrate good geographic diversification, a good commodity diversification, a good clientele in terms of dealing with some of the globally diversified majors right way through mid-tiers, but juniors.

I think it bodes well for the project pipeline moving forward. The other important thing is we're dealing with, in that 90 plus 90 mix of studies, we've got some good advanced stage definitive feasibility, bankable feasibility studies, some good pre-feas works, and good scoping study work, concept level works, again, bodes well for that continuity of work through the various phases of projects' call it life cycle.

In terms of conversion, it depends. I guess, in terms of converting a study into a project, you're converting a definitive feas or a what they call a bankable feas or advanced phase feasibility study into projects.

The early stuff obviously converts into a pre-feas and so forth. Typically, if we're involved with a project and we continue to do good work for our clients, we get carried forward through the various study phases.

That percentage of sort of, call it tenure or retention is very high. Then into execution, invariably, our clients need to bid the execution work.

Obviously, it's difference between 1.5%, 2% of capex to 15% of capex, it's an important, often, a thing for them to be able to baseline before simply awarding us an EPCM. I think in pretty much every instance, an organization would like to carry forward the engineer who's done the study into execution, but that doesn't necessarily always work that way.

I would say that in plus 70% of cases, we are able to convert our advanced stage studies into projects which we execute.

Great. Just one more question before we open up the line to the analysts.

On the Americas, it's great to see tendering underway across a handful of countries. Can you just give us a sense of the tender pipeline quantum and realistic timeframe to material project award in that region?

How does a project like the Blackwater expansion help credentialize that North American team in the region?

The timeline of projects is, again, quite good because we've been working on some study work, we're bidding some EPCM work. We're really targeting the size of projects such as San Cristóbal, which really suits us, I think, better to enable us to build our Lima office, our Tucumán, our Buenos Aires offices, and Saxum's capabilities.

Even the stuff that we're tendering in Canada. Blackwater is by far the biggest of those.

Typically, the work that we're tendering, certainly at an EPCM level, is sort of, I want to say, a project between capex value somewhere between $500 and $800 million. Which, again, is very much in Lycopodium's sweet spot.

To your question with regards to Blackwater Phase 2 and our involvement with Artemis, look, we're delighted to be involved with Artemis. The Artemis team are made up of a group of individuals with whom Lycopodium's worked before.

We've got a unique opportunity to become involved with that project. It's a very, very significant project, certainly the largest thing we've undertaken in Canada from boots on the ground perspective.

It does credentialize you. We've worked with them and are working with them on their Phase 1 expansion, their Phase 1 rectification, our Phase 2 expansion project, which is very significant project in its own right, and now starting to kick off work with them on their Phase 3 study, which is a very much a forward-looking, at this point in time, concept study.

Could see us involved, if we do the right thing, working with that organization for well into the 2030s. Successful delivery of Phase 1, Phase 1A, and successful delivery of Phase 2 will underscore our credentials in delivery and EPCM, full EPCM service in Canada.

It helps us credentialize ourselves in terms of cold weather engineering. For us, it's a really key and important project.

We've assigned significant resources not only from within Canada, but globally to support that team in the delivery of that project. It won't be without its challenges.

All these projects have got challenges, but going well. We're very pleased to say.

Great. Thank you.

Next question comes from Oli Porter at Euroz. Ollie, please unmute your line and go ahead.

Have you got me?

Yep.

Yep.

Yep. Hey, Peter and Justine.

Thanks for taking the time. Just from me, obviously guiding to big growth in '27, which is fantastic.

Beyond expanding the workforce, is there anything else you need to invest in internally to deliver at that elevated level, or are the investments you've made over the last few years are sufficient to prepare you for that?

Look, structurally, from a corporate structure perspective and a structural perspective, no, there's nothing to invest in. Office space, I've mentioned, we need more office space in Lima, and we've identified the location.

We're seeking to grow Lima capacity to about 110, 120 people. Toronto, we're planning to take up another piece of space there, which will enable us to grow that contingent to the levels we need.

Vancouver, at the moment, it's quite a small office, and it was only intended to be that. We see opportunities to continue to grow Vancouver because the level of interest in our organization in terms of delivery studies and engaging with clients, and then as a pipeline into Latin America and other places in North America, has been really promising, we'll grow that office or move into a slightly larger office there as well.

Really, it's just that office space. A lot of our IT licenses and things obviously vary with headcounts, but again, that's all accommodated in our budgets and plans and aligned.

Excellent. Then just on that guidance again.

Guiding this early clearly is indicative of a elevated level of confidence compared to prior periods. Does that confidence at this stage extend to '28 relative to how you felt a year ago?

Look, FY 28's a long way out, but in terms of the market, and it's subject to the market, but in terms of the market, we're seeing kind of sustained opportunities. Really, it's about that.

I think on one of the slides we've said that push into the Americas has increased our addressable market by 40%. That's what can drive continued growth into FY 28 and beyond, but obviously it's a long way out, and God knows what's going to happen between now and then.

Lots of work to deliver on between now and then. All right.

Thank you, Pete, Justine. Appreciate it.

I'll pass it on.

Great. Thank you, Ollie.

Next question comes from Sam Pittman at Taylor Collison. Sam, please go ahead and unmute your line.

Can you hear me?

Yep. Yep,

yes we can.

Perfect. Just in terms of the resource studies, obviously, that's a pretty significant jump half-on-half.

Clearly it's driven in part by a buoyant market, but what drove the increased studies number?

Buoyant market being first, but also our approach. It's this sort of focus on regional approach.

I'll give you an example of some of the kind of bearing some early fruit for that change in approach or that tweaked approach. Our Melbourne office for a long time has been solely focused on industrial processes, engineering, project delivery, the same fundamental competencies and capabilities, but that office now reports in under our APAC hub.

We've eliminated some silos, opening up some geographies, and that office is starting to see and engage in a broader scope. Our Brisbane office is winning study work in its own right.

Cape Town has some really interesting and important study work going on in uranium, in diamonds, in platinum, palladium, chromium, and other things, as well as gold. It's really taking that one Lycopodium approach across the hubs, try to break down silos.

I think that for me is being probably one of the main things we've been able to achieve in the last 12 months. It hasn't all happened in the last 12 months.

This has been work in progress for many years, but we're starting to see some good traction. The Americas.

The list of studies that have been picked up between Toronto, Vancouver, and even with Saxum is impressive list of studies across commodities, geographies, and clientele.

Thanks. That's all.

Excellent result, as well.

Great. Thanks, Sam.

Just one final question here. Just on FY 27 guidance, and maybe Ollie got to this a little earlier, but the FY 27 revenue midpoint of 560 implies 50% growth year-on-year.

What proportion is already locked in within the $661 million committed contracts, and how much depends on projects still ramping or yet to formally commit?

Just under 70% is already committed, which is fantastic for this time of the year, on the financial year, being so early in. The balance obviously, the just over 30% still needs to commit.

Some of that is I feel quite near term as well, we're in the final phase of discussion, negotiation on a number of things. Of course, one I think project that probably stands out a little bit is, given the news of the last couple of days, is obviously Katanning.

We're involved with early works, and that is a modest piece of work at this point in time. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out across the next 12 months.

A lot of the work that we would be doing in the next financial year has already been booked, and/or will be booked in the next month or so.

Great. Thank you.

I think that's all the questions we have today. If there are any follow-ups, please feel free to email myself or Justine, and we'll endeavor to come back to you.

Maybe with that, Peter, I'll just pass it back to you for some closing comments.

Thanks very much. Again, listen, thanks, Sam.

Thanks for those that asked the questions. As Sam said, any questions that you have, please feel free to come through to us through Sam or Justine or myself, and we can seek to answer them for you.

Thank you for listening in. Again, it's been a fantastic year.

FY 26 was a great year for Lycopodium, and we're looking to another great year ahead in FY 27. Thanks for all the support and for the interest, and have a great day.

Thank you.